“The Hoodoos of Coalmine Canyon, Arizona” © 1999, 2000, 2004 Stu Jenks; Story revised: June, 2007
[Had a first this week. First time I ever got a unsolicited, rude, hateful email from a anonymous stranger about my writing and my Art work. Mostly about my writing. The subject line on the incoming email was "How Dare You". She was upset, maybe crazy. She said I had no right to speak for all of the Navajos & Hopis (didn't know I was), that I was clueless (I'll concede that), insulting (don't think so) and had a superiority complex (what the fuck?). And that no 'people' would ever adopt me (now that's just being mean!) She didn't say specifically what it was that I had written which had caused her to go off on me, but that line about not being adoption-worthy gave me a hint at where to look. I'm pretty sure my 'Hoodoos at Coalmine' story triggered this woman to flame me. I know it was a woman, white woman actually. She was naive enough to write me from her work IP and work email, using her real name in the email address. Took me all of a minute to google her and find out she teaches school on the Navajo Reservation. Saw a photo of her and everything.
I wrote her back a brief 'just writing from what I've read, from what I've heard and from what I've seen' note, but that didn't seem enough. It did bother me what she said, actually angered and hurt me quite a bit, so I did re-read the story I had written and kinda winced. I did use some pretty gross generalizations and words like. 'Navajo are' and 'Hopi are'. I knew I was doing that at the time and I knew all Hopis and Navajos aren't one way or the other. I was just trying to be both funny and informative at the same time. 'Two bigots walk into a bar' is funny. 'Two guys who appear bigoted walk into a bar, but not all guys are bigots' isn't.
Anyway, I decided to contact an Native American scholar friend of mine and have him read my story. I trust his opinion. Well, he told me upfront, that for people who didn't know me, some parts of my story could be seen as flip and that many Natives from on and off the rez are very sensitive to outsiders' views about them and their cultures. Not news to me really, but I knew what he meant. So I thanked my friend and went to editing the story just a bit.
I don't feel like I'm caving to criticism, taking out a few lines, rewriting a paragraph or two. The main purpose of "The Hoodoos of Coalmine Canyon" story is to just show the reader, the End at Dawn of a Spiritual Road Trip to Visit Coalmine Canyon, and to explain how I took the photographs that morning. The thumbnail sketches of the life and history of the Navajo and Hopi people is just to give those who know little about the cultures, some information, some context. And to bring a bit of humor to the text as well.
So below is the 2007 version of the story. Hope you like it, and if you want to read the original, it'll still be at www.stujenks.com under the Circle Stories section for a while, but I can pretty much guess the below edited version will still piss off the school teacher from the Rez if she happens to read it, and other people too. Well, you know my email address. Flame on, if you must. But to the teacher from up north, a word of advice. Next time, get an anonymous email account from Yahoo and don't use your real name. I ain't going to do anything for I'm a good person, trying to live by spiritual principles, but you might not be so lucky with the next person, if you continue to write unsolicited vitriol to strangers from work. They may drop a dime on you and call the principal at your school. Just a word to the wise.]
“The Hoodoos of Coalmine Canyon, Arizona”
I'm driving cross-eyed, rushing to meet the dawn. The sky is still black. It's 4 a.m. I'm north of Flagstaff on US 89, south of Tuba City, listening to Bruce Cockburn on the boom box that sits in the passenger seat of my 1985 Yellow Nissan King Cab truck. The truck has no power to speak of. Can't get the damn truck to pass emissions. 300,000 miles on the odometer. Third Carburetor. Bugs the hell out of me, but shouldn't complain. It does still get me to places like Coalmine Canyon.
I've left the high alpines of Flag and have just driven past the Cameron Trading Post. Plenty of gas. Plenty of smokes. Another cup of weird Texaco coffee in me, that fake cappuccino with the flat foam. It's all right I suppose, once you put a splash of real Joe in it. Got plenty of diet soda in the cooler. Getting closer to Tuba now. Transmission hums a bit loud. Nothing wrong, just an old truck.
Bruce sings "Apartheid in Arizona, slaughter in Brazil. If bullets don't get good PR, there's other ways to kill. Kidnap all the children, put 'em in a foreign system. Bring them up in no man's land where no one really wants them. It's a stolen land. Stolen land."
The Hopi pretty much escaped the boarding school system from what I’ve been told, but that wasn't the case for the Navajo, whose reservation I just entered back at Cameron. Many Whites took in the Navajo kids or rather took the children, changed their clothes, forbid their language, cut their hair and tried to make them into little white boys and girls. Didn't work at all. Just pissed off the Navajos and left an ever greater divide between the Anglos and the Indians. Still some hurt, anger and sadness exist to this day.
