High Tide in Tucson Read Online Free Page A
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after anotherâthat is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.
What a stroke of luck. What a singular brute feat of outrageous fortune: to be born to citizenship in the Animal Kingdom. We love and we lose, go back to the start and do it right over again. For every heavy forebrain solemnly cataloging the facts of a harsh landscape, thereâs a rush of intuition behind it crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.
CREATION STORIES
June is the crudest month in Tucson, especially when it lasts till the end of July. This is the season when every living thing in the desert swoons south toward some faint salt dream of the Gulf of Mexico: tasting the horizon, waiting for the summer storms. This year they are late. The birds are pacing the ground stiff-legged, panting, and so am I. Waiting. In this blind, bright still-June weather the shrill of the cicadas hurts your eyes. Every plant looks pitiful and, when you walk past it, moans a little, envious because you can walk yourself to a drink and it canât.
The water that came last winter is long gone. âFemale rain,â itâs called in Navajo: the gentle, furtive rains that fall from overcast skies between November and March. That was weather to drink and to grow on. But not to remember, anymore than a child remembers last birthdayâs ice cream, once the months have passed without another drop. In June there is no vital sign, not so muchas a humid breath against a pane of glass, till the summer storms arrive. What weâre waiting for now is male rain. Big, booming wait-till-your-father-gets-home cloudbursts that bully up from Mexico and threaten to rip the sky.
The Tohono Oâodham have lived in the Sonoran Desert longer than anyone else whoâs still living; their answer to this season is to make frothy wine from the ripe saguaro fruits, and drink it all day and all night in a do-or-die ceremony to bring down the first storm. When it comes, the answer to a desertâs one permanent question, that first storm defines the beginning of the Tohono Oâodham new year. The storms themselves are enough to get drunk on: ferocious thunder and raindrops splatting so hard on the cooked ground you hear the thing approaching like mortar fire.
I saw my first of these summer storms in 1978. I hadnât been in Arizona long enough to see the calendar open and close, so I spent the early summer in a state of near panic, as the earliest people in any place must have done when they touched falling snow or the dry seasonâs dust and asked each time: This burning cold, these dying plantsâis this, then, the end of the world?
I lived in a little stuccoed house in a neighborhood of barking dogs and front-yard shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe. One sweltering afternoon I heard what I believed must be kids throwing gravel at the houses, relentlessly and with feeling. It was hot enough so that the neighborhood, all of it, dogs and broken glass on the sidewalks included, had murder in mind. I knew I was risking my neck to go outside and scold kids for throwing rocks, but I went anyway. What I saw from the front stoop arrested me in my footprints: not a troop of juvenile delinquents, but a black sky and a wall of water as high as heaven, moving up the block. I ran into the street barefoot and danced with my mouth open. So did half my neighbors. Armistice Day.
Now I live on the outskirts of town, in the desert at the
What a stroke of luck. What a singular brute feat of outrageous fortune: to be born to citizenship in the Animal Kingdom. We love and we lose, go back to the start and do it right over again. For every heavy forebrain solemnly cataloging the facts of a harsh landscape, thereâs a rush of intuition behind it crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.
CREATION STORIES
June is the crudest month in Tucson, especially when it lasts till the end of July. This is the season when every living thing in the desert swoons south toward some faint salt dream of the Gulf of Mexico: tasting the horizon, waiting for the summer storms. This year they are late. The birds are pacing the ground stiff-legged, panting, and so am I. Waiting. In this blind, bright still-June weather the shrill of the cicadas hurts your eyes. Every plant looks pitiful and, when you walk past it, moans a little, envious because you can walk yourself to a drink and it canât.
The water that came last winter is long gone. âFemale rain,â itâs called in Navajo: the gentle, furtive rains that fall from overcast skies between November and March. That was weather to drink and to grow on. But not to remember, anymore than a child remembers last birthdayâs ice cream, once the months have passed without another drop. In June there is no vital sign, not so muchas a humid breath against a pane of glass, till the summer storms arrive. What weâre waiting for now is male rain. Big, booming wait-till-your-father-gets-home cloudbursts that bully up from Mexico and threaten to rip the sky.
The Tohono Oâodham have lived in the Sonoran Desert longer than anyone else whoâs still living; their answer to this season is to make frothy wine from the ripe saguaro fruits, and drink it all day and all night in a do-or-die ceremony to bring down the first storm. When it comes, the answer to a desertâs one permanent question, that first storm defines the beginning of the Tohono Oâodham new year. The storms themselves are enough to get drunk on: ferocious thunder and raindrops splatting so hard on the cooked ground you hear the thing approaching like mortar fire.
I saw my first of these summer storms in 1978. I hadnât been in Arizona long enough to see the calendar open and close, so I spent the early summer in a state of near panic, as the earliest people in any place must have done when they touched falling snow or the dry seasonâs dust and asked each time: This burning cold, these dying plantsâis this, then, the end of the world?
I lived in a little stuccoed house in a neighborhood of barking dogs and front-yard shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe. One sweltering afternoon I heard what I believed must be kids throwing gravel at the houses, relentlessly and with feeling. It was hot enough so that the neighborhood, all of it, dogs and broken glass on the sidewalks included, had murder in mind. I knew I was risking my neck to go outside and scold kids for throwing rocks, but I went anyway. What I saw from the front stoop arrested me in my footprints: not a troop of juvenile delinquents, but a black sky and a wall of water as high as heaven, moving up the block. I ran into the street barefoot and danced with my mouth open. So did half my neighbors. Armistice Day.
Now I live on the outskirts of town, in the desert at the
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