Cuizalla

    The west wind blew strong and hard, sweeping up dust and sand as it made its way east. I loved to watch the dust skitter across the ground. Each speck running and dancing and hoping for flight. There were patterns there, I thought, secret patterns in the graceful curves and snaking movements of the sand. I would sit for hours beneath the hot, sunny sky watching those patterns.
    There wasn’t anything else to do then. Not during that summer when the sun and the wind blew the earth and the people back to the east.
    ‘The Cuizalla is no place for foreigners’ my father said imperiously. ‘This is not some eastern valley that can be shaped by people. It is a land with its own mind and its own heart. You are either born to the land or not. No time will change that fact.’
    The words were spoken often then, that summer.
    The Cuizalla prairie they had called it when the first of the farmers staked claims on the western lands. Population drove them there, overcrowding, small farms, all of it had spurred the first few to travel into the west, into the unknown lands.
    Beneath large blue skies they found flat land filled with grasses and wildflowers. Small streams worked their way along faint slopes in the ground.
    The first of the settlers were surprised, and delighted with their surprise. They called for their relatives to join them in this vast land that held so much potential. It was a land of plenty. Only a few years later farmers, who worked hard and honestly, were able to harvest great crops. The wealth that this brought in started the small villages that grew into larger towns. Estate homes were built on large tracks of land owned by one or another family.
    ‘But did they take any notice of the people that lived here before they intruded with their large homes and excessive habits? No!’
    My father added his commentary to the history I was supposed to learn for school. He has always claimed ancestry with the nomads of Cuizalla. But I was not so sure.
    My teacher had explained to us that there were some nomadic tribes living on the Cuizalla prairie when the first settlers came. They were a skittish and backward people, small in number and primitive in their lives. He continued to explain that the few people the settlers did meet they tried to help, to show them how to be civilized. It worked, apparently, for some of the nomads married and became like the farmers on the lands.
    But I have heard other stories. Ones of violence, blood shed and war. There are whispers that the nomads were angry at the foreigners invading their lands and attacked them. My friends brother, he told a good one about cannibalism and murder. It was very exciting to hear, but I don’t think it was very likely.
    Some stories have the Cuizalla tribes fighting each other and the settlers getting involved, either by accident or on purpose. It doesn’t seem to matter, the end of the stories is always the same. The Cuizalla are either driven further west, or incorporated into the new blossoming society, or they are killed.
    My father had his opinions too. He says they were driven from their lands by the settlers. That soldiers and paid fighters were called in from the east to clear the lands of their true people, the Cuizalla.
    ‘Slaughtered like cattle or driven further west and north. Robbed of their true home.’
    ‘But if they were nomads, why was it a problem for them to wander further west and north? There was not many of them anyway,’ I asked one time when I was still interested in such things.
    ‘It is not as easy as that. Nomads depend on the land as much as farmers, but instead of settling in one place and remaking the land to suit them, they wander long distances to find where the things they need grow naturally.’
    I must have looked unconvinced, because my father tried to continue.
    ‘It is like, like ... I don’t know, but it was better that way. Less harm to the land. More peaceful. You will understand when you are older.’
    I still don’t understand. I don’t see how being a wanderer would have prevented the droughts that had gotten worse each year. Or made the rains stronger. I can’t see how wandering would help you survive, when there is nothing left to find.
    Despite the years of prosperity and the generations that grew to depend on the land for their lives. The gods or the lands or fate itself had a change of heart.
    I know when I was little I used to run through wide open fields, green and full of colourful flowers. I know that, but I can’t remember it. I can’t remember the green that coloured the land.
    What I remember was yellow and brown, burnt grasses and dusty fields. The wind sweeping up the soil and the people and taking them away.
    It started with one long hot summer.  The crops were not so good and more water was needed. Wells were dug deeper to save as many crops that could be.
    No one worried at first, it was just one bad year. But the next year was not any better. The spring rains were short, the wells not deep enough to irrigate the fields through the entire summer. The sun was hot and forceful. 
    Was there a year or two of relief? Or did it just continue getting worse. I don’t remember, I was still young and did not pay attention to the concerns of adults.
    The adults were concerned. They talked in tight voices and looked worriedly at the deep azure sky. Frowning at the sun that drew the waters from the land and wondering how they would survive. The farmers were descended from resilient settlers and they would not give up easily.
    But the Cuizalla had a mind of its own.
    The wells dried up. The land was bleached of all colour. The crisp, linear horizon became blurred with heat.
    My father watched the failing crops and the failing people with a knowing sort of calm.
    ‘This land raises its own. It does not look kindly on the foreigners,’ he laughed shortly. ‘They called it the Cuizalla Prairie when they came. Right? Didn’t they teach you that in school? Well, they were wrong. It is not a prairie but a desert. Cuizalla means desert grass. It is not something that can be farmed and controlled. Ha! Well it serves them right.’
    ‘But what of us?’ I asked confused. Aren’t we farmers too? Didn’t we also depend on the land to survive.
    ‘We are Cuizallian. The land will take care of us.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘Wait and you will see. The land will talk to us, teach us what we need to know. Like it did for the first of our people that were born to this land.’
    It was always difficult getting any information from my father.
    They started leaving last summer. Just a few at first. The rest held to hope and little else. My father watched them go, sitting on our front porch, staring across to the distant horizon.
    My best friends left with their families. Swept back east with the wind. Carried along with the dust and the sand. While the eye of the sun watched their retreat, never blinking.
    I waited. I waited for my father to do something. Or for the wind to pick me up and take me with it. I waited to be claimed.
    My father waited too. Silently, continuously he waited. His gaze watching the shimmering, insubstantial horizon, waiting.
    One day the sun and the wind took him. I don’t know where, but I know it wasn’t to the east. Perhaps he was claimed by distant Cuizallian ancestors and taken further west.
    I was alone, still waiting. Sweat trickled down my back, while the wind, hot as the sun above, coated me with dust. There beneath the bleached blue sky, I watched the flow of sand. Tiny rivers in a barren landscape, where colour had been abandoned.       
    I watched the horizon, the wavering space between the burnt earth and the blue, blue sky. Sometimes I thought I saw things coming out of that fluid space; strange dark shapes that moved restlessly. Perhaps it was all my imagination.
    It felt like forever, the waiting. Beneath the unblinking sun that darkened my skin to a deep nut brown. Sun, wind, and dust. I don’t remember night; moon or stars, just the day and the heat and the movement of the wind. 
    I don’t remember them coming either. I don’t remember the journey. And I only barely remember waking up confused, with friendly and distantly familiar faces hovering above. I remember their tears and their worried looks. And later I remember their smiles as I adjusted to my new adopted family in the east.