As you gathered, the week before last was surely not my finest. I had had no illusions about striking up endless numbers of wonderful conversations (I’d been in New Mexico and Navajo country often enough to know that an outsider didn’t often stumble into those), and I wasn’t burdened by Least Heat Moon’s half-breed fears. But I wasn’t expecting the road’s latest reminder of how the journey itself shapes the experiences one has along the way.

I knew that it did, of course, but hadn’t counted on the shock that New Mexican reserve would be after the generosity of spirit I’d encountered in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. I now realized that when I’d flown into New Mexico from Washington, DC, the reserve seemed to be a natural part of the spare yet boundless space I had sought—but in the wake of Texas it just seemed cold. And that seemed doubly shocking precisely because I loved the region so much. view photo

 :: Tracking a Hopi ::

So it was especially heartening to find Kendrick Fritz last week. Heat Moon met him at Southern Utah State College in Cedar City and reported that he was studying to become a doctor in order to go back to Hopi land to help his people. Twenty-five or so years later, I met him in his office at the Tuba City Indian Medical Center. (Tuba City lies in the Arizona portion of the Navajo reservation, not far from Hopi land, which is surrounded by Navajo land.)

I hadn’t called ahead or written—I continue to refuse to “schedule” the odyssey. I simply found the hospital and asked an exiting staff member if Dr. Kendrick Fritz worked there. The attractive, good-natured woman (whom I took to be a Navajo nurse, but I didn’t ask) told me that they had a lab technician of that name, and if I came back in the morning I probably could have a word with him. We didn’t talk long because rain had succeeded the dust storm that had been blowing, but we might have had a lovely conversation. She was delighting in the badly needed rain, and I told her that I was happy for her but I, for one, had had enough.
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 :: Found: One Good Indian ::

Thus it was that I spent the night in Tuba City. The next morning I wandered into the lab and received a warm welcome, despite having arrived without warning. Time had been kind to Kendrick. Although his face had that set look all faces achieve in adulthood, it was unlined and his hair was jet black; he still looked youthful and his smile was warm and infectious.

He also appeared to be the same thoughtful, caring, witty person he was in Blue Highways, and he just may be one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. “I was reading that section again a few years ago, and really laughing at it,” he said. “[It seemed] funny in that I guess I really haven’t changed—I mean, you know, my thoughts. Basically my beliefs are all rooted in the Hopi religion, [which] still shapes what I do in life.” view photo

 :: How He Got Here From There ::

Kendrick told me that his formal education had been interrupted by minor-league bad choices and six years in the Navy. But his education in life and medicine went on, and the years in naval hospitals taught him that he wasn’t suited to direct patient care—he found it difficult to separate himself from patients’ pains, fears, and losses. About nine years ago, after a progressive series of jobs and educational stints, he came full circle by returning to serve the Hopi and Navajo peoples as the hospital’s chemistry supervisor. “I kind of like to think that I did bring some changes to the hospital,” he said. “When I first got here, . . . everything [in the lab] was all manual . . . but we’ve come some way since then. We’ve made this place pretty good.” His work gives him great satisfaction: “Money is nice but it’s not the main thing; it’s the pleasure, the enjoyment of working, and helping other people, teaching other people.” (A nationwide shortage of medical technicians often has forced the staff to train new people on the job.)

I asked whether there were any Native American doctors at the hospital, since the lack thereof was, he told Heat Moon, one of the main reasons why he wanted to come back here to practice medicine; he said a few came through. Then I dropped the big one: Were there any Native American women doctors at the hospital?! Well, chalk one up for the sisters: The hospital’s CEO just happens to be a female medical doctor. view photo

 :: Straddling Cultural Divides ::

I also wondered about Hopi/Navajo relations, since the historical enmity between the two peoples had been exacerbated over the last 30 years or so by the re-partitioning of Hopi/Navajo land. “I think for the most part,” Kendrick said, “both tribes get along fairly well—it’s when things get politicized that the problems occur. . . . But as far as one-on-one, everybody has good relationships with each other.” He is, in fact, married to a Navajo; they have six children. As you might expect, they take a light-hearted approach to their mixed marriage: They joke, he said, about building a house straddling the border of the Navajo and Hopi reservations, so each could keep to his or her land and they would cut everything down the middle.

“But we try to teach our kids both sides and have them make up their minds,” Kendrick told me. “I tell them that we all have our own way of doing things—our religion, whatever—but I tell them that, being in the Navy, that’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned: We may be all different in our skin—that’s superficial—but inside we hurt, we feel joy, in everything we all feel the same way. The only thing that’s different about us is our skin color. And the reason why there’s prejudice out there is because . . . [of] ignorance.”

