Those Dam People

The arid mesa country, which they occupy, provides any number of natural devastating calamities which could endanger the food supply of an entire village. Thanks and appreciation for mother earth's gifts are shown through their daily individual communication with the spirits as well as by their performances of elaborate and colorful ceremonials.

Mora believed that the Kachina dances he was observing were the last tenuous vestiges of Hopi religious life, and that if the ceremonies and dancers could be captured on canvas and film, he could produce a noteworthy record of a vanishing way of life.

In a 1904 letter to his parents, he wrote of his fears."... That's my Hopi land I'm getting now to know and to think that in a very, very few years all this will be gone. For the government is doing all in its power to stop their dances and ceremonies. These are the last Indians of the U.S. to retain their original customs and ceremonial rites. The last ones to retain their original dresses and modes of living."

Jo Mora's resulting photographs were to become an ethnographic record of unusual merit because of a focus on the details of the dances, the variations in performers and their costumes and the scenes of everyday life in the pueblos.

Additionally, his was the first photographic record of the yearly cycle of ceremonial events on First Mesa. Many photographers and artists preceded him but their work was of mediocre quality.

Mora's paintings are posed records with each detail artistically rendered, portraying the costumes of ceremonial and lay figures alike.

And obtaining them certainly was not a simple procedure, as he wrote in a letter home.

"I've been here a month now living right with them; drawing and painting them; seeing some of their gorgeous ceremonies; loving them and swearing at them almost with bitterness. One doesn't know an Indian 'till one lives with them! Now, I'm commencing to see under that outer layer of first observation and, oh God! It's perfectly fascinating."

His fears, shared with some modern-day students, that Hopi ceremonial life would be obliterated, have proven unfounded so far. Others feel very sure that the Hopis will observe their structured year around religious observances as long as Hopis inhabit their Fourth World. Their stubborn tenacity in clinging to arid mesa tops and raising corn in fields that look as tillable as a concrete parking lot seems to support that latter theory.

But among the Hopis themselves, on at least one of the mesas and in some of the villages which are really autonomous city-states there is talk of prophesies that portend the breakup or abandonment of some ceremonies, a break in the cyclic rhythms of the ceremonial year of the Hopi.

The Year of the Hopi starts with Soyal, or Kachina Return, in late December or early January; Powamu, or Bean Dance, in late February; Night Kiva Dances in March and April; Niman, or Going Home Dance, in late June or early July; Snake dances in the fall; Wuwuchim, or Initiation, in late November.

Mora understood that Hopi ceremonies are interlocked into annual cycles of germination, growth, harvest and preparation for germination again. And of birth, life, death and preparation for another life.

To him, Wuwuchim, Soyal and Powamu portray the germination and establishment of all life; Niman, Snake and Flute carry through the growth and development periods; the women's ceremonies symbolize maturity, fruition and preparation for the new cycle to come.

But he would surely be the first to admit that paintings, photographs and words are feeble media to project the mystery plays that are religious experiences as well as theatrical song-dance-drama pageants that seem to transcend time, space and reality. As Mora himself said, "words can't express it... my vocabulary fails me. It's enough to make an artist betroth himself to this field for life and a writer to mount his Pegasus and soar!"

Editor's note: A premiere showing of J. J. Mora's painting and photography, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, will be on display September 15 to November 8 at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. "The Year of the Hopi," presents 40 paintings of Hopi ceremonial figures and 63 photographs representative of the entire ceremonial year. Limited edition prints of Mora's work will be available.

Text by Ginger Hutton Photography by Jeff Kida Their days are immersed in the roar of engines and water. Their nights are wrapped in a quiet so complete that a slight breeze seems an intruder.

They have a personal relationship with nature bordering on worship. And they say they took their wilderness jobs to be far from people.

But when someone comes, they reach out, open-faced and open-hearted. They are the keepers of the dams.

THE LONER...

On winter nights, Ron Rupp sleeps next to an open window so he can hear the calling of the birds and animals in the mountains.

On summer days, his companions are swarms of bees feeding on blossoming oleander bushes ringing his backyard; on summer nights, they are the toads that capture bugs brought by light to his door.

