by Kurt Caswell
Shortly after that, Tom dropped out of my class and began working with the Special Ed teacher for language arts. Whenever I saw him in the hallway, I said hello, but he had nothing to say to me. He would stand straight and tall, square his shoulders, and walk by staring past me as if I wasn’t there.
After the monsoon rains in October, the desert bloomed with wildflowers. It was still warm and wonderful outside, and so I took my classes out to write in their journals. I led the eighth-grade class out behind the school and through the gap in the fence beyond the berm that held the water back when it rained. I had been walking here every day now for weeks, and the flat was littered with garbage—old tires and tin cans, pieces of roofing, rusted metal and broken glass—but today most of that was hidden by colored flowers. Purples and reds. Yellows and oranges. And our feet brushed a trail through the colors as we walked out to the foot of the mesa. Here the juniper crowded into a city of rocks fallen from high off the sandstone cliffs. A red-tailed hawk passed overhead along the edge of the mesa top, and William Brown said, “That’s a ret-tail hawk!” Everyone looked up. “I seen ’em when I get water for my grandma.” We watched the hawk draw a line out into the distance until it became a black spot against the sky.
I instructed everyone to find a place to sit. Pick a good place that you’ll want to spend some time in, I said. We’ll come out here often and write in our journals, and over time everyone will get to know their spot. In a moment I was alone.
I walked down around this great collection of boulders and found a place up against one just inside the sun with a view of the green and colored land spread out before me. The warm sun settled over my page as I scribbled away in my own journal, partly to set the example for the kids, but also for myself. I wanted to mark this moment, to record a piece of my life here. A little bluebird—the Navajo call it the bluebird of happiness—came flittering by and paused a moment in a juniper tree. It bounced on its tiny legs, bounced again, and then was off, a blue bolt across the flowers. I took it as a good sign.
I heard voices up behind me, boys’ voices calling out in Navajo, words I did not know. Teresa Smith came walking around to discover me in my hiding place; I heard her feet on the dry ground. She stood in front of me, a thin, frail creature, and she looked out of breath.
“They’re up there throwing it down,” she said.
“Throwing what down?” I asked.
“Throwing down things from up there. Rocks and things.”
High in the sandstone cliffs, the boys clung to the rocks like spiders. They were whooping and hollering and calling down to us. I called up to them. I told them to come down. What they were doing was too dangerous.
They laughed and echoed me: “It’s too dangerous,” they yelled back, and I saw Jerry Valdez hanging from the edge of a great stone by one arm like a monkey a hundred feet in the air. “It’s too dangerous!” he yelled down, and everyone laughed.
“It’s lunchtime,” I called up to them.
And it was. The girls all came out of their places and crowded around me with their journals in their hands to watch the boys, to watch William Brown cast down a great chip of the mountain that he could hardly heft.
“Look out!” said Renee. “He’s gonna throw it.”
We all stepped back a few feet, a dozen or more, and watched it fall, all of it, whatever it was, soft and fast and slow all at once, until it reached the ground and exploded into dust. “Sorry, Mr. Caz-will,” William said. “I’m comin’ down now!” And he disappeared beyond the rim.
“Let’s go, c’mon,” Mary Jane said. “Let’s leave those stupit boys.”
“Yeah,” said Vanessa, “we don’t need them. They’re actin’ all crazy anyways.”
We started out the way we had come in, as the boys came down off the mesa and trailed a little distance behind us.
“Did you have to go to college, Mr. Caswell? To be a teacher?” Renee asked.
“I did,” I said. “Are you thinking about being a teacher?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. I want to go to high school anyways.”
“You’ll do great in high school,” I said. “And if you want to go to college, you’ll do great there too.”
“Is it hard to go to college?” she asked.
“Well, it’s hard, but if you go to high school, it will help you for college. You just learn a little at a time.”
“Is it? I don’t know if I can. But if I can I want to do something good for the Navajos,” Renee said. “If I can.”
“No way. I’m not going to college,” Vanessa said. “I’m just gonna stay home and do nothin’,” and she laughed and giggled.
“Me too,” said Teresa. “Just stay home and make fry bread.”
“I don’t know,” Renee said again. “Maybe I’ll go up there to Durango. Or I’ll go over there to Albuquerque. I don’t know.”
“You go over there then,” Vanessa said.
“Albuquerque?” Mary Jane said. “They got lots of hot guys over there.”
“Is it?” Vanessa and Teresa said at the same time. They looked at each other and laughed.
“Okay,” Vanessa said. “Let me go with you, then.”
Renee looked back at her and made a funny face. “I’m not goin’ for boys,” she said. “Boys mess everything up.”
“Not hot boys,” Vanessa said, and she laughed, and Teresa laughed too and they both blushed, their cheeks like desert primrose.
We walked on a little bit in silence now, Teresa and Vanessa and Renee behind me, and Mary Jane leading the way. When we reached the gap in the fence, Teresa tapped me on the shoulder. “Mr. Caswell,” she said. “We got them for you.” She handed me a bouquet of wildflowers set into a weathered jam jar she had picked up from the castaway junk piles in the desert.
