by Kurt Caswell
As I saw it, none of these children were going to the spelling bee to win a championship or to prove that they had mastered the English language and would prosper in a white, literate society. They just wanted to go somewhere, anywhere really, and do something different from what they had always done. Anywhere outside Borrego Pass was a good place to go, because for most of them the world beyond Borrego was a dark mystery. Who could say what it was like out there? Who could say what other Navajos did in this world, how they lived, what they ate, how they talked? And who could say what white people did out beyond the borders of Borrego, what they looked like, what they wore, how they smelled? This alien world frightened many of these children who lived so isolated and so simply. Time to face it, perhaps, time to get out and have a look around and live some stories that would sound good now, and years later, when told back home.
Renee, Vanessa, and Linda had all traveled with me to Mission: Wolf. I was a little surprised and also honored that they trusted me enough to try it again. Maybe they had forgiven me for all the misadventures of that last trip, or perhaps they had decided those misadventures were just the sort of adventures they were looking for. If so, I had something to learn from the way they let those feelings go, or transformed them, or whatever. I still packed around a load of guilt and sense of failure about that trip.
I worked with the children on their spelling words while the front office staff arranged for three rooms at the Thunderbird Inn at the mouth of Canyon de Chelly, secured a bus driver and some cash, and registered the spellers in the bee; and soon we were off.
The sun rose up into the morning behind us, a clear New Mexican spring morning, as we motored down the bumpy dirt road. It smoothed out as we crossed the cattle guard and hit the pavement, then merged onto Interstate 40 headed east to Gallup.
Judy Yazzie sat across the aisle from me, three rows from the front of the school bus, perched at the outside of her seat looking onto the New Mexican landscape unfolding in front of her. She wore round glasses that looked like big balloons resting on her cheeks. She was in the third grade at Borrego Pass and had never traveled very far from home. She had never been anywhere, really, except to school and to the Gallup Wal-Mart. Her parents had been away for a week now, and her big sister, Carmen, was in charge of the house. Since Carmen was going to the Eastern Navajo Agency Spelling Bee in Chinle, Judy was going too.
Betty, our driver, had requested the trip because she loved to travel, she said, not unlike Redd, who had driven to Mission: Wolf.
“But I don’t go for no camping out,” Betty had said. “I want a nice room and a nice restaurant.”
Betty was popular among the students because she was lighthearted, patient, and kind. She always carried in her coat pocket a can of chew that she might at any moment pass around the bus. Do I hear repeat performance? She did her hair up high above her head, and she was thin and frail-looking from smoking too much. If ever she raised her voice at the children while driving, they would watch her reflection in the big rear-view mirror, because the more excited she became, the more forceful her voice got, until a vaporous fume of residual smoke steamed out of her mouth against the glass. They quieted down real quick, not because they were afraid of her but because they wanted to see that smoke come out. I’d heard them call her the Dragon Lady.
Somehow it happened that the only bus available for our trip was the four-wheel-drive monster that sat so high above the ground. The extra clearance made it a dream in winter, in heavy mud or when it snowed, but on the open highway, it was a slow, jumpy ride, the bus bumping up and back over the smallest imperfections in the asphalt. The children sat as close to the back as they could (except little Judy, who sat near the front), and when the bus went over a bump in the road, it catapulted them up off their seats. If it was a particularly good bump, they might even be so lucky as to knock their heads on the ceiling.
We shot down the interstate at a wild fifty miles per hour, everyone in the back waiting, waiting, waiting, and then the nose of the bus sank into a sharp trough in the freeway, and the tail end of it came up. “Whooooaaa,” we heard as they came back down, their eyes big and round. And then another, and then bump, we heard as the suspension stiffened and press down against the axles and the earth like we were flying out on a Borrego dirt road, and then thunk! we heard as a cluster of little heads smacked the roof. I looked back to see them all rubbing the sore spots with their hands and laughing. We hit maximum speed, maybe 55, and I watched as cars, pickups, tractor-trailers, and even old ranch trucks hauling mile-high loads of hay driven by old ladies with glasses so thick they were legally blind, all of them moved out into the passing lane to steam by us, a stream of bright yellow New Mexico license plates lining out into the distance.
