The Hopi Snake Dances

When I was 11 years old, my dad arranged for our family to travel to Second Mesa on the lands of the Hopi Nation to see the annual Snake Dances. For a little girl with a snake phobia, this was a mixed blessing: the opportunity to witness a rare cultural event combined with a waking nightmare. Yet I'm so grateful I went and had the opportunity while this ceremony was relatively open.

In RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME, Jim takes Meg to see the annual ceremony. She is like I was: uneasy (read, terrified) in the presence of snakes. Here is a little of what happens, just as the ceremony is about to begin.

It had been nearly two hours since their arrival at the pueblo. They'd walked down from the place designated for the off-mesa visitors to park through narrow alleyways between the walls of the first American apartment buildings, some of them nearly a millennium old. The pueblos rose two and three stories high, built of stone and adobe. People reached the upper levels by climbing handmade ladders, and even the oldest Hopis seemed comfortable scaling their way up and down.

Many doors had been open as they came through and Meg had seen into the Hopi homes, their floors hard- packed red earth, some flagged in stone; their walls whitewashed and sometimes painted in dark geometric shapes. Lines were strung across the walkways, some draped in drying laundry, others hung with strips of raw meat that would soon become jerky.

They had finally come to the flat surface near the pueblo where Hopi men—some in ceremonial dress, others in jeans and flannel shirts—had designated the area for the dances and had carefully warned each watcher that cameras or recorders would be confiscated. Jim explained that the snake dances had not been photographed since 1911 and surviving photographs were few.

“I wish I’d seen them,” Meg said. “That might have helped to prepare me for this.”

“You’ll be fine,” Jim assured again as he took her hand. “You’re stronger than you think, and besides, I’m here too—if you need me.”

“Thank you,” Meg whispered. She found a tender sweetness in both his confidence and his support.

Now they sat in the proscribed circle, waiting, Meg's stomach tensing more with each passing moment.

“You know you’re lucky to be able to see this,” Jim said, gently stroking her fingers.

“Lucky? How’s that?”

“Look around you. How many white faces do you see?”

She looked and counted. “Not many.”

“These dances used to be open to tourists, if they behaved themselves,” Jim explained. “Now they’re only open to outsiders who have been specifically invited. It’s a long, sad story why, but let’s just say that some visitors didn’t behave themselves very well. The Hopi take these ceremonies very seriously. Even those tribal members who don’t generally practice the Hopi religion see this as a primary way of holding onto their ancient culture—well, this and using the Hopi language.”

Then he added, “And before you ask, no. I don’t even dream of speaking Hopi. Navajo is an Athabascan language, Hopi a Shoshonean tongue.”

Meg smiled. “Not at all the same, I gather?”

Jim shook his head. “I’m glad you get that. Lots of people think that just because I can speak the one, I should automatically be fluent in the other. That’s a lot like saying that someone who can speak Korean should be fluent in Mongolian just because they’re both Asian languages.”

Meg laughed. “I’m glad I knew better than that. It sounds like you’ve been around that block before.”

“A few times,” Jim said, but his voice was calmer as he went on to tell her that the snake dances had been closed to most outsiders since a popular comic book had characterized their deities as “evil kachinas,” or avenging spirits back in 1992.

For a limited time, RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME is available as a FREE download for Nook, Apple and, soon, for Kindle. Also available at Smashwords, OverDrive and scribd.com.

"Indian Burial Grounds" in Rainbow Rock books

Last week's entry introduced readers to a bit of the Navajo culture included in RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME, a sweet contemporary romance now appearing as a FREE download. This week does a more realistic take on the old Hollywood concept of Indian burial grounds. Meg and Jim have taken a picnic to a nearby canyon filled with native petroglyphs. Burials like the one mentioned here are probably Anasazi.

For a time, they merely wandered along the creek, hand in hand, one and then the other pointing out sights worth noticing. After a time, they stopped beside another sheer wall of red, its last two feet mortared closed with gray cinder blocks.

"What's this?" Meg asked, leaning against the red as she examined the block wall.

