the book

Chapter 2

February 5, 2011 by The Noisy Plume

[Western diamondback rattlesnake image captured by me at Achii Hanyo Native Fish Facility, C.R.I.T Reservation, Arizona]

We whistled around a bend in the highway and began our descent onto the massive, man made piece of concrete that is the Hoover Dam. To the East lay Lake Mead, a patch of sapphire in a tawny and twisted landscape. To the West, the water flowed out from the dam and down into Black Canyon, a steep walled section of the Mojave Reservoir that seemed more like a river than a lake. The sky was moving in sheets of rain, billowing over us like a flag in wind. It was the wettest winter the Mojave Desert had experienced in quite some time. In the fading daylight, the world was wildflowers as far as we could see.

Robert and I were on route to his new position as a fish biologist at Willow Beach National Fish Hatchery, just below the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. Everything we owned fit in our Toyota Tacoma truck. I was 21. He was 24. We had been married for one year and made our way to Arizona after a season of work in Alaska with a rafting company and three months in Northern California, where Robert had been timber cruising for a logging company. I was waiting on a pending application with the United States government for permanent residence status. I was also waiting on a temporary work visa I had applied for. Between Alaska and Arizona, we had stayed with Robert’s parents in Grass Valley. During this time, Robert was away on his timber cruising job for five days at a time, leaving me very free to explore the vast beauty of the Sierra foothills. During our time in Grass Valley, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. No long term jobs had presented themselves though Robert constantly scoured the country for work. We had barely a thing to our name, which ultimately made us very free in our decision making. We were keen for an adventure.

At some point, in the early fall of 2004, Robert applied for a job in Arizona. The description had been short but interesting. I’m sure the weight of supporting our family of two rested heavily on his shoulders, especially since I wasn’t able to work. The Arizona job with the federal government was a remote fish biologist position, and we had entirely forgotten about Robert’s application when we received a random phone call in December of 2004. The manager of Willow Beach National Fish Hatchery was on the line, he was calling to interview Robert for the position he had applied for in September. We were excited, of course, and thrilled by the prospect of potentially being on our own again, as lovely as our stay had been in Robert’s parents’ home. The phone interview was short and consisted of two main questions: Are you open to living remotely? Are you open to working in the presence of snakes, scorpions and poisonous spiders? Robert answered yes to both and three days later he had a job. We were moving to Arizona.

We crept over Hoover Dam, romanced further and further south by the billows of wildflowers, eventually turning off highway 93 to coast the final five miles down to Willow Beach, our new home. Willow Beach functioned as a station for employees of both Fish and Game and Fish and Wildlife departments. Since it was a relatively remote fish hatchery, most everyone lived on site in a mess of single-wide trailers and junk piles. The actual hatchery station was a bit of an eyesore and certainly not the pride and joy of the Department of the Interior at the time. We had called the assistant manager, John, before arriving at the hatchery and the main gate was open. It was now night, as we crept through the compound in our truck. I could see bats swooping for bugs in the street lights that lined the single road through the hatchery. We pulled up in front of John’s house, knocked on his door and waited for him to answer. I had butterflies in my stomach I hoped for a thousand different things, in that moment: that Robert would love his job, the management of the hatchery would be wonderful, we could have friends in this place, I could unpack our housewares from the boxes that had been taped up tight for months, but most of all, I hoped that we wouldn’t regret taking this position with Fish and Wildlife.

After some brief chit chat with John we were shown to our temporary home, a salvaged FEMA office trailer, complete with urinal in the bathroom and a smattering of mouse droppings throughout. It wasn’t what I had expected for a temporary house at Willow Beach. Robert had been hired to manage a remote satellite station of Willow Beach National Fish Hatchery, about two hundred miles South, on an Indian Reservation outside of Parker, Arizona. We would be at Willow Beach for roughly three months while he was being trained and taught about the endangered fish he would be raising and researching, the bony tail chub. As I stood in our little mobile home, I found myself praying that the three months of training would be quick and painless. Admittedly, I uttered that prayer with myself in mind, I was still gloriously young and selfish at the time.

