Running is having reservations

Dear Land ‘O Lakes Butter,

My parents go to Santa Fe almost every year. They drive, stopping for lunch in Pueblo on the way, and spend the weekend buying all kinds of stuff. Chili pepper Christmas lights. Ristras. Santos. Navajo rugs with different earth tones mashing up against one another with their polygonal sawteeth. A ladder built from split cords of poplar wood, bound together with plastic animal gut and sinew. Spindly squash gourd earrings, fashioned together with obsidian. Pastel colors. Zig-zag patterns. Dreamcatchers to keep the incubi at bay. Some nights at home, they page through a guide they got off the Internet on Hopi kachina dolls. They buy the ones that interest them and get them Fedex’d overnight and spend thirty minutes looking at them when they finally arrive. Then they arrange them on the windowsill in dramatic poses. Fighting brave under fluorescent track lighting. Angwusnasomtaka next to runner up golf trophy. Crow Mother next to family heirloom Bavarian beer stein. Dancing Bear (with authenticity certificate signed by the artist) juxtaposed with a book on IRA mutual fund options. Jean Baudrilliard could probably write a whole book about that windowsill.

One year on the way down to Arizona for a backpacking trip, my dad and I stayed in a Motel 8 on the Navajo Reservation, in Kayenta. I remember a lot of driving. Some of the Navajos walk. You’ll be thirty miles out from the nearest town on a two-lane road, surrounded by juniper and sage and spindly cattle fences and wild moonscaped terraces of crimson dirt and you’ll see a Navajo just out there walking. On the shoulder. It’s usually the old guys and elderly women, in mesh hats and flannel, or bulky, wool skirts. When we got into town, Kayenta was full of sandblasted Quonset huts, gutted F-150s lying like beached mechanical whales in the arid wastes of their front lawns. It was Easter Sunday and the restaurant downstairs in the lobby was serving a special holiday menu. They served a lamb chop so dry it could’ve doubled as a joke on the BBC, paired with some congealed mint chutney and a pile of wilted endives. My dad ate it all. Then spent most of the night in the can, keeping me up with diarrhetic moaning.

(pictured: Louis Tewanima)

One time, when I went to an advanced placement engineering camp at a local university during high school, I roomed with a Shoshoni guy, about five ten, sixteen years old. He spent a lot of time reading Mad. A bunch of Shoshonis were on scholarship at the camp, learning how to mechanically dissect water timers. I don’t remember the guy’s name. Isn’t that horrible? I think it was something like Ivan. I’ll go ahead and call him Ivan, since I doubt he’ll read this. Anyway, one hot evening, Ivan took a thick bundle of dried sage from his bag and hung it in the doorway of our dorm room with extreme care. Sitting at my desk, unable to figure out how to apply a quadratic equation to an especially nasty geometry problem, I swore. Ivan looked at me.
“Apologize to the sage,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You just swore in front of the sage smudge. Apologize.”
“To a plant?”
“Yeah.”
“Apologize to a plant?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t.
And I forgot about it until last Christmas, in front of a painting by Sanford R. Gifford or Bierstadt at the Gilcrease  in Tulsa.

Regards,

-C. Turner

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Days streaked: 21

Total Miles: 79.1

Today’s running mixxx: The Dodos, Born Ruffians, and 764-HERO