September 1
I met my third creep this afternoon; he was driving a red Pontiac with California tags. I was, as usual, walking against traffic.
When I wouldn’t stop to talk to him, the guy kept pace with me on the opposite shoulder.
He said, “Do you take breaks?”
I thought, “Great, another one of those.”
He said, “How long is your hair?”
I keep it tucked up under my hat to avoid people just like him; the more androgynous a girl alone on the road appears, the better.
He said, “Ever smoke pot?”
I said, “No thanks.”
He said, “I’m just trying ... well, I don’t know what I’m trying to do.”
I could have said, “I think you are trying to pick me up.”
Instead, I just kept refusing to stop until two ladies passing by in a sedan saw what was going on and pulled over to ask if I was okay.
They offered to give me a lift and I was loathe to refuse but did. I told the guy that I knew the women and he finally drove away. My guardian angels stayed until we were sure he wasn’t coming back. I spent the rest of the day’s walk on the look-out for red cars.
Crossing into New Mexico, my ninth state, I traded mountains for mesas and buttes. The dark green scrub cedars that dot the white rock hills are most impressive when viewed from a distance.
This is the first desert beauty I’ve ever witnessed.
In Cedar Hill, I found my hosts’ house in turmoil.
Guy and Jeanne Linder love animals. They breed miniature poodles and horses, and have several other dogs, some chickens, and three cats. One of the bigger dogs had attacked one of the poodle moms and punctured her lung while Guy was out getting me. Jeanne dropped everything mid-dinner preparation to run the dog up to the vet. Then ‘Grandma,’ a humungous Great Dane, puked an entire bowl of food onto the new carpet. Autumn, Jeanne’s 12-year-old daughter, and I kept busy trying to stay out of the way.
Shirt still splattered with blood, Jeanne returned at seven carrying a bandage-swaddled, but living Baby. Dinner was good - Fresh string beans with bacon, homemade cranberry sauce on pork roast, and fresh tomatoes and cucumbers -- but quiet. Jeanne hadn’t gotten to making the peach cobbler dessert, so Autumn and I decided to take on the task. We had a great time, got flour and peach juice all over the place. It didn’t look like your typical cobbler, but it tasted just fine. 20 miles today.
September 2
Since I’m only going through the northwest corner of New Mexico, and because I’m breaking in new boots, I’m going to do short days. Today I walked only ten miles to Aztec. I spent the rest of the afternoon in the library, then Pastor Bill Ivins picked me up and took me to the Brooks family. Bonnie and Larry have been married for twenty-four years. They have three kids: Jeremy, 22, just married his childhood sweetheart; Shawn, 18, is at college in Lamar, CO, and Mikela, 12, attends elementary school across the street. Larry and Bonnie married when they were both 19, two weeks after they met. They are an interesting addition to my informal research about happy marriages.
Throughout this trip, I’ve met a wide variety of happy couples; people who did or did not live together first, newlyweds, people with eight kids, and people with twelve grandchildren. As far as I can tell, the happiest couples are the ones that communicate most often, both verbally and physically. Problems occur when couples will not or cannot (not just when age makes hearing difficult) listen to each other. Bonnie and Larry are very good at letting each other finish a thought. Many times, I’ve cringed when a husband or wife won’t let the other have his or her say. Yes, indeed, I’m learning a lot.
September 3
I stayed with Bonnie until 11 AM as we sat at the kitchen table discussing various aspects of religion. Jeremy had something of a religious awakening just before his marriage; Larry was concerned that Jeremy and Christy were doing the pre-marital horizontal mambo, so he had a talk with him about living a Christian life. Jeremy took every word his father said to heart.
Bonnie admits that she is jealous of her son’s new religious fervor. She says she keeps praying for a sign. She tells me how a friend of hers in Texas has a little girl that was bitten on the leg by a rattlesnake. As the woman rushed her baby to the hospital, she suddenly had a flat tire. When she got out of the car to change it, she saw a man standing there on the side of the road.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said, and proceeded to change her tire.
She turned to get something from the trunk, and when she turned back the tire had been changed and the man was nowhere in sight. The little girl lost her leg below the knee, but survived and hops cheerfully up the aisle at church every Sunday.
Bonnie said that she constantly prays for a sign like that. I said that I only hope I never get into a situation where I need a sign like that. I believe in a higher power, I don’t know if it’s one god or several, or just the power of our amazing brains, but I do believe that there’s something connecting all of us.
