Prose by Gregory McNamee
Photos by Stephen Strom
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The Tohono O’odham, the Sonoran Desert “people of the stony barren,” tell of water serpents that dwell in the boiling summer clouds that rage across deserts the world over, bringing rain to the dry earth not in nourishing drop but in great black undulating curtains of water, leaving floods and destruction in their wake. It is no sin to kill such serpents, the O’odham explain, but even their best shamans and archers rarely succeed in doing so. During one such thunderstorm in Arizona in the summer of 1941, a saltwater clam fell from out of the sky on a young boy, who was knocked out cold by the blow. He fared better than the playwright Aeschylus, on whose bald pate an eagle, thinking it was a rock, dropped a tortoise, killing both writer and chelonian instantly. Eroded hillsides and ocotillo, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California |
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Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural
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