Winter Count Read Online Free Page B

winds that came west to us from this side of the mountains seemed to me exotic but aloof. The wind I found in this upper Sonoran country with my father was very different. It was intoxicating. The wind had a quality of wild refinement about it, like horses turning around suddenly in the air by your ear. Whether it blew steadily or in bursts its strength seemed so evenly to diminish as you turned your face to it, it was as though someone had exhaled through silk. I have never since felt so enticed or comforted by the simple movement of air.
    I returned to this valley in 1967 with a friend (whom I would bury the next year in Mexico when a road washed away from under us and left us rolling over crazily in a flash flood). The winds again held me in sway, seemingly alive, so much so that I felt contrite for not having visited in so long. Unable to sleep, I rose several times in the night to smoke a cigarette and, by turning my head slightly one way or the other, to listen. My friend only shrugged his shoulders as I explained, but he made no disparaging remark.
    On this same trip I met a man who lived at the western end of the valley, in a small adobe house at the confluence of the dry creeks of Blue and Willow Divide canyons. The first time I saw him he was sweeping a large area of the desert with a broom. As there was no vegetation where he swept, all he could be doing was removing small bits of rock and loose soil. I watched him from behind creosote bushes until some quality of dance or music in his sweeping finally brought me out. I remained concerned as I walked toward him that he might be adrift in another world. My father had told me never to approach such men.
    He was pleasant enough, but I could soon see I was imposing somehow. He stopped working while I stood there and did not encourage the conversation. I finally gave an excuse and left. All the way back to the tent I wondered at the improbability and awkwardness of this meeting, feeling that I had ruined something. When my companion returned from a trip to Steadman I told him what had happened. He thought perhaps the man only wanted to be left alone, that I shouldn’t have intruded.
    As I thought about watching him from the bushes, I thought how most of us come so late to understanding any need for privacy. I had even asked the man why he was sweeping the desert floor. He said it was an opportunity—an impossible task at which to work each day, as one might meditate or pray. He said he lived on land passed down with his family, that he mostly read—Bernal Diaz, when I asked, the volumes of Bernardino de Sahagún on the Aztec, as they became available, Copernicus—and he said he did not mind the loneliness. Several times a year he went to Steadman. Occasionally he would go on to Tucson, where he had grown up but had not been in a while. I understood him to mean the town had lost its heart, as a place that is photographed too much ceases to seem real.
    I returned to the valley in 1973, alone, and—to put it honestly—driven. I wanted to see him again. In my memory his grip, even of what little of his life I had seen that day—the rhythmic sweeping, the distant house and garden shaded under mesquite and paloverde—his grip seemed sure, as though whatever it was he was doing was as good as one might hope to do.
    The first evening in the valley I camped by myself and slept hardly at all for the breezes that came and stayed the night. The following morning I walked from the end of the bad road to his house, not more than a mile around the sweeping point of a high, chalky bluff. I noticed as I approached the arbor that sheltered his home that the area he had been sweeping that day was now covered with thousands of stones, seemingly without pattern, though it was impossible to miss the intent of a design.
    It was late in the fall, very pleasant weather if you are not used to the heat. He was at home—he remembered me and said I should stay for lunch, if I wished. I