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lwood28 April:
The morning's soundtrack, naturally, continued to be Frede Grofé, "Grand Canyon Suite."
It's twenty dollars for a vehicle to make its way into the park proper, and then it's only a little more driving to reach the South Rim, which is the far more developed side. I had no real idea what to expect, but knew it would be stunning.
The main road makes a T-intersection at a place called Mather Point. Diana and I parked, and got out of the car. At our first look of the far wall of the canyon, several miles away and a thousand feet higher, Diana said, softly, "Well, now I remember why I never wanted to come here before... I'm afraid of heights!"
I said nothing. I couldn't; I was too busy drinking in all that view.
There are pictures, but they don't even begin to do justice to the thing. I fear they're just Another Set of Grand Canyon Pictures: you really have to go there for the impact to hit you. This is why I mislike photographs; while they're reasonable at letting you see how a thing physically looks, it's a much, much harder row to hoe to get any of the genus loci to come through with it.
This isn't even straight off of Mather Point; this is over to the left, looking into the Canyon, with some of the South Rim in the foreground to attempt at a little perspective.
This is a little closer to straight out.
I was completely dumbstruck, floundering for something to tie this to everything else. For the rest of the day, I would try to wind it 'round with numbers and words, but even as I tried to build a cozy nest of facts and nestle into the reassuring numbers of how wide, how deep, and how old, I knew it would only distance myself from the experience.
I was so clearly and obviously shocked out of normal modes of consciousness by the view that Diana suggested, gently, that I "just take a little time to be here and now for a moment, okay?" Or, translated: ground and center, dear, before we draw stares.
But I was here and now; it was that here and now had thrust me into ecstasy. As a child would, I wandered around the overlook, feeling the wind whistle around me while ravens sported on the breeze: a thousand feet or more below me and still far above the ground. I read the provided signs.
Did you know that nearly every promontory, mesa, and knob has a name? In retrospect, I suppose that seems obvious. However, here at the Grand Canyon, the only names they can think of to fit what they've seen are those of gods. Nor are they particularly picky about pantheon: Norse, Egyptian, Hindu, are all well-represented.
There is a river at the bottom, although it's hard to see. We made sure to bring back proof:
One stone was pockmarked by dozens of small, round craters, and was liberally sprinkled with the pocket change of several countries' tourists. Thinking this a right and proper way to honor the wights of this place (as long as the coins didn't fall down), we left some behind us as we took the stairs back up to the car.
I drove the car towards Grand Canyon Village, stopping at other pullouts along the way to savor more of the view. There are more pictures of this available in the full gallery, if you like.
At the Village, we tried first to have lunch at the restaurant at Bright Angel Lodge. "My, Diana, dare we dine with angels?"
"Well... only if we can find parking." We couldn't.
Stupid angels.
We wound up at Maswik instead, which has a cafeteria. Honestly, I'd been hoping for regional cuisine, possibly something involving elk, but all there was was American and vaguely Mexican-American. We sat with our food, and I pulled out the literature they'd handed us when we entered.
"Oh, look, Diana... one of those bits of rock is named the Walhalla Overlook. It's on the North Rim, though." I mean, there was Vishnu this and Isis that, too, but dammit-we're-heathens, so seeing Norse names officially attached to geography is rather like seeing your friends' names in the newspaper.
"Well... there's no bridge."
"There is so, at the east end of things."
She arched an eyebrow, "One bridge only crosses over it?" We both laughed at the in-joke.
Honestly, the raven appears to be the most common bird in the Southwest. As we left the restaurant, we could hear them croaking in the trees as they looked for carelessly dropped leftovers, or as they danced on the breeze. We chased one that flew over the car, around a cabin, and perched first on another cabin and then in a tree. Here he is in the tree, it's rather a nice silhouette:
Our next leg would be to proceed east along the Canyon's South Rim along Arizona State Route 64, and into another country. Until then, though, there were many other pullouts and overlooks to gape at!
