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| (c) Google |
After we woke in the RV park in Monticello, I realized there was a Rodeway Inn over the road which, since we didn’t need to dump our wastes or fill up, would have been a more beddy place to sleep. We didn’t think of that the night before. We ate at a hippy café just up the road from the RV park. It sold crystals and healing drops in the side of the place, in that hopeful way that people do when they feel they should branch out of simply offering whatever their core business is. Coffee, in this case. I’m not the right person to ask if there’s much of a market for persuading people who wanted breakfast that they should also stock up on mystic crystals. For all I know the crossover market is immense, particularly in the view of this mountain, whatever it may be. (The map suggests it’s Abajo Peak, of the Blue Mountains, but my mapreading skills are not of the finest class.)
Stephen had a wholemeal bagel, which he thought was a little pointless since bagels are not by any stretch of the imagination a health food, with lox and cream cheese, and I had a melt of some sort with fries, which was a little too much food for breakfast. We retrieved the RV, filled up at the Shell station and drove down the 191. After a while I got a massive feeling of déjà vu, and said, “I think I’ve been here before.”
“Nope, I haven’t, “ STB said.
“I’m sure we have. This is where those giant twin rocks called the Navajo Twins are.”
“The what?”
“Those,” I said, pointing into the rear view mirror, as they had just gone past. “We ate at the café just underneath them. “
He grunted.
“So, let’s go back and look at the Navajo Twin Rocks.”
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| Twin Rocks, Utah |
He turned the vehicle around and we drove on to the vast gravel apron just under the alarming towers of the Twin Rocks. These are two rocks much in the Balancing Rock mode, but less close to collapse. The way they appear together, without any similar formations nearby, means that they do truly look like a pair of petrified giants. There’s a trading post underneath, and since the formation is just on the edge of the Navajo and Hopi Reservations, there’s a chance it is an actual trading post. It’s filled with the most marvelous of Native American artwork, all of which is beyond my budget, but if it hadn’t been, I would have been out of there with a sack of turquoise and silver jewelry (my favorite) and textiles. The owners have made an effort to make the place informative rather than exploitative, with displays giving the history of the various textile designs. One of the brothers…wait, is the store owned by actual Navajo Twins? That would be weird. (Truth to tell, they looked Anglo to me.) One of the brothers captured STB’s ear and pumped him for as much information on engineering courses in US universities as STB could recall. (His English accent is quite um, pronounced, so he clearly isn’t a US graduate, but as an engineer I guess his input is valued.)
“Now do you remember being here before?” I said as we left.
“Not at all,” he said.
We didn’t eat in the next door café as we were pressed for time, but we did have a chance to get coffee and peruse their more touristy offerings. It was made up, mostly, of bags of rocks, cactus seeds, pictures of rocks on postcards and pictures of cactuses on postcards. The sheer number of “grow your own cactus desert” seed packets for sale in Utah and Arizona suggests few of them succeed, if you pardon the pun. If most were successful, the whole of America would be heaving under the weight of saguaro and that plant that’s claimed to be “just resting” and if you only put it in water when you get home it will “bloom” until you get fed up of it, which you then let dry back to “just resting” and store it in the attic for forty years.
Next was the long drive south through the Reservation. I’d spotted that the Canyon de Chelly National Monument was only a few miles off our route and could not remember if I’d been there before. I’d obviously been this way, and the trip had included a long walk in a canyon with ladders up to Anasazi (I think) dwelling places, but Canyon de Chelly didn’t ring a bell.
