OK so one I want to read now, my editor
kept saying too many rattlesnakes, too
many rattlesnakes.
[LAUGHTER]
To me of course they're just some of the best beings.
They have much more integrity than a good many human beings
and so I couldn't quite see it.
But I have all sorts of encounters with them.
The house I live in is really old.
It's up in the Tucson mountains and the rattlesnakes
live under the floor.
And they were already living there when I got there
and I expect they'll be living there when they carry me out
of there.
They've just always been there.
So I have all sorts of little snake stories
but this is something that I--
well, you'll see what it is.
The fourth morning after July 11th, 2001 when my mother died,
I took my horse for a ride.
I left the house before dawn to get
saddled and ready for daybreak.
The Catalina Mountains were heaped with blue rain clouds,
so the light of the rising sun was diffuse and luminous.
A silver blue shimmered in the jade green
of the Jojoba and Palo Verde and the great greasewood.
The horse took his time and picked his way
through the rocks on the trail.
When he stopped I thought he was malingering
until I heard a faint rattle and saw
a rattlesnake on the trail, motionless,
half-coiled, and poised for full retreat.
In the early morning light the snake
was an amazing, ethereal pale blue.
Rain cloud blue.
The horse walked another 50 feet and stopped again.
There in the middle of the trail sat another pale blue rattler
in a flat hunter's coil.
The horse stopped soon enough so the snake did not rattle.
As a child, I'd seen a grass green rattler and a rattler
as black as local basalt, but I never
expected a blue rattlesnake.
The snake scales are actually tiny hard feathers
with a prismatic inner structure,
in which the color of a feather comes not
from pigment but from light.
Like the opal with shifting patterns of refraction
that allow different hues of light to pass through,
the snake scales soak up the color of the surrounding light,
making them invisible to the human eye for minutes
at a time.
Twin blue rattlesnakes.
I thought of my mother at once.
That's where she was now.
Her human form and energy changed and joined
with the silver blue light of the morning.
The twin rattlesnakes caught my attention.
They were her message to me.
Where she was now was in this world and nearby me,
but not as she was.
It was my mother who of course her grandma Goddard
was a Cherokee daughter of a man born on the Trail of Tears.
And among the Cherokee people, as with many--
well I don't know of an indigenous group
in the Americas that does not have a high regard for snakes.
But my mother was the one that when we were kids
taught us not to be snake killers and to love snakes.
So it actually came from her.
Of course, then later on a great many among the Pueblo
people too of course, there's a high regard for snakes.
So that was that morning when I saw the twin blue snakes, that
was why I thought of my mother.
So--