This is Uncle Ben. I would like to share this true story my friend Dan Geiger experienced recently. He said I could share it with you. In it you will find a completely different aspect of America that few people know. The Navajo Nations of Native Americans is in New Mexico and part of Arizona in the South Western region of the United States.
Navajo is pronounced as though it were written Nava-ho.
Navajo Country
Driving through the Navajo Country in New Mexico, great expanses of the earth rise and fall like great ocean waves. Islands of red rock offer sanctuary as I cling to a small black thread known as Route 66. The Creator has been both harsh and kind to a land that has no beginning and no end.
Red cliffs wrinkled and smoothed by time's tools, wind and water, expose only the most recent chapter of millions of chapters lost in archives unknowable to man. These atoms have existed in eternity but have shifted in form as described in the many stories of creation. Today they exist in this form to create this ancient landscape. What form they will take in the future is an infinite mystery that our finite minds can not imagine. The knowable surface of this ocean hides the unknowable depths of the future.
Lured to the depths of this great sea by my imagination, I am dangerously popped to the surface by the jarring of my car hitting a pothole in the road. Abrupt decompression leaves my mind gasping for sense in a reality thin with justice. I quickly return to a place that reflects the attributes of the Creator leaving my subconscious to steer the car. After awhile the constant tugging of my conscious mind reels me back to the surface in time to observe a Navajo Hogan or prayer house nestled in the cliffs. My subconscious has alreadya slowed the car in time to turn up a red dirt road leading to the Hogan.
The modern technology of my automobile isolates me from this sacred earth until I stop the car and step out into a world of smells, sounds, warmth and colors hidden by my impersonal steed. Parked a few hundred feet below the Hogan, I sit on a rock and enjoy sage, sun, symmetry and song as a sparrow chips from a nearby bush. Minutes silently tick away an hour on a wrist watch stuffed into my pocket when a worn Toyota pickup turns off 66 and bounced the half mile toward me. Its dark blue color is lightened by coats of dust. Stopping next to my car, its rough idling engine shakes some of the newest dust off like a wet dog emerging from a river.
"Lost?" yells the driver over the noise of the rattling engine.
"Not since you found me," I answer.
"What if I'm lost too?" the driver returns the humor with humor.
"Then we are both in trouble," I answer. The driver, a Navaho man in his late 60's radiates warmth with the smile lines in his face and gentleness in his voice. "Does your back work? I could use some help with these buckets", he asks. He is referring to nine 5-gallon plastic buckets filled with water in the back of his pickup.
"It was working yesterday, I can give you a hand," I answer.
"Leave that fancy car there and ride with me," he says pointing to the Hogan and a small house two hundred yards up a steep questionable road. "I'm George," he says as he shifts the pickup into first gear and lets it pick its own way up the rocky narrow road, much like a horse would find its way home. "What did you say your name is?"
"I'm Dan," I answer.
"You know any lions?" he says, joking about the biblical story of Daniel in the lion den.
"None that I wanted to know." I quip back. After 200 bumps and as many yards we stop in front of a small one room house.
"We can leave the water here," he says pointing to a place next to the front door. "This one goes inside," he says pointing to the last bucket unloaded from the pickup. "Put it there," he says pointing to a counter top next to a sink without a faucet. The room is simple. The walls are covered with pictures of family: grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren. A 3x5 foot woven Navajo rug hangs on the wall and one half of a finished rug hangs in a handloom. The intricate pattern in the rug presents an optical illusion of three rugs in one. A larger one overlaid by a medium ne and in turn overlaid by a small rug. From a distance it looks as if three rugs are piled on top of each other but in reality it is just one rug. I estimate this rug to sell in Santa Fe for several thousand dollars. A handsome price but one patiently earned a dollar at a time with each painstakingly warf and weave of the loom.
"Sit," George says pointing to an old over-stuffed chair. It is the most comfortable chair in the room and appears to be reserved for guests. George sits on an overturned wooden apple crate. He strikes a wooden match on the nearby wood burning stove and lights a hand rolled cigarette, one that was rolled so quickly I missed the actual rolling and assumed he pulled it out of a pack of cigarettes. It is the same illusion a quick draw artist presents.
"Smoke?" He says offering me a pouch of tobacco and a book of cigarette papers. "No, I've got other bad habits," I answer.
"Yeah, we wouldn't want to get too healthy," he says.
"I don't have to worry about that," I say.
End of part 1.
