Cover the Earth

Singer did his post-doctoral work in microbiology at Yale.  He was bullied by his supervisor, an irascible Nobel Laureate, and, at his first opportunity, departed the university laboratory for private industry.  The bio-engineering firm that employed him specialized in industrial gene-splicing – that is, modifying the DNA of microbes so that they would produce useful substances.  Singer’s firm had a contract with the paint manufacturer Sherwin-Williams.  Singer’s role was to work with research and development at Sherwin-Williams to develop microbes that would produce pigments so that paint surfaces would continuously regenerate color.  The idea was to embed pigment-producing microbes in the company’s paints so that a color, once applied, would remain perpetually fresh and vibrant, a quality achieved by colonies of living microbes photosynthesizing light into color.  “If this project succeeds,” Singer told Sherwin-William R & D, “you will be putting yourself out of business.  No one will ever need to buy new paint.”  The client’s director of R & D replied that they would cross that bridge when they reached it.

Singer’s team selected several species of cyanobacteria for study.  Cyanobacteria is ubiquitous.  The microbe flourishes everywhere – it can be found growing in ice at the North Pole, between grains of sand in the Sahara, thriving symbiotically with algae in all seas and lakes, and, of course, blanketing living organisms.  Some sloth in rain forests have cyanobacterial algae darkening their fur to the color of moss – but this is just an exotic example of a condition that is ubiquitous.  Human beings are coated in the stuff as are all other living creatures.  The microbe is easily cultured and studied and so Singer’s research group set to work genetically engineering the bacteria to produce pigment.  

Cochineal is a bright red substance secreted by certain beetles originally found in Latin America.  These beetles (dactylopius coccus) are soft-bodied insects that live primarily in prickly pear and agave cacti.  The insects convert the sap of cactus fruit and flower into carminic acid, a bright red fluid.  (The acid is thought to be bitter-tasting and deter predators.)  Singer acquired several thousand cochineal beetles, raising them in terrariums with small bulb-shaped nopal plants.  A Zapotec-speaking technician was recruited to manage the beetles.  Singer was astonished at the brilliant color resulting when he crushed one of the beetles under his thumb.  The insect burst when he pressed on its abdomen, flattening into a purple puddle.  The flat of his thumb was dyed bright red.  The technician told Singer that the beetles were sacred because they were fat with blood and blood is the substance of life:  “The ancient people thought the gods required blood to sustain the world and these creatures symbolized that relationship.”  Singer replied that this was very interesting and could be used to market the paint.   

Singer extracted the gene sequence correlated to the red in the beetles.  With his team, he spliced the cochineal DNA into the genetic code for the cyanobacteria.  As expected, petri dishes cultured with cyanobacteria turned bright red.  Singer, then, applied the mutated bacteria to panels prepared with an adhesive film.  Again, the experiment was successful – a micro-film of cyanobacteria producing carminic acid colored the panels.  The pigment seemed to be both durable and capable of regenerating itself if scratched or marred.  

Larger scale tests were conducted at the Weatherization facility near Cleveland.  Several test panels colored with the pigment, code-named Erythros, were set on steel brackets installed in a pasture behind the laboratory.  Stanchions supporting the test panels were set in a circle facing outward so that the paint samples would be weathered in all exposures.  Cameras set for time-lapse photography surveyed the experiment.  

On the fourth day, driving rain scoured the test panels.  Some of the pigment dissolved and ran down the metal post to form a puddle at the foot of the stanchion.  The puddle was about the size of a man’s fist.  A weekend intervened.  When the technicians returned to the site, the red-colored blotch on the meadow made a gory-looking footprint about the size of semi-trailer.  The stain was spreading and so the technicians used a roto-rooter to score a trench around the red patch.  The next morning the furrows of dirt were all suppurating with red slime.  The crimson cyanobacteria had leaped across the ditch and the trees in the adjacent wood-lot were spectacular with red veins creeping up their trunks and coating the undersides of leaves.  

Singer reported to his boss that the pigment had become a sort of infection and was spreading rapidly.  The company’s lawyers were consulted and a liaison with the local pollution control agency was established.  The use of powerful anti-bacterial agents was proposed and several tanker trucks of cleansing agents were ordered to the site.  But the pollution control agency enjoined spraying the anti-microbial solutions on the scarlet meadow and forest.  The effects of that remedy had to be studied and there was concern that the cleansing agents were kill insects and birds in the terrain.  Wearing a haz-mat suit, Singer went to the site of the experiment.  When he trudged through the oozing woods, he stirred a dozen starlings, all of them red as cardinals, and the birds flew off-site, across the freeway to roost in the trees of another small maple grove.  Singer was alarmed and asked that the company’s Board of Directors meet.  Another few days passed and trucks and cars coursing over the freeway, now slick with red bacterial, carried the contagion into Cleveland.  Several skyscrapers turned red and the Cuyahoga river was dyed the color of blood.  The beaches on Lake Erie were now scarlet and huge veins of pigment were reaching out into the water like the outstretched fingers of a great red hand.  At the board meeting, the directors of the company saw that the water in the pitchers had become pale pink.  The meeting was long and contentious.  By its ending, several of men had red beards and a female director’s eyelashes were scarlet.

The situation was now desperate.  Singer stood on a hillside and watched bulldozers gouging huge ditches between the infected and uninfected land.  Tanker trucks sprayed lysol into the ditches.  The chemicals made Singer’s eyes water and he choked on the fumes.  It was a grey day with pulpy-looking black clouds overhead.  As the lysol filled the moat, Singer looked into the distance and saw that it was raining.  Columns of water pouring from the cloud were bright red.  Several of the clouds had bright pink underbellies.  

