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Author Archive: Ned
August 11th, 2009
by Ned
Security helped us find a good parking spot at the top of a hill overlooking the Sun Dance. We settled into it, turned off the engine, and disembarked to go see what was happening below. What we saw was a large camp with a few dozen tents and pickup trucks—some of the tents were small overnight sleepers, but some of the larger ones were just large overhangs with tables and non-perishable food underneath. We even saw a couple of massive teepees. In the middle of all the tents was a flagpole flying German, French, Swiss, and Italian flags.
Away from the camp, near the edge of the plateau, there was a ring-shaped pergola beneath which people were gathering. We headed in that direction, beginning to feel a little uneasy. Chet and Bill had described the Sun Dance to us as a festival, with dancing Cheyenne girls and a lot of free food; the image in my head looked a little bit like a slightly tamer Navajo Saint Patrick’s Day. But everyone was quiet and solemn, occasionally shooting wary glances in our direction.
As we approached the arbor, a white woman named Pam approached us and told us the rules. No one was to wear shoes beneath the arbor unless those shoes were moccasins, she said. Everyone was to stay respectful and quiet beneath the arbor. Additionally, no one could wear glasses, bring bottles of water, or wear shorts—we had to go back and change into our long pants if we wanted to witness the ceremony.
She asked us how we had found out about the Sun Dance. I think she, like most of the other white people present, was an anthropologist. We were obviously not. Peter explained to her how we had met Chet and Bill, and how they had told us about this festival where volunteers had their chests bolted to a rope running up to a tree, and remained there for four days without food and water. Chet had shown us the scars from his own participation in the ceremony, Peter mentioned.
Pam shook her head. “That’s not cool that he did that,” she said.
We went back to change into our long pants, suddenly very nervous. We had had no idea that we were stumbling into a solemn ritual with our giant hippie bus. And while we had no intention of leaving before we had gotten a chance to observe and participate, we knew we were going to have to go out of our way to be as respectful as possible.
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August 10th, 2009
by Ned
A Sun Dance is not an easy thing to get to, especially if you’re trying to negotiate the road in a school bus. The road from First Mesa to Piñon, the town in Navajo territory where the Sun Dance was to take place, was by far the bumpiest, worst-paved road we’ve encountered. It was covered with a thin layer of dirt, as if to imply the idea of a dirt road, but beneath that was a jagged vehicle trap seemingly designed to make even us environmentally-conscious veggie oil-fueled hippies mourn the death of the Hummer.
After about an hour of shuddering along through the desert, we made it to a diffuse, scattered little village, as small as anything we had encountered thus far. This was Piñon: a supermarket, a health center, some houses, and a whole lot of negative space in between all of it. We parked in the supermarket to get our bearings and ask for directions from the locals. Most seemed amused by our presence; we were quite literally the only white people in the entire supermarket, and everyone correctly guessed that we were there for the Sun Dance. A few people approached us and asked for food, underscoring the poverty of the area. We made some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for people, and then headed toward where we were told the Sun Dance was.
Unfortunately, it was down another winding dirt road. By the time we finally made it there, the power steering and brakes were acting up, and our exhaust pipe had been partially dislodged from its rightful place at the rear of the bus. These weren’t debilitating issues, but it meant that the bus was in dire need of TLC, and there was no chance of us leaving the Sun Dance that night. For good or ill, we were there until the next morning.
It turns out it was for the best. That evening, we participated in one of the most remarkable events I have ever seen.
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August 5th, 2009
by Ned
We picked up our first hitchhikers on the way from Tuba City to Piñon. They were three Hopi Indians, trying to get to a ceremony of their own in First Mesa. The most talkative of them was Wilbert (pictured, left), a man who carved small wooden statues and was going to peddle his wares; his two companions were women who sat quietly beside him, one of them weaving a basket from dried yucca.
Over the course of the ride to First Mesa, we got to know both Wilbert and the Hopi tribe a lot better than any of us anticipated. Wilbert told us about his arrest record, the mistakes he had made in his youth, his current living situation, and the focus and craft with which he made his wooden figurines. More to the point, he also filled us in on the troubles of the Hopi tribe; the tribe was struggling with corruption, he said, as tribal leaders pocketed money that should have been distributed across the reservation. But even more than the corruption, what he was concerned with was what he saw as the dying out of the old ways of life. Fewer and fewer young people, he said, were participating in sacred rituals or festivals by making the sacrifices that were required, such as fasting for several days. Without young people who were willing to hold onto the old rituals, he was worried that the tribe would gradually become a shadow of its former self.
