Another Like Me

by Albert Norton, Jr.

  It was near midday when Jack entered this country. At that time of day, with the light coming from high overhead, the color of the rock and sand was dull and monotonous in its bleached-out sameness. But Jack knew that this was a function of the light only. Here, as elsewhere in the West, the color of the landscape would change dramatically as the angle of the light changed, and that as the seasons changed. And the variability of clouds would change it, as well, though there were none on this day. His surroundings seemed near-colorless now, but he knew that would change dramatically as the afternoon progressed and gave way to the slow fade to evening, and then change yet again in the morning, and again dramatically, with the sharp angle of sunlight from another direction.

  The front cyclists were well ahead of Jack when they reached one of these peaks in a long slow incline, although this one was visibly not quite flat, but rather a perceptible incline, as they headed north. The peak of that incline was clearly visible because when the road began its decline, after the peak, he could see that it had been cut through the tableland, forming a long, low-angle chute through weathered and crumbling rock the colors of pencil erasers and chalk. Guardrails lined both sides of the chute. It ended at the floor of the desert, and then the unguarded road continued on, monotonously straight. Ahead of them, a low table of washed-out sienna-colored rock seemed to bar the road. As they drew closer, though, the table seemed to grow in stature, and the road itself gave way before it, arcing wide toward the right and into Chinle proper. But there was nothing there. They continued another three miles through the most desolate land Jack had seen so far before the village itself appeared as a former human habitation along the highway approach.

  The highway widened significantly as they approached the town, with multiple lanes in each direction, but it was difficult to conceive how there could have ever been enough traffic to make full use of them. They turned off the highway onto “IR 7,” which Jack realized meant “Indian Road” 7, and they were on the final approach to Tséyi’.

  Tséyi’, or Canyon de Chelly, was a canyon cut abruptly through the relatively flat Defiance Plateau. The bottom of the canyon was in most places flat, and through it ran a shallow stream, lined with cottonwood trees. In fact, there were several branches of the canyon, originating at different points to the east, but they all converged at a point in the west, just before Chinle. The Navajo, when there were Navajo, farmed sections of the canyon and raised a special breed of sheep which they used in their unique textiles. The walls of the canyon leapt up from the canyon floor, either at right angles to it, or atop shoulders of sloughed-off rubble, and then to walls of a hundred, or many hundreds, of feet—often perfectly vertical, more frequently sloped, but everywhere with mysterious twists and turns. The canyon floor, and the stream in it, snaked back and forth as the stream marked its westward course.

  The easternmost points of origin for the canyon were at a distance of perhaps thirty miles from the western confluence, but if one could straighten the many switchbacks and oxbows and meanders, the length of it would be much longer. In this canyon, or series of canyons, there were fingers reaching off in all directions, in every conceivable configuration, sometimes ending at the sharp corner of two massive sun-blocking walls and other times turning and narrowing, yet ultimately opening into routes by which Navajo sheep, or mountain goats, or even a man, might clamber up and pick a passable route all the way up onto the plateau high above.

  The rock walls were colossal. Beyond imagination, until one faced them and felt himself light, and of no consequence, alongside them. Through the twistings and turnings of this canyon—or these canyons, more accurately—the rocks were thrown up in every conceivable pose and combination. Enticing paths disappeared between walls, there to twist and turn again, but most ending in dark corners. Only a few ended in paths by which one might ascend, through hours of arduous toil, out of the canyon and onto the table. And though these rock walls were so massive and so numerous as to anchor the whole world, they nonetheless took on a sentimentality, reflecting back our imaginations as they ran, in the course of a twenty-four hour period, every shade of color such rock under the sun could possibly be, the same stones running magenta to ochre to rust to sienna to shadowed blue and then black, if there was no moon, or deep pearl, if there was.

