High Tide in Tucson
Page 24
For several years that Cooper's hawk was the steadiest male presence in my life. I've stood alone in his shadow through many changes of season. I've been shattered and reassembled a few times over, and there have been long days when I felt my heart was simply somewhere else--possibly on ice, in one of those igloo coolers that show up in the news as they are carried importantly onto helicopters. "So what?" life asked, and went on whirling recklessly around me. Always, every minute, something is eating or being eaten, laying eggs, burrowing in mud, blooming, splitting its seams, dividing itself in two. What a messy marvel, fecundity.
That is how I became goddess of a small universe of my own creation--more or less by accident. My subjects owe me their very lives. Blithely they ignore me. I stand on the banks, wide-eyed, receiving gifts in every season. In May the palo verde trees lean into their reflections, so heavy with blossoms the desert looks thick and deep with golden hoarfrost. In November the purple water lilies are struck numb with the first frost, continuing to try to open their final flowers in slow motion for the rest of the winter. Once, in August, I saw a tussle in the reeds that turned out to be two bull snakes making a meal of the same frog. Their dinner screeched piteously while the snakes' heads inched slowly closer together, each of them engulfing a drumstick, until there they were at last, nose to scaly nose. I watched with my knuckles in my mouth, anxious to see whether they would rip the frog in two like a pair of pants. As it turned out, they were nowhere near this civilized. They lunged and thrashed, their long bodies scrawling whole cursive alphabets into the rushes, until one of the snakes suddenly let go and curved away.
Last May, I saw a dragonfly as long as my hand--longer than an average-sized songbird. She circled and circled, flexing her body, trying to decide if my little lake was worthy of her precious eggs. She was almost absurdly colorful, sporting a bright green thorax and blue abdomen. Eventually she lit on the tip of the horsetail plant that sends long slender spikes up out of the water. She was joined on the tips of five adjacent stalks by five other dragonflies, all different: an orange-bodied one with orange wings, a yellow one, a blue-green one, one with a red head and purple tail, and a miniature one in zippy metallic blue. A dragonfly bouquet. Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation. The choice is draw the blinds and shut it all out, or believe.
What to believe in, exactly, may never turn out to be half as important as the daring act of belief. A willingness to participate in sunlight, and the color red. An agreement to enter into a conspiracy with life, on behalf of both frog and snake, the predator and the prey, in order to come away changed.
The Cooper's hawk has been replaced as my significant other. A few weeks ago I was married, in the sight of pine-browed mountains, a forget-me-not sky, and nearly all the people I love most. This is not the end of the story; I know that much. With senseless mad joy, I'm undertaking what Samuel Johnson called the triumph of hope over experience--the second marriage.
Hope is an unbearably precious thing, worth its weight in feathers. If that's too much to think about, best to tuck it in a pocket anyway, and make it a habit. I was stomping through life in my seven-league boots, entirely unaware of how my life was about to snag on a doorframe, sending me staggering backward, on the day I met my future mate. But the gris-gris charm for luck in love, given me by a fetisher's apprentice in West Africa, was in its customary forgotten place, the watch pocket of my jeans. Now I keep it in a small clay jar among the potted plants in my bedroom window. Let the vandals carry off all but this--my hope.
On the day we met, my mate and I, he invited me to take a walk in the wooded hills of his farm in southwestern Virginia. I told him I loved the woods, and he took my word for that, and headed lickety-split up the mountainside. I ran after, tearing through blackberry briars with the options of getting hopelessly lost or keeping up.
He did remember, after all, that I was behind him. When he reached the top of the mountain he waited, and we sat down together on a rock, listening to the stillness in the leaves. A song rang out through the branches, and because Steven is an ornithologist, he was able to tell me it was a rose-breasted grosbeak.
It sang again. He listened carefully, and said, "No, that's a scarlet tanager."
Either way, I was impressed by his ear for song. I asked him if he was sure. He said, "Yes, absolutely, that's a scarlet tanager."
And right then, exactly as he spoke, it came and landed on a branch directly in front of us, and it wasn't a scarlet tanager, it was a rose-breasted grosbeak.
Steven looked downcast; I shrugged and said, oh, what did it matter anyway. I think we both felt a little dismayed that this bird had come out of the woods to prove him wrong.
And then, directly in front of us, in a blaze of vermilion and perfect vindication, another bird landed--the one that had been singing, after all--and it was a scarlet tanager.
I had no idea this visitation of birds contained our future. Everything: risk, belief, forgiveness, being wrong, being right, finding how precariously similar those things are. And mainly, the whole possibility of bright red, singing marvels. What luck, I remember thinking. Here is a man who listens carefully to every voice.
He also had the patience to feed a wild fox who had whelped her pups in the pokeberry thicket behind the barn. Late that evening I sat on the stone porch steps of his old farmhouse and watched these two, man and fox, in their nightly ritual. He tossed out small scraps of meat, one after another; she approached, showing none of her hand but a pair of fierce green orbs in the dark--and accepted.
Eventually he would show the same patience in seeing me through my own wild fears and doubts, all the foul things my brain can turn over in a restless spell when it scrabbles around and around its cage at night. And so I have molted now, crawled out of my old empty banged-up skin with a fresh new life, and look here, what is this? I have regenerated a marriage, precious as a new eye.
