ALL WHO WANDER

HIGH COUNTRY LAKE Christmas Tree Lake now harbors the onceendangered Apache trout. PETER ALESHIRE

all who wander Sons of Geronimo An Apache reservation encounter meets fear with wisdom

SO I'M STANDING in the parking lot of the only motel in Whiteriver, hungry, weary and misplaced with $1,500 worth of camera gear slung around my sunburned neck. I've spent most of the day lost on nameless reservation back roads, looking for Christmas Tree Lake, just beyond where the U.S. government confined the once free-roaming Apache Indians, including the glowering and indomitable Geronimo.

The government actually let the White Mountain Apaches keep this high, rain-blessed landscape of mountains, forests, meadows and streams after concluding it was too remote and cold to be of much use to the settlers who claimed the lands of all the other Apache bands.

I've long studied the brave and brutal history of the confrontation between these irreconcilable cultures: The whites wanted to make some money on land vital to the spiritual and moral values of the Apaches. The Apaches believe the landscape itself can smooth and shape the mind, imparting wisdom and insight. So the whites and the Apaches bloodied one another, each mystified at why the other fought so hard. As a result of all that study, I totally understand why your average Apache might be ever so slightly irritated at your average white guy wandering around the reservation with a lost look and an expensive camera.

So perhaps I overreacted just a tad when I noticed bearing down on me across the parking lot a stocky young Apache guy with muscles like a weightlifter, long black hair, intense brown-black eyes and a black heavy-metal T-shirt sporting a couple of leering skulls. He trailed a skinny kid in threadbare jeans with the angular features I recognized from historical photos of the warriors in Geronimo's band. The big guy was looking right at my camera. I mean, right at it.

I would have locked myself in my car and hid under my jacket, but he was so close now that I figured this would just irritate him, and that he would then pick up my car and shake me out of it, like Godzilla with an oil tanker.

So the angry-looking, 250-pound Apache guy with his eye on my camera walks right up to within easy grab-your-throatrange and stops.

I try to look friendly, but not pathetic.

"That your camera?" he asks conversationally.

"Uh, yeah," I reply.

"You take pictures?" he asks.

"Uh, yeah," I say cautiously.

"Will you take our picture?" he asks, gesturing toward the 10-year-old kid at his side.

"Sure. Glad to," I say.

"He's my boy. It's his birthday."

"That's wonderful," I say. "Happy birthday."

The kid grins, brilliant as sunlight through the rain.

"Hey," says the big guy with the skulls on his shirt, "have you eaten?"

"Eaten?" I stammer. "Not really. Spent all day looking for Christmas Tree Lake."

"Yeah. Good place," he says. "So, look, we're having a party for my boy. You come on in," he adds, gesturing toward the restaurant."

"That would be great," I say, abashed at my gut reaction, delighted at the invitation.

So started my best-ever night spent in the White Mountains.

Henry took me into that restaurant and introduced me like I was his long-lost cousin from Cibecue. Everyone welcomed me. Turns out, Henry is a sometime-firefighter, occasional cowhand and intermittent construction worker. Like most of the guys on the reservation, he can find work only now and then. He is quick, friendly and possessed of the delighted Apache sense of humor, off-color and filled with puns, while willing to laugh on the smallest of pretexts. The generations of his family surged in and out of the restaurant, clan members and distant relatives knitted together by generations of staying in one place.

I shot the four rolls of film I had, then turned them over to Henry, so he'd have pictures of everyone. He bought me dinner and taught me something about hospitality and prejudice and how you measure whether someone is rich. When we parted much later, he told me how to get to Christmas Tree Lake.

I followed his directions straight to the lake the next day, where I had my second-best White Mountains day ever with the blue grouse, the elk, the deer, the turkeys, the fox and the gleam of an endangered native trout.

Standing on the shore, soothed by the gleaming facets of the water and the wind rustling through the aspens, I figured maybe the Apaches have it right. Maybe such a place smooths the mind and teaches such wisdom that you can forgive even the sons of the sons of the white guys who hunted your father's father.

Or, maybe Henry's just a really good guy.