I needed to get right. I needed to escape the grim pace of my city, its gum-pocked sidewalks and the muttering mad denizens of the area in Midtown where I work. It had gotten to me, the heat glare microwaving me inside treeless concrete canyons, the curbside ravers, the sinister Times Square panhandlers dressed up as Minnie Mouse.
Something felt unbalanced, as if a stealth assault had been made on the limbic system, the lacy cortical network that forms the architecture of our primal needs and emotions: pleasure, anger, fear.
This is no new occurrence. It happens with some regularity. And when it gets acute, an instinctive response kicks in, a psychic autoimmune reaction: I dream. The dream is always the same one, set in the same place. In it I am driving along an unbroken ribbon of blacktop through the high desert southwest. Red mesas stretch to the distance on both sides, their draped escarpments pleated with absolute shadow. The movement of cloud silhouettes scudding across the floor of a distant valley tracks the cumulus shapes racing across the dome of sky.
I know this road. I have driven it more times than I can remember. And, on those occasions when it comes to me in sleep, I interpret it as a signal to get there quick.
The road is U.S. 191. I am on it now, scaling back speed as I head into Navajo Nation land from Gallup, New Mexico, and Interstate 40, where my foot on the accelerator pedal turns to lead. There is a spot along this route, a road sign marking a census catchment barely worth calling a town, where I can always count on my pulse slowing and where I begin to exhale. This is Ya-ta-hey, a spot named for the gentle all-purpose Navajo term of greeting. Only when I have passed it do I feel I have arrived.
From here the road will gain altitude to follow the general incline of the Colorado Plateau, a 130,000-square-mile raft tilting upward and rising steadily at a rate of one inch per century. The air, when I roll down the windows, sweetens with the fragrance of dense pinewoods bracketing the road. Soon these will give way to starker vistas of tenuous grassland and hogback mesa. This occurs just past Ganado, Arizona, where, at a traffic circle constituting the sole significant landmark in the hamlet of Burnside, I loop around and exit onto a stretch of 191 that, for the next 30 miles, conducts me into the landscape of my recurrent dream.
I am on the Navajo reservation, a sovereign nation legally constituted by treaty in 1868 and moated, like some semi-mythical island, by the contiguous 48 states. At 17.5 million acres—roughly the size of West Virginia—Navajo land is by far the largest Native American reservation in the country. In the Navajo creation myth, the Diné (people) first appeared here, and this, for the tribe, is sacred land.
Yet, neglected to the point of abandonment by the federal government, many of its residents live well below the poverty line, suffer rampant unemployment, experience abysmal rates of high-school graduation, and endure the assorted plagues of a postindustrial society—alcoholism, obesity, and diabetes—with few of its advantages. Running water is so much a luxury in the Navajo Nation that before traveling here for the first time, 30 years ago, it had never occurred to me that one might acquire a Porta Potty on the installment plan.
That first time, in the 1980s, I came for a pack trip one late October, a small-scale equestrian camping adventure taken solo, although among a group of random strangers of assorted nationalities and uneven ability in the saddle. Flying into Albuquerque, I drove onward to Gallup and spent the night in a roadside motel on Route 66. The next morning a wrangler met and rounded up our ragtag group in the parking lot of the Rodeway Inn and then drove us up to Monument Valley. Once there, we were greeted wordlessly by some Navajo cowboys and paired up with our mounts, mine a paint gelding with a wild look in his eyes.
Of the many ways that trip altered me, the one I fix on now is how it secured for me a place of spiritual refuge, somewhere I knew I could come whenever things threatened to spin out of control. The reasons for that can hardly be called complex. In the emptiness of the high desert, I found silence, space, and a vastness that cast into perspective every puny human concern.
That is not to suggest the trip was any sort of idyll. Though the vistas were grand, the riding was handicapped to the level of the least experienced among us, which meant we mainly walked on a loose rein through a landscape of lunar vacancy. Our campground was in the lee of a red-walled canyon of the Permian era. We had individual tents and portable bathing facilities, a campfire and chuck wagon cook to prepare our meals. Were it not for the grandeur of the surroundings and the spooky starlit sky, we could have been at a Brownie camp in the Poconos.
What I recall with the greatest clarity from that trip is returning one day from a trail ride to the top of a big rock anvil called Mitchell Mesa. Going up we’d picked our way through scree littering an old uranium mining road; reversing, we slid down with our mounts practically sitting on their haunches. Back on the valley floor those of us legged-up enough were given rein to let rip and gallop along a sandy creek bed, the horses flying so fast their bellies hugged the ground.
