The Call of the Canyon
Monument Valley.
Our original schedule was looking rather ragged by now, but the fortunate encounter with the two African American women from Atlanta meant that we had a few days to spare before we needed to be in Washington, D.C. After my intriguing conversation with “Will Kane” I realized that the time could be put to no better use than in paying a visit to the Navajo reservation where she had been brought up. Not that I had any intention of even trying to obtain any DNA samples, I just wanted to see what it was like. We booked a flight to Las Vegas, picked up a car, and headed off on the long drive to Flagstaff, Arizona, past the Hoover Dam and then through scrubby desert peppered by faded settlements with evocative names like Grasshopper Junction and the distinctly chemical Chloride.
It was dark by the time we arrived in Flagstaff, and our first accommodation, on the outskirts, was a bad mistake. I had been away from home for two months now and long exposure to hotel air-conditioning had given me a chesty cough, which was beginning to feel and sound like a recurrence of the asthma I had years before. This got a lot worse in the desiccating atmosphere of this particular building, created by a croaking air-conditioning unit and exacerbated by the extreme dryness of the outside air and the elevation. Flagstaff is almost seven thousand feet above sea level. Besides, since the hotel was a set of suites, there was no food and we had to make do with a very basic Thai meal three blocks away. Not what you want after a long drive. Early the next morning I went in search of somewhere else to stay, preferably without air-conditioning, and headed into downtown Flagstaff. This was a very different place from the outskirts, with two-story brick houses laid out in small blocks. On one corner stood an old hotel, the Weatherford, and it had a cancellation. Within an hour we were on the upstairs veranda drinking beers and listening to old Beatles tracks coming from the loudspeakers on the walls above our heads. My dry cough retreated a little further with every familiar track.
As any American road buff knows, Route 66 passes through Flagstaff. From there the original road takes the steep ascent to Oatman and on to the promised land of California, ending on the Pacific coast at Santa Monica, 2,448 miles from its starting point in Chicago. There are plenty of notices in Flagstaff alerting you to the town’s location on this iconic highway, but if you miss them, the throaty roar of Harley-Davidsons cruising up and down soon lets you know. We had a great view of these shiny chrome machines from the veranda as they slowly growled their way along the narrow streets before roaring off to rejoin Route 66 near the railroad tracks. Very occasionally another make of motorcycle, a Triumph or a Yamaha, puts in an appearance only to be “seen off” by the Harleys and scuttle down the side street, out of town.
The Weatherford Hotel opened its doors in 1900 and since then has had its fair share of famous guests, including the much-traveled President Theodore Roosevelt and his friend Charles “Buffalo” Jones, the first game warden of Yellowstone and a hunter-turned-conservationist who tried to interbreed buffalo with cattle, which didn’t work. However, the project did take Jones on a fund-raising lecture tour back east during 1907. In the audience in New York was a dentist from Ohio whose name was to become the one most associated with the Weatherford. His name was Zane Grey, and he was so enthralled by Jones’s tales of the outdoors, the mountain lions, and the adventures that he gave up dentistry and began to write for a living. He became the most prolific novelist of the American West, writing more than ninety books with worldwide sales of forty million. His first books were his best, but although his later works were rather repetitious, his readers still loved them. In later life, by then a millionaire, Grey traveled the world indulging his first love, which was fishing.
Zane Grey was also instrumental in publicizing New Zealand as an unspoiled mecca for fly fishing, which is how I first heard his name, at Turangi on the Tongariro River near Lake Taupo on North Island. That was where Richard caught his first wild trout. Zane Grey often stayed at the Weatherford on his research trips to the West, so I did not mind at all following in his footsteps. To complete the experience I walked around the block to Starlight Books on North Leroux Street and bought a copy of Call of the Canyon. I spent the rest of the day on the veranda in the company of the rugged Glenn Kilbourne, living rough in the Arizona wilderness after returning from World War I, and his reluctant fiancée, Carley. Reluctant, that is, to leave New York and the soft life of cocktail parties and shopping that made up the daily routine on the Upper East Side for wealthy young ladies in the early 1920s. Having recently finished my namesake Plum Sykes’s debut novel Bergdorf Blondes, I was struck that nothing much seems to have changed in the intervening ninety years. In the end, of course, Carley relents, and true love transports her to the West where she and Glenn live happily ever after on the range.