He is alone and a loner, both by choice.

"It's not that I'm a bad guy. I just don't like people." His eyes are dark and intent and framed by long brown hair, his mouth unsmiling and hidden by a dark mustache.

"It's all right when you get into trouble and you get yourself out, but when people get themselves into problems and won't at least try to get themselves out and want you to do it for them. They make too many demands."

So in his job as gateman for the Salt River Project's earthen Horseshoe Dam, the 31-year-old man gets the solitude he desires.

Most of the time.

There are occasional visits from a rancher neighbor or U. S. Forest Service and Salt River Project employes. And on weekends there are the swimmers, explorers, and campers who get too deep into their weekend pleasures and have to be pulled out of sand and water.

"I try to remember why they got there and not get mad," Rupp says, revealing soft spots in his stony outlook on the human race. "They just don't realize sometimes. Like the guy who parked his truck and forgot to put on the emergency brake, and it rolled into the river."

His anti-people attitude softens more as he anxiously tries to detain visitors showing them his house, his fruit trees and grapevines, his dam. And a loneliness creeps through his manner as if he has not so much rejected people as he feels they have rejected him.

But he did tell his mother that she couldn't come to live with him. The constant companionship would be hard to take, he says. Which is why he's divorced and has not remarried.

"I was married once. I learned," he says, abruptly, then explains: "It's pretty hard to find a girl who likes this type of life. In most normal jobs, the guy is gone a good portion of the day. But here you're with each other 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That's why I live by myself."

For 18 months he's lived in the weather-washed white house for which he pays the Project $11 monthly and gets most utilities free. Nine months prior he worked in a similar capacity at Stewart Mountain Dam.

Before that there were stints in the Marine Corps, jobs as security guard, stops in isolated places where “the biggest thing in town was a new stop sign.” Now, besides rescuing stranded pleasure-seekers, his job includes monitoring radio communications, checking water levels in Horseshoe Lake and releasing water into the Verde River as it is needed for Valley residents below.

In his spare hours he builds models of old sailing vessels, repairs rifles, watches television, reads history and philosophy books, and meditates.

On his days off he visits his parents an hour and a half away in Phoenix. Or he takes his jeep through the layers of mountains seen from his hilltop house and sleeps under a star-white sky, comfortable with the wild isolation he learned to love when his father took him camping as a child. And in the stillness, he says, he'll find life's answers.

THE COMMUTERS...

Frank Leach, a devilish-eyed man of 58, and his 20-year-old daughter Maggie were matching wits one minute and talents the next as she played “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” on the piano, and he joined in on the banjo.

Opal Leach, sweet-faced and 58, finished putting her hair in pin curls as she kept time to her family's music.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and the Leaches were taking pleasure in the warmness of the day, the isolation of the area and the fact that they were together.

During the week they live in separate worlds Opal and Maggie in a house in Phoenix, Frank in the Salt River Project house with its view of the Verde River, cacti-covered mountains, an eagle's nest and Bartlett Dam.

While they're apart she works as a pediatrics nurse, attends classes in “anything I'm interested in” at local colleges and teaches the Lamaze method of natural birth an occupation which gave rise to the family joke that anytime mother answers the phone her “Hello” is always followed by: “And when is your baby due?” Frank worked first at Horseshoe Dam for more than seven years a job he took after falling in love with the area while patrolling it as a Maricopa County sheriff's deputy. In December, he moved to the nicer house and the job as gateman at Bartlett.

Opal was only slightly hesitant when Frank told her he wanted to take the job that would separate them during the week. She loved the mountains, river and the wildlife ever since the evening they had brought their daughter and a friend up to watch the water being released at Horseshoe Dam.

“It was spring, everything was green, and it was a weekday night so there was not a soul in the picnic area,” she recalled. “We saw coyotes they came up to get the dead fish laying on the banks of the river as we watched. It was like a little movie, and we were in it. We went up to a lookout point, and we could see everything all the way up and down the Verde River. And around us the sheepherders were running sheep.” So the chance to spend weekends with the wildlife, sunsets, mountains and deep quiet unmarred by telephones outweighed her husband's weekday absence. And it hasn't harmed their marriage.

