Second Mesa, 1976

In 1976, my dad was feeling flush from a small inheritance, so he bought a conversion van and loaded my mother, brother, and me into it for an extended vacation across the American West. Dad is an erratic traveler, a trait I have inherited, and we spent the month wandering through the West in a relatively random pattern directed by Dad’s and the overheard murmurings of truck-stop and Denny’s patrons regarding events to be held in one location or another. We hit most of the tourist sites along the way: the South Dakota badlands, Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, Sedona (before it was trendy), Tucson, Tombstone, and Mexico via any number of border crossings. My mother, who is not a particularly gracious traveler, made the best of it and even learned in those long western stretches between rest areas to pee in a cup like the rest of us.

Near the end of the trip, we found ourselves on the Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona. The larger Navajo reservation surrounds the Hopi reservation, and I have read that it is an uneasy peace between the two nations after centuries of enmity. As a boy in 1976, though, I knew nothing of these conflicts and was only slightly aware of the differences between the two peoples. I knew only a little of the rumored Cherokee and Comanche presence in my family tree then, and I was proud and happy to be among “real” Indians.

We had been driving a lot that day, tacking from tiny reservation village to tiny reservation trading post in search of native-made jewelry for my mother. When purchasing a heavy silver and turquoise squash-blossom necklace from the pawn counter in the back of a Foodway grocery store, my mother claimed mixed emotions. Still, I knew her pride in owning such works of art soundly quashed any sorrow she felt in buying some family’s heirloom for a fraction of its value. Many years later, she would be forced to pawn those same jewelry pieces to feed herself.

It was the start of monsoon season in Arizona, and even in the high deserts of the reservations, the afternoon storms could turn dry washes into roaring rivers as suddenly as lightning strikes. As we topped a hill on the reservation road just outside Second Mesa, we saw a pair of teenagers hitchhiking ahead. Beyond them, the sky was black, and bolts of blinding white lightning sliced through it like claws through wet tissue paper. Dad slowed the van, and I was amazed as I opened the big sliding door for the hitchhikers, for I knew Dad had never picked up hitchhikers and had warned me against doing it.

They had been holding hands as they walked backward up the road, the boy with his thumb out, so I knew they were boyfriend and girlfriend. The girl giggled shyly but did not speak as her boyfriend thanked Dad for the ride, and the rain came with a vengeance as I slid the door closed. I sat in the back of the van and looked secretly at the beautiful girl before me, still holding her boyfriend’s hand and nodding politely at my mother’s small talk. I knew why this boy loved her and wished I were him, knowing I would be content to live in this desert with her forever. Her skin was soft brown, and her long black hair flowed across her shoulders, splashing over her small breasts. Her onyx eyes, full of light and completing her smile, filled me with urges for which I had no explanation at that age.

Dad asked the boy where they were going, and the boy pointed up a dirt road that seemed to end in the khaki and red wall of a distant mesa.

Dad looked at the high mesa and glanced at my mother. It did not appear that there was anywhere to go in that direction, and I am sure he was wondering what he had gotten himself into.

“It’s OK,” said the girl with a smile that swallowed my heart, “your van will go there.”

She spoke with the flat accent that I had come to know well on that trip. Dad chuckled and turned onto the dirt road.

“I’m not worried about getting there. I’m worried about getting back.”

The hitchhikers laughed at this, and the girl said something to her boyfriend in Hopi. The boy reassured Dad that the road was good and wasn’t as far as it looked.

We rode in silence for a couple of miles before it became apparent that the road did not end at the mesa's base. Soon, we were climbing a gently sloped road up and around the mesa, a road that had been worn and worked out of the side of the mesa for hundreds of years by the people who had lived there for that long and longer.

Halfway up the mesa, the rain stopped, and we passed a little cemetery, and I was amazed to see the scattered bones of generations of Second Mesa residents scattered on the hillside. I wanted to ask the girl about this (I wouldn’t have asked the boy, for he was of no interest to me), but I sensed it might offend her. My mother later explained that it was probably animals and landslides that had exposed the old bones, and that the Hopi superstitions regarding the dead were so great that they would never touch the bones to rebury them.

Soon, we turned a bend in the road and entered a small village. The village stands atop a table of rock hundreds of years from our past and is still occupied by the descendants of its builders. I was amazed as I looked at the houses and other structures that were completely invisible from the road where we had picked up the boy and girl. The only apparent change to these dwellings since their original construction seemed to be the addition of electricity, for wires stretched from house to house, and television, for antennae were perched on most roofs. Small children played unsupervised on the edge of the thousand-foot drop to the desert below, and here and there a beat-up old pick-up truck sat waiting to carry someone the five miles down the mesa and through the desert to the nearest town. To my thirteen-year-old eyes, the village at the top of Second Mesa resembled suburban Bedrock in “The Flintstones.”

Before Dad could drive very far into the village, the boy touched his arm.

“You can let us out here and turn around there.”

I realized that it was possible that in all of history, fewer than a hundred whites had ever seen the top of Second Mesa, and I knew there was ample reason for that. We would be treated politely here, but would never be truly welcome.

The boy and the beautiful girl climbed out of the van and thanked us for the ride, and Dad turned the van and drove back down the mesa, back into the rainstorm, back into the twentieth century.