We didn't cross the bridge and make an attempt to look at things from the North Rim, but we stopped many times along the South Rim as we meandered along AZ 64 from Grand Canyon Village to Desert View, near the east end of the park. The rim of the cliff usually has a slight guard rail, although in places where it didn't I liked to walk near the edge and peer off. This made Diana nervous, for fear I'd slip. Mind you, it probably didn't help that I chirped helpful things like, "Don't worry, there's this really poiky bush here to break my fall!"
I do have some sense of self-preservation, though: the wind was blowing from the north, and so away from the edge. It was a fairly constant 20 knots or so, gusting as high as fifty! If it'd been blowing from the south, I wouldn't've dared be so close to the edge.
The trees here are a sort of pine known as pinyon. It's one of the very few trees that grows in this desert. Its nuts are very large, so it's valued as a food source by the native peoples.
So, about seeing your friends in the newspaper?
There's a tree in the foreground on the left. Directly to the right of the tree, sunlit in the far background, that's the Walhalla Plateau on the North Rim, nine and three-quarters miles away.
The mesa "next" to it, the one in shadow, is called "Wotan's Throne" and is two miles closer, with a significant amonut of space in between. Now that you know what the land shapes are like, this next picture is actually a little better:
There is, of course, a Helpful Interpretive Sign to label all of this:
Later on, while looking at DeLorme's Arizona Atlas and Gazeteer (nice big mapbooks with much topographical detail), it turns out that there're also formations labeled "Siegfried's Pyre" and several other things.
As we were walking toward yet another overlook, I heard someone strike a djembe nearby, as did Diana. "Boy'd better watch himself, or I might just take mine out and show him...." In the car, with the eighteen dozen other things, were Diana's harp and my smallish frame drum.
The djembe pounded out another rhythm, this one longer.
"That's it!" I laughed, and pulled the drum out of the car as we walked over to find a young man, standing between the road and the edge, playing his djembe. I admired his playing, he admired Diana's painting on the drum. I handed the drum to Diana as she's got more experience at improvising, and stood between them for a long moment.
It wasn't until then, standing between them, that I remembered that I'd been trained to hop off into a whole array of interesting mental states when drums are played in my vicinity, and that one of the drums I was most attuned to was now being played, with some intent, about three feet to my left. I closed my eyes...
Diana stopped drumming, and so I opened my eyes and pulled myself back together as fast as I could. We thanked the djembe-player and got back in the car, faring onward...
At another overlook, I decided to play with the wind a different way, and took out my cloak:
... except, from another way of looking at it, it was actually pretty much the same way...
At one overlook, a raven perched on a low retaining wall just three feet from the nose of the car. Diana (and, thus, the camera) was too far away to call back in the wind, but he was happy to pose at other places in the parking lot.
After three of these, I called a moratorium on pictures of ravens on asphalt. I mean, honestly! Let's stick to natural settings, please!
Travelling east, the last well-developed portion of Grand Canyon National Park is called Desert View. Not only is there yet another look at what the Colorado has sculpted into the rock, but looking north and east you can see into the Painted Desert. A watchtower has been erected here, to accompany the several bookstores, the general store, the coin-operated telescopes, and general touristpalooza that only comes up here and at the VIllage. Diana succumbed, picking up a CD titled Beneath the Raven Moon, by a lady named Mary Youngblood, which we played a few times while trundling out of the park's eastern gate.
Continuing on AZ 64 took us out of the park, and out into the Navajo Nation. Considered its own country, the Navajo Reservation (alternately, the Navajo Nation, Navajoland, the Rez, etc) spans parts of three of the four Four Corners states: Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. It's a separate country contained wholly within the United States, and within its confines there's another whole separate reservation for the Hopi people. Because Navajoland spans three states, two of which observe Daylight Saving Time, the Arizonan part does too.
...the Hopi part doesn't. The border is in a town called Tuba City, right down the middle of the street.
Anyway, it's pretty simple to know when you've reached the Rez: sure, there's a sign, but more notably it's when the streetside vendor stands start, trying to catch the tourists.
