Enchantment, Dreams, and Peace

I was born and raised in Arizona. For a swift moment when I was in First Grade, my mom, dad, brother, and I lived in far southwestern Colorado, and I did earn a trip to Disneyland selling new newspaper subscriptions for the Scottsdale Progress on my reservation when I was 13 years old, but really, for the true majority of the first eighteen years of my life, all I experienced of the the world was the southern Arizona deserts.

I’m often asked the question why I chose to attend Dartmouth for college. I had the intellectual talent to pretty much choose anywhere I wanted to go, so a “good” school was my first priority, but being a considerable introvert, my minisculely second priority was that whatever college I chose would be a small, even tiny, one. The third priority, but again almost equivalently important as my first and second priorities, was that the school would be in a physical environment as far removed as absolutely possible from the Sonoran Desert.

By chance (but as with all things in life, maybe not), the new director of the Native American student support program at Dartmouth was traveling around the country recruiting students. A cold call to my high school gave her a lead, and a meeting was set. I was only 15 at the time, but my outstanding academic performance, my tribal enrollment, and my residency actually on a reservation was supremely appealing to Dartmouth, and less than two months after my meeting with Dartmouth NAP director, I was flown out for a college visit in a New Hampshire February. It was freezing, and it was captivating, and it was irresistible to me.

I did keep my options open. My natural talents were more math and science, but my heart did not find a good domicile there. For a term of genuine gravity, however, I did pursue the life of an engineer. MIT was in Boston, far from Arizona, and I gave it serious consideration. My mom had become friends with the newly elected Arizona U.S Senator John McCain, and he was impressed enough with me that he fervently attempted to persuade me to attend the Naval Academy and offered me his personal nomination, but in the end, I chose the school that “made the first move” and compelled me to the Great North Woods in the heart of true New England.

My father, as I have shared, was born in Poland (Nazi Germany at the time), raised in Köln, West Germany, and then moved to Canada before settling in the United States. I sometimes wonder if personal traits, like “wanderlust”, that define the characteristics of one’s spirit could pass biologically from soul to soul. I certainly feel I inherited a love for travel, to find joy and peace on the ever changing road, from my dad. I discovered that ecstasy of the road, my place of introspection and gentle, real peace, attending college 3,000 miles from home.

During my time at Dartmouth, I drove across the country dozens of times. I will inevitably recall some of those times here in writing - maybe in comprehensive recollection of separate trips or maybe, as today, remembering ephemeral but significant moments.

Just two days ago, I had to leave my family to travel to the Navajo Nation to meet with an old friend. He and his son (an even older friend of mine) are attorneys, and I am starting a new nonprofit focused on what I’ve lent my attention to for my entire life, both personally and professionally, the appropriate status and management of sovereign Native American lands. My friend’s dad, my meeting in Window Rock on the Navajo Nation, heard of my efforts and wanted to talk. When an 80 year old Native elder, and former CEO and Chairman of the Board for Navajo Oil and Gas as well as the former Attorney General for the Navajo Nation, wants to meet, one makes accommodations. Consequently, on National Navajo Code Talker Day 2026, I spent a few hours sharing food and thoughts with an old friend in Window Rock.

I mentioned I have concerned myself with Native American land personally and professionally. Some of that work was with my tribe working in a bureaucratic capacity as the Director of Community Development fashioning solutions for the challenges confronting our Community in the areas of economic development, land planning and management, and environmental and cultural protection and preservation, but fate also granted my family “ownership” of properties on once essentially worthless and nearly useless, but now perceived as quite valuable, land contiguous with the affluence of Scottsdale, Arizona. In pursuit of fellow landowners wishes and input, I had to also travel to the Laguna Pueblo to meet family and fellow landowners in regard to specific properties home to developed and developing commercial projects, so after Window Rock, I traveled on toward Albuquerque.

I have a thousand stories related to that northwestern part of the Land of Enchantment. Maybe, assuredly, I will share some of those stories here. Maybe I will keep some just to myself for my own smiles when I need them and to preserve a moment or two of my life that may mean nothing to anyone but everything to me.

