The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir Read online

  I didn’t see the big snake again until late October. It was dark in my front yard. I was coming from the car on the driveway without a flashlight; near the mesquite tree I felt my foot leave the ground with the sickening sensation of live moving flesh under my foot and instantly I knew what I’d done. As I jumped as high as I ever have, away from the snake, I heard him rattle once softly and then he was gone.

  My carelessness should have earned me a snakebite on the instep or ankle; maybe the big rattlesnake remembered that I once set him free. The snake knew I meant him no harm.

  I know of a number of instances when people accidently (usually in the dark without a flashlight) stepped on rattlesnakes or even sat on a snake without a bite. An emergency room doctor told me that all the rattlesnake-bite victims he’d seen were people who were actively molesting the snakes—holding them or poking them with sticks.

  CHAPTER 15

  T he drought began in 1985. The small cottonwood tree I planted in 1989 died in the summer of 1997. The tree depended on gray water from the kitchen sink but I did very little cooking and washing while I completed my novel Gardens in the Dunes.

  The last good rains came in 1983 from a hurricane that came out of the Gulf of California. The rivers and arroyos that were usually dry suddenly filled with torrents of water that swept over their banks and washed away bridges and condominiums.

  The approach of rain clouds on the horizon became an important occasion. I’d stop whatever I was doing, including writing, and sit outside to wait for the clouds, and hope they wouldn’t pass us over.

  In 1997 I started writing little notes about the sky, the clouds, and all us desert creatures anxious to have the rain. The first rain of any duration came stealthily around the tenth of May that year—no weather radar map showed any clouds even when I could see the clouds and the wind blew. I didn’t look outside again for hours until I noticed the sky darkening. I left art magazines and a VCR outside in the yard as an unwitting offering to the rain; I brought the items indoors then worried that I’d offended the rain clouds. To leave valuable possessions outside indicates the wretched hopelessness felt after years of drought.

  Clouds please take pity on us.

  Ten days later the northeast sky is violet blue, the spin of the storm spiraled it north but now we may be in its path if it begins to spin southward.

  But it didn’t spin southward after all. No rain. The air is so dry even if rain did fall from the clouds in a gossamer veil of blue, it would evaporate before it reached the ground.

  Here I abandoned the rain journal for a while. A superstitious person might say don’t keep a rain journal because it won’t rain if you do.

  Even the chance for rain puts me in the mood to write about the approaching clouds; they are so lovely I want to sketch them in chalk too.

  If I kept a heat journal I would have a great deal to write about every day.

  Temperatures above 103 degrees overheat the ape brain and humans become slightly crazed. Minor traffic accidents increase in Tucson. Those of us with overheated monkey brains brook no delays at traffic lights or in supermarket check out lines.

  Newcomers to Tucson’s summer heat are amazed to find their car’s rear view mirror lying on the front seat because the glue melts. Car windshields become solar furnaces capable of melting plastic objects left on the car dashboard, including cell phones, sunglasses, cameras, DVDs and credit cards. Dashboards themselves gradually crack and disintegrate. Car batteries suddenly explode. Transformers on electric power poles also explode in the heat.

  During daylight hours the dash from the air conditioned supermarket to the car wilts all fresh produce or cut flowers, and defrosts frozen food; so the wise shopper waits until the night. So do the wise hunters.

  Night. Heavenly delicious sweet night of the desert that calls all of us out to love her. The night is our comfort with her coolness and darkness. On wings, on feet, on our bellies, out we all come to glory in the night.

  There are a few deserts on Earth that go without measurable rainfall or snow for years and years and not just six or seven months, as Tucson does. Places in the Taklimakan Desert on the old Silk Road, in the Atacama Desert in Chile, get less rain than Tucson does. Places in Iraq and Arabia get hotter than Tucson; even Phoenix and Las Vegas get hotter than Tucson.