"A burial."

Meg's hand came away as if she'd touched a hot iron.

"Some local kids crawled in there to check it out, found remains, and notified me. I called friends in the anthropology department at Northern Arizona University and they had a team out here from Flagstaff by the next weekend."

"I guess they must have authenticated the find," Meg said, inclining her head toward the wall.

"They authenticated it, examined and cataloged it, then reburied everything exactly as they believe it was in the beginning. After that, some Boy Scouts came in here and bricked it up as a service project, so nobody else would disturb the site."

Meg nodded understanding. Then she touched the rock again, this time almost reverently. "Who's in there?" she asked.

"They were children, three of them, apparently all from the same family."

"Oh." Meg felt the wind go out of her. "Three children in the same family. How old were they?"

"The eldest was about three, the youngest just an infant. The middle one was somewhere in between."

Meg thought instantly of Sally's beautiful children and felt a stab of pain for the unknown mother who had buried three children at once. If Jim had noticed the correspondence in ages, he was tactful enough not to mention it.

"My anthropologist friend dated the burial back to around the time Europeans first settled in this area. It's his guess that the whole family contracted one of the many diseases white men brought—smallpox, perhaps. Maybe typhoid or diphtheria. Apparently the adults survived, at least long enough to bury their children. There may have been older children who made it too."

"How sad." Meg's breath caught in her throat. "How very sad."

"Yes, it is." Jim paused. "Now let's find a way to get happy again." He grabbed her hand and ran, dragging her, splashing and protesting, into the creek.

RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME is now available as a download.

Cultural Context in RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME

This week's sweet sample is from RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME, which is now available as a FREE download (for a limited time) from Smashwords and scribd.com, and which will soon be available FREE from Kindle, Nook, and Apple as well. One reviewer said the overall quality of the book was "elevated by its cultural context." The book is set in northeastern Arizona and shares glimpses into Navajo and Hopi cultures, like this one.

Dawn crept over the eastern horizon as they made their way out of town toward the Navajo nation. The eastern sky was a rainbow of soft pastels, ribbons of pink, peach, and mauve mimicking the brighter layers of sandstone beneath them.

Meg quickly understood why Jim drove a pickup. By the time they crossed the borders onto the reservation, the roads had turned to barely paved trails. Later they became paths made by horses' hooves and wagon wheels, little more than ruts on the desert floor.

Their first stop was at a summer hogan some thirty miles inside the reservation. There Jim dickered for a magnificent squash-blossom necklace, got the price down so it sounded like a steal, then nonchalantly mentioned that he might consider the earrings too, and ended up paying as much as the artist had asked in the first place. All of it Meg followed through the men's body language, the items they picked up, and the dollar amounts they quoted.

"I didn't realize you speak Navajo," Meg observed with admiration as they started down the rutted path.

"Like a native, or so I'm told." He shrugged. "It makes sense. I learned it as a native language, right along with my English."

"How? Navajo is one of those languages nobody learns—except Navajos."

"Remember Franklin Nakai?"

She couldn't have forgotten. Nakai had been at the hub of too many jokes and pranks during her school years. "Didn't he work for your father?"

"That's right. He and his wife Ruth worked on our place from my earliest memory. Ruth helped Mom in the house. She understood English, but she never spoke anything but Navajo. I grew up speaking Navajo to Ruth and English to my mother. I learned both at the same time and never thought a thing about it."

"I've heard of that," Meg said. "We studied the concept in a language class in college. They say a child can learn any number of languages at once, so long as he always speaks the same language to the same person and never mixes them up. It's only when the same person speaks to the child in different languages that the kid gets confused, or worse yet, stammers."

"It worked that way for me," Jim answered. "When I got older, the Nakai boys were always around and we spoke only Navajo. When I'm with them, I think in Navajo. It's automatic."

"The only Navajo I ever learned was Yah-ta-hey."

"And that's only sort of Navajo," Jim said. When Meg looked confused, he told her of how a former tribal chairman had started a radio program for Navajo listeners and had created a greeting out of the Navajo words for "good" and "morning."

