The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir Read online

  A few years later Laguna Pueblo got the state highway relocated away from this area. Paguate Hill was notorious for car wrecks; now the highway swings east and then continues north, closer to the remains of the open-pit mine that ceased operation with a world glut of uranium thirty years ago.

  Aunt Susie told me that a spring flows out of the basalt ledge on the west side of Paguate village. In times past the medicine people used to send their patients to soak in the spring water because it cured certain maladies. In their natural undisturbed state, the uranium-bearing minerals in the earth beneath Paguate village were healing mediums, not killers.

  Some years ago the U.S. Public Health Service tested a sample of the water the Paguate villagers drank for as long as the people lived there. The water was from a spring under the village and was slightly radioactive. As a “down-winder” exposed to fallout (and yellowcake), I pin my hopes for good health on my genetic inheritance from my Paguate ancestors who over the centuries might have acquired a resistance to radiation.

  My great grandma A’mooh who was born and reared at Paguate, and drank the radioactive spring water much of her life, lived past her ninety-eighth birthday. She told my mother that as a young woman she had survived an appendicitis without Western medicine. That seemed impossible without penicillin or antibiotics, so I wondered about the story until a few years ago.

  Then I became a patient of Dr. Roberto Zamudio Millán who immigrated to the United States from Mexico in the 1960s. On my first visit I wanted him to know that I wasn’t impressed with Western European medicine so I told him that my great grandmother had survived an appendicitis without doctors, hospitals or penicillin.

  To my delight, Dr. Zamudio Millán responded to my story with another story. While he was in medical school he found a book written by a doctor who worked in a small town in the mountains of the State of Chihuahua in 1920. The people traveled considerable distances on foot to obtain medical care in the town, and in emergencies family members came for the doctor to take him to their house where a loved one lay ill.

  So a family brought the doctor to their modest home in an Indian village high in the mountains to take a look at their old granny who was feverish and quite ill. The doctor told the old woman’s family they had to get her down to the clinic hospital in town at once for surgery or she would die of a burst appendix. The old woman refused to go to the hospital. So the doctor returned to the town, and a few days later they came again and said she was very ill now and again the doctor went and again she refused the hospital.

  A week or two went by and the doctor heard no more from the family of the old woman, and the doctor thought she was dead by now. Then the following week, the doctor saw two of the old woman’s sons and when he cautiously inquired about her, certain she must have died, her sons said, “Oh she’s just fine; strong as ever.” They told the doctor that the fever went down and she asked for the bedpan. Then she told them she was hungry and wanted to eat.

  A few weeks later the doctor went to the village. When the old woman saw the doctor she yelled at him, “You don’t know anything! See, I’m still alive. I didn’t need your hospital!”

  Dr. Zamudio Millán said that in extremely rare cases, before the appendix ruptured, the body formed a membrane around the infected matter inside the appendix so it was encapsulated and then the large intestine passed it harmlessly. That was Dr. Zamudio Millán’s explanation of how my great grandma survived appendicitis without doctors and antibiotics. He completely won me over with that story so I see him on those rare occasions when acupuncture and herbs don’t work.

  After John Silko and the boys and I returned to Laguna from Alaska in 1975, we lived with Grandma Lillie in her house with my father who’d moved back from Palm Springs. I needed a quiet place to write so I set up an office in my great grandma’s old house. My great grandpa Marmon’s work table with a drawer was there; he’d had it made out of the oak shipping crates he saved.

  Only one room was habitable, Grandma A’mooh’s old bedroom. There was electricity for my typewriter. I loved it because I’d spent my happiest hours as a child with Grandma A’mooh there. Out the window the old swing was still there; the morning glories and bridal bush were gone but I replanted the morning glories and hollyhocks the first chance I got.

  Later we fixed up Grandma A’mooh’s old house and moved in. It was while we were living there in 1977 that I suffered a misdiagnosed ectopic pregnancy that almost killed me. Four different doctors called it the “flu,” but every day I got weaker and shorter of breath. One night as I slept in Grandma A’mooh’s old parlor, I had a dream that was not visual but aural. A voice said “A flu like this one could kill you.” The voice I dreamed didn’t sound like her voice but I knew it was her.

