And she's back... Feb 9th

Oh wow I just remembered that it's February now!  Geez...

Well,  a week and a half later, I'm back to staring at a computer screen, tip-typing away.  I haven't looked at a screen for 10 days.  I think that's a record for me since I was, like, 9 and on vacation down the shore or something.  It has been kind of a lovely thing.  But it's also kind of a lovely thing to be sitting in a starbucks, watching (but not feeling) the blizzard outside, and writing little notes into the ether. This modern world we've created is, well, pretty comfortable for those who are used to it.

So anyways, I've just come back from Black Mesa, where I was supporting a Navajo couple- Marie and Eagle- by herding their sheep and watching over their homesite when they were away.  Below is the hogan where I stayed. A hogan is the traditional Navajo housing. Marie and her sister, Rain, grew up in this hogan with their mom, Katherine, and other siblings. Marie and Eagle now live in a bigger hogan up the hill (shown with the green roof) and Rain and her husband, Hound, and Katherine live just next door in a traditional American house that the "Feds" gave them.  Long story.

The hogan I stayed in, outside and in.

another inside view.

Marie and Eagle's hogan. Wish I'd gotten pics of inside. It's huge and beautiful.

Ok. So the drama I walked in on when I got up to their place 2 Thursdays ago (and there is always drama to be walked in on) is that Marie and Eagle were down 2 sheep dogs and 2 sheep.   A couple days before I arrived, 2 wild dogs had attacked and killed 2 of the sheep.  This was really devastating for them (they have 58 sheep now) and they were furious about the dogs. Believing that 2 of their 3 sheep dogs were sort of teaching the wild dogs how to behave around the sheep, how to sneak up on them, and where they stayed at night, Eagle believed that 2 of the dogs had started to "go bad," so he shot one of them in the hip (injuring it, but not killing it) in order to "teach it a lesson", and then poured antifreeze all over the dead sheep so the wild dogs would be poisoned when they ate them.  Well, his own dog ate it instead and died within a couple days.  When I drove up last Thursday, I saw the injured dog on the side of the road near their home.  And then on Friday, when Eagle was showing me the ropes of herding, we found that someone had shot and killed the injured dog and dragged it into a ditch on the side of the road.  Eagle was mortified and I was somewhat traumatized.  I mean, geez.

So that's what I walked in on.  I was left with one sheep dog, who was possibly the most useless sheep dog I've ever run across.  Her name is Ida Mae and she would just trot along after the sheep, not actually herding at all.  She'd fall asleep while they were grazing and when they were on the move, she'd get distracted with digging in a rabbit hole or gnawing on her foot and did nothing to help.  I was truly a lonely sheep herder.  Dumb dog.

this is Ida, the scraggliest and most useless sheep dog ever.

the horse

My days started by waking up before dawn because we had to "beat the sun", according to Eagle. He had a thick Navajo accent and it wasn't always easy to understand him.  He told me many traditional stories about the Sun and the Rain and the Sea and how the beginning of the man started, etc. He told me stories of Geronimo, telling me that he aspired to be like him (which... is kind of intense). But I enjoyed his stories. He also showed me a lot of cats cradle string tricks and was very impressed that my mother had taught me these tricks as well when I was young.  He told me that doing these kept one's mind alive and healthy.  I believe him.  And man, he was way more in shape than any 50 yr old I've known.  Trekking around after him while herding gave me 2 blisters and made my whole body more sore than I've been in ages. He was just fine at the end of the day, chopped a bunch of firewood for the week, then cooked us some steaks. That was very welcome.

A really impressive Cat's Cradle string trick.

But anyway, in the morning, I had to get up and start the fire in my wood burning stove first (because it got down to about 15 degrees at night) and start warming up water for coffee.

the view from my door at dawn. the colors are lost here, but the sky was pure turquois and the clouds were white and the horizon was this deep orange. It made waking up that early worth it.

this is a visual reminder to myself the Juniper tree bark is the best natural kindling.

After breakfast, I'd feed & water the horse and the cat, and open up the corral to let the sheep out by 9:30 am.

the sheep in the corral.

The first half of my stay was pretty painful herding days because snow had recently melted and the ground had a good 2 inches of mud that I had to muck through after these sheep for 6 hours each day.  If you've ever walked for more than 5 minutes in 2 inches of mud, you know that 6 hours of that would suck.  Nuff said.

The sheep grazing

There were no fences, just me (and Ida) to keep the herd gathered and within the valleys we wanted them in. At the beginning of my time, I didn't understand sheep's herd behavior and was thinking way too much about it, being over controlling in unnecessary ways.  But once I spent a few days with them, I realized the actual small amount I had to do in order to keep the herd together and was much more lenient about them spreading out over a large area to graze.  But honestly, at first, I was just wierded out because when Eagle was showing me how to herd that first day, the 2 wild dogs CAME BACK and ATTACKED the sheep right in front of us!  Eagle had his gun with him, so he shot at them and they ran off, but that totally made me more on guard than I might have been. When I was solo, I didn't want the sheep in the treeline of the valleys because I couldn't see them all, and I wanted them relatively all together so that I could chase off any dog that came in at any angle. But as the week went on, I relaxed a bit.  And no dogs attacked.  (thank the blessed Lord)

They lined up nicely to go home

The evenings consisted of me putting the sheep back in the corral, which made those stupid sheep herding video games have a lot more legitimacy for me.  This is the time of day where I bet having a GOOD sheep dog would have been really valuable.  Ida would just take off.  Wutajerk.

You might think this is just a game... but it is so for real.