As we drove down into the Painted Desert, we found out that the Grand Canyon is just one of many canyons that mark the landscape in this part of the world. We saw one formed by the Little Colorado River just as we crossed into Navajoland.
AZ 64 and US 160 flow together for awhile, down from the heights alongside the Grand Canyon. The first part of the drive is part of the Painted Desert, where very little grows. At several points, we saw great mounts of pulverised stone that Diana was sure were the tailings from old mines.
AZ 64 ends just south of Tuba City. In Tuba City, we turned right onto AZ 264, and entered the Hopi Reservation. It was a long and blustery drive, and we don't have pictures for much of it because our map indicated that the Hopi do not approve of pictures being taken of their land and we respected this. The Painted Desert gave way to arid pasturelands and many long mesas, although the road remained well-paved, with little traffic. The Hopi live on three of these, named the First, Second, and Third Mesas.
I was surprised to find any cellular service at all -- I did, though, although it was analog and only in populated or high places. Apparently it did strange things to my Caller ID, too. Somewhere in here, Diana drove for awhile and I read the CD's cover more closely. Henh -- Mary Youngblood's apparently Aleutian, as the only non-English titled tracks on the CD are in Aleutian... I found out later, in the process of writing this, that she's also part Seminole and was born in Sacramento.
Houses are infrequent here, except in the few towns like Chinle and Window Rock, due to the simple fact that it takes so many acres for a family to raise its sheep. There are still hogans among the doublewides, although these traditional east-facing dwellings may be built out of modern materials instead of the traditional logs. It is beautiful country, although everywhere it's incredibly obvious that it's also very arid country.
It was here, while driving through Navajoland, that Diana and I became aware of the very definite correlations between altitude, moisture, and temperature. Well, of course it's obvious that temperature goes down as altitude increases, but in this particular series of biomes, water is best found in two places: on the mesas and at the bottom of the canyons. If you're in neither one... well, there are plants you can look for that will help. In some places, seeing any plants at all will be the only signal that water can be found.
The other thing that really struck us on this leg of the journey, and continued to be so for any art of the trip where we were over 2000 feet, were ravens. Ravens everywhere, We'd look up, or to the side, and there was another one. "Look, a raven," in a semi-amused tone was easily one of the more common things you'd've heard in that car... which is why this travelogue has the name is does.
Eventually from AZ 264, we turned north on US 191 and right on Rez Route 7, coming into Chinle. Chinle is near the Canyon de Chelly National Monument. That last word is in Dineh (the Navajo tongue) transliterated into Spanish -- and, therefore, should by no means rhyme with "jelly." Actually, it was here that we started seeing bilingual English/Diné signs. From reading the signs and comparing to other transliaterations I'm familiar with, most specifically Viet, it's clear that this is a tonal language, with a couple different consonants. Also, they have no 'u.' As for new consonants, the crossed-L was particularly apparent to me because of its similarity to the Icelandic eth (Ð/ð).
In writing this, I performed a cursory search for web pages featuring this language, and this was the best I could easily find.
Just east of Chinle, heading towards the Canyon the Chelly National Monument, is the Thunderbird Lodge, a former trading post. We decided to spend the night here, especially when it had a nice, traditional adobe look instead of the very modern Best Western that had been a couple miles back down the road. The front desk of the lodge featured the entire run of Tony Hillerman mysteries for sale (he writes mysteries featuring Navajo characters based on the rez), maps of the nearby landmark, and a schedule of local AA meetings for every day except Wednesday.
It's completely illegal to have alcohol anywhere within Navajoland. I'm not sure how effective this is as a deterrent, but it has the side effects of increasing the number of nighttime drunk driving accidents from people trying to come home after a night of drinking off the res, a couple liquor stores in border towns that do brisk business, and that prominently posted schedule of AA meetings. I wonder if the tendency toward alcoholism is at all related to tendencies toward diabetes that are also quite prevalent in native populations...
