Along the Way

ALONG THE WAY Bluebirds, Bat Woman, and Ruminations among the Ruins

We stood gazing upward at the silent ruins of Montezuma Castle, a small family adrift on a current of circumstance swirled into an unexpected eddy.

Some 900 years ago, the Sinagua Indians built this 50room refuge 100 feet above Beaver Creek. They occupied its gracefully curved rooms of mud and stone for perhaps 200 years before wandering off to other lands. Protected by the overhang, the castle now sat like a dream bereft of its dreamer.

We'd come to the spot as a result of our own meanders. The California paper for which I worked was slowly going broke, and we were contemplating another wrenching relocation. So we'd combined Christmas vacation with job hunting, drawn to the distant horizon of the desert for reasons we couldn't fully explain.

Staring up at the ruins, I felt a surge of envy for the vanished Sinagua. I brooded on my future while my wife and three sons wandered along the stream. What must it have been like to belong so completely here? How sweet it must have been to know the richly ornamented legends linked to each hill and spring and season of the nearby Verde River.

I turned from the castle and watched my boys playing along the stream. Seth thunked a rock into the water, splattering Caleb, who lunged forward to seek revenge. Noah laughed so hard he stepped backward off his rock and into the stream. Hisyelp provided such a divertingspectacle that Seth and Caleb stopped to laugh.

The clamor flushed a bluebird from an overhead cluster of mistletoe on a cottonwood branch, like a feathered fragment of sky. Bluebirds spend the summer on the forested flanks of the mountains. But they flit down into the Verde Valley come winter, seeking a Christmas bounty of luscious red mistletoe berries decorating the leafless cottonwood limbs.

The sight of the bluebird reminded me suddenly of a Zuni folk tale explaining the origin of the brightly colored birds.

One night a god of rain rode a raindrop through the smoke hole of the lodge of a beautiful maiden. They were married, unknown to all her people, and he came to her each time it rained. Together they had a most remarkable child, who grew to become a great hero, although he never listened to the wisdom of his elders. He slew several great monsters before he set out to destroy a family of giant eagles that fed mainly on human beings.

He wrapped himself in the greased skin of a giant bison and let the father eagle seize him and bear him to the nest containing the four hungry young eagles. He quickly killed all the eagles with his bow, then happily plucked their feathers to carry his prayers up to the gods. However, he soon realized he had no way to get out of the eagle eyrie. Fortunately, his grandmother, Bat Woman, happened along. She said she would fly him to the ground, but only if he kept his eyes closed while she recited the necessary prayers. Of course he opened his eyes halfway down, and they tumbled to the ground. Bat Woman swore she would never help him again, but nonetheless warned him not to carry his load of magical feathers through any fields of wildflowers.

The boy walked around patches of flowers at first, but he soon grew impatient to reach home. So he walked boldly through a great field of flowers.

Immediately the eagle feathers in his hand turned into a great flock of brightly colored birds. Animated by the spirits of all the creatures the eagle had eaten, the feathers became the Sacred Birds of Summer when exposed to the fragrance of the flowers which evoked the world they'd loved so well.

I watched the bluebird flit off through the trees, like a prayer released from the bonds of Earth. The Sinagua must have savored the same sight, fashioning a story to explain the bluebird's appearance in winter. They no doubt heard prayers in the wind, prophecy in the call of the owl, and glimpsed the future in the dew-drenched strands of the spider's web. I found myself yearning for such portents and a story to connect me to the bluebird.

Seth interrupted my pondering, breathlessly extending an open palm on which rested a tiny tooth, like a fossil bird tear.

"I lost a tooth!" he crowed. "Good job," I said, taking this small evidence of a season's in-exorable change.

We trudged back to the car, Seth all but skipping ahead in his excitement.

I sat a moment in the car, hoping for a last glimpse of the bluebird.

Nothing.

So I turned the key, stirring the radio to life.

"All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth," sang a voice on the radio.

I turned in my seat and stared at Seth, who listened with something like awe brimming from his toothless, ear-to-ear grin.

Turning back, I watched the swaying of the cottonwoods in a sudden breeze that came from nowhere.

Portents, after all, are whereever you find them.