Free Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy Page A

everyone has to go to work the next day.
    Among the most traditional Navajo, songs still frame wealth or poverty. A poor person is the person who does not own a single song. There are personal songs, songs that belong to the whole group, and songs of the chanter—secret and healing, sung only at the proper ceremony and in the proper sequence. Songs lull babies to sleep. They bless new community centers.
    When the world began, it was very small. Songs blew the earth up to its present size. Songs turn frustration into power, anxiety into comfort. Like a blanket, they form a zone of protection around the singer. Sing on the way home alone at night in a fearful place and the song will move out into the space around you. Is this not prayer, sounds that come from our breath, lifting the spirit as they meet the air?
    On the stretch of interstate north of Albuquerque, hundreds of semitrailers lunge across the desert, knocking SUVs into barrow pits, flattening the Wonder Bread step-van guy, squashing anything on four wheels like pathetic bugs so they might deliver seven hundred cases of room deodorizers to El Paso before dark. Four of them, all double trailers, wheeze past me on a downhill grade, one after another, mere inches between their bumpers. The cloud of grit in their wake peppers my truck. If I take my eyes off the road to read their how’ s my driving ? stickers, I am dead meat.
    I sing a Navajo force field around me. Thou shalt make me hear of joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. Adrenaline jolts loose bits of the Book of Common Prayer from the swamps of memory. Another wheeled mastodon screams by, its flanks a hairsbreadth from my side mirror, a minivan plastered to its radiator like toothpaste. The Lordbewithyouandwiththyspirit-letuspray.
    A chain gang of monster trucks blows me off the reservation, then off the highway itself, onto an exit ramp in a valley town below Tso'dzil, one of the four sacred peaks that circumscribe Navajo geography. A melting adobe ruin sits in a thatch of blond grass, the weathered walls and rubble of an old stage stop. The interstate-hugging frontage of chain hotels and truck stops, a busy place, offers the newest stage stop. I head for the middle world, the Route 66 stage stop, the old commercial district, which is easily recognized by its universal next West feature: wholesale abandonment.
    A battered café hugs the lip of an arroyo choked with dry brush and a shopping cart, upright and loaded with tumbleweed. The arroyo forms an alley between rows of buildings that are boarded up but, if you look closely, still in use for something not easily determined. A tangle of airborne plastic bags rides a gust of wind up the arroyo and snags on a thicket of Russian olive trees.
    Winter's bareness does not flatter the place, but the café hintsat occupation and hot coffee. When I open the door, four old cowboys on counter stools raise their coffee cups and turn their heads in unison to see what the wind has blown in. In perfect sync, they turn their heads back again, take sips, and lower their cups to their saucers.
    The café decor has locked itself into a stretch of years between World War II and a local uranium-mining boom at the peak of the Cold War. “Our food will blow your mine,” the menu claims. Black-and-white photos of miners and ore-hauling trucks mix with Jesus posters on the walls. Are any of the miners still alive, I wonder, declining the menu's offer of pancakes called “yellow-cakes,” nickname for the radioactive ore.
    I order a bowl of chili verde. Somewhere in the Southwest, I dream, is an unsung chef, modest and brilliant, loyal to the simple food of a home village deep in Sinaloa, making diner chili into a work of art waiting to be savored by travelers who yearn for anything original and local, for relief from the monoculture of interstate-exit cuisine. Perhaps this is the place.
    Loud clatters of pots and pans emerge from the kitchen. I