Leaves painted red couldn’t photosynthesize and crops failed.  The Earth’s albedo was altered and ice caps melted.  Purplish-red seas rose and flooded coastal cities.  Abandoned carmine skyscrapers stood half-drowned in red lagoons.  There was famine and pestilence; family members killed one another over cans of food.  Great migrations clogged the highways, but, as people died, their cars and trucks blocked the way and, finally, no one could travel except on foot.  Ragged red shadows haunted the deserts where there were still patches of rock and sand not colored by the erythrotic infection.  Flash floods poured down from mountain heights where the glaciers were melting and salt basins that had once been gleaming white were sunk beneath level wastes of stagnant red water. 

With his family, Singer had fled to Nevada where some traces unpigmented stone and dust remained in remote basins.  A bird the color of a clot of blood hovered over the desolation and, when Singer looked back over his shoulder to the way that he had come from his fuel-less abandoned vehicle, he saw that his footprints, and those of his wife and two small children, were visible as red tracks in the sand.  Ahead of them, Singer saw an oasis, a small round pond in a chalky sinkhole.  The water reflected the sky and tufts of brown and green sedge encircled the pool.  Some fat brushy palms with green fronds flaring above greyish bulbs of vegetation were crouched over the water like exotic crested beasts come to drink at the spring.  As they staggered toward the spring, Singer saw that a reddish film was slowly spreading across the still surface of the water.  The cattail tips of the reeds were like rubies.  The sun was hot and Singer sat down in the shadow of a boulder that looked like it was made of corroded iron slag.  The mountains were red and crested with gruesome oozing wounds.  The more remote hills were the color of sunset and, the far away, the scarlet ridges and valley softened to the color of porphyry and agate.  

A billionaire who had made his fortune selling electric cars boarded a rocket and fired himself into space.  A fleet of other space craft followed him.  Nine months later, the rockets touched down on Mars.  A year passed.  If Singer had turned his telescope on Mars, he would have seen a livid stain on the quadrant of the planet where the billionaire had landed to found his extraterrestrial colony.  If he had watched night after night, Singer might have observed the dark red abscess on Mars spreading.  But Singer was no longer alive and, indeed, there was no one left on Earth to observe the gradual ruination of the red planet.    

White Pebble Exorcism

 White Pebble Exorcism

1.

They were returning – the animals that had fled so many years ago.  Probably, it had something to do with the abundance of smaller creatures on which the big beasts fed.  During the corona-virus, hunters stayed home and so there were more deer and wild turkeys.  Someone glimpsed a puma stalking the big demented-looking birds strutting in circles inscrutably at the edge of a corn field unharvested because shattered by hail.  At the end of Winter, hungry deer came into the villages and chewed bushes and ornamental trees into bare clumps of brown sticks.  A bald eagle as tall as four-year old boy stood in a ditch next to the road tearing strips of jerky-colored flesh from a dead possum.  Boars with black bristles and yellow tusks hid in the thickets.  Down at the boat landing on the big river, a fisherman glimpsed a zeppelin-shaped monster lurking in the shallows.  No one expected to see bison on bare hilltops dipping their brown beards into the winter-cured yellow prairie grass but packs of coyotes gathered there to sing at the stars.  

2.  

There was a bad intersection near the Reservation’s northern edge, a crossroads that had claimed several lives.  One of the roads ran to a town that was mostly taverns and liquor stores just outside the tribal territory.  The other highway was a two-lane blacktop that rose and fell like roller coaster, crossing the steep brown hills and the hollows between.  That highway invited speed because it ran from no place to nowhere and the few cars and trucks traveling that road were hurrying to be someplace else.  The two highways intersected at the top of bald ridge among stony outcrops and zigzagged electrified barb wire fences.  There was no stop sign or other signal because the frequency of traffic, at least on the east-west road over the hills, was negligible.  Some yellow caution signs were posted near the crossroads, but they had been shot full of holes and were bent and crumpled because heavy grain trucks turning at that place crimped them back away for the intersection.  Every year two or three wrecks happened at that place and, usually, there were fatalities.  

3.

One wet and stormy night, a pickup loaded with drunk kids coming back from the town at the Reservation border smashed into a van hauling elders home from a church meeting.  Two of the young people died and the driver of the van was flung onto an altar-shaped boulder next to the road.  Several of the old people returning from church where badly hurt and, after discharge from the hospital, had to convalesce in the nursing home that the tribe operated on the hilltop overlooking the old agency.  Lawyers filed dram shop cases against three of the taverns in the nearby town, but the lawsuits failed because the bar-keepers were untruthful and no one could reliably identify the bars that had sold booze to the kids.  The town was full of taverns and all of the saloons looked alike and, in any event, the kids had been drinking in the car as well – cans of malt-liquor empty and full were strewn all around the accident scene and the crash smelled like a brewery.

Families put up white styrofoam crosses at the intersection’s roadside and there were plastic flowers as well and, even, a pyramid made from whiskey bottles and beer cans although this was thought disrespectful by some and removed in the middle of the night.  People said that the place was cursed and that there were evil spirits haunting the intersection.

4.

