The Saltcedar Song

1. THE SECRET LIFE OF SALTCEDAR SAM

Saltcedar Sam doesn’t usually say too much. It ain’t his style. But sometimes he gets real drunk and then he’s got no choice. One night Sam and I were getting drunk together at St. Elmo’s Bar in Bisbee, Arizona when those words of his started slipping out, one after the other, like they were finally sneaking out of prison after a long sentence.

Seems he went out one evening at twilight to find the saltcedar trees SINGING to themselves.

“Wow, Sam, very strange, Sam, I mean, whattaya mean?” Or something like that — I was heavy with Coors myself at that point and couldn’t hardly understand nothing except that there were some mighty strange vibrations from the barperson sitting cattycorner over there behind the vermouth bottles, doing her knitting, pretending not to listen.

Sam wiped a fleck of foam off his week-old whiskers. “Yeah, in HARMONY, you know? The big one over here, the little one over there, and a whole damn chorus in the background, just singin’ their hearts out!”

The barperson fidgeted slightly.

I ordered another beer and excused myself. “I’ll be back in a minute, Sam.”

Sam just sat there.

When I returned to my barstool, Sam was still there, staring at the ashtray, but the barperson was gone. I had completely forgotten about the saltcedar song.

The next morning I could have kicked myself in the seat of my pants for not asking more questions. What a missed opportunity! I mean, at the very least I could have asked him if the lyrics were any good.



2. CREOSOTE AND FRIENDS

The hills and mesas around Dos Garcias, New Mexico are covered with olive-drab creosote bushes. They stand about 4 feet tall and are uniformly-spaced about 10 feet apart. They don’t so much sing as hum. This humming keeps other plants away, including other creosote bushes, which is why they’re spaced uniformly about 10 feet apart. (Actually, the bushes aren’t spaced all that evenly. This is because there are beat frequencies in the humming vibration, and other plants can grow in the nodes where the frequencies cancel each other out.)

Creosote forms a counterpoint to the mesquite, which prefers moister ground and gives a shrill shriek during blooming season, much like the sound of a frightened honeybee caught between a window and a screen. But usually the mesquite stays pretty quiet.

The grand old cottonwoods along the river, some of which stand 100 feet high, sing with deep bass notes, like pipe organs. Most of the cottonwoods are sapped by yellow-green clots of mistletoe. Many an ancient tree is so strangled by this parasite that it simply gives up and dies. So does its mantle of mistletoe, but no matter — that’s what seeds are for. The mistletoe doesn’t really sing. Instead, it sort of clatters like gray bones rubbing together.

You can stand on Garcias Peak and insert yourself into simultaneous time and see forests of cottonwood dying to mistletoe and springing up again and great tides of saltcedar surging up from the Gulf of Mexico and clumps of tarbush marching across the hills, always in the direction of the prevailing winds. The Juniper Belt oscillates up and down the north slopes in time to the Ice Ages. And always the grass, the ever-present grass, rippling like it’s on fire in a high wind.



3. A FURTHER EXPLANATION

Saltcedar trees sing softly to Cygnus, home to Milky Way star clouds which are 10,000 light years away and beckon us on, gravitationally speaking.

The trees start singing as soon as Cygnus clears the eastern horizon, and their chorus slowly swells until Cygnus tops the sky overhead. Then their song starts to fade. By the time Cygnus finally sets, everything’s quiet except for the gurgling of the river as it eddies around the snags, and the occasional short strangled screams of rabbits being picked to pieces by Great Horned Owls.

The coyote willows, on the other hand, sing only on the night of summer solstice, when they bend their tops together and howl quietly to each other.

Lone Jones the Water Rustler and His Daughter Lucy

Drawing by Judith Puthey

New Mexico is a desert land. Water is scarce. Scarcity means relative power to whoever gets it, so the ones who got it make sure they continue to get it. This means that every drop in the Rio Ancho is apportioned by historical precedent and force of law.

But there’s always a few who want more than their share. Lone Jones was one. He was a water rustler.

The Rio Ancho has ditchriders who ride up and down the ditches opening and closing sluice gates and generally making sure that everybody gets the share of water they paid for.

So Lone Jones used to irrigate at night by the furtive light of a moon which didn’t much care one way or the other about the water he stole, since half the moon is always looking the other way, after all. Old Lone always wore black so he’d blend in better.

Sometimes he’d send his daughter Lucy downstream to waylay the ditchrider while he stole a big old slug of water, sometimes several acre-feet or more, so he could irrigate hundreds of pecan trees, each of which would yield 100 pounds of pecans in the fall... not a bad trade at all, and Lucy didn’t mind one little bit. In fact, it was her idea to begin with — one evening she announced, “I’m going down to talk to Mr. Gomez while you steal you a big old slug of water, papa,” and every dark of the moon since then, she maintained her end of the family tradition.

