Month: January 2012

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Cowboy Reggae on the Road to Elko

Scattered clouds that reminded me of lace, of lenses, of mackerel backs dodged the sun and swamped the tops of mountains. Scattered patches of ice gave way to spots of snow, then as we ascended into the Owyhee highland country, snow masked the bottoms of sagebrush.

We climbed out of the Snake River Valley and up to Grasmere where a herd of pronghorns galloped west, then east, then stopped and watched us as the sun lit up their shiny white rumps. They looked like bright lights.

Pronghorn at Grassmere

On the Duck Valley Shoshone-Paiute Reservation, caballos stopped foraging and watched us as we sped by towards the towns of Owyhee and Mountain City and on into the Owyhee River Canyon. Dark red willows, orange-yellow willows loomed over patches of ice and patches of dark water peopled with mallards and buffleheads.

Duck Valley Caballos

Halfway between Mountain City and Wild Horse Reservoir a golden eagle sat on top of a pinnacle of rock and fought off a persistent wind. We stopped below but he acted more interested in keeping balance on his perch than on the photography we attempted.

Owyhee Canyon Eaqle

Ice fishermen on snow machines made patterns on the reservoir and sat on their perches as we drove on and turned into the long high plain that drains off into the Humboldt River. The clouds reminded me of cotton swabs cleansing the tops of the mountains between us and Tuscarora and the Spanish Ranch.

View from Highway 255: The Road to Elko

In Elko, we checked into the Esquire Inn and then went to dinner. Later we attended a show by the Ronstadt Generation, members of the famous Tucson musical tribe. Two guitars and a cello; one father, two sons. The father can warble. The emphasis this year at Elko and the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering turns on the southwest, so we tapped our feet and kept time with our hands to cowboy tunes, ballads and lullabies sung in Spanish. We heard jazz and blues with Woodie Guthrie tunes thrown in. In a Paul Simon piece with a strong sense of reggae, the cello sounded like the steel drums one would hear on the streets of Jamaica.

I didn’t want to go to the show, but I am glad I did. From “Malagueña” to Muddy Waters, and “Sixteen Tons” with a cello solo. Vavoom!

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On Cowboy Poetry, Elko, Teresa Jordan and Blogging

Betty and I will soon be off to Elko, Nevada for the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a celebration of the American West and an effort to preserve our western heritage.

This year we are going early so that I can attend a two day blogging workshop taught by writer Teresa Jordan. Teresa is noted for her books of non-fiction. My favorite is Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album, which is a memoir of her younger days on the family ranch north of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Sometimes I think that those of us not out rounding up and branding calves think that cow folk have vastly different lives than we do. Teresa’s book shows us that though they may have a hard physical life, ranch people have all the same issues the rest of the world deals with. I like knowing that our trials and tribulations tie us all together.

Teresa is also a great blogger so I am hopeful that attending the workshop and hearing more experienced bloggers talk will spur me into writing timelier and better blogs. I write two blogs and like most things in my life, when I began them I had lots of torment and anxiety to write about and I think some of the blogs were pretty fair country writing. But after two years, my energy has waned and I am tired of the routine, the demands I have created for myself. So…on to Elko

I recall reading in a book that a lot of the academia responsible for educating America’s writers is concerned about the level of writing and reading in America today. People aren’t writing nor are they reading, or so the conventional wisdom goes. But after becoming a blogger, I have discovered an immense community of young people out there both writing and reading blogs. It’s not Jane Austen or Ernest Hemingway, but a lot of the stuff I have read is very well composed, whether in a technical vein or something more in the creative non-fiction milieu. I suppose blogging doesn’t match up to Homer or Virginia Wolfe, but I still think that since people are writing and reading that writing, discourse and democracy and thought and discussion are still going on and that’s what matters. And some of the blogs are really well written…downright exciting.

Some things about blogging are technical. How to set up a page and put in plug-ins and widgets and compose in HTML. A lot of the technical stuff is beyond me. In my earlier years I would have crashed into the technology head-on, but these days, if I can’t figure it out ricky-tick (as Michael Deede, one of my sergeants in Vietnam used to say), then I hire a pro or flounder around.

