The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir Page 7

  Eleanor and Carl Chapman, Dick’s parents, were staunch allies of mine; in a way they were my parents too. I was eighteen and my parents had just gotten divorced and there was no money for school. Eleanor and Carl helped out financially and encouraged me to stay in college after Robert was born. They helped us pay off the hospital bills because we hadn’t counted on the expenses of a premature birth. Eleanor gave me all the baby clothes she saved when she had Dick and his brother, Steve. Beautiful embroidered gowns and hand-knit booties and sweaters and appliquéd blankets and quilts which Eleanor made. She was a wonderful artist who could draw or paint or make stuffed animals like the Cheshire Cat and Eeyore and Piglet which she sewed for Robert.

  Eleanor made all the drawings and diagrams used in Carl Chapman’s scholarly publications on the archeology and pre-history of the Missouri River Valley, including the Spiro mounds where Eleanor worked on the fragments of copper plates with the wonderful bird men figures. As she did the drawings and helped to reconstruct the missing parts of the plates, she theorized that the figures had been embossed on the copper with deer horn. Eleanor got herself a plate of thin copper and a deer horn and made replicas of the Spiro copper plates to show that this was how the images on the plates had originally been embossed.

  Years after Dick and I were divorced, Eleanor and Carl and I remained close. Every Christmas Eleanor sent wonderful boxes of little thoughtful gifts, mostly handmade, not just for Robert and me, but for my younger son, Cazimir, and for his father, my second husband. Eleanor and Carl died in a car crash in 1987. I miss them very much.

  CHAPTER 12

  Grandma Lillie used to take me and my sisters for walks by the river to the ruins of the old water pump house by the artesian springs where Laguna got its water and where the railroad got water for the locomotive engines. I remember a small pool wreathed with watercress where the water bubbled up through the sand. When I knelt down and drank, it was delicious and so cool.

  She used to tell us stories about things that happened in the places we hiked and about the times she took our dad and uncle hiking in the hills when they were our age. She used to tell us the adventures she had when she was a girl in Los Lunas.

  Grandma Lillie liked to say she was a tomboy when she was growing up. One time she and her sister Marie found a nest of baby prairie dogs and they managed to get them into a gunny sack and home but their dad refused to let them keep them. As it was, one of the prairie dogs bit through the end of Marie’s finger.

  She’d ridden horses with Marie, and had fallen from a horse and cut her scalp on a rail of the tracks in Los Lunas. She always preferred to wear pants and only wore skirts when she went to Mass which was only twice a year on Christmas Eve and Palm Sunday. She was excommunicated when she married Grandpa Hank because he wasn’t a Christian. She could fix motors, lamps and leaking pipes. She preferred mechanics to cooking. She knew how to work on the Model A Ford to keep it running. She was always busy. She liked nothing better than to clean and completely rearrange the tool shed, down to sorting the bolts, washers and nuts into coffee cans she saved for just such purposes.

  Grandma Lillie always had a pile of old used lumber and posts, and scraps of tin roofing and wire; I have piles here at the ranch of just such items that someday I am sure to need for some important task.

  Poor Grandma Lillie. She always feared I’d be killed in a horse accident. She’d grown up in the days when most people still used horses and wagons because only the wealthy had cars, so she knew bad accidents could happen with horses. She’d been thrown plenty of times herself when she was a girl.

  From the time I can remember, I’ve been crazy about horses. I used to ride my mother’s brooms. When I was eight, my father drove me to the big tribal corrals by the railroad tracks at Quirk, south of Paguate where the wild horses on Laguna Pueblo land were gathered and sold every two years. The Government Extension agent picked out a bay weanling colt and my father bought him for twelve dollars. The colt had a pretty head, big eyes and small ears, and the narrow chest and shoulders of the North African horses. I named him Joey because he jumped the fence around our yard like a kangaroo.