That night, when I was drifting off to sleep, I heard the stirrings of what would be a three-yearlong issue for me, house infiltrating rodents. I could hear them in the floorboards of the trailer, clawing and scratching, scurrying and blinking their beady eyes in the dark. I couldn’t sleep. I finally woke Robert and asked him if he could hear the mice and rats, just to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind. The rats were stampeding now like a herd of tiny, filthy bison crossing the great plains. I was convinced they were in the room with us, sniffing around the edges of our bed, carnivorous in their intent. My skin crawled. The cacophony of their claws became so atrocious that I finally forced Robert out of bed and into the kitchen where, beneath the sink, I had seen mouse traps and rat traps earlier in the evening. We set the traps with bits of dried apricot in different corners throughout the actual trailer and then outside at the hitch at the front of the house. We crawled back into bed and within ten minutes I heard all the traps snap shut in the dark. I woke Robert once more and told him all the traps were full. He didn’t believe me, but when he rose to check them, after I made some hysterical demands, he found them all snapped shut on rodents of various sizes and species. Robert set and emptied all of the traps four more times that night before I was able to fall asleep in silence.

We had been told to be down to the hatchery office by six o’clock the next morning, and so we were. Robert’s fellow Fish and Wildlife employees were present, as well as the manager of the hatchery. There were introductions all around and I felt shy. Since I had nothing better to do, I was asked to work as a volunteer at the hatchery for a pay of twenty dollars a day. I was expected to work from six in the morning until noon, every single day, helping out with odd jobs, fish sampling and fish feeding. I looked forward to it, and surprisingly, I thoroughly enjoyed the work, though the human company could be hard to handle at times.

The hatchery was primarily raising and releasing rainbow trout into the Colorado River. In addition to trout, the hatchery was at the center of a large restoration effort, an effort that continues today, to reintroduce and restore the populations of multiple species of threatened and endangered fishes native to the Colorado River system. The main hatchery building was situated directly on the bank of the river and consisted of long rectangular concrete pools called raceways. These raceways featured filtration systems, a gravitationally induced flow of fresh water pulled straight from the river as well as thousands upon thousands of fish. The water in the raceways teemed with the soft, smooth bodies of trout. I was mesmerized from the moment I first saw them swimming against their artificial currents. Some raceways held trophy-sized trout, some held magical albino trout, pale pink and glowing next to their siblings of standard coloration. Some raceways were quiet, filled with the endangered razorback suckers, dark and still in the shadows of the concrete. Other raceways were homes to bonytail chub, the most delicate and temperamental of all the fish at the hatchery, These would be Robert’s fish, the fish he would eventually be responsible for and would understand better than anyone else on the bonytail chub restoration project.

The days passed slowly. I went to work with Robert at six in the morning, everyday. I was given assignments or told to simply find something to do for the morning. It rained nearly every day that winter. I did my work in a raincoat and rubber boots. I ran errands. I took water samples to a lab in Bullhead. I lost myself in my volunteer work, watching the fish fan their fins, flit and dart in and out of the sunlight filtering down through the bird netting that surrounded the hatchery. I watched the herons and egrets smack their beaks hungrily from the riverbank as they eyed the leaping trout in the raceway waters. I daydreamed. I threw fish food with a flick of my wrist during feeding times. I sported hip waders, jumped in the raceways and herded fish with huge crowding screens for weighing and counting, every couple of weeks. When I felt like working alone, I tended the planters that surrounded the hatchery, weeded, transplanted cactus paddles into sun baked dirt, trimmed weeds, or mowed the small patch of lawn outside the maintenance shed. In the afternoons, during my free time, I sat in my trailer and sewed or baked, wrote letters to far away friends, drove over the Hoover Dam to Boulder City for groceries and walked up the road to the cantina that sold fishing bait to buy myself popsicles.

After a while, once I became more comfortable in my surroundings, I began to explore the washes tucked away in the rumpled hills on the edge of the river. I took one of the hatchery employee’s dogs with me, Ramona, and walked long and far through hip deep wildflowers to where the coyotes stood sentry on the ridges and the rattlesnakes left their skins behind on the ledges in the canyons. I couldn’t believe that the desert was considered a barren place, void of life and beauty, since I had arrived in the rainiest winter season imaginable. Everywhere I looked, the world was blooming with color. I could sit down in the wildflowers and still they rose inches above my head. Fields of flowers became sanctuaries for me. I could sit, hidden, and watch the sky spin. I watched the wild burros clatter through the washes on nimble legs. I peered up into the boulder piles for desert bighorn sheep. Life was abundant.

