There is magic in the air as the sky touches the earth and the sun allows no escape. The desert is everywhere, and all there is.

The Siren Song of the Desert drew me. It draws me still.

Shirley was taking an Anthro course at PCC. The teacher, very good, was Elvio Angeloni. He traditionally arranged a field trip to the reservations in the Southwest. Shirley signed up.

I signed up too. It was during the summer, and I didn’t have to teach summer school to survive, because the School District had finally figured out how to pro-rate our salary so we could get paid a little less each month but get a paycheck each summer month. Other Districts had been doing that for years.

I wasn’t a student in the class, but I was the spouse of a student, friendly with the teacher who was really impressed by Shirley as a stellar student, and I was allowed to accompany.

The students, a whole class in number because everybody wanted to go, had to pay. There were expenses, gas, lodging, food, entrance fees. Shirley was exempted, and I was too, because we were given special duties.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but it slowly dawned on me, why we were allowed to go without paying.

Elvio led the field trip every year, so he knew people. He had contacts with tribal leaders, with owners of trading posts, with the Park Service, with restaurants and camp sites along the way.

We would be mostly camping, the cheapest way to go. We would be carpooling with designated drivers in touch with each other by walkie- talkie with limited range so we had to stay close enough to keep in contact and so would never get lost.

Every year Elvio collected donations to deliver to the reservations which needed everything. It was mostly clothes, some kitchen devices, anything useful. They filled the trunks of cars, along with tents and sleeping bags, so it was a tight fit. But everybody was young and eager, even those students past middle age who were young again, everybody rarin’ to go.

Shirley and I were assigned to ride with Bernice. She had a little truck with a covered back like a van, and could carry extra. There was only one bench seat in the truck, and we three crammed in. I was the driver.

Elvio seemed a little disappointed that the cargo for the reservations was of such slight extra overflow that there was only a small pile of clothes for Bernice’s little truck to carry, but he let his disappointment briefly pass so probably no one else noticed it besides me.

I think Bernice was also given a free ride, partly because she offered her little truck, partly because she seemed to be a long-time student and had gone on trips before and so was a regular, was repeating the course for fun, and could not conveniently be denied.

I quickly saw why Shirley and I were assigned to Bernice, and why we didn’t have to pay. It became clear to us that we were to chaperone Bernice.

She was pretty old, but not old enough to need special care. She was certainly not feeble. We formed a trio, Shirley, Bernice, and I, became a cohort, a little not quite separate world where we could join the others around the campfire, but parked just a little ways away so when we set up our tent we were a little apart from everyone else. I don’t remember, but I think Bernice slept in the truck.

She wore an Aussie out-back hat, the side brim turned up, the kind made currently famous by Crocodile Dundee in his movies, and I called her Crocodile Bernice.

It became progressively clear why we were assigned to baby sit Bernice and keep her at a safe distance from the others. She was full of a bitterness that she could spread and could not contain. We were driving through Arizona toward New Mexico, miles and endless miles of arid desert, and Bernice muttered to us, captive in the front seat, “God forsaken country!” and “Why would anyone want to live here?” I wanted to say, “Why did you come on this trip?”

But this is not all about Crocodile Bernice, and I’ll try to withhold further references to her until we get to Acoma.

Elvio had planned the trip with scrupulous detail, and we stopped at a Trading Post it seemed to me notable but just off the beaten path. I may be wrong and mis-remember, but my memory’s vision sees it maybe near the Nevada border, where highways converge or cross.

It was our first Trading Post. There would be others, but as the first, we had to stop, get out, explore, admire the handicrafts, finger the fabric and pottery, maybe buy a souvenir or example of archaeology and memento of the trip.

We were cautioned not to overdo the spending at the first stop, don’t overbuy, because there would be many other opportunities to compare, we shouldn’t use up our money so soon and fill the cars with souvenirs which would crowd out later possible purchases of greater desirability.

Nonetheless, it was a good first stop. I don’t remember the name of the place. I could look on maps, try to retrace our route, search for written records. Some students were taking notes, but that was years ago and we’ve lost touch. And since I wasn’t in the class myself, and shepherding Bernice kept us pretty much apart from everyone, though Shirley may have known them, I didn’t.

And, at each such stop, we all together were sharpening and heightening our senses to the feel and smell of leather, the texture of wool, the coolness of silver and turquoise.

The walkie-talkies told us where to stop for the night. We’d set up camp. We were close to a reservation which was having a traditional dance through the village, and we were invited.

Elvio told us how lucky we were, because many of the field trips didn’t get a chance to see a celebration dance, and our trip became increasingly special, memorably unique.

After the campsite was set up, and dinner, we drove over to the reservation and were welcomed in, parked, and were immediately swept through the streets filled with dancers, and brought into a house with windows where we mingled with the reservation residents as we all watched through the windows, dancers nearly naked, bodies oiled and gleaming, black hair shining, antlered headdresses, leather booted stamping feet, waving totems and green branches, chanting, the shining bodies emanating everywhere the scent of cedar filling the streets and infusing the houses. We stood inside the house beside tribal members swaying and moving in syncopation with the dancers passing outside.

