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Red Willow Springs
(Our 1st trip to Big Mountain on Navajo [Dineh'] Reservation Feb. 1999) by Candy Porett Kee Watchman steel streaked and thinning pony tail hangs limp hands buried in the pockets of 'man patched' jeans eyes shift from his worn tennis shoes to the night dark horizon probably mistrusting but tolerateing my white chatter about our ignorance of the confiscations and relocations. Morning barely warming from the eastern glow cracking on the edge of this world I smelled the crispness of this mesa where six horses stop to inspect me from a distance snorting foggy breath from moist flared nostrils and I shiver to touch their rough winter coats, and slide my hand down just one strong neck, but they continued in a crescent path to the back, by the pen where lambs, kids and their mamas press close to Kee Watchman. Retired yellow sheep dog panting in the back of a blue preened pick-up Kee drives us down rusty serpentine roads that dip and turn past pinion and a hogan where white and faded blue and yellow ribbons flutter in memory of the man that died there. At Red Willow Springs Sacred Site dry scrub growth and cactus cling fiercely to the walls of this God gouged canyon descending rapidly to meet at the edges of a nomadic creek covered with a thin February crust. His English halting, with the spellbinding accent of his Dineh' tongue Kee Watchman says "We used to pray and have ceremonies here, where ancient Spirits spoke. Their voices came from those holes, before they made that road, and it broke the Earth." looking at the cylindrical tunnels angled into the rock across the abyss then points to the jagged edge of stone to the right where a delicate rock shelf once extended out 20 feet sheltering the Sacred Site. In lower tones, his accent more halting Kee Watchman tells us "The Spirits no longer speak. Since that big machine came through to make the road, they no longer speak." In the bottom in the cold shade of what was left of that rock roof, our fingers slide down wet sides of four tremendous ice pillars that stand like silver columns at the entrance of a mansion, destroyed by war. At our feet lay boulders and shards of rock in heaps of waste. Icy water trickles from their bases, clear ribbons converging and lacing beneath the frozen layer. Small feathers, striped black and bright orange, as if they came from a tiger, lay in shared direction toward the glacial shafts. Above, too far above for man to have reached without the rock ledge, scarlet painted pictures tell a story and suddenly I am so insignificant. A distant voice and the dull clang of a bell rebound the resonance floating down as Kee Watchman calls to us descending with woolly sheep and shaggy goats following the black dogs past the red pump "…the pump 'Oscar Whitehair built, before he died of TB two months ago." the animals pick their way through unsettled stone bleating and baaing without rhythm, like impatient children to sip through black lips from the pure tailings of the melting pillars. Kee Watchman 'feeding his babies' 
Photo by Dave Rotering copyrighted 2/99 |