“Did you hear about Marcella?” Lauren asked. “Since she’s on the trip.”
“No,” I said.
“You know how she always carries that bag around school? Even out at recess?” Lauren said.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve noticed that.”
“Well, Bob King asked her if he could see it on Tuesday. And she didn’t want to show it to him. He insisted, of course, and she still refused. So he asked her to come into his office. She went along, and Louise and a couple other teachers were in there to help. Marcella let them open the bag, of course. And it was filled with stuff she was selling at school. All stolen stuff. Candy, sodas, little portable CD players, music CDs, hairspray and cologne, cigarettes, Copenhagen, makeup, lots of stuff.”
“For reals?” I said.
“For reals,” Lauren said. “I just thought you should know.”
“So what happened to her? No suspension or anything?”
“I don’t know. I think she went home for the day. Louise talked to her mother, I think. What can you do?”
Betty pulled off the interstate at Thoreau. We drove along a fence line crowded with trash and tumbleweeds collected against it by the wind. On the edge of the reservation boundary we passed a store where, if you knew which door to knock on, you could enter and buy alcohol. The big cottonwood across the road was the only shade nearby, except for the freeway overpass. There were always a few Navajo men lying or sitting or standing around it. We stopped at the gas station, and Betty ordered everyone off the bus. “No one on the bus while gassing up!” she said. “Regulations.”
Everyone filed down the steps and outside. The children raced into the store, digging into their pockets for hidden money. Despite the poverty on this part of the reservation, every time I traveled on a school outing, the kids had money for candy and sodas. Plenty of it. Lauren and I discussed setting a candy limit, but we knew we couldn’t enforce it. We decided that the faster their money was gone, the better. Soon we were back on the bus and rolling down the freeway to the spelling bee.
When we arrived in Chinle, we drove east on Highway 7 to the mouth of Canyon de Chelly. The Thunderbird Inn was usually crawling with tourists, but it was early in the season and we had the place largely to ourselves. We checked in at the front desk. Betty took us around the building and parked the bus. When the room doors opened, the kids rushed inside in a wave, the boys into one room, the girls into the other two. They inspected everything: the beds, the telephone, the TV, the running water, the free shampoo and soap, the clear plastic drinking cups. They looked at themselves in the mirrors, bounced a little on the beds, turned on the bathtub spigot until the water was too hot to hold their hands there. They pressed their faces into the fresh white towels. They pulled open all the drawers in all the dressers. In the boys’ room, Tom Charlie discovered the Holy Bible, placed by the Gideons. The telephone rang.
Tom, who was leafing through the pages of Exodus, looked at the phone as it rang. He had probably used a telephone only a few times in his life, and he certainly did not have one at home. It rang again. And then again.
“Well, pick it up,” I said.
He did, and pressed it to his ear. He waited. Nothing happened. We waited with him, and still
nothing happened.
“Say hello,” Miles told him.
“Hello?” Tom said.
“Hello?” said Valeria Benally, calling from the girls’ room. I could hear her voice coming from the phone and also from the open door.
They both sat there.
“Hello,” Tom said again.
“Ask her what she wants,” Miles said.
“What do you want?” Tom said.
In the other room, Valeria turned to Lauren and said, “What do we want?”
Lauren told her to ask if we were ready to eat dinner.
Valeria asked us. “Are you guys ready to eat dinner?”
Tom looked at me. “She wants to know if we are ready to eat dinner.”
“Are we?” I asked.
“Yeaaaah!” everyone said.
Tom sat there.
“Tell her yes,” Miles said.
“Yes,” Tom said.
