Our quiet Tuesday doing laundry and planning the next leg of our trip to the Grand Canyon (I've managed to book us into Best Western at Grand Canyon for two nights), has given me leisure to reflect on people we met on our trip to Monument Valley and Canyon de Chelly.
First of all there was D-, an apple-shaped, moustached, rugged type about my age, who stopped and worried about Kate and me on the White Mountain as we waited for AAA to tow our car. He'd been brought up in South Tucson and has moved only as far as Coolidge, AZ a little community in the middle of nowhere, making his living as a general handy man, with his tow truck, his basic knowledge of car mechanics, and his practical experience of building and building contracting. Probably he went to Vietnam in the late sixties, and after that, he was apparently glad to live quietly in an all American backwater. He was a good source of information though and we were glad to have met him. He put us onto O-'s lot (see below). When he eventually drove off leaving us on the mountainside, we all exchanged warm hugs as though we'd known each other for a lifetime: perhaps it wasn't so far-fetched. We ascertained that he most likely was in high school along with Kate's Tucson cousins back in the early sixties.
Then there was P-, another person of my age range. She always does the night, or graveyard, shift at Denny's in Holbrook. Shapeless and overweight in her black T shirt which said "Get your grave on", P- was a twin (her girl twin had passed on many a year ago) with 10 or 11 brothers all with prolific families, but she'd never had her own children and was glad she hadn't. You might say she was the opposite of Dan in many ways. She had never been a settler, and now she is an outright drifter living on the edge of extreme poverty, probably little or no health insurance which is the key indicator of economic affluence in the USA. She drove trucks for 16 years before settling to a nomadic existence going from one Denny's outlet to another as the mood took her, living in tiny motel rooms until the next call to move on beset her. She'd been married for a while, but her mate had passed on a few years before, and she hadn't the heart to maintain their trailer home after that, or perhaps the cost of healthcare had eaten all her assets such as they were. It seemed a sad and lonesome life, yet her crystal, almost aquamarine eyes ("My people came from Norway") twinkled a welcome to every single person who pushed the door open in Denny's: Kate and I had a good laugh with her and she promised to write me out the best, most scenic route across America, based on her trucking experiences.
And there was J-, a slip of a man about 30 years old, completely toothless, who seemed so colourless and spiritless to us at first. As he towed our car off the White Mountain and kindly took endless trouble to make sure we were stopped off in a safe and convenient spot, mostly silently, from time to time we gleaned some scraps. He had run away from some sort of abusive family situation in Utah to stay with the only other person he knew, his Dad living in Globe. He hates Globe because it's a small town (yes, ironically named!) and there is nothing to do and he has no prospects - he ran away from home before completing high school: another lonesome person living on the edges of American society in pretty deep poverty without enough health insurance to get a set of teeth...
Not so different perhaps from S- except for the age. S- would be about 56 years old according to J-n. His face is covered with a long matted grey-brown beard. Although he clearly has no Native American heritage himself, he lived on the Navajo reservation working for Justin the owner of the stables, until J-n and he fell out. J-n told him he suspected that he was on the run from something - the combination of no contact wth his family, and his propensity to avoid socialising made J-n suspicious. I must say that Kate and I had a bit of a soft spot for S-. He's a quiet loner, happier with his rescued dogs, and other animals than with humans; we were glad to hear from J-n that he had got another job on the reservation herding sheep with a litle cabin to live in, thrown in. His needs are minimal and this sounded perfect for him.
J-n himself is another character. Again in my generation, he is from a land-owning Navajo family. He's actually done some college in Utah, but spent most of his youth, according to his own story, in an agressive alcoholic haze. Eventually he got sorted out in Utah where he joined AA and for 36 years "I have been clean ... but it's still one day at a time". J-n is quite a well known Navajo artist, as well as the owner of the stable of horses we used when we rode down the Canyon. As I rode in exhausted from my first horse ride (all six hours of it), he came over and said "Where's Judy, I am so proud of her!". It made my day. Later J-n came over to the Thunderbird Lodge and showed us some of his paintings and we had an interesting discussion about social issues and life in general. All the reservation voted for Obama, who he calls "Brother Obama". I hope that Obama can fulfil some of the aspirations of dispossessed America: the social problems among the young Navajo bring tears to your eyes; the problems of other drifting people living on the edge, with no health insurance and very little security bring tears to your eyes.
T- our Navajo guide, is a little younger - probably in his late thirties or forties. He too has come through a wasted period of bad alcoholism, and has been clean for 3 years. He was sad, because his father sold all his family's land for a case of wine, and did not ensure that Navajo lore was passed onto him. Apparently there are strict rules as to who can do this, and there is no-one left who can do this for T-... or any children he might have. It's like his line has become lost. Right now he works as hard as he can to raise enough money to buy a little place on the reservation. I hope he succeeds, before he kills himself with over exertion.
V- was our guide in Bluff - another person of my generation - there seem to be so many of us! I suppose that's what is meant by baby-boomers, though I am on the older fringe of that generation. As I wrote in my blog for that day, taking a trek with V- who says he is of Dutch-German extraction, tall and lean with hands and feet like spades, is like taking a university course: his knowledge is encyclopedic, but it's not just this: he knows the various arguments and points of view of different archeaologists, and will tell you what their differing viewpoints are, and what his own opinion is. He is an exponent of the Natural Museum concept, and when he goes off on his own, he often finds artefacts that he hides as close to the spot he finds them as possible (and keeps his own records).
O-'s lot are the chief owner-mechanic and his two employee mechanics at Pine tops where we left Kate's car for repair. I've already described them wearing their identical greying pony tails. They were helpful, practical and inventive mechanics, prepared to make do and mend: just what we needed. Yet even their lives had most likely not take a straight course: Dan had implied that they'd all messed up at some point, and were only now "trying to do it right". Perhaps their lives had also been affected by a spell in Vietnam. We need to understand what extended periods of combat may be doing to the current generation of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.
PS. James, Oksy and I are off to Benson, Tombstone and Elgin for the day (Wednesday).
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