'The Turquoise Ledge': Discovering the treasure hidden in the Earth

A Memoir

By Leslie Marmon Silko

Viking. 336 pp. $25.95.

Silko, recipient of a MacArthur grant, is the author of Ceremony, among other novels, as well as short stories, essays, and poetry collections. Her new memoir, The Turquoise Ledge, is both an exercise in discerning the voice of the Earth and an account of the beauty and rigor of life under the skies of Arizona's Sonoran Desert, where she has lived for 30 years. It also documents her process in writing the book, where finding a turquoise bead on a lawn chair is a good omen, but a heat wave prostrates her in front of old movies on TV, not "good for writing or anything else."

The memoir's title and structure derive from early-morning walks Silko takes through the lonely arroyos and ancient trails of the Tucson mountains. "The idea," from Chapter 1,

was that the exercise and open air would help release my mind into a less self-conscious state where I could better perceive the delicacy of the light and the dawn moisture in the breeze . . . the pace of the walks helped edit the experience of the walks to the essentials.

Along the way, she developed an interest in the turquoise rocks that appeared, sometimes as if sent by unseen beings, in undisturbed places that had previously yielded no such treasures.

Bit by bit the geological and human story of these mountains emerges, along with Silko's awareness of a hidden ledge of turquoise - or is there more than one? - underneath the desert. The much-valued blue stone created by weather, water, and the accretion of minerals was traded to the ancient peoples of what is now Mexico, a region poor in turquoise, by the "ancestors" whose voices Silko occasionally discerns "singing grinding songs" in the night around her isolated house.

The book is divided into sections: "Ancestors," "Rattlesnakes," "Star Beings," "Turquoise," and "Lord Chapulin" (the Spanish word for grasshopper). Themes from one section cycle through the others, as in "Turquoise," when a neighbor's bulldozer attacks the arroyo to pry out boulders for his garden. This provokes a "strange angry energy," leading to unprecedented, fatal owl attacks on Silko's beloved macaws.