Just Kidding

        “Ramitri wants to take us hiking,” said my wife, Kathleen over dinner.

          Ramitri was her 19 year old Navajo coworker, born and raised in Monument Valley.

         “He wants to take us somewhere white people aren’t allowed to go,” she said with a raised eyebrow.

         I mirrored her look of excitement. We’d taken Ramitri hiking with us a few times, and he’d regaled us with stories of growing up in Navajo Nation the only way a shy, awkward kid can. He wanted to show us his home and we were excited to be invited.

         The Navajo Nation is not public land. It’s sovereign Tribal land. All hiking needed to be permitted through the Nation, and we’d need a permit issued by them unless we were hiking with a member of the tribe. Ramtri wanted to be our guide.

          Kathleen set the date. “He said to bring a rope, that it was important.”

         “How much?” I asked.

          He didn’t say. I figure we need enough for a hand line to get down a slope, maybe 20 feet.”

          “I know what we can use,” I said.

           In our garage there was a blue Rubbermaid tote that most veterans keep locked away and forgotten somewhere. Inside were the tailings of our previous lives. Mine held an old gas mask, dog tags, zippo lighters, paperback books I’d never finished, m16 magazines that I wasn’t supposed to have and length of black climbing rope, stiff as a tree limb, that I’d acquired somewhere along the way.

            The day came, and we loaded my old Jeep Commander up with our daypacks, spare water and the rope. We picked up Ramitri at his trailer in Blanding Utah. It was an hours drive to Monument Valley, past the spot where Forrest Gump ended his fictional cross country run, and still served as a hazardous crossing by the invasive species’ known as social media influencers.             

As we approached the intersection with the entrance to the Tribal Park Ramitri, his white teeth shining in his round face said, “You better let me drive from here. Let’s park over there.” He pointed to a bare patch of ground near a row of booths advertising Navajo jewelry, most of which were empty.  A few had displays of beads and turquoise rings. These were manned by elderly Navajo women, busy sewing or beading bracelets.

  We parked next to a brown trailer that advertised fry bread, tacos, coffee and soda. The sent of grease heating on ancient cast iron hit us and I gave in to my stomach’s growling protest. “Let’s grab a snack before we go.”

        That’s the magic of fry bread, no one needs fried bread, and also no one will argue about eating it when it’s readily available. The golden, crispy puffed four slathered in honey squeezed from a plastic bear was heaven. We licked our burnt fingers and climbed back in with our Indigenous guide at the wheel.

           We drove down the arrow straight road leading into the park. Once we reached the entry booth, Ramitri waved to the middle aged woman sporting long twin braids just showing the first signs of gray.

          “My cousin,” he said as we pulled away. “Everyone here is my cousin, almost.”

I could see his pride. He was someone here, everyone knew him. This was his territory.

It appeared that we were going to the visitor’s center and the popular loop drive that see a constant traffic jam of middle American vehicles, minivans, Subarus, and oversized trucks from Texas, full of oversized American families there to see the iconic towers made famous in old John Wayne films such as The Comancheros, and How the West Was Won.

Before we made it to the crowded parking lot, he pulled into a sandy driveway with four old tires barring the entrance, acting as a gate. He jumped out and went to move them out of the way, and we stepped out to help. He waved us off.

“They wouldn’t like seeing you guys coming through here. I know the owner, he’s kind of mean, ha.” Then he added, “Just kidding.”

I knew Ramitri well enough that “just kidding” was more of a nervous tick than an actual joke. Many of the things he said ended with that phrase. I hoped that he was just kidding in this case, but I doubted it.

Once we’d driven through the tire gate and closed it behind us, we drove down an ever increasingly bad road headed towards a wall of sheer red sandstone.

“Where exactly are we going, Ramitri?” Asked Kathleen from the back seat.

“Up there,” he said, pointing his chin, the way the Navajo do so as to not point an accusing finger. “Just kidding. But, really, that’s where we’re going. My sister and I did it all the time when we were kids.”

His sage wisdom he’d earned on his 19 years on earth did wonders to fortify my confidence.

The mesa that we parked under was the same on the visitor’s center was tucked next to, although we couldn’t see anything of it from where we were. As we shouldered our daypacks, above us a slickrock chute soared vertically up the cliff face. My eyes scanned the minute ledges for some semblance of a route which I couldn’t find.

“Don’t forget the rope,” said Ramitri. I wouldn’t dream of it.

Both Kathleen and myself sported $150 Osprey packs with three liters of water in a hydration bladder, first aid kits, flashlights, maps, snacks, and the aforementioned antique military rope. Ramitri’s pack, on the other hand was of the Verizon Wireless promotional variety, who’s straps were made of shoe laces that also served as a cinch for the top. Inside it appeared to have a disposable bottle of water, and nothing else. Our hiking boots mirrored our packs. Ours were thick Vibram soled and his were thin canvas skateboarding sneakers. I looked him over and then up at the red El Capitan behind him.

His smile never faded. “Ready?” He asked.

“We’re following you, Ramitri,” said Kathleen. If she was nervous she didn’t show it. I leaned on her bravery, inviting that contagious, radiating energy. It pulsed off her like heat from a flame.

Kathleen and Ramitri chatted away as we began our ascent, not a care in the world. At first, the climb was no worse than a scramble. The coarse sandstone gripped our shoes sticking us to the rock like lizards. With the task at hand, I could see that Ramirti was following, if not a path, a route that he knew well.

