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.

Weather

Last Sunday, hoarfrost painted the tips of the sagebrush on the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Reservation for about one hundred yards on each side of Highway 95. Mist rose off the macadam in wispy breaths that wavered like ghosts from the Greek tragedies. The hoarfrost only lasted for a short space but was a chorus in the morning that sang of the sleet, scant snow and rain that smattered our windshields. Remnants of a late winter storm, wet enough to make the golden eagles on the telephone poles hunch their shoulders. The clouds obscured the Santa Rosa Mountains, whose jagged ridges usually hack up the bright blue sky of northern Nevada. Dry creeks ran muddy and the way the ripples in the water caught the wan light made the surfaces seem like scaly patterns on the sides of sunfishes.

Later in the day, the contrast between the high desert and the low coastal plain hung between Nevada and California, in my mind, like comedy and tragedy penned by Euripides  and Aristophanes. Not that I wept as if I’d just read Medea, or cackled after watching a production of Frogs. Nothing so distinct as sad versus happy, but emotions that were similarly divided and evoked by the harsh and violent beauty that surrounded us. What separates the high dry of Nevada from the low and verdant damp of California are the Sierra, which this year flaunted a mantle of deep snow, and though at this late date looked like soiled white togas, still spoke of the weather that crashed face-first into the coastal headlands and barreled across the Sacramento and San Joaquin river valleys and into the mountains. Outside Reno the snow strangling the sagebrush on the cold slopes owned mule deer and coyote trails stitched into the icy white.  The long cold Washoe valley wore a hopeful look that someday spring would march into view and sing its verdant tunes of crocus buds and passerine birds that love to sit in the tops of conifers and warble their mating messages.

Monday, a stiff breeze changed the weather in northern California, from wet to sunny and dry, back to wet. The yellow blossoms of acacia trees lit up the freeways and the colors of plum and cherry and peach tree blossoms stood out like lost Greek gods calling from a bleak wilderness. The long winter rains made the country green green green and the air clean.

And for some reason it made me laugh and yet it made me sad and I don’t know why but I swelled up inside. Maybe it was nostalgia for something lost, or an appreciation of all that verve, the yellow of mustard blossoms like a billion candles burning in the green after my cold winter of dry bitterbrush and winter fat. Maybe.