As we enter another season of feasting, gift giving and love, I want to talk about what that is all about for me. I was always under an impression that a great prophet was born in the season and through him we are promised salvation. It is about saving lives and opening up heart and hearth. Our collective story of our vulnerability and our saviors come together in our conversation. It is not about the Gods of our creation that I am speaking of here. The men and women who do these deeds are just humans who happen to be in the right place at the right time.
I was hiking along the shelf of White Mesa some years ago with my kids and two wonderful ladies who lived as our neighbors back in Kayenta. It’s a hike I’ve done many times and again. We admired the landscape below and the great rock arch that spanned the width of the shelf. This is White Mesa Arch. As we moved along gently I stepped away from the safety corridor to view something from another angle. I lost my footing and started to slide toward the yawning roll of the edge. I told myself all along that the fall should not be far. “It’s sandy below the drop.” I tried to convince myself as I rolled with gravel all about me. In a last ditch effort of stopping my possible demise I threw my right hand back as far as I possibly could and I felt another hand catch the tips of my fingers. From there, they worked me back up. A human chain had been formed. And I was saved.
When we walked back later I looked at the scene. If I had fallen there was no soft place, it was strewed with boulders and there was no sign of a sand dune. It was at least a 60-foot drop. My body weakened as I realized the danger.
These beautifully fast women saved my life. We never went back to that site. That was in the 1990s.
My father was saved by coyotes that kept to his left where he would have stumbled off the cliff of another place and time. He was returning from one of his first calls to perform a ceremony. He left late riding a burro. The night was dark and a fierce blizzard came up. In the darkness and cold and uncertainty the man and the animal became lost; so lost. In time, the burro decided to just lie down, fatigued from plowing through deep snow. My father tried to coax it up but to no avail. He started walking at this point into the swirling storm. In time, he too became too tired and fell asleep in the snow. He says he dreamt of warmth and being home. According to him, someone coaxed him awake later.
“Ni’dii dah’ yee ya’ Dii’ dlool!” (Wake up, you will freeze to death!)
There was no one there who could have spoken the words, but there were three coyotes he saw as he stumbled up. They kept a distance but guided him away from a deep canyon’s edge. They accompanied him close to home where familiarity took over. The coyotes disappeared before my father could speak to them. He came home early that morning nearly frozen and had to spend weeks afterward hospitalized for serious frostbite. This was before I was born.
The strangest event in saving a life connected me with a young teacher in Kayenta. We were part of a group that partied somewhat hard in those days. One of those times found us floating on Lake Powell with looming thunderheads and lightning in the distance. I called out to her to get out of the water but she was nursing a bottle of something. Our party was some distance down the beach and unaware of her situation. It got dark pretty fast and coursing lightning was the only light. When the area lit up again she was missing from her raft. I called out for her frantically. I couldn’t then, nor have I ever, learned to swim. With my toes I started feeling for the bottom but it got deep fast. Forgetting my own safety I dove into the murkiness and found her just below her raft. I dragged her ashore where our friends attended to her. She was spitting and coughing up Lake Powell water. It was only then that it hit me—I could have drowned along with her. She survived.
That should have been the end of it, but several months later, early one morning with no traffic on highway160, I saw a car overturned with its tires still spinning. The underside was smoking dangerously close to the fuel tank. I jumped out and pulled the woman driver out through the window. It was Jessica, the same lady from the incident at the lake.
She had sustained a few bumps and bruises. I advised her, “Go home, your real home. I may not be around the next time you are in need!” She did. She moved back to Texas.
I believe each day someone speaks the words or makes the gesture that shapes a right decision or action that saves someone out there. Someone saved my life.