Anyway, the lodge also had a cafeteria that served mostly American food in a high-timbered hall well-decorated with Native artwork: clothes, rugs, arrows, and jewelry, all for sale. When Diana and I travel, we generally make it a point to sample the local ethnic cuisine, and here was no exception: on top of all the hamburgers and other fare, the cafeteria did serve several properly ethnic dishes: Navajo green chili stew, Navajo tacos, Navajo burgers, and frybread. Diana was in heaven, because she hadn't had proper frybread in twenty years...
Oh, hm, I should explain that!
Twenty years ago, before she decided to write full-time, Diana was involved in testing educational materials that were going to be used on several reservations, and as a result she'd been assigned here about twenty years ago. She found out that Navajo like things spicy, and had acquired a taste for frybread...
Years later, when she and I visited our first Krispy Kreme, she declared that if you had some of their Original Glazed without the glazed, it was pretty much the same thing.
We each got a bowl of the green chile stew (pretty darn spicy, but with a slow burn) and our own piece of frybread. And, yes, frybread does taste like a glazeless Krispy Kreme. The one bowl of chile stew we each had didn't quite qualify as dinner, so I stepped back into the line just before they closed, and came back with a "Navajo taco" that we split. This is meat-bearing beans (although a vegetarian option was available) with lettuce and cheese, served on a frybread. After paying for the taco, I investigated the several new condiments near the cash register, which included a tall jar full of teensy green peppers soaking in vinegar.
The jar had a shaking-lid, which was my first clue that whatever was in there was going to be extremely exciting.
It was! Whoof!
It turned out that these were Tabasco peppers, picked green and pickled, and were fiercely hot, including the vinegar. I tried some of the vinegar (Diana wouldn't), and then followed it up with an actual pepper, and holy CRAP that was hot. I bought a bottle of milk from the cafeteria to deal with it, and I never have to do that when dealing with spicy food.
However, it occurs to me that a bit of beef marinated in that overnight and served raw might go down pretty well at Umbanda affairs at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pearlshadow's house, especially when offered to Ogun as the peppers are, after all, green.
With the wind still blowing and the sky threatening actual rain overhead, we curled up in our room. Diana read the new Tony Hillerman novel she'd jus tpicked up at the hotel's office, and I uploaded pictures from the camera to the trusty iBook. Then, I turned back to my knitting, because my Hogwarts scarf (House Ravenclaw, natch) was nearly done, and I thought it might be a good idea to have it when we were camping in the Sandia Mountains in two nights' time.
I idly flipped through the available television channels, and found a show about Ansel Adams that contained a lot of good shots from Yosemite (as you might expect).
There had been an emphasis from Stefn that Diana and I were on vacation, dammit during this sojourn. Indeed, he didn't want us to so much as think of Troth business while we were away -- and as sticking our noses in Troth business while we were away would have also been against what we wanted out of this, it was no hardship.
But:
The next day would see us into Albuquerque, and the one after that, we would be at a heathen festival. The vacation, at least insofar as avoiding heathen politics was concerned, would be on hiatus for the weekend. I mentioned this, with regret, to Diana.
In Albuquerque, we'd be staying with Bill Bainbridge--and really, he's post-political: he's a former Steersman, he's out of the game and happy with that, although he still keeps a certain amount of tabs on things. He and Diana were very old friends, and it was still safe to speak openly in front of him.
On the weekend, it would be less so. At the Lodge, Diana gently suggested that I act a little less Otter and a lot more Raven. "Grave and solemn" should be my watchwords for the weekend, which wound up partly unnecessary and partly practice for Trothmoot.
Still, all that was for later. Tonight, there was a warm bed out of the wind, out from under the skies that threatened rain, and another good drive ahead. We slept well, there in the heart of Navajoland, and here I leave you readers again.
-- Lorrie
The morning's soundtrack, naturally, continued to be Frede Grofé, "Grand Canyon Suite."
It's twenty dollars for a vehicle to make its way into the park proper, and then it's only a little more driving to reach the South Rim, which is the far more developed side. I had no real idea what to expect, but knew it would be stunning.
