Back to our honeymoon place ~ John's Rug Fever takes over!

Day #4 & 5 Back to our honeymoon place
 John's rug fever takes over!

We leave for sunrise for the South Rim Drive to view the canyon from the top of the cliffs looking down into where we traveled the previous day. We are inspired by a view of Spider Rock which is a sandstone spire that rises 750 feet from the canyon floor. Here John tells me this is his most spiritual moment. 

Along the way to Gallup 140 miles away we stop at several trading posts which became places where the Navajo could trade jewelry, rugs and crafts for staples. Hubbell Trading Post is the oldest operating trading post on the Navajo nation. 



I remember being here 47 years before. It looks much the same with squeaky wooden floors and a selection of hundreds of amazing baskets attached to the ceiling and a variety of rugs thrown together in piles in a dark room making it difficult to see the color of the rugs. We enjoy talking with a Navajo man who looks like he has worked here forever. He tells us he believes the Hubbell Trading Post was the first Walmart in America because it had everything from food to clothing to cooking equipment to house furnishings. 

Next we stop in Window Rock, population 2,712 and go into another trading post where John almost buys a rug, but when he checks the color outside he thinks it is too red.  Yikes I could feel his passion for rugs begin to take hold. For those of you who have read my blogs about John’s rug fever in my Iran and Jerusalem blogs you will know of my concern. 

Window Rock 

We proceed to Window Rock headquarters, the capital of the Navajo Nation which hosts the Navajo government campus, Supreme Court and many Navajo administrative buildings. Its main attraction is the large window formation of sandstone the community is named after. 

Scenes from road trip

Traditional Hogan

The Navajo Nation is the largest federally-recognized American Indian Tribe in the United States with a population of close to 400,000. Along the car ride inside the Navajo reservation I am struck by the sense of poverty. Homes seem run down without electricity and frequently are trailers.  This does not seem much advanced from when we were here 47 years ago. I had hoped for something better. Thinking I was incorrect in my assumption we check the data and find more depressing news. Our guide said that half the Navajo population lived on the reservation whereas some other data suggests slightly more than that. Sadly, the per capita income is one third that of the United States and almost half of Navajo families live below the poverty level. Moreover, American Natives suffer the most grievous health disparities nationwide. Access to basic health care services presents challenges for the majority of Navajo people due to isolation of rural areas where the families live. Mortality rate is over 31% higher than the US rate. 

Memories Resurface

John 1971

Gallup is where we had our honeymoon 47 years ago and when we both had transcultural grants from the department of psychiatry for the summer. John was getting up each night to accompany police to see how they treated Navajo Indians who were drunk. This was his medical school thesis and ultimately resulted in a publication in the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol. 

We hiked constantly in 1972 ~ John only wanted camping gear for wedding gifts

Our honeymoon Gallup house where we lived in 1971 with another couple

My daytime work involved traveling on the reservation daily with two traditional Navajo women to visit women living in hogans and interviewing them about parenting and child rearing feeding habits. This resulted in a manual I left for workers to educate mothers. I am sure we both fell in love with the Navajo people, their culture and their art at this time because of their kind, genuine, and spiritual nature. We bought small Navajo rugs at that time and sand paintings that are still on our walls. Because of John’s 2 summers on the Navajo reservation he had always wanted to work in Crownpoint a town of 2,700 people after leaving medical school. However, I convinced him I needed trees in my life and we went to work for Alaska Native Health in Ketchikan instead. John has expressed some regret about this decision and decides we should go to the Crownpoint for the monthly rug auction sale the next day! 

Traveling down the historic Route 66 we find lunch at Jerry’s Mexican-American restaurant. This traditional place is 98% Navajo and during lunch children come in to sell jewelry and candy. I am impressed by middle-age Navajo men bringing their mothers here for lunch. These women are dressed in what I remember their clothing was years ago, that is, velveteen shirts with amazing silver turquoise necklace jewelry and long skirts. After lunch John wants to go to our hotel to nap so he can be ready for the auction which will be a lengthy event.

