Navajo Nation 2014
When I found out my friend Wanda was driving home to see her family for the weekend and to run in the Ship Rock Marathon, I immediately volunteered to travel with her. The reason for this is because she grew up in the Navajo Nation (or “the reservation” – or “the res”) in the area of New Mexico. (The nation spans the corners of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico). I hoped in vain to meet up with the elder Navajo who had gifted me my beautiful ceremonial rug (see the Navajo Part 2 post).
On the way there, there was a huge gap of non-scenery between Arches National Park and the Canyons of the Ancients. During this visual free time, we avoided counting the endless Joshua trees by telling each other stories of our childhood. We had a good laugh about her self-made nickname in college being Bilasáana (Navajo for ‘apple’) because she says she’s “red on the outside – white on the inside.”
Once we’d crossed over into Colorado, we made a pit stop at a random grocery store in the middle of nowhere. It was there that while I was washing my hands in the bathroom, a man who had been mumbling to himself in a stall came out and went to the mirror next to me. When he pulled out a yellow box cutter from his back pocket, I found myself warming up with discomfort. He opened it and lifted it to the mirror. After my inner-voice screamed, “screw this,” I bolted for the door. When I turned around before walking out the door, he was actually trimming the long greasy grey hairs from his forehead, as if straightening his imaginary hairline. When I told Wanda about this in the car, she told me it must be because we just started driving on the old Route 666 – and strange things always happen on that road. Awesome?
After I’d had my share of Old American roadlore, I pulled out a book I’d been trying to read for years, “The Motorcycle Diaries” by Ernesto ‘Ché’ Guevara. I was given the book 10 years ago while living in Germany. Back then, my Bohemian Eastern European social circle was comprised of the new and ‘evolved’ generation of hippies, communists and socialists. It was not uncommon to encounter any one of us wearing a shirt with Che’s face on it or talking loudly over giant beers about the positive ideals of communism and socialism that were tainted by power-hungry monsters in recent generations. Although it ended up being nothing more than young sensitive minds dreaming of the good old days that were never ours – kind of like those die-hard fans of classical musician that think nothing younger than 200 years is real music.
Regardless of the controversy over this man, I found myself strangely identifying with him. Although I was in no way a communist, I, too, came from a better-off family and was deeply affected by poverty and social injustice that I witnessed at a young age that affected me the rest of my life. Those affects had me traveling and wondering long after I’d left the mobile military nest of my childhood. Although I was not a contradictory communist guerrilla and he was not an ironically introverted opera singer, we were both “homeless” and attempted to fill the void of not belonging anywhere by making everywhere we went belong to us.
“Hey, listen to this Wanda:”
“The first commandment for every good explorer is that an expedition has two points: the point of departure and the point of arrival. If your intention is to make the second theoretical point coincide with the actual point of arrival, don’t think about the means — because the journey is a virtual space that finishes when it finishes, and there are as many means as there are different ways of “finishing.” That is to say, ‘the means are endless.’”
“Ha!” she laughs, “that about sums you up!”
“So, does this mean we can get off of Route 666 now?”
“No, this is the only way.”
Huffishly grunting to myself, “But of course it is.”
And then there it was, a rainbow sign with the words “Welcome to Navajo Nation.”
We meet up with her family to have a picnic at a round basketball court and then head back to her brother’s house where I stayed up talking to her mom and siblings learning how to speak their language. They laughed and were amused at my determined attempts. Inevitably, we created my very own traditionally formal Navajo greeting:
Yá’át’ééh, shije eh Bryan, yinishyé do shima do shije eh Beverly and Johnny. Bilagáana nishli, bilagáana báshicheii, bilagáana dashicheii, bilagáana dashinali.
(Hello, my name is Bryan, son of Beverly and Johnny. I am white man, I was born of the white man, from my maternal grandfather’s clan of the white man, from my paternal grandfather’s clan of the white man.)
“That doesn’t sound nearly as cool for me as it does for you all! Can’t you at least give me a cool name like “Strutting Eagle,” “Silly Rabbit,” or “Bigalow Bear?” The room erupts in laughter. “We need alcohol for that,” her brother said. After a quick trip to the liquor store, the reality of the alcohol problem in the community became surreal when her young nephew became frightened by a disheveled drunken man walking through the store. He pointed and said, “Look, a zombie!” Sitting down with the reservation-made honey Bear Claw stout, the greeting morphed into hysterical versions along the lines of:
Shash yázhí nishli, Tsís’náltsooí báshicheii, Tsís’náltsooí dashicheii, Tsís’náltsooí dashinali.