The main road makes a T-intersection at a place called Mather Point. Diana and I parked, and got out of the car. At our first look of the far wall of the canyon, several miles away and a thousand feet higher, Diana said, softly, "Well, now I remember why I never wanted to come here before... I'm afraid of heights!"
I said nothing. I couldn't; I was too busy drinking in all that view.
There are pictures, but they don't even begin to do justice to the thing. I fear they're just Another Set of Grand Canyon Pictures: you really have to go there for the impact to hit you. This is why I mislike photographs; while they're reasonable at letting you see how a thing physically looks, it's a much, much harder row to hoe to get any of the genus loci to come through with it.
This isn't even straight off of Mather Point; this is over to the left, looking into the Canyon, with some of the South Rim in the foreground to attempt at a little perspective.
This is a little closer to straight out.
I was completely dumbstruck, floundering for something to tie this to everything else. For the rest of the day, I would try to wind it 'round with numbers and words, but even as I tried to build a cozy nest of facts and nestle into the reassuring numbers of how wide, how deep, and how old, I knew it would only distance myself from the experience.
I was so clearly and obviously shocked out of normal modes of consciousness by the view that Diana suggested, gently, that I "just take a little time to be here and now for a moment, okay?" Or, translated: ground and center, dear, before we draw stares.
But I was here and now; it was that here and now had thrust me into ecstasy. As a child would, I wandered around the overlook, feeling the wind whistle around me while ravens sported on the breeze: a thousand feet or more below me and still far above the ground. I read the provided signs.
Did you know that nearly every promontory, mesa, and knob has a name? In retrospect, I suppose that seems obvious. However, here at the Grand Canyon, the only names they can think of to fit what they've seen are those of gods. Nor are they particularly picky about pantheon: Norse, Egyptian, Hindu, are all well-represented.
There is a river at the bottom, although it's hard to see. We made sure to bring back proof:
One stone was pockmarked by dozens of small, round craters, and was liberally sprinkled with the pocket change of several countries' tourists. Thinking this a right and proper way to honor the wights of this place (as long as the coins didn't fall down), we left some behind us as we took the stairs back up to the car.
I drove the car towards Grand Canyon Village, stopping at other pullouts along the way to savor more of the view. There are more pictures of this available in the full gallery, if you like.
At the Village, we tried first to have lunch at the restaurant at Bright Angel Lodge. "My, Diana, dare we dine with angels?"
"Well... only if we can find parking." We couldn't.
Stupid angels.
We wound up at Maswik instead, which has a cafeteria. Honestly, I'd been hoping for regional cuisine, possibly something involving elk, but all there was was American and vaguely Mexican-American. We sat with our food, and I pulled out the literature they'd handed us when we entered.
"Oh, look, Diana... one of those bits of rock is named the Walhalla Overlook. It's on the North Rim, though." I mean, there was Vishnu this and Isis that, too, but dammit-we're-heathens, so seeing Norse names officially attached to geography is rather like seeing your friends' names in the newspaper.
"Well... there's no bridge."
"There is so, at the east end of things."
She arched an eyebrow, "One bridge only crosses over it?" We both laughed at the in-joke.
Honestly, the raven appears to be the most common bird in the Southwest. As we left the restaurant, we could hear them croaking in the trees as they looked for carelessly dropped leftovers, or as they danced on the breeze. We chased one that flew over the car, around a cabin, and perched first on another cabin and then in a tree. Here he is in the tree, it's rather a nice silhouette:
Our next leg would be to proceed east along the Canyon's South Rim along Arizona State Route 64, and into another country. Until then, though, there were many other pullouts and overlooks to gape at!
We didn't cross the bridge and make an attempt to look at things from the North Rim, but we stopped many times along the South Rim as we meandered along AZ 64 from Grand Canyon Village to Desert View, near the east end of the park. The rim of the cliff usually has a slight guard rail, although in places where it didn't I liked to walk near the edge and peer off. This made Diana nervous, for fear I'd slip. Mind you, it probably didn't help that I chirped helpful things like, "Don't worry, there's this really poiky bush here to break my fall!"