Doris visited her mother Emily, also known as Sweetwater Bird, in the nursing home.  The old woman’s hip was broken in the crash and both of her knees were black with deep wounds the size of silver-dollars.  The wounds were too big to heal properly and the doctor at the tribal clinic said that Emily would need skin-grafts, surgery that would require an ambulance trip to the hospital at the big city and several weeks of convalescence there.  Emily told her daughter that she was afraid to go to the city because nothing good ever happened there to native people.  She said that something had to be done about the crossroads where the accident had happened.  The intersection was like a grizzly bear or a cougar – it seized people in its terrible jaws, mauled them, and spit out their bodies.  

Emily distrusted ambulances and didn’t want to spend the money for transportation of that kind.  She recruited her two of her nephews to drive her to the hospital in the city.  Their route from the agency took them over the roller-coaster road to the intersection where the accident had happened.  The styrofoam crosses were yellow but the plastic flowers, the color of frosting on a birthday cake, remained bright and vibrant.  The electric fence among the boulders made a faint humming sound.  From the hilltop crossroads, the land spread out in all directions, mottled by the shadows of clouds passing overhead, hilltops blue in the distance above the brown flood of the river.  

Sweetwater Bird said a few words in the language she had spoken when she was a girl.  Doris didn’t understand.  “What is that?” she asked.

“White Pebble Ceremony,” Emily said.  

Doris said she didn’t know what she meant.  Emily told her nephew driving the van to slow down a little.  

“It makes me nervous up here,” she said, gesturing to the road side where broken glass and beer cans glittered.

Emily said that the “White Pebble Ceremony” was a way to banish evil spirits and purify a place where something bad happened.  It was more powerful than sage.  Those who knew how to perform the ceremony were members of the Shell Society.  

Doris had never heard of the ceremony or the Shell Society.  It was something from the old times.  Her mother wasn’t nostalgic for old ways and had been a staunch Catholic all her life.  So Doris was surprised to hear her words.  When she was growing up, Doris’ mother said that it was bad back in the old days: “We were just wild Indians,” she said, “wandering around the country and looking for death.”

5.

After her mother’s surgery, Doris went to the Cultural Center at the Agency and asked about the White Pebble Ceremony.   A young woman paid to teach the old language to the people’s children said that she had never heard of this ritual.  She said that the tribe had once been divided into many societies before it was destroyed by the White people and, probably, the Shell Society was a group of men entrusted with certain specialized ceremonies.  But she wasn’t sure about any of this.  The books on the shelves at the cultural center were mostly political, about tribal sovereignity and self-empowerment.  The books counseled fidelity to old ways but didn’t specify what those ways had been.

6.

Doris had a friend who worked in the Registrar’s office at the tribal headquarters.  This woman said that there was a fat green book kept where she worked that people sometimes consulted to confirm their ancestral allotments.  At the end of the 19th century, land titles were issued to families living on the reservation.  The big green book, heavy as a brick, contained an alphabetized listing of all families residing on the reservation in the year 1906 when the volume was published.  In effect, it was a sort of census naming heads of households and specifying by number the allotment granted to each family.  The allotments were numbered and there was a large, very fragile map printed on onion-skin that could be unfolded from where it was glued into the back of the book.  The reservation was shown as a jigsaw puzzle of numbered allotments.  In this way, the location of a family in 1906 could be determined.

The book was beautifully bound with a heavy moss-green cover on which there was gold-embossed the image of an Indian chief with his head haloed by rays of feathers.  The volume had cream-colored pages with fine, legible print on big sheets with broad margins.  There were many black and white plates in the volume which was styled a “Report to the Chief” of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Smithsonian Institute.  The pictures showed dignified men wearing blankets like togas, teepees and lodges built with curved branches and covered with earth, medicine pouches made from the guts of bison and full of mummified fetal animals, agates, and the claws of eagles and bears.  There were weapons displayed, hoes and rakes for farming, diagrams as to how the different clans cut their hair, lists of children’s games and recipes for food that the people had once eaten.  The book was very long and thick and it told how weddings were celebrated, how children were named, and how the dead were buried.  On many pages, there were musical notes displayed in staves and bars and the words for old songs were printed in their original language with annotations explaining as much as was known when the book was written about the meaning and use of those songs.  Several pages recounted in detail how sometimes, in the remote past, a young girl had been sacrificed to the Morning Star.  This offering was to insure the return of the buffalo. 

When Doris examined the book, she was told to take care because some of the photographs were loose and the glue in the volume’s binding had flaked away so that some pages also loose and might be lost if the book were mishandled.  No one read much in the book because it was said to be “anthropology” and this was a science invented by White men to steal corpses and cheat people.  But Doris noticed that the authors of the book were identified as the son of a famous chief in the tribe, a leader said to be both wise and great and remembered even unto the present day and a lady school teacher, apparently married to the chief’s son.  When Doris read from the book, the prose was like the language in the Bible. 

Near the back of the Smithsonian report on the tribe, Doris found a listing of ceremonial fraternities, including the Shell Society.  Several pictures showed men with bare chests and elaborate feather bonnets holding in their hands oddly shaped sticks and whittled rods.  The Shell Society had the authority to exorcize evil spirits and could perform the White Pebble Ceremony to that effect.

The writers of the book had recorded men in the Shell Society chanting the ritual incantation to expel demons from people and places.  The chants were transcribed and the notes recorded on the page complete with quavers, semi-quavers as well as flats and sharps.  The words of the incantation were written as well in the native language.  Commentary to the song said that most of the words were of unknown meaning, apparently borrowed from the Osage and Pawnee languages – the few words that could be deciphered were names of animals and the four directions.      