When I met John he had shoes like these men that are now very expensive

Rug Auction ~ Going, going, going your wife wants it. You will regret it. Sold!

On the 2^nd Friday of every month, Navajo weavers from all over the Southwest converge on this small town of Crownpoint to sell their rugs by way of an auction. This event was started in 1968 and is a way for rugs to be bought directly from the weaver. It is held in an elementary school gymnasium and the rug submission and viewing begins at 4 pm and ends at 6:30 allowing prospective buyers to examine the rugs prior to the auction at 7 pm. We arrive at 4:30 and there appear to be about 200 rugs, small and large to view which continue to increase as weavers arrive and finally total over 300. Of course, rugs can be paid for by credit card or check or cash.  Dinner is provided in the school cafeteria and school teachers make the dinner with the money generated going to the school. John has a Navajo taco that is basically taco material stuffed in fry bread. I have sugared fry bed. 


John inspects the rugs and records the numbers of four that he is interested in.  Two grey hills design is his favorite and we have one of these at home above our fireplace. 


There appear to be about 150 potential buyers. When the auction begins the rugs come up in random order. The auctioneers start with a price; I cannot figure out how they come up with this starting price but it may be their vast experience looking at these rugs.  Some start at $40 and some at $800.  We know that trying to sell all the rugs can be important to the financial welfare of the weaver’s family and may have to support the family for a long time. However, some rugs are not sold. We later learn that the weavers pay a 15% fee to the auctioneers for a successful sale. Well, as you might guess rugs are purchased!  I am not sure what walls in our house will hold them, especially as they can’t be placed in the sun or they will fade and our house has many windows. Perhaps John's new retirement project will be rug auctions! 

I buy a yei rug which I have often admired over the years. Another woman saw me looking at this yei rug earlier and told me she wanted it to put on her bathroom floor which horrified me. So unfortunately she bid the price up and I persisted so likely did not get a good price.  John bought a small Two Grey Hills rug for his office. This means we will now need to have the walls painted from yellow to white and the rug re-carpeted to highlight the wall rug art properly! I am reminded of all the hogans I visited when I was working here in 1972 with women sitting inside weaving rugs.

Navajo women weaving a yei rug  in a hogan we visited in 1972

In regard to buying these rugs I tell myself that because the money goes directly to the Navajo artisan weaver it is a compelling rationale for the purchase. The experience itself has been indelibly memorable. As we leave we meet the weaver who made the rug John bought. She seems so grateful for our purchase and I take a picture of her with John. 

Weaver with Two Grey Hills rug she wove 2019

Trading Posts 

The next morning before leaving for Albuquerque we go to Richardsons Trading Post in Gallup, which we heard from someone at the auction was a pawn shop and a place where one could get inexpensive rugs.  Entering this trading post I find myself flooded with memories of similar posts we visited here in 1972 and again with our children in 1996.  It is like being in a museum packed with Katchina dolls, rugs, pottery and jewelry. We thought it would be interesting to check out our auction prices with a store price. Of course, we are incredibly naïve buyers and don’t really know how to judge rug quality although we do check out the tightness of the weave and some of the web site suggestions for selecting rug quality.  Nonetheless who knows?  A rug made on a machine using a traditional Navajo design might easily fool us. As we talk with a very knowledgeable rug seller John finds the rug of his dreams… and guess what? 

Richardson's Store 2019

Toby Turpins 1996 with our daughter 

Seth and Anna 1996

With John's dream rug in hand and another plan for remodeling his office we start out the door for Albuquerque. But first I must look at the Hopi Katchina dolls. I have always loved these dolls and bought one when we lived in Gallup but with all my current puppets at home I thought another doll would be too kitschy. I actually had looked at them earlier in the year when in Santa Fe for a conference and stopped myself from buying one. However, I found I was still intrigued by them, perhaps having the same kind of fever John has for rugs. These katchinas are known to be spirits of deities or animals and are given to children not as toys but as objects to be studied. I had resisted buying them earlier because most are male but our very informed rug seller produced a corn doll katchina entirely made out of cottonwood depicting a woman! Yes I made the purchase.