Before we left, I had heard that this particular route was kind of touch and go. The road wasn't great, and it occasionally got washed out altogether. But the people I talked with at the health center said that it wasn't too bad these days, so I decided to go for it. If this were a story about a calm, pleasant drive home, it wouldn't be on the blog.
The first stop of the drive was Lake Powell. It was something like 140 degrees outside, so it was kind of hard to imagine myself having a relaxing afternoon on the boat. But there were certainly people out there enjoying their Bud Lights and inevitable sunburns. I suppose that in AZ we don't get to be too choosy about our recreational waterways. And you can see from the photo, the scenery was stark and stunning.
After Lake Powell, and Page, the city adjacent to it, we entered the west side of the Navajo reservation. It was one of the more rural sections of an entirely rural reservation, but there was a huge set of power lines next to the freeway. We followed the road (and the power lines) all the way to the 1960s. Well, it was actually a coal mine, but nothing around there appeared to have changed in the last 50 years. Signs were written in faded mid-century fonts, and there wasn't a soul on the road that day. If I didn't know the back story of the mine, I would have easily assumed that mine dried out and the area was abandoned years ago.
But that's not actually the case. It's a small, active, and controversial mine that provides the fuel for the area's power plants. The irony certainly isn't lost on the Navajo tribe that their options for electricity and modern life come from either coal or uranium. Both come from the reservation, and both provide their own unique environmental challenges. But they also provide the electricity that their community needs, and one of the few solid employment bases of the region. It's not an easy decision.
The area is known as Black Mesa, and it's not hard to figure out why.
But I didn't have much time to enjoy the scenery or ponder the ethics of bringing electricity to a community, and then requiring them to mine their own land to support it. The sun was going down fast, and every few miles, the road degraded a bit more. By dusk, we were on a winding, signless dirt road without a single person in sight, and no cell service.
The map that I brought with me didn't have much detail on that road, but it didn't matter much. The road had been washed out so many times that it was almost indistinguishable from the desert around it. Aimee was being a good sport, and Judy was sleeping, but I was trying to figure out how I was going to spin the story about how I got everyone lost overnight in Indian Country.
After about an hour of driving in pitch blackness, I saw a handpainted sign showing "Ganado" with an arrow. I couldn't show how relieved I was, because that would have betrayed my considerable internal worry. But with the tiny town of Ganado as our new landmark, I new I'd get us home.
The rest of the drive was more pitch blackness punctuated by the occasional road sign or coyote. But we made it back without incident, and I slept like a baby.