 

The names of several old men prominent in the Shell Society were listed in the book.  Near the very end, just before the tribal census printed in tiny font, a picture showed a handsome young man in overalls sitting with his wife and two little boys on the porch of his frame house.  The caption to the picture said that the man was “A Prosperous Modern Farmer”.  The young man looked skeptically at the camera.  Doris thought that he reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t place his features.  

7.

Sweetwater Bird didn’t do well in the hospital.  She returned to the nursing home on the Reservation much battered and bruised.  

Doris told her that she had read about the White Pebble Ceremony.  Sweetwater Bird’s mind was ruined and she didn’t know what Doris was talking about.

Covid got into the nursing home and Sweetwater Bird who was also known as Emily died.

8.

Doris traced the lineage of the old men who had been members of the Shell Society.  She found two brothers and a cousin of those men living on the Reservation.  At first, the young men didn’t want to perform the ritual.  But Doris enlisted the young woman who taught their native language at the Cultural Center.  The young woman was also skeptical about the project and said that books of anthropology where “genocidal rubbish.”  But, when Doris told her about the authors of the Report to the Chief, the young woman recognized that the tribal informant was related to her, a grandfather of a grandfather.  She examined the book and denounced it, but was willing to talk to the three boys whose forbears had been members of the Shell Society.  The young woman was attractive and dressed well and she was very urbane and cosmopolitan.  The three men were impressed by her and hoped that she would like them and so they agreed to learn the incantation, the ritual gestures that accompanied the song, and how the words should be pronounced.  

9.

On a windy day in autumn with distended fast-flying clouds overhead, Doris and the young woman from the cultural center drove to the intersection on the hill-top where so many deadly accidents had occurred. The country sprawled out around them, vulnerable to the winds and the droplets of rain spitting out of the sky.  The gale blew dust across the asphalt crucifix where the roads intersected.  The memorials at the roadside were flattened by the storm and the faded photographs of the dead people were torn and fluttered like forlorn butterflies in the wind.  From this place, the reservation seemed enormous and empty, a crumpled landscape of bare hilltops and deep hollow where trees crouched around shell-shaped ponds.  After a while, the kids who comprised the Shell Society arrived in an old Impala with its muffler broken so that the car made a sound like thunder.

The boys started the ritual, but a couple of pickup trucks full of their cousins headed toward the tavern-town appeared in the distance.  The Shell Society brothers stopped chanting and let the trucks pass.  Hip-hop music was blasting from speakers in the vehicles.  The young woman wrinkled her pretty nose as if something foul-smelling had poisoned the air.

The Shell Society began chanting again.  Then, a grain truck labored up the hill and the ritual was interrupted once more.

A third time, the Shell Society began chanting.  This time the roads were empty to the horizon.  It would be disrespectful to describe the ceremony although you can read about it in the Report to the Chiefs of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Smithsonian Institute published in 1906 on the subject of this specific tribe.  

During the White Pebble Ceremony, three bald eagles swooped down from the dark clouds and made a spiraling kettle over the intersection.

10.

The gods in Washington and at the BIA hesitated for only a couple months.  Then, the Tribe received a grant, mostly for Covid relief but, also, with money earmarked for infrastructure.  The intersection on the hilltop was re-designed.  For half a year, people cursed the road construction that closed the highways and made the trip to tavern-town longer and more arduous, a winding way on gravel lanes down in the river valley that claimed its share of victims before the intersection was re-opened.  But, at last, the work was done and travelers marveled at the new cross-roads: two stainless steel poles supported a chain on which a flashing red light was suspended.  Because it was windy on the hilltop, the light swung to and fro but it was visible for several miles, tolling in the sky light a great red bell.  Turning lanes had been installed and rumble-strips to rattle the undercarriages of cars approaching from all directions to warn them to stop, or, at least, slow down.  A couple of cameras mounted on the poles eyed the intersection and, for a year, the Tribal police issued tickets to drivers observed not stopping for the semaphore flashing red.  Now, if you wanted to kill yourself at the cross-roads, you had to violate a half-dozen laws and exercise real ingenuity.  

11.

In the green book embossed with the profile of the gold Indian chief, Doris read about the Morning Star Ceremony.  She wondered whether the account of human sacrifice involving a young girl was true or just a lie told by anthropologists.  But there were other accounts, fairly well attested.  The ritual seemed to be practiced by the Pawnee.  Doris knew that her tribe was related to the Pawnee but had split away from those people hundreds of years ago. 

The Morning Star Ceremony was brutal and involved torches and war clubs and everyone shooting arrows into the corpse of the girl.  The Pawnee astrologers who supervised the ritual disliked it and would require sacrifice only when certain prominent men dreamed that this was necessary.  But the blood of the girl killed in the ritual renewed the world and adjusted misalignments in the heavens and summoned the buffalo in their great, shaggy herds.  Most of the details were now lost and no one remembered whether the Morning Star was Venus or Mars or, even, Jupiter.

12.

The Shell Society didn’t formally meet after the ritual on the hillside.  Sometimes, the boys got together to play basketball.  But that was the extent of it.

13.

Doris went to the Cultural Center.  The young woman stood at the head of a class of small children teaching them to count in the tribal language.  She was wearing a red bandana as a mask over her mouth and nose.  Doris thought that she looked like a bandit, but, of course, she knew that the young woman was the very opposite of such a person.