I do have some sense of self-preservation, though: the wind was blowing from the north, and so away from the edge. It was a fairly constant 20 knots or so, gusting as high as fifty! If it'd been blowing from the south, I wouldn't've dared be so close to the edge.
The trees here are a sort of pine known as pinyon. It's one of the very few trees that grows in this desert. Its nuts are very large, so it's valued as a food source by the native peoples.
So, about seeing your friends in the newspaper?
There's a tree in the foreground on the left. Directly to the right of the tree, sunlit in the far background, that's the Walhalla Plateau on the North Rim, nine and three-quarters miles away.
The mesa "next" to it, the one in shadow, is called "Wotan's Throne" and is two miles closer, with a significant amonut of space in between. Now that you know what the land shapes are like, this next picture is actually a little better:
There is, of course, a Helpful Interpretive Sign to label all of this:
Later on, while looking at DeLorme's Arizona Atlas and Gazeteer (nice big mapbooks with much topographical detail), it turns out that there're also formations labeled "Siegfried's Pyre" and several other things.
As we were walking toward yet another overlook, I heard someone strike a djembe nearby, as did Diana. "Boy'd better watch himself, or I might just take mine out and show him...." In the car, with the eighteen dozen other things, were Diana's harp and my smallish frame drum.
The djembe pounded out another rhythm, this one longer.
"That's it!" I laughed, and pulled the drum out of the car as we walked over to find a young man, standing between the road and the edge, playing his djembe. I admired his playing, he admired Diana's painting on the drum. I handed the drum to Diana as she's got more experience at improvising, and stood between them for a long moment.
It wasn't until then, standing between them, that I remembered that I'd been trained to hop off into a whole array of interesting mental states when drums are played in my vicinity, and that one of the drums I was most attuned to was now being played, with some intent, about three feet to my left. I closed my eyes...
The wind blowing from the other rim caught under my wings as I banked, soaring into it. Ravens fly lower to the ground than the great raptors, and so flap more often than they soar, but even a raven could lock his wings on this, and sport the wind. I dipped a wingtip and turned again, losing a few feet of altitude, raised this to gain it back, propelled by drumbeats and even more by the constant blowing. I danced, because for now and for once flight was no clawing fight with the air against gravity. I danced, exulted and exalted, the sun reflecting bright, hard black off my every feather--
Diana stopped drumming, and so I opened my eyes and pulled myself back together as fast as I could. We thanked the djembe-player and got back in the car, faring onward...
At another overlook, I decided to play with the wind a different way, and took out my cloak:
... except, from another way of looking at it, it was actually pretty much the same way...
At one overlook, a raven perched on a low retaining wall just three feet from the nose of the car. Diana (and, thus, the camera) was too far away to call back in the wind, but he was happy to pose at other places in the parking lot.
After three of these, I called a moratorium on pictures of ravens on asphalt. I mean, honestly! Let's stick to natural settings, please!
Travelling east, the last well-developed portion of Grand Canyon National Park is called Desert View. Not only is there yet another look at what the Colorado has sculpted into the rock, but looking north and east you can see into the Painted Desert. A watchtower has been erected here, to accompany the several bookstores, the general store, the coin-operated telescopes, and general touristpalooza that only comes up here and at the VIllage. Diana succumbed, picking up a CD titled Beneath the Raven Moon, by a lady named Mary Youngblood, which we played a few times while trundling out of the park's eastern gate.
Continuing on AZ 64 took us out of the park, and out into the Navajo Nation. Considered its own country, the Navajo Reservation (alternately, the Navajo Nation, Navajoland, the Rez, etc) spans parts of three of the four Four Corners states: Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. It's a separate country contained wholly within the United States, and within its confines there's another whole separate reservation for the Hopi people. Because Navajoland spans three states, two of which observe Daylight Saving Time, the Arizonan part does too.
