Soon after arriving at my parents’ home, Marshall Tome came to visit me. He had planned on staying one week. My parents liked him immediately and treated him with warmth. Nevertheless, after two days in New England, he was ready to go home to the reservation. I could sense his discomfort. I asked him privately why he wanted to leave early. His short response spoke volumes. “The sky is too small here.” I knew exactly what he meant. The sky was too small for me too.

I drove Marshall to the airport in Boston. We hugged each other at the gate. We both had to wipe away our tears as we said good-bye. On the drive back home, I realized that I had never seen a Navajo man cry before—or hug in public.

My room on the third floor of my parents’ house became like a museum of my life with the Navajos. Native American objets d’art filled the room from floor to ceiling, including all the shelves and dresser drawers. I hung my Navajo rugs—the ones I made, bought, and received as gifts—on every wall. When I ran out of space, I carefully folded the rest of the rugs and stacked them neatly in a big pile on the spare bed.

My parents lived in an historic, two-hundred-year-old home. Although they rarely went up to the third floor, they walked up the steep flight of stairs two or three times while I was home. They sat entranced among all the objects that represented my life with the Navajos. I gave them an abbreviated version of the story behind each piece.

I left all my treasures in that room on the third floor while I followed my dream and served in the Peace Corps, working with Indians high in the Andes Mountains of South America.

Two and a half years later, when I returned home from my time in South America, I went upstairs to my room on the third floor. I immediately noticed that something wasn’t right. The rugs on the walls looked dirty. I reached over to brush off what looked like dust. The entire rug disintegrated into a cloud of debris made up of wool fibers, moth excrement, larvae, and live moths. I moved from one rug to the next in a state of horror. The entire room was infested. Every item made of wool was beyond salvage.

I collapsed onto my bed and cried. I will never forget those rugs and all that went into them—herding and shearing the sheep, carding, spinning and dyeing the wool, and finally the weaving. When the tears stopped, my spirit filled with deep feelings of gratitude to the Navajo people and the precious gift they gave me—my spiritual home.

I spent the next day removing all the items made of wool. I wrapped them in a white sheet as though I was wrapping a dead body. I dug a hole and buried the remains of the rugs in the far corner of my parents’ vast garden, near a wild berry patch. I sprinkled some corn pollen on the burial site and then said a prayer in Navajo.

To this day, when I see a clothes moth, I’m stirred with a dreadful sense of loss.

Not long after I returned from the Peace Corps, I moved to Boulder, Colorado, to get my master’s degree in outdoor education. During the summers I worked for Outward Bound, teaching mountaineering, wilderness survival, and rock climbing in the Rocky Mountains.

While in Colorado, I drove out several times to the reservation to visit Marshall Tome. We had a warm, heartfelt reunion and reminisced together. He brought me up to date on the happenings around the reservation, including news about Virginia and Lee Tomes 70^th anniversary celebration.

During my time in Boulder, I took advantage of some of the many resources that the university offered their student body. Since the course work for my master’s degree required very little time and effort, I decided to sign up for a few of the advanced placement undergraduate science courses, like biology and biochemistry—courses that I missed in college because I tested out of the science and math requirements and dove headlong into the world of art, theater, and literature.

I discovered that most of my young classmates were premedical students. They seemed to be of average intelligence. I thought you had to be close to a genius to be a medical doctor. I got that idea when I spent the summer after college with my uncle in Switzerland, a most unusual and brilliant doctor. Knowing that I would not be able to match such brilliance, I never even considered becoming a doctor—even though I come from a lineage of Swiss doctors.

During those premedical courses, I had a surprising revelation. Unwittingly, I had stepped onto the path that would eventually lead me to fulfilling the purpose of my life.

Against all odds—no money, too old at 29, wrong gender, and wrong background with my liberal arts degree—I applied to the University of Colorado School of Medicine. To my surprise, the school not only accepted me, they offered me a generous scholarship that covered tuition for the first two years of medical school. The National Health Service Corps paid for the last two years.

I told Marshall that I’d be coming back to his people someday, to serve them in a different way.

Thirteen years after teaching school and herding sheep, I returned to the reservation in 1986 as a newly minted doctor. I looked at various sites that qualified as “medically underserved” to fulfill my obligation with the National Health Service Corps, the organization that paid for two years of my tuition in medical school.