Farmington is twelve miles from Aztec. “Home of the World’s Largest Commuter Airline, MESA” touts the welcome sign. It is also the shopping hub of the Four Corners area. There's a Walmart, a Target, and a Sam’s Club all in one block; the mall across the street has more than sixty stores in it.
That’s a whole lot of mass consumerism. I smiled at what some of my college friends would say and wished that I needed something at Target so I could justify strolling its aisles. The great and terrible thing about chain stores is their generic setup makes them all seem familiar.
It's 99-degrees at 3:30 -- according to the bank signboard across from the gas station -- when I end the day’s walk. Will and Marge Kottke are my second Rotarian hosts (the Freedmans being the first). Their house reminds me of this black-and-white sci-fi movie I saw once late at night in our dorm lounge: Frustrated with his unhappy life, a man discovers a company that will stage your death for whatever money you’ve got in your life insurance police. They then perform plastic surgery to make you look like your ideal and put you in whatever alternative lifestyle their extensive tests determine is best for you. The guy in the movie turned into Charlton Heston and became a famous artist.
The only catch was you couldn’t tell anyone about your past and this guy got drunk one night and told everyone at his party what he had done. All the guests turned out to be members of the same life-changing club, and they cursed and attacked him. At the end, they wheeled Heston back into the death/operating room, desperately screaming for another chance.
Anyway, the Kottke’s house looks just like the fieldstone ranch house in the movie. I miss 3am movie watching.
Loren Wheat came to dinner as a representative of the United Methodist church in town that found me the Kottkes; he’s been pretty gung-ho about finding me places to stay but was very subdued at dinner. Marge filled him in on everything I’d told her about my trip thus far, which was a welcome change from having to repeat it three or four times every visit, myself. After he left, I wrote in my journal and caught up on my delinquent postcards until bedtime.
Just before bed, Marge and Will’s son, James, happened to call from Phoenix. He just finished hiking all over Europe and he once sailed in the S.S. Universe around the world. When he heard about me, though, he told his mom that he might as well go back to bed. I told him that I could never have done this without people like his parents, who have taken not only me, but thirteen exchange students into their home over the years!
September 4
In Kansas, I saw crickets jumping all over the place in the weeds by the road. Here, it’s striped, turquoise-tailed lizards that zip away from my approach. I am definitely in the desert now, and in Native American territory, but Waterflow, a town between the Ute and Navajo reservations, is not on any map.
I am staying with Jim and June Moore in the little adobe house and trailer addition that they call home. She’s a high school teacher; he’s a former high-school teacher and bus driver. He retired after a bout with leukemia five years ago.
Jim told me my second marvelous story of the week: When he came out of intensive care, several of his family members asked him about the man in the brown suit he’d kept insisting was in the room with them. Jim didn’t remember anything about that, but one of the things he apparently said was that the man told him to take a rope out of his left hand. Somewhere in the Bible, Gabriel tells a sick man to do the same, saving him.
I am neither skeptical nor gullible, but it does give me something to consider. Angels: I often wonder whether I’ve got a few, myself.
September 5
All this morning, flocks of geese flew south above me, another indication that fall is coming early. I arrived in Shiprock just in time for Blessing West’s third birthday party. Reverend Paul West, the birthday girl’s grandfather, picked me up at the 7-2-11 (not 7-11! Out here, it goes by a different name - I don't know which came first, but they don't seem to be owned by the same company).
I spent the next couple of hours at a genuine family function, i.e., Mayhem. I ate until I could eat no more, smiled and nodded infinite introductions, and wore a silly birthday hat like everybody else. I was ready for a nap.
Instead, I went to a wedding, a traditional Methodist service with a reception afterward. Vivian, a woman I met at the party and who sat next to me at the wedding, leaned over to me at the reception and whispered, “Did you notice that you’re a minority?”
I hadn’t noticed. Paul, his wife Dorcas who played the piano for the service, and I were the only “Anglos” (the local phrase) in attendance. All the guests I met were very open and friendly; no one stared at my too-casual hiking attire. If not for the language being spoken, I might not have noticed anything different at all.
The reception was my introduction to some traditional Navajo dishes: Mutton stew, ‘fry bread,’ which is much like West-Indian Naan, and blue corn mush. Stuffed as I was from the birthday, I still managed to clean my plate. 13 miles today.
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