We zigzagged across the face of the chute, hidden ledges appearing as if they’d just sprouted there. Roughly 30 minutes into the climb we stopped to catch our breaths. I looked behind us and realized we’d climbed nearly 500 vertical feet. We were roughly halfway. This wasn’t that bad, trust Ramitri.

“Let me see the rope,” he said between labored breaths.

He was standing on a wrinkle of rock about the width of my hand that folded into the cliff face a few feet beyond where he stood. I swung my pack around to my front and fished out the loose bundle of rope and handed it to him.

With the rope in one hand, he spun to face the wall and then, like a gecko on a window pane, slithered up to a ledge about 10 feet above us. His nearly smooth shoes giving him more surface tension than our aggressive ones.

The rope clattered between Kathleen and myself.

“Come on up,” came the cheery call.

My eyes followed the black chord up to see what Ramitri had tied off to. I could see that he’d wedged himself into a shallow alcove, not much wider than himself. The rope was in left hand where it where it passed behind his left hip and emerged on his right side. He’d tied some sort of knot in front of his sizeable waist. Ramitri was our anchor.

“Oh my god,” I whispered.

“It that tied around you, Ramitri?” asked Kathleen.

“Ha, yeah,” he said. “It’s okay, I do it all the time.” Under his breath he muttered something that sounded like, “just kidding.”

“Oh boy,” said Kathleen as she pulled a few times on our Navajo boulder, testing it for soundness. She looked at me and nodded. Silent as a cat, she bounded upwards. Our anchor held. I on the other hand, was nearly twice her size. I couldn’t bring myself to put my full weight on the rope, but as I started to slip before I’d reached them, I had to trust, and the rope, or rather Ramitri held.

As we climbed further, the route mercifully became slightly less precarious. Now, if one of us fell, we’d bounce several times before our freefall back to the tiny silver rectangle that was the jeep far below.

“We won’t need the rope until we get back to that spot,” said Ramitri. “There’s this big cable here that goes all the way to the top.”

He picked up a rusted steel cable as thick as Kathleen’s wrist that twisted upwards, under rocks and disappeared far overhead. To demonstrate, he leaned his whole weight backwards onto the relic until he was perpendicular to the rock face. “See.”

“What was the cable for?” Asked Kathleen.

“They used to mine stuff up on top a long time ago,” he said as he dropped the heavy chord and started up the slope again.

I looked around at the slope and saw that it was strewn with rocks about the size of baseballs. Most of them had a dusty yellow hue that stood out against the red sandstone bedrock. I picked one up to examine it. The specimen I held crumbled ever so slightly when I dug my fingernail across the surface, dull yellow powder fell off, catching the wind and drifted to oblivion.

Scanning the area, my eyes fell on a rusted heap of metal not far away about the size of the trunk of a car, crumpled next to the cliff wall, caught by gnarled juniper roots. I recognized it as an old mining bucket. The cable must have been used to haul ore buckets. The semi-flattened bucket still held some of its material: the yellow, dusty rocks.

I felt the sickening feeling of dread crawling out of my belly and seizing my throat. I dropped the piece I was holding as if it had bitten me.

“Uranium,” I said, mostly to myself. The others looked at me. The irradiated material was scattered all over the place. “Jesus, Ramitri. This was a uranium mine wasn’t it?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Is that what it looks like?”

I didn’t answer. “Don’t touch any of it. It’s radioactive.”

He cocked his head to the side. “I guess that is what it looks like. Ha.” There’s no life like Rez life.

Using the heavy cable we climbed faster to get out of the superfund site and neared the top. The last hundred yards was mercifully less steep and less radioactive. Ramitri was ahead of us. He topped out on the flat plateau, his sillouette black against the sharp blue sky.

The three of us stood on top of Monument Valley, the iconic stone mittens, made famous by John Wayne in the western epic movies such as Comancheros, and How the West Was Won, looked like toy building blocks hundreds of feet below us.

“Wow.” Kathleen exhaled.

“Not many white people get to see this view,” said Ramitri.

There are no shortages of awe inspiring scenery in the American Southwest, but standing above Navajo Nation, seeing the land falling away to the south, all the way to the Grand Canyon to the south and the twin buttes that gave me a job, called the Bears Ears to the north, this view topped them all.

Kathleen spoke without looking away from the endless horizon. “Did you and your sister come up here often?”

Ramitri looked down at the precarious route we’d just climbed. “Nah, she only did it once. She didn’t want to do it again after she fell on the way down and hurt her leg.”

We stared at him.

“Come on, you can see the roof of the visitor’s center from over here,” he said, his smile never fading as he walked out towards a peninsula of rock surrounded by air.

Kathleen was looking at me, but something else drew my eye. “Look.” I pointed to the mining cable we’d entrusted our lives to. The cable stretched another 30 feet into the rabbitbrush where it ended, frayed and laying on the ground, tied to nothing. The only thing keeping this relic from being yanked off the clifftop was its sheer weight.

I was speechless. Kathleen said, “Remind me to never follow a 19-year-old up a cliff again.”

Then, she bounded towards where Ramitri was crawling out on a ledge but stopped after a few steps and half turned back to me with a mischievous grin,

“Just kidding.”