In the Navy, Kendrick said, he went out of his way to make friends with different kinds of people and help them get to know each other. He certainly encountered ignorance: “One of the things they used to ask me and tease me about was, Do you guys still live in teepees? Do you still have war parties?” But he disarmed it with humor: “Oh yeah, we still do that. (I would go along with them, you know.) But then I would turn around and say Oh, I’m just kidding you. I’d tell them that [Native Americans are] all different. . . . Each tribe is different, just like a French[man] might be different from an Englishman.” Kendrick and I shared an ideal: that people might appreciate and celebrate both their common humanity and their cultural differences. “Like I tell my kids,” he said, “wouldn’t it be so boring if we were all the same?”

Our conversation ranged even farther and I could have talked to him all day, but after an hour or so I felt guilty about eating up his work time and took my leave.
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 ::On To Utah ::

From there I followed route 89 north to the Navajo Bridge, an early 20th-century engineering feat that finally made it easy to cross the mighty Colorado River. Because the old bridge hadn’t been designed to bear today’s traffic, a new bridge was opened right next to the old one a few years ago. The original bridge is now open to foot traffic, a boon for engineering buffs, shutterbugs, and nature lovers alike.

I followed 89 across the Utah State line until I hit 14, the westerly mountain route that almost proved to be Heat Moon’s undoing. It is a glorious road with glorious views, and I would recommend it as heartily as I recommended route 337 in Texas’ Hill Country were it not for the traffic: Although not nearly as concentrated as that of an urban road or interstate, it was heavy for a blue highway. Trucks rode my bumper at 50 MPH on serpentine mountain curves, and I pulled over fairly often. view photo

 :: Killer Chipmunks ::

That night I stayed in the Dixie National Forest’s Duck Creek Campground, at a large, private site surrounded by towering old pines and young aspen trees comically gnarled and twisted by fire. The board at the campground entrance proved its worth to anyone sensible enough to read it: A notice in the bottom corner announced that cute critters like chipmunks—and the fleas that feast upon them—in the area might carry the plague, so if one fell ill within seven days of camping there, one should see a doctor immediately. I envisioned my tombstone:

What She Did on Her Summer Vacation:
Went Camping,
Got the Plague,
Died (Happy).

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 :: Cedar Breaks: A Mindblower ::

Poor Heat Moon didn’t know what he missed by hitting the Cedar Breaks in May, when it’s still winter at 10,000 feet above sea level and route 14 is truly treacherous. (Timing is indeed everything. Even in mid-July I snuggled under my wool blanket.) The Cedar Breaks is a misleadingly modest name for a truly spectacular geological formation: Wind, water, and the freeze/thaw cycle have turned a huge, ancient, intermountain lakebed into a natural amphitheater over 2,000 feet deep and more than three miles in diameter. Spires, goblins, hoodoos, and stone babies rise from the canyon floor; the rock layers vary widely in hardness and color, so that the entire canyon is a constantly changing palette of color, shape, and shadow. It took my breath away. The Breaks may be the best-kept secret of all of our national lands.

Being a mountain lover, it pained me to leave the heights and descend one vertical mile to the flatlands; that’s where the road was going, though, and I needed to go with it. So I did. view photo

 :: Free-range Cattle Always Win ::

The road took me to Nevada, where I gambled on two state-park campgrounds and lost.

The first was excellent, and I would have stayed despite the fact that the gravel wasn’t terribly tent-friendly; I passed it by because of looming thunderheads and a stiff wind that would have pitted me and my tent against one another in ways sure to elicit unladylike language from me.

I reached the second by driving seven miles back into the mountains on a gravel road that set my teeth to chattering at five MPH. (That was when I wasn’t stopping to avoid open-range cattle that felt they owned the road. Try explaining a close encounter of the bovine kind to your urban insurance agent.) I finally had found a campground too isolated even for me (when traveling alone)—there was no one there, no rangers, no campers, no jackrabbits. Maybe it was the Brigadoon of campgrounds, or the ghost campground in the sagebrush. In any event, I thought I’d feel too vulnerable there, so I braved the four-legged steaks and made it back to the blue highway and a motel room in Ely.

And there’s more to report, but I’ll save it for next week’s update. My Reno friends have made me very welcome, and I’m taking them up on the offer to catch up on some work, recharge my batteries, and be spoiled rotten for a week.

Stay tuned for next week’s installment. . . .
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