  Once the excitement was over, I was a little disappointed because it would be at least eighteen months before he was old enough to ride. We kept him in the yard around the house for the first year and my sisters and I played with him and made him carry our dolls on his back so by the time he was old enough to ride, he didn’t mind having blankets or a saddle on his back.

  For a long time I rode him bareback because I didn’t own a saddle but also because it was less weight for the colt to carry. The Montgomery Ward farm and ranch catalog sold saddles and I found the one I wanted. It cost sixty-five dollars. So I delivered Sunday papers until I had saved up the money. I can still remember the big box that came to the post office and the smell of new leather that filled the room when we opened it; the leather was stiff and shiny, a light tan color and embossed with rosettes; it squeaked whenever the saddle stirrups moved. I was accustomed to old saddles that were well-worn and the leather supple. I used saddle soap to soften the leather and to get rid of the squeaks. On Western saddles the stirrup leathers have to be broken in so the rider’s foot and leg fit correctly.

  My father’s cousins Fred Marmon and Harry Marmon and their cowboy, Jack Kooka, teased me and said I should break in my new saddle the way the cowboys did it: they tossed the new saddle into the water trough then cinched the soggy saddle to their horse and rode on it all day.

  I think the cowboys were probably right but I couldn’t bear to throw my beautiful new saddle into the stock tank so I broke it in over months, the hard way.

  I was eleven and had only been riding Joey about a year when something happened. Our cousin old Bill Pratt found me on the ground unconscious in the salt bushes not far from the pen where I kept Joey. Joey was very gentle and Bill found him nearby, so it didn’t seem as if Joey had bolted or bucked. I landed on my head. I have no memory of what happened. I woke up on the couch at Bill’s house. He sent one of his sisters to tell my parents. For the next three days I was barely conscious; I don’t remember much—only how badly the muscles in my shoulders and neck hurt. I have no memory of what happened that day, of what went wrong. I remember St. Josephs Hospital and an x-ray of my skull. It was during summer vacation so I didn’t miss any school.

  This might be the reason that later on when I kept horses, Grandma Lillie was always worried about me getting killed on a horse.

  In 1971 I was in law school and commuting to Albuquerque from New Laguna where my son Robert and I lived with John Silko. Back then at Laguna very few people had telephones and there were no private phone lines, only party lines. We were renting the old Gunn house at New Laguna where we had goats, many cats and dogs, and of course, horses.

  One morning we were eating breakfast at New Laguna (having decided to ditch law school that day) when the door burst open and Grandma Lillie rushed in; when she saw me she said, “Leslie! They told me you were dead! Killed on your horse!” I was so surprised—all I could say was that I hadn’t even ridden my horse for the past three days.

  Grandma Lillie had been at my uncle’s coin-operated laundry at Laguna when some women from Paguate village came rushing over to Grandma in tears at the news of my death. A moment later Fred Marmon, our cousin, who had always helped me with my horses, arrived because he’d heard the same rumor.

  Later we figured out what had happened. Grandma Lillie had a party line. About two weeks before the rumor about me, Grandma received phone calls about one of her nieces in Albuquerque whose young daughter was dragged to death by her horse after she became entangled in the lead rope. Someone must have picked up the party line and overheard them talking about it. So the rumor spread from this misunderstood overheard phone conversation.

  Years later when I was teaching at Diné College (known as Navajo Community College then) I ran into Robert Fernando from Mesita village near Laguna. He worked for the BIA at the Many Farm
s boarding school. He couldn’t believe it was me because he’d heard that I had been killed; no one had bothered to tell him the rumor was false.

  CHAPTER 13

  The old folks used to admonish us to leave things as they are, not to disturb the natural world or her creatures because this would disrupt and endanger everything, including us humans. The hummah-hah stories from long ago related what was done the wrong way and what calamity to the humans followed.

  The U.S. Federal Government by way of the Department of the Interior/Bureau of Indian Affairs forced the Laguna Pueblo people to allow Anaconda to blast open the Earth near Paguate for an open-pit uranium mine. The tribe tried to resist but the Cold War politics fed the frenzy for uranium for atomic bombs. In the early 1950s the aboveground testing at Jackass Flats in Nevada began.