The fortuitous move to the Weatherford was amplified by the evening’s session in the bar by a Celtic band, which was just as passionate and lively as anything on the Isle of Skye. In the mid-nineteenth century Flagstaff was growing just as Scotland was exporting Highlanders in the Clearances, so there has been a strong Scottish community here ever since.
While it was charming to be reminded of home, it was not getting us any nearer the Navajo or Hopi reservations. Our first step was to stop at the excellent visitors’ center near the train tracks. We looked through the brochures, but while there was plenty on the nearby Grand Canyon there was nothing much about the reservations. Then a young man with a broad smiling face came up to ask if we need any help. He told us he was half Hopi himself and pointed out the best way to get to the reservation. Ulla wanted to enroll him as a volunteer straight away, but I was reluctant to put him on the spot, so Ulla and I went back to the hotel for lunch. Over a Reuben sandwich of corned beef, sauerkraut, and melted swiss cheese—Zane Grey’s favorite apparently—we wondered what we should do about our new Hopi friend. I was still reluctant about overstepping an invisible line, especially after talking to “Will Kane” about the Navajo moratorium on genetic testing, and reading about the even greater reluctance of the Hopi to reveal themselves. But Ulla’s enthusiasm was, as usual, persuasive. In the end I agreed that she could go back to the visitors’ center and see if our friend would like to join us for a chat at the Weatherford. I don’t know how she did it, but an hour later we were all sitting in the hotel lounge and ordering beers.
Although I certainly did not expect it, our friend did want us to do a DNA test. This meant he had to have a pseudonym, and the next film character out of the bag was “Roger Thornhill.” The newly anointed “Roger” told us that both of his maternal grandparents were Hopi. His grandfather had been born before any proper records of births or deaths were kept, so he didn’t know when he was born or how old he was. This left him free to choose his own birthday, and he settled on the Fourth of July because, as “Roger” told us with a smile, this way he was guaranteed fireworks on his birthday. His grandparents had been brought up in different villages and belonged to different clans. His grandmother was a member of the Spider Clan, while his grandfather belonged to the Sun Clan. A close relationship between members of different clans was frowned on, so they eloped and left the reservation to live and work together at the Grand Canyon. From there they moved first to Phoenix, then to Flagstaff in the 1960s. They had saved enough money to buy a plot of land and build a house, where “Roger”’s mother had been born. His grandfather is still alive and, at around eighty-three, now spends most of his time back on the Hopi reservation where, over the years, he also built a house. “Roger” told us that poverty is still a big factor on the reservation, with many people living without electricity or running water. Generating income is still a major problem, and though some still farm the land, those with cars look for work in the closest towns, like Winslow, Gallup, and Flagstaff, which also operate a shuttle to and from the reservation.
I could tell that “Roger” was used to helping people: Our conversation was punctuated by sudden thoughts about what he thought might interest us. The Hopi have lived in the same villages for longer than any other Indian tribe, with Old Oraibi on Third Mesa being the longest continually occupied village in the whole of North America. As I had picked up from my visit to the Cheyenne, there was a deep division within the tribe between traditionalists on the one hand, who are reluctant even to share their history with the outside world and just want to be left alone, and modernists on the other, who are eager to embrace the life they see outside the reservation and often decide to leave. This is not just a benign ideological debate. It is a real clash between colliding ideals, which, as “Roger” told us, has recently become violent with gas stations on the reservation—symbols of the new—blown up and destroyed.
