Remembering Tony Hillerman

There will never be another Tony Hillerman novel. My friend Keira introduced me to his books when she lived in Arizona, and I bought my first one in the Phoenix airport, which is decorated with Native American iconography. I just re-read "A Thief of Time" not too long ago. I really liked the insights Hillerman gave into the Southwest Native American cultures and the struggles between those cultures and the modern world.

I understood Navahos, in particular, a lot better because of his novels. I understood better why all the Navajos I knew growing up seemed so shy. And why missionaries on the Navajo reservation were called on so often to dress bodies for burial. The traditional Navajo ideas about the afterlife are very dark, and Navajos concentrate on the beauty of this life.

I also appreciate the way Hillerman made his characters into real people. Especially the Navajo Police officers whose lives we followed through several novels. New readers might want to start with the earliest books and move forward to the more complex later novels.

Several years ago, Mom, Marianne, Little David and I went on vacation through some of the territory in which Hillerman set his novels. We saw Indian ruins and canyons which were familiar when I read the books. Navajo names we read on the rodeo schedules were the same as those in his books. We battled little blackflies at Four Corners. I remember Mexican Hat and the trading post there. The motel owner told us the story of the artesian well under the river which was accidentally drilled while speculators were looking for something else (and which gave us water pressure in the little trailer-motel where we stayed).

I could relate to Officer Chee's surprise in one novel that his underwear didn't dry overnight in Los Angeles. Our clothes dried in minutes in Mexican Hat when we draped them over the caesalpinia bushes, one of the plants which sustains hummingbirds in the hottest, most arid parts of the Southwest. As an aside, once when I was visiting Keira and Wally in Phoenix, we revived a fledgling hummingbird which had ventured out on an extremely hot day and had fainted on the asphalt. Apple juice brought it back to life.

I once read in a Land's End catalog a Hillerman short story about a "skinwalker" (murderous Najavo witch) in the form of a wolf chasing a trucker on the highway to Mexican Hat, and haven't felt quite the same about that road since. His novels bring back memories of that trip and others - including the family campout at Capitol Reef.