“Wow. Thank you,” I said. “This is beautiful. This is really nice.”
“Put it on your desk,” Renee said.
“Yeah,” said Teresa.
“Right,” said Vanessa. “Put it on your desk.”
“Okay, I will,” I said.
“No. Do it now,” Teresa said.
“All right,” I said. “You come with me.”
We walked to my classroom in the trailer and I set the flowers on my desk.
Then Renee said, “Take a picture, Mr. Caswell,” and she handed me a little camera she took out of her bag. “Take a picture of us with the flowers.”
Renee grabbed the flowers back off my desk and we went outside. The three of them assembled on the back step, each holding onto the jar, and they posed there with the beautiful flowers in the Navajo sun.
SIX
THE WOLVES OF THE MOUNTAINS
Halfway to Mission: Wolf, the weather turned cold and foul. The little Borrego bus couldn’t top fifty miles an hour against the wind, and we slogged north up Interstate 25 out of Albuquerque for hours as night fell around us. Climbing up over Raton Pass into Colorado, it began to snow. The snow fell out of the darkness like rushing stars, and the Borrego girls complained of being cold and hungry because they hadn’t eaten all day. Stopping for lunch had not completely slipped my mind, but we were running behind and I was filled with worry about the storm and the distance ahead of us, and how Mary and I had miscalculated the time it would take to get there. She and her students had left Ganado about the same time we left Borrego, which meant we had about a two-hour lead. At that time, the sky had been clear and blue. We planned to arrive at Mission: Wolf about five o’clock, and our two groups would meet for the first time while cooking dinner over an open fire in the high country.
I had no way of getting in touch with Mary on the Ganado bus, no way of knowing where they were, or even if they were still on the road braving this storm, and my bus was on the verge of mutiny. Everyone wanted to go home. Even Redd, the bus driver, a hulking, buzz-cut Navajo with an eternal chew in his lower lip. He had volunteered for this trip, saying he loved camping, but now he was grumbling about the roads and the cold and the
snow. “Too cold for camping,” he said. And of course he was right.
Kuma was a little pup then, and he wandered the aisle saying hello to the Borrego girls. Now and again he piddled on the floor. “Hey, Mr. Caswell,” I heard from the back of the bus. “You’re puppy’s doin’ it again.” Earlier that morning, I had pleaded with Redd to let me bring him on the bus. The pup had nowhere else to go, I explained to him. I couldn’t leave him in my trailer alone for three days. “Against regulations,” Redd had said, and then he gave in: “Don’t tell anyone I let you.”
The snow fell in great sheets, and the road was a white line through the mountains. The little bus pulled the hill slow and sure, but I was sure the whole trip was a mistake. It was too late in the year to be headed into the high country on a school camping trip. What a foolish dream the whole trip was.
This camping trip to Mission: Wolf, a wolf sanctuary and education center in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of southern Colorado, originated with an e-mail exchange project Mary and I cooked up. Mary was always asking teacherly questions: How did Navajo communities across the reservation differ, if at all, she wondered? And did those differences affect students as readers? As writers? As learners? Did children from these different communities have different life goals?
Mary’s school in Ganado was on the west side of the Fort Defiance Plateau out of Window Rock, the heart of Navajoland. Borrego was located on the remote southeastern corner of the reservation, a region known as the Checkerboard Area because of its mix of federal, state, private, and reservation land. Since our students came from very different parts of the reservation, we decided we could explore these questions by asking our classes to correspond with each other by e-mail. Our project would focus on fostering understanding and friendships among Navajo children with different backgrounds and experiences. As the students developed relationships online through writing prompts and focused discussion topics, we would make a series of outdoor trips together with the hope that meeting in the outdoors would deepen these friendships, opening a dialogue that would color the differences and similarities between the two groups. Perhaps that information would help the students become better students and help Mary and me become better teachers.
During the weeks before we left for Mission: Wolf, the online correspondence between the students had been reserved, a little unfriendly, even slightly antagonistic. Some wrote their introduction letters as if to a machine, as if they didn’t understand that a real person waited to receive that letter on the other end. Others wrote aggressively, warily, regarding the unseen online partner as a stranger to guard themselves against. Was it the technology they didn’t trust, Mary and I asked, or was this a sign that these kids were so different, so separated by geography and socioeconomic situations, that the project had already given us its outcome? We didn’t know. We charged ahead with organizing our first camping trip.
The trip to Mission: Wolf was plagued from the beginning. None of the boys in my classes, who had committed to going, showed up at the bus the morning we departed. We waited for them for nearly an hour. It was just as well, I thought. I had worried over what mischief the boys would bring. I found middle school girls easier to work with. They sat still and listened for nearly an entire class period, while the boys seemed always to be up and around, agitated even, as if something big needed doing and they planned on doing it. On more than one occasion I sat in for a teacher who was out sick, or out turkey hunting, or just down and out, and as instructed, I would plug the class into some action movie in the library. As soon as the lights went out, the boys moved into stealth mode, creeping in and around and behind the stacks on their bellies, and one or two of them would inevitably find their way to the door and slither out into the free world. On several occasions, I ended up separating a few boys hidden under the tables with their hands down each other’s pants. I had no moral position against boys diddling each other, but somehow the school library didn’t seem like the right place. Of all my roles as a teacher, I disliked playing cop the most, so I was happy to be traveling with a group of eight girls. They would be reasonable and helpful, I surmised. They would respond if I asked something of them. Among them were all of my best students at Borrego: Vanessa Angel, Teresa Smith, Jolanda Jones, Linda Yazzie, and Renee Benally.
