Unfinished Nest: My family extends beyond the stars

The clouds that blanket the Plains of San Augustin rarely notice the science traveler, the Mescalero Apache, the patchwork family with a bag of marshmallows and one unused match. The clouds push from Arizona toward Texas, push across the reservation, the dried lake flats, push past the twenty-seven radio antennas without a second glance. Every time I drive past the installation, I feel those wandering jewels mock me, tell me I don't belong in this wilderness.

Click, I tell them. Click. My camera speaks the only words we have in common. 

I tried to describe the sky to Hector as he bagged my groceries. I wanted to tell him that his skin looked like the San Augustin clouds - mysterious, dark, rippled, old. I bit my tongue. 

"Hector, I can't believe you've never visited the Very Large Array. It's incredible! Even if you don't like astronomy, it's worth the drive. The sky always looks like she wants to dump secrets, ya know?"

Hector shoved my jalapenos into the pink reusable bag I brought from home. He dumped a bag of rice on top of them, a dusty box of tofu, an ear of corn.

"Bye, Birdie. You need help outside?"

My Turkish friend, Ulak, grabbed the tote and grunted.

"No, thanks. We're walking. Good day."

I patted Hector on the shoulder and chased after my friend.

"Geeze, man. You didn't have to be so rude. What's wrong with letting him walk us outside? He likes to do it. He's my friend."

"Birdie. How can you let such an old man pack your food? He must be 80 years old. He should not be packaging groceries for young mothers. Where are his children?"

Ulak's long legs carried him across a vacant lot seeded with sweet grass, across Friedman Drive where the New Age acupuncturist presses needles into the taut skin of the pained. A starling squawked warning as we lifted angry foot onto compact dirt.

"Well, Ulak, he is old, but he likes to work. I don't think he has a family. Why not let him do what he likes to do? He's always so nice to me. Besides, I'm not a young mother. I have adult children now, and I am now officially middle-aged. Hector just wants to work. He probably needs the money. Heck, I know what that's like."

Ulak, didn't let his leather sneaker hover, didn't slow his long-legged pace. I struggled to match his stride, even though he carried the groceries, carried the heavy piece of twisted mesquite I found in the alley on our way to the store.

"You are not old. You are younger than me, and you look like a young mother. You are like that old man, you know. You don't let anyone take care of you. What is wrong with all you people in New Mexico? It must be something in the water. I think I need to visit more than once every six months. You need someone to watch over you. No camel route is long with good company. "

I stifled a giggle. Ulak let right foot lead, let his weight shift from one slim hip to another. His arms rippled with muscle, with years of hauling one bag of coffee beans after another. His salt-and-pepper hair flew behind him. So long, I thought. His hair got so long this year. We're all changing in ways we don't realize. He looks older, stronger, as if some artist continued carving him out of the mesquite he carries, carved a Turkish man on vacation in New Mexico, a man out of time, out of element, a man in love with an aging woman who can't love him back. I know I look my age, look forty, look forty-one, look as tired as the months behind me.

"Yeah, it's the water. Or the lack of water most years." I laughed. "But honestly, Ulak. Would you like me any other way?"

That night Ulak prepared coffee the way of his ancestors, let the ground beans boil with a thousand exotic spices. He poured sweetened milk into a tiny cup, topped it with the black pitch. My mesquite acquisition leaned against a stuffed bookcase, one end splayed with exposed root, the other pointed, firm, arching toward the sky.

"Birdie. Tomorrow we go to the Very Large Array. And then I must leave. You know I am returning to Turkey for a year to buy coffee and make new business arrangements. I wish you'd come with me. The boys would love it. My family is very wealthy and the schools are good. Please think about it."

I pictured myself in Turkey, in a land rolling more conservative, more modern, all in one breath, all in one confused breath, a woman with tattoos in a land she can't reveal them.

"Ulak, that's sweet, but you know I belong in New Mexico."

He didn't say another word until the turn at Socorro the next morning. The boys slept, still exhausted from a late night of Scrabble, from sneaking the rich coffee I saw Ulak hand them before bed. I kept my eyes on the road. Ulak cleared his throat.

"Birdie. Tell me again about the Plains of San Augustin."

He closed his eyes. The tires spun across a road tired of tourists, a road the Apache took when they left the reservation, a road covered in bird pitch and the skin of a thousand dead lizards. I let him rock to sleep. My cowboy hat pressed into my forehead, protected me against the rising sun. We passed the Bosque del Apache - a nature preserve filled with thousands of migrating cranes. An eagle squatted on a decaying cedar, his talons sharp and ready. He gave me the evil eye as my car sputtered past. I heard the flap of hungry cranes in the distance. Ulak snored. A strand of drool hung from the left side of his mouth. Ick.

I recited the story to myself as the men slept. The Plains of San Augustin. LLano de San Augustin. A flat place of deserted water, of mystery. A place said to contain the crashed Roswell spaceship. A place now studded with the Y-shaped formation of disks known as the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Each disk measures twenty-five meters in diameter. I said this out loud, though I knew Ulak and my boys couldn't hear. But together, they create a virtual disk twenty-two miles across. We can meet the heavens here in New Mexico. We can carve the sky.