Part of this was a result of modernization, and cultural cross-pollination with Christianity and secularism, but Wilbert did not see all outside religious influences as bad.
“Some people in the tribe who follow the old ways are Christians too, and some aren’t,” Wilbert said with a shrug. “It’s your choice.” When someone observed the old rituals of the Hopi while still believing in Christ, he said, they called it “two hearts.” He told us his sister had two hearts.
We dropped off Wilbert and his friends at the bottom of the hill where there festival was to take place, and then went off in search of our own. The whole time we had been talking to Wilbert, none of us had thought to ask what we should expect there.
Tags: hitchhikers, Hopi Indians, Wilbert
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August 4th, 2009
by Ned
The day before we went to Piñon for the Sun Dance, we decided to go to that great wonder of Arizona: the Grand Canyon.
It turns out the canyon itself is only a portion of Grand Canyon National Park. There are also other trails, campgrounds, gift shops, food courts, and so on. That probably shouldn’t have been as surprising as it was, but when I pictured the Grand Canyon, I pictured just that: an enormous canyon.
We paid the entrance fee of $25, parked the bus, and then headed towards the canyon itself. It should go without saying that the view was absolutely breathtaking (see above). But once we descended into the canyon itself, it only improved. I had no idea that the canyon was going to be so green; the word verdant comes to mind. But there was vegetation everywhere, and squirrels which we soon discovered had been conditioned by decades of hikers and tourists to be not the slightest bit wary of humans. They would get so close you could reach out and touch them, then dart off to somewhere a couple feet away.
Americans made up a much smaller majority of the human visitors to the canyon than I expected. It seemed like a solid third of the people we passed were young, hyper-athletic francophones; among the Americans, only a percentage were the sort of people who are dead serious about hiking and willing to hike the 10.7 miles to the bottom. The rest, a large percentage of whom were children and the elderly, were content to hike around the top mile of the canyon.
We landed more on the latter side; we made it three miles down and then hiked back up. Even that was exhausting—as an elderly couple we passed joked, it was “three miles down and twelve miles up.”
It would have been interesting to see what the canyon looked from the bottom. But that would have been a two-day trip, and we had neither the tents and rations for that nor the initiative. Besides, we still had a Sun Dance to attend.
As we were warming up the bus to drive away, Ali looked out the window and started gesticulating feverishly. We looked over and saw a massive elk, its horns at least a head over my height, striding down the road. Despite the paved roads, the gift shops and the water fountains, the canyon was still his place, not ours.
Photo courtesy of Peter Hildebrand.
Tags: Arizona, Grand Canyon, tourists
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August 4th, 2009
by Ned
Arizona is perhaps the most desolate state we’ve traveled through thus far. This is by no means a bad thing—the stark beauty of the surrounding landscape is just as awe-inspiring as it was in New Mexico and West Texas. But it does mean that there’s a lot of ground to cover in between each sign of civilization, and most of the towns we passed through were little more than a strip of road with a few restaurants.
The two exceptions we encountered before Phoenix were Winslow and Flagstaff. Flagstaff in particular was a very strange place. It was by far the greenest town we encountered in Arizona, thanks to a remarkably high altitude that made the nights there chilly even by the standards of us as New Englanders. And while we only saw the Wal-Mart, we got the impression there of a diverse, endearingly oddball community, shaped in large part by the proximity of Northern Arizona University.
Exhibit A: We were in the Flagstaff Wal-Mart for all of two minutes, surrounded by RVs, before we got a friendly knock on the door. A beefy, talkative guy with a scraggly beard bounded onto the bus and introduced himself as Pockets. He was traveling with his friend, Shadow, and their dog, in a van that they had been living out of for years. Pockets called us “family,” saying, “I knew there would be family in this parking lot,” and asked us if we had been at the gathering that year—meaning the massive flash-hippie commune known as the Rainbow Gathering. We said that we had not, and he launched into an involved description of his various debaucheries and hallucinogenic experiences over the course of the gathering.