Then I'd feed the horse and Ida and have some dinner myself- sometimes with either Eagle or Marie, often by myself.  There is no running water or electricity at the hogans, and outhouses were our bathrooms. I could get pretty used to that whole system, actually.  I washed with no shower without too much spilt water, took the time to cook my meals, enjoyed the warm glow of kerosene lamps, and am used to sitting on a cold toilet seat because of my house in Philly, Cambria.  I would actually love to have a wood burning stove for winter at Cambria.  I love it!  We've kicked the idea around, but yeah. It's a beautiful thing. We would just have to figure out a good wood source.

Ah, yes. And I got a very sunburnt nose and cheeks.

this was my usual attire.  Notice the nose is in the sun.

This pic doesn't give justice to the pain my nose was in.

I had no sunscreen (stupid me), so I began to literally cover up as the week went on.

Marie and Eagle were an interesting couple. They didn't exactly get along. When I first arrived, Eagle was there by himself and when Marie arrived, he left within a half hour and didn't come back.  Marie was there with me until Wednesday morning, but then left to do work in Albany, NY for the rest of the week. Eagle was supposed to come back Wednesday night but... he never came back.  He finally called Friday afternoon to tell me that he'd be back after I left today (Saturday).  So I was alone for about 3 days.  That would normally be ok, but while Marie was giving me the rundown of chores to do while she was away, she handed me this little rifle and told me to keep it next to my bed at night.  This was both for chasing off the wild dogs if I heard them at night and for "my own protection".  WHAT??  Apparently, they had pissed off their neighbors recently and didn't want me to get the "short end of the stick".  I didn't ask too many questions, said my prayers at night, and slept pretty terribly. No shots were fired.

Gun.

OH!  Friday!  Well, first, Rain and Hound. Rain is Marie's sister and Hound is her hubby. I liked them a lot. They kind of took me under wing when Marie & Eagle were absent.  Hound is an artist, which was fun to talk with him about. I showed him a copy of my book and he liked it so much that I just gave it to him. It was a gift worth giving. He's just a lovely older guy who made my stay a little more enjoyable.  He told me he did leather working and sculpted wood, and I nodded politely. But then I saw his work and I wanted to ask him to teach me everything he knows.  He's AMAZING.  I don't have a picture of it, but he sculpted this beautiful Eagle Dancer out of the roots of a Cottenwood tree. There was so much movement and patterns involved, I was dumbfounded.

I got to see that sculpture when he and Rain asked me to model a pair of chaps he had just finished so that he could add the pictures to his portfolio.  They were chaps for a young man who commissioned them for riding bronco in the rodeo.  Every detail and cut on these chaps were hand done by Hound.  On the belt, there was all this stamping and burning to create a great floral pattern and I thought to myself "no way he did that himself- he must have bought it that way".  But no- he explained how he designed and executed the stamping.  My eyes were popping out of my head.  So I tried to do them justice in wearing them.  They took photos, and I asked them to take a photo with my phone, but they got mostly me and not the chaps. Oh well.

And so then on Friday, it was supposed to be windy and rainy, so I bundled up and headed out, but Rain and Hound stopped me and told me that in those conditions, the sheep would just run everywhere and not graze, so to give them a bale of hay to munch on and take the day off.  YES!  So I went over and hung out with Katherine, Marie & Rain's mother, who is 95 years old and kind of the matriarch of the community. She has been heavily influencial in the resistance to relocation and the "Feds" since 1981, including spending some time in jail for the effort.  She played a big part in the creation of the Broken Rainbow documentary about the Black Mesa, which I posted last month.  But at this point, she's really hard of hearing and on Friday, she was doing her bead work.  And so I went over and helped her punch holes through lots of little seeds from the tree outside so that she could string them into a necklace.

In general, I felt odd taking photos of the folks there because I felt that would be "touristy", but this is a photo of Katherine that hung on the wall of the hogan I stayed in.

The top pic is the wall of necklaces that Katherine has made. The bottom is the necklace she gave me made of those seeds and little white seashells. 

In my 35-page "Cultural Sensetivity Guidebook" that I had to read before going out there, it was stated that as a Supporter, I was there to be a help, and not to pry into people's lives.  This meant not asking a ton of questions, especially about the politics surrounding the relocation, etc. because it could be very emotional for them and be an upsetting topic.  So even though I really wanted to ask lots of questions and get a more full and personal take on the situation out there, my time there wasn't meant for that.  Marie and Eagle talked some about that stuff to me. Their stories made things seem more complicated and hopeless than anything else.  This is a hard time for the Navajo and the Hopi, for sure. If you're interested in learning more about it, you can read more here: http://supportblackmesa.org/

So, that's about all I have brain power to record right now.  I am writing all this so that I don't forget it all some day. But it is right now still very much in the "processing" part of my brain, and I have not been able to go through that process completely yet, or come out on the other side with an idea of how I would like to act in response to the experience.  My Observe-Process-Respond way of interacting with most things in life is going to take a while for this one.

My prayer that I prayed every day during my time at Black Mesa was the Prayer of St Francis. Really, that's been my prayer for about a year now, but it seemed especially applicable this past week or so.

Lord, make me a channel of thy peace;

that where there is hatred, I may bring love;

that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;

that where there is discord, I may bring harmony;

that where there is error, I may bring truth;

that where there is doubt, I may bring faith;

that where there is despair, I may bring hope;

that where there are shadows, I may bring light;

that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted;

to understand, than to be understood;

to love, than to be loved.

For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.

It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.

It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.

Amen.