Todays audio update: Navajo film location manager Orville Sisco expresses his respect for Monument Valley. Lost to a world in which I crave no part,
I sit alone and commune with my heart,
Pleased with my little corner of the earth,
Glad that I came—not sorry to depart.
—From Richard Gallienne’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
The town of Kayenta, Ariz., is almost poetically depressing—the kind of place that should be visited regularly as a prophylaxis to hope and romance. A small, discouraging town on the edge of Monument Valley, it gets its name from a word loosely derived from the Navajo: “Teehindeeh,” meaning “bog hole.”
It reminds me of African shantytowns that spring up on the edge of that continent’s cities, except that African shantytowns have a kind of chaotic, lively exuberance and vibrancy to them, however squalid and disease-choked they may be, and this shantytown feels like rows of heartless, demoralized shacks connected to the sky by upward-facing satellite dishes and to each other by pocked, dusty roads. Mobile homes, which give the impression they’d get up and leave if they only had the energy, look sand-sunk in the restless desert dunes.
Dead cars and old electrical appliances carcass the gardens of the houses. The residents appear stunned into a sort of high-cholesterol stupor. The wind rattles at windows and catches under the edges of the metal roof of the trading store. We are told that the only restaurants open tonight are McDonald’s and Burger King. There is a strong smell of burning rubber on the air that I can only imagine comes from tourists fleeing the place for the nearest town, 78 miles away.
We left Moab after breakfast fighting the not-overwhelming urge to join the cluster of tourists who stop at the Four Corners Monument (where New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah meet) to put their fingers in all four states at once—the only place in the United Sates where this can be done.
We have arranged to meet a Navajo guide in Monument Valley who will take us around the sun-stunned, lofty buttes and icing-fragile pinnacles that give this valley its name and that led to its fame as a backdrop for Marlboro advertisements and John Ford’s Westerns. The Navajos were brought here by their Chief Hoskinini in 1863-64 to escape Kit Carson, who was attempting to round up the tribe in and around the Canyon de Chelly, Ariz. The Navajo were given “badlands” to settle—an area the size of West Virginia that includes this photogenic but fairly small (50-square-mile) piece of land. It was designated as the first tribally owned and operated park on July 11, 1958, by the Navajo Tribal Council, now called the Navajo Nation Council.
Our guide tells us that the Navajo believe that they spring directly from Mother Earth and that they consider it a responsibility of the first order to honor her. He has just finished telling us, however, that the Navajo are the wealthiest nation in the United States. Royalties from uranium, coal, oil, gas, and timber have contributed to their wealth. “If you treat the earth nicely, then she will treat you nicely,” he says without apparent irony. He climbs back into his large GMC truck and drives us to a “hogan,” an impressive mud-and-stick structure traditionally used by the Navajo as homes, until they downgraded and moved into settlements in Kayenta.
Rose Yazzi, an elderly lady with hennaed hair, sits in a small chair in the back corner of this designed-for-tourists traditional home and spins wool. (Rose herself lives in a trailer home on a rise behind us.) The hogan is a globe-shaped building, “female” in gesture (the Navajo sex their lives), with its opening to the east. The nine greater poles that hold up the structure represent the nine months of a woman’s pregnancy leading to labor. The intertwined poles that lead up to its chimney represent the umbilical cord. It is cool and airy in here, a soothing, grayish light that is a relief from the outside’s harsh red glare. Rose collects wool from her own small flock of sheep, then spins, dyes, and weaves the wool into imaginative artistic designs. We leave her $5 for the privilege of watching her weave a rug and speak Navajo for a few moments and head back to the car.
I am a white African of British descent, so I am used to this old devil that now sits on my shoulder reminding me that I can only ever be a voyeur into a world not mine if I don’t choose to live in it for longer than a few hours (years would be best). To pay for glimpses into something I can never hope to understand or assimilate in an afternoon can only be degrading and demoralizing to both parties. I feel as if I have just been a customer in what amounts to cultural prostitution.
Check back tomorrow for a detour from the Outlaw Trail: a visit to a New Mexico ghost town.
