Eating Stone (8 page)

“Liturgical time,” writes Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk, “is essentially poetic time, oriented toward process rather than productivity, willing to wait attentively in stillness.” I wait in a season of muted color and sound made explicit by cold, cold air. Night pushes at the margins of day. Night's chill robs all warmth from the canyon's mass, and the jade river runs a few degrees warmer than ice.

Late one afternoon, I watch a group of seventeen bighorns as they feed on a talus, heads down, their silhouettes illumined by the day's last angle of the sun. Every filament of their bodies is ignited with golden light. They seem encircled by imploding halos. What strikes me the most about them is the grace of their fit—this animal to this desert, in this light.

All seventeen sheep gather and move off the talus, move as if they hear music. With their muscles, they map the shape of the stone. In single file, they walk slowly up-canyon, bodies still incandescent against gray rock. The lead ewe guides them to an improbable crack. One by one, they enter the crack and vanish.

No matter where I look or how long I wait, I cannot find them again. I cannot find them for the rest of the day or for days afterward. The sheep are gone.

For years, I have been enchanted by a wild creature that lives in the far south ripples of New Mexico's basin and range province. I follow her life with a manic swing from worry that she has died to news that, despite formidable odds against her, she is still alive on the craggy escarpment that is her home range.

To single out an individual from the herd is a human, rather than a sheep, impulse, for everything about the life of wild sheep is group life. This ewe has no group. This ewe lives by herself on a wildlife refuge that was set aside over sixty years ago specifically to preserve bighorn sheep. Without her, the refuge would be preserving this many bighorn sheep: zero. She is the last remaining native desert bighorn in the Chihuahuan Desert.

On the register at New Mexico's San Andres National Wildlife Refuge, she is San Andres Ewe 067, named for the order of her capture during a refuge operation. I have a photograph taken from a helicopter that found this one elusive animal in a sea of peaks. She hates helicopters and usually walks straight into a wind cave when one arrives. And there she stays. She would likely emerge only after the chopper ran out of fuel, dropped out of the sky, fossilized in the desert sun, the human race expired, and cockroaches took over the world. Then, perhaps, it might be safe.

This time, the camera caught her as she fled. A broken outcrop fills most of the image. On the far left of the frame, the gray-beige bighorn stands against the blue-black rock in side profile, her face turned to the camera.

At thirteen years old when this picture was taken, she is elderly but healthy. A red tag hangs from one of her ears like a Navajo slab dangle earring. Her triangular face tapers to the signature black Y of sheep nostrils set against the pale hairs of nose and chin. Her brow is broad, her eyes two orbs of pooled darkness.

Horns of female bighorns rise from the poll in a short arc, like a bony rebar with torqued ends. Ewe horns lack the mass and curl of ram horns, freeing the females—given all that head bashing—from anxieties over the size of their body parts. As a typical mature desert bighorn female, SAE 067 should have these bony exclamations atop her head. But she does not. Her horns are gone. She looks into the camera with a sleek, smooth head. She is “bald.”

For two long years, SAE 067 was alone on over 57,000 acres of wild New Mexico, the only survivor of a herd that died off, one by one, in a tragic crash. She is surrounded by more than two million acres of high-security military bombing range. Below her mountain sprawls one of the largest towns in southern New Mexico.

In the photo, next to SAE 067 is half of a three-month-old lamb. The ewe is in full portrait. The lamb has partly disappeared from the frame, bounding into the photo's blank border. If you look again at the picture—one ewe, solo in a remote mountain range for two years, beside the lamb she gave birth to—you would think that this is the bighorn sheep–equivalent of immaculate conception.

That wild animals have largely moved out of our view is of small note to many of us. We think, abstractly, that they live out there somewhere, browsing or flying or killing or doing whatever it is they do, and we think that we are keeping them among us by
the sheer force of our desire, even as we consume, insatiably, the places where they live.