“Wait,” I said. “Tom, ask Valeria if they want to go up to Spider Rock before dinner.”
“What rock?” Tom said.
“I know,” Miles said. “The one up there in the canyon.”
“Go ahead, ask her,” I said.
“Do you want to go up to Spider Rock before dinner?” Tom said.
Nothing happened.
“She didn’t say nothing,” Tom said. But he had let the receiver drop under his chin, and Valeria probably couldn’t hear him.
Renee poked her head into the room from the open door. “Talk into the phone,” she said. “We can’t hear you.”
Miles raised the phone up for Tom and said, “Ask it again.”
“Do you want to go up to Spider Rock before dinner?” Tom asked.
Valeria turned to Lauren in the other room. “He says do we want to go to Spider Rock before dinner?”
Lauren and I had already talked about driving up to the canyon overlook, so she told Valeria to say yes.
“Yes,” Valeria said, and hung up the phone.
Then Tom hung up the phone. He went back to looking at the Bible.
Everyone waited, staring at him.
“What did she say?” Miles asked.
“She said yes,” Tom said, turning pages and not looking up.
“Then let’s go,” I said. Tom dropped the Bible on the bed, and we filed out the door to the bus.
None of the kids except Miles, the white boy, had ever been to Canyon de Chelly, even though it is one of the most important historical and spiritual centers of Navajo culture. It was first occupied by the Anasazi some two thousand years ago, then by the Hopi people, sporadically, from about AD 1300. The Navajo displaced the Hopi about AD 1700. Until the early 1800s, the canyon was a Navajo stronghold; its sheer walls and a winding system of spur canyons offered good protection and defense. It was a place of dependable water where the people grazed sheep and goats and grew melons, corn, squash, and peaches. The Navajos looked after some five thousand producing peach trees in Canyon de Chelly until 1864, when Colonel Kit Carson and his soldiers burned them all.
Today Canyon de Chelly is a National Monument of about 83,000 acres under the joint management of the National Park Service and the Navajo Nation. Except for the trail to White House Ruin, to enter the canyon one must hire a Navajo guide. The canyon floor is still private property. Navajo families live and work down there, as they have for the past three hundred years.
The kids clustered in the back of the bus waiting for the bumps, and sometimes stuck their arms and heads out the open windows as Lauren and I sang in unison, “Don’t put your arms or heads out the window!” while the bus chugged and strained along the steep grade and we rose up and out and above the town. The air cooled and patches of snow dotted the landscape. We wound along, curve after curve, and we could see into the canyon now, see how high above we were, then again how much higher.
At the top, where the road changed from National Monument pavement to reservation dirt, we angled north along the drive and into the parking lot. The kids filed off the bus and into the evening air.
“Take your coats,” I called to them, but most of them didn’t bring a coat, or didn’t have one.
Valeria turned to face me at the bus door and said, “We don’t need no coats. We’re Nava-joes,” and she laughed and leaped down into the world.
By the time Lauren and I got off the bus, the patches of snow had already become a thousand snowballs launched among the short, twisted pines, helter-skelter. The parking lot was empty except for an older couple who hurried into their Lincoln Town Car and shut the doors. We watched as the red taillights faded into the dust kicked up from the road.
Now we were alone.
At the overlook, we stood before the canyon, which is shaped like the footprint of a great dinosaur. The toes are the north and south canyons, and the heel is the mouth of the canyon, spilling west into Chinle Wash. The sun was dropping fast into the western lands, and the light on Spider Rock was muted a soft red. The kids stood together along the railing, looking over into that huge open chasm, all the way to the bottom. A hawk sifted in and out and along the cliff face. We watched the soft movements of the wings in shadow for as long as we could see them, out over the empty space and across our dreams, all of us. It drifted beyond where we could see now, away and beyond somewhere inside the belly of Canyon de Chelly.