Then a dancer, and another, entered the house, danced around and among us, their branches brushing over us, and out another door to join the dancers endlessly dancing down the village street. As they moved closer to us in passing, their gleaming bodies scrubbed deeper than clean, the emanation of cedar coming from their inner essence as we breathed it in, they were animal and tree as they passed, taking our spirit with them, not leaving us behind. For all of them, it was a ceremony and celebration, and they were sharing it with us.

I have never been so taken in by the essence of tree.

We became a part of everything in the universe of the moment.

We were changed.

Elvio came to tell us it was time to go. We should get back to camp so we could sleep in preparation for the next day.

I didn’t want to leave. This was more important than sleep. The dance was still going on, for hours, and would last all night.

I was in the midst of a mystical experience and didn’t want it to end. Only a few things in my life have I been able to give myself up to so completely to something so much greater. It was with the greatest reluctance that we tore ourselves away. We had to get Bernice home to bed.

The sequence of events is unclear in my memory, but I remember when we came to Chaco Canyon.

It seemed remote, off any beaten path, with signs as we entered the camping area. There was only one above ground faucet with a sign, “Not for drinking.”

Non-potable water poisoned from the poisoned ground where people no longer lived among the ruins. It told us we could not stay, and we brought our water in, jugs and bottles, for drinking and cooking, for a day, maybe two.

There was a sadness in the ruins, as if the spirit of a vanished people hovered disembodied in displaced frustration.

Shirley and I and Bernice missed many of the discussions and lectures placing our experiences in perspective. There was talk and planning around the campfire, of setting our clocks to wake us early, before dawn, so we could climb up to the higher larger ruins of the real city and see the sun rise.

Bernice wanted to sleep, no alarms set, and we slept through the moment. We all gathered for breakfast as the others came down from the sunrise experience and talked about what they had shared. All we could do was eat breakfast.

So I never saw full Chaco. But maybe I can go back. The past is always there, waiting for us to reclaim it.

The tribal reservations throughout the Southwest are vast tracts of land, sometimes gerrymandered, sometimes parallel, sometimes contiguous.

We stopped at a famous Trading Post at the edge of the great Navajo Nation and Elvio renewed his acquaintances and we drove into the reservation to the setting of the famous rug auction and saw a lot of rugs and talked with the weavers who told us of secrets, tradition, and the true colors of the earth.

They denounced the mass production machines and the artificial analine dyes. They recognized the tribal victimization under the crush of capitalism for easy money. They showed us their aging hands and fingers spinning the wool, feeling the knots, protecting the secrets of the colors ground from nature, the hanging rugs waiting for feet or shoulders, the persistence of truth in a diminishing world.

We drove further. We were shaken by the desert. The endless miles of flat, the rising sun with parallel rays, then the taking of the sky at noon, and evening parallel, then sinking below the edge of the world, then the night, and darkness, and the stars.

Everywhere the air we breathed was of former days, the people who remembered and would not forget.

At the Trading Post we heard mention of a dance the next night, one reservation over, and Elvio changed the itinerary. One dance, he said, was unusual and special. Two would be singularly epic and forever memorable.

The next night we drove over to the Pueblo to see the Hopis dance. Unless it was Zunis. I should have taken notes.

We climbed the ladders to the roof, adobe structures all around, people at the levels looking down on an inner village square, surrounded on all sides, as the dancers below, if I remember correctly, some with Katchina heads, some holding symbolic snakes, were, as I learned, not stomping, but in a motion that looked similar, lifting the foot drawing power from the earth.

Some dancers had baskets of fruit they were tossing up into the audience, some to neighbors, some to tourists, eager to catch the fruit tossed their way.

Shirley was standing next to me. She herself was a dancer for years, professional, with the true spirit of dance that infuses the body beyond the last finger tip, not the counting of steps but the joy of movement. She saw fellow dancers below, made eye contact with one, their spirits joined in mutual acknowledgement, and he threw an apple up directly to her. She caught it, red and ripe and sweet, as she bit into the juice and took in the dance. She shared me a bite, juicy and sweet, and I became one with both of them. My world expanded, my horizons broadened, and again I didn’t want to leave.

And then we came to Acoma.

I’ve written about it in a poem which I included in a collection I initially called Navajo Poems. But our trips to the Southwest were not just Navajo. Some of the poems have variously appeared in Many Smokes, and most notably in Weber Studies where they gave me a full page of five poems, including The Grandmothers of Acoma which is approachable in my blog.

Acoma is special.

It’s like those monasteries in the mountains of Greece, Monasteraki, built on the top of pillars of thrusting stone like the volcanic neck of Acoma, flattened on top, virtually inaccessible. In Greece, to visit, the monks lower a rope, you step into a container, and they haul you up. Men only. No women allowed. Because, you know, monks. And all their food and water is lifted up the same way, safe from attack.

Very much like Acoma, a citadel, a retreat, where wars may wage on the desert below, but the Peaceful People absent themselves, dig their roots deep to outlast and survive.

