Again to the sea. The boulders and rocks of limestone and quartzite originated in the Great Sea. As the stones from millions of years reckon it, man and machine are no more than a shadow of a mote of dust.
CHAPTER 60
My dear friend Mei-Mei came to Tucson the first week of December 2008. She gave seminars and performed a wonderful reading of her new work last night. Later Mei-Mei and I took a walk along the trail. I told her about the orange red rock that appears to be round on the hillside, but when I hiked up to it I felt I’d somehow gotten to a similar rock but not the round rock I’d seen from the trail. Distance and light affect the appearances of rocks, but the rock just looked too different to be the right one.
A short distance past the pit of the Gila Monster Mine, at the east end of the deer and javelina dance plaza, I stopped and pointed out the round red orange iron oxide rock. The old-time people used iron oxides for pottery, face paint and for cliff murals and sand paintings.
We left the trail and hiked cross-country from past the tribe of large round rocks at the edge of a small arroyo; then we took the old burro trail that passes at the foot of the small orange hill.
The hillside was steep but not too rocky to scale. We reached the orange red rock which looked entirely different than the rock I remembered from my recent visit. There must be two similar red orange iron oxide rocks in the same area of the orange hillside.
Yet when I looked I didn’t see another such round orange rock. I need to make a more thorough survey. Today the sun was almost behind the hills so we needed to get back to the main trail.
We passed the place populated by the round rocks, and took the trail past the ant palaces with the star patterns of stones around their entrances. Then we came up the last rise before the big arroyo.
I braced myself for what I might see next, but the man and his machine had not returned since he’d pushed the two boulders across the trail. Some of the paint on the small white stars got scraped off when he toppled the boulders and pushed them across the trail, but a few of the crosses were still visible. The white crosses on the other rocks made a pictograph of a constellation fallen to Earth.
Now I realized the boulders the man pushed over were his attempt to block the trail in the bottom of the arroyo to discourage hikers and horseback riders who would have to squeeze by the rocks. He also blocked his own access to the fragile rock along the north side of the arroyo and the boulders which he’d begun to excavate before I painted them. Of course he could always use the machine to push the boulders aside if he wanted to go after the rocks and boulders painted with the white crosses, but I got the feeling the man didn’t want those rocks for his yard, so maybe the painting worked after all.
We continued up the big arroyo homeward. We met a woman with her two dogs. She asked if we’d seen the “gang graffiti” painted on the rocks. The woman said she’d had a break-in and sent the sheriff’s deputies who were investigating to see the “gang graffiti” on the rocks. Clearly she connected her burglary with the “gang graffiti.”
Gangs spray-paint their graffiti all over Tucson but none of it looks anything like the small crosses painted with a brush and tempera. In Tucson “gang” and “gang graffiti” are code words white people use to indicate young brown or black men who they consider to be “aliens” even if they were born in Arizona.
How interesting that the small white crosses were interpreted as “gang graffiti” and not connected somehow with Christianity. Apparently the emblem of the Star Beings penetrated the psyches of the newcomers who got the message: indigenous forces are present to oppose you.
The woman concluded by saying that now she and her neighbors had to install an expensive gate on their private driveway. She and her neighbors are newcomers to Tucson—early retirees with enough money to build “dream houses” in the desert despite the financial crash.
The woman’s reaction gave me an insight into the boulders toppled across the trail. Apparently the machine man had a similar response to the appearance of the white crosses of the Star Beings and thought an urban gang had driven miles out of town to the big arroyo to paint “gang graffiti” on the rocks he was excavating. The boulders he pushed over with the machine were intended to block the arroyo from further visits by gang members.
New Year’s Day, 2009. The hikers’ parking lot was nearly full when I left for my walk this morning. The holiday and the lovely warm weather brought out a great many visitors to the national park, but I only met one couple on the trail after I left the parking lot. Most park visitors come to hike the Sweetwater Trail that overlooks the city.
I found the tracks of a lone deer that danced last night at the sandy dance plaza. The ground is still damp in the low places like the dance plaza. I paused there to look at the orange hillside and to study the round orange rock. I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a second, similar orange red rock on the hillside.
I didn’t see another orange red iron oxide rock, but above and to the left of the round red orange rock on a prominent outcrop of the hill, I thought I saw petroglyphs in a lighter stone where the dark stone was pecked away. It might have been the angle of the morning light and nothing more.
It was a year ago today that I found the second attack by the man and the machine on the beautiful boulders and sandbars in the big arroyo. But this morning the place was very still, and felt at peace. The boulders with the crosses, even the ones the man flipped over, were beginning to lose the appearance of sudden violence; the machine tracks were smoothed by the rain. A number of the small white crosses already looked old and faded; they recede into the basalt and quartzite with every raindrop.
Gentle warm rains from the south have already graced us. Venus is a night sun brighter and larger each night. This is a good place to end. Gratitude to all of you beings of the stars.
Leslie Marmon Silko, The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir
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