"So it's a translation?" Meg asked.

Jim nodded. “Sort of.”

"Then I promise I won't use it for the next two days."

“That’s a good idea,” he said, smiling wryly.

Their itinerary took them through Indian Wells and Ganado, as well as down a couple of rutted cow paths with the hogans or small homes of talented artisans at their end.
“I’ve noticed most of these little compounds have both a home and a Hogan,” Meg observed. “So where do they live?”

“Some of the Dineh still live year-round in hogans,” Jim answered, “but most have a more or less European style home they live in. Still they keep a Hogan for ceremonial purposes.” He grinned. “It can double as a guest house, too.”

Meg noticed how the hogans were all built in the same general pattern, mostly in hexagonal or octagonal shapes with an earthen ceiling. At each stop, Jim pulled into the door yard and waited patiently in his truck until the occupants came out to speak to him, explaining to Meg that Navajos considered it a sign of rudeness if a stranger walked up to their door. Whenever the people spoke English, Jim used it, trying to include Meg in their conversations, but many reservation-born artists spoke only their native tongue. Jim led those negotiations in rapid, easy Navajo, quickly concluding deals worth hundreds or many thousands of dollars and always paying in cash.
"Don't you worry about carrying so much money?" Meg asked as they loaded a beautiful hand-tooled saddle into the truck.

"Only when I'm off-rez," Jim said. "Things I take onto the reservation sometimes walk away by themselves, but I've never had anything stolen."

"What's the difference? Between walking away and thievery, I mean."

Jim frowned in concentration. "It's a little tricky to explain to someone who doesn't already understand the concepts, but the Indians have a communal sense of ownership unlike anything we know. If you leave a half-eaten plate of beans lying around, or a pair of still-serviceable work boots sitting outside your house trailer, they likely won't be there when you come back. They’re being used by someone else who has a need of them.”

“And people just accept that?” Meg felt her cultural norms doing a one-eighty.

“It’s what people grow up expecting,” he answered. “On the other hand, everyone here recognizes that money, being a European concept, is treated with a white or European kind of approach. It belongs to an individual. If it's mine, no one else will touch it."

"You sound like you have a real respect for these people."

"Where else in America could you drive around in a new truck with nearly thirty thousand dollars in your jeans and expect to come home alive?"

Check out RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME and the other Rainbow Rock books, available FREE (now or soon) at Kindle, Nook, Apple, Smashwords and scribd and soon at OverDrive.com.

I hope you have all taken advantage of the FREE download for RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME, available from Kindle, Nook, Apple I-Store, Smashwords and scribd.com. If not, it will still be FREE for a limited time. Please take full advantage.

RIDE THE RAINBOW home tells the story of high school pals, Meg Taylor and Jim McAllister who rediscover one another ten years after graduation. One of the characters you'll meet in this story if Jim's brother, Kurt McAllister. This week's sweet sample is from AT THE RAINBOW'S END; it begins with Kurt's point of view.

A stiff breeze scoured the desert floor, catching powdery snowflakes and drifting them against the roots of the greasewood and creosote bushes. Kurt McAllister watched the would-be storm with tepid interest, idly reminded of the way his mother used to sift powdered sugar onto freshly baked gingerbread.

It had been a good meeting in Gallup that morning. If all went as planned, Rainbow Productions would soon have a contract for an exclusive series of educational videos. They had a funding proposal in for a documentary on Navajo weaving and were already paying their bills with pickup jobs for weddings, birthdays, graduations, and family reunions. In the four years since he had established his business with the woman who was now his sister-in-law, Kurt and Meg had built an inventory of successful management training programs that were bringing in steady income.