As we stood there together looking out on Spider Rock, the wind came up and blew through us. The air was sharp and cold. I was ready to go, ready for supper. Then Valeria called everyone over to the plaque on the sandstone retaining wall that told the story of Spider Woman in both Navajo and English.
“All right, everybody, listen up,” Valeria said as we gathered around her. “I’m going to read this story.”
Valeria had never been a strong reader in class. Most days she was reluctant, even frightened to read aloud in class, especially in English. That she was volunteering now to read to us was surprising. Perhaps something about this moment had taken hold of her, something about this place; perhaps, seeing her own language on the plaque next to the English, she felt a sense of ownership, even kinship with that language, with the canyon, and with Spider Rock. She read the story aloud, first in Navajo, then in English. The story she read goes something like this:It was Spider Woman who gave the Hero Twins power to find the path to the Sun’s house. They claimed the Sun was their father, and after passing a series of tests, the Sun agreed. He gave them magical weapons, and taught them how to slay the monsters of this world. And so Spider Woman is revered by the Navajo for helping make the world safe. After her great deed, she chose this rock spire, now known as Spider Rock, to make her home.
Spider Woman is regarded as both generous and potentially dangerous. Navajo children know that if they misbehave, Spider Woman will descend on a silken thread and take them to her home on top of the great sandstone spire. There, she will devour them as punishment for their crimes. The top of Spider Rock is white because it is blanketed with the bones of bad Navajo children.
But Spider Woman also taught the Navajos how to weave. Spider Man, her husband, constructed the loom. He made the cross poles of sky, and the chords of earth. The warp sticks he made of sun rays. He made the healds of crystals and lightning. The batten he made of a sun halo, and the comb of white shell. It is because of Spider Woman that the Navajos know how to weave, a skill that has sustained them for generations.
After the story, we lingered for a few minutes as the mood of the place and the moment transformed into memory. The children became children again, and a few snowballs went sailing. We walked back on the paved path, got on the bus, and drove back down into Chinle to find a place to eat.
We stopped at a diner with all the usuals: burgers and fries; chicken-fried steak; soups and salads; Navajo tacos. What I didn’t realize as we waited for a table was that these Navajo kids had never been to a restaurant with a waiter. On most school trips, the driver stopped at Furr’s Cafeteria in Gallup, an assembly-line style of dining that offered large portions for li
ttle money, and a comfortable degree of self-service. And of course, at school too, they ate this way in the cafeteria. What they were about to experience, they didn’t know existed.
The hostess led us to a table, and everyone sat down. Judy sat next to me at the end of the table, and across from Lauren. She noticed a big, barrel-chested Navajo man with a broad, flat nose walk by with his wife or girlfriend. They laughed together, holding hands, and he repositioned his black felt hat on his head.
Little Judy Yazzie tugged on my shirtsleeve. “Navajo people come in here?” she whispered. “They eat in here?”
I nodded. “Yes. They do.”
Our waiter appeared and handed around menus. Judy opened hers. It was big and colorful, almost as big as she was. She looked at me, then back at the menu. What did it all mean? She had never seen a menu before, never been asked to read the options and make a choice. She could read all right, as well as any third grader in America reading English as her second language, but she didn’t know what she was reading. A description of a mushroom burger made little sense to her. I tried to give her some options. Navajo taco? (She had never heard of such a thing.) Patty melt? Roast beef and mashed potatoes? Double burger?
“Double burger!” she said. “And hot chocolate.”
“That’s a pretty big dinner,” I said. “That’s two burgers on one plate.”
“Yeah,” she said.
The news that Judy had ordered a double burger spilled around the circle, and because everyone was equally befuddled by the menu, they all decided to have double burgers and hot chocolate.
“Can I have dessert?” Judy asked.
“Sure,” I said. “But let’s wait until after we eat. Then you can order again.”
“I want the double burger,” she said. “Can I have it?”
“Yes,” I said. “But you have to wait a moment. When the waiter comes over, he’ll ask you what you want, and you tell him the double burger.”