Authors: Beth Gutcheon
R
ue and Henry flew to Phoenix in a normal plane and then to Flagstaff in a little prop plane. Small planes frightened Rue, but Henry seemed in a mood to welcome danger. Even in early March the heat in Phoenix was suffocating as they left the plane. But it was piercingly clear and crisp in Flag, and the blue of the sky that formed a dome above them as they emerged onto the runway was intense.
The chill and the tall pines that rimmed the runway reminded Rue oddly of Maine, though the land here was flat and the pines a different kind from those at home. They went inside and Rue stood around like an invalid, looking at historical displays of Flagstaff’s early days, while Henry rented a car for the drive to Canyon de Chelly.
As always when they traveled, Rue was in charge of the guidebook, but Henry had done enough research to know that the Navajo reservation was dry. Before heading north and east, he found a gas station cum convenience store that also stocked a surprising variety of wine and liquor.
“They even had equipment for brewing beer,” he reported as he climbed into the driver’s seat and gave a bottle of scotch to Rue. She put it into her bag of books. Rue couldn’t leave home without a supply of reading matter to last a month, as if she were constantly worried that she would be marooned somewhere and run out of things to read before she starved to death.
When they traveled, Georgia was in charge of maps.
Now Henry glanced at the photocopied road map the car rental woman had given him and then laid it on the seat between them, where it remained, as if neither of them knew what to do with it.
The view from the windows mostly stunned them into silence as the road climbed toward the Four Corners, the junction of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. From time to time Rue would read from the guidebook.
268 / Beth Gutcheon
“Chelly, pronounced
shay
, is a corruption of the Navajo word
Tseyi
(she struggled with that), meaning something like ‘among the rocks,’ or ‘canyon.’ Tsegi Canyon is named from the same word.
Chelly (she pronounced it phonetically) is the Anglo version, Tsegi the Spanish. If it’s Anglo why the ‘de’? It should be French.”
Henry grunted. Outside the car the world was like a table, jackrab-bit country of sage and tumbleweed. In the distance they could see startling buttes rising red from the earth.
“The Hopi reservation is within the Navajo, and there has long been a territorial struggle between the two tribes. Most people believe that the Hopi are the descendents of the Anasazi people who lived in the Canyons from the time of Christ to thirteen hundred. The Navajo arrived in the Canyons about seventeen fifty; ‘Anasazi’ is Navajo for ‘Ancient Ones.’ Navajo and Hopi disputed rights to the territory for many decades, until the matter was finally bloodlessly settled by a pushing contest.”
Henry smiled and nodded at that. “Send these people to Washing-ton,” said Henry.
“To Bosnia,” said Rue.
They arrived at The Lodge, where they planned to spend several days, just at sunset. Navajo women ran the hotel desk; they were given their room key and elaborately told where to find the ice machines. Although the guidebook said they were at the canyon, they had no sense of being near anything but endless flat desert.
They had a brief but intense discussion over breakfast the next morning over whether to take a jeep tour into the canyon, or go on horseback.
“Or hike,” said Rue. “We have plenty of time.”
“You’ll love riding,” Henry said. What he meant was, he would love riding. He had grown up with horses, albeit eastern fox-hunters, not quarter horses with western saddles. Rue had spent enough time riding to be able to mount without falling off the other side, but that was about the extent of her expertise. “We’ll be able to go places we couldn’t on foot, or in a jeep,” Henry added.
“You haven’t ridden for more than two hours in thirty years,”
Rue pointed out. She wasn’t sure that she had ridden for more than two hours ever.
Saying Grace / 269
“It’s like riding a bicycle,” said Henry. He called the horse rental place, and arranged for a tour and a guide. Rue went to the cafeteria to order three box lunches.
A young Navajo named Earl provided a saddlebag for the lunches and for a bottle of water Rue had brought. Three horses, tacked, were loaded into a trailer, and Rue and Henry were invited to board the four-door pickup that pulled it. They were driven miles across flat scrub land, still with no sense that a canyon was near. Rue guessed they had gone twelve or fifteen miles. If they were riding all the way back to where they started, this was not going to be a cakewalk.