My charges awoke as I pulled into the empty visitor's parking lot. A signed warned us to turn off our cell phones, as our life signs interfered with Science, with ancient alien discovery. I pressed the Off button of my phone first, then Ulak's, as he groaned aware, stretched his legs below the dash. My watch read 9:00 a.m., still a wee bit too early for a tour, too soon to enter the Visitor Center and watch the endless film loop spout azimuth and incline.

We can watch the clouds and just rest as the sun continues to rise, I thought.

"Whoa."

My older son, Louis, age 12, scanned the horizon. The radio antennas stretched forever, one white flowering bud after another, each rising out of earth impossibly green with wild grass.

"Mom, it's not the desert anymore!"

Martin, age 10, opened his door. A blast of spring heat met our chests, our faces, our legs. The land shone green, looked strange, like a Midwest meadow, like the lake bed it once was. I glanced up at the sky, at the clouds moving in swirled formation, the beginning of a scheduled storm. I smiled.

Ulak stepped into the heat. His t-shirt clung to his back with sweat.

"Birdie."

He couldn't say another word. I knew this moment, knew it myself the year prior. You step into a land not-quite-New-Mexican yet all-too-familiar here, an intersection of wire and metal and sage. I lost myself in the moment, in Ulak's first breath of science-gone-loco. I didn't see the little black 'n white fella tiptoe around our car.

Spraaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

"Holy shit!"

Ulak swore! My boys whipped around - as surprised at Ulak's impropriety as they were with the stench that began to fill the field.

"Yuck!"

A skunk hustled toward the array, his tail high and mighty, tiny butt wiggling back and forth with aromatic pride.

"Fuck."

"Ulak!" My boys admonished him in unison. They laughed, too, as Ulak stood near the car, his body pulsing with disgust.

"Um. Did you bring a change of clothes?"

I sounded hopeful, helpful, as if my words would manifest a new t-shirt, jeans, sandals, and ten gallons of tomato juice to wash away the odor.

"Birdie. I did not."

I scanned the horizon for something, anything, to kill the smell. A garden hose rested next to the visitor's center, wound like a snake in the center of a small desert flower garden. What could a mom of boys do but the obvious?

"Ulak, take off your clothes. I won't take no for an answer!"

My friend spun around, tried to ascertain whether any other tourists might see his naked butt, and figuring he was safe, stripped down to navy boxer briefs and his socks. His copious black back hair stuck up in tufts along his spine.

"Ulak, I'm gonna turn on the hose. Sorry, this is one of those times where you're just gonna have to suck it up, okay?"

I twisted the spigot. Frigid water arched from the hose to Ulak's back. He flinched, screamed. The boys exploded in laughed. I continued to hose him down while offering instructions.

"Okay, now try to rub down the smelliest parts with your hands."

Ulak flipped me the bird. I squirted him in the butt.

"Excuse me? Hello?!"

A middle-aged man in khakis and an orange polo shirt strode toward us. His eyes still held sleep, still spoke of late night science, of listening to the pitch and roll of electrons against computer, of a wife most likely tired of abstracts and peer review. My boys leaned against each other, their sides against the car, holding stomachs ready to burst from an excess of mirth.

"Oh, sorry! We're just borrowing your hose!"

I continued to water Ulak. He held his hands in front of his boxers, but the cold water prevented any embarrassing displays.

"What the hell are you doing? What's with Chewbacca?"

The scientist nodded toward Ulak, who now was shivering from both the cold water and abject fear. I stared at my friend for a moment, realized that he did look a bit like a hairy visitor from another world.

"Oh, he got sprayed by a skunk. You know. Does that happen a lot around here?"

The scientist slowly backed away from us. He kept his hands ready, as if I the array had called me down from some lonely planet. I rolled my eyes and bent low to twist the spigot off.

"Ulak, you're gonna have to leave your clothes here. Your boxers, too. Can you imagine what they might smell like over four hours on the road home?!"

The scientist ran.

Two hours later, Ulak snored once more. My boys played rock, paper, scissors in the backseat, grand prize the last handful of Hot Cheetos. And my trusty cowboy hat - my beautiful black malevolent hat that knew the clouds of two hundred New Mexican afternoons - sat on Ulak's lap, shading his you-know-what from the desert sun. His natural covering of man-fur protected everything else...

Just a few days ago Ulak sent two postcards from Turkey. One for me, one for Hector. The one he sent me features a blue-tiled mosque glinting in the summer sun and a jaunty Wish You Were Here scrawl. Hector's is more simple - a man as sunburnt as roasted chile and a bored-looking camel in front of a sand expanse, not a cloud in the sky.

Hector, it says. I was wrong about you. The skunk sprays the old and the middle-aged and the young. He sprays us all. May you enjoy all of Birdie's groceries.

********

I wanted to write about my Turkish friend, Ulak, as part of my Family Essentials column. Ulak isn't a blood relation, isn't a lover, a husband, a father. But his old world wisdom and humor have meant the universe to me and my young boys.

Who is the person in your family that is bound to you by friendship, not blood, not marriage?

********

Birdie Jaworski teaches 7th and 8th grade at an Expeditionary Learning elementary school in rural New Mexico. She's feeling her way around the new academic year, discovering new ways of sharing stories with her students. Her Gather: Family Essential column, Unfinished Nest appears twice a month, and sometimes... when you least expect it.... even more often.

You can read all of Birdie's Gather articles at birdiejaworski.gather.com.

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