But a lot of things about blogging have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with story. Is there a compelling conflict, or obstacle the blogger or someone the blogger writes about must overcome? How that conflict or obstacle is tackled is what makes the blog work, or not work if the writing doesn’t meet the challenge thrown down by the task. It is not so important if the obstacle is overcome or not, but how it is written that matters.

Besides obstacles, are the people in the blog interesting? Can we see the people through the images the writer chooses to describe them? If there is a setting, is that visual and are all the five senses involved in the writing? We are visual critters, but words that evoke smell, sound, touch and taste also add to the complexity and rich texture of a blog. Is the language peppy and musical and appropriate to the mood of the piece?

Is the blog about something important? When I say that I mean does it delve into the essential questions that we encounter in our lives. I’m not saying it has to be composed as if the blogger is Plato or Francis Bacon or George Santayana, but we often read to discover how someone else solves the common problems we all deal with: love, hate, war, death, and the wide array of emotions that rise from the bottom of our cowboy boots to the tops of our Stetsons, every single day.

Just standing here composing this is energizing me to get down to Elko and work with Teresa and the rest of the people who will help me become a better blogger. While in Elko, we will also be taking photographs, talking about making films, talking about music and poetry, listening to music and poetry and prose, talking about the past and future heritage of the American West. And yes, I will do some blogging.

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Gesture

Four days before Christmas last Betty and I ventured to Socorro, San Antonio and the Bosque del Apache on the Rio Grande River in central New Mexico. We went in search of photography and nature and hot chili.

Dodging uncharacteristic assaults of big blizzards, we spent a day and a half seeking and photographing the great migratory birds; cranes and snow geese. We went in search of the Owl Cafe and green chili cheeseburgers. We sought raptors, songbirds, waterfowl, cottonwood trees, fiery skies, roseate sunrise and sunset. We found all of that.

Bosque del Apache, San Antonio, New Mexico

At dawn the sandhill cranes awoke and began their morning gestures. They skraked, croaked, walked and pranced, flapped their great gray wings and pirouetted against each other like high school kids sparking at an after-football-game dance.

Sandhill Cranes

Then the snow geese rose off the water and flew in wide formations towards their corn field feeding grounds. They reminded me of upset old drill instructors yelling at each other over recruits, this all magnified by the thousands. The geese’s great World War II bomber-like formations etched against the dull gray skies that threatened us with foul weather.

The racket bounced off the flat water and hustled up to the sage covered hills. It was cacophony. Music. Conversation.

Bald eagles watched from dead snags in the middle of ponds and pintail ducks with their elegant necks dabbled, quacked and whistled. Ladderback woodpeckers ascended the trunks of cottonwoods, the willows captured solstice light with a color quality of polished Spanish doubloons. Patches of cattails blew puffs of cotton-like pollen that gleamed in the glare of the sun.

Redtail Hawk

Avian mayhem carried the day punctuated by cries of alarm when fancy-coated coyotes sneaked around with their tongues dangling from the sides of their snouts. Javelina gangs rooted in the roads. Roadrunners lifted fancy crowns, then hid them, then lifted them, as if sending us signals.

At the Owl Cafe in San Antonio, where Conrad Hilton cut his teeth, green chili burned our lips, our palates, made our foreheads sweat. Not once, not twice, but three times, we let the savory flare of chili reconnoiter our mouths and conjure our ancient New Mexican memories.

Threats of a big blizzard kept showing up with other rumors: an Aplomado falcon on the south end of the preserve, a herd of elk grazing in one of the corn fields, mule deer bucks locking horns along one of the ditches on the east side, a bobcat darting across the road just below the visitor center. For us, these rumors all remained unfounded.

Sandhill Crane

We went armed with our photography gear, waiting for the gestures, the moments that told us something was afoot not tied to our Anglo-Saxon lexicon. Something in the way a wing gets lifted, or how the sun shines off the white pate of a bufflehead duck. Gestures that communicate something different from what we know. Or that tell us something common to all of us: humans, birds, New Mexican dirt, the aurora borealis, the universe.

Maybe we found it. Maybe we didn’t and imagined that we did. I am not sure there is a difference. The thrill often lies in the quest. Seeking holds much meaning.

