Leslie Silko - The Turquoise Ledge - A Memoir

Once years ago on a cool November morning I found an emerald green hummingbird, dead, I thought, outside the front porch window. I leave my windows unwashed so that birds don’t break their necks or skulls against the glass, but dirty glass didn’t work this time. I felt such regret.

I picked up the little green-feathered creature to give it a burial of some sort and when I held it in the palm of my hand I felt the rapid beating of its tiny heart. I held it in both hands to warm it, and the heartbeat seemed to get stronger. After a couple of minutes I felt the hummingbird move and when I looked into my hands I saw he was awake, so I offered him my finger and he perched on it. I watched him recover more and more while he sat on my finger, and when I thought he seemed ready, I took him to a flowering brittlebush and he stepped off my finger onto the bush. I stayed nearby and watched until he recovered enough to fly away.

Hummingbirds are very territorial and the ones that live around my house spend a good deal of time chasing one another from the three or four feeders I hang in the trees of my front yard. Among the old-time Pueblo people Hummingbird was considered a great warrior and hunter, in the same category as Eagle and Owl. Hummingbird can’t survive in the desert on flower nectar and pollen alone, and must hunt gnats and other tiny flying insects in order to survive the months the desert has no flowers.

This year the abundance of the prickly pear fruit extends beyond the cornucopia spilling around the cactus plants. Coyote dung is black with prickly pear seeds; the ants retrieve the seeds, and outside the entrances to their palaces, thousands of tiny black seeds are kept temporarily until the ants make storage space down below.

As the trail nears the Thunderbird Mine I pass the small barrel cactus I replanted a few years ago. Would-be cactus rustlers dug it up and left it lying root up by the trail to remove later, but never returned. I couldn’t find the spot the rustlers dug it from, so I found a place where rainwater flows past and a small jojoba grew to give the cactus some shade. I replanted it there and now this morning the small barrel cactus had five or six blossoms on it, a sign the cactus is happy with its location.

I’m always on watch for snakes as I head down the hill toward the Gila Monster Mine because there is a stretch of fine white sand that the snakes like because they can scoot themselves down into the sand and be less visible. This morning I spotted a small snake curled up there — it was only one or two shades away from being an albino, and blended perfectly with the soft sand. The snake didn’t seem to be hunting — it seemed to have spread its coil flat as if to absorb moisture from the sand through his skin.

As I came down the path where the old road drops into the big arroyo I looked down and saw a small outcrop of rock salted with grains of chrysocolla. I walked through the dickhead’s private sand and gravel pit. Poor boulders! Slashed and shattered by the steel claw. One of you boulders should roll over the machine and crush that man, I thought as I passed by.

In the big arroyo, I found a fist-size stone mortar of light orange quartzite, and a little farther up the wash in the fine loose sand as I reached down to pick up a shard of brown glass, I spotted a turquoise cabochon the size of a bean.

The hurricane clouds look different than the usual rain clouds. They are fluffy from the strong winds that bring them, and very dense for such silvery white clouds. Usually the thunderclouds out of the southwest have to be very dark to be so dense.

Later an undulating white rain came in graceful waves down the dark basalt foothills of Black Mountain but without thunder or lightning. Now the rain mist breeze is fragrant with the yellow star flowers of the sennas and the cascades of tiny yellow blossoms on the greasewoods, the chaparral.

In a few minutes the clouds darkened and thunder rumbled; a strong wind out of the southwest drove the rain under the porch roof so I fled indoors. I’m wary of lightning; some fearsome natural forces become less threatening the more you learn about them, but lightning isn’t one of them.

Lightning is able to travel twenty miles or more horizontally, to strike out of the clear blue sky. A lightning strike affects the body’s ability to regulate blood pressure and body temperature, and the rate of the heartbeat. Basically lightning shorts out the body’s own electrical system. Half of all who survive a lightning strike are dead within the first year from heart failure.

After the lightning and thunder had passed I went out on the porch again. The rain barrel by the porch was three quarters full. The cactus spines on the saguaro, cholla and prickly pear glittered with the light the raindrops reflected; the greasewoods and palo verdes seemed to grow bright green leaves before my eyes. Their speed in flowering and going to seed lets them take full advantage of the rainy spells.

It is possible to collect enough rainwater to run a household year round if you have a way to store the rainwater. When I first came to this old ranch in 1978, only the drinking water came from the well pumped by the windmill; all washing, bathing and toilet flushing water came from the twenty-two thousand gallon cistern in the ground out back.

It seems a pity to flush toilets with rainwater. Now there is a system which stores gray water from showers and recycles it into the toilet tank. The people who remain here after the groundwater is used up will have to depend on gray water and rain.

My old friends the white-eared hummingbirds are back from the mountains early this year. They have wintered around the house for the thirty years I’ve lived here. They often come to the feeders when we are on the porch talking, and then after they feed, they perch nearby and patiently listen and watch us.

All the wonderful rain down here lured them back. The feeders were full of sugar water but I had no takers all summer because there were so many blossoms and sugar gnats for the hummingbirds to eat. The Gila woodpeckers that usually drain the feeders were elsewhere too, eating fat larvae and bugs that thrived from the rain.

Hurricane rains’ white silver mist curls down the mountainside. The moist air shimmers green, each droplet a tiny mirror of the desert leaves, the cactus skin and palo verde’s green bark. The hurricane clouds keep coming — unfurled by the winds, they are heavier and thicker than ordinary August rain clouds.

Ordinary clouds move slowly with nicely rounded bellies on top, even and layered in silver gray and blue. The hurricane clouds rise and crowd close, heap up and tumble over one another with great thunder, and make their way to the Catalina Mountain peaks high above the valley. In the mountain updrafts the clouds take the shapes of blue herons and bison.

The clouds in the distance are as deep blue as the sea with frothy silver white breakers blowing over them from the south. Purple clouds rise behind the black mountains, but in the center of the western horizon through a slit in the clouds the eye of the Sun looks through for only an instant.

Later the sky cools as the Sun moves below the horizon. The purple blue bellies of the clouds spread and flatten — ocean, lake or big river — then a dark rain begins over the Black Mountain ridge. The clouds come in dark blue banks overlaid with wind-frothed silver. In the distance to the west I can see thick wide purple blue clouds as the temperature continues to drop. The wind is out of the southwest where the clouds come from.

This summer of 2008 was the coolest summer ever since I came here in 1978.

Part of the cool summer was the publication of another wonderful book of poems from Ofelia Zepeda, titled Where Clouds Are Formed . The poet knows the old names for the mountains in this desert: