The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir

  In the arroyo I find pieces of light gray and pale orange quartzite with smooth surfaces and interesting rectangular shapes that might be the result of erosion by the water and sand in the arroyo or might be evidence that a human hand worked the stone.

  A few years ago while I was walking along the edge of the ridge near the east boundary of my property, under a large old palo verde I noticed a large light-colored stone that stood out against the darker basalt. I looked more closely and saw the center of the stone had been carved out to form a cavity; and then I thought “Of course!” The grinding stone with the concave space prevented the hard dry beans from ricocheting and scattering all over when the stone mortar struck them. Previously I’d walked right past these grinding stones without realizing what they were because I was accustomed to grinding stones made for corn which are nearly flat.

  These grinding stones were fundamental to survival on the mesquite and palo verde seeds or “beans” that the trees bear in June. The beans, though plentiful and nutritious, were indigestible unless they were ground into flour first then cooked in tortillas. Without a good grinding stone, precious beans would be wasted along with the energy and hard work it took to gather them. For a woman, her grinding stones were her partners in feeding and caring for her family. The stones were handed down from generation to generation. No wonder the grinding stones sometimes talked, and gave their owner warnings about those who might harm her or her family.

  The ancestors left the stones under the trees because year after year, they returned there to harvest the mesquite and palo verde beans. It was inconceivable that anyone would steal or remove the grinding stones because they were so heavy, and only useful right there for the hard seeds.

  Once I realized what they were, I kept my eye out for the grinding stones and the next one I found was under a large foothills palo verde that was hundreds of years old. After that I made it a practice to look beneath the oldest trees for grinding stones, and I usually wasn’t disappointed.

  Grinding stones are like other objects that humans make and use every day; they take on a presence of their own. When I see a stone that has been worked by human hands I bring it to the house so it will have a home again.

  Up here late at night in November sometimes in the wind I’ve heard the voices of women singing their grinding songs. After dark I avoid looking out the living room windows on the west side of my old ranch house because I’ve seen as many as a dozen figures walk past in a group.

  In my kitchen there is a window that looks into the hall and laundry area but at one time the window looked outdoors. Four or five times in the thirty years I’ve lived here, out of the corner of my eye I’ve gotten glimpses through that window of a woman and a man in the laundry area. I never see their faces clearly but they appear to be young adults, dressed simply, the woman in a gingham dress, the man in jeans and a shirt.

  CHAPTER 3

  In the rain mists that shimmer across the shoulders of the mountain in the west wind I can make out the tall graceful forms of the shi-wah nah, the cloud beings. I was amazed the first time I saw them crossing the Tucson Mountains.

  Once when the rain clouds were hurrying east over the Tucson Mountains, I watched them from my front yard. They were dark with moisture and I wished they’d give us rain, but I could tell by their speed that we’d get no rain—maybe the taller mountains across the valley would get rain. Still the clouds were very lovely—I could smell their sweet moisture and felt the coolness as I watched them move past. Behind the main group of clouds, came others and I noticed one small cloud trailing them—its belly was fat and dark blue but its edges were sunlit silver—“Ah what a beauty you are,” I said out loud, “just look at you!”

  Then the most amazing thing happened: the small cloud left the path the other clouds followed and it came right over and rained down gently on us before resuming its journey behind the others.

  Once I told this story at a Hopi school at lunchtime. Afterwards one of the teachers told me this: a year or so after her seven year old son died, she was outside her house when a small rain cloud stopped above her and rained a few drops before moving on. It was her son. Beloved family members and the ancestors show their love for us when they return as clouds that bring precious precipitation.

  On book tour in Albany I met a young woman who’d grown up on a nearby farm. We were talking about horses as she drove me from the airport. Recently her beloved horse had died. The day after he was buried, she went down to the pasture in the evening to bring in the other horses and when she called them, off in the woods she heard the distinctive whinny of her beloved horse.

  At the moment my dear old Arabian horse died, his stable mate suddenly galloped around the corral whinnying frantically and looking intently toward the south, as if he was trying to follow although he could plainly see his stable mate lying still on the ground.

  After death, it may take some days for the spirit to bid farewell to this world and to the loved ones they want to reassure; so they visit us as birds or other wild creatures to let us know they are in a good place not far away.

  The old folks used to keep a dish on the table and passed it around so everyone might put a pinch of food from their plates into the dish. That was to feed all their beloved family members who had passed to the other world. At the end of the meal, the contents of the dish were burned. Once when I was a small child I visited the neighbor as she cooked fried bread outdoors, and I remember how surprised I was when she flipped the first piece of fried bread from the hot oil into the hot coals and ashes. But then I realized that she’d done it to feed the spirits.

  Within days of his death, my friend James Wright, the poet, made communication with me through the visit one evening of a small burrowing owl that refused to be frightened or startled by me. James especially loved owls, and he’d written about the elf owls in a poem about the Sonoran Desert. He and his wife, Annie, were scheduled to come to Tucson that April for James to read at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, but of course that was never to be.

  Four or five days after my old friend Sheila died in 2004 a small grackle appeared right before dawn while all the other birds were still quiet. The species doesn’t usually venture into the desert and I’d not seen one up here before. The bird made raucous teasing squawks as it did a wild dance of joy on the top of the electric pole next to my house. I recognized right away it was old Sheila joyously on her way. I never again saw a short-tail grackle up here.

  One day around noon in early 2007, an unusually large cactus wren came to the big prickly pear cactus next to my living room window and perched on a cactus pad where wrens and other birds don’t usually land. The wren looked through the window at me and tilted its head back and forth until I paid attention to it. It continued to hop back and forth on the prickly pear quite gaily as it saw me watch it. I turned to Bill and I said, “See that cactus wren? That’s strange behavior. I’ve never seen a bird look through the window before. Someone I know died.” Later that day my father called with the news my dear cousin Lana had died.

  So it seems that after the passing of a friend or loved one, a few days or a week after they go, they manifest their loving energy: the wind chimes tinkle in the twilight though there is no breeze; the chimney of the oil lantern rattles by itself; the electric fan blades make an unusual sound—the realm of the spirit beings and the ancestors contact us from time to time.

  Around the Arctic Circle, the Inuit people believe family and ancestral spirits get reborn again in a few generations. Howard Rock who was Inuit published the first Eskimo newspaper, the Tundra Times. He wrote a beautiful memoir of his childhood, and he published excerpts from it in the newspaper.

  He recalled the time when he was a small child and his parents took him ice fishing, and he caught more fish than any of the adults. Howard was only five years old, so everyone noticed right away this was unusual, and then someone addressed Howard as “Grandmother,” because his late grandmother always used to catch
more fish than everyone else when they went ice fishing. That was how they recognized that her spirit had been reborn into the little boy named Howard.

  A few times I’ve had dreams in which I visited beloved family members. Once I visited my great grandfather Robert G. Marmon, who died many years before I was born. My father loved him a great deal and talked about him while I was growing up and of course, Grandma A’mooh told me about him so I felt we knew each other somehow.

  Twice in my dreams I visited with Grandma A’mooh. Both times she hugged me close to her as she did when I was a little girl; when I awoke her familiar scent was still with me. But after only a few moments that memory of her scent when she held me faded into my dream consciousness.

  CHAPTER 4

  Human beings have lived along the Rio San José in north central New Mexico continuously for the past eighteen thousand years. Not far from Laguna, to the southeast, near State Road 6, the river descends into a gorge, and it was here in shallow caves and cliff overhangs that archeologists found hearths used thousands of years ago by the indigenous hunters who chipped elegant leaf-shaped spear and arrow points to hunt the bison and elk that grazed on the plain. Archeologists called the culture San José man, a counterpart of Folsom man, whose spear points were found in eastern New Mexico, near the town of Folsom.

  When I think of the Pueblo people, I think of sandstone—sandstone rainwater cisterns, and sandstone cliff houses; sandstone was the preferred building material at Chaco Canyon and at Mesa Verde, and in the pueblos when I was growing up. Sandstone is a sedimentary rock formed chiefly by quartz particles in a cement of calcite. The calcite cement is often white but some is also yellow, red or brown depending on the iron content in the calcite. Sandstone formations ring the fossil remnants of the great inland seas of the Jurassic Age, which left behind Lake Bonneville and its survivor, the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Southern Utah, western Colorado, northern Arizona and New Mexico are crossed by the same formations of yellow, orange and red sandstone the geologists call by such exotic names as Kaibab, Chinle, Entrada, Carmel, Navajo and Wingate.

  The Pueblo people preferred to live along rivers like the Rio San José, the Rio Puerco, and of course, the Rio Grande. If they did not settle by a river, they sought mesas or hilltops with expanses of light yellow or ivory sandstone, the wind-deposited cross bedded dunes laid down eons ago in the Mesozoic, compressed and petrified by overlying sediments that later eroded away. The sandstone was fine-grained and hard enough to resist crumbling under the mason’s basalt hammer, but soft enough to carve hand and footholds on the faces of cliffs. The people sought the sandstone formations because pools of rainwater collected in natural basins and cisterns in the petrified Jurassic dunes. The same formations contained long vertical seams that formed fissures in the sandstone where fossil water, artesian springs cold as ice, seeped and dripped down to form shallow pools. So it is not remarkable that the Pueblo people settled on or near the sandstone formations.

  As a child I used to watch my great grandma A’mooh kneel on the floor of her kitchen to grind green chili with garlic cloves on the curved rectangular stone of fine-grained black lava. The people preferred the lava stones for grinding because stones made from sandstone sometimes left a residue of fine grit in the food.

  Aunt Susie said when she was a child, the women of the household and the neighbors did the grinding together, and as they worked they sang songs. The songs changed their task from hard work to pleasure as they lost themselves in the sounds and the words. Maybe the grinding songs kept the clanswomen from gossiping too much. The songs belonged to particular clans and the women didn’t sing the songs of other clans.

  It was a grinding song that caused Coyote’s disastrous plunge from a high cliff of yellow sandstone. Coyote wanted to learn the grinding song the cedarbirds sang while they were grinding cedar berries.

