The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, May 9th. It is the 43rd of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Ben Folds, and the Things We Aren’t
The lock screen on my computer (do you call it a lock screen?) is always a different picture. Every few days it changes. I don’t know who changes it. Microsoft, I guess. A new picture comes up, and it’s almost always beautiful, and a little text box talks about the place but doesn’t say where it is (it’s trying to get you to click, which will take you to Bing) while another text box says the name and location of what you’re seeing. (Which really defeats the purpose of the aforementioned clickbait, as though it’s saying, “Well ok, I know you don’t want to go to Bing, but I had to try—here it is!”)
I realize now, after describing all of this, that many of you probably know this setup personally. I may have just described the very experience you experienced moments before beginning to read this essay, one that is a facet of your everyday existence. Many of you probably use Windows 10, or whatever Windows we’re on. You probably also have the Microsoft-chosen-rotating-picture-lock-screen.
But for those of you that don’t have the Microsoft-chosen-rotating-picture-lock-screen: It’s kind of fun.
Earlier this week, between a picture of a flock of penguins (do we call them flocks?) charging down a sand dune (I’m sorry, I don’t have any more context—I didn’t click into Bing) and a picture of a French town largely unchanged from medieval days, my lock screen was a picture of some indigenous settlements nestled into a red canyon wall. They looked familiar. They were familiar. They were settlements at Canyon de Chelly.
Canyon de Chelly sits in the heart of Navajo Nation, a doughnut of land across bits of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. It’s slightly larger than the state of West Virginia. It’s a long way away from me as I write this. It’s probably a long way away from you.
We’d been at Mesa Verde National Park, down in the southwestern corner of Colorado, having driven west to Des Moines and south through Kansas City to Manhattan and then slowly upwards, crossing Kansas to Denver before a morning’s drive through the mountains took us down to Durango and through it, to those cliff dwellings in those canyons. It was a few hours more to Chinle—the town that sits at the mouth of the canyon—but Jake wanted to hike in the morning before our midday jeep tour, so we left Mesa Verde without eating dinner and entered the reservation. The sun was setting as we stopped at Four Corners, and it was a sad sunset, because Four Corners is—or was that evening—kind of sad. The air was purple then, and we cut through it in the shadows of sandstone towers, and there would be no sign of inhabitation for miles save for the angled ribbon of pavement and the cars stretched out, dotted along it, little bits of light sliding on across the empty.
We passed a high school that night. Red Mesa High School. The sign outside read, “Home of the Redskins,” and I did a doubletake, and when I looked it up online later on the 3G network—we’d left 4G in Colorado and LTE probably up in Denver (it was 2016)—the gist of what I read, if I remember correctly, was that the nickname had been chosen decades ago, and that they’d think about changing it now except they were more concerned with getting the uranium drinking water.
When we got into Chinle, we ate supper at a Burger King, and it seemed everyone in town was eating supper at that Burger King. The Holiday Inn we stayed at was nice—older, the age of many a Holiday Inn—but clean and comfortable. I think it had a little restaurant inside it. I remember there being a gift shop.
In the morning, Jake slept in, and I popped over to an Ace Hardware to get a valve cap for my tire, having noticed one missing at a gas station a day or two prior. I was sending a text when I got back in the car, and when I looked up, a man was at my window.
He probably wasn’t much older than I am now—a young man. There was a fog in his face, and his skin burned dully in the sun. He leaned on the car as he asked for help. I don’t remember what I gave him. I remember having a Subway gift card on me (my dad had given each of us a dozen two Christmases prior, for this sort of purpose), and I remember having seen a Subway between the hotel and the parking lot, but I don’t remember whether I gave him that, or whether I gave him anything at all, and if I did I suppose I couldn’t fully trust it now, with that interaction—that brief encounter with a desperate, struggling world just across the window from your comfortable effervescent concerns—so commonplace for those of us who’ve lived in cities. I seem to recall an anxiety that the Subway I’d seen (it would have been a gas station Subway) might not accept gift cards, or perhaps him telling me that they didn’t.