The other long-running battle has been with the Navajo, whose reservation entirely encircles the Hopi land. The two tribes have quite different ancestral origins, reflected in their completely different languages. While the ancestors of the Hopi, so it is believed, had moved up from Central America at least two thousand years ago, the Navajo had migrated south from northwestern Canada much more recently. “Roger” could tell the difference by their appearance, the Navajo being taller and slimmer compared to the shorter, more compact Hopi. In “Roger”’s opinion the Navajo were more progressive than the very conservative Hopi, and that attitude had helped them to expand their territory and surround the Hopi lands.
The key moment was in 1901, when a Navajo delegation arrived in Washington, D.C. to lobby President Theodore Roosevelt to grant them more land so as to reduce the frequent clashes with the growing numbers of white settlers in and around Flagstaff. The Navajo hired a clergyman, the Reverend William Johnston, to come with them, not so much for himself but because his nine-year-old son, Philip, was fluent in Navajo and acted as their interpreter. Philip was later to be instrumental in proposing the use of the Navajo language as the basis for the secret code used by the U.S. Marines in the Pacific during World War II. But back in 1901, what a scene that must have been with a child acting as the vital link between the Navajo nation and the president of the United States. (In much the same way, the young John Quincy Adams, later the sixth president, had acted as French interpreter for the American mission to the court of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg in 1781, when he was only fourteen.) With Philip Johnston’s help, the Navajo intervention worked, because Roosevelt signed the Leuppe Extension Treaty, which sealed the expansion of the tribal territory at the expense of the now-encircled Hopi. I had read enough about Navajo history to know that this was a tremendous simplification, and that the president’s apparent generosity was in stark contrast to the terrible treatment the Navajo had received at the hands of earlier administrations, especially the mass deportation to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in 1864, that was only reversed after a public outcry.
To return to “Roger”’s own story, his paternal grandfather had been the son of a Mohawk father and an Ojibwa mother. He had faced the familiar prospect of discrimination, but being light skinned, he managed effectively to conceal his Indian ancestry, adopted a familiar Irish name, and lived as a white man. Rather like Zane Grey he was drawn to Arizona, and his love of Westerns led him to enroll at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and there he met and married “Roger”’s grandmother, a redhead European American with a Dutch-German background, and then they moved to upstate New York, where “Roger”’s father was born. So, from a genetic point of view, “Roger”’s ancestry was one-quarter European American and three-quarters Native American. “Roger” told us that he planned to go to New York one day and find out more about his Dutch-German forebears.
Unlike “Will Kane,” “Roger” had not been brought up on the reservation but in Parker on the Colorado River, just south of Havasu, close to the border with California. (It was also incidentally, the final resting place of a structure I knew as a child—the same London Bridge I used to cross to meet my father after he had finished work in the City of London, when we would go for a meal and a movie. The old bridge of 1831 had been moved across the Atlantic, numbered stone by numbered stone, after its demolition in 1967.) It was while the family was in Parker that “Roger”’s mother was asked if she would like to join CRIT, the acronym for the Colorado River Indian Tribes, a federation of Mohave, Chemehuevi, Navajo, and Hopi. She declined even though the federation owns and operates the BlueWater Resort & Casino in Parker, which adds millions of dollars to the federation’s coffers and allows generous educational grants to its members, which would have included the young “Roger.” As it was, “Roger”’s family moved to Prescott, Arizona, from where he enrolled in Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff, where he has stayed ever since.
“Roger” was an intriguing mix of the traditional and the modern. He felt himself to be Hopi at heart, but was also completely at ease with the modern world. There was none of the quiet, almost demure reserve I had sensed in “Will Kane.” “Roger” was open and optimistic. He had dated Navajo girls while at high school but had found them too bound by tradition for his taste. In college he found himself hanging out with the white students, which is how he met, fell in love with, and then married his wife, Emily, a red-haired girl with her origins not among the arid mesas of the Hopi and the Navajo, but in the emerald meadows of far-off Ireland. At the same time “Roger” feels deeply attached to his ancestral roots in Hopi land even though he never lived there. But he is also very aware of the titanic ideological struggles going on in his ancestral homeland.
