I am losing my hearing from all those years of my childhood when I happily watched my parents fire high-powered rifles and large hand guns without ear protection so I probably miss a great deal but still I can hear the happiness of the curved beak thrashers and speckled cactus wrens over the recent rain and the wild flowers.
CHAPTER 43
I like to think about the interesting things I saw on my walk. The round orange rock on the hillside north of the Gila Monster Mine pit is one of those “arresting” things. It is a bright orange granite that is not abundant but still present here. The shape is nearly round and I imagine I’m not the first to notice it. Someday I want to detour from the trail and hike over to the orange hillside to look at the bright orange round rock close up.
The rain made the desert trees and brush so lush and thick I have difficulty locating the round orange rock on the hillside these days.
Two days ago on June 15 the first clouds — small and round, fluffy and fast-moving — passed through headed northeast. Some of them resembled birds flying backwards, or flying antelopes in threes and twos, and a bear crossing the sky, followed by a frog and a squirrel. They fill the horizon, fleecy on the edges from the winds above that push them. A swimming snake, a swimming fat man who just lost his flipper. A reclining nude woman with two heads. Out of the west, long thick strands of clouds parallel one another, like herds of elk and herds of buffalo. Clouds are constantly changing, especially these fast-moving clouds, that remind me of wild horses with wind whipped manes and tails. It is possible to communicate with the clouds — I don’t know why — I just speak to them.
One hundred eight degrees Fahrenheit. The air itself is hot and heats my silver bracelets and earrings. I learn to cover my brown skin with loose white cotton or linen; I never go out without dark glasses or a wide brim hat.
Occasionally I take a different route. Not long ago I walked north of the Gila Monster Mine, past an old digging, and toward the hill with the arresting orange rock. Distances and the rough terrain of the desert can be deceiving; I wanted to have some idea of how long it might take me and how difficult it would be to reach the orange rock.
The desert brush was heavy and the terrain was rocky at the foot of the hill. I decided to put off the orange rock for another day. I found the easiest path was to walk down the center of the small arroyo to avoid the catsclaw and mesquite along the edge. I saw deer tracks and javelina tracks there. The mountain lion and bobcat probably hunt around here.
I feel I must share the well water with the wild creatures. When my last horse, the sweet Prince Charming, suddenly got sick and died, the horse water trough in the corral was no longer required. I’d have more water for us humans if I stopped filling the trough in the empty corral. But too many wild creatures had come to depend on the water in the corral in the thirty plus years that people kept horses and water there, from javelina, deer, bobcats, coyotes and all number of birds — including owls and hawks. I call it the “memorial water trough” in memory of my two beloved Arabian horses Hudson Bay and Prince Charming.
I try to keep the troughs and dishes completely full of water so small creatures can climb out if they fall in. Alas this morning I found a half dozen hatchling Gambel’s quail drowned in one of the round flat water tubs down at the old corral. I felt so badly because I didn’t anticipate such an accident with the tiny quail. I set out the dead chicks where hungry creatures might find them; this is the only consolation the desert offers for death. Long ago the Tibetan Buddhist priests were given “sky burials” under the stars, on remote mountains where hungry creatures could find and consume them.
I’ve lived here thirty years and I still have so much to learn about the desert and its living things. The round water dishes needed large gravel, and small stones on the bottom to create secure footing, and shallows so that rocks would protrude above the water’s surface allowing the tiny quail hatchlings to climb out if they fell in, as in natural water holes.
Even after I filled the water dishes with stones and made a ramp into the water trough, I found a single tiny quail drowned the following morning. I added more rocks and so far it’s not happened again.
In the intense heat there is silence. The molecules of air expand so far apart that vibrations can’t bridge the gap between them, and the sound stops. There is no wind; nothing moves.
We are waiting for the rain. Along the high plateaus, veils of blue mist trail out of the clouds’ blue bellies; even when the big-bellied dark blue clouds amass around the mountains’ peaks, the air is so hot and dry the raindrops evaporate before they hit the ground.
In fewer than three hours the sun will reach the “North Corner of Time” as the old-time people at Laguna Pueblo called it, or the summer solstice. In the old days down here, the Tohono O’Odom women harvested the carmine red fruits of the giant saguaro cactus with their long poles made of saguaro ribs. They brewed a sacred wine from the ripe fruit and drank it in order to visit with the ancestors and beloved family members who had died.
Last week a Tucson newspaper printed a list of the city’s most memorable summer storms. The first date was my favorite: on July 11, 1878 five inches of rain fell on Tucson in seventy minutes and caused a sea of water to wash away most of the downtown area.
The first day of summer is 110 degrees Fahrenheit by 2:00 p.m. I was up early and sat outside to watch the fat fluffy clouds along the southwest horizon. I tried to sketch them but they seemed to evaporate into the heated sky.
Late in the afternoon thunderclouds began to roll in from the west. The spine of the Tucson Mountains and the highest peak are in full sun but here on the northeast slope my house is temporarily in the shade of a huge cumulus cloud as the other clouds gather around the black mountain peak. Across the valley to the east over the high blue mountains, tall waves of bright white and dark blue clouds rise in the forms of great cliff s and giant mountains fifty thousand feet high.
Two days later I opened the door early in the morning and the air smelled heavenly — rain! The scent from yesterday’s clouds took all night to reach us down here. I walked outside and it was so cool. All the living beings from the palo verde trees with their green bark to the ring-neck lizards are drinking up the precious moist air through their skins. I can feel my hair drink the moisture in waves and the skin on my face feels refreshed and cool.
It was such a lovely morning I didn’t want to go back indoors, even to put on my clothes. I don’t care who sees me in my nightgown which is nothing more than a very long t-shirt. I walked down the hill to the corrals to check on my new arrangements of the water dishes and the new ramp into the water trough.
As I walked I looked at the dark basalt hills, and at the cactus and shrubs and trees; all of them were in harmony with one another, and I felt within that beauty. In an instant I saw that even man-made things — the roll of old fence wire, the old rail ties withered by sixty years of the heat and the sun — were in the light of that beauty. In that beauty we all will sink slowly back into the lap of the Earth.
CHAPTER 44
Yesterday the temperature reached 111 degrees Fahrenheit. No wonder the clouds suddenly vanished while I was trying to sketch them. The heat evaporated the clouds. When I went outside to spray the macaws, there was a breeze and the hose spray wet down my clothes and the breeze cooled me so 111 didn’t seem quite so bad.
But now the humidity is coming, and it will make the air feel hotter.