Weekend Journey across the Navajo Nation (Part 1--Page to Kayenta)

It’s been over a week now; the sun is low; the sky is faded; I’m tired.  The post I so looked forward to writing remains undone, scattered notes gathered as we made our way across the Navajo Nation for Marci’s Grandma’s second 90^th Birthday.  The weekend was just what I’d hoped for, but as is so often the case when writing travelogues, no matter how brief, by the time the trip is over, you’re too tired to record what went down, and then the next morning real life sets in and before you know it, the journey is seeping into your unconscious like desert rain sponged up by parched ground.  Sure, it will spring up again, triggered by another thought or memory, but what good does that do now.  For now that memory is dry, cracked, fragmented, curling up, and flaking away into the hot wind.

Recovery takes work, energy I’m not sure I have right now.  I think I’ll post a few of the better notes that I do have, a few photos, perhaps fill in some holes and call it good.  It won’t be the work I envisioned, but it won’t be totally gone either.

Notes exist when either Rio or Marci was driving.  They don’t exist from when I was driving for obvious reasons.  But photos snapped through dirty windows help.  As we only had the weekend and 956 miles to cover, there simply wasn’t time to stop and compose, either the photographs or the writing.  It truly is a journal written on the run.  

Since we left Dry Creek as the sun was setting Friday night, I begin the record the next morning as we were leaving Page, Arizona. 

Saturday, February 8, 2014
9:40 a.m.

Page:  Gateway to the Navajo Nation.   Antelope Canyon, a narrow, slight-undulating narrow groove gouged in the gently slope slanting down toward Glenn Canyon and Lake Powell.  From the highway, it is almost imperceptible, not much wider that a narrow wash or sidewalk.  But inside, it is a cathedral of light, among one of the most photographed spots on planet earth.

I know this road as well as the back of hand, but just like I don’t know the names of the countless creases in my aging hand, I can name very few of the folds, creases and scars of this weathered land.  This is because I’m Bilagáana, and as much as this space pulls my heart-strings, it belongs the Diné, who do know the name and history of every dimple and pock mark, many having tó, or water, as part of the name, water being so essential in this high desert of sand, monolithic stone and juniper.

One of the many stone monuments for which I don't know the name, U.S. 98.

10:19 a.m.

Grasslands are more a part of red-rock country then you would think.  High-open spaces of gold dotted with scattered Juniper, and with just a little elevation climb, the juniper thicken to dark clumpy forest.  Pinion join.  Then a drop—the land falls away in forested folds towards the knees of Black Mesa, a long line of clouds trailing along the top.  Crossroads Trading Post:  Saturday is flea market day, the heart and soul of the Navajo economy.   Too bad we don’t have the time to stop for mutton stew.  Damn, I haven’t had mutton in such a long time.  I can’t wait to eat at the birthday gathering.

10:33 a.m.

I love how often stone is at the surface here: not rock piles, but massive whale-backs of bedrock.  Sometimes they rise out of horizon like enormous sea-monsters arching their back, but just as often they remain mostly submerged in the sand, a crest of rippled rock forming a broad, low hill.  I’ve always wanted to build a Villa Savoy-like home in such a place, a white ship floating above red, rippled stone on concrete pilasters.  There’d be no grass to water, just cool, slick undulating stone to walk across in bare feet in the morning—a beach house on a frozen beach.  Wonderful!

A whale-back hill near Tsegi Canyon, U.S. 160

11:00 a.m.

Between Tsegi Canyon and Kayenta.  Rock is the drumbeat of this land: monoclines, anticlines, volcanic plugs, monuments, buttes, swells. 

Cliff faces headed east of Anasazi Inn and Tsegi Canyon on U.S. 160

Photographs and After-the-Fact Narrative

It was probably 11:30 when we pulled into the Chevron in Kayenta.  Kayenta is the cleanest, most prosperous of the large Navajo towns (Kayenta, Tuba City, Chinle, Shiprock and Windowrock).  I don't know if that is because it is the gateway to Monument Valley (and therefore receives more tourists dollars) or because it has a unique, more autonomous government than the other large towns, or most likely, a combination of both.

That may take some explanation.  Politically speaking, as well as traditionally speaking, there are no towns on the Navajo Reservation.  Unlike the Hopi, Navajo have never gathered in towns.  In the past, there were no villages.  Instead, there were clusters of extended family units.