Finally “Roger” left us with instructions of how to get to the Hopi mesas, which is where we headed the next day. I knew there was no prospect of any DNA collection on the reservation, and I had no intention of even trying to do so. Indeed, on each occasion that I had entered an Indian reservation I made quite sure the DNA sampling kits were left behind. This was primarily out of respect, but it also removed any residue of temptation I might have felt when I got there. I was, after all, a collector of genes, and I was well aware of the devil that comes over all collectors, be it of fossils, archaeological artifacts, or butterflies, banishing all sense of danger, moderation, or propriety when surrounded by the objects of their desire.
We headed east along Highway 40, which is hereabouts superimposed on the old Route 66, toward New Mexico. The tracks from Easy Rider were replaced by a collection of cowboy songs featuring, among others, “Rawhide,” “Riders in the Sky,” and “The Streets of Laredo.” I need only put them on now, and I am back on the long, dusty road. On each side the stands of ponderosa pine that surround Flagstaff thinned out then disappeared, leaving a flat semidesert of dried grass and yellow shrub stretching to the horizon under a cobalt blue sky. Tumbleweeds really did blow across the road. Other than the highway and the occasional roadside signs urging voters to back McCain and Palin, left over from the previous year’s presidential elections, there was nothing else. Gradually the grass cover thinned and was replaced by reddish brown grit dotted with stones and isolated tufts of grass. There were no cactuses or Joshua trees to alleviate the dry monotony. Eventually hills appeared on our left horizon. These were the Hopi mesas, our destination.
After the desolate town of Winslow, flanked by boarded-up cafés, we headed north up Highway 87. As the country got even drier, the hills on the horizon began to separate and take shape as we approached. Now there were ramshackle farmsteads and small herds of black cattle on either side of the road. But what they found to eat I could not imagine. There was nothing there, even less than when Richard and I had crossed the Great Basin of Nevada on the train, some weeks back. The road ahead stretched to the ends of the earth, or so it seemed. The hills became banded cliffs of gray and delicate pink; then, a little farther on, dark buttes like the cones of small volcanoes erupted out of the desert. They were not really volcanoes but the last remnants of a great plateau of sedimentary rock that had been eaten into by the wind and left standing. In time they also would also be ground into dust and disappear. Still the road stretched out ahead, a gray ribbon laid across the desert. The buttes were left behind, and the road headed straight for a low cliff on the horizon. This was Second Mesa, home of the Hopi for at least the last two thousand years. As we got nearer we could make out white dwellings on the steep sides and along the top of the cream-colored limestone cliff. Once the Hopi had also lived on the arid plains, but they had moved all their villages up onto the mesas following the Pueblo revolt of 1680 as a defensive tactic in anticipation of Spanish reprisals.
Warned by “Roger” not to take any photographs, Ulla put the camera away when we reached the base of the cliff, and we followed the road as it wound upward past the old village of Shongopori and onto the plateau at the top of the mesa. From here you could see how the three Hopi mesas stretched down like fingers from a much bigger and darker formation to the north—Black Mesa, one of the causes of friction on the reservation, as we shall see. We turned right along a narrow ridge that led to two more villages, Shipaulovi and Mishongnovi. A thousand feet below us the butte-studded plain stretched out into the distance, while on the ridge itself there were small patches of corn and squash. What a contrast to the endless dense green stands of corn and soybeans the Zephyr had passed through on its way across the Midwest. The houses were made of mudbricks and adobe around dirt squares. A man carried a pet ground squirrel, and three teenage boys were playing soccer.
We had come to the Hopi mesas not on a spiritual pilgimage but just to see what they were like—to experience the atmosphere, what people we saw, and of course the all-important landscape that is such an integral part of the Hopi spirit. Without these visits, my wonderfully revealing conversations with “Will Kane” and “Roger Thornhill” would lack any narrative context, and their genetic results would mean less as a result.