There’s a parking lot below, stairs leading up, easily defended. I think there’s a way now to drive to the top. I think we took the stairs.

There we were, a group of college students including Shirley, their leader Professor, me as husband, and Bernice. We roamed the top a little bit, admiring the rows of adobe houses, the typical stacked apartments with the ladders to the next story up. It was an actual little village, a small handful of full-time residents, most of them old. The younger tribal members live below on the reservation.

One painful encounter took place on a side street. Elvio and some of us were passing the backside of houses and a not yet old but prematurely aging Indian was sitting against a building in the shade. He had obviously been drinking, was drunk, slurring, trouble focusing, whiskey breath, and seemed to be relegated to the back side to keep him out of sight until the “drunken Indian” sobered up. He was a member of the tribe, an embarrassment, and it seemed to me that they were trying to protect him.

He had a cardboard box of piki bread between his knees and seemed to be assigned to the role of ambassador offering and selling the little piki, crispy like potato chips, to visiting tourists with tourist money. It may be that his collected money had gone for drink.

My interpretation may be incorrect, but my empathy was not, and I felt a deep sadness almost to tears, not for him alone, a tragic pitiful figure, but for the conditions which reduced him to this.

He saw we were a visiting college contingent, and offered us the whole box of piki, free as a gift. It seemed a gesture of desperate pride, to hold on to the scattered shreds of himself, to try to do something of value and be recognized for it. I felt his community knew him with the Hopi kindness of patience, didn’t know what to do with him, and he didn’t know either. They didn’t want to throw him away. They had given him a little job to save face, and he felt near tears because he had let them down.

Elvio was put on the spot and said, “Oh no, we couldn’t take…” And the man said, “No, no, they’re all yours, take them, I give them to you as my gift.”

I thought immediately, because I couldn’t block the swift parallel, of the students I had taught at Sherman Institute near Riverside, an off-reservation Federal school where “problem” Indians were sent to a high-fenced boarding school like a detention center. Here again was the visible end result of a system, the heel of Power crushing a “problem.”

We had a tour of Acoma, led by a young woman of the tribe. She led us to the end of the plateau where a single tree was still growing, like a symbol of the tribal roots, and a sunken area with wood burning and coals glowing, and grandmothers sitting around the edges, shaping pottery with their old remembering fingers and placing each pot in the flames on the coals, often giving them the dark carbon brown burn characteristic of much of Acoma pottery.

Our tour guide proudly introduced us to her grandmother as one of the tribal elders, who, like all the others around her, had her pottery displayed near her feet where visitors and tourists could buy and take home straight from the artist source.

Crocodile Bernice came up, picked up a pot and said loudly, “This is junk! No good! I can get better at K-Mart, and cheaper!”

The granddaughter was shocked, insulted, near tears.

I took Bernice by the arm, led her away, and said, “There’s something I want you to see, over here by the edge, just a little farther…”

It was difficult to restrain myself from giving her a closer look at the distance. I said to the tour guide, “I apologize. She’s not like the rest of us.”

I stood on top of the mesa at the edge of the world and drew power from the ground. I became the past. I shepherded the present into a future as yet unknown. I knew I would return.

We climbed down the steps, got in our cars, and headed to Santa Fe.

New Mexico has a special feeling about itself, The Land of Enchantment, and Santa Fe is The City Different. It really is. I’ll say a little bit about it now, and add more in a later blog post covering our later visits. Our love affair with the Southwest was started by this Anthro field trip, but didn’t end there.

When we rolled into Santa Fe, Elvio announced that we would take a break from camping and stay in a motel.

A universal cry of joy went up. “At last! A bed! Clean sheets! A shower!”

We were on a limited schedule, had only a day or two, but did the town. We tried to see everything.

We went to real restaurants for real food.

We slept as long as we wanted.

We went around the plaza over and over.

There was a folk art museum. Amazing.

There were churches and a cathedral.

There was a really good bookstore on the square.

Shirley and I liked the town so much, a small city really, that we determined to come back as soon as possible, find a real estate agent, and maybe find a place where we could move to, live happy, the way our Pasadena friends had done to find in Santa Fe “the last good house available.”

Along the walkway in front of the Governor’s Palace, blankets were spread, women from several tribes sat, backs against the wall, their offerings arranged at their feet, jewelry and pottery and weavings and baked goods and, of course, piki bread.

We stopped and talked. We compared notes. Some of us bought treasures, souvenirs, mementos with memories. We would be heading back to California and Pasadena and the PCC parking lot from which we had embarked and where our parked cars were waiting for us.

We drove through New Mexico and Arizona and waved goodbye with familiarity because we recognized where we had already been just weeks before.

As we entered California, approaching Pasadena from the east, Elvio steered us to Fontana for a farewell dinner at the pizza restaurant owned by his relatives whom he had already alerted beforehand.

The food was good, the talk was enthusiastic, tired, and we all knew we were less than an hour away.

We got to PCC, unloaded into our cars, notebooks turned in, and Elvio thanked us for taking care of Bernice.

I’ll tell you later about our other trips. We got pretty good at revisiting.

No, we didn’t move there.