Incident at Peach Creek: The White Women Who Stopped

We hiked up out of the Havasu canyon May 27, 2006. Behind us was a cascade of blue green water pouring impossibly from the desert and spilling through the lush river banks where we had camped for five days. Ahead of us were eight miles of desert trail, a dusty parking lot, and three hours of highway over the mesa into the razmataz of Las Vegas. It was a long way to go.

Havasupai canyon- that ridiculously beautiful place that puts the word OASIS to shame. Susan had been sensitive to some sort of unsettled vibe while we were there, something about the trash in the roads, furtive glances and unwillingness to meet the eyes of two white, middle aged women on their joyful BFF week together in the desert. I was so giddy to be with my friend, to have left my life behind me, to be experiencing this place again after 35 years, that I chalked it all up to native cultural discourse. After all, we WERE on their land, walking thru THEIR village, with our backpacks, vegan jerky, Nalgene water bottles (before we were told they would poison us), having spent money on plane tickets, hotel rooms, a rental car, food, etc., etc., just to invade their sovereign territory.

I’m an idiot. A few months after our trip Susan came across an article detailing the murder of a hiker to Havasupai, that had occurred two weeks before our arrival. A young native man was charged. The village was traumatized, shamed, trying to put this behind them and keep their seasonal tourism alive. Susan picked up on the shadows as I blithely skipped about. And, in retrospect, it all makes perfect sense now, so many years later, that what occurred during our departure from that area of the world would have gone the way it did. Of course it would have. The axis of Native country was still off tilt, the sorrowful vibrations still emanating across the desert and canyonlands like the sweet smell of sage overlaid with the scent of animals decomposing in arroyos and ravines. We were a breeze that came and went, or a stone that playfully skipped across the surface of a pond harboring toxic run-off from fields growing food harvested and marketed for others….. our vacation, their daily lives…..

We were driving South on Indian Road 18 –yes, that’s really what it’s called. Earlier that morning– MUCH earlier –we had woken ourselves up without a watch, trying to guess if it was before dawn or not, so we could get a lot of the hike back out of the canyon completed before the full heat of day. A week before we had made our way down the stunning but hot, dry, and dusty trail wearing two heavily laden backpacks, full of things we would need and things we definitely would NOT need. We had arrived at the little village general store and downed something cold and bubbly, then hoisted the packs for the final 2 miles to the campground along the creek. By the time we headed down the last hill that paralleled Havasu Falls, I was dehydrated, literally and figuratively teetering on the edge of the trail, just this side of delirious, and in desperate need of someone to pour mass amounts of cold creek water over my head. Susan was more than happy to oblige, I rehydrated like a wilted weed after a rainfall, we put up the tent, and then the fun of the week began. Hiking, swimming, reading, gazing, yakking — all the things we do best together. When we heard we could pay a paltry fee to have our packs brought back up by mule (since the mule train goes up and down daily for supplies and mail) we swallowed our girl-macho pride, said “Hell, YEAH !” and enjoyed heading back up the 10 miles carrying only day packs filled with snacks and water.

It didn’t get too hot too fast, but it was still a relief to turn the last switchback…..and when we got up to the trail head parking lot we were happy to see a little drink and snack concession in a mini trailer. Diet Dr. Pepper (me) and Sprite (her), and then we just had to hunker down and wait for the mules to arrive….. which took hours. So we dozed in the car, we read, we just chilled…..The packs finally arrived, we loaded the car. We had a day of driving back to Las Vegas to fly home. Maybe we could get a good lunch some place, take a shower at a truck stop, mosey on down the dusty road and revel in our good fortune in having had perfect weather, epic scenery, and time with each other.

That’s what got us to Indian Road 18 heading back South, reversing our trip of the week before. From Havasupai, a dream that seemed outside of time and space we entered a different dream rooted in another time and another space….

Five, maybe six miles down the road we saw someone by the right hand side of the road…. Even from a quarter mile away he looked like a statue, or a totem pole– standing stock still, standing and gazing over the shoulder of the road, staring down to the scrub and desert that began two feet from him and continued in an endless landscape of existential desolation.