  The frontispiece of Carole Gallagher’s book American Ground Zero is an Atomic Energy Commission map of the locations that got dusted with radioactive fallout during the U.S. nuclear tests in Nevada. From the map, which indicates heavier fallout with darker shading, it is clear the U.S. Government managed to nuke this country more completely than the USSR ever dreamed. All (lower) forty-eight states have locations where radioactive fallout from these tests was detected more than once, although Nevada, Utah, Colorado, northern Arizona and New Mexico got the heaviest contamination.

  On this map, I found the Rio San Jose Valley where Laguna and Acoma Pueblos are located; it was clear the prevailing west winds followed the San Jose Valley so the clouds of radioactive particles from the Nevada atomic test site passed over us every time they “tested” a bomb. We were “down-winders” with all the other “expendable” people who became human guinea pigs.

  Because I was born in 1948 I had a few years to grow before my body was subjected to the radioactive fallout. I’ve been blessed with good health thus far, but my younger sisters have not been as fortunate. They were two and four years younger than I was the first time the radioactive clouds from Nevada followed the San Jose River Valley east right over Laguna.

  To add to the exposure from this radioactive fallout, once a year the Federal Government sent chest x-ray vans to Laguna to check for tuberculosis; to save a few pennies, we small children at the Bureau of Indian Affairs day school were given chest x-rays at a strength meant for adult body weight, not young children.

  The Anaconda Company was not required to dispose of the radioactive tailings or store them safely to prevent contamination of the air or groundwater. For years the mountain-like piles of radioactive tailings remained there, blowing east toward Albuquerque, percolating radiation into the water table with every rain-and snowstorm. No plants ever grew on the tailings though sometimes around the base of the piles, a few hardy tumbleweeds appeared. A few years ago the tailings were finally buried beneath piles of clean dirt, and now the weeds grow there profusely.

  Far more egregious abuses of the people by the U.S. Government during these years came to light during the Carter administration and in the 1990s when U.S. Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary declassified millions of pages of “Top Secret” documents. A number of disturbing books were written based on the contents of the declassified papers. Handicapped children in boarding schools were secretly fed plutonium in their oatmeal, and poor black men in Alabama were secretly injected with plutonium “to see what would happen.” The aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had already showed us what would happen; these demented secret experiments of the 1950s and 1960s are more evidence that anything may be done by U.S. Government agents as long as the two words “national security” are invoked.

  While nothing like a true “gold rush,” at first the search for uranium was big business in the early 1950s; the Cold War and the U.S. atomic bomb production needed more uranium. For a few years prospectors descended on the Southwest with their Geiger counters over one shoulder like a purse. As a child I remember my father calling me over to look at a box full of rocks a uranium prospector had in his jeep. They were beautiful—bright glowing colors of lemon yellow and lime green on yellow sandstone.

  My father showed a prospector the rock collection he and his brothers and Grandma Lillie made from their hikes in the hills, and sure enough, one rock they’d carried home made the Geiger counter buzz. They picked up the piece of uranium so long ago no one remembered where they’d found it.

  Carnotite is the vivid yellow or green powdery mineral that coats the sandstone where uranium chiefly occurs. It is a secondary mineral formed by the change of primary uranium-vanadium minerals through intense heat and exposure to water, possibly during volcanic activity. Pure carnotite contains about 53 percent uranium and 12 percent vanadium minerals. Carnotite is radioactive and easily soluble in acid and in acid rain.

  My father took me along with him when I was in junior high school to one of the Kerr-McGee yellowcake mills at Ambrosia Lake, near Grants. He’d photographed the facility previously and was bringing the proof sheets to the mill manager. He thought it would be “educational” for me to go. I liked to see how things worked so I went.