Most of the reservation is still that way.  Towns are few and far in between, but there are lots of clusters of homes on family lease sites in between.  It's not near as rural as it seems.  There just aren't many towns.

And again, I use the term "town" loosely.  Politically, with the exception of Kayenta, there are no towns.  Even Windowrock, the capital, is not a town.  Instead, power is held at the chapter level (the equivalent of a county government), and what appear to be towns are no more than incidental proximity of families, which leads to the need for schools, hospitals, which then fuels a local economy, such as gas stations and grocery stores.

However, these communities have no autonomy from the chapter and have no power to self-regulate, such as establishing taxes, raising bonds, deciding zoning or promoting tourism.

Kayenta is the exception.  With a population of 5,189, it has the only municipal-style government within the Navajo Nation and has a 5-member elected town board which hires a township manager (Wikipedia).  It officially became a township April 30, 1997 for a five-year-trial after 17 years of planing.  In the 2003, Kayenta obtained official permanent status as a municipality (Kayenta Township).

From appearances, it seems to have worked.  Though still a long, spread out strip along the highway, like the other large Navajo Communities, it is cleaner and looks more prosperous, even on the backstreets.  Of course, as Monument Valley is only twenty-five miles away and is one of the most photographed spots on earth, it would have a more robust economy with or without township status. Still, Chinle has Canyon de Chelly National Park and is not near as vibrant as Kayenta so I tend to think local control has a positive impact.

Church Rock, a volcanic plug about 5 1/2 miles east of Kayenta on U.S. 160
is one of the many rock monuments in the Kayenta area.

Two Valentine Poems, One Dead Cow

That cliche', "absence makes the heart grow fonder," unfortunately is at least partially true.  Not that love isn't always present, but in the comfort of closeness, it's easy to take relationships for granted. Most of my meaningful love poems have been written in the absence of Marci.  The two below are no exception.  The first was written during a writing "get-away" trip to visit my brother in Dallas.  I had looked forward to it for months, but being away from Marci and the boys was no easy thing, even with the company of my brother, who has always been my mentor in the arts.  The second was written the year I decided to take a job as an educational consultant that required me to travel twelve days and nights a month.  I loved the work, the people, but as I quickly learned, no career is rewarding enough to warrant that much time away from home.  My family handled it fine, but I was falling apart.  

Without You

Here at the Dallas Zoo,
on this great writing get-away,
that anticipated peace
I longed for

     --a week without our boys
     and their noise--

has bloomed black,
cold,
rubbery,

a blossom of slick
oyster-like flesh
blocking the river-way
like a dead cow.

Sadness is deep,
moist,
rank,
rooted,
breaking apart the rock
that edges
the waterways
of me,
steve,

without you,

a little lost
boy.

© Steve Brown, 2004

Away

Full moon barefaced
in the brick night.
It's only October, Love,
and January is here.

CAFE austere white,
4:30 AM at the Anasazi Inn.
28 degrees, Love,
as I drive by.

Whaleback rock-thrust
hulking beyond.
It's jagged, Love
living this road.

Star blades.

Even the blue flames
of dawn
won't warm this heart

blown by business
from the tree--

a pit too cold
to rot.

© Steve Brown, 2008

Tupperware, Moss & Ice: A Bilagaana's Views on Life from the Navajo Nation (and "Poem for Jody" by Simon J. Ortiz)

This is the introduction to a collection of poems, Tupperware, Moss & Ice, that I compiled in 2004, my fourth year living on the Navajo Reservation.  We continued to live there another four years afterwards.  Dry Creek and the Navajo Nation are the two places in my life that have felt like home. Everywhere else, no matter how nice the place, no matter how good the people, always just felt like a residence.  Everyone has one or two spiritual homes, places they know they can just slide into and be. Dry Creek and the Navajo Nation are mine.

Tupperware, Moss & Ice

Traditional Hogan, Navajo Village Herritage Center, Page, Arizona

Thursday, December 9, 2004.  It's a little after 5:30, and I'm headed up a two-lane paved road through Lukachukai, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation.  On the left is Totsoh Trading Post, a wonderful old concrete block building, and one of the last of its kind, a real trading post, selling canned goods, great sacks of Bluebird flour, a few choices of vegetables and meat, as well as lanterns, shovels, metal buckets, Pendelton blankets, and caste-iron frying pans.  It's owned by the grandparents of one of my students, Danielle. Two of their other granddaughters were also my students in the past.  There is a wood sign outside, "Pinions Sold Here," and a great big lighted spruce tree in front of the adjoining house.  It's near-dark, and the big, old-fashioned gum-drop Christmas lights delight me.  The Lukachukai Mountains are not much more than a gray outline against the darkening sky.  Up ahead is the green sign pointing to Lukachukai Community School. I pass a trailer of another student, Ailene, and turn onto another paved road.