After returning to the camp, the group gathered around a fire as if in a Marlboro ad. It was then that the head wrangler—an all-hat-no-cattle Anglo cowboy—began jawing in the manner of boorish tour guides the world around. I was not much bothered by his homespun hokum, and assumed that for a group that included visitors from England and Australia the performance was in line with stereotype. It was only when this man’s yarns drifted toward slurring stereotypes about East Coast liberals and their companions-at-arms, the homosexuals and the Jews, that I silently rose and left the group, head aflame.
Walking out was hardly a practical option; we were a long way from anyplace marked on a map. Instead, I made my way back to the dry riverbed, passing beneath pink rocks tilted to form a natural portal, as I waited for the throbbing in my temples to stop. Yet what remains with me from that time has less to do with the cartoon bigot than with the effects on me of the still sunset desert, the appearance of snake tracks scribbling a cursive message in the sand, and a physical awareness I developed of the day’s heat draining away amid silence so absolute as to be curative.
Now, with the car windows up, I can drive for hundreds of miles on this reservation, along empty roads, quietly alone with my thoughts. Radio signals are as sketchy in these parts as cell phone service, and anyway, I am here to escape just those things. That is why I booked a flight to Albuquerque and rented an ecologically indefensible Chevy Suburban, pointing it west and pushing past 100 in my suicidal rush to get to that place in my dreams.
I have arrived now at the Thunderbird Lodge. I have unpacked my few things, folding them into a drawer of a rustic dresser in a stucco-walled ground floor room with a view through its screen door of some shaggy junipers. I am at Canyon de Chelly (pronounced de SHAY), a monument designated a national park in 1931 to protect a system of deep earth fissures historically home to the Navajo people and, before them, until roughly 1300, the Ancestral Puebloans once known as the Anasazi—a people so enigmatic as to seem phantasmal. The lodge dates from the 1890s and cannot have changed much over the years. Except that its ownership reverted not long ago to the Navajo Nation, it is the same sleepy spot I encountered on my first visit here, three decades ago, with the same cafeteria hung with Navajo weavings and offering mutton stew, Navajo fry bread, pale wedges of iceberg lettuce, and cubes of rainbow Jell-O for dessert. Options are few in Navajo land for what you might politely call dining, and as for drink—well, the entire reservation is dry.
Though the specific emotional history I have with this place commenced with a trip intended to dust off my feelings at the end of a long relationship—and would continue after a trip to heal from my youngest sister’s sudden death—what I recollect most clearly now is a dog.
He was a spotted puppy. Sighting him wobbling down the centerline of Highway 191 on a long-ago morning, I veered onto the shoulder. At the time I had no idea how commonplace abandoned dogs are on the reservation, or that there is no word in the Navajo language for “pet.” Scooping up the animal, I parked him on the front seat, poured him some water in my cupped hands, and afterward carried him along with me in a backpack as I hiked down the White House trail at Canyon de Chelly and back.
Eventually, I would take the puppy back to Gallup and the Humane Society of McKinley County, postponing my return to New York until he was adopted. I had decided that if no one came along by the end of the then three-day deadline for euthanasia, I’d somehow work four more feet into a menagerie that included two 85-pound Rhodesian Ridgebacks that were already straining the limits of New York apartment life.
While it is clear to me now that in rescuing the dog I was also salvaging some helpless and wounded part of myself, I did not at the time understand this. Returning with him from the canyon, I spirited some mutton stew out of the cafeteria and cut up bits of it for him to eat. I bathed him in a shower stall and made a nest of bath towels at the bottom of the bed. Then, exhausted from the long day, I lay on the counterpane and blubbered like a child.
The dog survived, and so, too, did my feelings. The current trip is less freighted emotionally, its goal the restoration of my flagging psyche, the prescription a week during which a given day’s agenda is formulated ad hoc at Denny’s over toast and eggs.
I will hike a bit. I will revisit the Anasazi ruins. I will drive the perimeter roads encircling the canyon rim, pull into parking lots where locals sell crafts and souvenirs from the back of pickups, make my way at some point after dawn or near sunset to the overlooks at Mummy Cave or Massacre Cave, where you can stroll to a flat ledge perilously adjacent to an unfenced 900-foot drop-off, lie back, and lose yourself.
