"Can we save it?" Jon asked. "Why don't you call your saguaro man and ask him if we can cover the holes from the arms with something and somehow keep it alive."

"No way," Rudy said. "That's dead. You're just lucky it didn't fall over onto the house last night."

"It does lean toward the house a little," I added. "That man who cut down the other saguaro told me to look out for this one. If it dies, we'll have to pull it away from the house." I phoned over to Tohono Chul Park, but the man who cut down my other saguaro would not be in for two days. That might be too long. On closer examination of the saguaro, I could see the top bending to the south, rot forming along the burn lines, and ooze coming from the gash at its base. No, there was no way this saguaro would survive any explosion that blew its arms off. It was probably charred at its core. Poor thing. From deep in my heart, I silently saluted and thanked this beautiful creature for protecting us. My second guardian would have to come down. Still stunned and saddened, I got out a long tow rope and the A-frame ladder. Jon didn't want us to rest any extension ladder against the saguaro, because its balance was probably very tenuous from the loss of its arms. A push in the wrong direction might topple it. Climbing the rungs, I wrapped the rope around the trunk about eight feet up, then triangulated it out to two stakes, to the northwest and the southwest. We estimated that the top of the cactus wasn't more than five feet above the ridge of the roof -- about twenty-five feet in height. The distance from the saguaro to the straw bale house was only about ten feet, but the distance to the west, from the cactus's trunk to the trailer, was thirty seven feet, so we could safely let it fall to the west.

Jon didn't have his chain saw with him, so we left the cactus staked. We would take it down another day. I felt relatively assured that if it hadn't fallen on the house so far, it wasn't going to do that now. However, my nerves were frayed; I was in no mood to work. Since Jon needed to do some plumbing at a beautiful straw bale house in the foothills south of Tucson, I took the day off and went for a drive with him. He had built the house about five years ago and was anxious to show it to me. Not only was the house an elegant example of straw bale construction, but the artistic women who owned the house had boldly painted their walls with deep reds, purples, and blues. I was trying to decide whether to be that brave.

The top five feet of the saguaro had fallen off that day and now lay on the ground amid the broken arms. To my amazement, one of the researchers showed me photos of the last strike they had documented. The top had fallen off the cactus after five days (we were at four days now) and on the sixth day, the remaining stalk had dropped its skin in a matter of hours, like a molting snake. Left standing, was the graceful wooden skeleton of ribs. I surveyed the growing gash at the eastern base of the saguaro, which was still causing it to lean toward the straw bale house. Then, I double checked my stakes and lines that supported the massive, but dying trunk toward the west. Inside me, I really didn't want to cut down the saguaro and hoped this was a message that I didn't have to.

"Sure," I agreed. "I'll wait a few days and see what happens. I'd love to have a standing skeleton here, to remember the saguaro by."

"Great! And please don't touch any of the metal objects around the base of the saguaro, here," added Leo, the researcher who knew Jon. "Tomorrow we'd like to bring out another member of our group who can run a magnetic detector over the bits of rebar and nails to tell us exactly how the lightning traveled."

"Sure, that would be interesting."

"We think that the gash at the base of the saguaro was from the lightning traveling over to this large piece of rebar and then bouncing back to the saguaro. It may have saved your power lines."

"I hadn't thought of that. I won't touch a thing."

Rudy told me that my neighbors to the north had lost their power and their computer had been blown out when the lightning hit. It was amazing that this force had passed within thirty feet of our electric box and only a couple of breakers had been thrown. The little black box that Jon had put on our electric panel had definitely done its job. The skin didn't drop for two weeks. We worked in the shadow of this dying monument, watching ooze pour from its gashes as its skin became brittle and black. On the second Sunday after the strike, it dropped another section of its top and now was no threat to the house. The lightning experts, who by now were familiar faces at the job site, told me that my staking rope was keeping the skin from falling. Deciding that the house was no longer in danger, I removed the rope carefully from the cactus's sides. There was still something majestic and peaceful about this creature, though it was merely a stiff carcass by now. Within minutes, I heard the skin cracking and falling in pieces, and by the end of the day at least half of the skeleton was exposed. The wood shone radiantly in the setting sunlight.

This would be our Christmas tree each year, I decided. We would decorate it with lights and make it a monument of joy. Now, it held no danger of poking us with its thorns, nor of falling on the house. It would still be our guardian in its new form.