A few miles down the road we were lucky to find the modest but atmospheric Hopi Cultural Center. I felt reluctant to ask too many questions, as I would have under normal circumstances, and walked slowly around the displays of old photographs, ceramics, and the strange kachina dolls. These are the representations of spirit beings that visit the mesas during the spring and early summer before returning to their spiritual homes among the San Francisco peaks above Flagstaff. Without soliciting inquiries, a woman busied herself in the small office. It was only when I offered to buy a small book about the Hopi that she revealed herself as Anna Silas, both the book’s author and the founder of the museum, which she had opened twenty years before.1 Then Ulla started a conversation, and although I did ask a few questions I felt slightly as though I was intruding on a secret world where I had no business to be. Having now read Anna’s book, I realize that it was not really the center’s intention to be secretive, but neither was it there as an entertainment. Rather it was providing a glimpse into a world where not everything was meant to be completely revealed to other than the Hopi themselves. We met, or rather saw, more Hopi in the small adjacent café, where the servers said all the right “American” things but were palpably gentle and restrained. They reminded me of the Polynesians I had met in the South Pacific, and like them, they were also heavier than they should have been, a harbinger of the diabetes that afflicts all Pueblo tribes in the Southwest.
As we headed back down the sides of the mesa toward our own temporary home below the San Francisco peaks, it struck me that we had glimpsed a way of life not dissimilar to that of all our ancestors. A way of life that had been lost a very long time ago but one that nonetheless had shaped and molded, through millennia of evolution, the DNA we still carry. While the life of the Hopi on Second Mesa might seem very foreign and strange, and while very few of us would willingly return to it, even were it possible to do so, it resonated with a deep ancestral memory that we all share. Although it was easy to retain that thought as we headed back under the darkening sky, it got a lot harder when we were finally reimmersed in the chaos of modern life.
The following day we headed north toward Kayenta and the heart of the Navajo reservation. Once again the ponderosa pines thinned and disappeared as the highway headed for the pinks and yellows of the Painted Desert. We passed through the sprawling trading post of Cameron and on toward Tuba City, the most populous on the Navajo reservation. The road was dotted with shacks advertising shawls and jewelry, none of them inviting. Tuba City itself was elegant in comparison, with the accoutrements of any small American town—that is to say a large gas station and a McDonald’s, just beyond which a modern school was decanting its neatly turned out pupils into the ubiquitous yellow school buses. Right along the route to Kayenta, fifty miles to the northeast, the buses spread out in all directions along unseen tracks in the desert, their routes traced by clouds of thrown dust. Their destinations were the scattered clusters of dwellings, mostly trailers or small bungalows, that were home to the Navajo. I had read that the Navajo find it difficult to live in close proximity to one another, and this scene confirmed it as the dust plumes moved out into the desert for miles in every direction.
The land was certainly dry but not as utterly arid as the Painted Desert. I discovered later that an aquifer ran deep underground between Tuba City and Kayenta, and wells kept the residents well supplied with water. Or at least they did once. As Ulla and I neared Kayenta a new railway line curved in from the north and ran along the road. Where can this be going? we wondered. The answer lay a few miles ahead when we saw a giant tower. As we got closer we could see a conveyor belt running high above over the road toward the tower, under which the rail tracks fanned out into a classification yard. This was, as I was later to discover, the exit route for coal from the Black Mesa we had seen in the distance from the Hopi villages the day before. The whole hill was made of coal, and it was being systematically reduced. The presence of the mine was and still is highly controversial—one more symbol of the internal struggles within the Navajo nation. Leased to one of America’s largest energy companies, the same one that Richard and I had seen ripping into the ground on our way to Bear Lodge, the coal and other minerals, including uranium, located nearby are a valuable source of income for the Navajo, but it comes at at price. The negotiated terms of the lease were particularly advantageous to the company, and questions about its propriety still hover. Until a few years ago, before it was shipped off by rail, the coal was pulverized, then mixed with groundwater, and the slurry sent through a pipeline more than 250 miles to the generating station at Laughlin, Nevada. If that seems a crazy thing to do in a desert, then it is. Even six years after the slurry operations were closed down, the people of Kayenta still can’t get enough water from the aquifer.