One of the hospitals where I interviewed was the Indian Health Service Hospital in Shiprock, New Mexico. After the interview, I decided to spend the afternoon trying to find Virginia and Lee Tome’s cabin. To my surprise, the long, rutted dirt road had been paved.

My heart pounded in excitement as I recognized the cabin, the ceremonial hogan, the corrals, and the little cinderblock house that had been built while I was gone. The place looked abandoned. I decided to walk around to indulge myself in some nostalgia.

I heard a familiar whinny. I went to the corrals and there was Jimmy! He looked just the same, even though I knew he was old in horse years. He walked over to me and nuzzled against my chest. I put my arms around his neck and my cheek against his hair. I could barely contain my emotions. It took all my will power not to climb onto Jimmy’s back and ride off into the sagebrush like the old days.

I walked over to the cinderblock house and opened the door. It was dark inside. A weak voice screeched “Eee yaa,” an exclamation of fright in Navajo. I peered into the dimly lit room. Virginia Tome sat in the far corner, shriveled up and ancient. Her pupils showed the large white opacities of cataracts that had left her totally blind.

“Ya’at’eeh Shimá sání,” I greeted her. (“Hello my Grandmother”)

Without even pausing to ask my name, she replied, “So you have come back to herd sheep again.”

“No, Grandmother, I am no longer a sheepherder,” I answered.

I wanted to tell her that I was a doctor. Not having spoken Navajo in many years, I could not remember the word for doctor. So I improvised.

“I am a Hathlaali” (Medicine Man). She thought that was funny and laughed, showing her toothless gums.

“Where is your man?” she asked.

“I have no man. I am not married,” I replied.

Her response was a familiar one. “Belagaana, t’oo diigiiz.” (White people are really crazy.)

I waited in the cinder block house until one of Virginia Tome’s adult grandkids came home. I got caught up on the family news and learned that Lee Tome had died when he was almost 100 years old.

I have passed through Chinle several times on my way to Canyon de Chelly. Chinle has become very different from when I lived there. Most of the roads are paved. The little town has a hospital, a shopping center, restaurants, and motels. Like elsewhere in the US, the people eat more junk food and don’t look as healthy. It’s harder to find the slim, strong men and women that I remember.

On my last visit to Chinle, I drove to the abandoned housing compound where I lived as a schoolteacher. The duplex apartment looked tiny, dingy, and overgrown with weeds. But during the time I lived there, I had no complaints. I felt fortunate to live on the reservation and have my own apartment.

Curtis Yazzie, the boy whose family accepted me into their home and welcomed me into the Native American Church, drowned in an accident. When I went to visit his family, they implied that, if only I had married Curtis, this fate would not have befallen him.

Juanita, the woman who was assaulted, went back to college to get her degree in education and became a schoolteacher. Her life continued to be marred with misfortune, including the loss of her son while he served in the military. She eventually married a kind and loving man who helped her heal her invisible wounds. The last time I saw her she seemed genuinely happy. Her infectious smile and laughter had finally returned.

Much of what I knew and cherished about my life on the reservation is gone, remaining only in my journals, my cassettes, and photographs—and in the fiber of my soul.

I chose Cuba, New Mexico, as the place that I would repay my National Health Service Corps obligation—not too far from the Navajo reservation. About half of the patients that I treated were Navajo. I felt honored that I could serve the Navajo people as their doctor.

By default, I was designated the medical director of the Cuba Health Center, a busy outpatient clinic and 9-bed hospital with a serious shortage of doctors. My very first patient was a Navajo medicine man, brought in by ambulance, whom I tried desperately to resuscitate. A truck ran over him and crushed all of his ribs.

One of my last patients, at the end of my two-years of service in Cuba, was a Road Man in the Native American Church. He wanted to give me the gift of a Peyote Ceremony as a way to thank me for my service to his people. Like the miraculous healing of the tumor on my neck that took place in the Peyote Ceremony when I was a young schoolteacher, this Peyote Ceremony helped bring into the world the biggest miracle of my life. (see the 3-part Cuba, New Mexico series: https://www.musingsmemoirandmedicine.com/2016/08/serving-time-in-cuba-thats-cuba-new-mexico/

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Dear Readers:

Thank you for going with me on this journey into my life with the Navajo People, to a world that not many Americans knew about in those bygone days, almost half a century ago. And thank you for your thoughtful comments that I so appreciate.

My next few posts will be about medical topics. Some of you prefer the medical posts, and others prefer the memoir posts. Hopefully, some of you enjoy both types of posts.

Stay tuned!

Erica