Wanderlust

Some meandering but maybe meaningful thoughts as background…

I grew up on the Gila and Salt River Indian reservations, and I can say with certainty that we were financially poor.

My father was born in Gdańsk, Nazi Germany the day before D-Day. While my grandfather was a prisoner of war in France (being a doctor, he was well-cared for), my grandmother and infant father traveled by foot across Germany to my great-grandparents’ home on the German-Swiss border.

After the war, my grandparents settled in Köln, and that was where my father lived (aside from apprenticeship time in Düsseldorf) until he turned 21, and he immigrated to North America. Not really speaking English well, but French well enough, my father moved to Montreal. After time, he made his way to Calgary and while there, made contact with my mother as a pen pal.

My mother was born in Phoenix, Arizona. Her father was Salt River Pima, and her mother was Gila River Pima. My mom grew up on the Salt River rez, but my grandfather wanted to make my grandmother happy, and they moved to Sacaton on the Gila River reservation when my mom was 14.

An engineer, my grandfather intended to build a new home for his family on their land in Sacaton, but he had a very untimely death at the age of 44 due to an aneurysm - likely a latent result of injuries suffered during World War II. My mom was 17, her sisters were 15 and 8, and they and their mother were left living in a “temporary” house without any regular income. My grandmother was an RN, so she found work at the state prison about 30 miles away in Florence. My mother, wanting to help, started working as a secretary for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as soon as she graduated high school. It was there that, one day, the agency superintendent handed her a letter telling her she could respond if she wanted. Some guy was looking for pen pals.

In 1968, my parents were married - a German immigrant and a Native American. They had different backgrounds, but they embraced a common future. Of all their commonalities, the one that likely made the greatest impression on me was the drive to move beyond where one was.

Like I said, we were poor, so, in reality, my brother, my parents, and I spent the greatest part of our time in Sacaton. On occasion, we would travel to Casa Grande, Coolidge, or Chandler for needed items or services, and a few times a year, we would travel to Phoenix. It was an amazing experience for me to be in Phoenix with all the varied sights and sounds. It seemed so impressive to me as a city then. Though now I can recognize what a little burg Phoenix really was in the 1970’s, it let me feel some of the possible greater excitement and energy of humanity.

With just the right circumstances of desire and ability, my parents would take my brother and me to other parts of the state. My great-uncle, who was over 100 years old, lived with his wife (herself in her 90’s) in Casa Blanca, so we would go there often. They spoke only Pima and though they lived in a newer built house, they still maintained their old “ki” (a shallow pit house covered with a dome of arrow-weed) and “vatho” (a ramada with mesquite trunk posts and an arrow-weed roof). If we spent the night, only my Uncle Charlie and Aunt Kate slept in the house; the rest of us slept under the vatho - I truly loved that. Also, although there was a bathroom with modern plumbing in the house, it was reserved for the elders, so us younger folk had to use the outhouse - that wasn’t as fun, especially when rattlesnakes would wander near or INTO the facilities.

My great-grandfather lived in Sells, Arizona which was a few hours away near the Mexican border on the Tohono-O’odham reservation, and we made sure to visit him for a few weeks at a time especially during the summer. He was actually my grandmother’s maternal uncle but became her adoptive father after she was orphaned at the age of nine. He also only spoke O’odham (though he could speak English and Spanish, he chose not to), but it was the Tohono O’odham dialect, and that was what my grandmother adapted to speaking and what my mother, aunts, and my brother and I heard and learned as we all grew up.

Southern Arizona was and is hot, and my dad never really acclimated to it (hell, I was born here and never really acclimated to it), so once a year, if we were lucky, my parents would figure out a way to travel north to Flagstaff and, if we were really lucky, the Grand Canyon. Those were the most memorable times for me - letting me witness an environment so, so different from what I was used to.

Eventually, when it came time to pick a college, I wanted to go to an exceptional school but preferably also some place cool with rain and running water rather than the dryness and heat I knew so well. Recruited by Dartmouth and provided a trip there by the college when I was a junior in high school, I eagerly applied my senior year and happily matriculated after being accepted.

We had so many different cars growing up, it was funny, but my last two years in high school, we were, for the most part, carless. With my share of the tribe’s water settlement that I received when I turned 18, I bought an old van my parents were trying to “buy” from a private dealer who took advantage of numerous people on the reservation with Godforsaken terms. For their own fun, and to help me move my belongings to New Hampshire from Arizona, my parents offered to drive me the three thousand miles to Dartmouth from Salt River.

So, in late August of 1989, my explorer parents and I drove across the country. It turned out to be the first of many for me. By 1995, I personally drove across the nation almost thirty times. My trip with my parents, as well as my other trips with friends (some who would become very much like family), will be the likely frequent subject of these posts.

I still love the road, but those old trips were special. No responsibilities except schoolwork, no cell phones, the best company, plenty of resources and good, reliable vehicles - those were the ingredients for magic.

With luck, maybe a little of those captivating moments from the past can be distilled into a drop or two of energy and emotion today.