Meanwhile, back at the orchard, Lone and his shovel would be working overtime. Building dikes and breaking dikes. Flooding thirsty dirt by sense of touch.

Lone Jones had it all figured out. Even if the ditchrider could escape from Lucy, all he’d see would be a black reflection in midnight ripples. And there was nothing to hear—just the sound of a spade slipping against adobe mud and the quiet slapping of stolen water against the ditch bank.

Which was a good thing. Lone knew the score, alright: If they caught him, he’d forfeit his irrigation rights for life, not to mention his heirs. But he knew the score, alright: Five more years of irrigating in the dark and he could retire to Santa Fe as a gentleman.

Of course his ace in the hole was Lucy. Good old Lucy. They should write a story about her some day.



The Drowning of Sundew (Mama Baca’s Little Daughter)

One afternoon Mama Baca’s little daughter fell into the Rio Ancho and was swept clean away. The boys formed a posse and probed the river with poles, but they couldn’t find anything. (Her last breath had risen alone.) For days afterwards you could hear Mona and Kid padding up and down the river path at twilight, calling softly. But Sundew never answered.

A week later, Lone Jones found Sundew’s bloated little body caught in the sluice gate of his irrigation ditch, so he trucked her up to Dos Garcias for a good simple burial into the Earth with sprinkled offerings.

The next spring Papa Baca planted a pecan tree over her grave as a memorial. "She always liked pecans," he said.

Every fall, Mama Baca would go up there and pick the nuts from the tree for a pecan pie to remember Sundew by. She always left a few pecans on the grave.

Mrs. Garcia's Surprise

drawing by Karen Bailey

Mrs. Garcia was a nice old lady. She was the baker for the little town of Dos Garcias, New Mexico. Sometimes she would bake more pretzels and pies than Dos Garcias could buy, so she’d have to eat them herself. Needless to say, her body was covered with rolls of bakery fat, and she had big tits that hung down like jello watermelons.

She had a big horno in her backyard—a large beehive-shaped oven made of adobe dirt. She’d fire up that mother every Tuesday morning, and every Tuesday afternoon, people would saunter over “to see Mrs. Garcia” and buy some baked goods. They’d gather around the oven and admire the aroma while she removed piles of pies, cookies, soda crackers, and rich loaves of whole-wheat bread with crackly butter crust.

But Mrs. Garcia was most famous for her surprise rolls. Every roll had a surprise in the center. During cherry season, you might find a cherry inside, or maybe a cherry pit. Come fall, maybe you’d find a pecan... shelled or unshelled, depending on her whim. Other rolls might contain pebbles or pennies or snail shells or tiny bones. You could never tell what Mrs. Garcia might put inside.

It got to be the custom that people who got married or decided to live together would buy one of Mrs. Garcia’s rolls and split it open to see what it had inside — like Chinese fortune cookies but more cryptic.

Once Buff bit into a roll that had a rimfire cartridge inside. “It’s a wonder it didn’t go off in the oven!” he said.



The Toad Mind

One evening, towards the end of Rainy Season, Rimfire Kid borrowed Pointmaster’s steam car and drove the 17 miles up Real Road to Lost Runt Canyon. He knew that there was a pool of water about a mile up the canyon, and that during the summer after heavy rains this pool was lined with spadefoot toads, who puffed out their throats like miniature balloons and chorused out their mating song. Kid wanted to be with the toads awhile.

There was lightning in the east and an occasional spatter of rain on the windshield as Kid fired up the car and headed up the highway, tires hissing on the wet pavement. It was almost like the old song:

My bags are packed at last.

My tank is full of gas.

It’s 4 a.m., I’m gonna drive real fast.

I’ll be long gone by dawn.

Graffiti Cliffs they cut like knives across the Milky Way.

The luminous sky is reflected in the bumper of my Chevrolet.

And I’m the only man alive

On Highway 85.

“What is a shev-ro-lay, anyway?” Kid wondered. He pulled over at the mouth of the canyon and released the pressure. Hiss of escaping steam, and then silence.

Kid started walking up the canyon in the darkness. The wet sand was firm under his feet and made walking easy. Desertwillow flowers perfumed the air. A lightning flash behind his back strobed against the canyon walls. Through the Keyhole, along the Narrows, and as he passed Black Knob he could first hear the toads singing far up the canyon.

Three deeps breaths and silence. Three deep breaths and silence. Yes.

The toad song got louder as he neared the pond. A couple hundred toads ringed the inch-deep water along the edge, singing their high-pitched ri-i-i-i-kkk. Several dozen on one side would cut loose simultaneously, and then a bunch on the other side would answer. Sometimes they’d all sing at once.

Kid circled halfway around the pond, found a comfortable spot and settled down. The toad mind was wet and warm and slow. A gibbous moon rose behind the hills and threw its track across the water.