The rain book is an offering the people bring to the cave but it also tells the people how the pilgrimage should be conducted. At one time of course the text was written in Nahuatl or some related dialect, not Spanish. The amate paper itself was held in great esteem, so the paper cutouts themselves are powerful. My theory is the paper cutout figures compensate for the use of Spanish. The Nahuatl words are much more powerful for rainmaking than the Spanish; it is enough to write the Nahuatl words on paper, no amate paper cutouts are needed.
After I added two more words to my original Nahuatl rain prayer in ink on paper, rain clouds came and stayed for three days:
Ca! Caca! Hey Frog!
cacalachitli clay rattle
Cacalotl cacapaca Raven clapping
atlatlacamahmanilizti thunderstorm
ayahuitl fog mist of ghost warriors
“Atlatlacamahmanilizti” is made of the sounds of a thunderstorm: “atla atla camahma” is rolling thunder and “nilizti” is the crackle of lightning.
My niece Halley told me this: Two of her friends moved to Tampico, on the Bay of Campeche in Mexico, to teach school. The mayor of the city was showing the new teachers around the town when one of them asked if hurricanes ever struck. The mayor quickly assured the teachers Tampico would never be threatened by hurricanes—“it was a certainty,” he said. “But how could this be so?” the new teacher asked. The Bay of Campeche was a “calving ground” for tropical storms so it was odd that Tampico would be spared. The mayor took a deep breath. “I might as well tell you,” he said. “We people here in Tampico believe the UFOs protect us and keep the hurricanes away.”
The mayor told them at one time a rumor had raced through Tampico that the UFOs were going to leave. All the townspeople hurried down to the beach to watch them depart. Of course the townspeople were very concerned about what might happen to their town without the UFOs to protect them from hurricanes.
The townspeople waited for two or three hours but they didn’t see any UFOs departing, so they went home, and Tampico remains protected from hurricanes by the UFOs.
In the middle of the night a gentle steady rain fell — no lightning, and only a little distant thunder. My son Robert said last night when he got home the giant toad was guarding our front door.
I wonder if it’s the same giant toad I rescued a few years ago? That one had lived under the bricks of the front porch but rodents had removed the soil beneath the bricks. The big toad may have burrowed beneath the bricks of the porch floor too, when the bricks suddenly shifted and caused a cave-in that partially pinned him.
He was there a good while before I found him and looked the worse for it from dehydration. I got a bucket of water and poured a little water on the toad and on the bricks around him. I was alone the afternoon I found the trapped toad, but I had a short steel bar called a “wrecking bar” and I was able to pry up the bricks and free him.
I moistened the toad again in the sand of the tree well by the porch. I poured more water on the ground and the toad dug into the moist sandy soil. After a time I checked the damp sand of the tree well and the toad had vanished.
The five hundred year drought cycle is well under way here; as a result the desert toads in the Tucson Mountains have scarcely spawned pollywogs since 1983, when a hurricane came into the Gulf of California and headed straight to Tucson with flooding rain.
The pollywogs need clean water that is still or slow-moving, with enough volume to last until they become little toads. If the rainwater pools are too shallow or scarce, the big toads won’t lay eggs; they sense that off spring will not survive. Instead they conserve fat reserves, feed on insects all night and bury themselves in sand during the heat of the day while they ride out the drought, and wait for the hurricane rain to return.
The rain clouds assemble in their colorful dance costumes of white and pink mother of pearl, coral, lapis and turquoise, lined up in rows across the sky as the ka’tsina dancers do.
The light this afternoon is a soft green from the hills where the rain clouds are gathering. The leaves, grass and green bark of the palo verdes give off an incandescent glow that turns the bellies of the clouds pale green.
CHAPTER 46
I got up early to walk the next day because it had rained during the night and I wanted to feel the coolness and freshness of the breeze before the heat of the day descended. The ground felt softer and fuller from the rain. All the shades of green from the grass and leaves gave off a soft glow in the early morning sun.
In the big arroyo I saw fresh V-shaped tracks of three or four javelinas that passed through ahead of me, but no sign of humans. The rain had been heavy enough to send the runoff down the arroyo; its appearance had been transformed overnight. Stretches of rocks that jutted out fully exposed before the rain now were partially buried in the sand and pebbles. Small rocks I’d not seen before were brought to the surface and others buried; small branches and other debris washed up on the sandbars on either side of the arroyo.
After great downpours and floods, the bed of the big arroyo changes greatly and only a few features in the bottom of the wash remain identifiable. The banks and ridges along the big arroyo were not affected, although an epic flood or earthquake could reshape them. Even this small flow of runoff had moved a great deal of fine sand; it was exciting to see the arroyo’s new contours.
The sunlight was only beginning to illuminate the arroyo directly so I didn’t expect to spot any turquoise stones. As I approached the small boulders surrounded in fine white sand I saw the most amazing object lying on top of the freshly washed sand. Amethyst light shone through it as if it were a gemstone. The runoff down the arroyo from the rain had uncovered a large shard of purple glass.
When I was a child there was a collector of purple glass who made me aware of its value. Of course collectors only want whole objects, not shards, but I still picked up the piece of purple glass at once as I had when I was a child. It was part of the thick bottom of a mug — the glass shard was almost solid and molded in a fluted form.
Before 1960, clear glass for molded beer mugs and vases was manufactured with an ingredient which caused the glass to gradually turn purple after years of exposure to sunlight. There was only one possible source for this piece of glass — the old ranch trash dumps from eighty years ago. The nearest of the old ranch dumps was two miles away.
The shard of purple glass had traveled a great distance downhill from the old ranch trash dumps, where it lay in the sun for at least twenty years before it began to turn purple.
I felt lucky to find it. If another human had passed by before I did or if a pack rat or a large raven had noticed the amethyst shine, the purple glass might have been gone before I walked by.
In thirty years here I’ve learned to marvel at the survival of anything alien or man-made in the desert heat and terrain. At some point after the glass shard began to purple, it had been hit by rocks as it tumbled in floodwater, and a hairline fracture occurred. The fracture line is a pale pale violet; it seems to have slowed and clouded the process of purpling in the glass fragment.
When I first came to live here in 1978 I rode horseback in the area frequently where I discovered a number of house sites that were only rock chimneys. No other traces of the houses remained; the palo verdes and burr sage had obliterated any evidence of a foundation.
After Arizona got statehood in 1912, eager gringos flocked to seek their fortunes here. They moved their small herds of cattle and built their houses up here in these hills before the summer heat arrived. They probably lasted only a few years or until the cattle drank the well dry. Then they moved on and left the houses to the pack rats and vandals from town.