Thanksgiving 2005 was perhaps the strangest ever.
The Navajo servers moved at their own pace, talking barely at all, and visitors grew quieter themselves. The food was American – turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes. It took place in a rare, wide-open American preserve – the 83,000 acres of Navajo Tribal Trust Land that enclose the Canyon de Chelly National Monument. The ancestors of people who still live here were Americans when the forebears of the white guests in the cafeteria still were working factory jobs to keep the Industrial Revolution on track, or chanting in Hebrew somewhere the Tsar couldn’t hear.
Yet it was a foreign land. Where a normal Thanksgiving argument would have broken out, there was companionable silence. It turned out that pumpkin pie, eaten contemplatively, is really, really good.
Outside the log building that houses the Thunderbird Lodge cafeteria, the landscape didn’t seem to have changed that much from 100 years ago, when the only official building in this valley was a small trading post. Under the huge sky, it got easier to grasp the vast distances of the Navajo reservation. People continue to live far from each other. Here is a sweeping generalization: They are probably better at being alone than we are.
Remote outpost
Canyon de Chelly has been a national monument since 1931, but it still feels unraveled.
“It is,” says Mary Jones, who has run the Thunderbird Lodge, the National Park’s official lodging, since 1993. “Back in the ’30s, there were no roads into here. You had to come by buckboard. It was a two-day trip from Gallup.”
Having worked so hard to arrive, visitors would stay several weeks, camping out or bunking down in one of just a few stone buildings. These days, the lodge contains 73 motel rooms, but even these are primitive – sort of like the spartan rooms you would occupy if your frugal parents took you on road trips in 1957.
“It’s so remote,” Jones says of the canyon she has lived next to for 22 years, not all of them easy. After just one year in business, her husband took off with the motel’s cashier, and Jones’ Navajo staff was uncomfortable with her openness. “None of them ever mentioned that people went to the potty,” she remembers. “It was considered impolite. And they weren’t used to telephones. They’d scream into the receiver to make sure people heard them.”
Nevertheless, she recently attained her goal of employing only American Indian managers, and, having understood the personality of the place, she plans to stay.
“You can’t compare it to the Grand Canyon, because it’s better. You can’t feel it as much as ours. I think of that every time I go out there and sit, looking at Spider Rock. We get New Age spiritual people out here once in a while, trying to clue in to the Navajo mystique.”
Dramatic sights
Whether that can be done on a three-day visit is open to debate, but the Canyon itself is worth any amount of time you can spare – even three minutes. It opens up precipitously and stretches on for miles, getting deeper and more dramatic with every turn in the road. Unlike any other National Park property, it is still occupied by the people who have always lived there – Navajo sheep ranchers and farmers, who treat the green bottom of the canyon as seasonal territory, moving up to the rim when the weather turns cold.
Which explains why, on the hike down to the White House Ruins, crowded even on an offseason day with Japanese- speaking tourists, senior citizens circumnavigating the country and a regular-old Denver family, a very old Navajo woman in a bright-orange skirt could also be seen hobbling slowly down the path. Her daily ritual was to spend the day herding a small flock of sheep at the bottom of the canyon. As evening fell, she hiked back up, another 2 miles. Despite her toothlessness, she was the kind of tough old broad most almost-old broads want to be.
The White House Ruins cling to the north wall of the canyon like some kind of ancient apartment building. Sixty to 80 Anasazi families once lived here, as long ago as A.D. 300. You have to view the ruins through a chain-link fence, but when you do, you might as well be alone in the canyon, awash in mystery. It is worth the hike, and so is the red, rocky landscape, brilliant against blue sky. This is when everyone should stop long enough to think: Now I remember why I am drawn to the West.
If you ask Mary Jones, not enough people are.
“We were hit hard by 9/11, and the hanta virus in the 1990s was tough to get over. People just aren’t into Southwestern at the moment. We need another ‘Dances With Wolves’ or something.”
Or, if you like your Southwest utterly unspoiled, you could just go visit, instead. A film crew just doesn’t seem right.
Robin Chotzinoff is a freelance writer who lives in Evergreen.
The details
Canyon de Chelly National Monument is located 3 miles east of Chinle, Ariz., on Tribal Route 7, about three hours from Flagstaff or Farmington, N.M. The Visitor Center is open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. The canyon can be seen by car, foot, horse or Jeep. Backcountry permits are available as long as you hire a Navajo guide. Call 928-674-5500, ext. 226.
The Thunderbird Lodge inside the Park offers 73 motel rooms, some dating to the 1930s, a cafeteria serving continental and Navajo-style meals and a gift shop that arranges a variety of Canyon tours (928-674-5842).
