Category: travel

The Reservation was sparsely populated; about 13 or 14,000 people occupied 1.6 million acres (some 2600 square miles). Many were clumped in small settlements, about eight or nine distinct communities, and some only had a trading post with a gas pump, or less. Some Tribal members lived in shacks and cabins, often still using the traditional wickiup (think “wigwam”) nearby. Scattered throughout the scrub plateaus and denser forest areas — elevation range was about 3000 feet to over 11,000 feet — would be virtually hidden cabins. Many homesteads had a few grazing animals (overgrazing, incidentally, was a often-cited problem) and a plot of vegetables and a patch of corn, always close to one of the many sources of water on the Reservation. (If I recall, it was said that something like 400 or 500 miles of streams and creeks flowed throughout the Reservation, and as we have previously pointed out, several rivers and very large lakes were to be found at various elevations.) Accompanied by our Apache translator/interviewers, we visited a number of families — sometimes single-parent — with several children and elders living in one or two rooms. Traversing side roads often required 4WD. Roadsides were often littered with trash, particularly beer cans.

During our stay, the Apache Tribe was finishing construction on a new resort with lodging, dining and ski facilities at the high elevation (over 9000 feet) Sunrise Lake.

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As we have seen in a previous post, the Dew Drop Inn was the watering hole for many of the locals in the miniscule mountain outpost of Pinetop, Arizona.  A rather curious place, frequented by Apaches, blacks, Latinos and hippie-esque whites in about equal numbers, to come inside during the light of day would expose its shabbiness and decrepitude.  But at night all was concealed and rather mysterious.  Nevertheless, everybody seemed to get along well there; bar fights and rowdiness were rare, much less so than with a couple of other bars down the road.   (Maybe it had something to do with the fact that bar was tended by two young women — and occasionally the owner — who seemed fearless and quite formidable.)  And the Dew Drop and its clientele stood in considerable contrast to the cocktail lounge/restaurant that catered to the ski crowd in season.  My intention was to create a photographic project around the place, getting down the stories and images of the regulars as I got to know them.  We even talked about later on exhibiting on its walls the photographs that I was taking there.  But I basically gave up on the project as the shooting conditions were too harsh for consistent quality (the best light was in the bathroom) and as summer came on I wanted to spend more time outside.  Anyway, here is a little more evidence of some times and people in and around the place.  

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Pinetop, the tiny outpost on the edge of the Reservation, had along its main drag a few motels, two or three restaurants and a handful of nondescript bars, among them them the popular but shabby Dew Drop Inn.  Nobody much cared whether you were black, Latino, Indian or whatever.  Most of the faces are familiar, some names are remembered, others are not.  With almost no light except one over the bar and one over each pool table, the environment was hardly conducive to photography.  Nevertheless …

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A lull in my income tax prep workload while awaiting some key documents gives me a chance to revisit my film negative project.  Here we have some evidence of one of those New Mexico weekend trips during my tenure at the White Mountain Apache Reservation in eastern Arizona.

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My long-time photographic sidekick, Bill, visited me on the Reservation in 1973. Here are some photos I made during his stay.

SIDEBAR: I probably have a few hundred photos of Bill (we always photographed each other, and our other photographer friends, as a routine matter for years). We are still in touch almost daily to the present. When I first met Bill in L.A. in the late 60s, he was chief photog for International Surfing Magazine. Before he retired from teaching at a Southern California college just a few years ago, he also made his mark with sculpture — primarily in glass, including a life-size guitar assembled from small square and rectangular glass pieces about 1/2 – 1 inches in length that was commissioned by the family of Jimi Hendrix. Today he sent me an abstract image that he just created using a stylus on his new iPad Pro, shown below.

Remember Catt Black (also known as Catness)?  This animal had a couple of unusual behaviors.  One was that she liked to ride on my shoulder, like a monkey.  Another was that she preferred to ride in the passenger seat of my VW bus.

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You met some of my Apache project staff earlier.  Here (in spite of promises to avoid photos of personalities of no conceivable interest to our viewers) are some more, pictured in the spring on the steps of our temporary Tribal base of operations.  From left to right, with their known origins: the engineer/free thinker (Santa Barbara, CA); the pianist/accountant (Tucson, AZ); the pool shark/Special Forces/investigator (LA); the psychologist (Washington, DC); the historian/sociologist/financial auditor (Boston, if I recall); the guitarist/auditor (Eugene, OR).
 

Not pictured: the mathematician, the computer guys, the contract Apache interviewers/translators, the contract economists & anthropologist and maybe some others I forgot.

And the engineer and his family again — an exception to the bachelorhood of all other full-time, onsite staffers (who were all LA office personnel, except for the psychologist) …

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