We stopped in at the visitors’ center and got a map of the canyon’s trails. I vetoed anything that involved driving anywhere near the edge of the canyon as it’s a well-known fact that RVs which have driven 2000 miles upright without significant slipping will tip over or slide sideways if they are within 50 feet of a long drop. This, combined with the fact that we were in the wrong place to get a Navajo guide along the bottom of the canyon, meant that we were limited to the White House Trail. This is a self-guided trail down a sheer cliff face that clearly only goats would be able to manage, and only young goats at that. After the cliff, it traverses the flat bottom of the canyon to a fence where you can see the famous White House (no relation) from a great distance, reminiscent of certain arches we may have visited. (The lack of access to the White House ruin itself is understated in the map.) We parked the RV well back from the cliff and walked over the flat rocks towards the edge. A brisk wind was blowing, which made me nervous. It’s a well-known fact, again, that a brisk wind that is near a long drop is quite likely to blow you arse over tip, off your feet and down the cliff. This despite the fact that no breeze, wind or even gale in my experience has ever so much as lifted one of my feet off the ground. The physics of wind changes near a drop and I feel everyone should know that.
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| The wind gets more brisk the closer you get to the edge |
At the well-marked top of the clearly marked, three foot wide, machine-made, handrails provided, path down the cliff I began to have severe doubts about its safety. I may have mentioned this out loud at the time. The path then went inside the rock for a few yards and continued winding on down with the occasional bench for resting, steps cut in the steep bits and so forth. I felt this was even less safe, and may have mentioned it again. Also we were now a few feet lower than where we’d parked, and I suggested that since it was going to be all uphill on the way back, getting too far down might be a problem. At this point STB gave up on me. Once he was out of sight round a bend, I realized that the path was actually super wide, with a good footing provided by that irritating road gravel national parks dump on top of their native rock, and was well supplied with wildlife in the form of lizards and birds, trees and grasses and was in fact a delightful easy-peasy walk. It may be that I’m not so much afraid of heights as I am of other people around me on foot when I’m near heights, which would explain why things like sky trains, planes and parachute jumping are not at all worrisome for me. Since I’d spent so much more time getting down than STB had, and since I was still not sure I could climb very quickly, I kept an eye out for STB’s blue shirt and tan shorts coming back on the path on the canyon floor. I was about two thirds of the way down when I saw them, and began the slower walk back up.
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| Canyon de Chelly |
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| Canyon rock |
The man swiftly climbed up and drew level with me, and of course it was some other idiot wearing similar clothes. I stopped and craned my neck trying to find the real STB in the distance when a screaming, whooping call from above startled me. A few seconds later a Navajo man appeared. I pinned myself against the rock to let him past but he turned and buttonholed me and began a line of smooth patter such as I haven’t heard since I last went to Brick Lane market in London. It’s hard to describe the breathlessness and density of the spiel, but here’s an attempt.
“Whoo! Yeah! My grandmother lives down there. I’m just going to see my grandmother. I’ve just left school for the day and I’m bringing her some things. Some milk and things and things for her cows and her sheep and some things. I go down to the bottom of the canyon two or three times every day, bringing my family things. My family live down there and I just go down there and bring them things. I don’t even use the path, I just go vertically down the cliff. I can get down there in about five minutes. I do it three or four times a day.”
And so forth. He told me of his family’s orchard, which does not fruit so much now ‘they’ have damned the river that used to flow through the canyon, that his people built the ruins and he understands the meanings of all the petroglyphs. Did I want to see his paintings? He did paintings of the canyon with glyphs and sold them, but only out of sight of the park rangers, but if he sold them he could bring mor things to his grandmother…
“Why do you have to keep out of sight of the park rangers?”
“They don’t allow us to sell things?”
“Why the hell do they care?”
“They call it soliciting,” he said, as though that answered the question.
Anyway, as I’m sure he does a dozen times a day, once the mark is engaged with him, he knows there is likely to be a sale. He brought his pictures out of his rucksack. I picked one out, and swallowed the price rise he then laid on “because it’s 3D”. It’s a nice little painting, and I’m not sorry I bought it. The pigments used are...wait for it…acrylic paint. So not exactly the techniques of his fathers’ but the colors are well chosen and the stone it’s carved and painted on is a nice size and weight for an ornament. He explained all the glyphs he’d used (all of which I quickly forgot again), then signed and dated it and posed for an authentication photo. “Not made in China,” he grinned, which for the first time made me wonder if it was made in China.
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| Artist and painting |
Suddenly he let out another earsplitting whoop and jumped down the cliff. He did indeed go vertically down without using the path. He talked up some other tourists and then came running back up to me.
