Searching for Rose V: Indian Country, Jacob's Lake, and Home

I would be lying if I tried to pretend my mother loved Indian culture.  It was hard, as she got older, to choose a movie to take her to.  She would recite: "Not a cartoon, not science fiction, not about cowboys and Indians, not violent, not sexy...."  We settled on "Gandhi" (although he was, in fact, truly Indian).    But Mom did love to travel, almost anywhere, including deserts and red rock country, and so she would have enjoyed our road trip from Prescott, Arizona, to Salt Lake City on January 17, 2022.  
 

Ever since we waited in a horrendous line to catch the rental car bus when we arrived in Phoenix on January 13, Dave had been monitoring the lines at the airport over a website on his iPhone.  When he checked yesterday, long lines were predicted for our date of departure, Martin Luther King Day.  We decided to drive home, rather than spend all day in the Phoenix airport.  The catch—Dave wanted to leave at 5:30 a.m. for the 10-hour drive.

I got beautiful photos of dawn breaking over the high desert, south of Flagstaff.  Dave was like a horse heading back to the barn—unwilling to stop for anything.  “I’ll be quick.  I’ll take it out the window.  I’ve got to get this picture,” I pleaded, as brilliant streaks of pink and yellow hovered above the horizon.  

We stopped, near Tuba City, to take this evocative shot--a church, image of community, contrasted with a barbed wire fence and empty field.

We also stopped at the Jacob Lake Inn, one of our favorite places along the route from Arizona into Utah.  The cookies from the Inn bakery are renowned, as is the Inn store with Indian jewelry, rugs, and paintings.  We saw photos and paintings by some of the same distinguished artists who were featured in the Desert Caballero Western Art Museum in Wickenberg.  I know that Jacob's Lake was also a favorite spot of my father's, although I don't remember why.

The Jacob's Lake Inn marks the cut-off for the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  As I thought of Dave's and my many happy trips to the Grand Canyon, I thought of my mother spending a summer at the South Rim, working as a housekeeper while she was in college.  Mom enjoyed the sightseeing, but she was very aware that the housekeepers had lower status among the summer help than the waitresses did!  She applied a second summer to be a waitress at the Grand Canyon, but, when she didn't get that job, she decided to use her substantial talents elsewhere!