This was the first, raw desert I had ever known. I explored it after noon, and sometimes in the evening with Robert, every day for three full months. I found steep-walled slot canyons, small and large waterfall chutes, conglomerate rock pockets that held bird nests, quiet bays on the rivers edge where I could watch the whitewater of Black Canyon boil. Best of all, those afternoons when I was able to wander alone, I was removed from the strange dynamic cultivated by people who work where they live and live where they work. Robert and I had never been welcomed into the group that threw barbecues on Friday nights and played cards on Saturday evenings. We arrived as outsiders and remained outsiders for the duration of our time at Willow Beach. I could forget about our isolation from the hatchery community each time I took myself hiking in the washes and canyons. When I took walks, solitude was my choice and it offered me peace and moments of reflection on the world around me and my life. There was no reminder, in the wild spaces, that I was a stranger to Willow Beach. I loved working with the fish in the hatchery, they were beautiful, the experience was grand, but I began to live for the moments that took me over the canyon wall and down into the sacred loneliness I found out in the desert.

One night, Robert and I went walking in the canyons and found ourselves in a small cove on the edge of the river. The cove was lined with prickly mesquite bushes, slowly being choked by gangly tamarisk, and all was silent but for the music of the bees and the gurgle of water over stones in the shallow beds of the cove. It was dusk. The day was winding down. Robert and I were talking quietly and perched on the ground where the river water lapped against the tips of our shoes when suddenly a storm of desert quail descended upon us. All around our heads the wings beat and my hair swirled around my face in the isolated, quail-force wind. It was a covey of fifty birds, but it sounded and felt like hundreds. We sat quiet and unmoving as they landed on the ground, all around us, took their drinks from the Colorado River, then one by one leapt up, with a skilled scoot and thrum of wings, to roost for the night in the small trees at the edge of the water, safe from coyotes under the light of the moon. We listened, in amazement, to their quiet beeping and cheeping as they settled in for a long sleep, blended perfectly with the branches that hid them from predators, their musky, wild scent pooling and fading on the ground all around. I felt like an Israelite sitting there, receiving my quail and manna, taking only what I needed to sustain me in that moment. Free of greed. Full of all that the desert had offered me that evening with the glory of a quail storm. I knew that everything would be alright, that the desert would take us in, that we had found a home in her for as long as we would need that home.

Robert and I stood up, still silenced by the small, natural miracle we had witnessed, and we walked up the wash and over the canyon wall to our small, mousey single wide trailer at Willow Beach. We felt like the world and our life together was full of unopened promises waiting to be unwrapped, unfurled and discovered. The future was rich. We were rich. That night, I didn’t hear a single pack rat in the floorboards beneath the bed, and the trout jumped for joy in the morning when I set out to the hatchery raceways to feed them.

Filed Under: the book

Chapter One

January 10, 2011 by The Noisy Plume

It was our habit to run or take walks in the evening, after the heat of the day had turned from a boil to a gentle simmer. Even in the winter months, I often found the daytime temperatures beneath the directness of the Arizona sun to be too much for my cold weather loving bones. It was a Sunday in April when we set out for a late afternoon stroll through the wheat fields and alfalfa fields that surrounded Achii Hanyo Native Fish Facility. We lived in the middle of nowhere on an Indian Reservation a short distance from the Colorado River in Southwest Arizona. Robert was the manager and lone employee of Achii Hanyo, a remote satellite station of United States Fish and Wildlife Service, he was raising and researching an endangered fish that no one had ever heard of in the middle of a hot chunk of desert.

To put it simply, our region of the state was arguably the hottest part of Arizona and the summer temperatures there were comparable to Death Valley, California. It was the middle of April; I was wearing a strapless sundress and Robert was dressed in shorts and a sleeveless shirt, still we were glowing with a slight sweat as soon as we reached the edge of the three acre compound to set out upon our half mile driveway that would link us with the gravel roads that crosshatched the agricultural portions of the reservation we lived on.