...the Hopi part doesn't. The border is in a town called Tuba City, right down the middle of the street.
Anyway, it's pretty simple to know when you've reached the Rez: sure, there's a sign, but more notably it's when the streetside vendor stands start, trying to catch the tourists.
As we drove down into the Painted Desert, we found out that the Grand Canyon is just one of many canyons that mark the landscape in this part of the world. We saw one formed by the Little Colorado River just as we crossed into Navajoland.
AZ 64 and US 160 flow together for awhile, down from the heights alongside the Grand Canyon. The first part of the drive is part of the Painted Desert, where very little grows. At several points, we saw great mounts of pulverised stone that Diana was sure were the tailings from old mines.
AZ 64 ends just south of Tuba City. In Tuba City, we turned right onto AZ 264, and entered the Hopi Reservation. It was a long and blustery drive, and we don't have pictures for much of it because our map indicated that the Hopi do not approve of pictures being taken of their land and we respected this. The Painted Desert gave way to arid pasturelands and many long mesas, although the road remained well-paved, with little traffic. The Hopi live on three of these, named the First, Second, and Third Mesas.
I was surprised to find any cellular service at all -- I did, though, although it was analog and only in populated or high places. Apparently it did strange things to my Caller ID, too. Somewhere in here, Diana drove for awhile and I read the CD's cover more closely. Henh -- Mary Youngblood's apparently Aleutian, as the only non-English titled tracks on the CD are in Aleutian... I found out later, in the process of writing this, that she's also part Seminole and was born in Sacramento.
Houses are infrequent here, except in the few towns like Chinle and Window Rock, due to the simple fact that it takes so many acres for a family to raise its sheep. There are still hogans among the doublewides, although these traditional east-facing dwellings may be built out of modern materials instead of the traditional logs. It is beautiful country, although everywhere it's incredibly obvious that it's also very arid country.
It was here, while driving through Navajoland, that Diana and I became aware of the very definite correlations between altitude, moisture, and temperature. Well, of course it's obvious that temperature goes down as altitude increases, but in this particular series of biomes, water is best found in two places: on the mesas and at the bottom of the canyons. If you're in neither one... well, there are plants you can look for that will help. In some places, seeing any plants at all will be the only signal that water can be found.
The other thing that really struck us on this leg of the journey, and continued to be so for any art of the trip where we were over 2000 feet, were ravens. Ravens everywhere, We'd look up, or to the side, and there was another one. "Look, a raven," in a semi-amused tone was easily one of the more common things you'd've heard in that car... which is why this travelogue has the name is does.
Eventually from AZ 264, we turned north on US 191 and right on Rez Route 7, coming into Chinle. Chinle is near the Canyon de Chelly National Monument. That last word is in Dineh (the Navajo tongue) transliterated into Spanish -- and, therefore, should by no means rhyme with "jelly." Actually, it was here that we started seeing bilingual English/Diné signs. From reading the signs and comparing to other transliaterations I'm familiar with, most specifically Viet, it's clear that this is a tonal language, with a couple different consonants. Also, they have no 'u.' As for new consonants, the crossed-L was particularly apparent to me because of its similarity to the Icelandic eth (Ð/ð).
In writing this, I performed a cursory search for web pages featuring this language, and this was the best I could easily find.
Just east of Chinle, heading towards the Canyon the Chelly National Monument, is the Thunderbird Lodge, a former trading post. We decided to spend the night here, especially when it had a nice, traditional adobe look instead of the very modern Best Western that had been a couple miles back down the road. The front desk of the lodge featured the entire run of Tony Hillerman mysteries for sale (he writes mysteries featuring Navajo characters based on the rez), maps of the nearby landmark, and a schedule of local AA meetings for every day except Wednesday.
It's completely illegal to have alcohol anywhere within Navajoland. I'm not sure how effective this is as a deterrent, but it has the side effects of increasing the number of nighttime drunk driving accidents from people trying to come home after a night of drinking off the res, a couple liquor stores in border towns that do brisk business, and that prominently posted schedule of AA meetings. I wonder if the tendency toward alcoholism is at all related to tendencies toward diabetes that are also quite prevalent in native populations...
