In the sandy bottom of the arroyo bunches of red three-awn grass send out feathery purple red tufts on the end of each stem after the rain. Fountain grass with its silvery tufts grows next to the red three-awn grass, and they appear to be related, but the fountain grass is an invader species from South Africa that was introduced about fifty years ago.
The feathery tufts of the grass glitter with tiny droplets from last night’s rain. With the dark gray basalt and light-colored boulders of tuff and limestone, the glittering stalks of grass are magical.
A short distance past the bunches of grass I stopped because I heard a strange sound that might be air rushing out of a cave, or the low hum of a great hive of bees — the sound of the Earth breathing. I listened carefully. The sound seemed to come from behind the basalt boulders surrounded by thickets of catsclaw and mesquite.
I glanced up at the sky above the cove formed by the thickets and the basalt boulders; strands of low clouds swirled away from the cove. I checked the rest of the sky and none of the other clouds were moving like that. I thought about walking back to the cove to take a look, but something about the sound made me think of a sacred place I should stay away from out of respect. A Lakota story about the coming of the bison to human beings involves a cave with wind rushing out of it.
I continued my walk in the arroyo to the flat top boulder with the old petroglyph; like the other flat top boulder only a short distance away, the stone on top of the boulder had been chiseled out to form a rainwater cistern.
At Old Laguna village the natural cisterns in the expanse of light yellow sandstone are still carefully protected as a blessed place. In long droughts, the river and even the springs dried up, but the hard, fine-grained sandstone cisterns caught the least rain or snow that might fall from the meager clouds.
I found something really amazing and beautiful today. I decided to walk down to the arroyo to photograph the old petroglyph on the boulder instead of working on the manuscript. Too many disruptions early in the day put me in the wrong mood for writing.
Now that I had rediscovered the petroglyph I wanted a new photograph to compare to the photograph I made more than twenty years ago. Anyway, the morning was too beautiful to remain indoors at my keyboard. Last night a cool rain came and filled the big rain barrel half full and left the air smelling wonderfully of rain. So I got the camera ready, grabbed my hat, my belt with a water bottle, an emergency whistle, the ultralight.38, and off I went.
On my walks I’d noticed interesting rocks that washed down javelina paths from the top of the bank into the arroyo. The rocks I’d noticed were hard fine-grained quartzites of yellow or light orange or off-white, very unlike the other rocks that were mostly dark basalt. Moreover these stones were smoothed and rounded and fit my hand perfectly for crushing and grinding seeds. I thought the stones were a sign of human occupation but I never detoured to find out. But now that I’d rediscovered the petroglyph on the boulder only a short distance away, I knew what I’d suspected was true: thousands of years ago people lived here in the Tucson Mountains.
On my way to photograph the petroglyph I had to pass the rainwater cistern carved in the top of a boulder. The rain the night before had filled the rock cistern, and when I climbed up to its edge I found a small feather, an owl feather. I left it where it was, where Owl the Warrior Scalp-taker, the Sacrificer, had left it.
I’d photographed the cistern long ago for my fictional photo narrative about sacrificial altars. During the ten years I wrote Almanac of the Dead I did a great deal of thinking about the Maya and the Nahua ancestors. The photo narrative was concerned with the way words modify how we may see a photograph. Photographs need only resemble slightly what the words with them described for the viewer to “see” whatever the words describe. For the purposes of my photo narrative, the boulder top made a perfect altar; the carved-out rock cistern looked like it would catch sacrificial blood.
I decided not to go straight down the wash to the boulder to photograph the petroglyph but instead to walk along the bank above the arroyo where I felt the ancestors had lived.
I had to pass the rubble that marks the place where a “real estate developer” used a bulldozer to subdivide the land — not to be confused with the man who gouged boulders from the big arroyo with his machine. Nearby the rubble I saw signs of the ancestors’ home — dark basalt and pale quartzite grinding stones that had been overturned and everywhere tiny pieces of colorful chalcedony, chert, jasper and flint. I picked up a small piece of bright red jasper and saw it had been hand-chipped; I looked at the others, and then I looked all around and saw colorful unique stones and pebbles the ancestors gathered. Unfortunately the blade of the bulldozer had cut a crude road through the site and most of the hand-chipped stones and other artifacts had been buried under a heap of torn plant debris and dirt.
Only once, years before, I had found a perfectly chipped arrow point of fine-grained basalt near my gate down the hill. Back then I didn’t realize the ancestors lived here — I knew they used to hunt here, but that’s all. I thought all of the ancient people lived down along the Santa Cruz or Rillito River, not up here in the hills. I had a neighbor two miles away who had found arrowheads near Broken Springs Road, but this was the first indication that the ancestors had lived near my house. No wonder some nights I saw figures in the darkness or heard women’s voices singing grinding songs.
I walked a short distance between the skinny greasewoods and I looked down and there on the ground, surrounded by many small stones and chips off rocks that were dark hues, I spotted a white quartz the size and shape of an elm leaf: it was a knife. I was thrilled by its perfection; it was so thin, so finely chipped I knew it belonged to the ancient ones.
I felt a great blessing from the ancestors who lived here and made stones into tools thousands of years ago. The white quartz knife was so prominent among the other small chips and rocks it seemed to me it had been intentionally left there — perhaps on the last night the people ever carved there or danced in the circular area above the boulder-top cistern?
The ancient people here managed to survive the great heat and the droughts, and made their living by the rocks and stones they chipped into knives and awls which they traded for food, just as my Paguate ancestors traded the sandstone griddles for corn in lean years.
I walked around the area and found awl stones used to make holes to sew hides together, and I found sharp-edged stone axes. I found many colorful cherts and blood red jaspers and pale chalcedony, clear rock crystals and even glittering pyrites, but I did not find any turquoise rocks. The ancestors must have found them in the big arroyo as I still do, but I imagine that the turquoise rocks may have been too valuable for the people here to keep and were traded away to the south for macaw feathers or food.
To reduce weight from their packs on the long journey south to Mexico, the indigenous traders scraped the chrysocolla from the copper-bearing rock and powdered it. This “soft turquoise” powder was packed in small dry gourds the traders wore around their waists. The cabochons of chalcedony-impregnated chrysocolla must have brought the traders a good price because it is rare, denser and harder than turquoise.
From Mexico City all the way to Guatemala, the powdered soft turquoise was made into sacred blue green paint to adorn those chosen to be made into “jewels” for Tlaloc, Lord of the Rain.