I take no chances with the owls and my remaining macaws. Every night we plug in a light and a radio tuned to a right wing talk radio station; my theory is the great horned owls won’t be able to concentrate on predations against the macaws in the octagon aviary if they hear the ugliness of the human voices from the radio and see a bright light.
The Gila woodpecker is drinking from the big hummingbird feeder. The bees laid claim to the two smaller feeders. Somehow the bees manage to drink from the hummingbird feeders — I’m not sure how — unless bees have long tongues like the butterflies and hummingbirds.
I saw a large mesquite lizard on the south-facing stucco wall of the house this morning. He seemed to be finding tiny insects in the rough surface of the stucco wall. His tail was fat. He might be a relative of the Godzilla lizard we used to watch in the front yard. Only the tiny lizards roam the front yard now; their small size makes them difficult for the roadrunner to spot.
Today the bees are fewer and not swarming on one another nor are they as excited as the bees that came yesterday. They are from a different hive and are not as numerous as yesterday’s bees. These bees recognize me; they fly up around my face as yesterday’s bees did. Some of them landed on my legs and arms as if they also recognize me by the scent of my skin.
CHAPTER 57
If you focus on a certain point in the foothills on the north slope of the peak that is many hundreds of yards away, it is possible in certain light to see objects — rocks or cactus or a person — magnified or as if you were very close. More than once, when I looked west toward the peak I noticed something very odd: all light, all that is visible emanating from that point appears much larger than the surrounding terrain. A magic circle of telescopic vision which could only mean some sort of discontinuity of space-time due to a hidden mass or density with a strong gravitational pull within the volcanic peak or ridge of basalt.
The gravity of a parallel universe very near to ours might cause refractions of the sunlight so that objects would appear oddly different in certain spots on the peak’s north-facing slope.
Or perhaps the gravity source is a tiny black hole smaller than the smallest subatomic particle, “a Hawking hole” exerting awesome gravity on all matter or energy that strays too close and falls into its gravity, one so powerful that light slows down noticeably from that point, and everything appears much larger.
After a rainstorm on the slopes of the peak, I’ve seen the walls of stone palaces built into the sheer sides of the mountain shimmer golden in the late afternoon light as the sun descends into the west. I glanced in the direction of that place on the slope of the mountain peak where things appear much larger than the surroundings, and for an instant that point expanded so everything in it appeared much larger in the golden light.
The small mesquite lizards are almost black; the darkest brown striated with dark gray that mimics the rough dark bark of the mesquite. They stay close to the mesquite tree this time of year. Perhaps this is because the gnats and other tiny insects that reach maturity now remain close to the mesquite leaves for moisture.
Inside the bottle of hummingbird sugar water are many small flying bugs of a metallic iridescent emerald gold. The Gila woodpeckers wait for these gold bugs to soak up the sugar before the woodpeckers gobble up the candied delicacies. I always think of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold-Bug” whenever I see these little flying gold bugs although Poe’s bug resembled a scarab beetle.
Here is my new favorite Dickinson poem:
Bee! I’m expecting you!
Was saying Yesterday
To Somebody you know
That you were due—
The Frogs got Home last Week—
Are settled, and at work—
Birds, mostly back—
The Clover warm and thick—
You’ll get my Letter by
The seventeenth; Reply
Or better, be with me—
Yours, Fly.
Halloween. The first day of the Celtic New Year. Yesterday morning the bees came for water and suddenly died. The wind was blowing the filthy dust from Tucson all across the valley, high into the sky.
Once the wind stopped blowing, the bees stopped dying. Later the local TV news reported that dozens of people went to hospital emergency rooms and urgent care centers for respiratory ailments.
Years ago in the mid-nineties, a mining supply company that sold chemicals used in smelting copper illegally dumped toxic wastes into the city sewers. The sewage treatment plant at Roger Road released a cloud of toxic gas that traveled six miles, into the Tucson Mountains, and woke me up at four in the morning.
It knocked Sandino to the floor of the aviary and required an emergency visit to the vet for cortisone to save him. The four baby military macaws in the nest with Sandino and Paco were killed.
Over a hundred people from the area around the mining supply company were rushed to hospitals. People were outraged and demanded the county shut the company down, but instead the company cleverly filed for Chapter Eleven bankruptcy which prevents company shut-downs even for environmental reasons. Copper is big business in Arizona, the Copper State.
My small red plastic writing table barely has space for the notebook or the manuscript because it is covered with pieces of crystal quartz I picked up here and there. The crystals range from opaque to translucent, even in a single piece. I noticed all the pieces of crystal quartz I found at the ancestors’ place were translucent. The figure of the owl carved out of crystal quartz has a translucent head and wings.
I spotted the bits of crystal quartz easily because they were surrounded by darker jaspers and cherts that formed a half-moon pattern around the crystals. The crystals were in the same area, within a few feet of one another, among the chips and pieces of white quartz and flint struck off for arrow points and knives. The flints, cherts and jaspers the ancestors gathered to chip stood out plainly on the pale gray volcanic soil. I found the white quartz knife not far from there.
The first quartz crystal I picked up was unlike any other stone in the area; it was so bright next to the darker rocks. Clearly it was carried to this spot by human beings. The quartz crystal is the size and shape of my thumb. One end is white quartz with many many tiny crystals amassed so they can’t be seen individually; this mass of crystals is called a “massive specimen.”
Before I saw a photograph of a massive specimen, I mistook the patterns of the quartz crystals as fractures caused by pressure or explosion. However the reason the quartz crystals grow in a mass may be due to pressure or an explosion that occurs during the crystals’ formation.
I imagine the crystals on full moon nights would catch the light and glitter — hence their value to medicine people, and to sorcerers.
CHAPTER 58
On my walk this morning I could see the machine man’s intentions for the other boulders and rocks. He’d already removed the sand and smaller rocks around them that held them in place. I feel sick when I think about it because nothing can be done to stop the harm.