I drive north to White Mountain Apache country, where I pass by the spaceship that brought Vincent Craig to earth and am greeted by Wild Woman

I knew that it was going to be a challenge to get a post up yesterday, but I had a plan and I thought it would work. I would take a few pictures with my iPhone from the car as I drove between Phoenix and Globe. I would get lunch in Globe and afterward would take a little time to make a post from my iPhone that would include some of those images. 

So here I am, following that plan, taking a picture of a Saguaro cactus as I cross the desert a bit beyond Phoenix.

And here I am, about to exit the tunnel that goes through a low mountain just north of Superior.

Now I am in Miami, a mining town just a few miles from Globe.

Miami, Arizona, as seen from my iPhone while I waited at a stoplight.

It had been years since I had eaten at a Jack-in-the-Box, possibly even a decade, although I doubt it. When we lived down here and had to travel often between Whiteriver and Phoenix, Margie and I would often stop here with the kids, so I decided that Jack-in-the Box would be where I would buy my lunch. Then I would put my blog together in my iPhone.

Now I am in Globe, passing by churches.

This is the last picture that I took in Globe. I then bought my Jack-in-the-Box hamburger. After, I opened up the Squarespace ap in my iPhone and set about to post my entry. I had used the iPhone to make a post once before, just a few days ago, but that post had no pictures in it.

But Squarespace has a horrible ap, and, after great struggle that resulted in not single picture being visible in my post, despite having been loaded, I gave up and drove north. From here on, I shoot with my pocket camera.

Here I am, going down the highway that winds its way through Salt River Canyon. Everything that you see to the left of the river is the San Carlos Apache Reservation, to the right - the north, is the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, home to Margie's White Mountain Apace Tribe.

In an earlier post that I made about Vincent, I recounted, among other things, the story of how I accompanied him on a rescue of a woman who had fallen on a cliff in this canyon and had broken her leg. That event took place up around a couple of the bends that you see before you.

Now I am on the White Mountain side, drawing near to Margie's home village of Carrizo. I will stop in Carrizo to see her mom, but she will not be home.

Now I am entering Whiteriver, passing by the old airport. When Dustinn was small, his dad would sometimes drive him past the airport and would show him the windsock extended in the wind. That was the spaceship that had brought him to earth, he would tell Dustinn.

One day, it would take him back again.*

This is the Whiteriver house where Margie and I lived. Jacob was a baby when we first moved in. Caleb soon followed and then Rex. Melanie came a bit later. Lisa was born in Alaska.

As I leave Whiteriver, this horse crosses the road in front of me. I drive on up the hill toward Hon-Dah.

Here I am in Hon-Dah, pulling into the driveway of Margie's sister, LeeAnn, where I am first greeted by her dog, originally named, "Wild Woman." When LeeAnn would step outside to call her in, she would shout, "Wild Woman! Wild Woman!"

She began to fear that someone might misinterpret the meaning of her shout, so she gave Wild Woman the nickname Wylie and that is the name she now shouts to call her in.

Next, Famous comes to greet me.

Wylie Wild Woman and Famous.

LeeAnn and Chewy. LeeAnn has rescued many, many, dogs over the years, several on the edge of death. She now has six dogs living with her.

Regular readers are familiar with the cradleboard that Jobe sleeps in and before that, the one that Kalib used. LeeAnn is the artist who made them, a talent passed on to her from her mother, Rose.

As you can see, I am way behind on my blogging. It has not been easy conditions to blog under and I have had unexpected tasks to deal with long-distance back in Alaska that have eaten up the time that I could have blogged.

And I have spent a lot of time just visiting.

I still fully intend to make a good tribute to Vincent. This will begin with my next post.

*I should note that this is stand-in windsock. Back then, there was a large, triangular, one that did, indeed, bear a strong resemblance to a spaceship.

In the interlude, I take a walk to Riverview Park

Yesterday, the Craig family gathered at the home of Dustinn, Vincent and Mariddie's eldest son, to decide where and when the various events and services would be held. The final decision was that a visitation will take place Thursday from 1:00 to 8:00 PM at the local Fort Apache Branch of the Mormon Church. That chapel is too small to accommodate all the guests expected to attend the funeral, so the services will be held the following morning at 10:00 AM at the large Pinetop-Lakeside Mormon Stake Center in Lakeside, a town just beyond the border of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, home to the White Mountain Apache Tribe.