The most adaptable fauna use Homo sapiens to full advantage. Canada geese eating entire municipal golf courses, the ravens in the Dumpster, a bison-burger farm outside the van window during a South Dakota vacation—these images may ping a faint nerve somewhere within the daily terrors induced by talk radio or dental work or the imperialistic aggressions of one's government. But the static of artifice soon floods over us again, and any world beyond the human world seems as out of reach as the moon.

The wildest, least tolerant animals edge ever farther away, running desperately out of “farther” itself. The locals, the most rigidly specialized and place-bound, head toward cracks where they will vanish like the Blue Door Band. Occasionally, they are caught in the half-light of glimpses, revealing another visible order, one no longer coexistent, but distant, and we are surprised to see that the abstract wild actually has flesh.

One consequence of distance is acute separation anxiety. I refuse to succumb. Since the Blue Door Band disappeared, I have been desperate for heartbeats other than my own—big mammalian heartbeats. One journey can rescue me from this dire loneliness, from the silence of an empty room in the ark. I am off to visit a bald bighorn in New Mexico.

I leave home after Venus rises above the river bluffs, so big and bright, it casts faint shadows, planet shadows, like a chip of unfinished moon. Thin layers of ice cover scattered pools of standing water left after a snow squall. Dawn washes away Venus, and the crisp winter air washes through my sore brain and cools the static. I feel like my normally abnormal self as I shift into a fifth-gear cruise through Navajo land.

It takes the entire morning to cross the enormous reservation. On the road, pickup trucks and canary yellow school buses sport bright red plastic bows on their front grilles as Christmas approaches. Késhmish, the older Navajos call it. At the junction of highway and red-sand feeder roads that disappear into the empty horizon, handmade signs announce shoe game tonite.

Navajo shoe games, played only in winter, originated as a contest for day and night, with all living creatures participating. Owl never wanted the night to end. Hawk needed the daylight. Gopher chewed a hole in the shoe—back then, a moccasin—so he could see where the stone was hidden and then guess correctly and win. The infamous gambler, Bear, played all day and night, then ran off in haste with his moccasins reversed. The sunlight turned his fur red, and Big Snake, Bear's helper, was given a piece of red stone to wear on his head.

Each creature that crawled, walked, and flew had its own distinct shoe-game song, thus giving the rite its many songs. No one remembers them all, a friend told me. The contest has tipped in favor of night beings, he joked, because, after a marathon shoe game, everyone has to go to work the next day.

Among the most traditional Navajo, songs still frame wealth or poverty. A poor person is the person who does not own a single song. There are personal songs, songs that belong to the whole group, and songs of the chanter—secret and healing, sung only at the proper ceremony and in the proper sequence. Songs lull babies to sleep. They bless new community centers.

When the world began, it was very small. Songs blew the earth up to its present size. Songs turn frustration into power, anxiety into comfort. Like a blanket, they form a zone of protection around the singer. Sing on the way home alone at night in a fearful place and the song will move out into the space around you. Is this not prayer, sounds that come from our breath, lifting the spirit as they meet the air?

On the stretch of interstate north of Albuquerque, hundreds of semitrailers lunge across the desert, knocking SUVs into barrow pits, flattening the Wonder Bread step-van guy, squashing anything on four wheels like pathetic bugs so they might deliver seven hundred cases of room deodorizers to El Paso before dark. Four of them, all double trailers, wheeze past me on a downhill grade, one after another, mere inches between their bumpers. The cloud of grit in their wake peppers my truck. If I take my eyes off the road to read their how’ s my driving
?
stickers, I am dead meat.

I sing a Navajo force field around me. Thou shalt make me hear of joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. Adrenaline jolts loose bits of the Book of Common Prayer from the swamps of memory. Another wheeled mastodon screams by, its flanks a hairsbreadth from my side mirror, a minivan plastered to its radiator like toothpaste. The Lordbewithyouandwiththyspirit-letuspray.