  We got a mini tour of the facility by the mill manager who took us to the shipping room where the fifty-five-gallon drums were weighed and sealed prior to shipment by truck or by train. The shipping drums were ordinary steel drums. The manager lifted the lid on one of the barrels to show us the pure yellowcake refined at the mill. Another open drum contained pitch-blende which occurs as small grains of black or brownish black or dark gray nodules of uraninite, uranium oxide in sandstones which often weathers into secondary uranium materials.

  The yellowcake and pitch-blende were powdered so finely they resembled velvet; the yellow was so bright and the black so intense I had the impulse to touch them; of course I didn’t. We stood eighteen inches away from the open drums but none of us wore a mask. Of course the U.S. Government kept secret the reports that proved the dangers of these materials, but they and Kerr-McGee didn’t want the workers and people who lived around the mills and mines to become alarmed.

  As it was, the Laguna and Acoma people refused to work underground. Whites and others from the Spanish-speaking villages in the area were hired to go underground in the shafts to mine. The Laguna and Acoma people refused to desecrate the Earth by entering her. Work in the open-pit mine was permitted, and for twenty years the Pueblo miners worked in the dust of the rich carnotite but wore no protective gear for their lungs or skin.

  In the early 1960s, Anaconda discovered that Paguate village sat on top of sandstone with very rich deposits of uranium. The company proposed to relocate the entire village, to move every household into a brand new settlement with new modern houses and modern conveniences. The Tribal Council discussed the proposal for weeks, and many at Paguate are still angered that a number of Council members from other villages argued for the relocation of Paguate village. In the end sanity prevailed, and Paguate was not destroyed.

  Instead the mining company sank deep shafts under the village to reach the rich ore. The huge open pit continued to grow, swallowing entire sandstone mesas in a few years’ time, and the pit moved ever closer to Paguate village. The sounds of the mine resounded in the village night and day, three shifts of workers, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

  During this time, in the early 1970s, seven young people, high school students at Paguate, apparently made a suicide pact. The students were in their junior year and were among the brightest and most popular at Laguna-Acoma High School. Their families were financially secure. They seemed to have a great deal to live for, but they chose otherwise. I always wondered if it might have been the presence of the mine—I could hardly stand the sound for the hour or two I visited my cousins Rachel Anaya and Esther Johnson at Paguate in the seventies while the Jackpile Mine was in operation. These young people heard that terrible mechanical roar of compressors and generators without cease, around the clock, every day of the year; they heard their elders rant about the destruction the mine wrought, they heard the old ones cry whenever they recalled the lovely o
rchards of apples and apricots that once grew where the open-pit mine left nothing.

  The suicide pact ran its course, and then in 1980 something amazing appeared at the mine. Two Jackpile Mine employees whose job it was to inspect the tailings piles for instability or erosion had found a strange object only thirty feet away from one of the mountainous piles of tailings. The two employees made the same round of inspections of the tailings twice each week. Sometime between their last inspection of the southwest edge of tailings, a twenty foot long sandstone formation in the shape of a giant snake appeared only a few yards from the base of a tailings pile. The sandstone formation looked as if it had been there forever—but it hadn’t.

  For hundreds of generations, this area had been familiar ground to the Paguate people who farmed and hunted the area every day, yet no one had ever seen the giant sandstone snake before. Traditional medicine people came from all directions and all the tribes to see the giant stone snake. What a wonder it was to find something so sacred and prophetic; it was as if Ma’shra’true’ee, the sacred messenger snake, had returned, but not to some pristine untouched corner of the land, but instead to the uranium tailings of the Jackpile Mine.

  That day I visited the stone snake, only three loose strands of barbed wire enclosed the sandstone formation. Some scraps of chain link from the mine were loosely strung up on one side. The effort at fencing off the sandstone was to protect the giant snake from damage by grazing cattle or horses in the area. I saw scattered bits of shell, and mother of pearl with small pieces of coral and turquoise, left with pollen and corn meal to provide ceremonial food for the spirit of the giant snake.