| Subject: on the road from Shiprock |
Author:
rustywire
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Date Posted: 17:55:56 03/19/01 Mon
Author Host/IP: 161.217.72.50
It was late one night and sitting in my Navajo Police Unit I wheeled out onto the blacktop, s string of black road heading South to the horizon. 90 miles South from there was home and I started to move that way at sunset. There was no moon as I went by the small communities I knew.
There was the turnoff to Red Valley to the Southwest, a turn on blacktop just South of Shiprock. The sage was blowing in the wind, and I could feel the sand rain on the sides of the white Chevy 4 door sedan. It could move that car, the white lines became a blur, as I drove passed Table Mesa, a long flat rock that sat by itself on the high desert plain. There is a spring buried beneath the rocks and you have to be from around there to find it. Past this place you drop into a long sloping valley where no one lives and lights are far and few between on this lonely blacktop. As night falls you look to the sides of the road where vagrant cows hang around the edge of the road looking for a blade of grass or the taste of road salt,
The worst things out there is the wayward horse heading along the same path you go, if your lights find the dark lines of the horse standing on the road, little will be left of it and your vehicle, so you look carefully for such things.
There is a place called Little Water a small outpost of a trading post, it is painted white and sits by the road by itself. It has long since closed and it is not too far from Tocito (it means Little Water). It is funny it has such a name in Navajo because they are seperated by a few miles, it lies to the Southwest The only way to know it is there is to see a few lights from three houses with electricity there. Tocito and Little Water mean the same thing, that there is very little water around the place.
Ten miles South are two monoliths of rock, piercing the sky, on each side of the road, they are Bennet and Ford Peaks, named after two cavalry officers who rode out this way a hundred years ago, who chased Navajos and their sheep. They wrote in their journals, they could see the dust clouds of the sheep as they moved, but could not catch these people who bundled up their families and headed up the mountain passes of the Chuska mountains to the West to safety.
Getting past this place is Burnham junction one road heading East to the store and what remains of the old boarding school, just a shell of rock walls now. 16 miles to the West of this place is Toadlena, there is a small store, a school, a few churches and homes sitting in a cleft of a valley against th emountain. I can see three lights, just small spects against the black background of the Moutain. I know that where that light glows my mother and father are home, resting and having supper. Tonight I head past that place in my unit and glance that way occasionally as I drive past.
The miles add up as I pass Newcomb, and go on to Sheep Springs. I can go over the mountain, but decide to go South through Chinle. As I head past the water troughs of Sheep Springs, I pull off the road and drive to the windmill. It clanks as it tries to spin, and it makes a lot of noise in the wind. I see the water barrell and stick my head into it, washing the sand from my face and turn my back to the wind and wipe my face as I head back to the car and the road still going South.
As I near the crest of a hill, I see an old couple standing by the road. They have three old fashioned trunks, metal one with stripes. They look like they are wanting a ride.
As I drive up to them the old man is waving his arms and smiles as I pull up. I open the door and they say to me, Haago Shiyazh? (Where are you going my son?)
Hogango, TseHosTso. Haago, ShiChe? (I am going home, to Window Rock, Where are you going Grandfather?)
Na'nizhoozhi' (the place where they wear long robes all the way to the ground-named after the Catholic Franciscan priests who live there, who wear long robes that drag on the ground-Gallup, New Mexico)
I tell them to get in, and get out to open the trunk. The old man tells me the suitecases are heavy, but I don't believe him, and try to pick it up and throw it in the back. It won't budge, it is like lead. I pull up again and he tells me it is heavy. I drag it to the trunk and slowly put it in. The old lady stands by the back door, looking at the thick plastic glass cage where bad men sit, wondering if she should get in. She decides to wait.
I load the three cases with some effort and old man sits up front, and his wife sits in the back. He tells her, you have to stay in there, while I run around Gallup.
We laugh and I look at him and see the laugh lines of his face, he looks like he laughs alot from the look of him. I ask him about his suitecases, why they are so heavy.
He said, we had to pack real good, cuz we're going away a long time, to where they have no fresh food. I think they must be migrant workers, picking fruit, maybe in Florida.
He says no, was we pass Naschitti and head to Buffalo Springs. As we pass the El Paso Natural Gas Compressor station. He says he works there. Oh, I say, he tells me they moved him to another place. I wonder where.
He says they are near the big water. I think, he must be in Texas along the coast maybe. I ask him how he likes it and his wife says, they don't have iceboxes there, for fresh meat, the people there just eat spoiied meat. I wonder there this place is.
They tell me about the dry land, drier than this place they say. I think must be pretty dry in Texas, but they say it is worse.
Where? I say.
He looks at me ans says Algeria.
What state is that in?
He looks at me and says, Africa, near the Sahara Desert. I look at him and he says, we came home to visit and now we have to go back. The heavy trunk has food in it, canned food, because there is no iceboxes over there. I listened as this old Navajo couple recounted tales of seeing sand so fine it can go through glass windows somehow, of lonely palm trees, and that they can not talk about religion or practice any kind of faith. They said those peopole don't like Americans over there, but they don't mind us Navajos, he said. His wife laughed because she learned to make
their kind of bread, and learned to wrap herself up like the women there do, head to toe in cloth. She showed her family back in Sheep springs and sayed she was hiding herself to fool some young man who likes to chase women at the trading post.
I marvelled at them having the willingness to so far to work. He told me he was retiring the next year and they would be living on the flat between Sheep Springs and Naschitti. They said they were already missing home, but still had a long ways to go.
I dropped them off at the bus station and last saw them heading across the street to go inside the White Cafe for some coffee and a little conversation with the Navajos gathered there. I wondered about them as I drove on to Window Rock and home, having passed two old folks who
were international travellers and had gone to some
places I will never see....so it was so long ago on a long stretch of blacktop one night when the wind blew on the Navajo rez....
rustywire
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