Took
Highway 191, the Navajo Code Talkers Highway, to Twin Rocks. Just had
to stay at the Kokopelli Inn, in Bluff, Utah, and have Navajo tacos
at the Twin Rocks Cafe. The family seated across from us had soup,
stew and chile that they scooped up with fry bread. Most of the
customers and employees were Navajo.
Bluff is quite the Diné (what the Navajo call themselves) town.
The
Southeast corner of Utah is more Navajo than Mormon.
The
Kokopelli Inn is run by Navajo women. The young woman who checked up
in told us about the Bluff Arts Festival, that was going on that
weekend, and gave me brochure.
There
was a DVD on sale in the lobby: Skinwalkers:
Witches of Navajo Country.
I bought a copy. A server at Twin Rocks Cafe had a Navajo Wolfman
T-shirt, based on a local petroglyph. A few decades ago skinwalkers
were a taboo subject, and it was even hard to get people to talk
about them. This is another century, a new world.
The
next morning it was 30 degrees in Bluff. Being from Phoenix, it was
so long since we’d been cold, it felt good.
We
headed home through Monument Valley. The wide-open spaces of the big
rez became Daliesque vistas where a woman pulled a rickshaw down an
endless highway . . . Hopi . . . the Painted Desert . . . abandoned
structures along the roads, the new ruins decorated with fresh
murals . . .
In
a week we had visited so many different landscapes, different
environments, different worlds . . . I wondered what world we were
coming back to.
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