  At their easternmost points, the beginnings of each branch of the canyon, a crevice in the earth began with no special promise, but then abruptly gave way to depths falling away ever deeper as one travelled west, until the full grandeur of the canyon depth was achieved. And so it went, through its entire length, until the point of confluence of the branches just east of Chinle, where the plateau ended at an angled north/south escarpment that formed the western boundary of the Defiance Plateau, except where it was riven by the canyons. West of the canyons’ junction, the walls came down, so to speak, as one traveled west. The walls of the canyon diminished just before Chinle because the plateau itself did.

  Indian Road 7 led right to the mouth of the canyons, and that’s where the motorcyclists took Jack. There was a streambed, and here just the beginnings of monolithic stones lying about amid gravelly soil and parched-looking shrubs. The bed of the stream was an expanse of packed sandy soil, soaked, in some places exposed to air and in others under an inch or two of water. The usual assortment of barely-hanging-on high desert plants surrounded the watercourse, except where the water touched the edge, and there, tall leafy cottonwoods chattered in the breeze.

  The motorcycles slowed for the turn onto the dirt road, and now Jack was close enough to them, again, to hear their rumble. Then he heard the motorcycles behind him, too, as they all pulled up to the edge of the stream. Jack realized that there was no steep shoulder down onto the packed sand of the stream bottom, and in fact he saw tire treads there. The lead motorcyclists paused long enough to make sure everyone was where they belonged in the train and then drove out onto the streambed. Jack followed, treating the streambed as the wide highway that it was, into the canyon.

  They proceeded about a mile, all of it on the floor of the stream, and much of it through the water itself. The ride in Jack’s vehicle was soft, there being resistance from the sand that was spongy, unlike rolling at high speed across tarmac under a bright sun, with a hard desert underneath. The motorcyclists, he noticed, avoided the softest and wettest parts as best they could. The water was so shallow that it spread out in fans, regrouped and spread again, all in channels with edges not more than an inch above the surrounding wet and porous sand. The surface of these fanning courses of water, Jack could see, would shift over time as the water level rose and fell. Inside his SUV, the edges of the streamlets were barely perceptible, but Jack saw that the motorcyclists were obliged to navigate the streambed with more care. They rode on the hard-packed sand where they could, avoiding both the inundated portions and the higher, bone-white and dry sand.

  At length, they approached a high wall that extended from far to the left, many hundreds of feet high, angling down as it protruded to the right. At first, it seemed to block the entire canyon, but as they drew closer, Jack could see that it ended abruptly, and the stream rounded its base at that point. To the right of that, there was a wide concavity to the south wall, and a large swath of green at its base between the south wall and the stream. Rounding the wall, Jack looked left and saw that though it was quite tall, the wall was a thin blade drawn down to a point—needle-thin, in comparison to the other sandstone formations.

  Once past the jut of wall into the streambed, they hooked left, with the stream, and rounded another bend to the right. Before them was spread an enclosed valley of possibly a mile square. It was of irregular shape, and it took a moment for Jack to realize that on the east side of this area, the configurations of monster stone suggested an avenue of canyon off to the right, to the east, and another off to the left, to the northeast. This must be the junction between the Canyon del Muerto and the Canyon de Chelly proper that he’d seen on maps. Jack tried to take in his surroundings,
including those high overhead, as the cyclists ahead of him navigated. Alongside the stream, however, there was a line of Fremont cottonwoods that obscured his vision to what lay immediately beyond, between the stream and the far wall. A hundred yards or so on, the cyclists turned right, off the streambed entirely and between cottonwoods, and up onto a rounded shoulder just inches above the streambed.

  Jack pulled his car up immediately behind the cyclists who had stopped ahead of him and noted that the cyclists behind him parked so close to his rear bumper that he could not move without upsetting motorcycles either ahead or behind. Not that a quick escape was feasible anyway in this environment, and anyway he’d come here of his own volition—in fact, at his own insistence. The streambed served well as a highway, but the dryer soil surrounding it certainly did not. He would go nowhere fast.