The tamarisk, hell bent on infiltration and invasion in the Southwest, lined the driveway in a thick wall of combustible green-feathered branches. The earth that made our road, in this part of the reservation, was a hard packed clay atrocity; with a smattering of rain, it turned to slick mud; with a deluge, it turned into foot deep gumbo making it nearly impossible for us to make the drive into town, even with our truck locked in four wheel drive. Our vehicles had cut ruts through the mud after the last rains and those ruts had baked, stone hard, under that fierce Arizona sunshine and were lined with the faintness of delicate silt. With every trip we made to town now, in the dry times, with every stroll down this rugged path, our tires and shoes broke the colloidal road rumples into fine powder that eventually would be inch deep silt, stirred up easily by the wind coursing through the desert – wind made of greedy, pick pocket fingertips, actively inciting sections of earth into sky riot and then rearranging those fine particles in temporary loess all across the state.

We walked, joined in lively conversation, making future plans, dreaming together about what life might hold for us. We walked, with our eyes on the world around us, taking in details of nature. We walked with our eyes flickering down to the earth beneath our feet, watching for rattle snakes, scorpions and cotton tail rabbits. We walked with the song of the red wing blackbirds in our ears. We walked.

We took the dogs on these forays into the fields with us. At the time, we had Farley, a German shorthaired pointer, and Tuba, a small but fierce miniature dachshund. We kept Farley closely heeled at our side or on a leash; as a far ranging gun dog, he tended to get a half mile ahead of us on our walks, bounding through alfalfa fields and wheat fields with the hope of locating doves and desert quail in his heart. Tuba was content to gallop just far enough ahead of us to locate and bury his nose in sink holes in the ditches by the fields. These sink holes were created by the flood irrigation employed by the local farmers. Remarkably enough, the valley we lived in was fecund and lush where it had been planted and irrigated. Alfalfa crops were neon green in contrast with the ubiquitous, bone dry mesas studded with creosote and ironwood that rose up blunted and beige on all horizons.

The farmers on the reservation sometimes cut and baled up to nine crops of hay in one growing season. Wheat grew thick and vibrant with unbelievably robust, whiskered heads such as I had never seen when growing up in Saskatchewan, the grain belt of Canada. The entire valley had been part of the vastly braided Colorado River channel before the waterway was contained by dams. The waters of the river had retreated into a neat, powerful body of flow, but the ancient paths of the river had left behind piles of nutrient rich soil, perfect for raising rich crops throughout the valley between Parker, Arizona and Blythe, California. These farms and fields were connected with concrete and dirt canals, growing smaller and muddier the further they crept from the actual river body.

The fields by our house and in actuality, Achii Hanyo Native Fish Facility itself, were watered by the mighty Colorado and it’s beautiful, icy emerald waters. No part of the valley, even in dry times, was without hope of moisture, thanks to that canal system; even for me, on days when the desert left me feeling brittle and frail, there was always the water and the peace that came from the baptism found in that river.

On this day, while we walked, the fields had been freshly watered, the air was humid; the song birds stood on the cattail heads in the ditches and there was a gentle gurgle and splash of water as it spread and swept slowly across carefully graded fields. We had covered three miles of our stroll and were discussing future plans for travel when we came around a bend in the road – a bend in our life path really, in hindsight. Tuba had galloped ahead, as usual and was sniffing around a clump of brittle brush on the edge of the road when he began to bark hysterically. Robert and I looked at each other and simultaneously yelled, “Tuba! No!” At that exact moment, we watched our ten pound, black and tan dachshund leap at a diamondback rattle snake and receive a venomous strike in the side of his nose. He leaped away from the snake and then lunged towards that wretched reptile a second time, snarling and growing like he was in combat with the devil himself, nearly taking a second snake bite on the other side of his nose. Finally, our voices pierced through the armor of his fierceness and he suddenly turned away from the snake and took a few steps towards us to our great surprise.