The bird song, the crane cries, the goose flight, the rough coats of the javelina illuminate my thoughts.

Leaving Socorro, where we spent the nights, specks of snow dotted our windshield as we went in search of our next adventure.

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Canyon de Chelly

Recently Betty and I journeyed to the Southwest to show our film and visit family members who live there. On the way back to Idaho, we visited a few places that we had not seen for many years as well as a few places that were on our wish list.

One of the destinations was Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona. I was born and raised in Arizona and yet had never ventured there. My father often talked about us visiting Canyon de Chelly. (He pronounced Chelly, as Shelly, instead of the Spanishized word “Chelly,” which has been incorporated into English so that it is pronounced “de shay.” The Navajo word for the canyon is “Tseyi” which was borrowed by the Spanish as “de Chelly” and incorporated into English from there.) But we never went and I suppose it was because my father did not like to go anywhere too far from his house, his job, his business, and I also think he didn’t really want to go much of anywhere with me. My saying as much isn’t to rebuke my father, because I was a handful when young, always getting into messes in places I had no business getting into. I talked incessantly and asked a lot of questions. I had opinions—strong ones—which when expressed, often made my father’s face turn the red color of the cliffs in northern Arizona.

In the summer of 1963, I worked on the Navajo Nation in a little slaughter house that killed dry ewes. The packing plant sat on a small piece of private land outside of Window Rock, not really that far from Canyon de Chelly. But I never ventured to the canyon, just hung out trying to see if I liked smoking cigarettes, getting trucks stuck in the snotty clay of a wet summer, dreaming about sex and being scared near to death about the sin of it all, the chilling thrill.

But two days before Christmas of 2011, Betty and I met Leon Skyhorse Thomas, a Navajo guide, musician, filmmaker and native ceremonial officiate, at the visitor’s center of the canyon. We climbed into his beat-up white Jeep with our camera gear and drove into the heart of Canyon de Chelly. The walls are the color of terra cotta when the light is right, and almost orange when the light is right a different way. They shoot right up like someone cut them with a cross-cut saw, then used an adze to shape them. It was early and cold and the breeze was like Kit Carson’s saber when he drove his U S Army troops into the canyon in the 1860s to destroy the native strongholds and their beloved peach tree orchards.

First Ruin

The ride in was rough along roads that seemed to change like the tracks of sidewinders in a wind- driven sand. The walls were narrow and Chinle Creek was mostly frozen. I asked about the notorious quicksand of the canyon and he laughed and told me he’d buried three vehicles in the canyon. After hearing that, I seemed to sit lighter in my seat as we jounced and bounced and battered our way down the track between the narrow walls. Several times Leon stopped, got out, and surveyed which route might be the best.

There are still farms in the bottom of the canyon, and people live there in the summer. The way the light lit up the warm, south-facing walls of the canyon played against the dark walls of the cold side and we were rocking and reeling back and forth between the dark and the light.

White House Ruin

Leon spoke Navajo to us. A lot. He sang to us in Navajo, too, and he chanted a prayer. And he took us to First Ruin and White House Ruins and to natural alcoves, one where Navajos had scratched pictographs in charcoal that documented a Ute Indian raid into the canyon. We saw Anasazi petroglyphs and Hopi petroglyphs and both ancient and more modern native pictographs. Petroglyphs are art sculpted into rock. Pictographs are painted with pigment onto rock. And the wind knifed through the bare limbs of the cottonwood trees. And the cold pelts of the resident cattle and horses were fluffed up to deflect the cut of the morning.

Canyon de Chelly Petroglyphs

Once, parked next to some rock art, Leon began to explain the Navojo sensibility vis a vis the canyon. As he spoke he changed from English to Navajo. We didn’t know what the words meant but we understood the emotion of them as they flew away from Leon and married the sculpted and concave walls of the towering cliffs. His words began to echo, around and around us, through the trees, along the fence lines, and back against the walls.

Canyon de Chelly Pictograph of Ute Raid Into the Canyon

For visitors to Canyon de Chelly, there are motels with clean rooms and good food. The Navajo people are friendly and attentive. I suspect summertime is very busy and very hot. The fall might be the best time to go, because as Betty likes to say, the fall is always the best time to travel.