They were earning a strong reputation in the field and had recently moved into a larger storefront office in Holbrook. All was going splendidly, better than expected.
So why, Kurt wondered as he gunned the engine of his shiny new pickup and pulled into the I-40 fast lane, did he feel like chewing rails and spitting spikes? Frustration seemed to dog his heels these days, faithful as a bloodhound and not one bit prettier.
The road sign showed that Holbrook and his turnoff were still twenty-seven miles away as Kurt punched up the speed to pass a black touring car, but the added speed did nothing to decrease his restlessness. Neither did the fact that there was no apparent reason for it.

Things were going splendidly in the business. The only weak area they'd had from the beginning had been scriptwriting. Meg wrote the basic script when they did a management training video, and his brother Jim, an expert in Navajo and Hopi art, wrote most of their documentary pieces. So far, there had always been someone at the community college in Holbrook who could refine their scripts. Though he and Meg had spoken of hiring a professional scriptwriter—and they'd have to get someone if they got the documentary on Navajo weaving—that seemed more an opportunity than a problem. So it had to be something else that was wringing his stomach.

Whenever they had a problem in the business, Meg always sat down to analyze it. Maybe he should try... But thinking of Meg only made him more uneasy. Was it something about Meg that was bothering him? True, she hadn't been kicking in her usual full share in the business lately. Normally, she'd have been with him at that meeting in Gallup, but her burgeoning pregnancy was slowing her down. Kurt hadn't minded picking up the slack. Rainbow Productions was his dream, and he never would have been able to start it without his sister-in-law.

Besides, he was delighted to see Jim becoming a father. He loved Jim as he loved all the McAllister clan—fiercely, and Meg had made Jim happy. They were a dynamite couple and Kurt had no trouble imagining the beautiful, intelligent child that would result from combining those two gene pools. He fully expected to be an insufferable uncle, bragging to anyone who would listen. So the problem wasn't with Meg's contribution to the business, or with the pregnancy.

What was it then? He was thirty years old, well established in a growing business, and doing exactly what he'd always wanted to do, and still he couldn't help feeling that something important was missing from his life.

* * * *
The idiot light in the small compact flashed on for the fifth time in as many miles: Brakes, it said.

"Drat!" Alexa brought her fist down on the dash. "Now that's useful. Tell me something I don't know." She eased her foot onto the brake pedal and got mush, the same thing she'd been getting for the last twenty miles. "If I'd wanted oatmeal, I could have stopped at that greasy spoon," Alexa grumbled, pushing harder on the brake pedal and cutting back a little more on her speed. She had struggled for so long, wanting what no one from Henderson, Kentucky had ever dared to want, and promising herself she would have it. Now here she was, touching distance from the dream of her lifetime. No way was she going to let a set of bad brakes stop her!

The last road sign had said Holbrook was only twenty-seven miles away. It was probably a risk to drive that far on spongy brakes, but she figured they'd still stop her in a crisis, and risking it was probably wiser than stopping along the shoulder of Interstate 40 in the middle of nowhere at all. She glanced at the road atlas she kept open on the passenger seat.

Holbrook didn't look like much of a town, but even if the place was positively dead, it probably had a mechanic who could work on brakes, or the master cylinder, or whatever it was that was causing that accursed idiot light to make her feel like such an idiot.

"Okay," she said aloud, determined to strike a deal with the car. "I'll coax you into Holbrook if you promise not to break down on me before we get there, okay?" She cast a worried glance at the offending light, almost expecting it to answer.

I hope you enjoy reading RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME, now available as a FREE download. If you do, perhaps you'll want to know more about Kurt and Alexa as well. Have a great week!

RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME: End Chapter 1

For the last two weeks, I've run samples from my sweet contemporary romance, RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME. I start this week with an exciting announcement: RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME is now available as an e-book and, within the next few days, you'll be able to get it as a FREE download for Kindle, Nook, and other e-readers. I hope you will take advantage.

Last week's sample ended with Jim and Meg meeting again ten years after high school. Meg has returned only to help her friends, Frank and Sally Garcia, with their new twins. Jim asks if she's busy. Several of you have written to know more about what happens. Here is the end of Chapter 1, beginning just before last week's cut-off.

Moments and years yawned between them, reminders of differences too wide to span. Meg sighed. "So you're working on the farm again?"