The light was odd that day — It was like Sci Fi movies of other planets or dystopic renderings of the possible future of our world after whatever crazy-ass leaders are in power at the time lead us to nuclear holocaust. The air was gray, and even though it was Arizona-dry, somehow it seemed humid, with steady gusts of wind that blew insistent, indecipherable, worried whispers.

As we approached whoever this was, Susan said, “He looks like a Buddha!” and I remember saying, “Maybe he needs a ride or something.” There were no cars for miles around, and he had no bicycle next to him, no motorcycle. Susan was driving, and began slowing down as we neared, planning to pull over just past him. As we pulled along side of him before arriving on the shoulder, we saw his face — splashed with blood, blood on his hands, his expression blank and almost unseeing. We knew then we had to help with whatever was going on….what could it be ? What could it be….

The car had stopped, and we both got out to approach the man. He was young, a Native kid, looked to be late teens, husky, dark hair buzzed short on the sides and longer and brushed in an upward spike with gel on top, wearing a basketball jersey that said ROBERT (name has been changed for privacy) on it. He was tall, broad, heavy. His eyes were bloodshot, his eyes wet, tears streaming down his face. He smelled like alchohol.

“I killed my friend,” he said. “I killed him, I killed Anthony.”

“What do you mean ? Where is he ?”

He pointed over the edge of the shoulder, which dropped off precipitously to a gully. Looking past his outstretched arm, over to the right, was a pick-up truck, motor and lights still on, as if it had gone over the side and somehow magically landed upright and swiveled so it was facing towards the road from whence it had leapt. No one was in the vehicle.

“Where is your friend?”

“Down there…. He’s dead….”

Looking to the left, much further to the left — we had to crane our necks to see the man’s body parallel to us, part way down the cliff, the only visible parts just a hand bent at a strange angle poking from between rocks, and legs outstretched. We couldn’t see more from where we were.

“Are you sure he’s dead?”

“I think so….”

“Are you hurt?”

“My side, my side….”

I don’t remember exactly how we figured out a spontaneous plan of action, but we both felt that Robert needed to sit down or lie down — he was obviously in shock and might have had internal injuries. And for some reason I felt that we really needed to make sure Anthony really was dead, because if he wasn’t we might not necessarily know what to do to help him but maybe we could at least talk to him.

“Has anyone passed by ? Does anyone know ?”

“Yeah, a woman came by, she’s going to Peach Springs to call the police.”

Cell phones don’t work on this stretch of road, well, maybe now they do, but in 2006 they didn’t. So someone would be along eventually, but for now Josh had stayed behind to stare over the cliff at his truck, idling as if it was awaiting further orders, and listen to the wind and the quiet of a dead man lying below.

Susan got the dashboard protector from the car and laid it on the hard shoulder of the road, and we took my sleeping bag out of the trunk to cover Robert with if he got shocky and cold… Susan is a counselor, she always seems to know the right thing to say at the right time, whereas I am bound to say something stupid on a good day, offensive and possibly injurious on a bad one. I had, however, recently discovered latent desires to pursue nursing or health care some day down the road, and from hospice volunteer work I was discovering that bodies in various states of illness and injury didn’t seem to bother me. We decided she would stay with Josh and talk to him, and I would go see about the man in the gully.

Truthfully, I had no desires to gaze upon a maimed, broken body, and feigning some kind of professional objectivity was the furthest thing from my mind…. But I really was worried that he might be in pain, he might need someone to hold his hand in a moment of Hollywood melodrama, and I was prepared to fulfill that role if need be.

Alas, totally unnecessary.

First I saw his arm, having landed straight up from the elbow, with his hand jutting out an odd angle like a flag. His head was smashed in on one side, one eye was hanging out. I can’t describe it any more than just that, because my whole M.O. was to see if he was dead, and leave as quickly as possible. I literally saw what I saw, and then concertedly forgot what I saw. Susan looks at me in wonder sometimes, amazed that I could gaze upon the horror of this man’s remains, and how I can live to tell the tale without crumpling in emotional agony at the memory. But I saw enough to know, and did not gaze one second longer than necessary to ascertain if he was dead or not. And that’s what my little trip accomplished — once I saw the extent of his head injury and I looked down at his chest to discern no rise and fall of respiration, my work was done. I walked over to the truck, and — again, thanks to way too much TV and love of the silver screen working in my brain, for some stupid reason I thought I should turn off the engine so it wouldn’t blow up. As if it wouldn’t have already blown up when it landed ! As if it wouldn’t have blown up when I climbed in to turn the stupid thing off ! But that’s what I did, and noticed the beer bottles on the floor of the cab, some smashed on the rocks on the ground, some unbroken full ones here and there. Evidently, fairly recently, it had been Miller time. Shit, I thought, this kid is so screwed…driving drunk, evidence everywhere. His friend dead, a DWI charge, plus reckless homicide, etc etc. What kind of life will he have now ?