After the class was released for recess, Doris spoke with the young woman.  She asked her if she thought it would be good for the buffalo to return.  The young woman said that she was indifferent to such things because she was vegan. 

A few weeks later, Doris send an email to the young woman inviting her to meet.  “I have something very important to share with you,” Doris wrote.  The young woman didn’t reply to the message.   As it turned out, she no longer worked at the Cultural Center and had returned to the City to take a better and more high-paying job working with slum kids.     

14.

The cameras on the hilltop showed a couple of mangy coyotes loping across the intersection.  Something large and dark moved in the background.  It’s open range out there and cattle roam the prairie – the shadow was probably just a cow.

Xeric

 

1.

It was a hot dig at Texas Boys Rock Shelter in more ways than one.  The scoop of stone over the trenches radiated heat that made the site unbearable by early afternoon.  The stratigraphy in the test pits was blurred by previous excavation and the crew quarreled over documentation and context, disputes that boiled over when the sun scalded the workers under the big shield of crumbling limestone dike.  At first, the Rodent Girl was carrying on with the Cultural Coordinator – although this was before her work with packrat and gopher bones put that nickname on her.  In general, things didn’t go well and, even before noon, the sun got into your brain and confused your thoughts into a sort of boiling stew with odd fragments of lust or rage or simple indignation bubbling up to the surface. And as it turned out, there was even a curse on the place.  

The team bunked at a Basque rancher’s place 14 miles down a four-wheel drive track.  Beyond the ranch in the other direction from the rock shelter, a gravel road bucked up and down where it crossed the basin’s flash flood chutes, ending at a half-abandoned mining town where there was a brothel in a cottonwood grove, a disco ball on a pole marking the place’s bar, the girls receiving clients in Airstreams scattered along the banks of a gravel bed that flowed with water only during snow-melt in the mountains, that is, a period of six weeks or less.  Two taverns in sheds decorated with neon edging stood on the town’s only asphalt road where there was a small bank and a café next to the cinder-block post office.  On the hillside, among the black, crouching head-frames, a small supermarket stood on a terrace leveled into the ramped heaps of tailings.  The Tribe had offices near the supermarket, modular buildings atop another embankment of tailings, and there was a women’s clinic on the barren hillside and a pre-school.  We spent weekend nights in the town, drinking at the bars, and, then, bouncing back in the moonlight over the ten miles of bad road to the ranch where the team’s support trailer was located among the caravan of campers in which we slept.  We bought fire-wood at the grocery, expensive stuff because the land was treeless for a hundred miles in each direction, and, after dark, built bonfires at our camp.  The Basque sheepherder dragged a folding chair from his ramshackle bungalow and drank with us in the orange glow of the flames.  He was married but his wife lived in Reno and he saw her only every other weekend.   

Isolation of this kind isn’t healthy.  Particularly, when its hot and the team is ill-assorted.

For obvious reasons, the location of Texas Boys Rock Shelter shouldn’t be disclosed and, in fact, you will find the site’s GPS coordinates redacted on the Registry of Historic Places.  If you are interested, here is the Smithsonian trinomial: 26PP4509.

2.

An owl lived in a niche in the rock shelter.  When we arrived in our pickups before dawn, the air was still surprisingly cool and, even, seemed damp: dew made the stones slippery and the sage was moist, breathing its perfume into the air in a woozy gush.  The basin was grey and the distant mountains were the color of blue gun-metal.  

The owl could abide the first vehicle.  But the second was too much and the bird, round as a cannon-ball, flew from its roost, big wings hollowing out a way through the cool air.  The sun’s rays came through the comb of the peaks an hour later.  Then, it warmed-up.

3.

Before we called her “Rodent Girl,” Debbie was just a graduate student at the State University at Reno.  She had a silver nose ring clipped to one nostril.  Her hair was short and blonde, no-nonsense and low maintenance, you might say.  Debbie was good-natured.  In the cool of the morning, she wore a sweat shirt with a hood until the sun established itself.  Then, she removed the shirt and worked until noon, when we knocked-off, in what seemed to be the upper half of a two-piece bathing suit.  Debbie wore cut-off jeans and her legs were long and brown.  

Of course, she was a favorite with all the men at the site, the sole woman working this excavation.  And, she caught the eye of Jason, the cultural coordinator and liaison with the Tribe.  Jason drove a new Jeep Grand Cherokee and, after the first week, he generally reached the site mid-morning after lounging around at the tribal offices in town.  In the afternoon, he and the Basque rancher hiked the dry gulches hunting rabbits.  We heard their shotguns barking as we tried to nap 

But it was too warm to sleep.  So, when the shots sounded, we got up and sat in the shade of our camper-trailer, a novel or scientific paper opened on our lap, although sweat dripping into our eyes blurred the print and, then, unwittingly, we fell asleep, an unintentional slumber from which we awoke with an aching head, thirsty and irritable.

4.  