After the service, a funeral procession will work its way 25 miles down the winding highway that descends the White Mountains into Whiteriver, where Vincent will be buried with full military honors. Vincent is Navajo, but, like my wife Margie, Mariddie is Apache and it is in Whiteriver that the couple and their family has spent most of their life. One can be certain, however, that many Navajos will be present, along with members of other tribes and plenty of non-Indians, too.

Afterward, there will be a feast at the Fort Apache chapel.

Just before the family meeting began, there was a feast at Dustinn's house. As the older people visited, Taikayah, a granddaughter to Vincent and Mariddie through Mariddie's cousin Alicia, hula-hooped in the backyard.

As evening approached, I took a walk toward Riverview Park, just a few blocks from Dustinn's house. A jet, on final approach to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, passed overhead.

I found four softball diamonds, with a game going on each one.

A jet flew over the game as well. 

Not far away, a saguaro cactus stood tall as still another in an endless procession of jets slipped down toward the runway.

It was the kind of evening I have not seen in years. Not blistering hot as Phoenix can be at this time of year, but very warm, with twilight rapidly chasing the setting sun and then darkness coming in behind that.

It does not happen this way in Alaska. 

The feeling was pleasant yet, given the events of the past 24 hours and my state of mind, ethereal and strange.

A boy ran around the edge of the man-made pond at Riverview Park.

After the walk, I returned. I had a press release to write, but Dustinn and I stayed up into the morning hours, talking. He showed me many of his photos and video clips, including footage from his father's final performance February 6 at the Tahon O'Odhama Tribal Fair in Sells, Arizona. 

In the footage, Vincent looked very weak and peaked, but extremely determined to get out there, be Vincent Craig and please his audience - which he did. The emotion between he and his audience was strong. Dustinn also showed me several images from the project that he has been doing for years on young Apache skateboard enthusiasts. He employed many of these same young men to fill the roles of Apache men in the feature length film on the Chiricahua Apache Geronimo that he created for the PBS series, American Experience.

These tend to be young men who find it hard to find their place in modern society, but they do find it with their skateboards and with each other. They wear baggy pants and dress the same as do skateboarders in the big cities. Dustinn showed many pictures of them with their skateboards - and then also dressed in the type of clothing worn by the Apache Scouts of the later 19th century.

It was an amazing transformation. They looked the part. In my opinion, in his skateboard series, Dustinn is in the process of creating an exceptionally powerful story. When he is ready to show it to the world, I will provide links. In his efforts to work with these young men, who, I can see from his photos, respect and admire him, he reminds me of his father.

Now, it is late the next day and I have been diverted by many things, from the need to write a simple press release that proved very difficult for me to complete, to a strange, bizarre and time-consuming process to pick up a rental car and, after I did, to making a couple of wrong turns and then wandering around for far too long, always close to but seemingly never to reach my destination - but I did.

Soon, I must drive north, to the White Mountains, in my rental car. I do not have the time to begin the series of remembrances of Vincent Craig that I had planned to begin today. I hope to start tomorrow.

Vincent Craig - his was a challenging, beautiful, rich, life, well-lived: 1950 - 2010

I woke up this morning to the tragic-comic tune of a song being performed only in my head, sung in an intentionally exaggerated Navajo accent to the accompaniment of acoustic guitar chords rapidly struck. These were the first words that I heard: “I told her that I wanted to marry her but she said ‘you’ve got to steal the candy bar…’”

My friend, Vincent Craig, is gone. The words that I heard in his voice come from his famous ballad about a young man who loved Rita so passionately that he did steal the candy bar and so wound up in the Window Rock jail.

It was my heartbreak and privilege to be in the room with Vincent and his family just minutes after he exhaled his final, peaceful, breath. All present were related to him either by blood or marriage and that includes me, as his brother, Emerson, is my brother-in-law. It is Emerson who holds his brother’s hand earlier in the day in the photo above. For the past 35 years, this family has shared the great, wonderful, talented, funny-yet-deeply probing man that was Vincent Crair with his legions of fans all across Indian Country, USA, but now they wanted him for themselves.

So I took no pictures and I will not now describe what I saw except to say that, yes, it was mournful, bitterly sad and I was struck by that feeling one gets at such moments, that feeling about how there is no fairness in this life. It hurt deeply, even more to see the pain felt by his wife Mariddie, his children, grandchildren, brothers, sister and other relatives. 