The Hopi and the Navajo were traditional enemies. Hated each other hundreds of years ago, still some hurt feelings between some of the members of the tribes now. From the Navajo perspective, they immigrated to this area and just wanted to have a little land to live on. From the Hopi perspective, the Navajo were uninvited guests, who attacked them on their mesas, and felt entitled to the land that wasn't theirs.
Now that’s an oversimplification of things. I know that. Today, many traditional and modern Hopi and Navajo together fight Big Oil and Big Coal, trying to protect their individual and tribal rights and save their lands from exploitation. But people are people and much like some of my Southern brethren who still see Damn Yankee as one word and who still smart when they think about The War Between The States and about Reconstruction, some Navajos still mess with some Hopis out of spite and vica versa.
Just a few years ago, the Rainbow People were looking for a place to have their annual smoke dope/have sex/act spiritual/eat macrobiotic/and dance till dawn event. A Navajo woman said you could have it on her land. The White Pseudo-Indians were thrilled to have it on Indian land. Only one problem. After hundreds of Rainbowers had arrived and set up camp, the local sheriff informed them that they weren't on Navajo-land but on Hopi-land, and the Hopis rightly wanted them to leave. The White boys and girls left, leaving behind a couple of days of shit in holes they had dug on the Hopi property.
It’s a complicated thing, this relationship between Hopi, Navajo and White. Some hold on to old resentments. Some forgive and let go. Some go about their business and don’t make no never mind about any of it. Some continue to perpetrate against strangers and kin. People are People, white and native alike.
"You've been leading me beside strange waters. Streams of beautiful, lights in the night", Cockburn sings on the boombox.
I'm approaching Tuba on US 160. A line of dark gray to the east. Just a hint of morning. It's coming but not for a while. The red and purple of the Painted Desert mesas aren't visible yet, but soon. Now, the mesas are just deep black humps and lines against a lighter black sky. I drive past a crudely painted sign pointing toward dinosaur tracks, drive past the old Laundromat with red sand in the washing machines, and up the hill entering Tuba. I take a right at the Tuba City Truck Stop, which in any other little town would be a small breakfast cafe with a good sized parking lot to accommodate the semis. The decaying carcass of a Rezzie dog lies off the shoulder at the crossroad. (Some Navajos don’t touch dead things, so many dead dogs and cats just slowly rot and blow away on the Rez.)
The Hopi village of Moenkopi is off to the right, perched on the cliffs that overlook the cornfields below. No corn now. Too late in the year. The gray to the east is getting bluest. Got to beat feet if I'm going to get to Coalmine before dawn.
Coalmine Canyon (Coalmine for short) has been a sacred place for me since the mid-1980's, when a friend who used to live in Tuba told me about the place. At the time he asked me to promise not to take just anyone into Coalmine, so if I'm a little vague on directions from here on out, that's why. It's not as if you can't find it on a good AAA Indian Land map, but you'll have to do your own footwork. And be nice to the place, if you go there.
Coalmine is called that, for part of its exposed strata is a thin vein of coal. You can see parts of the canyon from the paved road if you look left at the right time, but it doesn't jump out at you. Coalmine is actually a number of canyons falling off from a high mesa. Coalmine drops probably a good 800 to 1000 feet to the canyon floor. Its walls are pink, purple and white with a line of black, and the sandstone is so soft, you can easily crush it under foot. I’ve been told that neither traditional Hopi nor Navajo medicine men go to Coalmine Canyon for they believe it is haunted, and it is said that on a Full Moon night, you can see the Ghosts of Coalmine dancing across its pink walls. I've never seen the ghosts but one time years ago, when I hiked deep down into Coalmine, I felt energies of good and evil having a little battle. Maybe I was just too hungry or too tired or I just imagined the whole thing. Maybe. Maybe not. I've definitely felt Dead Places in there at times, and in those places I do not stay long. Whatever they are, the energies are very strong at Coalmine, both positive and negative. I've gone there to pray, to shoot, to grieve, to just sit, and be, for over 20 years.
This morning I'm going to the eastern part of Coalmine, an area I've only been going to for the past 10 years or so. Trying to find the dirt road down into this section of Coalmine is as much about sensing the road as it is about seeing it, and in the dark, I slow down, way down, and continue to glance to the left. The paved road is straight in front and behind, for probably four miles either way. No traffic. Good. Ah, there it is. I slowly turn and take my old yellow truck onto the one lane track.
Dirt roads on the Rez are 'subject to closure due to weather conditions' as they say. Translation: if it's been raining or snowing, getting back to grandma's house can be an adventure. The weather is dry this morning, but I do, out of habit, stop, get out, and check the ground. It's good and solid. The earth is a mixture of sand and dirt. More sand, less dirt. I go slowly but not too slow. Too slow and you may get stuck in the loamy soil. My truck is a 2 x 4, not a 4 x 4, so I have to keep my speed up, but not too much, for the shocks are just regular shocks. Plus my truck sounds like a box of rocks as it is. Knock it too much more and new rocks appear in the box. The current creaky rocks drive me nuts, now as it is. Slow but not too slow but not too fast. Try and find the balance amongst the noise. The story of my life.
