The Turquoise Ledge Read Free Page B

“Grandmother,” because his late grandmother always used to catch more fish than everyone else when they went ice fishing. That was how they recognized that her spirit had been reborn into the little boy named Howard.
    A few times I’ve had dreams in which I visited beloved family members. Once I visited my great grandfather Robert G. Marmon, who died many years before I was born. My father loved him a great deal and talked about him while I was growing up and of course, Grandma A’mooh told me about him so I felt we knew each other somehow.
    Twice in my dreams I visited with Grandma A’mooh. Both times she hugged me close to her as she did when I was a little girl; when I awoke her familiar scent was still with me. But after only a few moments that memory of her scent when she held me faded into my dream consciousness.

CHAPTER 4
    H uman beings have lived along the Rio San José in north central New Mexico continuously for the past eighteen thousand years. Not far from Laguna, to the southeast, near State Road 6, the river descends into a gorge, and it was here in shallow caves and cliff overhangs that archeologists found hearths used thousands of years ago by the indigenous hunters who chipped elegant leaf-shaped spear and arrow points to hunt the bison and elk that grazed on the plain. Archeologists called the culture San José man, a counterpart of Folsom man, whose spear points were found in eastern New Mexico, near the town of Folsom.
    When I think of the Pueblo people, I think of sandstone—sandstone rainwater cisterns, and sandstone cliff houses; sandstone was the preferred building material at Chaco Canyon and at Mesa Verde, and in the pueblos when I was growing up. Sandstone is a sedimentary rock formed chiefly by quartz particles in a cement of calcite. The calcite cement is often white but some is also yellow, red or brown depending on the iron content in the calcite. Sandstone formations ring the fossil remnants of the great inland seas of the Jurassic Age, which left behind Lake Bonneville and its survivor, the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Southern Utah, western Colorado, northern Arizona and New Mexico are crossed by the same formations of yellow, orange and red sandstone the geologists call by such exotic names as Kaibab, Chinle, Entrada, Carmel, Navajo and Wingate.
    The Pueblo people preferred to live along rivers like the Rio San José, the Rio Puerco, and of course, the Rio Grande. If they did not settle by a river, they sought mesas or hilltops with expanses of light yellow or ivory sandstone, the wind-deposited cross bedded dunes laid down eons ago in the Mesozoic, compressed and petrified by overlying sediments that later eroded away. The sandstone was fine-grained and hard enough to resist crumbling under the mason’s basalt hammer, but soft enough to carve hand and footholds on the faces of cliffs. The people sought the sandstone formations because pools of rainwater collected in natural basins and cisterns in the petrified Jurassic dunes. The same formations contained long vertical seams that formed fissures in the sandstone where fossil water, artesian springs cold as ice, seeped and dripped down to form shallow pools. So it is not remarkable that the Pueblo people settled on or near the sandstone formations.
    As a child I used to watch my great grandma A’mooh kneel on the floor of her kitchen to grind green chili with garlic cloves on the curved rectangular stone of fine-grained black lava. The people preferred the lava stones for grinding because stones made from sandstone sometimes left a residue of fine grit in the food.
    Aunt Susie said when she was a child, the women of the household and the neighbors did the grinding together, and as they worked they sang songs. The songs changed their task from hard work to pleasure as they lost themselves in the sounds and the words. Maybe the grinding songs kept the clanswomen from gossiping too much. The songs belonged to