A FATHER’S PRAYER

This is the time of day that many in Navajo Nation call “grandfather talking god.” When the strip of white light rises over the mountains, there is no evil, no pain; the dust of the previous day has settled.

In this white dawn, in 1984, Steve Darden, a 31-year-old Navajo, drove his Ford Ranger on the dirt road up the side of the San Francisco Peak, an extinct volcano. To the Navajos, the mountain is “grandmother,” one of four holy mountains.

Darden looked younger than his years. He was the first Navajo leader to be elected to the City Council of Flagstaff, Arizona, and would go on to lead a long and distinguished career in public service. He was also part of a movement to preserve the old traditions and to live them. He had agreed to show me the mountain.

“I will not go up just for you,” he had said several times. “I go up for my own purposes.”

An elk was standing on the gravel road ahead of us, and Darden stopped the truck. “If it crosses the road,” he said, “we’ll have to turn back.”

After a moment of indecision, the elk returned the way it had come, running down through the firs and birches, haunches moving in jerky slow motion. It joined five others and blended into the brush. They watched us.

Darden breathed quietly. He pushed his fingers into a tiny deer skin pouch. “I was wondering last night what I would see; would I meet a coyote, a trickster, who knows how to manipulate? ” He looked at me.  I would have turned back; but the dzeh, the elk, is a good sign.”

From the pouch he took corn pollen and sprinkled it from the window, and, eyes shut, head down, he spoke a Navajo prayer. And then he told how, a long time ago, the Holy People had punished the Diné, the Navajos, because man had abused animals, and man was separated from them. “When we enter their territory now, we must pray, we must go through a transflux, a transition so that we can be among them.”

He started the engine, and we began again to climb the mountain.

The dawn moon was up over a long field grazed by cattle with plastic clips in their ears. Darden parked the truck and we walked under a ski lift, its base black new metal, like a moon lander or an insect, shiny silver cables sashaying up, along the raw cut, to a distant point near the top. We crossed the field and went up into the trees. “We call the mountain grandmother because her hair is white,” he said. We passed through white aspens with trunks carved with graffiti. “This is where I get angry. Beer bottles, drugs, all disharmony. It’s like slobbering on your grandmother.”

For a quarter mile, he said nothing. He moved quickly, listening, watching the ground, pausing to watch a deer move off into the pines. He stopped next to a spruce seedling.

Four times a year he makes these pilgrimages; this time he had come to give thanks for his new son, who had been born a few days earlier. And to ask for guidance.

He knelt in the leaves and needles, bending over until his forehead almost touched the ground. His chongo, the bun of long hair tied with cloth, was white in the dim light. He began to speak in the language of the Diné, his voice rising and falling. The wind moved the trees. He dug little holes in the ground, and from his pockets took campaign fliers and buttons, and pieces of turquoise and coral. He planted these artifacts in the mountain, returning them to their maker.

After a long while, he stood up. “I want my boy to have a strong back, a straight life, like this little spruce. A lot of things around this evergreen have fallen; the tree that you are sitting on fell a long time ago. And yet new, straight life always comes along.”

On the way back down the mountain, he stopped the truck and pointed with excitement. There, on the opposite side of the road from where they had been, were six bull elk. They were standing much closer now, heads raised with wide, velvety antlers.

“In eight years,” he said, “I have only seen elk on the mountain twice. This is a good day.”

He said he was thinking of his son.

And I thought of mine.

Editor’s note: Richard Louv is the author of THE NATURE PRINCIPLE: Reconnecting with Life in a Digital Age and LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. An earlier version of this piece appeared in his book “Fatherlove.”

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