  Over time the monkey brain adjusts to the temperatures above one hundred two Fahrenheit, but there are compensations which must be made.

  Long before there was any such thing as daylight savings time, the people of the desert Southwest got out of bed long before dawn—at midnight if the moon was up—to work in their cornfields until daylight. By noon the people would be asleep. The Englishmen saw this and accused the people of laziness; but to work in the heat at high noon as the old gringos did was madness.

  Tucson nights in the summer approach a perfection of temperature between the night air and that of the human body. The air is faintly perfumed by the reina de la noche, the Queen of the Night, an indigenous variety of the night-blooming Cereus cactus that bears blossoms of astonishing beauty which last only one night.

  The light of the moon on the desert causes subtle motion to become perceptible as the giant saguaros move in the wind along the ridge. It all happens with the light; what we see, what the human brain registers—what we call “reality”—is all light.

  CHAPTER 16

  One hundred five degrees Fahrenheit on this late June day but I see clouds, high thin cirrus clouds that give me hope; the level of humidity in the air is rising as moist air flows from the Gulf of California and the Sierra Madre.

  Then two days of prayers and deer dances are offered by the Yoeme and the Tohono O’Odom people in honor of San Juan to call in the rain clouds. Today one hundred two degrees Fahrenheit. By afternoon a light rain falls.

  Off come the leaves of the mesquites and palo verde, and my datura plants too. Down the hill a little whirlwind swirls in the chicken yard. In eight minutes or less it’s passed and then the second wave comes with big raindrops for two or three minutes and it’s over.

  Sometimes in the rain or at sundown one may catch glimpses of ancient scenes of grandeur—cities of gold in cliffs of sandstone mesas in remote valleys beyond the black volcanic peaks.

  It’s mid-July now and yesterday when it was bright and hot, I was picking ripe figs and noticed the odd branch actually brushed the ground now, pulled down by the two fat black figs ready to pick. My attention was focused on the two ripe figs and how to reach them in the shade by the wall. I was about to blindly push past the fig branches and around the pots of tomatoes to pick the figs when something caused me to look more closely at the shady ground where I intended to step: almost invisible on the ground under the ripe black figs was a large, beige-colored rattlesnake in a low profile coil.

  This snake lives under the back step and knows my morning routine in the garden of red clay pots. She doesn’t bother to rattle because she trusts me, as do the blue-bellied sky lizards who wait for me with the hose to wash out scores of caramel-colored cockroaches.

  The rattlesnake that lives in the front yard was determined to come inside the front room last autumn. He would come and press his nose against the glass by the front door. Indoors, the dogs, Tigger and Thelma, could see the snake and went wild with concern. The snake stayed awhile then left.

  Finally one evening the snake came while the dogs were away. The dogs left the broken screen door wide open. Persistence paid off for the snake, and he found a way to get inside the house.

  The dogs soon returned and smelled at once what happened. They tracked the snake in the front room and cornered him by the front door and barked furiously until I came out with a dust mop and gently guided the snake out the front door.

  The dogs were devastated by the breach of their sanctuary and ever after they came in the front door with a certain hesitation because the snake got inside once and might do it again.

  Some years before this, I came in from the front room where
my studio is located now, and I heard a loud rattling from the direction of the kitchen. Right away I could tell by the sound this was not the rattler that lived underneath the kitchen floor, the one that used to rattle whenever I stepped near the refrigerator door. No, the sound wasn’t coming from under any floor, the buzzing rattle sound was coming directly from my kitchen.

  The merry Feng Shui remodeler never bothered to fix the holes in the wall behind the stove and the refrigerator; a small spotted Sonora skunk used to come out into the kitchen from under the stove in the winter, so it was inevitable that one day a snake would follow the same route. The big red rattlesnake looked at me and at the kitchen in bewilderment. I opened the side door and used the broom to guide the snake outside. When she felt the outdoor air on her face she accelerated and was gone.

