Off the Edge of the Map

Tracting in Crownpoint was a new experience. It often involved picking one of the six or seven settlements ("chapters" of the Navajo Nation) strewn around Crownpoint and taking a half-hour drive out off the edge of the map. We would find twenty to thirty houses, but the arrangement of the houses varied. In an odd recollection, these settlements reminded me of an atom: there were clusters of houses on the inside with scattered, isolated dwellings outside. When we finished knocking the doors of the inner clusters, we would hop back in the truck and drive door to door, sometimes going a mile or more between houses.

The houses varied as well. Some of the more well-to-do neighborhoods looked like something you'd find back at home, if indeed you transplanted my subdivision's houses onto bleak gravel lawns dug out of the New Mexican scruff. Others were mere wooden huts, called hogans, which often had dirt floors and 72-inch plasma TVs. The Navajo people were generally kind and would let us in, but it took some gnashing of teeth to get them to follow through with the commitments they so gleefully made.

Other days we'd stay in Crownpoint. We could hike over the mesa to the east of our trailer for the most direct route to the bulk of the houses, or we could slink around the road to hit the Bureau of Indian Affairs housing to the southeast.

At nights, after we planned and did all the day's appointed tasks, I would sit on the porch sometimes and just look up at the sky. It was the same sky that beamed down at me months ago to remind me who was backing me up on this crazy adventure of mine, but this time it was unmarred by the lights of the city. I'd often smile up again and count myself lucky that the Lord had given me so many chances to be who He wanted me to be.