At one time, there was a beautiful lake
near old Laguna village.
A giant water snake named Ma'sh'ra'tru'ee lived
in the lake, which was connected to the four worlds below,
and which allowed the gentle snake to travel to the worlds
below.
The snake was the messenger who carried
the prayers of the people to the mother creator below.
Ma'sh'ra'tru'ee always made sure the people had plenty of rain
for the plants and the animals, and of course,
to keep the beautiful lake full of fresh water.
But the neighboring-- but then, neighboring cousins
became jealous, and one night, they
came and broke down the natural barriers which formed the lake,
and all the water drained away.
The beautiful lake that had been there dried up,
and the giant water snake was never seen after that.
Petroglyphs of coiled snakes are signs that a natural spring
or pool of rainwater is nearby.
The head of the snake glyph points
in the direction of the water.
The Spaniards thought the snake glyphs
pointed to buried treasures the Indians had hidden.
The Spaniards did not understand--
fresh water is the treasure.
Rattlesnakes sense the approach of summer rainstorms,
and they emerge to join the horned lizards, tortoises,
tarantulas, and the red-spotted toads,
all of them waiting for the rain.
The coyotes have a particular ecstatic howl
they give for the rain.
The curved-beaked thrashers and cactus wrens
also have special rain songs.
The red-spotted toads carry on with their singing
all night after a summer rainstorm.
When the hot days of June arrive,
and the last moisture of the spring rain has gone,
the desert animals become increasingly
vulnerable to drowning.
Once the natural waterholes dry up,
thirst drives the creatures to try to reach water,
no matter where the water may be.
I found an elf owl floating face down in a water barrel.
It was early morning, and the water was still cool.
When I turned him over, his big yellow eyes were open wide.
Although the wings were stiff, still the eyes seemed alive,
kept moist by the water.
If the water barrel had been full to the brim,
the owl might have been able to escape.
When the summer thunderstorms arrive,
the arroyos and dry riverbeds may be suddenly transformed
by muddy torrents of floodwater that appear out of nowhere,
even as the sun shines.
Flash floods race out of cloudbursts from many miles
away.
Lightning travels in horizontal branches for up to 20 miles
to strike a bolt out of the blue sky.
Motorists, most frequently those driving four-wheel-drive
vehicles, are swept away in floodwater as they [AUDIO OUT]
A number of automobiles have been lost in the underpasses
since I moved to Tucson.
But so far, no one has drowned.
During the 1983 Salt River floods in Phoenix,
vandals removed emergency barricades
from a washed-out bridge.
Two carloads of high school students
drove off the bridge in the dark,
and were swept away by the river.
Four students drowned.
Laguna Village is located on a sandstone hill above the San
Jose River.
I grew up in an old house at the foot of the village,
where the people put Presbyterians and mixed-bloods
like the Marmons.
After big summer rainstorms, the runoff
would come, reddish brown with white froth,
swirling past our house.
The runoff seldom rose high enough to flood our yard--
or my great grandmother's yard--
but the worry was over our old house with no foundation.
Its walls of sandstone and adobe mortar
were unprotected from the floodwater.
With my great grandmother's house,
the problem was that my great grandfather had
had a lapse in good judgment.
Although he learned to speak the Laguna language,
and never returned to his Ohio birthplace even for a visit,
still he had the idea that his house in Laguna
should have a cellar.
He directed the builders to dig a small cellar
beneath the kitchen.
This cellar was all that remained
of my great grandfather's Ohio notions concerning houses.
Otherwise, adobe was the building material used,
and the architectural style he chose
was modified New Mexico territorial.
Because of the cellar, the heavy summer rainstorms
used to cause us considerable anxiety.
If that damn cellar did trap the flood water,
the adobe walls would become saturated--
and wet adobe will crumble.
Would the muddy brown water, with its cargo of tumbleweeds,
corn husks, candy wrappers, and tin cans,
boil over into our yard from the road?
Once or twice, my father and my uncle Wafer
had to fill sandbags to hold back the rising water.
But the flood we feared never quite developed, not as
long as our neighbor, Felipe Riley, was alive.
Felipe Riley used to dry farm with the runoff
from the village hillside.
He diverted the water with an intricate network
of small stone check dams, which he carefully engineered
so that the rainwater fed small ditches leading to his pumpkin
and squash plants, his peach and apricot trees,
and to his big field of corn.
His granddaughter Madeline and I were
playmates, and how we used to love
to play in the shade among the tall corn plants
where we were not supposed to go.
Felipe's arrangement of the stone
checked dams was so subtle, conforming
to the natural contours so well, that we did not
realize how Felipe had saved our old houses until after Felipe
had passed on.
Without Felipe's care, the rocks which formed the check dams
gradually scattered.
The runoff from the village above
began to increase, until finally,
one summer, after I was in college,
the cellar at Grandma Alma's house
was flooded, as were tribal warehouses located nearby.
Later, government engineers spent
thousands of dollars to install giant storm
drains that dump into the river.
Felipe just needed a few rocks.
But then, that is the federal government.