The Furious Spinner

My dreams are peculiar here, more like movies than dreams. In one, a coach is telling a basketball player that he isn’t giving one hundred percent. In another, Gene Hackman is trying to kill me with a knife. (Yes, I get it: hack man.) I awaken shaking and terrified.

I have strange rashes, along with the strange dreams. I itch almost constantly. One day at a park I took off nearly all of my clothes to find the source of the irritation. Didn’t find it. Finally I lifted up my camisole and said to Mario, “What’s going on?” Mario pulled a thorn from my side. I have no idea how a cactus thorn got under my clothes, since my clothes and I have not be rolling around in the desert. As far as I know.

Those are only quibbles. The news of the world fades away. The dog has settled down. Mario and I often go to sleep about 10:00 p.m., wake up ten hours or more later, then have breakfast. The sun shines. Or it rains. It is cold. Or it is warm. We walk the wash after breakfast. Gambel’s Quail cluck, cluck, cluck as they run around in the underbrush before us. In the winter (like now), they form coveys (quail gangs, I say) and run together. Their bodies are plump, like other quails, and they have a plume on top of their heads. As they scurry about, they remind me of cloistered nuns trying to keep hidden, annoyed that I’ve pierced their sanctuary, yet unable to keep quiet or still about the entire thing. At night, the quail roost mostly in the paloverde, near bunches of desert mistletoe.

The desert mistletoe (phoradendron californicum) fascinates me. It’s parasitic, so it gets at least part of its nutritional needs from its host, but it does have chlorophyll and photosynthesizes. It’s green and segmented, looking like a spiky skinny tinker toy project in clumps in the trees around here. I’ve seen them mostly in paloverde, but they’re in other trees as well. They produce tiny red berries, which birds (especially the Phainopeplas) feed on. The birds often fly away to another tree and wipe their beaks on a branch to get the sticky seeds off and the seeds also get eaten and become—in tact—part of the bird droppings; thus the mistletoe finds a new host.

We see the Silky Flycatcher (Phainopepla) on our walks in the wash and around the grounds. It’s smaller than a blue jay, but it has a similar shape, including the jaunty crest, only the Phainopepla is indigo. Here in the Sonoran Desert, mistletoe berries are the main food source for the silky flycatcher.

We also see other birds on our walk, along with a panoply of cactus and other desert flora and fauna. We walk in desert sand, our feet making prints alongside the javelina prints from the night before, or the night before that. Javelinas are boar-like creatures who live in the desert and usually travel in packs, too. Their prints look like tiny deer prints—or like pig prints. We haven’t seen them yet, only their tracks, several of them, running in a line from one part of the desert to another. Sometimes they stop and dig at something in the Earth, and then are off again. They eat prickly pear and often what they leave behind looks like a peculiar art piece: a mittened hand, heart, Mickey Mouse outline.

On our way back through the wash, we stop at the Quail House, the tiny studio I mentioned. It’s a small square building with a pointed roof. The green door can be closed all the way or the top half can be opened so that you can be in the studio and outside (kind of) at the same time. I drop Mario at the Quail House where he spends the morning working and I return to the casita.

To the east of us, we can see the Rincon Mountains, the tops of which are now dusted with snow. We often hike at the Saguaro National Park which slides up the Rincons. To the north are the Santa Catalina Mountains, also topped with snow. When we lived here, everyone called them the Catalinas and as long as you were in Tucson, you always knew where north was because of the mountains. At rush hour, they would turn red from the pollution. I don’t know if they still do that or not.

I am surrounded by beauty. Sometimes it is so quiet I can hear myself breathe. Other times the annoying little dog next door won’t shut up, I can hear the traffic on Speedway, and someone with a motor bike is missing the entire point of being out in Nature—and spoiling it for those of us who do get it. But it doesn’t matter. I am getting into the flow of things. The dog didn’t bark at me even once today.

And thus far, no more thorns in my side.

Labels: Arizona, travel

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All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.