I'm still feeling fairly soft-shelled. I'm too old to look at things the way I used to; too old, in fact, to look at anything closer than my own elbow without twinges of presbyopia (or, as one of my relatives calls it, "that Presbyterian thing"); I expect my next pair of glasses will need the extra window. So if I'm not quite the Bifocal Bride, I'm on the brink. I have a midlife vision of all things, including love and permanence. My dear mate and I will get to watch each other creak into old age and fall into uneasy truces with our own limbs--that's the best case, presuming we cleave together as we've hoped and promised. It's a wonder anyone does this at all, I think from time to time, as I'm visited by the specter of all I could lose.
When I was pregnant I felt like this too. People will claim that having children is a ticket to immortality, but in fact it merely doubles your stakes in mortality. You labor and you love and there you are, suddenly, with twice as many eyes in your house that could be put out, hearts that could be broken, new lives dearer than your own that could be taken from you. And still we do it, have children, right and left. We love and we lose, get hurled across the universe, put on a new shell, listen to the seasons.
Ah, the mysterious croak. Here today, gone tomorrow. It's the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory. High tide.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
"Creation Stories," in somewhat different form, was published as the introduction to Southwest Stories, eds. John Miller and Genevieve Morgan. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1993.
A brief portion of "Making Peace" appeared under that title in Special Report, November 1990.
"In Case You Ever Want to Go Home Again," is loosely based on an essay published in the Lexington Herald-Leader, September 16, 1990.
"How Mr. Dewey Decimal Saved My Life" is based on an address to the American Library Association Convention, New Orleans, June 1993.
"Life Without Go-Go Boots" appeared in Lands' End catalog,
Spring 1990, and in the Denver Post, April 22, 1990.
"The Household Zen" appeared in different form as "A Clean Sweep," in the New York Times Magazine, December 30, 1990.
A much shorter version of "Semper Fi" was published under the title "Ah, Sweet Mystery of...Well, Not Exactly Love," in Smithsonian, June 1990.
"The Muscle Mystique" appeared as "After a Finger Workout, It's Great Pumping Iron," in Smithsonian, September 1990.
"Somebody's Baby" is loosely based on an essay entitled "Everybody's Somebody's Baby," published in the New York Times Magazine, February 9, 1992, and "License to Love," in Parenting, November 1994.
"Paradise Lost" appeared in different form as "Where the Map Stopped," in "The Sophisticated Traveler," the New York Times Magazine, May 17, 1992.
"Confessions of a Reluctant Rock Goddess" appeared in different form as a chapter in Midlife Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America with Three Chords and an Attitude, Dave Marsh, ed., Viking, 1994.
"Stone Soup" appeared in different form in Parenting, January 1995.
"The Spaces Between" is loosely based on an article entitled "Native American Culture Comes Alive in Phoenix," Architectural Digest, June 1993.
A brief portion of "Postcards from the Imaginary Mom" appeared in I Should Have Stayed Home, Roger Rapoport and Marguerita Castanera, eds., Book Passage Press, 1994.
"The Memory Place" appeared as a chapter in Heart of the Land, Joseph Barbato and Lisa Weinerman, eds., Pantheon, 1995.
"The Vibrations of Djoogbe" appeared in different form as "An Ancient Kingdom of Mystery and Magic" in "The Sophisticated Traveler," the New York Times Magazine, September 12, 1993.
"Infernal Paradise" appeared in slightly different form as "Hawaii Preserved," in "The Sophisticated Traveler," the New York Times Magazine, March 5, 1995.
Portions of "In the Belly of the Beast" appeared in the Tucson Weekly, July 2, 1986.
"Jabberwocky" is adapted from an address to the American Booksellers' Convention, 1993, and several other lectures.
"The Forest in the Seeds" appeared in different form in Natural History, October 1993.
"Careful What You Let in the Door" is adapted from an address given as part of the San Francisco Arts & Lectures series, 1993.
"The Not-So-Deadly Sin" was published in Waterstone's Writers Diary, London, 1995.
About the Author
BARBARA KINGSOLVER's ten published books include novels, collections of short stories, poetry, essays, and an oral history. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. In 2000, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts.
Ms. Kingsolver grew up in Kentucky and earned a graduate degree in biology before becoming a full-time writer. With her husband, Steven Hopp, she co-writes articles on natural history, plays jazz, gardens, and raises two daughters. Their family divides its time between Tucson, Arizona, and a farm in southern Appalachia.
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Praise
"The acclaimed novelist's extraordinary powers of observation and understanding of character serve her beautifully in this collection of essays."
--Entertainment Weekly
"A delightful, challenging, and wonderfully informative book."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"A book full of discoveries."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Whether cultural, personal, or theoretical, Kingsolver's nonfiction is a delight."
--Seattle Times
"Ms. Kingsolver possesses the rare ability to see the natural world with the keenness of both the poet and the naturalist."
--Washington Times
"Brilliant...lucid, well thought-out, and remarkably sensitive. Kingsolver's power will linger long after you've finished High Tide in Tucson."
--Kansas City Star
"Clever...magical...beautifully crafted. Kingsolver spins you around the philosophic world a dozen times."
--Milwaukee Sentinel
BOOKS BY BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Fiction
Prodigal Summer
The Poisonwood Bible
Pigs in Heaven
Animal Dreams
Homeland and Other Stories
The Bean Trees
Essays
Small Wonder
High Tide in Tucson
Poetry
Another America
Nonfiction
Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983
Copyright
HIGH TIDE IN TUCSON. Copyright (c) 1995 by Barbara Kingsolver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition (c) APRIL 2007 ISBN: 9780061863585
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