“Hell, we've been married 60 years,” said Frank in the joking manner he uses sometimes to answer serious questions. “A few days apart aren't gonna hurt us.” The two met in high school Latin class in Martinsville, Indiana. Since then they've shared a love of learning and reading (he's a Civil War history buff) as well as several homes, several jobs, four children and four grandchildren most of whom they were expecting to visit the following weekend.

Two of the grandchildren are from New York City where they are not Clarence Hale (above), machine maintenance operator for Arizona Public Service Company, and his wife Mamie Ruth (below) have lived and worked for 19 years in the little community of Childs, a nest of white houses, green trees and well-watered gardens along the banks of the Verde River.

Photography by Jeff Kida

"It's just as close to us as it is to them." "You help each other and don't think about it," agrees Clarence. "It's a way of life."

The two of them weave their conversation together as easily and comfortably as they do their lives. They read Western history, watch television, hunt deer and quail ("But not the ones we feed"), fish, play volleyball with the neighbors, tend their irregular vegetable gardens tucked between mountains, and fruit trees, and feed the wild animals.

"I fed a fox out here for a long time," says Mamie Ruth.

"Once we had a whole bunch of skunks, seven raccoons and a coyote all eating dog food out of one pan," says Clarence.

Most of their animal neighbors, which include javelina, bear and mountaintain lion, don't frighten them. "The lion's no more dangerous than a house cat," says Clarence. "But the bobcat wiped us out of cottontails. So I killed him. Bobcats are ornery. They might just jump on you for the heck of it."

He also kills rattlesnakes one over the protests of a visiting ecologist. "We have to live with 'em; you don't," he told the man.

Mamie takes scorpion companions in stride, too. "I just whomp the heck out of 'em and go on," she says.

"When you live with 'em you get used to 'em," adds Clarence.

"To live here, you've really got to love the outdoors and all the hard knocks it gives you," says Mamie Ruth. "You're always getting bruised and battered by something."

But wild animals and scorpions are not the only interesting visitors the Hales entertain.

Television actor Ted Knight once drank champagne with them in the back of a pickup truck during a summer rain. And they're regularly visited by UFOs, of which they're not frightened, says Mamie Ruth, because "they're just exploring, just like we explore the moon."

"Every night, when it isn't cloudy, we sit out and watch them. They sometimes come in the middle of the day, too. We've seen saucer-shaped and cigar-shaped ones, but we've never seen one that looked like the ones on television."

"Last summer," adds Clarence, "a beautiful green light came and stood over us, then streaked off and disappeared. A friend was with us. He said, 'I'm not going to tell anyone I saw that.'"

But Mamie Ruth and Clarence tell. Very matter-of-factly. So do their neighbors. And newspaper articles were written recently about their sightings.

"All these organizations came in here to see if we were nuts," says Mamie Ruth. "Oh it was fun!"

THE EVANGELIST...

Duan Suarez took the job to be nearer his God.

"If you get up in the morning and go and sit down at the breakfast table and look out at the mountains, you'll see all the handiwork the Lord's done," he said, gesturing at the steep red, yellow and orange walls of his house and yard, and Upper Canyon Lake below.

"If a person wants to enjoy this world," says the tall, angular man, "he's got to enjoy what God made," he continued, returning to turn steaks on the backyard grill. "Everything else was made by man and everyone knows man's imperfect. Look at the road look what man did to it."

The road is several miles of driver-challenging dirt curves that wind from the highway to the little community of seven families perched on a mountain-side in the Salt River gorge near Horse Mesa Dam.

At the top of the community is a schoolhouse where monkey bars and swings provide a view of the lake far below and a sense of height, beauty and world-ownership never felt by city children.

In the schoolyard, birds and ani-mals come to feed and play. And the children know them by their common names the chipmunks, rock squir-rels, quail, cactus wrens, cowbirds, finches, Gila monsters, snakes, chuck-