I made my way back up to the road where Robert was lying down on the mat with the sleeping bag over his shaking body.

“Why do you think you killed him?”

“I was driving ! I was driving, and he reached over and just turned the wheel ! I couldn’t stop him !”

“So he grabbed the wheel?”

“I was driving ! We had just went to the cemetery to see his father’s grave, he wanted to talk to him. He talked to his father, he told him he loved him, then we drove out here and he grabbed the wheel and …..”

“You didn’t fly out of the truck….”

“ I was wearing a seat belt, he wasn’t….. I was driving, I killed him, I killed him….”

Susan felt that Anthony should be covered up, out of respect, so she took the solar mat and walked down to where the body lay and kept apologizing out loud, “I’m sorry, Anthony, I’m so sorry, I can’t look….” She averted her eyes as she approached the prone figure, then draped the cover over him, not looking the whole time and telling him she was sorry that she couldn’t look right at him.

While she did that I realized I should say something to Josh, but felt completely incompetent. Susan uses reflective language, I thought, I’ll try that.

“How are you feeling, Robert?”

“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it, I killed my friend!”

“You sound so upset, so sad….”

“Of course I do !!! My best friend is dead !” (you stupid moron, was the unspoken subtext, do us all a favor and don’t quit your day job, let your friend take care of the emotional support, ok ????) Fortunately, Susan returned fairly quickly.

We waited, I don’t know how long. Finally some police cars drove up and started interviewing Robert, and then asking us our personal information and any details we could supply, which were few. Then we were released. We said goodbye to Rboert, the young Native man who thought he had killed his friend at this nondescript place on this nondescript road where tourists travel back and forth to hike down in to paradise….

As we drove away I realized that one of my very expensive and recently purchased orthopedic inserts had come out of my sandal and was probably lying on the side of the road or down in the gully. There was no way on God’s green earth we were going back to look for it……in all this vast empty space of organic matter, there is now a piece of molded plastic lying somewhere, very concertedly NOT biodegrading into the layers of sand, bugs, dirt, and animal excreta….the only trace of us having been there.

From start to finish, the whole episode probably took an hour. We headed down Indian Road 18 again, and recapped what had just happened. So strange, so strange, we kept saying, and we narrated the details in sequence to each other, like a folktale around the campfire that our children and grandchildren would recount and embellish for generations….

But now we were hungry! After a week of granola bars, tortillas wrapped with peanut butter and gorp, Annie’s vegan instant mac and cheese, etc, we were craving salad ! Iced tea with lemon and splenda! Burritos! ANYTHING! From somberly recounting the strange interlude we had just experienced we now became somewhat hysterical, chattering about food, about cold drinks, about anything and everything else but what we had seen.

Where should we eat? Indian Road 18 ended at the famous Route 66, where we turned West to head towards Vegas to return our car and catch our red-eye flight. Just as we really became serious about stopping we passed through a deserted-looking settlement — a motel that looked like a Hitchcock film set, and in front of it a diner. We weren’t even considering stopping there until a tumbleweed — really, I’m not kidding you, a tumbleweed! — crossed the road in front of us and came to rest in the parking lot in front of the diner. “It’s a sign, it’s a sign!” we giggled, sounding like Romy and Michelle, and since we had overshot, Susan swung the car around and landed us in a parking place right near the door. A tumbleweed brought us her! It was a sign…

We opened the door and went in, and I needed to pee so bad I just blurted out “Iced tea!” to Susan so that part of the order would be front-loaded before we even considered menus. I remember the bathroom still — small, really small, old mirror, cracked brown linoleum, a fan came on automatically when I turned on the light, the toilet was slow to flush…..