By this point, I was beside myself and was screaming, out of control, nearly blinded by the sound coming from my mouth and heart. I could feel fear flying from my mouth, gliding over the surface of my skin; my mind was closing itself and there was just the thunder of my own voice and the steel of my spine holding me rigid and rooted in place in that damned desert soil. I was terrified by the population of rattlesnakes that lived in the immediate surround of our home in the desert and I had no control over my fear or the visceral reaction of my body and the primal reaction of my voice when I came upon them. I was convinced that my life had been saved, multiple times, by the rapid reflexes of my body in situations that involved snakes. Over a period of three years, my reaction to rattle snakes had changed from one of fear and great respect to absolute terror and general mental and physical paralysis.

I was so afraid. Afraid of that snake. Afraid for my dog. There, on the ground, fifteen feet from where I stood, a seven foot diamondback rattle snake was making it’s slow retreat into an alfalfa field. My dog was whining and scratching at his nose. The sun was shining. All I could do was stand and scream while tears poured down my face. We were all alive, for the time being.

Robert, a man of action, ran towards Tuba now that the snake had disappeared. He grabbed the dog and wrapped one hand around Tuba’s long nose and proceeded to place his lips around the puncture wounds the snake had left behind. Robert sucked and spit, hoping that he could decrease the immediate effects of the venom, if any had been administered at all, on Tuba’s face and body. He sucked and spit. His saliva, when it hit the ground, was tinged pink with our dog’s blood. He sucked and spit and I stood there and panted, void of sound, void of myself, still choked with my fear and paralyzed by the violence that had just passed before my eyes. Robert continued to suck on Tuba’s wound and spit what he hoped was venom from his tongue and that small dog began to cry. Faintly, at first; I couldn’t tell his crying from a sighing whine but already, I knew what was to come. I told Robert to stand up, we had to get Tuba home.

We were three miles from the front door of our federal government housing when Tuba encountered this rattlesnake. We were a two hour drive in any direction from a veterinarian clinic. It was a Sunday evening now, the sun was beginning sink low in the distance. Tuba’s face was beginning to swell; he seemed dopey, maybe even lazy, as Robert carefully cradled him in his arms. My hands shook. I yelled at Farley, in my fear and frustration, I kept him tethered close, I cursed snakes under my breath as we made the long walk home, wary and already exhausted.

When we finally reached the house, Tuba was in pain. His nose was twice its normal size. We continued to hold him, his eyes were bright and he seemed to prefer being in our arms despite his obvious discomfort and pain. Robert ran to the office in the house and quickly researched rattle snake bites on our dial-up internet. We knew that if he were to perish from this snake bite, his death would come in a couple of hours, according to the information we had at hand. We calculated the time it would take for us to contact a veterinarian who could make an emergency call on a Sunday evening, the time it would take us to drive to one, the possibility of whether or not Tuba would even survive with the help of anti-venom coursing through the ten pounds of his body. It had taken us an hour to walk the three miles home. It would take us at least another couple of hours to drive to the nearest veterinarian clinic for treatment. We stood there, in our kitchen, weighing our options, hoping with all our hearts, attempting to trick our minds into believing that there was hope, at all, in this crazy and unforeseen situation. Eventually we decided that an hour and half had already passed since the incident and the damage had been done. If Tuba was to survive, he would, if not, he wouldn’t.

We called friends in town and asked them to drive out to us with a package of needles so we could give Tuba direct vitamin C injections, just beneath his skin, which would supposedly help neutralize the venom that was beginning to shut his body down. They came, sensing the seriousness of the situation by the cracking of our voices over the phone. By now, Tuba was in extreme pain and was beginning to look unlike himself. His long snout had already swollen into an awkward and bulbous shape. His breathing was steady and his eyes were bright, but I could tell he was extremely uncomfortable.

