There is, as it happens, an actual Turquoise Trail. It’s more metaphorical than literal, and not a particularly accurate representation of the name: It begins just south of Albuquerque and moves upward past the metro area to head northeast to Santa Fe, thence to double back down to the Albuquerque area once again. It’s marked, with signs leading off the freeway to take tourists to shops and restaurants and other commercial sites.
Ostensibly, it’s named for literal turquoise, the Skystone. After all, what is now New Mexico was once one of the leading sources of the gem, although most of the state’s famous mines are now depleted or closed entirely. But the peoples indigenous to this land well knew of its existence, and mined it on localized scale, using it in jewelry and for other purposes long before this land mass was so much as a thought in the head or a gleam in the eye of a single European.
Still, the Turquoise Trail of tourism doesn’t navigate those old paths. It’s far more white man’s curiosity than anything related to Native usage of the stone, or even the sources of the stone itself. The more famous of the New Mexico mines, the Cerrillos Mine, sat just south of Santa Fe; there is now a new mine near its site, one that, although it has appropriated the name, produces stone that looks nothing like the bright sky-blue stone of the real Cerrillos (once called “Tiffany Turquoise,” because it was similar to the blue used by the famous Manhattan jeweler, and also because it was top-grade stone). The other famous mines are further south and west: Tyrone, Hachita, High Lonesome, Santa Rita. There is, in Lincoln County, a relatively new operation called the Enchantment Mine, but it produces a much smaller supply than the old New Mexico operations of fifty and a hundred years ago.
I’ve written before, at some length, about the role of turquoise, the mineral, in the lifeways of this place. I’ve written, too, about its identity as the Skystone: the old indigenous story of how pieces of the sky fell as rain, and were instantly hardened by the heat of the earth into a beautiful, sky-colored jewel that the people could pick up, hold, carry, use. It became a talisman, protection against harm and proof against evil spirits, something to hang from one’s bow so that the arrows would fly true, to braid into one’s horse’s mane and tail so that she would always be sure of foot, to crush and turn to paint to edge the doors and windows of one’s home so that all that was undesirable would be kept at bay outside. And, of course, it was both beautiful and infused with its own spirit — as jewelry, as pottery accent, crushed into sand for ceremonial paintings by the people of Dinetah.
And today, the best American turquoise is extraordinarily valuable, by any measure.
But it is its identity as Skystone that speaks to me today, and the link between its famous color and the upper reaches of the atmosphere in this place, particularly at this season.
Our seasons are no longer so stable as they once were. It’s always been a land of extremes; wild has always been an apt modifier for weather here, no matter the season or moon or time of day. But now, as we hover between no-longer-winter and not-yet-spring, “extreme” takes on a whole new meaning, one that affects the look of the skies as much as the feel of the winds.
On this day, our skies are mostly clear, albeit with gossamer strands of wispy cirrostratus wedded to silvery haze around the horizon, a product of the inversion layer of wood smoke from fireplaces and stoves all over the valley. But the sky is cloudless, tree branches still skeletal and unbudded, and the above and all around us is a vast expanse of nearly pure turquoise. Toward the south, it’s a pale shade, perhaps more aqua than strictly turquoise, like a robin’s egg; to the north, the blue is not backlit by the sun, and so has deepened to a cornflower color that lacks the hint of green visible elsewhere. It’s a bit like being within a snow globe minus the snow, encased in the embrace of an inverted turquoise cabochon, one matrixed not with clouds but with the branches of still-dormant willow and aspen and cottonwood.
Recent days have seen more cloud cover, the kind that begins in the west where land meets sky and slowly spread overhead, like a sheet being drawn up to the chin of the mountain. On such days, the turquoise shifts, muted by the smoky veil and backlit by a different light, one that softens the edges of the sky and the shade of it, too.
On such days, the cornflower blue of the north, like the bluebells of the lands of my home, spreads east and south and west until it pollinates the heavens. It’s a quieter shade, if no less brilliant in its way, the soft rounded blues of Arizona stone, an oddity from a state whose skies are more sharply turquoise than our own. These are the skies of the storm, too: of the rains and the snow, of the winds and the Thunder Beings. They chart the path of the monsoonal flow in summer, of the blizzard in winter, of all the autumn sleet and spring rains in between, and the branches that trace their tracks mirror the network of ditches and streams, rivers and lakes on our side of the atmospheric divide.
And then there is the blue at end of day, a turquoise that, like its most valued and valuable gemstone counterparts, casts off all but the faintest hint of green, donning a blanket of purest indigo. It is a trick of the light, yes, and at the same time not: the angled beams of the setting sun intensifies its shade, but it does not alter its essential hue.
To the east, whence the sun rose this morning amid green and coral, the sky trades mineral for metal, indigo turquoise traded for the cobalt flame that foretells the night. And still the branches chart our path, presaging in the blue of their tentacled embrace both rise of moon and fall of dark.
At Red Willow, people still live in much the way of the ancestors, our lives reckoned by the skies, attuned to their shape and shade and subtlest gradations of color, of feeling, of the spirits of climate and weather. We plan our days, our months, our seasons by the talismanic turquoise skies that guide our steps and shield our world from unwanted spirits: by the original turquoise trail.
~ Aji
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