  A large light-colored Western diamondback rattlesnake lived under the house, under the kitchen floor when I moved into the house. At first she didn’t recognize my footsteps and used to rattle loudly under the kitchen floor where I stood. I jumped every time she rattled then gradually she stopped rattling because she got used to me. I suspected that she was the source of the half dozen baby rattlesnakes that appeared on the living room floor in 1989.

  My father and his wife, Kathy, came for a visit. I had gone grocery shopping but I’d left the door unlocked for them and they made themselves comfortable on the couch in the living room. My stepmother was almost nine months pregnant with my youngest half brother, Leland. They were watching TV waiting for me to get back when Milo the cat alerted them to the six newborn baby rattlesnakes wiggling on the old brick floor next to the fireplace where there were small holes in the plaster. My father and Milo promptly killed five of the newborn snakes; their tiny mangled remains greeted us by the front door when Gus and I returned with the groceries.

  While my father recounted the bravery of Milo and himself, Gus spotted the lone surviving baby rattler under the couch where my pregnant stepmother sat only moments before. Oddly, only a few weeks earlier, Gus had talked about wanting to get a baby rattlesnake; yeah, nice idea, I said at the time because I thought it would be impossible for Gus to get a baby rattlesnake.

  The mother rattlesnake must have given birth to them under the dining room floor near the back side of the fireplace, right next to the hole in the plaster that leads into the living room. Gus scooped up the tiny snake in a glass jar. The newborn snake was the diameter of a piece of spaghetti; coiled flat it was only the size of a quarter. Gus fed it live crickets from the pet store for two weeks and then the snake was ready to eat baby pinkie mice, and before long, it ate small mice. Gus named the snake Evo Atrox.

  In the snake’s first year it quickly grew to more than twelve inches in length and was big around as my ring finger. Like macaws and parrots, rattlesnakes have to grow fast to fool the predators or they won’t survive infancy.

  The second year, in September, the rattlesnake became restless and tried to get out of its cage. It wouldn’t eat. The winter hibernation instinct perhaps.

  The third year when Evo got restless I had a plan.

  A few months earlier in the summer I’d discovered a terrible thing—a fine rattler got entangled in poultry netting and had died some days before. I removed the poultry netting, but I didn’t forget the big snake that lived on the west side slope about seventy feet below the west door to the house.

  That September, when Evo began to move restlessly, Gus and I decided to take Evo to the eco-niche vacated by the dead snake, and set him free. There was a big palo verde tree next to a pile of lava boulders with intriguing holes under them. A perfect home for a snake. For the first year while Evo transitioned, I planned to bring him white mice and to keep a bowl of water under the palo verde tree. We slid open the cage door and Evo glided out and went into the hole at the foot of the boulders under the palo verde tree. We felt proud of ourselves for returning the snake to the wild.

  The next morning the dogs were barking on the west side of the house at eight a.m. and when I looked out the window on the west side of the house, I saw a rattlesnake that looked like Evo. But I thought it must be one of Evo’s relatives that lived under the house.

  About two hours later, the dogs were barking again on the west side, and when I opened the door, the rattlesnake was leaning against the door and flopped into the house. It was Evo. We retrieved the snake cage and water bowl from the site down the hillside and guided Evo into his cage where he’s remained ever since.

  CHAPTER 17

  Search the Internet under the subject “rattlesnake” and you’ll find the same proportion of snake-killers and snake-haters as there are snake-lovers and snake-appreciators. I downloaded the photographs of dozens of rattlesnakes stretched out and piled up on top of one another to cool off in the concrete culverts under the highway near Bakersfield, California. I was heartened to see so many big rattlesnakes together.

  I was telling rattlesnake stories at a Lannan Foundation dinner one evening in Santa Fe. I talked about the people I knew who’ve stepped on or even sat on rattlesnakes without being bitten. My uncle Wafer, Dick Chapman, myself—we had all stepped on rattlesnakes without incident. One cold day when Linda Niemann was a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad, she sat on a small rattler that was trying to warm itself on a rock, and it didn’t bite.