That part of New Mexico, though, ended up being the home to many of my true friends in this life, and it was even my residence for a wonderful few years with an ex-girlfriend and wife, and traveling forth and back across it the last two days, a few times emerged from memory.

As I just mentioned, some of my best friends I have came from that part of the state. The smartest person I’ve ever known, and my companion so many times on the road, my Neal Cassady, so to speak, came from the little town of Thoreau, New Mexico. I stopped there on my way home yesterday and drove around a bit. I happened on the view seen at the beginning of this piece, and I remembered going to a Navajo Enemy Way ceremony, or “Squaw Dance”, with him out there and needing to use the restroom. My friend took to an outhouse - with no door. I asked about privacy. He laughed and assured me no one was around, then he looked up and out away from the seat of the outhouse to the identical view I witnessed both decades ago and yesterday and said, “just enjoy the view.”

The second stirring memory I had was related to Laguna Pueblo as a place on the Earth. My friend from Alaska, my “sister from another mister”, was riding with me from Dartmouth to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon before going home to Nome. It was a June night we had decided to drive through, and as we passed Old Laguna, in the time before casinos and expanded utility infrastructure, the land and sky darkened beyond palatable depth. From above us, I caught a glimpse, through the windshield of my trusty Mercedes 260E, of the glow from one of my favorite sights, now more and more rare, the Milky Way. I opened the sunroof on my car to allow a better look. I never thought of the fact that folks who lived in Nome, in the land of the Midnight Sun, would never have seen the Milky Way. My friend was spellbound. There are maybe four moments of absolute contentment and peace I identify in my life. That moment of vivid peace and blatant grace is one of them.

Finally, once, while traveling home so late at night with my ex-wife and her mom, my beautiful, wondrous former mother-in-law, I was driving while my two passengers dozed. It was supposed to be a moonless night, but there was a rather bright glow coming from above. We weren't too far, neither geographically nor chronologically, from Roswell, so UFOs did cross my mind, but I had to find out what was happening, so I pulled over. My companions woke up with a bit of concern, but they truthfully probably thought I just had to pee, but when I told them of the light, they were out of the car before me. What we saw was a once in generations sight.

I had always wanted to see a comet since I read about Halley’s Comet in the 1970’s. When Halley’s returned in the 80’s, I was not in a good spot in the world to see it, and I was disappointed, but my comet desire just increased through life. I attempted to spot two other comets and successfully saw, or at least believed I saw, one of the two, but it was not nearly as magical as I imagined reading about comets as a child. What confronted my mother-in-law, my (now ex) wife, and I that night, absolutely unexpectedly, was Comet Hyakutake at the peak of its passing our planet. The pitch skies of the American Southwest, and our providential timing, revealed the greatest glory of that infrequent, unearthly visitor. I held my fist out with a straight arm, and the head of the comet was still larger. The tail of the comet stretched over half the breadth of the sky. I could discern colors and the flittering of starlight in the dynamic haze of the gasses emitting from Hyakutake. We all stood silent. We were blessed.

We had all been returning from seeing Smokey Robinson, my mom-in-law’s love of her life, and she had commented how she could “die now”, and sadly, just a few weeks later, my mother-in-law passed away from a freak car accident. My wife and I read some of my mother-in-law’s journals, knowing of the many concerns she had for her family, we hoped to find some thoughts of hope as well. There was much that was critical, but I always feel just a little brighter when I remember her last entry being a compliment on me and how she was happy for her daughter finding me, but that last entry was nearly a year before her death, and most of her prior entries were mere days apart. I commented how that was odd, and my wife told me, “maybe it’s just ‘cause she didn’t have to worry anymore.”

Life is struggle and sleep. It is peace and power. Death defines the meaning of our lives and the experiences that teach and form. Life is genuine drama, and it is the fulfillment of dreams - by us, of our ancestors, and for our descendants - with the eternal foundations and resolute strength of infinite love.

As I was yesterday, as I am today, and as I hope to remain tomorrow, I am grateful.