We finished reading our book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg on our way out of Arizona today. Next week, we will be returning to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Like our return to this French author, which we have been reading intermittently since September 2021, so it takes time to return to other things, such as the annual Sheep is Life celebration on the Navajo Reservation. We last visited this event 15 years ago, in the summer of 2008, when it was being held in Tuba City. Today, we are driving to Gallup, New Mexico, which is the closest we could book a room to Window Rock, Arizona, where Sheep is Life is happening this year.
Another chapter from our evolving book of life is being written about this weekend. What follows is a chronicle of the events that occurred over the previous 55 hours. Come to think of it, this is likely just about the same time remaining in Proust’s book and hopefully not the amount of time required to write about these wonderful days.
Where were we going and exactly what time of year was it that we were last driving up Arizona Route 87 admiring how green things were out in front of us? Now, here we are in the early dry days of summer, and things are baking in their old familiar tan hues. Grabbing a decent photo on this stretch of road is nearly impossible because it follows a long curve after cresting a pass, and by now, everyone is hauling ass, and the shoulder is too narrow to pull over to snap a photo. So, while driving as slow as I can in the right lane on a straight section of the road, I ask Caroline to take the wheel while I quickly focus on getting a shot out of the windshield from the driver’s seat.
We’d love to stay on the smaller roads that are less traveled, but this isn’t always easy or expedient. We weren’t able to leave the Phoenix area until nearly 2:30, and we’ll lose an hour when we enter New Mexico due to the time zone change, which will have us checking in to our hotel at approximately 8:00 p.m., the same time that the majority of restaurants close in Gallup. But John, with these skies, why concern yourself with anything other than witnessing and capturing the immense beauty you and your sweet wife seem to nearly always be falling into? Yeah, I know, it is quite charming, isn’t it?
And then the reality of expediency rears its ugly head, and we are thrust into the vapid expanse of the interstate that induces yawns but does promise faster delivery if one survives the madness of aggression that rages on America’s highways.
Not long after entering New Mexico on a slightly wider stretch of the highway, we had to pull over as far as we could so that, with the window open, I captured the setting sun that was busy enchanting us here in the Land of Enchantment.
Ten years ago, Caroline stayed at this historic hotel on Route 66 when she and our friend Sharie Monsam were traveling through New Mexico on their way to Durango, Colorado, for a fiber workshop at the Intermountain Weavers. Today, it is the two of us checking in at El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, New Mexico, just as John Wayne, Howard Hughes, Ronald Reagan, Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Errol Flynn, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, and Humphrey Bogart did before us. The hotel was originally built in 1936 for the brother of director D.W. Griffith and was used as luxury accommodations for countless Hollywood celebrities.
Sadly, room 316, known as the Howard Hughes Suite, was booked, so we were offered room number 326, the Dana Andrews Room. Dana who? That’s what we thought. It turns out that the majority of the films someone might know him from were shot in the 1940s and 50s, such as Fallen Angel and Kit Carson. Later in his career, he was relegated to TV and B movies such as Take A Hard Ride, directed by Antonio Margheriti and featuring Dana Andrews, James Brown (Cleveland Browns NFL player and actor), and Lee Van Cleef, which looks about as low budget as one might expect of Italian directors in 1975. This one might require watching if we can get past how dated it appears.