Yet...

I also saw great beauty in that room, and felt a strong sense of awe and power.

The beauty was that of love, for Vincent Craig was a man of love and all present were bound by love - love for him, love for each other, love that will carry them through the sorrow that his departure leaves behind. There was awe and power, because although the silent beauty of his presence still lingered over his still and quiet body, he had passed through this stage of his journey; he had moved from a challenging life lived well and full into that which waits beyond.

Those left behind expressed faith that they would one day again resume that journey with him.

As for me, in death Vincent left me with the feeling that I wanted to live a better life than that I have been living, that I wanted to be a better man than I have yet been, that I wanted to spend more time with my wife and to hold her in my arms and to let her know that despite my perpetually erring and wayward ways I love and cherish her ever so dearly.

I wanted to do better with my children than I ever have done, and to bring the same kind of love, joy and devotion to my grandchildren that I could see Vincent brought to his.

Perhaps on this final count, I can yet succeed - although Vincent Craig left a very high standard to match.

The bed upon which I awoke was a cot inside the house of Vincent’s oldest son, Dustinn, the filmmaker whose works you may have seen on PBS. The cot was placed in his office, surrounded by computer, video and still photography equipment, and a library filled with books on Apache and Navajo history and culture, gathered as research both for his past and future projects.

Along with Vincent’s song, I could also hear the muted sounds of jets, approaching and departing Sky Harbor Airport, of air being driven by the fan that hangs suspended from the ceiling above me and of traffic, barely heard, passing by on nearby University Avenue.

Otherwise, it was quiet in the house. I immediately opened up my laptop and began to write this, because I knew it would not be long until people began to appear and gather and my attention would then be taken elsewhere.

As I neared the end of this write up, I heard the small sound of chords being rapidly struck on an unplugged electric guitar. Although very different, the sound strongly reminded of that of Vincent playing “Rita.”

I stepped away from this computer and passed through the door of this office into the dining room and this is what I found, Vincent’s grandson, Kraig, playing his guitar.

“What are you playing?” 

“Nothing, really,” he answered. “Just a random progression of chords.”

Since I arrived here about 24 hours ago, I have heard many great stories about Vincent from his family members. It may take me a few days or I may do it in pieces over days, but I will post a tribute to Vincent based on such memories.

I am here in Arizona with my friend

He is a strong man. Many people love him.

I wake up on a hard day and look right into the eyes of a good black cat

I had a big post planned for today and this image was not a part of it. Before I went to bed early this morning, I selected 24 images from which to build today's post, put them in a folder and then selected 22 more which I put into a separate folder as raw material for tomorrow's post, as I will be traveling and it might be difficult for me to put one up.

I believe both posts would have been quite good. Tomorrow's would have had particular impact to long-term readers familiar with the people who appear regularly in the part of my life that unfolds in Wasilla.

Instead, I am posting this single, solitary, blurry iPhone photo of my good friend Jim. It is the first and so far the only photo that I have taken today. I took it right after I woke up, before I got out of bed, as Jim lay upon my chest, looking at me.

In my mind, it is appropriate that it is blurry, because to me, when I first wake up, the world is a blur, anyway.

Right now, especially. I suspect that everyone has days when the course of life seems unbearably hard, when the day ahead seems to be an impossible one. Today is such a day for me.

I must leave for Anchorage in about six hours to catch my flight to Phoenix. Between now and then, I have about six days worth of work to get done. I don't know how I can do it. In fact, I can't. I must also finally get my hair cut, my beard trimmed.

But that's not the hardest part. It's always like this when I leave home. It's never any other way. I always think that next time, I will be efficient and organized, but I never am.

The truly hard part is that I am leaving to say goodbye to a friend. And I hope to hell I get to Arizona in time to do so.

I don't know if I will.

But Dustinn tells me that the doctor says his dad is the toughest man he has ever treated, that no other patient of his has ever endured so long through the same trials.

Yes, he is a tough man, the toughest kind - yet also the gentlest kind. And good. A truly good man. A talented man. A great artist, fantastic musician, poet and humorist, husband, father, grandfather and friend.

So I yet remain hopeful that I will reach him in time.

Vincent Craig, I love you.