  The morning after the dream, Grandma Lillie came to check on me. I was sitting at the kitchen table and I looked up at her as she walked in the door. She looked at me and she said, “Leslie, you’re dying,” and I said, “Grandma, I know.”

  I drove to Albuquerque to the doctor who thought I had the flu. I told him I was weaker; I told him I thought it might be something uterine, and he sent me to the specialist who ordered a sonogram that revealed the ruptured ectopic pregnancy.

  The rupture had occurred on October second; the correct diagnosis was finally made on November second, All Souls’ Day or Day of the Dead. By that time I had lost a great deal of blood, I was very weak, and the specialist told me I was a poor risk for surgery but without the surgery I’d die.

  I was diagnosed late in the afternoon and wasn’t able to get to a telephone until early evening. I was only able to call a few people to tell them about the emergency surgery, and these were people who lived out of state or a great distance from Albuquerque.

  By the time I was admitted to the hospital and John Silko had driven the fifty miles back to Laguna to tell my father, grandmother and the boys, it was too late at night for him to return. I told John Silko to stay at Laguna with my father and Grandma Lillie to comfort the boys.

  I learned a great deal the evening and night of November second as they hurried the blood transfusions I needed before surgery. The other bed in the hospital room was empty. My mother, my sister Wendy and my friend Mei-Mei all lived out of state or a hundred miles away, so they telephoned me.

  I don’t remember what we talked about that night. In my rational thoughts I understood there was a strong chance I’d die in surgery the next morning and this was my last night in this world. But in my irrational hopefulness (I was twenty-eight and Viking Press had published my first novel Ceremony only three months earlier) I felt I would survive, that I would live although the doctor saw it otherwise. As sick and weak as I was, I didn’t feel I was dying though I was; probably we humans always die thinking we aren’t dying.

  Except for the telephone calls I was alone that night before the surgery. I brought along the sweater I was knitting for Cazimir who was five. I kept knitting that night even though I couldn’t finish the sweater before the surgery. Somehow I felt I’d be able to finish the sweater—completely irrational under the circumstances.

  The close call changed my consciousness of myself and my life in a fundamental way; it made me understand how short my time in this world might be. Later my friend Ishmael Reed said the reason I didn’t die was because I had more books to write.

  In some ways the person I’d been before November 3, 1977 did die that day. I woke from the surgery with a profound sense of responsibility for how I lived my life. I did have more books I wanted to write but not if I stayed where I was. My writing was a source of tension in the marriage, and the teaching and other duties stood in the way. So I moved to Tucson in early January of 1978, two months after the emergency surgery.

  PART TWO

  Rattlesnakes

  CHAPTER 14

  I came to live at this old ranch house in the Tucson Mountains, and before long the desert terrain and all its wonderful beings and even the weather won my heart.

  So
many of the plants and shrubs and the birds and snakes of the Sonoran desert were unfamiliar—I had a wonderful time reading and learning about them as I watched them outside my house. I knew it might be some time before I knew this desert well enough to write about it.

  As the poet Ofelia Zepeda wrote, “Tucson is a linguistic alternative.” She explains in one of her poems that the Tohono O’Odom word “Cuk Son” means “place by Black Mountains.” “Cuk Do ag” means “Black Mountains,” the name for the Tucson Mountains.

  I rode horseback in those days. The view of the land from horseback is a high and wide expanse, good for distances but not so good for small things on the ground. I was able to spy deer antlers and desert tortoise shells from the high vantage of the saddle, and I’d stop the horse to pick them up. Occasionally I’d stop and dismount when I spied a turquoise rock or other interesting rocks, and walk alongside the horse to pick them up.

  On horseback I traveled farther into the wilderness than I do now when I walk the trail. I haven’t found any tortoise shells or antlers on the walks but I do see deer now and then, and on rare occasions live tortoises. In the past thirty years the bulldozers and urban sprawl of Tucson have destroyed hundreds of square miles of pristine desert habitat and left the desert tortoises in danger of extinction along with the Gila monster lizards and spotted owls.

