High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [9]
Since I moved to this neighborhood of desert, I’ve learned I have other writers for neighbors. Unlike the toads, we’re shy—we don’t advertise our presence to each other quite so ostentatiously. In fact, I only found out I’d joined a literary commune when my UPS man—I fancy him a sort of manly Dorothy Parker in uniform—began giving me weekly updates. Visitors up at Silko’s had been out looking for wild pigs, and Mr. Abbey had gone out in his backyard and shot the TV, again. (Sad to say, that doesn’t happen anymore. We all miss Ed.)
I imagine other neighbors: that Georgia O’Keeffe, for example, is out there walking the hills in sturdy shoes, staring down the UPS man with such a fierce eye that he will never dare tell.
What is it that draws creators to this place? Low rent, I tell my friends who ask, but it’s more than that. It’s the Southwest: a prickly land where mountain lions make bets with rabbits, and rabbits can win. Where nature rubs belly to belly with subdivision and barrio, and coyotes take shortcuts through the back alleys. Here even the rain has gender, the frogs sing carpe diem, and fast teenage girls genuflect quickly toward the door of the church, hedging their bets, as they walk to school in tight skirts and shiny high heels.
When I drive to the post office every few days to pick up my mail, it’s only about twelve miles round trip, but I pass through at least half-a-dozen neighborhoods that distinguish themselves one from the other by architecture and language and even, especially, creation myth. First among them is the neighborhood of jackrabbits and saguaros, who imperiously tolerate my home, though I can’t speak their language or quite understand their myths.
Then, just inside the city limits, a red cobble of just-alike roofs—paved air—where long strands of exurban condominiums shelter immigrants from Wisconsin, maybe, or Kansas, who dream in green and hug small irrigated lawns to their front doors.
Next I cross the bridge over the Santa Cruz, whose creation story bubbles from ephemeral springs in the mountains of southern Arizona and Mexico. In these lean days she’s a great blank channel of sand, but we call her a river anyway, and say it with a straight face too, because in her moods this saint has taken out bridges and houses and people who loved their lives.
Then I pass under the artery of Interstate 10, which originates in Los Angeles or Jacksonville, Florida, depending on your view of destiny; and the railroad track, whose legend is a tale tasting of dynamite, the lives and deaths of immigrants who united a continent and divided in twain the one great original herd of American bison.
Then without warning I am smack in the middle of a Yaqui village that is fringe-edged and small like a postage stamp, and every bit alive. Despite its size, Pascua Yaqui is a sovereign world; I come here every Easter to watch an irresistible pageant combining deer dances with crucifixion. Like the Tohono O’odham singing down the rain, the masked Yaqui dancers listen for the heartbeat of creation, and keep a promise with every vernal equinox to hold the world to its rightful position. On this small patch of dusty ground, the religion of personal salvation is eclipsed by a faith whose question and answer are matters of order in the universe. Religion of that kind can crack your mind open the way lightning splits a pine, leaving the wind to howl through the scorched divide. I can hardly ever even