Anyway, the lodge also had a cafeteria that served mostly American food in a high-timbered hall well-decorated with Native artwork: clothes, rugs, arrows, and jewelry, all for sale. When Diana and I travel, we generally make it a point to sample the local ethnic cuisine, and here was no exception: on top of all the hamburgers and other fare, the cafeteria did serve several properly ethnic dishes: Navajo green chili stew, Navajo tacos, Navajo burgers, and frybread. Diana was in heaven, because she hadn't had proper frybread in twenty years...
Oh, hm, I should explain that!
Twenty years ago, before she decided to write full-time, Diana was involved in testing educational materials that were going to be used on several reservations, and as a result she'd been assigned here about twenty years ago. She found out that Navajo like things spicy, and had acquired a taste for frybread...
Years later, when she and I visited our first Krispy Kreme, she declared that if you had some of their Original Glazed without the glazed, it was pretty much the same thing.
We each got a bowl of the green chile stew (pretty darn spicy, but with a slow burn) and our own piece of frybread. And, yes, frybread does taste like a glazeless Krispy Kreme. The one bowl of chile stew we each had didn't quite qualify as dinner, so I stepped back into the line just before they closed, and came back with a "Navajo taco" that we split. This is meat-bearing beans (although a vegetarian option was available) with lettuce and cheese, served on a frybread. After paying for the taco, I investigated the several new condiments near the cash register, which included a tall jar full of teensy green peppers soaking in vinegar.
The jar had a shaking-lid, which was my first clue that whatever was in there was going to be extremely exciting.
It was! Whoof!
It turned out that these were Tabasco peppers, picked green and pickled, and were fiercely hot, including the vinegar. I tried some of the vinegar (Diana wouldn't), and then followed it up with an actual pepper, and holy CRAP that was hot. I bought a bottle of milk from the cafeteria to deal with it, and I never have to do that when dealing with spicy food.
However, it occurs to me that a bit of beef marinated in that overnight and served raw might go down pretty well at Umbanda affairs at
pearlshadow's house, especially when offered to Ogun as the peppers are, after all, green.With the wind still blowing and the sky threatening actual rain overhead, we curled up in our room. Diana read the new Tony Hillerman novel she'd jus tpicked up at the hotel's office, and I uploaded pictures from the camera to the trusty iBook. Then, I turned back to my knitting, because my Hogwarts scarf (House Ravenclaw, natch) was nearly done, and I thought it might be a good idea to have it when we were camping in the Sandia Mountains in two nights' time.
I idly flipped through the available television channels, and found a show about Ansel Adams that contained a lot of good shots from Yosemite (as you might expect).
There had been an emphasis from Stefn that Diana and I were on vacation, dammit during this sojourn. Indeed, he didn't want us to so much as think of Troth business while we were away -- and as sticking our noses in Troth business while we were away would have also been against what we wanted out of this, it was no hardship.
But:
The next day would see us into Albuquerque, and the one after that, we would be at a heathen festival. The vacation, at least insofar as avoiding heathen politics was concerned, would be on hiatus for the weekend. I mentioned this, with regret, to Diana.
In Albuquerque, we'd be staying with Bill Bainbridge--and really, he's post-political: he's a former Steersman, he's out of the game and happy with that, although he still keeps a certain amount of tabs on things. He and Diana were very old friends, and it was still safe to speak openly in front of him.
On the weekend, it would be less so. At the Lodge, Diana gently suggested that I act a little less Otter and a lot more Raven. "Grave and solemn" should be my watchwords for the weekend, which wound up partly unnecessary and partly practice for Trothmoot.
Still, all that was for later. Tonight, there was a warm bed out of the wind, out from under the skies that threatened rain, and another good drive ahead. We slept well, there in the heart of Navajoland, and here I leave you readers again.
-- Lorrie
