Day eight - Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii

Day eight – 19th May- Monument Valley and the Navajo

YA’AH-TEEH dear friends!!! That means something along the lines of hello in Navajo. Although I think I should start by saying that word of the day is Spellbound.

Arriving in Monument Valley, we pitched out tents in a haphazard hurry, joking about the possible rattlesnakes and scorpions before heading out across the flat, red-green land, towards the silhouetted monuments that indicate the Native American Navajo Reservation. I know I said if before but there’s something indescribable about what we saw and did over the following few hours but I’ll do my best. Richie meets us, introducing to Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii, the Valley of the Rocks, teaching us some Navajo greetings and the necessary Ps&Qs. Richie’s real name is so long and unpronounceable I won’t be trying to write it here, I’d likely turn it into an insult or something. Herding us into his open sided jeep, he speaks in a wonderful voice that seems to always hold a smile in it. He points out the various buttes and mesas, telling stories of his childhood and some of the mythology around the rocks. We’re told to jump from the rocks, sprint up the dunes and tumble back down. We do so laughing all the way.

He takes us to a cave, worn through by the wind and has us lie looking up at a hole that leads to the sky, the ring around it looking like a perfect eagle eye. With our backs to the warm, red rock, a melody begins and he’s playing the two-pronged flute in such a way that it’s like listening to a wooden bagpipe albeit smoother than anything I’ve ever heard in Edinburgh.

Once we’ve seen the trail, we’re taken in a sweeping curve around The Praying Hands to dinner with a handful of other Navajo. Tucked into an alcove, we wash our hands in cool water before being given a huge meal of traditional fry-bread, beans, green leaves, tomato, spices and steak. The boys were incredibly happy, especially Adam who shotgunned Maggie’s before we even arrived. It was a struggle to finish but the tradition says that you must.

A fire crackled throughout our meal, maintained as the drum was watered and stoked as we finished and were invited to the entertainment. The Navajo have a huge respect for music. It comes from the soul. As our ‘leader’ began to sing the Call to Dance – out springs a writhing, stamping, bell-clad dancer – his feet adding cow-bell sounds to the heavy beat of the drum and the entreating voice. Dust is kicked up by his feet, his eyes burn with energy, the ferocity of his movement takes us aback. A fan of twelve red-tailed hawk feathers is in his hand, twitched and jabbed like a weapon. The bright red garb, the grass-like uniform that we associate with ‘traditional Indian dress’ seeming more vivid in the firelight. A sudden halt, the wild-dancer with the painted face is Jordan, his warlike ardency comes through in a story. You’ll have to go if you want to hear them all though because the magic won’t be there in any written rendition.

We asked to join in then. I partnered Jordan. He taught us the dance, spinning us round – barefooted and laughing, we span and span. It was almost like a Ceilidh in the way that it was so simply enjoyable and unselfconscious. Afterwards, we played a game. Angela was not impressed when we were told to compete in a sing-off of A Whole New World.

Night fell. The moon was pale, a yellow fishbone in the sky it’s light making a halo with the dust of the dunes. Navy sky was almost royal blue; the stars were so bright, almost wafting in milky streams like glitter floating on cataract eyes. Fizzing meteorites swept across the darkness with blue-green tails of ice and peculiar space heat. A cool breeze drifted lazily from the North. Two conical monuments could be seen, tipping their hats to the skyline and the wind flew from there. Picking up the sand as it came, the wind arrived, just a brush of coolness. The desert stretched for miles, the sweeping sands that moved like the ocean as they flickered across the surface of the dunes in the wind. The dunes were like waves, constantly shifting, lifting, rising along the earth and sinking down, deep, tumbling into shadowed crests.

In the dark, dark, quiet, we stood faces uplifted, admiring the awesomeness of the sky and listening as the deep, velveteen voice of our Navajo guide threaded his needle and wove his story.

Once, he said, there was only pure light and pure darkness to distinguish the day and night. This was the fifth world and the first people disliked the completeness of the dark at night – they wanted some source of light. So all the animals were asked to give their coats to make a huge swathe of cloth and to place pebbles onto the cloth. The animals were pleased with this new game and formed patterns upon the cloth, laughing and laughing. But one had been left out: the transformative trickster Coyote. When he saw their new game he approached, wishing to be part of their new game. Asking to join he was denied.

“Coyote, you always do everything wrong and cause problems. You cannot have any pebbles.”

“But I want to join in,” argued Coyote.

They laughed again and told him to leave them for he was not welcome.

Moping, Coyote moved away but their laughter followed him so he went to a mountain and howled  out his sadness. Still they laughed at the sound of his hurt. Howls echoed off the rocky face of his mountain, reverberating through the night. When they continued to laugh, however, he became incensed. Why should they laugh at him when he was sad? So storming back down the mountain, he came to their clearing and still they laughed and laughed and played with their pebbles.

Darting forward, Coyote grabbed the edge of the great cloth and with a snap and a snarl he whipped it away from his fellow animals, sending the pebbles upward, soaring towards the sky, patterns disrupted and shifted as they became stuck on the inky blue of the dark. Their glow becoming the stars.

I think there’s Magic in Monument Valley and if there was anywhere on this trip that I would recommend with every fibre of my being it would be there, with them, dancing and laughing and singing.

Ah-sheh'heh Richie and Jordan for making the night so incredible.

HAGOONEE

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
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