by Kurt Caswell
“Somehow?” I asked. “What do you mean, somehow?”
“I don’t know,” Manny said. “It’s just somehow. It doesn’t work.”
“Here, use mine,” I said.
I would hear this usage of the word “somehow” routinely after this, for anything that didn’t work, or anything new or out of the ordinary. “Mr. Caswell, my stomach is somehow. Can I go to the nurse?” or “Mr. Caswell, your hair looks somehow,” or “My boyfriend is somehow.”
“All right. Let’s focus,” I said. “Yes, you can just write it, but if you follow these steps, it helps keep you organized. You can write a better report this way.”
“I don’t care about no report,” said Valeria.
“Me neither,” said Shane. “I don’t care. But I like low-rider bikes, Mr. Caswell.”
“Yeah, that’s cheap anyways,” said John George.
“Let’s just go outside and mess around,” said Kyle Bigfoot.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Look, here’s the thing. I’m going to give you these six steps—they’re just six words. You don’t have to understand them, just remember them. Just write them on your paper and what they mean. Then you can look them over, and then I’ll give you a quiz. Okay?”
“Okay,” Leanne said.
Everyone else just sat there, staring at me.
I wrote out all the words on the board with little definitions next to them, like this:1. prewriting—write some ideas as fast as you can
2. organizing—organize prewriting ideas that are the same into groups
3. drafting—write a report using these groups to make paragraphs
4. revising—read your report and make it better
5. proofreading—check for spelling and grammar mistakes
6. typing—type your report and turn it in
“For now,” I said as I wrote, “you don’t need to understand everything. Mostly you need to know that writing happens by taking these steps. These steps make it easier, and you’ll get better grades.”
“Are you from Mars or what?” Valeria said. “What are you talking about?”
“Yeah, you’re actin’ all crazy,” said Kyle Bigfoot.
I noticed then that Michael had gotten up and was wandering around in the back of the room, looking up at the ceiling.
“Hey, Mr. Caswell,” said Shane. “What do they eat over there in China anyways?”
With the exception of team teaching in Japan, I’d never taught the sixth grade. I didn’t really know much about sixth graders—what worked, what didn’t work; what they knew, what they didn’t know. I couldn’t determine whether the material was too difficult, I was being unclear, or these kids were trying to drive me insane. I was just doing my best with what limited information I had. The obvious signals coming back to me from the class were that my best wasn’t working, at least not yet. But it felt good that we were at least talking about the course material, and not every jab and joke was directed at me. I looked at the clock. Twenty-five minutes left. An immense span of time, I thought, with total chaos imminent. I needed to move them on to something else, and fast.
“I think we’re about done with this for now,” I said. “Did everyone write down ‘prewriting’? We’ll talk about that next time.”
“Yes,” everyone said, which was a complete lie. But no matter.
“Shane. Why don’t you choose a book from the shelf back there. I’ll read it to you.”
“Yeah!” he said. “I’ll get one.”
“A short one,” I said.
“Can I get one too?” Gay DeLuz said, speaking for the first time all period.
“Yes, why don’t you,” I said. “Maybe we have time for two books.”
“If we need three, I’ll get one, Mr. Caswell,” Manny said.
And that’s how the day ended.
On some ordinary day, cutting vegetables in my trailer kitchen, I discovered a bottle connected to the water line beneath the sink. I was just leaning over to put something in the garbage, and I leaned over a little farther than usual. It looked like an oxygen tank for scuba diving. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? I asked Bob King about it, and he told me it was an ion exchange filter to even out the spiking radiation levels from so much uranium mining in the 1950s and 1960s. The same technology is useful for stripping arsenic from drinking water.