(I am Honey bear, I was born of the WASP, from my maternal grandfather’s clan of the WASP, from my paternal grandfather’s clan of the WASP.)
The next morning we got up really early and I took her to the starting line for her marathon. Her father was going to meet me at a McDonald’s near the finish line a few hours later so that we could be there when she crossed. I decided to go for a little scenic drive for an hour or so and explore the area. As I drove away from the starting line, I could hear ceremonial peyote songs fading with the sight of civilization. Naturally, I soon found myself lost.
Ship Rock – Navajo Nation, New Mexico
Everywhere I turned, however, was the famous Ship Rock, a very eerie and isolated middle-of-nowhere mountain. I drove a good two hours trying to find my way back. Of course, stopping every 15 minutes to take pictures slowed it down too. It was one of the strangest and most beautiful places I’d been. I finally found a long stretch of road that disappeared into the horizon – right behind a tiny golden arches sign.
Metal sculpture of Navajo man on horseback in the middle of nowhere. Ship rock in the background. Navajo Nation, New Mexico.
I surprisingly arrived before her father did. I went inside to grab a burnt cup of coffee water. When I came out I saw him standing there. “Hey! Good morning! How’s it going?”
He looked at me startled but with a huge smile responded, “I’m doing really well.”
“How was your night? You were missed last night.”
He looks at me confused. “Who missed me?”
“Oh, you know…” a quick glance at him mid-sentence made me realize something. This was not Wanda’s dad. I’d forgotten what he looked like!
Well… shit.
“Oh, you know…” think think think, “the town Bar-B-Q for the marathon.”
“Oh!” He settled a bit. “Yes, well I was on the road from out of town. Sorry I missed it.”
“Where were you driving from?”
“Utah.”
“I just got in from Utah yesterday myself. I was coming with my friend for the marathon.”
“Small world. I’m from here but was back for a little school reunion.”
“Which school?”
He explained to me how he was bussed in every week from the reservation to the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, UT, a boarding school for children from the tribes of the four states. President Harry Truman had converted the school from a WWII Army hospital that was run by Nazi German POWs. I was absolutely fascinated, all the while I was thinking, “Book project! Book project!” He told me about how the students believed the tunnels that connected the buildings underground were haunted because that is where amputated limbs from soldiers had been tossed.
As he was telling me about how the school closed in the 1980s and the buildings are all boarded up and now visited regularly by ghost hunters, Wanda’s dad walks up. He was baffled at my new stranger-friend and whisks me away to see the end of the race.
“I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.” ~ Ernesto ‘Ché’ Guevara
Wanda finally crossed the finished line without a sweat. (Considering the 300° / -40% humidity weather, I couldn’t see how that was possible.)
On the way home, we stopped off at the Navajo farmer’s market where she got her celebratory mutton on frybread and I got a ‘traditional’ pickle-juice snow cone and a cup of blue mush (grits made from blue corn that resembled uncooked moldy cornbread).
“Well,” playing with my mush, “this is not the strangest things I’ve eaten before.”
“Oh?” asked Wanda, “What do you consider strange?”
“Well, there was this one time I had rattlesnake sausage…”
“Oh! Don’t tell my mom that! That is very bad luck and she would freak.”
Noted.
We got up early the next morning for the drive home. We took a quick stop at the Four Corners Monument where I did Yoga with my ever-delicate plumber-butting technique with one foot in Colorado – the other in Utah and one hand in Arizona – the other in New Mexico. I’m sure there was something mysterious and spiritual about the whole thing. I just couldn’t tell because Wanda wouldn’t stop laughing.
Back on the road, we discussed the original and natural inclusion of homosexuals among the Navajo. Nádleehé were the two-spirit people who served the roles of potters if a male and hunters if a female. They even had special marriage ceremonies. The nadleh (one transformed/ androgynous) helped raise their siblings’ children, took care of elderly relatives, and were the adoptive parents of orphaned children. These people were highly valued and respected before the missionaries came. T
aking a different out-of-the-way back home where wild horses were crossing the road, I was looking out the window when I saw a 500 pound nadleh woman dressed up in a Native American muumuu in the scalding heat with pink hair, a mustache, and smoking a pipe. “Wanda! Where are we going?!”
“You saw that too, huh?”
“Um…yes!” 