Jim's features tensed, an expression so brief Meg wasn't sure she'd seen it. "No. I help out occasionally, but my brother Chris is the farmer, and Kurt helps too. I'm more into commerce, myself. And you? What are you up to these days?"

"Management training, a consultant with Montgomery Adams Seminars."

"Now that sounds like the Peggy Taylor I remember."

"I'm called Meg now."

"Meg?" He tasted the name. "That doesn't sound like you."

She smiled indulgently. "It's all that sounds like me anymore--to me, anyway."

Again the silence stretched. "Say, are you busy this evening?"

"Tonight?" Meg tried to concentrate. "I don't have any plans after the picnic. That is, unless you count Tommy's bath and Isabel's bedtime story."

"That's quite a domestic streak you're developing." His amused look did odd things to the pit of her stomach.

She smiled, forcing herself to relax. "I'm afraid this is a case of 'looks can be deceiving.' I can cope with the older two, but the babies still scare me half to death. I'm glad their mother is constantly within reach. I never tended anyone under five before."

"Sounds like you could use a break. Think you can sneak away for a couple of hours? Most of the town's driving into Holbrook to see the fireworks." As naturally as if he did it every day, he reached up and picked a bit of mulberry leaf from her hair. The action brought him close, close enough that Meg could feel his body heat. "I'd like to take you. To the fireworks, I mean. Maybe we could talk over old times."

Meg's stalled heart resumed beating and shifted into high gear. "I'd love to go, if Sally can spare me. She and Frank have taken the kids for watermelon. I'm supposed to be melting--uh, meeting them there about now."

"Why don't I meet you there? As soon as I put something on."

Meg resisted the impulse to tell him to come as he was. "That sounds fine," she managed.
"See you then," he said as he strode away.

Most of a minute passed before Meg remembered to blink, but then she forced her feet into action. Who would have thought Little Jimmy McAllister would turn into such a model for a new Michelangelo? Or that he'd still be in Rainbow Rock? Or that he'd exude such... such power? She drifted toward the watermelon booths, surprised to notice how low the sun had sunk.

Sally looked up as she approached. "Well, there you are! We'd about given you up."

"I bumped into 'Little Jimmy' McAllister." Meg couldn't resist the sarcasm.

Sally grinned mischievously. "Looks good, doesn't he?"

"Brad Pitt should look so good!" Meg collapsed on the bench.

"Brad Pitt isn’t here," Sally observed dryly. "Maybe the three of us could get together sometime, talk over old times."

"Jimmy, er, Jim said the same thing, except he suggested a twosome at the fireworks in Holbrook. Sally, would you mind?"

"Are you kidding? Go! Enjoy! Frank'll help me with the kids, won't you, sweetheart?"

"Sure, babe." Frank leaned over the table and kissed Sally soundly. "Go, Meg. I wouldn't mind having the evening alone with my wife." He wrapped her in a possessive bear-hug and Sally giggled.

"Looks like I'm interrupting something." Jim arrived looking splendid in white jeans and a turquoise polo shirt. "Don't mind me," he said as Sally turned to acknowledge him. "Just go on with, uh, whatever you two were doing." He grinned broadly as he sat beside Meg, easily slipping an arm behind her on the table.

Sally extricated herself from the clutches of her husband. "Meg tells me you're going to take her into Holbrook for the show tonight."

"If it's okay with you two."

"More than okay," Sally said.

"Sounds good to me," Frank added.

Jim looked to Meg, who smiled dreamily. "Me too." Was that her voice? It sounded like an infatuated teen’s, all giggly and breathless.

"That's settled then." Sally dismissed them with an easy gesture. "Go have fun at the fireworks. Then maybe we can all get together later this week."

"It's a date," Jim said. "You ready Peggy, er, Meg?"

"Sure Jimmy, er, Jim." Meg fell into step beside the golden man who had been her girlhood pal. She had never been so ready in her life.

Be sure to watch your favorite e-book store this week for RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME, available as a FREE download.