Later I learned that a cattle dip vat site at Casamero Lake, the Navajo community five miles south on Borrego Pass Road, is listed as a Superfund site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, along with dip vat sites at nearby Crownpoint and Thoreau. What is the danger of living near dip vat sites? Arsenic poisoning in the soil, and the ground and surface water. For the better part of the twentieth century, arsenic was part of the recipe for pesticides used to combat parasite infestation in sheep, cattle, horses, mules, and goats. Because such pesticide solutions required large volumes of water, they were constructed near wells or good surface water. Ingesting arsenic in high volumes through water, food, or the air causes death, and in low volumes causes nausea and vomiting, abnormal heart rhythm, damage to blood vessels, and low production of white and red blood cells. And, of course, arsenic can cause various cancers: skin, lung, bladder, prostate, liver, kidney.
I discovered other nearby Superfund sites: the Blackjack Mine at Smith Lake, the Doe and Santa Fe Blue Water Uranium Mines near Prewitt, and the Brown Vandever Mine and the Febco Mine, also at Prewitt. In McKinley County, where Borrego is, I counted thirtyseven Superfund sites in all. In neighboring Cibola County another eighteen sites are listed, including the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation and the Anaconda Company Bluewater Uranium Mill, both at Grants, and the Poison Canyon Mining District in Milan.
I began buying bottled water in Gallup. I collected a half dozen empty milk jugs and routinely filled them at a water station at Wal-Mart or at Smith’s grocery store. I kept this up for three months, but, living in the desert, I began to feel trapped by this meager water supply. I used the bottled water only for drinking. I cooked with water from the tap, and bathed in it, and drank water from the drinking fountain at school sometimes. I asked Bob King again, and he assured me that the water was safe. And then he said, “Well, at least it’s easier just to drink it. Everyone else does.”
I started drinking it too.
The Grants Mineral Belt in the vicinity of Grants, New Mexico, is one of the largest uranium ore deposits in the world. During the Cold War, uranium mining became increasingly profitable as it was tied to issues of national security. The local people, mostly Navajo and puebloan people, became increasingly alarmed about this mining because of the potential health risks, which would persist for what amounts to forever. They held meetings, issued statements, tried to resist the poisoning of their ancestral lands. It did them little good. The mining companies, primarily Kerr-McGee and the Vanadium Corporation of America, extracted what was profitable and then pulled out, leaving behind deadly radioactive tailing piles, poisoned water and soils, and a Navajo labor force unemployed and infected with cancer. On July 16, 1979, an earth dam ruptured near Church Rock, off I-40 near Gallup, spilling over 95 million gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Puerco River drainage. Many experts consider this spill the largest nuclear accident in U.S. history, larger even than the accident at Three Mile Island. The media mostly ignored it, and as a result, few people have ever heard about it.
So here I was, breathing, drinking, eating, living a few dozen miles from the greatest radioactive spill in my country’s history. The ground I walked on, the air I breathed, the vistas I marveled at, had all been poisoned. Along with all the people I worked with at Borrego and the students here, along with everyone living in the region—Navajos, whites, Zunis, Hispanics—I was part of the generation that was inheriting a poisoned land. But there was one primary difference between me and the Navajo people at Borrego: I planned to leave, eventually, and they did not. Not ever.
I heard a knock at my front door. It was a Saturday, and the last thing I expected wa
s someone at my door.
“Hello,” I said, crossing the room. “Just a minute.”
“Hello?” I heard from outside.
I opened the door to Gay DeLuz, one of my sixth-grade students. Her long black hair was tied into long black braids, and her eyes were dark and direct. She looked happy to see me. A big car waited for her with the engine running.
“You wanna buy a cherry pie?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“How ‘bout an apple pie?” she asked. “Only one dollar. I made them myself. I baked ’em last night at my grandma’s.”
She pulled back the red-and-white-checkered cotton cloth covering the basket she held in the crook of her arm. It was full of little handmade pies wrapped in cellophane, little pies like Mexican empanadas, browned and golden, with fork marks around the edges where she had pinched the crusts together. I could smell them now, and they smelled real good.
“No,” I said again. “I don’t have any money.”
She knew I was lying and frowned.
