Mister, I believe in the Promise Land

Been so long I almost forgot how to long in. Truly, though, blogging stopped when I started writing. I can't even explain the words I've been floating the paper boats and twigs the best couple of months. Suffice to say, the real work has begun and while my project is supposed to wrap June first, a mere five or so months away, I feel like the longer I think about this work the longer the whole thing seems to stretch out in front of me.
And tonight, lying in bed feeling absolutely mind f-ed after reading The Griffen and Sabine Trilogy and thinking about how much I like my new boots, I had one of those epiphany omelets where I think I've hit something really grand and really big. Now, normally, when this happens I eventually realize that instead of hitting a vein of originality, I've hit ambition magma and it's just too volcanic and too difficult to wrangle, but this time, the idea is do-able. I just hope it is compatible with Middle Ground.

Fire up the Good Earth tea-it's going to be a long night.

I have to explain the ingredients, the chemistry first. This idea sprung Athena-like outta these other animals:

1. I wanted to a memoir and the land (ie, The Rez) that we both share and can't get away from. I wanted that book to be different than regular nonfiction. I wanted it to be cross between and memoir and a field journal and letters and a pop-up book. Seeing as how I have MG to work on, not to mention a burgeoning editing careers (I'll never get those thens/thans right), a impending move, and a degree that will never be completed (math credits-psshh!) I set that concept on the proverbial shelf to be taken up, I dunno, decades down the road when I will no doubt be extremely successful and required Oprah-reading.

2. This idea had a lot to do with me wanting to capture the physicality of the Rezervation. For me, it a place that is very physical. I had the idea of bring top soil to the Symposium, which still seems campy and probably illegal. But I want, somehow, to show whoever ends up reading this work the artifacts of my life out there.

3. I've had an extremely difficult time dealing with presenting the spirituality of the place. Possibly because I have such a hard time understanding my own spirituality and it's link to my childhood and ceremony and medicine people and my friends. In a nutshell, how to I explain concepts that are 1. On their way to poofing out of existence or have completely transmorphed from what they were when I was a child. and 2. How do I got about presenting those belief to an audience that most likely exists in a much more pragmatic and linear world.

4. Following the above, some 120 years ago some president declared that there was no more wilderness left in the USA. He was wrong. I grew up in one of the wildest places I can imagine. Sure I cafeterias and Pepsi and television like the rest of the world but I also had an entire culture staring in front of me. Instead of proper American History I was told coyote and origin stories. I truly believe that i grew up in a place where wilderness, where magic, still exists. Or existed. It could be gone, I am aging fast. I believe in the shared human condition and the ability to relate but the reservation is its own world.

6. But wait! How can I say magic! Magic isn't real...is it? And if it is, isn't the very word a kind of turn off. It conjures (lols) images of Harry J. Potter astride a broomstick at best and at worst 16 years insisting "No, it's majick with a K!!!" Only Neil Gaiman gets to write about magic. And if it is magic, can't I call it something else....like "energy" or "manifestation?" Maybe I'm just a kook who is having issues detaching from childhood and didn't actually grow up in a fantasy land.

7. I like maps. Like a lot.

8. I met Art Spiegelman a couple of weeks ago and he was lovely. Then I saw him speak. He broke down comic panels and made me realize how much I miss drawing. I've always been a middling artist but I can doodle one hell of a doodle.

Here's the rub: Why wait for an interesting physical text? Why not do it for MG? Why not draw maps of my childhood, as I remember it, to help situate readers. Let's make this a fun adventure, let's show them where I'm from and then direct them to other place they can go. I will draw maps for each MG piece and than bookend the whole work with drawing/maps of the Reservation. My renderings, of course. It's hit me that my perceptions of Rez Land should not be exercises in accuracy. Four piece is overwhelming but even more overwhelming is the impossibility of explaining this place, still so mysterious to me, in that amount of paper. Visuals will give a quick, albeit biased, look at the individual places the pieces take place and place as a whole. This will also be in keeping with the four scared mountains idea I previously outlined. This will also help me structure the piece because I really do want this piece to not just be four random splashes. I want wholeness.

I tire. I will try to upload my rough sketches as they come in.

Death Essay part one

A very, very early draft. 1,760 words.

The Graveyard

“I think that’s it.”

