Tahquitz — the Green Fire

Look up at that great granite rock towering over Idyllwild — Tahquitz Rock — and let me tell you the story it's named for, because it is the oldest and the deepest story on this whole mountain. The Cahuilla have told it for longer than anyone can measure. Listen.

In the beginning, the Cahuilla say, the creator Mukat made the world and the people — and among the very first people, he made a special one, and gave him great power. His name was Tahquitz, and he was the first of the shamans, the first medicine man. And his power was a wonder: he could heal the sick, he could pull the illness right out of a suffering body and blow the evil away, he could read the weather and help feed the people. Mukat gave him this gift so that Tahquitz would use it to care for the Cahuilla, to be their guardian.

And for a time, he did. But somewhere along the way — the old people say no one truly knows why — something went wrong in Tahquitz's heart. Evil crept into him, they say, like a scorpion crawling in, and it soured all that great power. He grew proud, and greedy, and cruel. Instead of protecting the people, he began to prey on them; he used his magic to harm them, to steal their spirits away. He became a terror to the very people he was made to guard.

And the Cahuilla would not stand for it. They rose up against him, and they drove him out — they banished Tahquitz from among the living, and cast him up into these high mountains, into a secret cave deep beneath the peaks of the San Jacintos. And there, the old stories say, he remains to this very day. Up in that rock. Under this mountain you're driving through.

But he is not quiet. When a meteor streaks across the night sky over these mountains — a sudden ball of green fire, there and gone — the Cahuilla say that is Tahquitz, flying abroad from his cave. When thunder rolls and booms and echoes off these granite walls, that deep rumbling is the voice of Tahquitz, restless in the mountain. Elders would warn the young ones not to go alone into certain canyons up here, for Tahquitz was always hungry for a spirit to snatch.

So this beautiful pine-clad mountain, this pretty tourist town under the rock — it sits on top of one of the oldest and most powerful stories in California, a story about a great gift gone wrong, and a monster locked in the stone beneath your wheels. Watch the sky over these peaks some clear night. If you see a green fireball cross it — well. Now you know his name. Drive on, friend, and drive respectful. This is Tahquitz's mountain.