Helmer, an archaeologist at Berkeley, had trenched the site in the fifties.  He botched everything about the excavation, although this wasn’t apparent from the crisp, misleading prose in his field report.  You don’t get any second chances when digging a site – the process is intrinsically destructive and the Berkeley archaeologist wrecked everything he touched.  Helmer found some obsidian flints and an infant burial, the little mummy resting in a sort of wicker tray, more or less completely carbonized.  On the first day, we discovered that his elevations were all untrue.  He had measured the site setting a grade at 2025 meters.  Our level showed that his reference elevation was actually 2067.  Therefore, all of his findings had to be transposed to the new grade.  Since Texas Boy’s Rock Shelter once rose as a stony spine above the waters of glacial lake Lahonton, Helmer’s errors had consequence.  The highstand of Lahontan’s waters was a full 32 feet higher than where Helmer had placed his reference.  Although the shelter has been bone-dry for five-thousand years, before that time, the place was periodically inundated, floods depositing a cobble of small round stones and sand on ancient beaches under the ear-shaped curl of limestone rising above the water.  

Helmer’s measurements were all wrong and, at first, our test pits didn’t locate the disturbed strata where he had dug.  Then, one of our trenches cross-cut a pit made by Helmer and we were able to orient ourselves with respect to his diagrams and photographs.  This was important.  The Tribe didn’t want us digging in the area where the infant burial had been found.  When Helmer found the burial, the mummy fell apart in situ and the carbonized wicker basket also decomposed, leaving fragments of grave goods and corpse still embedded in the sandy soil.  It’s always a nuisance when human remains are discovered on a site.  You have to consult with the tribe and a NAGPRA plan has to be drawn-up and approved and everything is delayed while due reverence is shown to the shards of uncovered bone.  It’s best to stay well away from places where a skeleton might be found.  

5.

A couple hundred yards from the foot trail leading up to the Rock Shelter, the four-wheel drive track out to the site slipped down into a sandy ditch, a flash flood channel that dragged cobbles and other debris down from the base of the cliffs.  On the third morning of the dig, Debbie misread the apron of loose sand in the ravine and spun her tires.  Her pickup’s wheels sank to the hubcap in the sand.

At that time, Jason was still anxious to supervise and restrict our work in the Rock Shelter and, to establish his authority, came out to the dig bright and early.  So, he was only a half-mile behind Debbie when she got stuck in the draw.  Jason drove a bright red Jeep Cherokee and he had his windows open, blasting out hip-hop.  Debbie heard the throb of bass approaching and saw the jeep thudding over the ruts and rocks on the trail, driving too fast for the conditions and kicking up a small, fatal-looking cloud of dust behind him.  He stopped on the spine of stone overlooking the sand pit where Debbie was standing next to her pickup.  

The sun was just rising and put a halo around Jason and Debbie found him impressive, particularly since he promised to rescue her. Jason was wearing sunglasses tinted onyx and his long black hair was neatly braided and, around his throat, Debbie saw a turquoise medallion, a Zuni bear totem.  His cowboy boots were shiny, crafted from fine leather decorated with an elaborate silver pattern pricked into the shafts.  There was more silver and turquoise at his belt buckle.

Jason didn’t want to get dirty and, so, after surveying the situation, he invited Debbie into his red Jeep and they drove up to where the jagged outcropping loomed over the desert, a shark’s tooth biting into the dawn sky.  The rock shelter hung overhead, a gloomy-looking socket in the stone at the end of the uphill foot path.  

Jason was courtly.  He opened Debbie’s door for her and, then, talked with the rest of us squatting in the shadow of the cliff.  I volunteered to tow Debbie’s pick-up out of the sand trap and took the Suburban with the come-along cable-puller down to where the vehicle was stranded.  It didn’t take too long to free the pick-up. 

Jason shadowed Debbie.  The Field Supervisor was distracted and didn’t pay much attention to the work.  He was an old man wearing a sort of canvas bonnet to protect his skin cancer scars from the sun and he sat on a camp-stool in the shade of a big table-sized rock fallen down from the shelter’s overhang.  One of his knees had been recently replaced and the other joint was sore and arthritic.  The purpose for the dig wasn’t clear, at least to me and the students working in the shallow trenches seemed to regard the experience as a resume builder but nothing more.  No one expected anything publishable from the excavation and the Field Supervisor’s primary objective was to refute and criticize Professor Helmer’s work done at this place almost seventy years earlier.  The field supervisor was delighted when we found that Helmer’s elevations were all wrong.  With a tear in his eye and a catch in his throat, he said that Professor Helmer had been his mentor and was very dear to him, but it was obvious to me that the work at Texas Boys was designed as some kind of obscure revenge.  

At our mid-morning break, Jason and Debbie sat apart from the rest of us.  Debbie ate a granola bar.  Jason poured tea from a thermos into a cup that he shared with her.  The rest of us all drank coffee.  Jason was a tea-drinker.  

When we returned to work, Jason told Debbie to be careful driving back to the Basque rancher’s place.  He said that she should call him if there was a problem and handed her a business card on which phone numbers were printed.  Then, he slid down the sandy path to his big red Jeep and we heard his sound system pounding out a bass beat as the vehicle bounced over the rough parts of the access track.  A writhing cloud of dust followed his vehicle all the way out to the horizon and, even, when he had vanished, I thought I could hear low notes sounding over the desert like a heart beat.

A few hours later, it was too hot to work and the field supervisor limped to his van.  I told Debbie that I would trail her back to the ranch but she told me that everything was under control and that she wouldn’t get stuck again.

6.

It was pretty clear that something was going on between Debbie and Jason.  At the end of the week, Debbie was scuffing up dirt in a part of the rock shelter that was supposed to be off-limits.  But Jason was watching her and, it seemed, that she was working with his permission, even guidance.  The Field Supervisor wasn’t well that day and had remained back at the camp and, nominally, I suppose, I was in charge, but really, for all intents and purposes, it was Jason’s dig since he was the Tribal liaison and  the site was the cultural property of his people.  

