Dirt Roads and Navajo Tacos

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Robert Frost

When my husband finished college, he and a friend contracted with a Navajo businessman to build a full-service restaurant/meeting room in Crownpoint, New Mexico, a tiny Native American community at almost 7,000 feet elevation in the Great Divide Mountain Range. I had lived in Albuquerque twice—once when my dad was stationed at Kirtland Air Force Base and once when we moved back there after he retired to finish his EdD in educational psychology at the University of New Mexico. I already loved the land and the culture—Anglo, Spanish, Native American. Then it was the only state in the Union where all official documents were automatically printed in Spanish and English. And the food! Nowhere else in my limited experience compared!

Crownpoint was a center of BLM operations. Other than those offices and a small hospital, there wasn’t much, or anything now that I think about it, in the way of food service for about 100 miles in every direction. We were young and naive, but we had high hopes, so we brought a mobile home and had it towed 130 miles from Albuquerque to be plopped down on a random piece of ground about a mile from the restaurant site. (No rental fees. As far as I know, not even any registered owner—except for the Tribe.)

We were hidden far into the mountains where no television reception was even attempted. No radio either, other than a Navajo station which broadcast in a language so difficult, it was the unbreakable code used for top secret military messages during WWII. Our nearest neighbors were a couple of random cattle and the trailer of a Hawaiian heritage LDS seminary teacher and his family—on top of the next small hill. (Oddly enough, when we moved to Kearns 6 or 8 years later, that family lived in our neighborhood, their kids going with mine through their public-school years.)

Daughter #1 was 18 months old, and Son #1 had been born 30 days before we moved. We didn’t know it then, but only 40% of restaurant businesses survive the first year. My husband and his partner often worked 18-hour shifts. They trucked in their own supplies because no shipping route even knew Crownpoint existed. Alone with two tiny children, I listened to my cassette tapes and read every book I owned over and over again.

There was an LDS meeting house not far away, but with only a dirt track, it was impossible to use my stroller to get to church. On the Sundays when my husband didn’t need the car for business, I drove. I don’t remember my husband or his partner ever making a meeting. Too much rested on their seeing the restaurant kept its doors open.

I loved that little branch. I didn’t speak the language, and the Navajo members lived in such isolated adobe hogans with impassible roads during the winter that there was never a predictable congregation of familiar faces. But every Sunday those who were could get there were smiling. A month of two after I arrived, the branch sponsored a dinner. Assignments were made, and a time set. I think I brought jello—it was what I thought a church dinner required. I had no idea most of the older Navajo generation had never even heard of it, much less tasted it. But it turned out to not really matter.

I showed up with my children on time. For almost an hour we were the only people in the building. Sometime later the Relief Society president bundled in with desert; an hour after than the main dish arrived, and about 9 o’clock the person assigned to bring plastic utensils showed up. We ate around ten. It was totally foreign to me, and yet I felt safe and welcome. Perhaps more than at any other time in my regularly disrupted life.

The long days without enough rest began to tell on my husband. He caught a cold, but he brushed it off, saying there was no one to take his place at work. He’d hired a couple of teenagers; however, instead of scrubbing floors and washing dishes, they liked to slip into the small arcade the Tribal leaders had requested be added to the restaurant’s meeting room. They would play pinball until someone forced them back to work.

A few days later, my husband’s partner sent word that my husband had collapsed on the kitchen floor. He had trouble breathing, and he was burning up. With no one to call for help, I loaded the kids in our little Volkswagen, drove the mile to the restaurant, and picked up my husband. The local hospital refused to see him because he wasn’t Navajo, but they told me the location of a Baptist medical missionary a few miles down a dirt road on the other side of town. When I found the place, I left the baby in his infant seat and his sister in the back seat looking at her books. In those days, I had no car seats to keep them safe.

The doc helped me support/carry my almost unconscious husband into his little trailer. His fever now 106 degrees, the doctor told me my husband would die unless I got him to a hospital in Albuquerque—a two-and-a-half-hour drive, a good part of it on dirt roads. No such thing as an ambulance nearby. The doc started my husband on antibiotics, called ahead (he actually had a telephone, rare on the reservation) to tell the emergency room we were coming. He also called my folks to meet us there and take my babies. We lowered my husband into the passenger seat. I wrapped the baby up tightly and put him my husband’s lap. Then I started to drive.

I kept talking to my husband, reminding him not to drop the baby, but his eyes would roll back in his head and his muscles relax. Several times I had to stop the car and re-wrap his arms around the baby to keep the child from rolling off his father’s lap onto the floor. Daughter #1 was scared and started to cry. I joined her, both of us with tears streaming down our faces–the road in front of us became a blurred vision through the dust and the tears. There was no traffic at all. Nothing on the 35 miles until we hit Interstate 40. I pushed the gas to the floor and raced for help.

My husband did almost die. The docs in the emergency room said a few more hours, and he wouldn’t have made it. He was in intensive care for more than a week, another week on the regular floor, then home to my parents’ house where it was a long time before he could breath without panting.

We lost the restaurant because our partner couldn’t do it alone. Probably for the best, as I understand it is owned by members of the Tribe, and last I heard, it was still serving my favorite Navajo tacos.

But when I read about the reservations which are being hit so hard by the COVID virus, my heart aches. Medical care for the Tribes hasn’t changed much in the last 50 years. It’s time to fix that.