  The cedarbirds dared not refuse Coyote’s demand to grind with them and learn the song, but as soon as they could, the cedarbirds planned their escape. They told Coyote they had to fly to the top of the high sandstone mesa to drink from a water hole. Coyote demanded to go along so the cedarbirds each donated a feather and they glued the feathers to Coyote’s legs with pine pitch. By flapping his legs very hard Coyote was able to fly in low circles that gradually took him higher, while the birds flew off to the mesa top.

  The birds were finished drinking when Coyote finally managed to fly up to the mesa top. While Coyote was drinking he noticed the heat of the sun had made the pitch soft and the feathers were falling off his legs. He realized he wouldn’t be able to fly and would be stranded on top of the cliff. He tried to threaten the cedarbirds to force them to help him, but they flew away.

  Old Spider Woman heard Coyote’s cries for help and came to his rescue. She told him to get into her magic basket and she would lower him down from the mesa top. There was only one thing he must not do while she was lowering him: he must not look up. But Coyote could not resist taking a peek and the basket he was riding in plunged to the ground far below and Coyote was smashed to pieces on the rocks. All this because Coyote wanted to learn the cedarbird ladies’ grinding song.

  The coarse blue corn flour ground between lava grinding stones made a thick tortilla with amazing flavor—far better than the thin tortillas from machine-ground blue corn. Our neighbors used to take orders from everyone in Laguna and the following day they delivered the most delicious big red chili enchiladas made with these stone-ground blue corn tortillas.

  Aunt Susie told me about the special sandstone griddles required to make the delicacy called piki bread. The cook has to work fast; she pours a corn meal batter onto the hot griddle all the while quickly smearing the batter with her bare hand into a film over the griddle so it forms continuous paper-thin sheets that fold around one another.

  If the griddle stone is too coarse, the batter sticks and the flaky sheets of corn batter are ruined. So the rectangular slabs of hard fine-grained sandstone were essential for making the piki. Griddles made with other stone would not do, and the people at Paguate village where my great grandmother came from possessed the best source of griddle stones. During droughts or other hard times, the people used to carry the griddle stones in backpacks and walk for four or five days to reach Jemez Pueblo where they traded them for beans and corn to take back to Paguate.

  The Anasazi, the ancient Pueblo people, were haunted by memories of terrible famines when the weather or other conditions failed them. Even now the Western Pueblos and the Hopi tell stories about droughts and famines that struck their villages, and forced the people to take refuge at other pueblos to avoid starvation. Sometimes small children and infants were adopted by childless people in other pueblos so the babies might survive.

  On the high desert plateau of north central New Mexico, the Anasazi had to pursue food sources relentlessly, gathering seeds, roots, berries and birds’ eggs, hunting small rodents and snaring birds. Hunters stalked deer and elk in the mountains and the antelope and bison on the grassy plains that stretched away to the south and to the east.

  Below the mesa and hilltop villages, in the sandy soil at the mouths of arroyos and other small drainages, the people carried on dry farming of corn, beans, melons, amaranth and greens. The deep layers of fine sand trapped and held the runoff down where the roots of the bean and corn seedlings suckled and grew. These deposits of fine sand were rich in nutrients gathered as rain washed the sand from the mesas. Unlike soils of clay, the deep sand deposits captured rainwater almost immediately so little precious water was lost to flooding or evaporation.

  The most ingenious engineering was done on the floodplains where small stones were arranged in slender curved half-moons, spaced so the swift muddy runoff from sudden cloudbursts was slowed by the small stone catch-dams and the runoff sank into the deep sand then spread nicely to water the fields of corn and beans nearby.

  The Pueblo people lived in the Laguna-Acoma area for thousands of years before the Europeans invaded, but the Spanish recor
d-keepers made no mention of Laguna Pueblo, only Acoma. It was at Acoma Pueblo that the Spaniards chopped off one hand and one foot of every captured Acoma man or boy over the age of seven, in retaliation for an Acoma victory over the Spanish troops in 1598.

  Because of their barbarity toward all the Indian tribes, the Spaniards were later killed or driven out of the country all the way to El Paso in the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Even the Apaches and Navajos set aside differences with one another and with the Pueblos to join them in the action to expel the invaders.

  In 1692 the Spaniards returned. The Indian alliances that produced the Great Revolt were no longer maintained and the Pueblo resistance failed. Those in the pueblos around Santa Fe who did resist the return of the invaders were killed and their families sent to Mexico as slaves or removed and resettled to Laguna. But the Kawaikameh, the Laguna people, had been living there by the small lake on the Rio San José for thousands of years already when the rebels from the northern pueblos were brought there. Thus the Spaniards erroneously stated Laguna Pueblo wasn’t established until 1698. The error about the date of the founding of Laguna Pueblo was repeated in later histories. The Laguna Pueblo people didn’t bother to correct the error because it made no difference to their reckoning of the world.

  CHAPTER 5

  From my earliest days, animals and beings of the natural world occupied as much of my consciousness as human beings did. Around humans often I sensed an uncomfortable feeling below the surface, one that left me with unease and anxiety to please everyone. So early on I preferred to play alone, or to be with cats, dogs or horses for companionship, not human beings.