on the reservation

Where to start? I’ve been on the reservation since Friday night. It’s been uncommonly rainy here for the last few weeks. Everything’s green, but apparently this is the exception. My host, David, is a teacher here, and he’s going back to school tomorrow morning. The teachers will be there for 2 weeks before the kids go back. The school here is a grant school, which means they have to jump through myriad hoops in order to keep receiving tax money. This mainly consists of filling out tons of forms on demographics, making sure attendance is high, and lots and lots of tests. It’s a bureaucratic nightmare. Yesterday I met David’s friend Alison, a second-grade teacher at the school. She is a character. We went hunting for cool stuff out in the wilderness in the early afternoon. To Alison, cool stuff includes rocks and old pieces of glass and metal. She wanted to show us the skin of a horse, but apparently someone or something had dragged it off (the fact that there was a horse skin means someone ate a horse). Horses, dogs and cattle roam around freely here. I was on the lookout for snakes and scorpions for photos, but didn’t see any. After walking around in the hot sun for an hour or so, we went to the baseball field. Baseball is the big event on Saturday. David and Alison recognized only a few people at this particular game, which they said is unusual, as there are only a couple thousand people on the reservation. It was some sort of league game against a nearby tribe. There was a concession stand by the field, where I was able to sample a local staple food called frybread (yeah, fried bread). After I’d eaten almost all of it, Alison informed me that it had been cooked in lard :/. This is the food that the federal government gives to Natives, white flour and tubs of lard. We got back in Alison’s Jeep and headed toward UFO. UFO is a mountain where a local had set some tires on fire and rolled them down the side, and the local fire-and-brimstone preacher (yeah, their culture has been seriously damaged) claimed it was aliens, and the congregation should go get their guns and fight them. Needless to say, the preacher lost some credibility. We were only there for a few minutes, but it was long enough for me to get some good shots of UFO and a broken-down Spanish home made from rocks. The Navajos built with the same stones, but their buildings are always circular with doors facing to the East, and the Spanish built with square walls (not that you probably care). We headed back to the local store, which has a giant wall of Coke products. That was definitely the saddest thing I’ve seen here. Across the street, candidates were proselytizing and trying to get votes in the upcoming elections. Corruption is rampant here in the form of embezzlement. We sat down and I listened to Alison and David talk about how the kids here have basically given up, and they just don’t care about school or anything else, and also about how the administration is constantly making impossible demands, and how teachers generally don’t last more than a year here. We headed back to the house, where David’s wife Jenny had prepared a huge meal of turkey, potatoes, yams, and broccoli. I skipped the turkey, but had some leftover salad instead. Jenny and I stayed up while David slept on the couch and had a great conversation.

Today I woke up around 11, and we headed down to Alison’s house to help her move some of the heavier junk that she has filling her house. Alison used to be an auction scout, and ended up buying a ton of random stuff which now makes it nearly impossible to move in her Frank Lloyd Wright-looking duplex apartment. After this, David, Jenny, and I headed to the Wellness Center, which totally blew me away. It’s like a YMCA, really state-of-the art. Fully equipped weight room, 10 really nice stationary bikes, basketball/volleyball court, showers, and there’s even an indoor climbing wall. They also have copies of P90X and Insanity. I’d never heard of Insanity until today, but I gave it a shot. David and Jenny kept telling me I might not be able to make it. Fortunately, I picked a workout from the recovery week which wasn’t all that difficult (it wasn’t labeled as such). Jenny did the workout with me, while David walked on the treadmill and milled around the various machines. Tomorrow, I think I’ll try one of the harder ones and see if it’s as big and bad as they say. Right after I finished, one of the personal trainers, and David’s friend, Archie invited us to dinner at his place. This was the first time David and Jenny had been invited to the home of one of the Natives, so we cancelled our plan to watch Princess Mononoke with Alison. When we arrived, Archie had a wood fire going on the grill. I was surprised to find out that he had multiple fruit trees growing in a small orchard— apples, pears, peaches, and plums, all organic. I was able to eat some of each right off the tree, and even got to take a couple pounds of plums and peaches with me. After some steaks had been cooking on the grill, about 9 Navajos began to emerge from the house. Archie and his wife had family from Mississipi who’d come in the same day as me. I passed on the steak, but there were homemade tortillas and potatoes which were quite good. Archie will be working at the Wellness Center tomorrow, and apparently he knows all the traditional Navajo stories. I’ll have to set the alarm to make sure I have time to talk to him. I met a couple of Navajos earlier today at the basketball court, and there should be more there tomorrow. I neglected to mention… I was going to leave this evening, but it looked like there was going to be some heavy rain, and David suggested I stay another night. I agreed. It turned out I would have probably avoided the storm… but I’ll be heading out tomorrow after David gets off work. The plan is to get to the Large Array around sundown and take some pictures, then ride toward Pie Town…. there’s another town on the way there that I can’t remember the name of. Anyway, it seems there’s a bunch of hippies in both of these towns that live in adobes, so the plan is to see if I can meet some people and get inside one. Pie Town is famous for their pies (shocking, I know), and they’re really cheap, so I might gain some weight. I’ll try to hitch from Pie Town up to the Petrified Forest Road, which is about 15 miles long. The Painted Desert is there as well, so I plan to spend quite a bit of time there with the camera. Then I’ll bike up to Hwy 40, and try to hitch out to Flagstaff, where I’ll stay with a guy named Kennedy who lives in a van. So that’s the plan for the next 2 days.