The fact is there is little else to do here. Though administered by the National Park Service, all land inside the canyon is part of the Navajo tribal trust and is off-limits to nonresidents. Except along the White House trail, it is prohibited to enter it unless accompanied by a registered guide or else in one of the Jeep tours that regularly transport tourists along corrugated roads that tantalize you with glimpses of stirring vistas and shake the fillings loose from your teeth.
I’ve taken those tours. I have hired approved guides to conduct me deep into the canyon, a practical if statutory requirement, since the place bristles with the unseen perils of quicksand, snakes, and the live possibility of vanishing into a barely mapped defile. There are the witches, too, and werewolves made familiar by the mystery writer Tony Hillerman’s best sellers: malevolent spirits that old-time locals treat as a fact of life.
Likely the hatáli, or traditional medicine men, who figure in the fictitious world of Hillerman’s monolithic Navajo still exist, though their numbers have dwindled. It may well be that shamans still conduct secret ceremonies to restore ailing souls like mine to harmony.
In 30 years of traveling in Navajo land, I have yet to experience a Blessing Way or a Beauty Way, rituals from which I am excluded by virtue of being a bilagáana, or foreigner. All the same, I feel in Navajo land an almost irrational rush of belonging. I certainly did one bright morning midway through my most recent visit, when I hopped in the car after breakfast and on impulse headed from Chinle to Monument Valley, deliberately taking the long way through the neighboring Hopi reservation.
The route I chose carried me south on Highway 191 and west across the high islands of mesa forming the Hopi ancestral homeland, then pitched downward in an arc toward the Utah border. The 200-mile distance didn’t deter me. I knew how miles fly by when you do 80 on empty reservation roads.
Still, after dawdling at several roadside trinket stands, I found it was already midafternoon before I reached park headquarters, too late by then to make the slow 17-mile Valley Drive circuit on unimproved roads and still return in daylight to Chinle. I bought a wooden postcard with the Mitten Buttes burned into the surface with a stylus and then got back on the road.
After years of coming here, I should have known better than to take shortcuts on routes where even Wikipedia points out that “things go wrong.” Naturally, I did. Blacktop in short order yielded to washboard, and it was with a conviction that I would never again see pavement that I racketed along as the sun drifted inexorably toward the horizon.
Eternities passed until I suddenly saw a car and slammed on the brakes. Waving down its occupants, I greeted an elderly Navajo gent with a long face and a ridge in his hair from the impression of his Stetson, and a woman festooned with the turquoise jewelry that in Navajo land is portable wealth.
Though we shared no common language, we somehow mimed our way to a kind of global positioning. They nodded farewell. I barreled onward with new purpose. Eventually I regained a two-lane that was instantaneously the most beautiful road I ever beheld. From the Many Farms intersection, I turned south again for Chinle. By now night had drawn over the desert like a blackout curtain. A billion stars pulsed overhead. Pulling in at last to the parking lot of the Thunderbird Lodge, I felt the adrenalized panic of a short while ago yield to giddy elation. I’d gotten lost for a time there. Now I was back.
Navigating Navajo Lands
Hit the ground
Albuquerque International Sunport is the closest airport if you’re heading to Chinle, but you’re still looking at a four-hour drive. You can rent a surprisingly affordable SUV at the airport before heading west on I-40.
On the way
About two hours into the drive you’ll reach Gallup, New Mexico. There are plenty of chain hotels with clean, affordable rooms. Even if you don’t overnight, hit Richardson’s Trading Co., one of the West’s most venerable pawn establishments, for its trove of Navajo turquoise-and-silver jewelry and handwoven rugs. Restaurants in Gallup are limited, but the local favorite, Genaro’s, is worth a stop: The ambiance is utilitarian, the fiery New Mexican food is anything but. There are also grocery stores where you can stock up on essentials. Continuing west, a must-see is the late-1800s Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site. Run now by the National Park Service, it’s both evocative of a bygone way of life and a still-thriving store selling everything from hand-spun wool from Navajo-Churro sheep to sacks of Blue Bird flour.
Setting up camp
Holiday Inn and Best Western (whose adjacent Junction Restaurant may be the best local dining option) operate motels in Chinle, but the Thunderbird Lodge is the only establishment within the boundaries of the National Park. If possible, book one of the 1930s-era rooms clustered around a grass commons.
When to go
The best times to visit are late spring and early fall, when the weather is mild and dry. If you can handle the heat, go in August for the annual Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, where Navajo and other tribes gather for a rodeo and powwow with competitive dancing.
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