  There, in a vast open and grassy arena dominated on every side by vertical slabs of friendly red-rock sandstone, a crowd awaited. Jack paused a moment, taking it all in from the sound- and atmosphere-protected environment of his SUV. Ahead of him, parked at intervals on the bank among the cottonwoods along the streambed were big vehicles, larger than Jack’s—Suburbans and Tahoes and the like. A large rock-ringed fire pit dominated the grassy area to his right. It was full of pallets of dry lumber and sections of tree boles. It was evidently intended to burn for some time but was not lighted until this moment. Around it, people were seated on blankets and on portable fold-out chairs. Jack saw one of them approach the fire pit with a lighted brand, setting the fuel alight. Then Jack alighted from his vehicle.

  The people gathered around the fire pit squirmed and scooted closer, glad to get a wash of fire-warmth in the brisk air. In short order, Jack thought, they’d be squirming and scooting backward as the fire climbed. Jack rounded his vehicle and hesitated, wondering what was expected of him here. The four motorcyclists removed their helmets. The two that had been ahead of Jack were indeed Hashkeh and Roland. These were the only two people he had any knowledge of, and that event had been an inauspicious introduction to the Diné. All four cyclists sauntered forward to the ring around the fire, picking out seats and plopping down, ignoring Jack. The other people ringed the fire pit entirely, which meant that many of them had their backs to Jack. They seemed to ignore him, too, but there was a studied casualness to it. If they weren’t here for Jack’s arrival, what were they here for?

  And yet, Jack had a sense that any more forward action on his part would be taken as presumption. He hung back for a bit, awkwardly. It occurred to him that this might be a community gathering for various purposes unrelated to him, and that perhaps he was only invited to be present for it. He decided to proceed as if he assumed that to be the case, and stepped forward to the outer edge of the group, taking a seat on the grass, and pulling his jacket tighter about himself.

  Chapter 16

  Jack expected at any moment that someone would emerge from the crowd and give a speech of some sort, perhaps exhorting the Diné in the principles that Hashkeh and Roland had so vigorously defended the week before. But that didn’t happen, even though the lighting of the fire had seemed to be an opening ceremony of sorts. Instead, people began clustering together, taking out food from containers that Jack hadn’t noticed before. The food mix was good. They had quite a variety, much of it prepared from real ingredients and not from looted grocery store shelves. They even had fresh bread, in rounded, perfectly browned loaves. The people started taking out their food and grouping up around blankets on the grass as soon as the fire was lit. Now they moved freely from blanket to blanket, a party atmosphere taking hold. Jack wondered if there would yet be some sort of official event associated with the fire and the food. Perhaps it would come along after the food, rather than before.

  Jack had sat watching at first, but now he saw a woman a few years younger than himself motioning him over. She was seated at the edge of a blanket with several others about. Jack got up and went over, feeling the welcome warmth of the fire at this spot.

  “Join us,” she said.

  A young man to Jack’s right had been sitting turned partly away, reaching inside a box, but now he turned toward Jack. “Try this bread,” he said, handing the loaf to Jack.

  Jack took the loaf, tearing a bit off for himself and passing it to a young girl of about ten to his left. He hadn’t had bread in years. He made a mental note to study up on how he might add it back to the diet.

  Surrounding Jack around this blanket was the woman who’d hailed him over, the young man, the little girl, another girl of similar age next to her, and an older man of perhaps sixty-five, with dark skin and a bald head with wisps of white hair on the side. If this was a family unit of some sort, the relations were not obvious.

  The atmosphere was relaxed, though Jack still had a sense that he stood out as a guest. He was pretty confident that there was no one else about who wasn’t already an integral part of the community. The little group at the blanket was welcoming, however, and there was no reason to suppose, from what he’d seen thus far, that this was some sort of setup to convey to Jack an impression at odds with reality.

