Leslie Silko - The Turquoise Ledge - A Memoir

Through circumstances beyond my control, I ended up with six of these wonderful mastiffs — all of them related to one another. I was the midwife for all of the pups Lyon and Thelma had, including the births of Macho and Osa. Snapper and Rosie are Lyon’s daughters but from Xena, also a Greco dog.

Ionly walked three times in September. Yesterday, October 6, I walked for the first time in weeks. The dirt and the stones of the trail welcomed me back. I felt it through the soles of my walking shoes; a softness, a giving way, a gentleness that welcomed me like an old friend. I suppose the trail and I are old friends after thirty years of my horseback rides and walks. For years I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep the old house or the acreage so I tried not to become too attached to the place. But now I’ve lived with these black basalt peaks green with saguaro and palo verde years longer than I lived in my beloved birthplace of sandstone, lava hills and juniper. All along I’ve been blessed.

The morning was cool and cloudy so I put on my Arizona Cardinals hat and I didn’t bother to wear sunglasses. The sun came out as I started up the hill and passed the ant palace of stone. I wished then that I’d worn my sunglasses. But I felt so good to be walking on the trail I didn’t mind the bright sun.

As I approached the side trail to the entrance of the Thunderbird Mine I saw something on the ground — trash of some sort. From my front porch off in the distance I’d seen two people at the mine entrance earlier in the morning. I went to remove the trash on the side trail but as I got closer I saw it was a pair of sunglasses. They fit.

The trail turned toward the east and I was glad for the sunglasses, and I felt such happiness for the generosity of the world. As I approached the Gila Monster Mine I was watchful for the two light beige rattlesnakes, one small, one larger, who like to nap in the middle of the trail where the sand is soft and fine.

At the Gila Monster Mine the broken limbs and trunk of the great saguaro still lay across the trail where the windstorm felled it weeks before. Shod hoof-prints showed that riders made their horses step over the broken cactus arms and start a new path to the left of another piece of an arm.

I passed the dance plaza of the javelinas and the deer where soft sand gets deposited from a small arroyo. Nearby I noticed a very elegant ant palace all in the base of an outcrop of orange pink granite. The coolness of the morning brought out the ants; their motion caught my attention. I forgot to look for the bright orange round rock on the hillside to the north-northeast.

I came upon the spot where I had earlier found the opalescent tumbled glass in the arroyo sand near the trail crossing. I always look for the reflection of the sun off other fragments of arroyo-tumbled glass in the sand. From there the trail goes up the hill where I must not look or I will see the two-story abomination. Then I had a premonition that the man and his machine had done more damage to the arroyo.

As I stepped around the mesquite at the edge of the big arroyo, I saw that the man and his machine had removed more large boulders and further destroyed the habitat on the bottom of the big arroyo. He left behind a reddish basalt boulder broken open in the middle of the arroyo as if he planned to take it next.

All the good energy I’d felt from the walk on the trail suddenly vanished. I felt sick. I’d really hoped that the tons of boulders and rocks the man and his machine had already removed would complete the landscaping of his gargantuan yard. But alas! He intended to turn the big arroyo into his own personal rock quarry.

Here is the catch with karma, or curses and witchcraft: they often don’t take effect fast enough. Karma may not even things until your next life.

The Celtic curse, which the British poet Kathleen Raine had pronounced under the old tree by the sea against Gavin Maxwell, her ex-lover, took effect almost at once. Within three months Maxwell’s beloved sea otter was killed while under Raine’s care; then Maxwell’s cottage by the sea mysteriously burned to the ground. Within twelve months of Raine’s curse Maxwell developed brain cancer and was dead six months later.

I could have called again to complain that the man was operating a sand and gravel pit in violation of the county zoning laws but I wasn’t hopeful. This is the old West and private property rights are absolute here; there’s no such thing as the common good. I’d already had two county officials from different departments tell me they couldn’t stop the man and his machine.

I lost all my walking momentum at the site of the damaged boulders, but a short distance past I found a turquoise rock, triangular in shape and the size of my thumb. I hadn’t walked since the last rainstorm. I found another piece of turquoise stone the size and shape of a butterfly on a sandbar near the hidden place where I hear the air rush out of the Earth. The big arroyo was no less generous with its turquoise stones despite the new damage and new loss of boulders.

This machine man strikes me as the sort who will gouge more boulders from the big arroyo each time the county contacts him, to show his contempt for the government and environmental laws.

Each time I walk, I notice I feel better as I get farther away from the gouges and holes where the boulders were removed. The next big rainstorm and flood down the big arroyo would erode the bank and hill beneath the huge ugly house; the holes would fill in with rocks and sand. Eventually a five hundred year rain would come and carry down boulders from the slopes of the Black Mountain to jam the big arroyo at that place once again.

Good news. The bees returned today to swarm in clusters over the hummingbird feeders. The hummingbirds also began to show up a few days ago. The cold spell from the north had sent the hummingbirds and bees down from the mountains where they avoided the big heat of summer.

I wondered if the great horned owls spent the summer in the mountains as well. They might spend the days in the mountains asleep high in the tops of pine trees at nine thousand feet where it is cool. Then after dark they might glide back down into the valley to hunt for heat-dazed rodents and lost house pets.

I think about the great horned owls frequently since the terrible attack on my military macaws in January. A week or so before the attack, I’d seen a great horned owl one morning on a power pole not far from the big arroyo. I was concerned the owl might harm itself in the power line, and made a note to call the power company to have them install a device on the pole which deters birds of prey from electrocuting themselves.

The power pole where the owl was perched is only a short distance across the arroyo from the site of the ancestors’ place where I found the carved quartz crystal owl and the white quartz knife.

I bought a book on owls to learn more about them; perhaps, I thought, more knowledge would give me peace of mind and more power to protect my beloved parrots from the great horned owls by night and the red-tail hawks by day. I learned a great deal about owls, and great horned owls in particular, but the knowledge did nothing to abate my awe or my fear for any being that might face a great horned owl in combat.

The great horned owl is one of the few owl species that is not endangered. Great horned owls prey on smaller species of owls and will kill red-tail hawks and peregrine falcons. They may live twenty-eight years, far longer than other owl species.

Hidden under their feathers, the great horned owls have long necks, so that their skeletons most resemble that of a pterodactyl. With their long sharp claws and powerful beaks, they are capable of inflicting grave injury or even death on human beings.