Western diamondback venom is hemotoxic. It is a poison that kills tissue – kills flesh. It causes massive swelling in the immediate injection site and is noted as the most painful type of venomous bite one can incur. Farley continued to circle over to where Tuba was lying on the couch; he whined and leaned in to prod Tuba with his nose. With one faint touch Tuba’s body went rigid and he began an involuntarily bloodcurdling shriek, unable to stop his screams, unable to stand up and walk because of his pain, unable to move, incapable of preventing himself from screaming out; the sight of him being wracked with pain filled me with guilt. In hindsight, perhaps we should have tried to get him to a veterinarian. Would the drive down twenty miles of washboard gravel roads before reaching a paved highway have been any kinder to him? Would a veterinarian have been able to save him after the effects of a three hour old snake bite on the face of a small, ten pound dog? We don’t know if we made the right decision, to this day, but I don’t rightly know that one choice was better than the other, and I am convinced that no matter our decision, we would have found ourselves at the same conclusion in the end: the end of Tuba.

All night long, we fed our dog water, with the help of a small syringe. All night long we kept vigil and injected vitamin C directly beneath a pinch of skin at the scruff of Tuba’s darling neck. Eventually his face became so swollen that our small dachshund looked more like a rottweiler than a tiny badger hunter. And over the final thirteen hours of his short life, we watched the violence of rattlesnake venom shut his small body down. His breathing grew shallow, and his eyes grew cloudy. There came a moment when we knew he no longer could see us or hear us. We held him in our arms, until the end. We prayed for him; we prayed for ourselves. When his breathing turned to shallow chokes, we told him to let go, and he did. We did too. He was barely recognizable in the end hours, in the dark night of the desert, and oh, how we cried.

Tuba was a dog, a fierce little dog, but we loved him. He was the first living thing Robert and I cared for together, in our marriage. As soon as life left his small body, we felt a void in our household, in our lives. When the sky finally turned to dawn, Robert took a spade and dug a deep grave beneath the mesquite tree behind our single-wide trailer. We placed Tuba’s body in that hole and Farley cried out, beside himself at the loss of his brother and friend. He leaped down into the grave and licked at Tuba’s disfigured face; I covered my eyes with my hands.

The sunrise was beautiful that morning. We placed large pieces of rough chrysocolla, which we had found in a tailings pile at a remote desert mine, on top of the fresh turned dirt of Tuba’s grave, reached for each others hands and stood in the light of the new day, hoping that the sun could restore our energy and emotions. Robert cried then, filled with guilt, filled with sadness, filled with loss. We asked each other if we had done the right thing. We asked each other if we could have done better by our small dog, if we might have saved him after all, then we turned, went inside our house laid down in our small bed and fell asleep tightly spooned and thick with grief.

I remember feeling bitter in the days following Tuba’s death. I remember giving the desert a face, in my mind, the face of a heartless witch. In my heart I believed, and I still do, that the desert demands payment. On her borders to the North, South, East and West she keeps tollbooths, when you pass through to explore the vastness of her wild and beautiful spaces, she demands a payment. Either give her your small gold coin or she will take a payment from you; there is no choice in the matter. It was improbable that Robert and I would escape the low desert of Arizona without personally suffering snake bites since we were always out and about on the land. We came across those slithering pieces of the animal world more often than we can say and even dug up a rattlesnake hibernaculum a mere fifty feet from the back door of our house, deep in a levy between the earthen ponds of Achii Hanyo. There was a massive, nine foot long rattler that lived on our driveway who barely missed biting me in the leg on two different occasions. I viewed my escape from that huge snake as a miracle. In all honestly, I’m glad the desert took her payment in the form of a small dog instead of taking my husband from me, or me from my husband.

The experience of losing a dog to a rattlesnake bite was one of the most violent acts of nature I have ever witnessed in person. Watching the slow and painful death of my valiant dog was a great test for me as a human being, and suddenly, more than ever before, a great bright light shone down on the necessity of the cycles of life and death, that light had a profound effect on my heart and soul; it opened me up, even more than I thought possible, to the real reasons for living: love, hope, peace and kindness to all and for all living things. I hate the desert and I love the desert for these lessons learned; for her tough love, for the way she raised me up and brought me to my knees simultaneously and repeatedly.

When Robert and I moved to Arizona in the first year of our marriage, we didn’t know anything about the desert except that it rarely rained there. The arrival of Tuba in our lives marked the beginning of our adventures at Achii Hanyo and he also marked the end with his death. Two months after he died we packed up our belongings and moved to Idaho. But this, this is the story of Arizona and our adventures there.

Filed Under: the book