“I don’t know,” my brother says.
“But see all those white things.” I say pointing at the boney objects sticking up along the small ridge a mile or so away. “I think they’re crosses.”

“I told you, Kat. Nothing grows out here,” my mom says. She is walking with her palms flat against her thighs and sounds out of casually out of breath. My mother’s body language gives the appearance that she is always walking up hill.
“What? I said ‘cross’?” I say. My brother loops ahead with the dog, who jumps into some bushes.

“Thought you said grass,” is her reply.

I am up here on my first visit. I am intimidated by my old schools, my old teachers and my peers that might be still be around. My old haunts aren’t mine anymore, I have to look for new ones. When I arrived Thursday night, I asked my mother if I could see the Kayenta graveyard.
“Do we even have a cemetery?” I asked her, in macabre glee.

“Sure we do.” She tells me. “That bone yard? That’s what it is. It’s the most barren and depressing piece of earth I have ever seen. Promise me you won’t bury me there? I want to be cremated.”

“Alright,” I say, “but can we go Saturday?”

We’ve walked about a mile to get here. There is no real trail, but on the outskirts

of town where you can see everything, the landing strip, the sewer ponds, and the housing, you don’t need trails. The ground is pounded flat by drought and joy riders. If you emptied glass of water out here, I imagine it would roll over the ground for yards before sinking in to nourish the budding tumble weeds.

About a half a mile before I see white crosses on the horizon we came to two

roads and a sign. “No Dumping,” it said in crooked black spray paint and “Show Respect.”

“We’re must be getting close,” I say.
My mother and Charlie, on his first visit home from college, runs ahead of me. I look down and see a bright green grasshopper anchored to the road. He is the greenest thing I’ve seen. His transparent wings, pulled away from his body by the wind, mild today, are also a transparent green. So are his eyes, I think I can see tiny black pupils, but I’m also not that versed in insect anatomy. Maybe his pupils are as green as the rest of him. Green like a rainforest frog. Green like pictures of New Zealand.

I look up and in this distance, coming from Snake Rock, I see a red pick-up coming down the road. Two or three people sit in its bed, and a dog runs, opened mouthed, behind the vehicle.
“Hey,” I shout, moving towards the graveyard. “There’s a truck.” Neither my Charlie or my mother look at the truck. “They have a dog.”
“Leash him,” my mother tells Charlie, who removes his leather belt from his jeans, and moves to attach it to Max’s collar. “We shouldn’t go in there, with them passing by.”

I pull the hood of my black jacket over my conspicuous blonde hair. I don’t want them to see me. I am pretty sure there are no Anglos are buried in that cemetery and what right have I to grace their grave yard with my straw-colored hair? I try to ignore the passing truck and walk the final, slightly uphill, yards to the graveyard. I don’t look at the passing truck but I hear it getting closer, and finally pass us by. I turn, holding my hood to my head and try to look into the faces of the people in the truck. I wonder what they think of us.

Charlie is being yanked around by Max, who has a small triangular object in his mouth.

“Is that a hoof?” I ask Charlie.

“No, it’s a fish head,” he says. “Attached to a some wire.” He jerks the fish head out of Max’s mouth. The fish looks gray and deflated. I can’t tell if it has eyes or if they have just sunken into its head.

“It’s bait.” Says my mom, who has reached the entrance of the cemetery first. “Figures we’d find the one fish in the entire desert.”
“People don’t fish here,” I say.

There is no discernable entrance to the graveyard. The fence that outlines the property is made of a variety of decaying materials. Twisted chain-link in some places, bleached and cracked wood in others. My family and I step into the cemetery.
“Look,” my mother says, “And people use it as a dump.”
She is pointing to a pile of trash, just inside the graveyard. We look closer; the mess is a mix of plastic bags, broken glass, and fake flowers. I see a small metal grave marker inscribed with a faded name. I squint but can’t read it. When I look up I am greeted by the most uneven landscape I have ever seen. Hundreds of dirt mounds extend unevenly for a quarter of a mile. They remind me of the hills kids make to jump their bikes, but these tiny hills are flatter and decorated. The mounds are covered with old fake flowers bleached out by the sun, glass vases and coffee mugs, things you might find in a kitchen.