  J.E. who worked for the Lannan Foundation was seated at our table and said she had a rattlesnake story. It happened when she was nineteen and had just arrived in Tucson from Connecticut for her freshman year at the University of Arizona. She had no experience in the desert or in the West. A week after her arrival, she was invited to a big beer bust at a campground on the road to the Catalina Mountains. After dark the party-goers built a bonfire and everyone was having a jolly, noisy time. She had to urinate so she went a distance from the bonfire in the dark. She pulled down her jeans and panties and as she squatted her right heel came down on a big rattlesnake.

  The snake buried its fangs deep into her heel. With her panties and jeans still down around her ankles, she ran back to the bonfire screaming for help with the big rattlesnake hanging onto her heel. No one saw whether she wore panties or pants—all eyes were on the snake as the people around the bonfire ran over one another in their haste to escape.

  Fortunately someone had invited a cowboy from a ranch nearby to attend the beer bust. The cowboy wasn’t afraid to help J.E. He told her to stand still while he went back to his truck. He returned with a shotgun and she said she thought “Oh no!—I’ve been bitten by a snake and now I’m about to get shot.”

  The cowboy thought the better of it and took the shotgun back to his truck. This time he brought back a hatchet. He chopped the snake’s head from the body but the head would not come loose from her heel, and the cowboy had to chop the snake’s jaws with the hatchet to get it off her heel.

  Next the cowboy called out for whiskey and took two or three big swallows “for protection” while he sucked the venom from the wound. J.E. believes the cowboy saved her life that night because it took the ambulance more than an hour to arrive. As it was she spent a week in the hospital but sustained no permanent damage.

  All the people and noise must have frightened the rattlesnake a great deal before J.E. came along, which may account for the severity of the bite.

  If you go to a place where the rattlesnakes don’t know you or places where humans attack snakes, then you must be much more careful. It is wise to cultivate a certain self-discipline that requires you to look before you step or reach. For me watering in the garden is the time I have to be cautious because the spray from the hose may cause a snake to move silently from a shady place behind a flowerpot behind me and if I step back without first looking, I might step on a snake.

  The angle of the sun about a week before the first day of spring is their signal. The rattlesnakes begin to emerge. The big orange snake suns herself by the west door on a heap of cut flower debris; she only rattled the first day when she and I startled one another. When the pup s
niffed the big rattler it allowed the puppy’s nose to touch it without incident.

  Later, on the west side of the house I looked out the window and saw two rattlesnakes dancing in a heap of stove ashes.

  The big albino rattler under the fig tree is the same color as the limestone around the base of the clay pot. This year he got angry at the dogs on the other side of the fence because they kept barking and spoiled his hunting. Now he’s sprawled under the fig tree with a big lump of dinner distending his belly, too full to be comfortable but also too full to flee. He’s back in a day or two to sit next to the pale limestone under the fig tree to watch the drainpipe where rats keep their nurseries.

  Later we found a yearling diamondback in the pigeon cage. He wasn’t after pigeons because they are too big for him to swallow. So he tolerated many pigeons stepping all around him without striking one. He was waiting for a sparrow or small rodent to come inside the cage to pilfer feed.

  Charlie herded him out of the cage and the snake hasn’t been back. Was he the one who tried and failed to swallow pigeons last summer?

  The snake by the fig tree is the same one that turns itself almost white when it sits in the sand outside the military macaw cage on the white sand. He shares that area with a small snake with a black mask.

  I once touched the dark masked snake when I was weeding my wild asters after sundown. I felt the snake shudder at my touch and draw away, but the snake didn’t rattle. The snake had every right to bite me when I touched him but he sensed I meant no harm. I don’t weed after dark anymore, and the snake didn’t sit under the wild asters again.