On the floor of my house lies an old Navajo “Eye Dazzler” rug. It’s the one that used to cover the sofa in my parents’ Zuni Mountain Trading Post on Route 66. I spent hours on it as a baby, following the zigzag geometric patterns. I was born nearby in Gallup, New Mexico, in 1946 and I grew up in and around trading posts. I guess it’s in the blood. I even got into the business myself once, for about six months.

Both sets of my grandparents also had trading posts in New Mexico Indian country. My mom’s folks were traders living on Zuni Pueblo in the early 20th century. My dad’s parents owned the Continental Divide Trading Post just a few miles from our Zuni Mountain place. My parents met at Gallup High School, then opened their own post right after World War II.

So I guess it’s no surprise that the home in Jemez Springs I share with my wife looks like some kind of museum. Seven-foot longhorns hang on the walls, Navajo rugs cover the floors, and the shelves are cluttered with pottery, petrified wood, old postcards, pictures, bookends, and various other mementos, including one of my favorites: my grandfather’s watch with the Zuni turquoise fetish watch fob.

I also inherited my other grandfather’s Stetson hat and belt buckle. The Navajos used to call him Mr. Odd Shape for the geometric shapes he made while polishing turquoise for them to make jewelry he would sell at Continental Divide. In fact, every one of these artifacts has a story to tell. Some of them are personal to me; they all tell something about a time now relegated to history.

 

 

 

 

 

When we were kids, my sister and I used to love staying with our grandparents at the Continental Divide. Ding and Nell Greer also ran a garage and filling station, the post office, and my grandmother’s café, where Nell dished out the best chili, coffee, and homemade pie for miles around. In between she hand-pumped gas from those fishbowl glass tanks where you could see the little balls rolling around in the colored gas. Across Route 66 my grandmother’s beloved red rocks loomed, marking the beginning of the reservation. It was all piñon and juniper country, sagebrush in between, with ponderosa pine higher up on snowcapped Mount Taylor.

We would go to Ding and Nell’s for Christmas, when we stayed up late by a crackling piñon log fire in the fireplace my grandfather had built out of polished petrified wood. We would nestle under huge piles of blankets and quilts in a room just off my grandmother’s café and fall asleep to the clink of coffee cups and Gogi Grant singing “The Restless Wind” on the jukebox.

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