Getting Ready for the Desert
In recent weeks, my wife Jane and I have been invited to visit our son Nathan, who lives with his girlfriend, Veronika, in the desert in a remote section of southeast Arizona. The idea has given me pause. It’s not that I dislike heat and rocks and landscape that look like the surface of the moon. My hesitation has to do with creatures, four-legged and otherwise.
Nate’s recent phone calls haven’t given me confidence. He’s told intriguing tales of rattlesnakes and scorpions, whip snakes, javelinas, and howling packs of coyotes.The stories have often been followed by photographs on the phone. One was of a prehistoric-looking lizard—large, brown and orange, pebble-skinned—taken during a “rare sighting” of a Gila monster. I’m always a bit apprehensive about animals identified as “monsters.” My research turned up footage of a crazed biologist from the University of Arizona, holding a lizard while glibly describing his experience with a burning bite on his finger. The fire quickly spreading up his arm made him nauseous and started kidney failure. Of course, his colleagues had quickly gotten him to a hospital. Otherwise, he happily reported, he would have had to curl up under a mesquite tree until the poison had done its work.
In Nate’s photos, there’s one of him holding up a long pole with a 4-foot diamond-back rattler coiling on its end. Another is of a similar snake which he’d captured and deposited in a 50-gallon drum to be released at a distance from his home. Nate has informed me that killing snakes is against the law. In fact, that is true in all fifty states.
My son seems completely at ease with snakes. As a child, he was known in our neighborhood as a snake handler. Often, he was summoned to someone’s home to remove a baby black racer or a DeKay’s brown snake which had somehow made its way into a basement. He has told me that one of his Arizona friends has identified and named most of the rattlers in the area. Nate has said that if you hike where he lives, you just need to watch the ground and listen for rattles. Sounds simple enough.
Nate currently has four dogs, all large, including two that wandered onto his property. At first, he thought they were wolves. The third one is a rescue dog, part pit and part hound, that he bought as a puppy for protection in the wild. Hmmm. The last was given to him by a neighbor. Apparently, it was a herding dog who refused to herd. Sounds like my kind of dog. Over the last year or so, we’ve gotten a photo of one dog bitten in the face by a rattler (think of a sad-faced Scooby-Doo) and another gored in the chest by a wild boar (remember the javelinas?).
No photos accompanied the tales of a dog bitten by a Gila monster, two more dogs injured by javelinas, or a dog hallucinating after licking the legendary Sonoran Desert toad. I am happy to say that all of the dogs involved in these adventures survived. As did my son.
Adding to my anxiety around animals is my own sketchy past in the natural world and suburban wilderness. As a kid, I lived around a lot of critters both tame and wild. On the wild side were copperheads and snapping turtles, both of which populated the woods and creeks where I grew up in Frederick.
I never felt directly threatened by either of them, but I was a bit intimidated because of my Boy Scout training. One part of our promise, to “be prepared,” included instructions on how to use our penknives to cut Xs on the puncture wounds left by poisonous snakes. We were then supposed to suck out the venom. I always wondered what might happen if that venom found its way into a hole left by a missing tooth or even a bitten lip. The Scout handbook’s information on applying tourniquets for severed limbs didn’t exactly put me at ease. Who knew? Those Frederick County snapping turtles grew mighty big.
Over time, I’ve had a shaky history with animals in the wild. Once, a herd of raccoons rampaged my romantic campsite in New Hampshire. I had prepared a mouth-watering steak dinner in aluminum foil, Boy Scout-style, over the embers of a campfire. Suddenly, glowing eyeballs appeared at the edges of our firelight, and the raccoons stormed up onto the table and began grabbing food. I chased them away with a stick, threw the whole contaminated meal into a trash barrel, and Jane and I retreated into the tent. The raccoons snarled and fought for about an hour in that barrel before heading off, leaving only shreds of foil behind.
I’ve had encounters with a black bear, a grizzly, and an angry bull moose in the Rockies. At home at Loch Raven Reservoir, I’ve had a run-in with a beaver who objected to me fishing near his lodge.
I’ve had two encounters with skunks. When I was in my 20s, sleeping under the stars at Swallow Falls State Park, I woke to the touch of a cold nose on mine. A skunk had sauntered in to check me out. I closed my eyes, he ambled away and I spent the rest of the night in the tent with my more sensible friends.
Years later, when Nate was three, we were on a family camping trip in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. We had just settled down to a nice family dinner at the campsite picnic table when a skunk strolled toward us out of the brush. “Head into the tent,” I whispered to everyone, and quietly and swiftly we did, zipping up the door behind us. Once the door was secure, I took stock of the family and realized that we had left Nathan behind. Out I went to find him sitting at the table unfazed by our intruder. He was as calm as could be while I quietly made my way over to him and carried him back to the tent to join the rest of us. He had firmly secured his place in the realm of family legends.
Our upcoming trip to Arizona might give rise to other legends. Nate has informed me that Mexican gray wolves have been re-introduced into the area. A puma has been sighted recently within two hundred yards of his home. Local naturalists are thrilled that at least three jaguars have taken up residence in a nearby mountain range. I’ve never had an encounter with wolves or large predatory cats. I’ll need to watch out and listen for them—if I can take my eyes off the ground while my ears are focused on rattles. And in Arizona, of course, I won’t be sleeping under the stars.
© Bill Jones
Bill Jones lives in Baltimore and received an Artscape Literary Arts Award for poetry in 1992. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction appear in numerous small press publications across the country. Apprentice House Press published two of his collections At Sunset, Facing East (poetry, 2016) and Still Life in a Hurricane (poetry and prose, 2019). He is currently working on a new collection of fiction and nonfiction, tentatively titled Half-Truths.
The Loch Raven Review 