  The old ranch house and the sheds and outbuildings are home to pack rats and deer mice accompanied by the gopher snakes, racer snakes and rattlesnakes that eat them. So in the beginning, I got to know the snakes and pack rats because we were neighbors. I began to keep notes about my encounters.

  Ca’cazni is the Comcaac or Seri name for rattlers. Onomatopoeia for the sound of the rattle—it begins to rattle with slow “ca-ca-” but breaks into a buzzing rattle, thus the “z” and “ne” sounds.

  The Raramuri, the Tarahumara Indians of the Sierra Madre in Chihuahua, use rattlesnake venom to treat cancer tumors. Snake oil has many medicinal uses, and the pejorative meaning for fraud is because a snake oil salesman called Rattlesnake King Stanley, at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, was arrested for fraud. He claimed to have lived among the Hopi people and to have killed and processed hundreds of snakes. But the oil in the bottles contained no rattlesnake oil, only mineral oil, turpentine, red pepper and camphor.

  Steep banks of violet blue cumulus drift over the southwest horizon, off the Gulf of California; later in the morning, the rattlesnakes come out in anticipation of the rain. The light is pearly blue and cool enough for the snakes to await the rain. They favor spots near sources of water or shade, so it is easy to anticipate where they may be. In my yard one rattlesnake sits next to a ceramic bowl and its twin curls up in the rainwater drainpipe nearby. They lie in wait for little birds and rodents.

  When I first came to this old ranch house there were the remains of a mesquite log corral below the hill, and I later repaired it so I could keep a horse. A big black and white Western diamondback rattlesnake lived near the old corral; what interested me at once was its calm demeanor. No coiling or rattling when we met, the snake made me feel welcome here. He knew I was a friend of snakes. I was careful to watch for him around the hay barn where he got fat on pack rats. If I found the big snake in the shade of the corral fence when I was making repairs, he patiently tolerated a gentle lift in the bowl of the shovel to a more out of the way place in the shade.

  I called him “Baby” as a joke because it was an unlikely name for a rattler four feet long and about five inches in diameter. He was a grandfather snake not a baby. He kept me company for my first two summers in Tucson, but after the summer of 1980 when I was away in New Mexico much of the time, he left. The black and white color of the snake was dazzling and unusual, and I always hoped I might see another rattler like him, but more than thirty years later, I have not. Maybe the old snake was a messenger of welcome and more supernatural than I realized at the time.

  Other big rattlesnakes live near the old corral but these snakes are shades of light brown and beige, the usual colors for snakes in this area; the only black and white they had were the rings of stripes on their tails by the rattles. I found an Arizona black rattlesnake under a piece of plywood on my driveway, but he was small and completely black with no white markings. I haven’t seen him again, but I always remember to watch out for him on the driveway, especially at night.

  I was seven years old and still under the influence of my father the snake-killer, when I shot and killed a yearling rattler with my single shot .22 rifle. It was early September and the poor snake was looking for a place to hibernate when it coiled on the step to my grandparents’ house. But I knew in a matter of minutes my ninety year old great grandmother would come from her house to spend the night and she would walk up those steps.

  I still regret the summer after my divorce from John Silko in 1979 because I allowed the neighbor boys to kill the big dusty red rattler on the west side of the house. I tried to persuade the big rattlesnake to relocate by splashing buckets of cold water on him three times. My younger son Caz was seven at the time and I was afraid he’d get bitten. But after that day, I promised myself to protect the rattlesnakes.

  Yet my ignorance and carelessness have killed a number of rattlesnakes. Ordinary chicken wire I discarded became the death snare for a fine three foot long rattler on the west slope of the hill below my house. The snake was able to get its head and neck through the oval opening but when the fatter part of it could not fit and the snake attempted to back out, the wire snagged its scales so it was trapped and died terribly.

