Hollywood Trembles on the Verge of Tears

Los Angeles to Kayenta

I left Los Angeles on May 4th. My plan was to drive across the country, alone for the most part, see my brother in Phoenix, stay with a poet in Albuquerque (Julie King), a novelist in Fayetteville, AR (Padma Viswanathan), stop in Missouri for two days and two nights to shoot Dawn Landes and Josh Ritter’s wedding — I like mentioning these things because America is enormous, because a trip like this reacquaints you with the generosity of strangers or near-strangers, and if those happen to be poets, novelists and musicians, then there is also some glowing sense of the ever-present spectacle of life, that all you need is a map and pins to mark where the show is. After the wedding I was going to pick up my best friend from high school in Asheville, and head up to New York City to make use of an empty apartment in Carroll Gardens for a few days.

It took me almost two weeks and a total of 3,947 miles. I spent more time on Interstate 40 than I would have liked, bargaining with myself — a half a day on I-40, the other half on whatever back roads I wanted. I left late from Los Angeles and arrived in Phoenix around 10:30-11, which meant that I was only seeing the nighttime contours of its weird face. The Holiday Inn light board to the road, “Welcome Chihuahua Club of America Rotating Spring Nationals,” on one side and “Welcome Special Olympics” on the other. From Phoenix, I took 89A, driving through Sedona in the late afternoon, when everything is aflame with the red from the rocks. It made me think of New England in the fall when I was a kid, the way you are conscious while looking at those colors that you won’t be able to hold them in your memory. Reading Travels With Charley later, I found the same sentiment in Steinbeck’s description of New Hampshire, “To find not only that this bedlam of color was true but that the pictures were pale and inaccurate translations, was to me startling. I can’t even imagine the forest colors when I am not seeing them.”

After Sedona, the red earth dries up and turns purple in the distance and white in the foreground with the bleached grasses, and flattens, and after Flagstaff, there are the San Francisco Mountains and Grey Mountain and Cameron, and then it’s just a cracked crust. I went to the Grand Canyon alone just the year before, and so I passed it up, trying to make some place by night fall, because I wanted to be driving only while I could see. This was the point. A couple of women I’d met near Grey Mountain were from Page and they told me about how beautiful it was up there and that I couldn’t miss it (Coffin later told me it was where Hungerford got his quiet, dark side, and seeing photographs of Lake Powell later, I could understand — like the Grand Canyon, it’s a landscape that somehow doesn’t enter the realm of human experience, it registers like something existing behind a curtain or a sheet of glass, and you have to wonder what it’s like to live in that landscape… does the curtain disappear or do people disappear behind it, too?). But Page and Lake Powell were too out of the way, and I needed to keep East of where I was, if I could help it.

Kayenta was a good destination, but before I got to Tuba City, on a long straight stretch of 160, I saw a big sign written in cartoony script, “DINOSAUR TRACKS,” and an arrow pointing to the left. I passed it and turned around and veered onto the dirt road in the direction of the arrow. The road went on towards a lost point under some shallow cliffs where there were some shoots of green trees, so there must have been water, too. But the indicated attraction was closer to the main stretch. There were a couple of empty stands, a few pick-up trucks, and a handful of men standing around, some hanging out of the doors of their trucks. For the first time I thought it wasn’t so great to be a woman, alone, but the thought didn’t last long because I was approached by a stout Navajo man, who reminded me precisely of a black kettle, with a German army hat, and he said he’d like to give me a tour of the dinosaur tracks. He said a lot of things before I even got out of the car, what I could see out there and how a small donation would be appreciated, and I joked with him that there were no real dinosaur tracks, mostly because I hadn’t committed yet to leaving the safety of a fully functional Volkswagen Jetta with keys in the ignition. The men in the trucks assured me that there were, in fact, dinosaur tracks, and I decided that I was being silly, and got out. I don’t know why I didn’t give Joey Many Whiskers any money for the tour. I didn’t have much, but I had some. Maybe because while I was still in the car I’d told him I had no money, which was a lie in case I decided I should forego the dinosaur tracks amidst strange men in stationed pick-up trucks. We walked farther than I expected, towards a mound that had an American flag jabbed into the top of it. There were tracks everywhere, not unlike those found recently on the Arizona Utah border, in a field that’s now called the “Dinosaur Dance Floor.” Joey told me about the tracks, and he said the smooth discs that were collected in a circle in one area were pieces of petrified dinosaur poop. There had been an exposed talon and an egg, he said, but someone came one night and carved them out. I tried to imagine this person, staking out somewhere near Tuba City, taking the turn with his lights off, chiseling under the dim beam of a headlamp. Why? Joey panted from the heat and his weight and told me about his family, and there was a lot of death in that story. I asked him why they’d put up an American flag instead of one for the Navajo Nation, and he shrugged, “I guess we didn’t have one.” I took his address, saying maybe I’d send him a postcard, but I meant to find a flag and send it to him. I just ordered it on Ebay.

Not all is right with this story. Unconsciously and uneasily I assumed the posture of an intruder where, for all intents and purposes, I was welcome; the guilt was historical, demographic and inescapable. I was hyper-conscious of myself, and him, the differences between us. I wanted to convey my interest without insulting him with my advantage. I didn’t want to trust his dull red eyes, overriding a natural apprehension towards any stranger, on account of his stereotypically gentle demeanor. All this is not all right. Maybe the tragedy of even the most benign forms of racism, that hyper-consciousness of race, is that it precludes a more human interaction. And there is a specious conflation at work. Race, in this case, wasn’t even the point; it only underscored an inability to be in possession of myself and whatever small, good intentions I might have had, in an uncomfortable situation. I don’t mean to indulge in judging myself too harshly. I don’t know exactly where I am going with this. I was looking for America.

By the time I got to Kayenta it was dark and everything was booked. I turned back to the Anasazi Inn, which I’d passed miles back, and took up a dingy trailer that had all you’d need to live comfortably if you had absolutely nothing to your name, and three kitschy paintings depicting Native Americans hanging on the walls. It was late but I was hungry and the diner was open all night. I ordered Navajo beef and fry bread because the waiter said it was traditional. “I like to put honey on the bread,” he said, so I asked for honey. The beef was dry and cold, but I liked the fry bread with honey because it reminded me of the fried dough my grandmother used to make. I ate alone and an older man with two boys asked me if I wanted to join them. I talked to them a little bit, asking them about their trip — they were from Toronto, traveling for 10 days in the Southwest, and they were standing behind me when I was turned away from the Best Western in Kayenta — but I kept my table. The whole diner was wall-papered in Native kitsch of every shade of sunset, feathers, eagles and howling wolves superimposed over portraits of people. An old Navajo couple came in, locals who knew the locals in the diner. They were speaking in the Navajo language, and the man had a cap that read, “Lone Wolf Guns & Ammo” and a jean vest over a tee-shirt. There was something printed on the tee-shirt but I couldn’t read it at first. Only when he sat down, I saw it said “Welcome to the Valley. Now get out.”

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