Once the horses were decanted from the trailer and the driver disappeared down the road, the three mounted and Earl led off at a walk across tableland of sage and pinyon. The pine nuts were gathered in the fall, he said. “Navajo people live on top during the winter, while the children are in school. In the summer, they live in the canyon, farming. It’s much cooler on the bottom,” he said. “Fifteen, twenty degrees.” Conversation was as difficult as always on horseback, when riding single file. At first Rue tried to induce her horse to walk beside Henry’s, but both animals had an aversion to that arrangement. So they ambled in silence one by one until the moment they found themselves at the lip of the canyon, and saw the earth split open to reveal a wide crevasse hundreds of feet deep, with walls of sheer red and buff sandstone, a sight of heart-stopping beauty.
From that moment, the day took on a trancelike quality. The air was intensely clear, and the sky a wild light blue. Hawks circled above them, riding the air currents. The canyon floor was beginning to show the light lime green of new grass, and the pine trees were towering, black green. The quality of light, the arrangement of colors, exotic but natural, provided such a rush of sensory marvels that Rue could feel it flooding her, as if the brain were fully employed in trying to record and store the experience, and any such taxing of the system as linear thought would overload it and cause a short or an electrical fire.
Earl’s last words, as they started over the lip onto the switchback trail, which descended to the canyon floor at a cant of about eighty degrees, were, “You can walk and lead your horse if you get nervous.”
270 / Beth Gutcheon
What makes him think I
could
walk this without plunging to my death, Rue wondered, and thought further that this likelihood explained the presence of the hawks. She decided to trust the horse and try not to consider that he seemed to be about thirty years old, which if true meant her life depended on the vision and reflexes of a creature the equivalent of her father’s age. When the loose stones rolled under her horse’s hooves, she stared across at the canyon wall opposite, and thought about what it could be like to live here, and run free, and be lithe and strong enough to climb to the protecting shelves carved into the walls of the canyon. The horse pottered and slid steadily downward, following Earl and Henry, swaying like a camel.
Halfway down, she pointed to a ledge across the canyon in the far sandstone wall.
“It looks as if someone has built a brush barrier partway across that ledge,” she said to Earl.
It was a question. He said, “Anasazi people and Navajo people used to bury their dead in open air. Now we have three cemeteries on top.”
Open air. Georgia. She couldn’t look at Henry.
“If a Navajo wanted to be buried like that now, in the canyon, would it be allowed?”
“Oh, yes,” said Earl. He started his horse and they followed.
Rue was liking the demand on previously unused muscles she was feeling so far. She could feel things tense and stretch in her thighs and abdomen. I can take this, she thought.
“Do you think there are still relics from the Anasazi to be found?”
Henry asked. Earl turned to answer, knowing otherwise his words would be lost to them, and Rue felt the same fear for him she would if he were driving a car and let it choose its own way as he turned to talk to passengers in the back seat.
“I know there are,” said Earl. “My brother-cousins were climbing up to a cliff, and they found a big ceremonial bowl.” Rue felt envious.
She knew that no one not of the Navajo Nation could go anywhere in this canyon without a guide, and that once here they might not disturb anything. Not take a pebble, or cut a switch with which to keep the horse awake. She knew too that it was scorned Saying Grace / 271
among The People to sell to outsiders any treasures that had meaning for the Nation. But what were the rules of ownership?
“What happens to such a thing?” she asked. “Do your brother-cousins leave it where they found it?”
“Oh no,” said Earl. “We have it at the house.”
Rue’s mind floated from fantasy to memory, and hour after hour she felt that what she was doing most was storing the colors. Once on the canyon floor, they rode along the wash and began to encounter log hogans. These were small, always round, with tiny windows and the door facing east. Round for ceremonial purposes, dark for people who live almost all the time outdoors. Around the hogans was often a good deal of garbage; the owners were not effete tree-huggers.
“How do the people who farm here in the summer get their belongings in and out?” Henry asked.
“They used to put it in a blanket and tie it on the horse; came in the same way we did. Now everyone has four wheel.” So far they had not seen another human, and the whole morning it was possible to imagine a time when there were no other humans here. Certainly they didn’t see or hear a plane, or an electronic noise, and aside from their saddles and the cultural detritus in their heads, there was nothing to distinguish their experience of these hours from that of the first Navajo to discover the canyon.
Earl told them the legends of the towering Spider Rock and Speaking Rock, which were said to talk to each other alone at night.
