Whenever I am near the ocean at El Golfo on the shore of Sonora, I follow this practice after high tide: I get into my clothes slowly as a sleepwalker might. Out the door, I shiver in the damp air and cold that settle over the desert coast ahead of dawn. The ocean leaves wonderful gifts to find — pink fluted seashells, a seal’s skull with a bullet hole, a sunbleached whale vertebra the size of a steering wheel and a topaz egg of sea glass polished like a jewel.
The hurricane remnants fly overhead bright silver and wind-fluffed. This summer was the coolest, rainiest summer since I moved to Tucson. The afternoon thunderstorms every day reminded me of the five or six year period from 1957 to 1962 or 1963 when I was a child, and the Laguna-Acoma area was blessed with rain showers every afternoon around 5:30. In those years the old-time people used to pray at dawn for the Sun’s children, the rain clouds, to come.
The Tohono O’Odom people west of Tucson get rainstorms every afternoon during June and July. Few other places are so blessed because the O’Odom people know how to ask the ocean to send rain.
Usually the foggy mists of the rain beings move slowly and dance slowly and gracefully. Today the first rain beings came swirling rapidly in a heavy white rain off the mountain peak that was invisible in the clouds. The fogs and mists took on forms of wraiths in the white rain; they crowded themselves together pushing one another much as men will to show affection to their comrades. I watched them hurry along in their formations, long lines of beings extending down from clouds of the white rain, and suddenly the word “legions” came to mind: legions of revenant warriors, ghost warriors, marched out of the clouds and across the slopes of the black mountain peak.
After the legions passed, little showers followed their path from time to time all day long.
The rain yesterday evening filled the rain barrel almost to the brim. Earlier I transferred the rainwater to the smaller metal can to make room for more rain as the storm clouds approached late in the day.
I made sure the lids were off the rain barrels before I went to bed. When I went out this morning and looked into the barrel, I saw a beautiful hawk moth, one of the biggest I’d ever seen. It was floating motionless on the surface of the rainwater. Oh no! If I’d kept the lid on the barrel the hawk moth wouldn’t have drowned. Gently I scooped up the big moth and it moved feebly. I held it in the palm of my hand close to my chest to warm it and it crawled onto the front of my shirt. Heartened by its motion, I took it to the potted jessamine bush and carefully set it down under the leaves out of the direct sun where it might recover or finish dying in peace.
The hawk moths depend on the datura blossoms and pollen for food, and they lay their eggs in the soil under the datura plant. The larvae become beautiful caterpillars of bright green with an elegant pattern of white and black stripes which the big moths retain after they emerge from the cocoons of their caterpillar phase.
About fifteen years ago on the front page of the local Tucson newspaper, an article announced the Air Force and U.S. Defense Department had a project at the base here in Tucson to experiment with hawk moths to see if there were military uses for them. The Air Force researchers glued tiny radio transmitters on the poor creatures.
Later I checked on the hawk moth under the jessamine and it was still there; but next morning it was gone. I hope it recovered and flew off after dark.
Today in the big arroyo I found a petroglyph I’d never noticed on a gray basalt boulder I’d passed dozens of times before. The basalt boulder sits in deep sand near the east bank of the big arroyo. The petroglyph was carved on the side of the boulder that faces west and is in shadow early in the morning.
The petroglyph is ancient and badly weathered so the light must be just right, from the west as it was today. Traces of the overnight rain were still visible on the boulder’s face, and the dampness darkened the basalt but highlighted the incised outline of the petroglyph.
The incised image exposed an under layer of basalt which is lighter in color; the droplets of rainwater on the surface of the pecked stone caught the early morning light. The image of the petroglyph seemed almost to glitter when I saw it. It appeared to be an oval within a larger oval outline.
Nearly twenty-nine years ago I found another petroglyph on a boulder as I rode horseback down the arroyo. That petroglyph is no longer visible because over the years, the floods had buried it in rocks, pebbles and sand. The petroglyph I found today is only about seventy-five feet from the location of the buried petroglyph.
I’d been thinking about the manuscript and whether I should walk more to get the book written. I’m ambivalent because nothing gets written while I walk. Now this is my laziness shining through; the hotter the weather, the earlier I have to wake up to walk. But after the rain overnight I woke early in anticipation of my walk in the rain-cool morning air. The discovery of the petroglyph made the prospect of a walk even better.
Surprise! I didn’t find a new petroglyph the other day; I merely rediscovered a “lost petroglyph.” I remembered that somewhere I had a black and white photograph from many years ago, of a petroglyph in the big arroyo. I rummaged through file folders of black and white photographs and copier prints and I found it.
I took the photograph of the petroglyph in early spring, 1980; since then considerable weathering had worn away and muted the incised outline; back then it appeared as a vertical ovoid circle within a slightly larger circle that in effect outlined it. The image appears to be that of the Sun or a head, in a close-fitting helmet or headdress.
During those years I did not regularly walk or ride horseback in the big arroyo I had lost track of the petroglyph. My memory of the location placed the boulder with the petroglyph incorrectly at the abrupt turn which the arroyo takes right below the flat outcrop of blue schist. I’d also remembered the petroglyph itself incorrectly, as a triangle on its point or as a “V.”
Now that I’ve relocated the petroglyph I see that both the boulder with the petroglyph and the boulder at the abrupt turn in the arroyo have similar triangular stones wedged on point against them. That must be the reason I confused the two boulders and the location of the petroglyph.
CHAPTER 47
I left on my walk this mid-August morning just before the Sun rose over the Catalina Mountains. All the rain and cool summer brought out the yellow five-petal flowers which the plant guide calls “desert senna.” Everywhere I look I see the bright yellow five-petal blossoms. The senna family has unusual stamens, each with a terminal pore that requires bumblebees to hang upside down in the flowers and buzz to shake loose the pollen, which sticks to their bodies.
As I approached the Thunderbird Mine I saw an odd sight: a grasshopper of ebony black with lines of white along his head and legs. He was perched on top of a pile of coyote dung almost as dark as he. He appeared to be eating the dung. Later I read that the black grasshoppers are poisonous so birds don’t eat them; the article said the source of the poison was unknown, but I’d say coyote dung might be one of the sources.
The rain left the prickly pear cacti plump with moisture, thick with buds and luminous waxy flowers of yellow and yellow orange. Once the blossoms dropped, the green bud pods began to fatten; the ripe fruits are the brightest luminous carmine red and as lovely as any blossom, and this year they are the size of chicken eggs and in their abundance they lie scattered everywhere. Birds and rodents feast on the cactus fruit but so do the coyotes and even the bobcats and the mountain lions.