My response was automatic, I think, and rude, even cruel. During my travels I had adopted “no” as a standard answer when offered anything from anyone I didn’t really know. Especially food. Better to decline something likely good than accept anything potentially bad and end up with a crampy stomach or diarrhea or worse. Besides that, I had begun to build an attitude against the many Navajo children selling jewelry and trinkets in restaurants in Gallup. In the beginning, these children all looked so sad and needy that I wanted to say yes to every one of them. They would file by my table with a bright display, everything laid out beautifully. “You wanna buy some?” they’d ask. When I was with Mary at, say, the Eagle Café on Route 66, she would straighten her face, shake her head, and wave the poor children away. So callous, I’d thought at first, but it came to happen so often. I learned that a parent, or an uncle or aunt, or even an older sibling or cousin waited outside while the little ones went in to make the sale. Mary’s hardened position was more about survival, not stinginess or cruelty. You buy from one little salesperson and a whole flood of them break through the door to get at you. Down here on the rez, we white folks were trying to survive too, if even in a different way. And besides, how many pairs of cheap earrings does a guy need?
Had I not been so guarded, I might have said yes to Gay. In truth, I might have liked a couple of those pies for breakfast. They certainly smelled good. But I was a traveler trying to look like I fit in, an outsider posing as an insider. What escaped me in that moment was that my policy worked in reverse: saying no kept me outside, because I hadn’t considered being neighborly.
Gay didn’t say anything more to me, but her countenance fell. She turned and walked back to the car. I watched her get in. The car drove away, fishtailing a little in the gravel and raising an angry plume of dust down the sad road.
THREE
THE ROAD TO CROWNPOINT
Rain fell softly across the windshield of my truck as I crossed the cattle guard at the school entrance and drove out the empty dirt road northwest to Crownpoint. The sky was light over there, dark over here. Sun pulsed in and out of the truck windows. The rain lasted only a moment, but the air was wet and electric. A thunderstorm was brewing.
I just wanted to use the telephone. I would have used the pay phone inside the school, but the doors were already locked tight for the night and I hadn’t been entrusted with a key. I was restless, lonely, tired of being alone. I wanted to hear the voice of someone I knew. Sakura’s voice from across the sea in Hokkaido. Mary’s voice. My parents’ or one of my sisters’. Anyone’s.
A mile from campus I came to the Borrego Pass Trading Post. I pulled up in front of the squat brick building. It was tucked in close to the big sandstone mesa, and other buildings grew out from the sides and behind it, including a little barn and corral right up against the rock where it came down along the road. Deena, the receptionist at school, had told me that I should introduce myself to the managers, Merle and Rosie Moore. They were good people, she said, very friendly and helpful. They lived in a house behind the Trading Post and were almost always there. They sold gasoline from the pump out front and a little bit of hay from the barn. Inside the store, the Moores stocked canned goods and dry goods, basic hardware, ice cream, soda pop, and candy. They also sold and traded silver jewelry and other traditional arts, like kachina dolls, mostly made by local Navajo artists.
A kachina is a wooden doll carved and adorned to represent one of hundreds of Navajo and puebloan spirits (primarily Hopi and Zuni in these parts). These spirits are not gods; they are intermediaries between the people and the gods. They often live in the mountains, and they come to dance and restore harmony between all living things. The men who perform these ceremonial dances wear elaborately decorated masks and are said to become the kachina spirits they represent. The dances are especially important for fertility and for bringing rain.
I spotted a pay phone outside the front doors of the Trading Post. Maybe I wouldn’t have to go all the way to Crownpoint after all. I got out and walked up onto the front porch. The sign in the window read “Closed.” I peered in through the glass. A pale darkness covered the interior and the front counter of the little store. I could just make out the great collection of kachinas arranged on shelves along the back wall. They seemed to be looking at me. And in the glass case in front of them, rows of beautiful silver things—rings and bracelets, pendants and concho belts—gleaming a little in the low light.
When I got the job offer at Borrego, I had called Sakura to tell her the good news. I was employed again, and off on a new adventure. We had parted in Hokkaido on good terms, making our vows to each other, our promises to see each other soon, and perhaps never again to part.