It was, of course, the exact sort of interaction you expect on a reservation. Someone in the throes of alcoholism, baking in the sun, asking hopelessly for help. A confirmation of sorts: “Yes, this is what this place is.”
But that was not what Chinle was. Or at least, it wasn’t what Canyon de Chelly was. Not the Canyon de Chelly we saw.
The deal with Canyon de Chelly is that people still live there. They still live in the canyon, many without electricity, many without running water, and they live an older sort of life. On our way in, on the jeep tour, I remember passing boys running horses. I know we passed our guide’s grandmother’s house, perhaps the only one in the canyon with electricity, adorned with solar panels our guide and his family had installed. There aren’t many people. But they’re there. And not in some historic museum sense. They’re living their life, just like you live yours, but theirs holds onto more of its ancestry than you think of lives holding.
Our guide—I think his name was James—had grown up in the canyon. It was a beautiful place. Soaring red walls; deep, sandy soil; a rich blue sky above us as we drove in. We didn’t go very deep into it. It creeps back for miles, zigging and zagging in two main prongs, with various offshoots. I think it might be multiple canyons, speaking technically, probably covering upwards of forty miles were one to walk to each tip. But I believe they have one mouth, from which their water flows in the spring, and that mouth, if I’m correct, is in Chinle.
James was a welder. He’d traveled all around the country as a welder. He’d made good money as a welder. His wife worked in the hospital in town—maybe as a nurse? He talked about a melding of cultures in Chinle, taking the best from the Europeans and the best from the Navajo and growing from that. It seemed so simple, and so true, and it made one feel good in its clarity—of course this was how it should work. Of course this was how it should have worked. Instead, there was genocide. Human nature, I guess—a shockingly counterproductive phase of evolution.
We stopped by the ruins of an ancient dwelling: Antelope House, if I had to guess now, five years later. There was a couple there selling goods out of a pickup truck. They were friends of James. The man wore a Dodgers hat and talked about his time in Los Angeles with the military. The woman sat and sold necklaces and things of the sort. I bought Emma a necklace, and they asked about our lives. I told them I’d be working for Target after the trip, up at their headquarters. “Tar-zhay!” the man laughed. “She loves Tar-zhay.” And his wife confirmed—she did love shopping at Target.
We drove up to Moab from there. Ate at the Burger King again. I wish I’d pushed to eat somewhere local. It was still a gorgeous day, and as we passed into Utah we saw plowed red fields, like normal fields to us, but red, as though our car’s windows had taken on a filter from a broken television. It was beautiful. It was a beautiful day. And I floated, on the beauty of the day and on the good feelings of what James had said and on the hope his words brought.
I do not possess the knowledge necessary to speak on America’s relationship with its original inhabitants except to say I know it’s too complex for me to speak on it and say anything much worth saying. I want to say, “Look at James, look at his words, look at how things should be,” because it’s good and true and obvious, but what is good and true and obvious on the back of centuries of unspeakable violence? Saying we should have coexisted and bettered each other is so far from what happened that it’s insulting. It doesn’t solve anything. It can’t change the unchangeable. But I guess I’ll say this, to myself and the rest of you:
I think you should care about Navajo Nation. I think you should care about all of this world. But Navajo Nation—like the 325 land areas smaller than it that also fit broadly under the category of “reservations”—is accessible. It’s there. It’s in Chinle, Arizona, and it stretches for miles around it, and right there next to Chinle is a majestic, magical, storied channel through the desert rock—a channel burned by the sun and stained with the blood of our national sins (really—our soldiers killed a lot of people there once) and still somehow hopeful. I think you should go there. I think you should see it, and talk to it, and allow it to be known to you. Because in the canyon are people. Just people. Like how you and me are just people. Some of whom, like so many of us, like to shop at Target.
Next week’s essay: On a Morning Last February