I was especially pleased that Renee showed up that morning. Academically, she led the eighth-grade class, not just in language arts but in all subjects. On any given day when the rest of her classmates were cutting up, bouncing around the room from seat to seat, firing rude questions or answers at me or each other, Renee might be the only student in the room working. She seemed to value what she learned in the classroom. She always finished her homework, always paid attention, always offered to answer questions during discussion, always talked about going on to high school and then to college. I found in her not a desire to please, but a desire to know. She was curious and intelligent. I noticed that when I talked about other places I had lived, she could not take her eyes off me. I sensed in her a deep questioning about the world. She seemed to want to explore, to grow beyond the borders of her life at Borrego Pass.
One day at the end of class, I asked Renee if she wanted to travel. She told me yes, that she wanted to see other places. She wanted to go to school somewhere outside the reservation, then come back home when she was older and give something back to her community. In her words, she wanted to “do something good for the Navajos.” That sounded like a rare and mature goal, to be sure, and her motivation came from within. If she had support from her parents and peers, it was likely encouragement to stay home. She would have to defy some of the values of her community in order to give back to it. Where her motivation and energy came from, only she knew. I guessed that she’d had a relatively ordinary childhood for a Borrego kid. She grew up in a modest house with her parents and grandparents. She rarely, if ever, left Borrego Pass, let alone the reservation. Still, her spirit wandered. She knew that a larger world of places and experiences awaited her if she just stepped out the door. This kind of vision was lost on most kids at Borrego. Working with Renee in the classroom, I wanted to champion this energy. She was the first student I found myself rooting for. Perhaps this was a sign that I was becoming a real teacher. I didn’t know whether or how I could help her along on this path, but I wanted to try. Maybe the trip to Mission: Wolf was a start.
As we neared the top of Raton Pass, the storm’s intensity grew. The snow made the dark sky a whirling white. Redd looked grave as he opened his window just enough to spit into the storm. He repositioned his grip on the wheel and pressed into the big hill.
“Too bad weather for camping,” he said, shaking his head. “Too cold and wet. We should go back. That other bus maybe already turned back.”
The trouble with turning back was that I was bringing most of the food and Mary had all the cooking gear. If we turned back for Borrego and Mary made it through to Mission: Wolf, her group would have pots and pans, but nothing to cook. If we pressed on and they turned back, the opposite would be true. We needed each other. Yet it seemed like madness to go on. If we did turn back, I could only hope we would see the Ganado bus on the opposite side of the freeway and flag them down. We had a hundred-mile lead on them, but at the slow speeds we had traveled all day, it was possible they might overtake us. Perhaps they had already overtaken us. The question I had to answer was not whether we could make it, but whether Mary was willing to brave this storm. If she had already turned back, then we needed to do the same. From what I knew of her, she was still on the road. Mary would expect the snow to stop and the sky to clear. In fact, I expected Mary to see the storm as a good omen. It would blow itself out, she might be thinking, and we would wake in the mountains to sunshine.
Redd felt certain that no bus driver he could think of would keep going in a storm like this. “No,” said Redd. “This isn’t busing weather. That other bus? They turned back already.”
“Yeah,” one of the girls said from the back. “Let’
s go home.”
“Yeah,” everyone chimed together.
As we approached the summit, Redd pointed out the big trucks pulling off the road into the rest area to wait out the storm in the parking lot. They gathered there under the big yellow highway lamps, idling and smoking up the swirling snow.
“See,” Ray said. “This ain’t busing weather.”
Both options seemed like defeat to me. Pressing on into the storm to go camping was, as Redd had asserted, a little idiotic, especially with a bus full of hungry children. To turn back felt like betrayal. Betrayal of the project, betrayal of the investment we had so far made in the trip, and especially betrayal of Mary and the students from Ganado. I had to make a decision.
“Okay, okay, okay,” I finally said. “Then let’s go back.”
All the girls cheered.
Redd shrugged his shoulders and spat out the window. “That’s what I said anyway,” he said. “Too cold for camping.”
Redd pulled into the rest area behind a line of trucks and swung around, and we bounced through the snowy parking lot and eased out onto the freeway headed south, back home.
“Hey, Mr. Cas-well,” Jolanda said from the back of the bus. “Can we go over there to Apache?”
The Apache reservation was much closer to Borrego than to the little town of Raton, where we were now, but I thought that Jolanda was trying to tell me she didn’t want to go home. She wanted to go camping somewhere. Anywhere. She wanted adventure. I hadn’t completely given up either. Somewhere in my hopes we would see the Ganado bus headed up over the pass, and we’d turn north again and follow them in to Mission: Wolf.