“Do you think,” she had said, when I told her the good news, “I could stay with you there in New Mexico? They have one of silver artists there,” she said. “I want to learn more about making silvers.”
She was an artist without specialization who loved to work in all kinds of mediums. She loved to paint, she loved textiles, and mostly she loved to explore.
“You want to come and live with me?” I asked. “Really?”
“I don’t have much here,” she said. “Just my little job and my families. I miss the States, and I could learn how to make those jewelries. I have some little money saved.”
“Yes, you could apprentice with some Navajo silversmith, maybe. Or learn weaving. Or paint every day.”
“And I could help you make a home there,” she said. “We could loving each other all the time.”
“Sounds like a dream,” I said.
I felt something cool across my back. The wind had picked up, and it had begun to rain again, lightly but steadily. Large round drops dotted the dusty ground around my truck. I remembered the pay phone. I put the receiver to my ear. Nothing. The line was dead. I hit the cancel lever several times. Still nothing.
I drove on. The road crested and started down the northwest side of the pass. I wound my way through the stands of layered rock and earth, along a long deep canyon where the road fell away. From the driver’s seat I could not see the bottom of it. Bob King had told me that this narrow section of road along the chasm was not so narrow a few years back. During a thunderstorm, a big pickup truck carrying four Navajos up front in the cab, and a couple of children in the back under a tarp in the rain, came through this place as the sky cracked and blew. Water came down from the mesa and flowed over the road, washing under the truck and floating it up, carving a path beneath it. Perhaps the truck remained suspended there for a moment or two, the water unsure of how to handle such a big thing, and then just as someone might have realized the danger they were all in and made motions for the door—“Get out!”—the water surged and dragged half the road, the truck, and all those people over the edge. No one survived. The truck is down there still. Later on one of my long walks through the desert, I went down in search of it, and found it, at least I thought I did, mostly buried n
ow, frozen in the mud by years of storms, the doors cracked and lifted like the shell casings of a desiccated beetle.
I drove alongside the canyon there and down through the sharpened pass, through a narrow opening in the mountain’s face and out onto the long, bumpy flats. I passed a few scattered hogans, dilapidated things, some with a mongrel dog or two tied off at a post or a makeshift shelter. House-sized stacks of firewood, not cut and split and stacked neatly, but whole trees leaned up against each other, standing like a pyramid. I noted the shiny new pickup trucks next to these sad dwellings, domestic mostly: Ford, Chevy, an occasional Dodge. A cluster of well-kept trailers rose up out of the desert, the rooflines dotted with tires to keep them from rattling in the wind. And as a companion to the empty land, a satellite dish, like a great ear, listening.
Like a good horse in the old days, my new pickup truck—a 1994 Dodge Dakota extra-cab, four-wheel drive, silver with black trim and seven thousand miles on the odometer—was both an essential tool on the reservation and a personal trademark. A truck defined the man who drove it, and many Navajos put their resources in their vehicles to the detriment of everything else. Electricity, running water, sometimes even groceries were optional, while a good truck was fundamental to Navajo life, a constant like the speed of light. It was the truck, not the telephone or the television or the radio, that was the real source of communication in Navajoland. If you wanted to know what was going on in the world or even next door, you had to travel, move, roam around until you found out. This was a world measured spatially, rather than temporally—here you might as well measure your age in miles as in years. To revise an old aphorism: a man without a truck ain’t a man at all.
Navajos travel great distances in their trucks, back and forth across the reservation, visiting family, shopping for supplies in town, attending powwows and ceremonies and rodeos, or just out seeing the country, going from place to place, covering ground. Several people might sit abreast in the front seat of a Navajo’s truck, with a few children huddled in the back, or a few hitchhikers catching a ride to the laundry or to the hospital or to drinking, in all kinds of weather. A good truck is like a Navajo family’s blood, and the roads are arteries connecting them to every corner and to the heart of Navajoland.