Later, after the Sun Dance and the Grand Canyon, we rolled through Flagstaff once more on our way to Phoenix, in search of veggie oil. Unsurprisingly, the downtown was really cool—depending on who aboard the bus you ask, it was almost as interesting, or more interesting, than downtown Asheville, North Carolina. The music shops, food and street performers were all great, but the best part for us was that everyone seemed to genuinely like the bus; it felt like we were surrounded by friends. Or, as Pockets had put it, family.
Tags: Arizona, Flagstaff, Phoenix, veggie oil, Wal-Mart, Winslow
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August 3rd, 2009
by Ned
 On our second night in Gallup, we met Brian and Sahara. They were from the other Gallup, the one that we hadn’t seen on Highway 66—both of them were white, not Navajo, and had recently graduated from the local private Christian high school. Nonetheless, they had some interesting stories about the local folklore—in particular the supposed beyond-the-grave hauntings at the local church and surrounding area. They also told us about the Navajo legend of the skinwalker, a mythical beast that used to be a man and could assume the form of a wild animal. In order to become a skinwalker, Brian said, you had to kill two of your own relatives.
It was nice to meet both of them, but the next morning the exchange left a funny taste in my mouth. In a mostly poor Navajo town, it seemed strange to me that our only extended interaction had been with the two people whose socioeconomic background was most similar to our own. It made me wonder if we were sequestering and sheltering ourselves just like if we had not started traveling at all–in other words, if we were just being tourists.
I should have known that history had already proven that fear mostly unfounded. And the next day, we got to finally meet two gentlemen from the “other” Gallup that Brian and Sahara had so little to do with. While we were still hanging out in the Wal-Mart parking lot, two Navajo men approached the bus and asked for some food or money. They explained that they had just been released from prison (although they did not say for what) and had nothing.
Their names were Chet and Bill. We invited them on the bus and gave them some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Over the course of the meal, they started talking about a four-day event that was starting in Piñon, Arizona that Thursday, a Navajo ceremony called a Sun Dance. We knew practically nothing about it, but they said we were welcome, and we resolved to make a stop there on our way to Phoenix.
Tags: class, Gallup, New Mexico
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July 30th, 2009
by Ned
 Sadly, we had to drop Audrey (pictured, right) off at the airport before departing from Albuquerque. Once she was gone, it was just me, Ali, Peter and John—the core group, the people who had been on the bus from Day 1 and stayed the whole time.
After departing the airport, we headed for Gallup, New Mexico. Along the way, we passed through the Pueblo reservation which resident Leslie Marmon Silko described in her book Ceremony. Peter, who was reading the book at the time, hopped off the bus and asked some locals if the knew her. They knew the Silko family, they said, but Leslie had moved a while back.
That encounter was the first indication that we were in Native American territory. As we trundled along, a sign pointed out for us that we were now in Navajo County.
Gallup isn’t technically on a reservation, but we were clearly in a heavily Navajo town. As if to underscore how distinct from the rest of New Mexico the town is, they don’t observe daylight savings time—meaning that, while we were there, we were closing to pacific standard time than to the mountain time of the surrounding regions. That caused more than a little confusion.
There are, it seems, two Gallups, and we encountered people from both of them. The night after we stayed in their Wal-Mart parking lot, we headed out towards Highway 66 to hunt for some veggie oil. It was a discouraging trip—practically all of the restaurants we stopped at had oil that was too clogged and dirty to be usable. And the poverty of the neighboring residential areas was obvious. On multiple occasions, people came to the bus asking for food or money, and the people we saw on the street had the worn-down, dejected look of people living in a place where industry had collapsed.
We were eager to get out of there, but we not very much veggie oil and some other technical issues, we were forced to stay another night. Yet as frustrating as it was at the time, our extended stay actually turned out to be an unexpected stroke of luck.
Tags: Gallup, Navajo, New Mexico, veggie oil
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July 29th, 2009
by Ned
As I mentioned in the last post, Albuquerque has a really odd mixture of different subcultures all occupying the same space. It’s something that we haven’t quite encountered in any other area.
One of the examples that really sticks out to me is Robin’s neighborhood alone. Robin lived near a park, in a nice area of faux-adobe houses. Her roommates were, like her, both Americorps volunteers. The guy down the street, outside of whose house we parked the bus, was a shaven-headed, goateed, tattooed chef. Those of Robin’s friends that we met seemed to fit into the hip subculture that we’ve encountered in a lot of cities—it reminded me a lot of being in Austin, in particular.