A tanned and wrinkled white woman introduced herself as Betty and asked us where we girls were coming from. Betty looked like any stereotypical character actor who would be cast in a film about a white woman who had lived in the desert for a long time and never believed in sunscreen. Her name could have been Flo or Arlene or Shirley. We were rambling, talking over each other, talking too loud, the adrenaline still coursing through us. It’s as if we had just gotten off a strange ride at Disneyland and couldn’t settle down. She seemed to enjoy our energy, she agreed to create things for us that weren’t on the menu, and soon our faces were buried in plates of food and I was basically drinking iced tea from the pitcher rather than taking the time to pour it into my glass.

There was an old style rotary phone attached to the wall by the swinging door entrance to the kitchen. It rang. Betty apologized to us for the interruption and answered it. As we were shoveling lettuce, tortilla chips, guacamole, and salsa into our mouths we slowly realized there was a change in the feeling of the place — Betty was closing blinds over the windows, and turning off lights in the other areas of the diner. “Excuse me,” she said brusquely as she reached across our table to turn off the neon OPEN sign that happened to be hanging in the window by our table. “We’re going to close early, but don’t you girls feel you have to hurry, you can take your time and finish up.”

There was a young native girl standing by the doorway to the kitchen crying, an apron over her jeans and shirt. “Did something happen?” either Susan or I asked.

“We just got a call that some folks we know were in a car crash near here,” she said. “We don’t know if they’re alive or dead !”

Susan and I looked at each other… How could we not have realized that probably everybody around here knows each other ? How could we have so blithely waltzed into this diner screaming for iced tea and tortillas and rhapsodizing about a flush toilet without talking to local folks about what had just occurred ?

“We were there -”

“What??? What do you mean???”

“We were just there. We were driving down the road and…” so we told Betty the story, and a young Native teenage boy, the dishwasher, came out from the kitchen to listen. He was crying, and Betty said that the phone call mentioned that his brother was in the crash but they didn’t say if anyone had survived.

“What’s your brother’s name ?”

“Robert.”

“He’s alive, he’s ok, we talked to him, he is banged up but he’s ok.”

“And Anthony?” this from Betty.

Gently, “Anthony is dead.”

The crying girl turned into the kitchen and closed the swinging door, and Betty said that Anthony was an ex of hers. They hadn’t been together for a long time now, but she still cared.

During the part of the story where Anthony reached over to yank the wheel and send the truck careening across the road and over the side, Betty exclaimed, “ He crossed over! He saw his daddy at the cemetery and then he decided to cross over! That’s their way….”

“There was a lot of beer in the truck — ”

“Yes, well, that would have been Anthony.”

And then she proceeded to tell us step-by-step how the funeral preparations would occur, taking place over 3 days, with potluck dinners and music and prayer, and that she would be the only white person allowed to participate in it all since she’s been living there so long and is so accepted by the locals. She mentioned this several times and in different ways, it was an obvious point of pride and source of identity for her.

How strange it all was, how fast everything changed, like delighted children at a birthday party that suddenly had a bucket of water thrown on the cake, dousing the candles. The diner now quiet and dark, with lights turned off, shades pulled down. Betty wouldn’t let us pay for our lunches, she thanked us for our business, we told her we would be thinking about the community and hoped that Robert would be ok. The tumbleweed that had escorted us to the diner, having satisfactorily discharged its duty, was nowhere in site, most likely having skipped across the parking lot, beyond the empty motel rooms, and back out to open lands to continue on its journey — or become entangled in a fence somewhere, the wind whistling through its brambles, whispering taunting tales of where it could go if only it could once again roam freely. But it never would be again.

And that was kind of IT. But not really, of course. We drove on to Las Vegas, stopping at a big truck stop to pay for showers. I remember standing in line for my turn, with a pocketful of quarters to feed the machine, and a Styrofoam cup lid in each hand, one with shampoo, one with conditioner from the free pumps on the counter. I felt like I was holding semen samples at a fertility clinic (not that I knew what that’s like, but one couldn’t deny what the goop in the lids looked like.) After we left the rental car and boarded the shuttle to the airport Susan and I talked a bit about the whole incident, Parts I and II. That’s when I teared up finally — I’m great in a crisis, can pretty much hold it together until I don’t have to anymore. Susan was thoughtful and seemed to be just as stunned by it all as I was.