  I was able to save a big beautiful Sonoran gopher snake that became trapped while climbing through the chicken wire enclosure around the back patio. I got rid of all the chicken wire; hardware cloth with its tiny mesh is superior in every way to chicken wire and does far less harm to reptiles.

  Monofilament nylon netting used to protect trees from birds is even worse than chicken wire for reptiles. The threads of monofilament nylon easily entangle a lizard’s toes and feet and as it struggles to get free, its delicate scales only become more entangled.

  The iridescent sky blue lizards that live on the roof and walls of my house are usually combative if they fall into human hands, but the fat sky blue lizard I found tangled in the nylon netting remained calm as I snipped away the netting with my kitchen shears. Somehow the lizard understood I meant no harm; similarly I’ve heard cowboys describe mule deer entangled in barbed wire that allowed the cowboys to cut them free without a struggle.

  After I freed the sky lizard, I removed that wretched nylon bird netting from the patio and was about to drop it into the trash when I noticed horse damage on a young mesquite tree in my front yard, so carelessly I tossed the netting over the tree and forgot about it. A few months passed. Then early one morning just at dawn I heard my dogs barking like maniacs and when I went outside I found a big rattlesnake caught in that piece of bird netting.

  The snake was terribly snagged with the nylon filaments cutting deeply into his body at the thickest point, about ten inches from his head which moved freely while his middle remained trapped. He was about thirty inches long and as big around as my wrist, but as soon as I called off the dogs, the snake stopped rattling. It was early July. The sun was rising and in only a few hours the trapped snake would die from the heat. I had to save his life but I didn’t know how I was going to do it because I was alone and the nearest neighbor a half mile away. I didn’t have much time. The sun was up and felt warmer by the minute.

  The snake didn’t want dogs near him but he didn’t seem to mind me, not even when I squatted down and slowly and very carefully examined how badly he was trapped. It was bad. As the snake struggled to free itself, it had only pulled the netting tighter, until the filaments drew blood on the tender skin between the scales. I had to act fast. I ran indoors and found a pair of tin shears, about fifteen inches long, handles and blades included. No matter how I did it, I was going to have to put both hands within easy striking range of the hea
d and upper body that was not entangled and moved freely. The big snake was calm so far, but I’d have to press the tips of the steel blades firmly against the snake’s body in order to reach the nylon filaments jammed under the scales. What would the snake do then?

  The sun was higher now, and I had no choice. I found a dry aloe stalk about twenty inches long with a forked end. Dry aloe stalks are hollow and flimsy and I knew the big snake could easily break the stalk, but force wasn’t the point. The aloe stalk was there to give me the illusion of safety. Twice I gently tried to put the stalk’s Y over the snake’s neck to give me the illusion of control, but he became uneasy when the stalk actually touched him, so I withdrew it a few inches but held it between the snake and me. I hoped the snake could read my thoughts because I was determined to set him free before the sun killed him.

  With my left hand I held the aloe stalk like a wand above his neck without touching him; somehow this made me feel safer although the stalk would have been completely useless if the snake suddenly doubled back to strike.

  I watched the snake intently for his reaction as I slowly moved my right hand with the tin shears toward his belly scales entangled in the nylon filaments. He didn’t seem to mind my proximity, so I took a deep breath, and focused entirely on the nylon threads cutting deep under the snake’s scales; I didn’t want to cut or harm the snake in any way. I slowly moved the tin shears down to the ensnared scales; I was so intently focused on freeing the snake from the netting the snake must have somehow understood. Because the snake allowed me to press the cold steel of the shears against his body. That touch was provocation enough that he might have reached back and struck me, but instead the snake remained calm, stretched out and motionless. Then a strange confidence came over me which I still can’t explain. In my left hand, I held the forked aloe stalk above his neck without touching him; with the tin shears in my right hand I pushed the steel tips firmly against the snake’s body to try to reach the nylon threads cutting into his skin. I managed to get a nylon thread in the shears and snip! The snake didn’t react. I exhaled. Again I gently but firmly put the blades of the shears under another nylon thread and cut it. When he felt his fat midsection cut free, the big diamondback glided away gracefully and I felt blessed.