None of this was unusual or surprising. But when we walked a block down from Robin’s place, we found ourselves in front of a motorcycle shop with the Nazi SS sprayed in various spots on the exterior. The place was closed during the day, but as we drove by at night we caught a glimpse of an aging biker with a scraggly white wizard’s beard reaching down to his chest inside dealing with customers. Robin confirmed our suspicions; this was a genuine neo-Nazi bike shop, operating out in the open.
The oddness of the city got further underscored when we went to go hunting for veggie oil. By 8 pm, it seemed, practically all of the restaurants in the area where we searched were closed. Despite what seemed like a fairly active youth subculture, practically everywhere we turned seemed to have shut down by before sundown. We had been to much smaller towns that were still significantly more active at night.
Little night life and neo-Nazis aside, though, Albuquerque was still a great town. It’s worth visiting for the food alone, not to mention the surrounding natural beauty. And I should add that practically everyone we met was perfectly nice and almost certainly not a white supremacist. Really, the fact that they found their little bigoted niche in Albuquerque indicates more about its strange eclecticism than it does any sort of trend.
Tags: Albuqurque, New Mexico, racism
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July 28th, 2009
by Ned
 We were lucky enough to have two friends in Albuquerque to visit—we spent our three days in Albuquerque at the home our high school friend Robin Dutcher (pictured) shared with two fellow Americorps volunteers. We’re lucky we caught Robin when we did—she told us she was only in Albuquerque for another month, and then was off to San Francisco to attend clown college.
Our other friend was my NYU Local colleague, Charlie Eisenhood. Charlie made the 2008 UWIRE 100 for his work blogging about the Take Back NYU! Occupation at NYU Local, and he’s currently blogging for the Albuquerque Journal. With the two of them and Robin’s boyfriend, we tried some local New Mexican food.
New Mexican food is, unsurprisingly, remarkably similar to Mexican food, but with some subtle differences. Charlie and Robin told us that New Mexican green chili was something of a local specialty. The meal also came with something called sopapillas—essentially fried dough that could be filled with either honey or the sort of ingredients one might put into a burrito.
But enough about the food, delicious as it was; the town of Albuquerque itself was a cool, but profoundly weird place. Part of that, I’m sure, has to do with its efforts to establish itself as a new Vancouver, one of the places that Hollywood goes to film thanks to the tax breaks provided by the state. According to some of the people we talked to, Val Kilmer has an estate in Albuquerque, from which he is contemplating a run for the governor’s seat.
But besides the growing Hollywood presence in Albuquerque, the pre-existing gestalt of different cultures and sub-cultures rubbing up against one another is just strange. And I say this with the utter certainty that we only saw a small glimpse of the whole story.
Tags: Albuqurque, New Mexico, NYU Local
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July 28th, 2009
by Ned
 Of all of the strange town names that we’ve encountered on the tour, two in particular stand out: Truth or Consequences, and Elephant Butte. It just so happens that those two places were both in New Mexico, bordering each other.
We saw Truth or Consequences first. We didn’t see much of the town, but we did find an interesting story behind the name; apparently the town was originally called Hot Springs, New Mexico, but in 1950 they changed it to the name of a radio show that was popular at the time. From the town’s official site:
Then in 1950, NBC television and radio producer Ralph Edwards, on the 10th anniversary of the Truth or Consequences radio program, called his staff together and said, “I wish that some town in the United States liked and respected our show so much that it would like to change its name to ‘Truth or Consequences.’” Upon hearing the proposition, the New Mexico State Tourist Bureau relayed the news to the manager of the Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce and the news spread like wildfire.
We weren’t there long, but we did have one interesting encounter—when we pulled into a gas station to fill up on reserve diesel, we rolled up alongside a pickup truck decorated on the back with Wiccan bumper stickers and, incongruously, a Star of David. A decal on the driver’s side door advertised tarot readings, and the owner of the truck—a portly, amiable man in a poncho—told us that he was a Wiccan reverend. He gave us his business card, blessed our bus, and then we were on our way.
After that, we were off to Elephant Butte, to swim in the lake there. The place was quiet, almost preternaturally serene, but peace and quiet isn’t what earned the surrounding area a place in the history books–Elephant Butte Lake is a little over 50 miles from the Trinity test site, where the first nuclear bomb was ever detonated.
Recharged and refreshed after a dip in the (thankfully non-radioactive) lake, we headed off to Albuquerque.
Tags: Elephant Butte, New Mexico, Truth or Consequences
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