Kayenta itself is less developed than Tuba City and had one sure sign of poverty, groups of dull yellow stray dogs, ribs protruding from their emaciated bodies. Why, I asked myself, are stray dogs always yellow? They looked exactly the same as the ones I had seen scavenging in Polynesia. There was no reason to stay long in Kayenta, and we left town heading toward Monument Valley. Buttes and mesas lined the route, glowing orange in the setting sun. It was dark by the time we reached our accommodation, a former trading post converted into a lodge. Monument Valley and its spectacular scenery, hidden from us for the moment by impenetrable darkness, came to the nation’s attention only when the owner of the trading post persuaded John Ford, the Hollywood director, to use it as a location for his Westerns. Many of these movies starred John Wayne, and the small hut that the star had used as his home on location was right next to the lodgings. Right next door to that, a small theater was showing his movies every evening.
Once we had settled in, Ulla and I made our way over to see that evening’s screening of Wayne’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Under normal circumstances I would have sat through the film, even though Westerns are not my favorite genre. But as soon as the stereotype “Indians” appeared whooping and hollering, I thought how crassly insensitive it was to screen such a film on a reservation. Ulla, who is always one step ahead of me when it comes to summing up a situation, got up, grabbed my hand, and led me straight outside. Of course, on reflection it was just another sign of the dilemma faced by the Navajo, like the Black Mesa mine. Acting in a John Ford Western such as this, even as a caricature of yourself, was a rare opportunity to earn cash in this utterly beautiful but unforgiving land.
I cannot pretend that our visit to Monument Valley was undertaken entirely in the cause of research. I awoke early and looked out the window. The sun was just above the horizon. Before me a wide plain of the familiar scrubby desert stretched for a few miles into the distance. On the horizon stark mesas and vertical-sided buttes glowed a soft pink in the early sunlight. This was not Monument Valley itself—that lay over a rise a couple of miles away—but even so the scenery seemed very familiar. I knew full well that whole area had once been covered by the deep and ancient sediments of the Colorado Plateau and that the sculpted monuments were all that was left of these thousand-foot accumulations of limestone and sandstone after first water and then wind had gouged and blasted the hardened rock over millions of years. But that isn’t what they looked like. Instead of being the eroded cadaver of a once-great plateau, each isolated cliff, each pinnacled mesa seemed like a high castle built up from the ground long, long ago. All that was missing were the princesses imprisoned at the top of every one.
Like all other tourists we took the drive around Monument Valley itself, where the formations were all the more dramatic and all the more familiar from the movies. Afterwards we sat on the terrace of the newly built hotel on the valley rim. By then the sun was going down behind us and the shadows were beginning to creep up the petticoats of fallen rock that surround the base of each rose-red monolith. The hotel was built and staffed by Navajo, and the way our server quietly and courteously brought our order had the same calmness and grace that we had seen in “Will Kane” back in San Francisco. At a nearby table a group of four middle-aged women sat chatting, their floral tops and permed hair slightly ruffled by the breeze coming up from the valley floor. From the pulses of overheard conversation that wafted across to our table, the women were Mormons from Salt Lake City. A ground squirrel darted out to grab a crumb from beneath their table and sped away back to his burrow under the sagebrush. By now the shadows had climbed almost to the top of the rock in front of us, and its shadow was projected for miles across the flat desert beyond. A dust plume betrayed the car that made it. Far, far away.
These places are made for contemplation, and my thoughts returned to the Navajo and how they had come to be here. As the murmur of conversation floated across from the other tables I became aware that, within the few square feet of the terrace, three completely different myths existed side by side. My own unashamedly rational and scientific version, based on the evidence of genetic links with Siberia and the Pacific; the women from Salt Lake City, who were sure the Navajo and other Native Americans were descended from the Lammanites of Israel; and the Navajo who worked here who believed their ancestors had left the fourth world through a rent in the sky and entered this, their fifth, through the gasping, steaming vents of Yellowstone.
Just as the sun disappeared below the horizon, the desert was suddenly flooded with a strange purple wash. The fairy castles glowed bright terra-cotta for a moment, then were consumed by darkness.