Thinking Out Loud: Worlds Within Worlds
Sharing an aerial experience that touches ancient America.
As I’ve mentioned, we’ve been digging ourselves out of Long Covid for nearly two months with the renown brain fog pretty much in the past but the fatigue still hanging in. I’m back in the cockpit with students and doing fine, but the early mornings and constant activity leaves me dead on my butt by late in the afternoon. We also had our first B & B guest of the year this week. By this time of the year we’ve normally been solidly booked for months but the Covid thing kept me from accepting bookings. Now we’re booking students and guests, but we’re tiring out faster than usual.
One sort of fun happening was that yesterday was my birthday and I could clearly see the Redhead, overwhelmed by our renewed activities, wasn’t aware of the dates. In fact, when a student checks in any day except Sunday, it totally screws up our mental calendars. This one came in on Thursday which really tossed us a curve ball. We kept thinking it was Sunday. Or maybe Monday. It was actually Friday. Oh, well.
I made it a project to avoid doing anything that would let her off the hook and remember it was my birthday. I was having fun with it and was hoping she’d figure it out the next morning. It wasn’t until we were going to bed last night and she saw a date on TV that she realized what day it was. She was suitably embarrassed and I gave her a certain amount of good natured grief and we nearly laughed ourselves to sleep.
The reason I’m meandering off into the journalistic weeds here is that when I finished flying today, I didn’t have it in me to type anything that came close to making sense. So, I plowed through my Grassroots columns from the distant past and decided on this one. It portrays one of the warmer, more interesting memories aviation has given me and I thought I’d share it.
GRASSROOTS
Drums
It was what the Navajos call the “empty country,” that corner of their huge reservation that stretches north and east from Flagstaff, AZ. It is nearly a quarter of the state. A trackless expanse of rocks, sand and mountains of various dimensions, it is their home, today and as it was millennia before. It washes all the way across the four-corners area of Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.
We were surveying the scene from four thousand feet AGL in an A-36 Bonanza. That put us at around eleven thousand feet MSL. This part of the world, even though essentially flat, is high. Really high. Barely three hundred miles behind us was that knot of civilization known as Phoenix, the fifth largest such knot on the American rope, but we were a long way from that kind of civilization. The trees and grass of the Mogollon Rim were behind us and had given way to the barren emptiness of the reservation. Directly below us you could see the tiny lizard tail arroyo that marks the birth of the Grand Canyon.
If you knew where to look, you could see First, Second and Third Mesa, the sites of the longest continually inhabited cities on this continent. They are hard to spot because, just like their inhabitants, the pueblos perched on top of tall mesas belong to the desert. They have long since been baked into a desert color that is more effective than any camouflage. There must have been a festival in progress on Third Mesa as the streets were clogged with vehicles. Even from altitude, it was obvious that the visitors were locals, not tourists, because most were driving pick-up trucks.
John Wayne and so many other westerns and advertising have used Monument Valley as backdrops. You need to look at the road and the tiny car on it to get a feeling for scale. The formations are huge. However they are not as close together it it appears here. The telephoto lens compresses distance.
As far as the eye could see in any direction, civilization, as defined by most of us, was absent. Tiny specs here and there marked where a Navajo family was scratching out a living. However, try as you may, you couldn’t clearly make out the trace in the desert that lead to their hogan or trailer. What you could make out, however, was the runway at Tuba City, which no manner how you define it, is not a city. Its runway, however, was new, long and capable of handling most small jets. In fact, if you kept your eyes open, you’d see runways scattered here and there in the empty country, as if left behind by aliens who had come to explore. But the aliens weren’t extra-terrestrial. Within the reservation, the aliens are Anglos and they are very terrestrial. The runways represent a tentative lifeline which has one end buried deep in the past, the traditions and the culture of the Navajo, while the other leads to hospitals, schools and other necessities brought about by modern times.
We were on our way to Monument Valley to do some photography of a new turboprop, which explained why the back door was off the Bonanza and the wind was howling in. As we approached the Valley, we dropped down past the red rock edge and worked our way to the desert floor. I knew Kayenta, a not-quite-town, lay ahead, but I had trouble picking it out from the surrounding landscape.
I saw the runway first. It lays out of the east edge of town and I was acutely aware of the runway, the town and the floor of the immense valley being so much lower than the surrounding landscape. As we turned base, it was hard to take my eyes off the red rock formations known to the world through movies and advertising. Some could have been obelisks from a lost civilization. Or monuments to nameless kings.
One of the Navajo tribal airplanes was parked on the small apron as we turned in. There wasn’t a single building on the “airport.” Just a ramp and some fuel tanks. Similar landing spots were scattered throughout the rez. Nothing but the essentials required to allow the small fleet of Pilatus PC-12s and helicopters to perform their duty as lifelines to the outside world. Most of the flights are medical in nature. Down in Scottsdale, you know they are in the pattern because their call signs are Native One, Native Two, etc. They have “N” numbers like everyone else, but the tower, like the rest of us, think of them as something special and treat them accordingly.
As I half-tumbled through the open space that once held the Bonanza’s back door, I had to grin. The landscape was surreal. Red and malformed. The air was surreal too. It was so clear and cool you could almost feel it against your teeth. I sat on the edge of the door and drank it in. The only sound was the rustle of a gentle breeze. However, after a few seconds, I realized the breeze carried something with it that let me know I had crossed over into another world – a world unknown to tourists and so far off the beaten path, it wasn’t on the way to anywhere
Distances are long in the West. Longer than most are used to or can comprehend. We’ve sent European B & B guests to the Grand Canyon and they’ve said the roads with no civilization in sight on either side made them very nervous. However, don’t expect to be alone in Monument Valley. It’s featured on tourist maps and brochures world wide. However, distances are big enough they can’t crowd you except at focal points like The Canyon.
As the breeze wafted around me sitting in the door of a 200-mph flying machine, it brought with it the rhythmic sound of drums. Somewhere in town someone was dancing. Some sort of event or incident was either being celebrated, prophesized, or supported in a way that was unique to the area and the people.
The combination of drums and airplanes presented a profound contradiction, which was somehow comforting. I was acutely aware that my flying carpet had taken me to a place where Original America still fought the good fight for survival. And it was comforting to know that the huge cloak of cultural conformity and sameness that tries to blanket so much of our country has holes here and there where the light of our heritage still shines through. Things may change in the macro sense, but here at the micro level, they try to stay the same.
On a clear night in Kayenta, the massive lights of Phoenix, only an hour away by Bonanza, don’t even smudge the southern horizon. However, the world of red rocks and an ancient culture stands alone with the only immediate link between it and my world being a runway. Everyone knows my world, but very few get the chance to visit that one. Damn it’s neat to be an aviator!
Drums on the wind. You were flying a time machine. Cool.
Happy Birthday Sir!
It's times like that that give pause. Envious of your experience.
The Covid battle seems to take forever, but you've got this!
Mark