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.
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.