After an hour or so, Debbie uncovered a small cache of olivella beads, fragments of seashell that had once been threaded together as a necklace.  She recorded context and we took photographs, although this made me uneasy since the beads were located outside our authorized grid.  Olivella beads were trade goods, made from molluscs collected on the northern California coast, and it was unusual to find them so far from their origin.  The presence of the tiny beads attested to trade routes extending over several hundred miles and had some importance in reconstructing the early Holocene economy in the area.  The little beads were probably worth a publication and there was a buzz on the site after they were found, some of us shaking hands with Debbie to congratulate her on her discovery.  Jason stood by, a slight smile on his lips.  He had beautiful straight and white teeth.  Out on the desert, where the heat shimmer was dissolving sage and stone into wavering blurred mirages, a couple of vultures circled in the sky.  

7.

If you were paying attention to such things, the relationship between Jason and Debbie, whatever it was, didn’t last.  On the third weekend, something went wrong.  Jason spent less and less time at the dig and, on some days, didn’t come at all.  Debbie didn’t say anything and isolated herself, taking her breaks alone, sitting at the bottom of the slope in the shade of her pickup truck.

At the beginning of the fourth week, a conference was called at the Tribal offices in town.  Jason was present with the field supervisor and a lawyer representing the tribe together with a couple representatives of the Council.  After the meeting, the field supervisor announced that there was a problem with the provenance of the olivella beads and that the artifact had been repatriated to the Tribe.  

The next morning, Debbie became the “Rodent Girl”.  The field supervisor told her that it would be very helpful if she would devote her efforts at Texas Boys to developing a small mammal assemblage.  In the short term, at least, she should avoid involvement with cultural artifacts.  I don’t know if Debbie questioned this decision.  She never told me.

8.

You want to help someone.  You want to rescue them.

Debbie had been working on the small mammal study for a couple days when I talked to her.  The Field Supervisor was having some medical problems and was in Reno for tests.  Debbie sat on a blanket, next to the wheel-well of her pickup, eating a granola bar and drinking Sprite in the vehicle’s shallow shadow.  In those days, I vaped on my breaks.  Beyond the dark patch cast by the truck, the landscape was melting in the heat, doing all sorts of funny things with mirages and quivering columns of thermal updraft.  

“So what do you think about this deal?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“The pack-rat project,” I replied.

“Oh, it’s okay,” she said.  

“So, you don’t –“

She interrupted: “It’s valuable work.  Someone’s got to do it.”  

I nodded and blew smoke from between my lips.  Maybe, I felt helpless, but she didn’t seem to share that sentiment.  

9.  

Owls eat pack rats and pocket gophers and other small mammals.  The bones of those creatures are deposited in their pellets.  To create a small mammal assemblage, the researcher finds a site where owls have roosted, then, excavates carefully, making a ditch cut to establish a stratigraphic sequence.    

Debris from the ditch is sieved to isolate owl pellets that are, then, tagged according to the sediment level from which they were recovered.  In this way, the pellets can be dated.  Once the age of the pellets is established, they are dissected and bones enclosed in the owl excrement are examined under a microscope at 40x to 60x resolution.  The bones are compared with images in reference works to establish species.  Most of the bones extracted from owl pellets are tiny mandibles.  Jaw-bones are readily diagnostic as to species.  Owls have a limited territorial range and, so, we know that what they are eating lives within a radius of 4 kilometers from the roost.

Establishing a small mammal assemblage is tedious and time-consuming.  But the results may be helpful in establishing the environmental context in which cultural artifacts are found.  In the Great Basin, time is parsed according to xeric (hot and dry) and mesic (moist and cool) periods.  Certain species of small mammals are indicative of xeric or mesic ecologies.  Therefore, analysis of rodent mandibles, painstakingly establishing absolute chronology and species identity, may be used to define the climatic conditions during past epochs.  This knowledge can be applied to material culture, providing context as to the conditions in which past people lived.  

I suppose that the Field Supervisor expected Debbie to quit when he assigned her to small mammal assemblage.  

10.

Debbie spaded down though the tufa deposited at the base of the outcrop.  She used a rocker sieve to isolate owl pellets and, then, tagged them in Ziplock sandwich baggies marked according to strata.  She worked slowly, drowned in dust as fine as flour from the disturbed tufa.  The rest of us worked ten yards away, sifting through sediment hauled out of the trench crosscutting Helmer’s excavation.  Slabs of limestone overhanging Debbie’s pit seemed loose and unstable and, sometimes, pebbles drizzled down on her.  By mid-day, we were all coated in grey dust smeared in the sweat on our faces and arms.  Staggering down to our vehicles in the blinding heat, we looked like ghosts or freshly unearthed corpses.

Nothing much came to light in our trench: we found a couple of tiny obsidian flints knapped from a larger tool that was missing.  Some of the cobbles were sooty – probably evidence of ancient hearths.  A nondescript tangle of fibers extruded from the side of our pit.  Perhaps, this was the remnants of a wicker moccasin.  

Ironically, the only person who found anything significant was Debbie.  A dark oval stone, unlike the surrounding gravel, emerged from the terminal Pleistocene-early Holocene strata in her trench.  She called us to examine the find.  After the context was photographed with a marker to establish scale, she lifted the peculiar-looking rock from where it was embedded among volcanic ash sediment and smooth pebbles, presumably the edge of ancient beach.  The stone looked like a dusty chunk of coal.  But when we poured on canteen-water to wet it, the rock shone dense and black, with glazed cutting edges.  It was obviously a biface skillfully knapped from obsidian.  (Later, the source stone was identified as the obsidian deposits at Bordwell Springs in Washoe County.)

