Continuing along toward Flagstaff, I saw a congregation of people on the side of the road. The sun was setting and the people were watching, off in the distance, a herd of elk ranging in a green river meadow. People were looking through binoculars and so I pulled over, took out my worthless antique binoculars, and of course couldn’t see anything through the clouded glass, but as I was looking, the car stopped running. A man leaning against a pickup truck offered to help. He said he knew something about cars, and after reaching under the hood, he told me there was something clogging the fuel line, some particle of dirt or carbon, and he suggested I fix it immediately.
The man followed me along for a while but I was fine. I waved him on. Every time I was about to stall I would shift into neutral, and in this way I drove into Flagstaff, to the area where the automotive repair shops were. They were already closed for the day, so I spent the night in the car on a side street.
I spent the next day talking with mechanics in Flagstaff, starting with an Indian guy who was working at Bill’s on Route 66. Then the Nissan place, which was expensive. An old man in front of a discount store told me to put cleaning solvent in the gas tank and carburetor. Which I did. But as I drove up the hill leading out of town it stalled again, this time in the middle of a busy road, and so I found a long-haired kid mechanic who said something about a new air cleaner. I went to an educated mechanic, who sent me to a hairy mechanic, who sent me to a mad scientist mechanic. But because the trouble I was having was transitory, because when they looked at the car everything seemed to be functioning, none of them could help.
And the reason I didn’t leave the car with these mechanics had something to do with the price they’d be charging, and something to do with risk. There was a pleasure in pushing my luck. And it wasn’t that I was enjoying the car trouble, but I was becoming used to it, almost addicted to it. The car trouble was distracting me from something else, which had nothing to do with the car, but the car was what I was focusing on.
4
It was late afternoon when I drove out of Flagstaff, and when I turned off the road, I thought I was turning into the sacred Wupatki Pueblo National Monument, but I ended up instead turning into the Sunset Crater National Monument. Since it was getting close to sunset, instead of reading any informational literature, I decided to sit on a rock and have a picnic. I was eating an apple, looking at the slanting light hit the rocks, and the shadows of the rocks, and for the first time in a long time I felt a degree of peace. The twisted wood of the shrub conifers, and the wind-carved stone, and the warmth still emanating off the earth. Something about the warmth was melting something in me, and I ate the apple, relishing its crunch. I threw the core into a waste container and for a long time just stood, listening to the distant hum of traffic, and the birds, closer, and the wind on my face. The smell of the dry dirt, and the dry air, and the horizon, stretching my eyesight and stretching itself, into the distance.
When another car pulled into the overlook and several children jumped out I decided to get moving. There was a loop drive that wound through the park and I was going to drive along that until I found another spot where I could survey the scenery. As I drove, the sky was taking on the reddish glow of the beginning of sunset, and I was looking out at that, driving down the gentle grade, my body alive in the seat, and I wouldn’t have admitted it, but I was imagining myself as an early human inhabitant.
Then came a swoosh sound and the engine stopped running. The car continued to coast down the hill and I let it coast, the engine quiet, the valley in front of me. When I came to a stop at the bottom of the hill, I pulled off the road again, got out again, and opening the hood again, I felt, perhaps, that my car was telling me something. About where I was. And I didn’t mind being where I was. But I couldn’t stay there, not really, so I started the car, or tried to. I waited the requisite minutes and tried, but the car didn’t start. Not only that, but it didn’t have the familiar sound of trying to start. It was a lifeless wheezing, and it worried me a little. But I waited again and tried again, jiggling wires and trying over and over, removing and replacing the fuel filter and trying again, and every time I tried, nothing happened.
The sky, which had been becoming dark, now was dark, and there I was, on the side of the road, and just about when I was thinking of spending the night where I was a car drove by. I flagged it down and the man who was driving came over and looked at the Pulsar. He had a flashlight and he shined it at an area to the side of the engine block. He said it was the timing belt, or timing chain — he said it was known by both — and that it wasn’t turning. This was serious, he said.
And as this man, a photographer, was pronouncing the car in big trouble, a truck drove up with men in the back, Hopi men, who lived near there and worked for the park and were going home. They looked at the car too, and they agreed that the timing chain was a serious problem. If it was the problem. The photographer reminded me that you never knew how bad it was until the engine was taken apart. They all helped push the car back onto a small dirt road, and since it was night by now and where to go was an issue, Gilbert, the Hopi man driving the truck, told me I’d better come with him.
When he said this, and when he had earlier agreed to the timing chain theory, he didn’t use many words. He said what he had to say and then he was quiet. The photographer drove off and I got in the back of the truck with three other Indian men, all wearing cowboy boots, and during the drive I didn’t talk. Once I asked one of the men if it was dangerous in the desert at night, but all the man did was nod. We drove on an old rutty road for about twenty minutes, the men in the back getting off at various roads in the dirt until at the end it was just Gilbert and me when we pulled into a kind of compound.
There were several dogs barking and some children near the house. It was a small house and modern, or fairly modern, built in a conventional way. Not far off was another building, a six-sided hogan with a sod roof. Gilbert went into the regular house and I started to follow. First I looked up into the night sky, which was black except for the stars, and then I followed Gilbert inside.
A woman was doing something at a stove and an older woman was sitting on a rocking chair. The older one was wearing a deep green shirt and a long full ruffled skirt. No one said anything to anyone as far as I could tell. Gilbert sat at a square table and I also sat and still no one spoke.
Gilbert nodded when I thanked him for the ride. I asked some question about sheep and whether he had any sheep and he pointed in a general direction with his hand. I nodded. I had so much to tell them, to share with them in words, but I could see that words were not the medium here, and in living without the gluttony of words, they were taking the burden off the descriptions of things and letting the things themselves be what they were. Although these people weren’t speaking, I imagined that when they did, their words would be a little purer and a little more meaningful.
I assumed that not speaking was a normal mode of relating and so I stopped trying to speak, stopped trying to think of something to say, and instead just sat. The fact that everyone else was doing the same thing made it easier. We all sat for quite a while and it didn’t take too long before it felt normal, and even comfortable.
The woman was making food, and food, I thought — that would be a good way to bond with this family. I was starting to feel at home in this strange abode. And happy. And because I wanted that feeling to last (into the future), I began wondering where I was going to sleep, thinking I should have brought my sleeping bag because I didn’t see any extra beds, and as my mind raced ahead, I was looking forward to sleeping in the traditional Navajo dwelling. Or Hopi dwelling, I didn’t know.