Gorgeous, isn’t it? I was camped out next to a dirt road about two miles from Shiprock, sleeping on the ground because the truck bed was filled with boxes of clothes. The sun was just rising and everything was lit bright pink, slowly turning to gold. Apart from some phone lines and fencing, everything looked pretty much as it would have 10,000 years ago and I wish I’d spent more time just watching the sunrise that morning.
Like most of us though I had things I thought were important that needed to get done. The guy behind the parts counter at Farmington Toyota was telling me the part I needed would have to be flown in when a woman came out of the customer lounge and said “You all really need to see this…” in an odd and serious way, and we all filed in to the lounge and watched the second plane fly into the World Trade Center over and over again. My truck, along with everything else in the world ceased to be important.
Two years earlier I’d decided the most useful thing I could do, given the resources I had, was to collect warm clothes, pack them in my truck and drive them out to the poorest, coldest and most isolated people I could find: Indian reservations, urban homeless, and villages high up in the Sierra Madres. During that time I’d delivered literally tons of clothes and blankets to thousands of the poorest, most isolated people on the continent. I had no idea what drove those men to fly those planes into the buildings, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t part of the problem.
After the towers fell, and it was obvious the part I needed wasn’t going to be “flown in” anytime soon, one of the mechanics helped me jerry-rig it so I could get back to my wife in San Diego. No charge, of course. Along the way I stopped in small reservation towns, leaving boxes of children’s clothes off at tribal headquarters and chapterhouses. You couldn’t get much further from lower Manhattan than the Navajo Nation, but the pall from the towers had reached there too. A terrible thing had just happened, and beyond that there really wasn’t much more to say.
“Thank you for the clothes.”
“You’re welcome.”
One good thing about being out on the res that day was how well the sandstone put things in context: you could stare at a hundred million years etched into the side of a cliff and know that those towers and airplanes and everyone and everything you know ultimately wasn’t going to amount to anything more than a pencil-thin line on the side of some future mountain.
Driving back across the desert I turned on talk radio and listened to it for the next two years. Turns out I was wrong about the attacks – apparently they were my fault. Not at first, mind you… At first it was all about radical Islam, Wahhabism and some shadowy figure named Bin Laden. But soon and for every day after that, 9/11 was the fault of The Liberals. The Do-Gooders. Me, my wife, my family, pretty much everybody I knew… Not only had we brought on the attacks, but unless we were stopped we were going to destroy the rest of the country too.
It took about two weeks for my radio to turn on me, all across the dial. It was like the entire AM band had started broadcasting directly from Rwanda: a relentless jeremiad blaming liberals and Democrats for everything bad that’s ever happened or that ever would. Sounds naive I know, but I was aghast. I’d heard about hate radio, but this was the first time I’d ever actually listened to it, and the thought it’d been going on for so long and reaching so many people. “This,” I thought to myself, “This right here is the fucking problem.” That assholes like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity could be talking to tens of millions of people for hours every day while the rest of us were told to write to our representatives or maybe — maybe — get a letter to the editor published. Naaah: that’s bullshit.
While I knew I couldn't reach millions of Americans for hours at a time like those assholes on the radio, I knew how I could damn sure reach a couple hundred thousand on the freeways.
Eighteen years and eight thousand signs later Rush and I are still at it. I shut him off years ago, so I don’t know if he’s gotten any better at talking on the radio, but I’ve sure as hell gotten good at sign-hanging.