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(More customer reviews)Kurt Caswell takes a job teaching language arts to middle school students on a Navajo reservation at the Borrego Pass School. The New Mexico high country is filled with natural beauty but the lives of poor people in tiny villages seem ugly to Caswell. His students have few options; nothing encourages them to aspire to a life beyond the reservation. Borrego kids insult other Navajos as bilagáanas (whites) if their English is better than their Navajo and particularly if they have spent time in cities.
"This was a violent world, one that stole energy and hope from its people, beat them down, and then kept them down, possibly forever. There must have been something else here too, something soft and caring, something safe and loving, something good that held this community together. If so, I could not, as yet, see it.... But why, I had to ask, did I so readily witness the cruel and violent face of Borrego, and nothing of the other side? Why would a community like this one show me, a stranger, this dark part of itself, and hide its best qualities?"
Caswell makes small inroads into the better qualities -- Renee, a bright, hard working student takes pleasure in his praise for an essay and adopts some of his suggestions for improvements. Earlier she had told him "I hate you." The words hurt so much that Caswell "knew then that I didn't want to teach at all."
Caswell's books is filled with similar hard hitting reflections on his life with his students, with his friend Mary, and with another teacher. He brings a clear, compelling prose to these reflections, and a deep honesty, very impressive in an author only 26 years old. He describes roads so bad that he is almost washed over the edge, a student taking aim at him with a shotgun, and throwing out his lesson plans in despair at teaching "Romeo and Juliet" to his charges.
Some of the best passages describe his enjoyment of the wonderful scenery:
"Such soft asylum is the sun, and that day in late October, that cool, happy day in fall, I needed sanctuary like I needed nothing else, sanctuary from my classroom, from my trailer home, from Borrego Pass School. I had just seen Caleb Benally ride away in a police car after he threatened somebody with a knife at lunch. He likely always carried that knife in his pocket, but somehow on that day, he'd decided the situation demanded he use it. He was a scary kid, and he didn't like me at all. I wondered how long it would be before he decided to use that knife against me."
Caswell is a traveller at heart; he leaves his job after the first year and moves on to other adventures, well described on his travel log (link in first Comment). His list of favorite travel books is inspiring:
(in order of adoration)
The Snow Leopard | Peter Matthiessen
Arctic Dreams | Barry Lopez
Arabian Sands | Wilfred Thesiger
The Long Walk| Slavomir Rawicz
The Songlines | Bruce Chatwin
West with the Night | Beryl Markham
The Lost World of the Kalahari |
Laurens van der Post
Desert Solitaire | Edward Abbey
The Narrow Road to the Deep North |
Basho
In Trouble Again | Redmond O'Hanlon
If Caswell continues to write so well about his travels, he will join that exalted company on my own list.
Robert C. Ross 2010
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In the Sun's House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo ReservationIn the year he spent teaching at Borrego Pass, a remote Navajo community in northwest New Mexico, Kurt Caswell found himself shunned as persona non grata. His cultural missteps, status as an interloper, and white skin earned him no respect in the classroom or the community-those on the reservation assumed he would come and go like so many teachers had before. But as Caswell attempts to bridge the gap between himself and those who surround him, he finds his calling as a teacher and develops a love for the rich landscape of New Mexico, and manages a hard-won truce between his failings and successes.
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