Laughing, “we’re going to my grandmother’s house for lunch before heading home.”
“Oh.” I whisper-sang to myself, “Over the desert and through tranny hood to grandmother’s house we go…”
“See that,” pointing across the gorge along the side of the road to a little hut, “that is my grandmother’s house.” “It’s not that far. Great!” “Well, it’s another hour away. We have to drive down to the bridge and then come back up.”
After driving through rough, unpaved terrain that resembled the mountains on Mars, we came to an octagon-round mud and straw hut (called a hogan). “That’s where my grandparents grew up.”
We drove passed it to a little white house where we found her mom and grandmother bent on the ground.
“Hi amá sání!”
They stood up to reveal a sheep that they had just freshly slaughtered. It’s neck was still hocking coagulating loogies.
“Oh…yum.”
Her mom started laughing and the grandmother gave me a laser-stare of death.
“Come,” said her mom, “help me with this.” She pulls me over to a big red bucket where she lifts up a long string of intestines. “Do this.” She lets the white wormy mass dangle from one hand as she grips her fist around it with the other hand and pulls down- pulling all of the digested grass and dirt from the soon-to-be reincarnated colon sausage.
“Hhhgh,” putting my finger up in please-hold fashion, “HHarggh!”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” stepping away, “is there anything else I can do?”
“Here, hold the ribs.” Whew? I stand there constantly re-picking up the bleeding rack because every time I put it down somewhere, the cats ran off with a piece of it. The whole time, her grandmother just kept glaring at me and scolding me with her body language.
“Hey Wanda, why does your grandma hate me?”
“She doesn’t hate you, she just thinks you’re my new boyfriend.”
Right as she said that, a little boy sitting at the picnic table had a half-a-gallon of slush drop from his body onto stones beneath him. Gasp! I yelped higher and louder than a stepped-on hyena. The little boy turned around in shock. He was holding a spongy nerf ball that he had just rung the muddy water out of. “Oh my god! I thought he just had explosive diarrhea!” Wanda and her mom laugh hysterically. He grandmother looked confused so her Mom translated to her in Navajo what had happened. She laughs so hard she cries. The rest of the day she was very warm and kind to me.
The whole time I was thinking, “Great, someone had to say in Navajo, ‘he screams like a girl because he thinks footballs are shit.’ In order to be liked- or trusted that I am clearly not her boyfriend).”
As we were cleaning up, I look down at my feet. I pick up a giant round wet slimy thing. “Look Wanda, you guys forgot the heart!”
“Uhm, Bryan?”
“Yea?” Holding my face in disgust.
“It’s a rock that had been bled out on.”
“Oh…” (“Drop”) I go inside and wash my hands.
When it came time to cook, we built a fire in a metal barrel sawed in half. We laid the meat across a piece of wire fence that had been strewn across the top of the flames. With slabs of mutton all over the place, cooking in the sun, it actually smelled delicious. Her mom then came over with some rolled up piece of sheep stomach fat that she was wrapping tightly with the ‘clean’ intestines. “They’re Ach’íí.” Because clearly my face was asking, ‘WTF.’
They taught me how to make Navajo tortillas and her grandmother kept rolling her eyes at me because I could not get them flat and round enough. We put the mutton in them and ate them like tacos. When it came time for me to try the Ach’íí, I wrapped it heavily in the tortilla so I couldn’t see the curly sliminess of the roasted slug. When I bit into it, the toughness kept it from leaving my mouth. I pulled harder and harder until the intestine uncoiled like a breaking rubber band and slapped me in the face. Dumb struck, I sat there waiting for the wet shock of intestine juice to drip off my face. With all of my incidental hilarities, fiascos with nature both dead and alive (ask me some time about the lizard in the outhouse), and old-man clumsiness, I earned the illustrious Navajo nickname “Cheii” (or grandpa). To this day, Wanda and her wonderful people call me Cheii. To this day, I call them family.
Shije eh “cheii” yinishyé do shima do shije eh Beverly and Johnny, Naaki níłchʼi nishli, bilagáana báshicheii, bilagáana dashicheii, bilagáana dashinali.
Ahéhee’
We hit the unlucky 666 homebound through the desert. I pick up my book where I’d left off, finding myself, yet again, joined at the spiritual hip to this controversial man.
“What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land” ~ Ernesto ‘Ché’ Guevara
Yup, Wanda was right. That about sums me up.
I Can't Take Me Anywhere 