Up ahead is the school, part of what I call the Tupperware world.  I've never been in it, but I work in a school much like it, and I know that world well.  It's relatively connected to the outside world in that it has electricity, telephones, Internet, plumbing, and is part of some larger bureaucracy.  It is accountable to No Child Left Behind.  Even though it has Navajo Culture and Navajo Language classes, it is less connected to the local community, and perhaps it is even somewhat sealed off from it.   While in that lighted, heated building, it is very easy to forget that many of the students had to heat water over an open fire when they bathed for school. They dress like kids in California, listen to the same music as kids in California, and to some extent, even talk like kids in California when they are at school.  It is part of their world.  But, it is not all of it.  The school is a giant Tupperware jar thrown in the brush--a plastic , insulated world warmed and cooled by electricity, surrounded by teacher housing, which is also insulated from the Reseravation, surrounded by fences, each home possessing an indoor toilet and shower.  In short, like all schools and hospitals on the Reservation, it is a world within a world, much like a foreign embassy.  Whether it's a good or evil world I'll leave to the judgement of the Navajos.

However, I do know that I enjoy teaching in such a world.  Sometimes, I even enjoy looking through state standards, designing rubrics, and grading papers.  More often I enjoy the students, and if truth be told, I love them--even the ones who won't do the work I want done.  I don't know if I love them because they're Navajo, or just because they're children, or maybe just because I turn a few of them into my little writing disciples.  The Rez is the only place I've ever taught, and so I don't have much of a world view of my profession.  I have no itch to leave, and so I probably never will expand my view.  These are the children I know and love to teach.

Just before the school, I take a left and enter the Navajo world.  It has been snowing for a week, has been very cold, and the dirt roads have been packed with snow pressed to a smooth polish.  But today it warmed. Lukachukai is considered lucky, for its soil is more sand than clay.  Even so, the slushy snow and mud oozes beneath my van's tires as I slip in and out of the grooves.  It is hard to describe these roads to an outsider.  I grew up in rural Utah, but it was no training ground for Rez roads.  At home, the farm roads are gravel, which compared to these, is like driving down the Interstate.  I fish-tail around a corner, hit an especially deep pot of ice, water and mud, which splashes up over my windshield, before I dip down through a wash. I admire the rutted, sandy, deep-grooved wash banks the best I can through my mud-smeared windshield. Then, it's up the other side, where this morning, one of the buses came uncomfortably close to me as it literally slid on by.

I head on up towards the red cliff-faces of the Lukachukai Mountains that I read about in a poem by Simon J. Ortiz long before I ever moved here.  I was reading in a bar in El Paso, feeling very lost and alone, when I came across "Poem for Jody."  I was in a bad situation in my life, removed from home and family, and it so simply and gracefully stated a love for place that afterwards I knew I was going home to rural Utah.  In trying to make it as a writer, I had become something I'm not--urban, cynical, and worst of all, excruciatingly shy. To this day, I don't know what happened; I knew some great people in Dallas and El Paso.  Still, somewhere along the way, I'd lost myself.  I had become a shell.  Then, when I returned to my roots, slowly I found me. Exposed soil and sage are deep within me.  Bare trees and red skies are who I am.  Frozen puddles and rutted road--I don't know why, but I can't breath without them.

I honestly believe my greatest worldly accomplishment is that I have now lived without seeing smog for six years except on those rare trips to Phoenix and the outside world.  I know that fact in no way changes the reality of the world--I drive 40 miles a day just to take Everest to and from the babysitter, and I contribute more than my fare share to global warming--but if life is meant to be walked in beauty, I have journeyed to the right place.  The moon is up, tufts of snow glow along the tops of the cliff-rock, and even with moonlight, the stars shine unnervingly sharp.