“You know, you can see original petroglyphs on this trail,” he said.
“Where?”
“There.” He pointed directly behind my head. On the rock face were painted foot-soles, going upwards. I had completely failed to notice them while going down the trail.
“It marks the path,” he said, reasonably, though that remark left open whether the Navajo just ran up the sheer rock face at that point, since this was prior to the machine that had carved the tourist path.
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| His painted rock |
Just then I saw a blue shirt and beige shorts below, and sent him vertically downward to sell something to STB. I carried back on up the path and heard his enthusiastic songs and shouts all the way up as I walked.
“I’m cured of fear of heights,” I told STB when he reached the top, having not bought anything from my grandma-doting new young friend.
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| (c) Google |
Now we had to finish going south across the Reservation to the Arizona part of I40, which if you remember is also basically Route 66. The 191 would seem to have that taken care of and although it’s a fairly boring road, at least it’s wide and well-metaled. About half-way through the reservation it does a little hink, which means getting off it on to Indian Route 8 for a couple of miles. That’s at Ganado, which we decided was a good place to eat, but at the only place with a sign, the not-very-Navajo Burger King, the power was out. No gas or burgers when the power’s out.
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| Rain at Chinle |
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| Reservation vegetation |
After Ganado, IR 191 starts again, but Google was determined for us to take other Indian Routes to finish up in Winslow, AZ. Although this would have taken us to no doubt fascinating places like Greasewood, Indian Wells and Castle Butte, it would also mean smaller roads, we were in a larger vehicle, it was dark with impending rain, and it was a billion miles to anywhere with a gas station. We ignored the Google lady as she increasingly demanded we take cattle-rut after cattle-rut to U-turn, double-back or otherwise get on to the road she had originally wanted. I checked the map about five times to make sure the 191 really existed and really went to the I-40. By the time she was practically screaming for us to turn around, STB checked the map as well, just to make sure. After a while she merely grumbled and then shut up entirely.
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| (c) Google |
We left the 191 and joined the I-40 at Sanders, which on the map is marked in a little white square, meaning not part of the Reservation, I guess. Once on that road, it’s just a few miles to get back into white mapland. (Wait, who chose the color scheme pinky-red for reservations and white for non reservations?) We would then scoot across the Painted Desert, which is a little baby national park, and then on to Winslow. We couldn’t remember why Winslow is famous, and a rather creaky recital of town names from Route 66 (the song) didn’t pull it up. As brains do, after consciously forgetting about the town name, brain came up with “standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona” – and from that it was a short memory sprint to remembering it was from The Eagles’ stupendous hit Take it Easy. One of rock’s many songs about ogling beautiful women on the street, it’s also one of many songs with an Arizona setting. I once made a fairly long detour off the Interstate to go to Benson, Arizona purely because a song about it was the opening theme to John Carpenter’s Dark Star. I suppose that Arizona’s proximity to California means that Hollywood types and canyon-dwelling rock hippie types often fetch up here with little to do but drink, take drugs, creep the women and noodle on the guitar.
Unlike the spots with town names on the map for the last several hundred miles, Winslow is a regular town, again. Like much that grows up near an Interstate it was large and had things like zoning laws. We quickly found a café – more of a restaurant really – called the Brown Mug Café and went in there. It seemed a plain, normal sort of a place but when we sat down, there was a familiar face looking down from the wall and a “Harrison Ford, the actor, ate in this booth” sign next to it. So my ass has sat where Han Solo’s ass has sat. Perhaps this is further evidence of my earlier statement about Arizona being the place where Hollywood-dwellers simply fetch up due to proximity.
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| Han Solo was here |
I had really good fried chicken and forty cups of coffee. Then we tootled off through Winslow – which still was not displaying any positive attractive qualities – to the Walmart on the oddly-named Mike’s Pike Street. Did Mike fish for pike? Did he use a pikestaff? Was it a turnpike? Outside of the national parks there are no informative boards beside the highway to tell us who did what and why.
And so, yet another night in the RV.
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