The one lane track descends down from the first level of mesa to the next level, but not the bottom of Coalmine. That's way down and miles away. No horses or cows in sight. No living creatures at all which is normal. The cows tend to be on the floor of Coalmine and the horses come and go all around the canyon. I turn off the boom box. The bouncing of the truck tends to make the tape sounds yowwy, and now I must be present, to say the least. The drop off to my right ain't a couple of feet but a couple hundred or so. Slowly bouncing I go down, down.
I level off at the bottom of this hill, or rather the top of this next part of the mesa. Coalmine Proper is off to the left, still dark but visible as a space in Space, a darker Dark, and off to the east, the color black has more blue in it. The sun is coming. Probably a half hour away. Good. I'm almost there.
Coalmine is the bottom of an ancient sea, without the water. Actually all of this area, for thousand of square miles, was underwater eons ago. On one of my earlier trips into Coalmine, I was shocked to find prehistoric oyster shells. Breaking them apart, I could smell the faint hint of natural gas. On the high mesas and in the canyon floor of Coalmine, premature quartz crystals are scattered about, along with small black basalt balls created from a distant volcano's eruption, a thousand years ago and about 40 miles to the South. Coalmine is part of the Colorado Plateau which cover parts of four states; Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. The Colorado Plateau is one of the greatest places in the world to see sedimentary rocks. And here at Coalmine, its as if the rocks were not fully born, so soft and fragile, so chalky and ever eroding.
The sun is coming. The black to the East is blue, and the old blue is orange. After only a few more miles, I come to a place to park, that is solid ground. I park and open the door of the Nissan to that dark before the dawn. Grabbing my tripod, my Rollei and my pinhole camera (for later-in-the-day shooting), I walk toward the rim of the canyon. The ground is soft with loom under my feet that makes little clouds as I walk. The baby crystals can be seen sparkling even in this dawn twilight. Careful. Watch your feet, Stu.
White peninsulas of sandstone jut out into the canyon like the bows of old sailing ships. I step out onto one bow of sandstone to go to a special place, a ways out. I'm careful with my feet, as much as to not disturb the rock, as to not fall 800 feet. I reach my own personal prayer spot and set up my tripod and my camera. Compose the shot. Stop. Wait. Pray.
Little black Hoodoos, three inches tall grow from the top of the white sandstone formation. (Hoodoos are rock towers that have more on top than on the bottom. Imagine a carrot sticking in the ground, big end up. Bryce Canyon in Utah is known for its 30 foot Hoodoos. Coalmine has some tall Hoodoos but there are not well known, thankfully.) I place the mini-Hoodoos at the bottom of my composition in the ground glass viewfinder of the Rollei. I attach a couple red filters on the Zeiss lens. I'm ready.
Sun is coming. Lots of orange now but no sun-ball yet. Zippo is in hand. I open the shutter and walk with a purpose to the Hoodoos, paint a flame spiral with the Zippo above the little towers, go back to the Rollei and close the shutter. 15-second exposure tops. I repeat. Sun is almost here. Again the Zippo. Close shutter. Open Shutter. Zippo. Close. Wait.
Then, like a light switch being flicked on, the Sun rises above the mesa and cuts a bright yellow slice on the far western wall of Coalmine Canyon, perhaps five miles away. Open the shutter. Zippo. Close. Advance film. Open. Zippo. Close. Four exposures. That should do it, I hope. The Sun is probably too hot, visually, for the flame spiral to show now, but the sunlight on Coalmine is glorious to see. I go to the far bow of this ship of stone and just sit. Breathe and sit. And then sit some more. No photos. Just the Sun, Coalmine and I.
I have a prayer I wrote for myself years ago, just so I can get centered in the morning. Frankly I forget to say this prayer as much as I remember these days. But on this morning, on the rim of Coalmine Canyon, I don't forget.
I stand and face the blinding ball of the newly risen Sun
"To the East, God and Humanness," I say softly.
I turn 90 degrees and face toward Utah.
"To the North, Courage and Vulnerability."
Counterclockwise, I pivot and face the far side of Coalmine Canyon.
"To the West, Self awareness and Forgiveness."
One last turn, facing the sandstone bows of other ships.
"To the South, Feelings and Wisdom."
Motioning with my right hand high, I say,
"To the Sky," then bringing my hand down I say,
"And to the Earth," and lastly I make a circle in the air and say,
"And to all that is,
OK, God,
Let's do it."
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"After The Car Bombs: Big Ben Infrared" (c) 2005-2007 Stu Jenks