A chain gang of monster trucks blows me off the reservation, then off the highway itself, onto an exit ramp in a valley town below Tso'dzil, one of the four sacred peaks that circumscribe Navajo geography. A melting adobe ruin sits in a thatch of blond grass, the weathered walls and rubble of an old stage stop. The interstate-hugging frontage of chain hotels and truck stops, a busy place, offers the newest stage stop. I head for the middle world, the Route 66 stage stop, the old commercial district, which is easily recognized by its universal next West feature: wholesale abandonment.

A battered café hugs the lip of an arroyo choked with dry brush and a shopping cart, upright and loaded with tumbleweed. The arroyo forms an alley between rows of buildings that are boarded up but, if you look closely, still in use for something not easily determined. A tangle of airborne plastic bags rides a gust of wind up the arroyo and snags on a thicket of Russian olive trees.

Winter's bareness does not flatter the place, but the café hints
at occupation and hot coffee. When I open the door, four old cowboys on counter stools raise their coffee cups and turn their heads in unison to see what the wind has blown in. In perfect sync, they turn their heads back again, take sips, and lower their cups to their saucers.

The café decor has locked itself into a stretch of years between World War II and a local uranium-mining boom at the peak of the Cold War. “Our food will blow your mine,” the menu claims. Black-and-white photos of miners and ore-hauling trucks mix with Jesus posters on the walls. Are any of the miners still alive, I wonder, declining the menu's offer of pancakes called “yellow-cakes,” nickname for the radioactive ore.

I order a bowl of chili verde. Somewhere in the Southwest, I dream, is an unsung chef, modest and brilliant, loyal to the simple food of a home village deep in Sinaloa, making diner chili into a work of art waiting to be savored by travelers who yearn for anything original and local, for relief from the monoculture of interstate-exit cuisine. Perhaps this is the place.

Loud clatters of pots and pans emerge from the kitchen. I glimpse a man in a rumpled apron, a pear-shaped man about two shifts away from incarceration. He flips yellowcakes on a sizzling grill. He resembles the cook in a film I once saw. With a cigarette dangling from his lips, the movie cook lined a large pan with a piecrust, plopped a handful of kittens into it, rolled out a top crust, and slapped it over the pie. Lumps of kittens rose and fell under the dough. The cook fired up what looked like a cremation oven. You noticed flour, catsup, and cigarette ash on his apron. From the pie could be heard tiny muffled mews.

Under a slab of glass on the café tabletop lies unavoidable reading material, a collage of graphic antiabortion E-mails. The printouts swallow up faded remnants of Route 66 scenes— cartoon saguaro cactus, road signs, a red Corvette driven by a blonde in white-rimmed sunglasses.

The eating area of the café is a small room with booths of
chipped plastic the color of cheap vampire lipstick. The bench seat is bumpy and uneven, stuffed with the bodies of former diners. Parked in the middle of the room is a 1955 Chevy—half of a Chevy, that is, cut with a blowtorch so that its rear window and boxy rear end stick out from a booth. The cab is cream-colored, the body a frosted gold lamé with chrome bumper and shiny red taillights. This is a clunky Chevy, built when cars had weight. A few models later, they elongated. You could throw your enemy against their sharky fins and impale him.

My food arrives. Bits of canned chopped green chiles float in lukewarm chicken broth. Under my spoon lie the Corvette blonde and a paragraph about screaming fetuses. At the counter, cowboys stir sugar into their refills. They raise their cups and turn their heads as the café door opens.

The last indigenous desert bighorn sheep in the Chihuahuan Desert lives on a long rib of rock beneath a storm-damp sky that shifts from thick slate to open tears of blue. I skirt the mountains’ east flank, the Tularosa Basin, but clearly envision its northwest flank, the Jornada del Muerto, a place I once visited. There, in the summer of 1945, the Manhattan Project wizards watched the fruit of their labors rise in a fireball from the Trinity site. Their invention remains loose in the world. No one can stuff it back into its box, and, sadly, no one with any power really tries.