He showed them, high in the cliff wall, the first of many Anasazi ruins they were to see. It was barely believable that a whole village had once lived there, daily climbing up and down what looked to be the distance of three or four stories of a modern building, carrying food and water and babies on their backs. The wall looked completely sheer. How did they do it?
They dug hand and toe holes in the rock. They were still there.
Had Earl been to that particular ruin? Oh, yes, he said, as if to say of course—wouldn’t you? He showed them a small low opening that led to an ancient storage cave. Anasazi people in this canyon farmed the floor but lived up in the walls of the canyon, to be safe 272 / Beth Gutcheon
from predators, and from winter flash floods. In other canyons, people farmed the mesas, the tabletop above the canyons, and finally even built great pueblos on top, but not here.
They passed a deserted hogan beside the wash, in the shadow of the cliff, and from behind it came a beautiful appaloosa. It trotted out, ears forward, tail high, and followed them closely for several minutes.
“Someone you know?” Henry asked.
“Yes, my aunt lives there. He knows me pretty well.”
When they reached the next bend of the wash and crossed it again, the appaloosa turned and galloped back to where he had come from, achingly beautiful.
They stopped by a bend in the wash, under cottonwoods, and dismounted to eat lunch. Rue was beginning to hurt and stiffen, and was grateful that the winter sun high in the sky warmed the windless valley. It was good to sit on something that wasn’t moving. As they ate, Earl said, “I always rode bareback when I was a little boy, but when I became a guide, the insurance people said I had to use a saddle. The first day I used one I came home all blisters.” He laughed.
Rue was beginning to know how he had felt.
“Your aunt’s horse just stays there, near the hogan, without being tethered?” Henry asked.
“Oh yes, they don’t go anywhere. It’s a good thing our horses are geld, because that one’s a stud,” he added, and Rue saw at once what he meant. She had a vision of the extreme discomfort that would ensue if one found oneself astride a horse fight. Like a dog fight, at three times the size, and at breakneck speed, with hooves.
She had a moment of gratitude for her own mount’s near somno-lence.
“Does your aunt ride him bareback?” Henry asked.
“Of course. And she wears a skirt,” said Earl. He talked a little about what the summers were like, when grandparents, great-grandparents, horses, dogs, and babies all moved down into the canyon to grow alfalfa and corn and beans, ride bareback, climb the cliff walls, and explore the ruins, when the only language is Navajo, and at night, in the dark hogan, the old stories are told.
Saying Grace / 273
Rue felt as if time had blessedly stopped. This is A Day of My Life, she thought, A Day of Days. The stunning physical beauty, the silence, the sense of being momentarily part of something human but mysterious and completely other was like a great tide that came up under the hulk of grief and mourning she and Henry soundlessly carried, and floated it, so although it was still there, it became weightless and small in this immensity. Their senses were so full it was possible to be entirely here and in the moment and nowhere else. It was a blessed relief.
When they rode on, the unfamiliar aches reasserted themselves and intensified. Earl pointed out ancient pictographs high on the sandstone walls, pictures of goats, men, dancers, antelope. The pig-ments, he said, were made from grinding different kinds of minerals found in the canyon and mixing them with pine pitch. They passed their first jeep tour, coming along the wash. Earl showed them a ledge inches wide, sloping high above their heads, where a nineteenth-century Navajo shepherd boy had painted white figures of goats. He pointed out the great streaks of natural black varnish pouring down and stained into the wall of the canyon as if someone on top of the mesa had overturned an immense bucket.
There were more ruins, including one at the floor of the canyon with its back to the cliff wall. It was possible to imagine—impossible not to—the traffic between the ancient tiny villages in sight of each other, the one on the floor beside the grain fields, the other across the wash and high up in the cliffs. They passed a farm field with several hogans, and Earl said, “That is owned by my clan grandfather.” Henry asked about clans, but Earl gave answers less direct than those found in the guidebooks, and then told them instead that his clan grandfather farmed by planting each corn seedling within a tin can, lidless at both ends, driven halfway into the ground. That way he could water the plant without wasting water on bare soil, each seedling in its own three-inch oasis. His clan grandfather also raised peaches. They could see the trees over against the canyon wall; Earl said they were beautiful when they bloomed.