Something I do not need to be told is that all the mounds are graves and that there is a person under each and every hardened hill. I recognize these kinds of graves from old photographs. I always assumed that these graves were shallower than most, because of the lack of construction equipment. But even the oldest graves I have seen, the ones back East around Boston, with the crosses and headstones sinking into the ground and the tree roots twisting around them, were smoother looking than these.

“Keep Max out of here,” she tells Charlie, who stays outside the intangible border.

There are very few proper makers. There are a few crosses, a few praying angels, and a few names spelled out using small rocks. The biggest maker is a piece of red-orange sandstone. The word “Sweety” above a cascading rainbow has faded.

“Sweety,” my mother says as I step further into the graveyard. “Tasha, I didn’t know she was buried here.”

“There’s nothing Navajo here,” I say. I am weaving my way between the graves. The mounds, like something out of a spaghetti western, make me feel like the bodies aren’t buried very deep. Like they are they, just beneath the dirt that make up the mounds.

I’m not paying attention and step on one of the mounds. It’s small, about the size of a backpack. My foot leaves a slight impression. Do I reshape this space with my hands? Do I ignore it? Is it possible that anyone could track me based off my sneaker size. I am not supposed to be here.

“I can’t be here,” my mother says. She is still standing in front of the Sweety grave. “ I’m sorry, I’m going. I’m going home. I didn’t know they buried her here. What kind of person would do that to their daughter?”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say. “I shouldn’t have asked to come out here.”

“Didn’t I tell you it was the saddest and most awful place you would ever see?”

“It’s something else. Did you notice, there’s nothing Navajo here?”

“Of course not.”

My mom leaves the graveyard. Charlie removes the belt from the dog who starts running ahead of her, back towards the direction of Black Mesa. Charlie enters the graveyard.

“She’s upset,” he says. “That was one of her students, I think.”

“Yeah.”

We start to walk through the graves. The places feels as though it has no atmosphere. I can see the American flags and ribbons whip about and I can hear the only real roses we see scratch the insides of their plastic bouquets, but I don’t feel the wind. Usually the wind mixes the smells of the near-by sewer ponds with the rest of everyone’s life, but I can’t smell the ponds today, or the horses. It doesn’t even carry the voices of children playing in the near-by neighborhood, though I heard them before we entered the graveyard. The graveyard exists, I decide, in outer space. That’s why no one visits and I wonder if that bothers the dead here. Can all the bodies since the lack of grass above them. I wonder what the place looks like from space or from an airplane, if it is even distinguishable from the rest of the land here.

“We should catch up with Mom,” Charlie says. “This place is terrible.”

I don’t say anything to that. I am upset with his obvious observation and petty reaction. I am upset with my own reasons for coming here and what I was hoping to get. I am tempted to do something really bad. I am tempted to steal one of the coffee mugs or fake flowers that decorate the graveyard because I didn’t get what I wanted. I am tempted to tuck a small angel statue into my jacket pocket and am tempted to steal the pebble that might complete the spelling of someone’s name. The only reason I don’t is because I am scared of what I might be taking home with me. There is no such thing as a good spirit in Navajo culture. Furthermore, I should be careful about what I leave behind here, a piece of my hair, or a sneeze.

I shove my hands into my pockets, like a tempted teenager in a drug store.

“Come on,” I say to Charlie. “Let’s catch up with Mom.”

She is more the half a mile away when we leave the graveyard and I want to catch up with her very badly. The wind has picked up considerably, as it tends to do in the afternoon. There are no trees to lend it a sound, the entire landscape looks still, but it is harder and harder to hear myself when I talk to Charlie. I look behind myself and the sight of the graveyard unravels little by little becoming smaller with every step I take until it was the mirage it was before I had entered it. I can hear Max’s collar and I can see my mom’s maroon jacket. I would shout for her if I didn’t know the wind would throw my voice back into my face.

"Beulah Land, I wonder when I won't need you anymore"

This is the first time I have been in Kayenta during this time of year in three years. The air smells like football games, like sports practices. It is more autumn here than in Flagstaff. There are leaves all over the ground that move the way they always have. There is an abandoned bike at a playground, the streamers on its handlebars are pink and opalescent and move in the wind. There is a pile of apple cores and skins. In the middle of the disintegrating pile is a pamphlet belonging to one of the many evangelistic sects in Kayenta. LDS? Witnesses? The Baptists? I have not be religiously propositioned since moving too Flagstaff. I almost missed the well-dressed and ultimately well-meaning missionaries asking me if my mother was home.