Each of us took turns holding the biface in our hands and feeling its cool, arrogant weight.  

“That wasn’t supposed to be in your hole,” someone said.

“Well, it was,” Debbie replied.  

The Field Supervisor shrugged.  “It’s obviously cultural,” he said.  “Not supposed to be in this part of the site.”

Debbie’s trench was under the niche where the lone owl perched each morning before fleeing our arrival.

“I suppose it’s got some kind of curse on it,” Debbie said.  “That would be just my luck.”

“The curse of the mummy,” I said.  

It was too hot to laugh, almost too hot for anyone to comment.  A feeble-looking dust devil was spinning up alkali salt on the playa a mile away.  

11.

A week later, we gave up on Texas Boys Rock Shelter.  Back in the lab at Reno, Debbie used a microscope to identify the rodent mandibles soaked out of the crumbling owl pellets.  Grayson’s authoritative volume, Mammals of the Great Basin, exists in only a few print copies, but circulates widely among local archaeologists in a PDF.  Debbie compared the mandibles (mostly occlusal surfaces) that she examined under the microscope with the plates in Grayson’s manual and, then, entered stratigraphic and species information as data points in her computer.  

After six months, she finished her study and submitted it to her supervising professor.  He was impressed with Debbie’s work and, after accepting her research in support of her Ph.d, asked that several colleagues peer-review her paper.  Copiously illustrated, a shortened version of her study was published in the Journal of Southwestern Archaeology.  The full report, printed as her doctoral thesis, now circulates widely also in PDF.

 

Debbie’s survey of cranial and mandibular fragments, mostly meadow voles, desert woodrats, pocket gophers, and chisel-tooth kangaroo rats, established that Texas Boys Rock Shelter reared up over a Xeric (or hot and dry) landscape in the terminal Pleistocene. The terrain was Mesic (cooler and wetter) in the early Holocene and initial middle Holocene.  The site was generally Xeric after the middle Pleistocene, although slightly cooler and better watered between 3000 to 1500 years before the present.  Hot and dry traded places with cool and wet four or five times as the Basin lakes filled with water and, then, evaporated.

12.

A year after her rodent assemblage study was published, Debbie was invited to present her findings by ZOOM lecture sponsored by the University of Nevada at Reno.  I attended by computer.  The lecture, organized by Power Point, began mid-afternoon.  Debbie spoke too fast and she was sometimes hard to understand.  She also used a sing-song patter that was a little disconcerting, although the content of her talk was excellent (at least in my estimation) although a bit technical and dry.  I poured myself a couple of drinks mixed with Diet Coke and whiskey while she spoke and became a little intoxicated to the extent that I didn’t notice her confusion during the last five minutes of the three-quarter hour talk.  Somehow, she missed a slide toward the end of her Power Point, or, perhaps, one of the images was out of place.  She raced ahead of her pictures, sometimes fluttering forward and backward among the bullet-pointed images, and, then, had to repeat herself when the slides illustrating her words, finally, appeared on-screen.  At the end of the talk, she told her listeners: “I’m sorry – I’ve completely messed-up the end of this lecture.”  One of the ZOOM interlocutors told her that it was okay and that the gist of her presentation was clear enough.  Debbie sounded distraught and said that she didn’t know what had gone wrong.  Computers, as you know, can be inscrutable.    

I sent her a chat message on the ZOOM application: Good talk. Fine and impressive work.  I didn’t notice the screw-up.  She replied, thanking me, and typed: Mummy’s curse, right?

13.

A month ago, I drove up to Reno for a conference.  Debbie was teaching, although by remote, and I waited for her to finish, sitting on a chair in the corridor outside her office.  Looking down the hallway, I saw chairs positioned outside each door – apparently, students waited for their professors sitting on those chairs during their office hours.  It was early afternoon and no one else was around.  Indeed, the whole campus was silent and the parking lots near the big brick buildings were empty.  Outside, the only sound was a mower cutting grass on a lawn far away, the click of automatic sprinklers, and the faint white-noise of the air conditioning fans.  

I felt like I had many things to say to Debbie.  

She welcomed me into her office.  “That really sucked,” I said.  She looked at me quizzically.  “What?  The mess-up on my Power Point lecture?”  

“Oh no,” I said.  “That was fine.”

“So what sucked?”

“What happened out there at the Texas Boys’ dig,” I said.

“Not at all,” she said.  “I earned my doctorate on that work.  It all turned-out just fine.”

I noticed that her name was hyphenated on the plate on her door.  There was a picture of man with red hair and a red beard, stoop-shouldered as he pressed himself through one of the tee-shaped doors in the ruins at Chaco Canyon.

“It was hot there, though,” she said.  She still sported the silver nose ring clipped to right nostril.

“Damned hot,” I replied.

15. 

Of course, I was in love with her.  I recall the heat, the shimmer of a playa across the basin.  In those days, I vaped, a bad habit.  I was hunkered down in the shadow of a big limestone slab fallen a thousand years ago from the eroded arch of the shelter overhead.  If a rock like that crashed down while we were working in our trenches, it would be fatal.   I inhaled smoke and, then, blew it into a blue shroud that covered my face.