I turn into the babysitter's.  There's two homes here.  One belongs to Amos, one of our school janitors.  He also works in the kitchen.  He works sixteen hour days and always seems to be happy.  I often wonder how that is possible, but that's at school, in the Tupperware world, where everything is distorted by what is plastic and opaque.  As I get out into the cold evening and walk between his cottonwood and Russian olive trees to the small house with the smoke swirling out of the stack, I know why he's happy.  This place.  It's the ice, the clarity, stars sharp and bright, earth wet and sound.  You can smell it, feel it, reality.  It's what most of the world is lacking--shit on the boots, mice in the car, ice-pelted sagebrush--a smell heavenly strong.  There is a rhythm to bringing in the fire wood that can't be duplicated by running to the mall again.

Next to him, in a wonderful trailer with with a full porch that's been added to it, lives his son, Bryan and his wife, who both work at our school.  He's a teacher and his wife is our ELL clerk.  Amos also raises a grandson and granddaughter, Richelle and Leroy, who are my students.   This is the moss--family, comfort, the cozy known.  I used to make fun of it and about voided my soul in trying to separate myself from my own version of it.  But we all need it--clan, family, roots, tradition.  Our society is severely sick from the lack of it.

I knock.  The door swings open, and out rushes my son, Everest.  He jumps into my arms as I go inside to fetch his lunch bag and talk briefly about work Richelle and Leroy need to turn into me.  And somehow it all matters--all of it.  I walk back on the wet, sandstone walkway, out the gate, through the mud and then take one last whiff of the fireplace smoke before getting in the car and driving back to my school compound about twenty minutes away.

On the way back Everest and I don't say much.  He's too busy looking at the stars.  I'm too busy looking at the stars.  I'm also thinking about how I'll explain the title of this collection--Tupperware, Moss and Ice--without voiding its meaning.

The Tupperware World is the plastic world we operate in most of the time.  It is the schedules, duties, work and pay checks.  I'm not sure if it's good or evil.  I know of very few people, including myself, who are brave enough to live totally outside of it.  When I tried, I was broke, hungry and miserable.  Now that I acknowledge it, I sometimes even get along quite well with it.  However, it has very little to do with life, simply because it does nothing to address those nagging questions everyone has whether or not they are brave enough to voice them--Why are we here? and What do we live for?  I feel great sorrow for those too afraid to search for those answers, those who wrap themselves in the material world, believing that it is all there is.

The Moss World is our family, both extended and nuclear.  It is the noise, the bickering, the hugs, the fighting.  It is not being able to stand being around each other.  But having no family around me for a long time, I can tell you, I for one, would die without it.  There was one particular night I walked down Mesa Street in El Paso swearing at every passing car, "I want to die--and you don't give a shit!" and of course they didn't.  They couldn't  The city makes people into strangers by placing them out of context.  In a small town you know an eccentric man's history, even a crazy man's history, and so you understand him.  Ripped from context, he seems scary and dangerous.  Living without family is like sleeping exposed on a glacier on an all-too clear, bitter-cold night, when every star is sharp and the surrounding steep granite cliffs point to the void with savage exactitude.  Most of us are not made to sleep well under such conditions.  We need moss, ferns, maple, pine, the sounds of other critters, some reassurance we are not all alone in this vast universe.  I am well because I found family again--both the one that raised me and the one I am now raising.

However, I also believe in facing that void--the ice, the clarity--feeling naked before a creation so great and incomprehensible that it makes us both stare in awe at its vastness and head for fig-leaf covers and cushy comforts, where we both want to know and not know the answers to life's questions simultaneously. Personally, I believe God can only be found there, in that place of not-knowing, glimpsed often enough to keep you believing, but hidden often enough to keep you searching.

And so, my hope is that these poems point a finger towards the ice without leaving behind the Tupperware and moss.  May we always be searching and never be found.

For my family

For my Creator

Thanks to both for the second chance at living.

© Steve Brown, 2004

Afterwards:

Simon J. Ortiz indirectly brought me to the Navajo Nation by instilling in me the desire to return to my own heritage, rural Utah, where I met Marci, a Navajo.  I don't think it's by accident that I came across "Poem for Jody" at the lowest point of my life or that we ended up living in sight of the Lukachukai Mountains.  And there is no more fitting way to update this post than with some lines from "Poem for Jody":

I was telling you

about the red cliff faces

of the Lukachukai mountains--

how it is 

going away--

...

and you don't ever want to go

but do anyway.