I’ve been making generalizations about small town life for about thirty-six hours now. I’m wearing silk but my sleeves smell like diesel. I am confused about my capacity. Am I to be soft and impressionable or fueled, spitting fumes, an aluminum dragon?

Writing is, I suppose, viewed as being a transformative art. When you type you are really spinning out cocoons for yourself and your friends. Write something that will make you change. People keep asking me what I think of the changes.
“What do you think of the new school,” one teacher asks me, from behind and metal screen that separates the cafeteria from the courtyard.I look at the rows of cafeteria tables, the giant menu on the wall, the big screen TV where CNN broadcasts Ike swirling collision with Texas.
“It’s so,” I’m trying for linear. “Institutionalized,” he finishes for me. I interview him tomorrow.

And maybe he’s right.
But I walk through the halls, I can’t help but wonder if those cameras are functional.
The school was always a place of half-hearted noncommittal threats.
A nine-foot black metal fence borders almost all of the school property. The tops of the fence are sharp like spears and I imagine them snatching a wiggling sophomore by their backpack. But I opened the gate as easily as anything tomorrow and entered the science building unnoticed.
Inside that black fence at least ten red-roofed pagodas have been built, kids get shade from a beige brick wall. I can already hear what everyone was talking about.
You can change the property but you can’t change the school. Or the people inside. The lockers and the couches in the library are the same. So are the kids, from what I can tell. High school, the land of sneakers.
It’s weird to inhabit a place where so many dramas took place. Where friends dished out sympathy or talked behind your back and shoved notes gleefully trashing the newest white girl. Francesca, olive-skinned, and oozing tom-boyish sexuality was the target in the 7th grade. After her, it was Jenny, who had animal fur from home stuck to her fleece sweater and a habit of spouting socialist-esque propaganda.
I’ll admit to my espionage. I helped create ugly nicknames for all these girls, while, at the same time, brought them Christmas presents. Eventually the girls, pale and cracked thermometers, moved away.I befriended a lot of these girls, and, to an extent, found them more comfortable than Racquel, Beranda, or Brittany. Brittany is the one friend I can’t find, in my memory, perhaps because we were the closest or because, in the end, I chose myself over her.

The faces that stump me the most are those of the Anglos. At Basha’s, which looks like a well-stocked warehouse, I play the Tourist Game, my own invention. I try to guess if this or that white face is a tourist. And, if possible, what country they hail from. A lot depends on whether or not they have a fanny pack.

Everyone expects that I am here with a Kayenta-instilled sense of pride. I don’t know what I am here for. I imagine my mind to be like on of those space-age smart foam mattresses. I imagine the impressions left behind my fingers and kneecaps.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Katherine, one thing that has changes,” my mother says. “I remember people coming to town with wagons and mules. No one liked to drive at night. Because of the sheep, and the yannies. Now you see all those houses, but then it was dark. Dark as a wilderness. Now there are so many lights.”

Dust

Going back to the source.

Having trapezed across campus for over a month now trying to get my grant funding figured out, I may actually have a solution.

Basically, I went to NAU Human Relations last week. Here's what they told me: We can't help you. Contact the financial aid office.

Who, as I expected, had never heard of the HURA award.

In addition, HR told me that they could not confirm my present NAU employment without first having contact with the Lumberjack. I then started out to fill out a New Hire application, my fourth, if memory serves.

Luckily, and I write this in the Lumberjack office, I should be able to get the my ambiguity as an employee squared away by Monday evening at the LJ's first ED Board meeting.

I will also probably finish filling out that new hire information.


*

Life feels a bit like camping with my father.

When I was young we would head out after dark. After we had eaten "pocket stews", potatoes, groundbeef, and bell peppers baking over a campfire in tinfoil.

We would head out on foot or in my father's Toyota Forerunner, which exists in my mind, a far off white beacon at the end of our many hikes.

If we head by foot, my father would often stop and attempt to call in owls.

But right now I feel more like those excursions. in the Forerunner. My father would take his spotlight and shine its yellow light out the window of the car and we would the dust swirl in front of us as we drove, very slowly, hoping for an animal that might dart out in front of us.

I feel like that. All night and wind, and one spotlight, a glaring metaphor, shining through the kicked up dust and sand.