  “What’s your name?” the woman asked. She was probably in her thirties, a little too young, he thought, to be the mother of the young man who’d offered Jack the bread. She had a broad, pleasant smile.

  “Jack,” he said, and to make conversation, “Thanks for allowing me to come visit,” though he had no idea what she knew about him, or if she knew why he was there.

  “Our pleasure. Are you thinking of joining us?” She motioned toward the little crowd around, to signify the Diné, rather than their little group around the blanket. So perhaps she didn’t know the circumstances of Jack’s being there.

  “Well, I just asked to visit.”

  “Well, I assumed that,” she said, smiling that he shouldn’t take offense.

  Of course, Jack thought. He would have had to go through something like what he did regardless of his reason for being there. But that roused his curiosity about how they all came to be there. “How did you come to be part of this group?”

  “Oh, I was there at the beginning.”

  “When was the beginning?”

  “A couple of years ago.”

  “So of all these people,” Jack gestured around him at the sixty or so people around the big fire, “some were there at the beginning, and some came later?”

  The woman looked around, then turned back to Jack. “My name’s Alma Lee.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m really at sea here, I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Alma just smiled. “Some were there at the very beginning with us, maybe half, but I think all the rest came in during those first three or four months. When we were still trying to achieve some kind of self-identity.”

  “I don’t see ninety-seven,” Jack said.

  Alma’s eyes flitted to the crowd and back to Jack. Jack thought she might be a little surprised at his knowledge of their exact number, but she said nothing to indicate that. She said, “It’s a little late in the year for a campfire. The rest are back in Chinle.”

  “This is optional.”

  Alma looked at him, a second longer before replying. “Everything is optional with us.”

  “So you’re just out here for a picnic.”

  “We come out here a lot, especially when it’s warm. We’re planning to make it home, instead of the boxes we’re in now in Chinle. We take turns already with the crops and the sheep. But we plan to live here. It’s magical.”

  “It is that,” Jack agreed. There wasn’t much to Chinle, the town that he had seen on his way in. He realized that if the community lived there, it wouldn’t be in the residences because the die-off had occurred here, too. They probably lived in uncomfortable, cold, and dark commercial buildings.

  “You want to get back to the land,” he said.

  “Yes. Well, we have to, really.”

  “You could migrate to some fantastic villas overlooking water. Live like movie stars.�
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  “Is that what you do?”

  “No,” Jack chuckled. “You’re right, we have to think long term. And this is a nice place. “So do people still join you from time to time?” he asked casually.

  “Not in a while. Anyone is welcome. But all the people we know of that are left have joined or else don’t like who we are and so won’t join.”

  “What about you?” the young man next to him asked. He was probably in his early twenties. He’d been quiet during Jack’s exchange with Alma, and was even turned partly away, but he had now turned fully toward the little group and was taking Jack in with an intense look.

  “Like I said, I just asked to visit,” Jack answered.

  “Do you know what we stand for? Who we are? What we believe?” The young man asked. “Where are you from?”

  “Maybe it would answer your questions if I told you my background,” Jack began. “Until about six weeks ago, I thought I was alone on Earth. I haven’t been looking around to find some group to associate with. It’s still a novelty to me that there’s anyone left in the world at all, and I’m naturally curious.”

  “But how do you know about us?” the young man asked.

  “I ran into some people who talked about the Diné, so I wanted to know who the Diné are.”

  “Apaches.” The boy spit out the word.

  “Well, I did learn about Diné from people who call themselves Apache, but at first I didn’t know about the Diné or the Apache. Still don’t know much.”

  “But what about you,” the young man said insistently.

  “I’m not an Apache if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Be nice, Billy” Alma said to the young man.

  “Beans. Eat beans. Chicken,” the older man said, in a thick accent. Indian, not American Indian. He was pushing toward Jack a ceramic bowl with colorful beans in a stew with what looked like peppers and onions and little squares of chicken.