Four days later. A warm rain out of the southeast fell gently all night. The rain barrel overflowed.
Tomorrow I will hike to the round rusty orange rock on the hillside that faces the dance plaza of the deer and javelinas. This seems like a good way to end the year of walks along the trail. I want to visit the little white crosses on the rocks to see what effects all the rain had on the washable paint.
The last day of November. I decided to make a new walking trail — off the back of the ridge and down to the small arroyo which the wild things, mostly the javelina, use for travel and as a sanctuary.
My plan was to walk to the rusty orange rock on the side of the hill, just a short distance on the old burro trail from the Gila Monster Mine pit. Although I was going north from my house, the ridge is very steep and rocky and I didn’t want to fall, so I took my time. I stopped or detoured to take a look at odd rocks or strange formations that caught my eye.
After thirty years here I know this area a little, but the earth is constantly changing, rocks that move, pebbles that roll out from under the sole of your shoe and throw you down, shifts and changes that are new to me because they were not here, not yet visible when I last hiked here with Dolly Dog and her brother, Banana, thirteen years ago.
I noticed a small area at the foot of the ridge where I saw a soft grainy whitish rock, a soda stone, a chalky calcite in a thin layer like petrified pancake batter. With the toe of my shoe I tipped over the thin broken piece of the light soft stone. The odd deposit of chalky calcite appeared to come from a single source. I detoured to look more closely; the thin layer of whitish stone had a somewhat circular shape as if a stone in water made ripples from a center point. I looked where I thought the center might be and lo and behold I saw a narrow crack in the ground; it appeared to be the remnant of an ancient steam spout or mud geyser. Warm water still comes out of neighborhood wells. It is “fossil water” from volcanic steam that was trapped a million years ago in pockets of lava and basalt five hundred feet below.
I hadn’t walked very far in the small arroyo when I disturbed a small herd of javelinas. They stampeded into the thickets of catsclaw mesquite and greasewood on the bank. I caught a glimpse of a baby javelina so I knew I had to be careful because the entire herd of javelina may charge a predator if they feel a threat to one of their babies. I hurried away, down the small arroyo, but to my left, to the north I could make out a game trail out of the arroyo that led to the old jeep trail about fifty yards away.
I crossed the jeep trail and headed for the small orange hill that lies east of the Gila Monster Mine. On my way to the small orange hill I encountered an odd patch of large round orange stones that looked as if they’d been molten then dropped in cold water. They appeared to be a large family of round orange stones like no others anywhere. They were all sizes and variations of round or egg-shaped forms; the largest were the size of sofas.
They looked so beautiful on the ridge above a little gulley, a great saguaro two hundred years old had grown up from between the largest round stones and towered over them.
How strange the round rusty orange rock on the hillside looked as I got closer to it, very different than it looked from the distance of the trail. With all the rain the desert shrubs and trees had grown mightily all summer and it had become difficult for me to see the rusty orange rock which I always thought appeared to be the image of a war shield, one of the Pueblo war shields that protected supernaturally. Yet on closer examination, the rock seemed a darker shade of red brown and less orange; it did not look at all like the round rust orange rock I’d seen from the trail whenever I walked. This rock had a brown iron ore deposit in the shape of an egg, not a circle or war shield like the orange rock had. On further reflection, I decided I hadn’t reached the rock I intended but another similar rock with a dark rust center.
From the orange hill I returned exactly the way I’d come, by intuition, not by any conscious effort, so once again I got to pass close by a clan or tribe of round rocks. I got back on the trail and continued my walk. As I neared the big arroyo, high on the ridge above it, I saw the man on his machine enclosed by the high wall that surrounds his penitentiary style structure. I had a bad feeling at once about the boulders in the arroyo.
When I reached the arroyo I saw the machine tracks, and three of the large boulders I’d painted with white crosses had been toppled and parts broken off; then the machine had pushed them to the middle of the arroyo as if to block it. Now the man and machine were blocked from reaching the other boulders he’d partially excavated to remove. I wasn’t sure what this signaled.
I had done as the Star Beings directed. Now life would become dangerous for that man with the machine. He was on notice the boulders and sand of the big arroyo were under the protection of the Star Beings. Now the Star Beings would show him no mercy. The Star Beings disliked human beings as it was, but they especially despised and destroyed his kind.
The big arroyo itself is space, open space, empty space, carved for eons through the rocks by floodwater as it descends toward the sea. Slowly but relentlessly the erosion will work so the bank of the arroyo will be undermined and in a flood it will collapse, and the wall around the house will topple into floodwaters with it. The boulders and rocks taken to landscape the yard will roll into the floodwater plop! plop! They always were travelers; the detour the man and machine took them on mattered less than a molecule. They will be on their way once more to the Santa Cruz River on its way to join the Salt River then on to the Colorado at Yuma and finally the sea.
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.