And then we flew home.

Susan called me a few days later and said that she had been thinking so much about it and wanted to write a letter to Robert to try to help him over his guilt that he was at fault for the accident. What a great idea ! See, I told you, Susan has the gift, she lives the ways of kindness I have been trying to learn. But she said she was having trouble with telling him who we were — we may or may not have told him our names, who WERE we to him other than the white women who stopped on the road? And that was what she said –

“Dear Robert–

We are the white women who stopped when you had your accident with Anthony. You felt so guilty about Anthony dying, and we just want you to know that your love for him was so obvious, you would never have done anything to hurt him. We could see that, you are a good person, and we wanted you to know.”

I was able to remember the name of the diner and called to ask where we could send the card. Betty answered, I remembered us to her, and got the address. “Oh, you can just send it here, I’ll make sure he gets it.”

“How is Robert?”

“Well, they airlifted him to a hospital in St. George and he had some broken ribs, but he’s ok.”

“Did the police press charges because of all of the beer bottles ?”

“No, he wasn’t drinking, he’s just fine!”

I was stunned.

“REALLY ? All those bottles and he wasn’t charged ?”

“He wasn’t drinking,” Betty said definitively, almost a challenge in her voice. “He was not drunk, and he is fine.”

Well, ok, then. I asked her to please give him our best, and that a letter would be arriving soon if she would be so kind as to deliver it.

Goodbye, Betty.

Anthony Orrin Raymond is buried in the Seligman Public Cemetery. He was 25 years old. We didn’t write down Robert’s last name, we don’t know where he is. The diner and motel are closed, that story is over, it would seem. Where is Betty ? I don’t know why, but I imagine she’s hooked up to an oxygen tank in a nursing home…. Again, too many movies, she could be gardening polytunnels in Oregon or working in a factory and living in New Jersey. Who knows ? I have used Google Earth to try to find the place where it all went down, but all of the gullies, washes, and arroyos flatten and look the same, the benignly smooth ribbon of Indian Road 18 cutting through, that thick, sharp line of asphalt which cars speed along, the whoosh of tires kicking up sand which eventually settles in new patterns perhaps just a few inches away from where they began to swirl. Dust devils dance across the desert, seen and unseen, and when the wind dies down the particles fall and scatter wherever the wind abandons them.

Just off the trail on the way to Navajo Falls, between the village and the campground and the iconic Havasu Falls — the one on the calendars with travertine terraces and blue-green waters that should be labeled “Havasu blue” in the Crayola box — there is a little trickling creek that falls from a steeply rising slope. We were told that if we scrambled up through the creek, even though it seems ridiculous and like a wild goose chase, if you keep going up, up, up, you will eventually duck under overhanging branches and then stand upright inside a dripping fairytale grotto. Waterfalls cascaded into pools of varying depths, the thick, wet canopy of leaves sheltering from the sun and views of orange cliffs. As bright and scalding as the colors of the canyon were, this was it’s verdant opposite, the yang to the yin. It wasn’t safe to take my camera out of the wet bag and try to get pictures, I was still using film at the time, and one slip on branches hidden under water and all would be lost. This memory is captured only in my mind, there is no external repository I can show anyone else. That such places still exist on this earth, that I could actually get there under my own power, the juxtaposition of so much desert sand, cliffs, and cactus with so much water, cool color palette, and lush foliage — well, the word “beautiful” is all I can summon to describe it, and it’s the only word that fits. We were there, we are now here. Memories emblazoned on retinas then stored for viewing on a rainy day. I can look, or not. On vacation we dip in and out of environments, hot and cold, wet and dry, into others’ lives and then back into our own again.

Susan and me, Robert and Anthony and Betty — the girl and the boy in the diner…We sideswiped each other on Arizona highways, and then bought paint to cover the scratches on the car finish. DID Anthony take the wheel and “cross over” because he had said what he needed to say to his father, he knew Robert would be ok without his friend beside him ? All we know is what we came across, we two white women who stopped…

But the sage and brush, maybe a coyote or snake, maybe a prairie dog or horned toad saw what really happened. I know the desert saw. I know the desert knows.