Deadly Windfall

THE SOUTHWEST

The demonology of the Navajo tribe is fraught with imaginary horrors. On the escarpments of the San Juan Mountains once lived a monster called Kicking-off-the-Rocks, who did just that to travelers. Nearby dwelt a giant named Ye'iitseh, with a mouth like an inverted bellows, who often inhaled the unwary; not to mention the flesh-rending Rock Swallows and an anthropophagous eagle whose calcified remains the whites named Shiprock. Yet there is no Navajo name for the meteorological monster that in ten days left the tribe --and much of the Southwest--buried beneath a man-and-cattle-killing, 7-ft.-deep snowfall, the worst in the region's history.

Candy from the Sky. From Flagstaff, Ariz., eastward to Fruitland, N. Mex., and from the pinon groves of Utah southward to the stands of saguaro cactus near the Mexican border, the six-state area last week dug out of disaster. The roar of plow and plane engines resounded as Southwesterners raced to clear the roads and rescue the stranded before fresh blizzards came sweeping down, as U.S. weathermen had predicted. The known dead totaled 15, most of them on the Navajo Reservation, which covers an area nearly as large as Ireland. Arizona state officials feared that more may have frozen to death in the clogged box canyons and drift-billowed deserts. More than 2,000 Army, Navy and Air Force men, Civil Air Patrol flyers and Job Corps workers aided state road and rescue crews in missions varying from "candy drops" (for the 22,000 Indian boarding-school students stranded during the holidays) to "Operation Haylift" (pinpoint parachuting of fodder to the 584,600 or more horses, sheep and cattle).

Some of the aviators were accustomed to a different form of combat. "Man, that's rough flying," said Navy Lieut. Commander Dan Mayers, 32, whose helicopter wing returned recently from Viet Nam. "It's not quite what we're used to." Battling wing ice and frozen gas lines instead of flak, pilots flew more than 1,000 mercy sorties. When an Air Force C-141 dropped 1,300 gal. of fuel oil and a team of paracommandos on Arizona's Tuba City (pop. 2,000), schoolchildren braved 10DEG-below-zero temperatures--to get the parachutists' autographs.

One elderly Navajo, Sidney Yazzie, walked ten miles through drifts to the White Water trading post, stuffed his burlap sack with groceries, and when Trader Cal Foutz asked why he had not ridden his horse, laconically replied: "The horse didn't want to go." Another Indian, bored by the snow-bound routine in his mud-and-wood hogan, went for a horseback ride and waved casually at a passing haylift helicopter-- then was nearly bombed by bales of unneeded hay and canned goods.

Awe & Resignation. C rations came in handy to ranches isolated by flood- level runoff from the snow, which cut U.S. Highway 66 along much of its Arizona course. A man in Miami, Ariz., was rescued by choppers, but his pet monkey was found frozen to death, hanging by its tail from a tree. Other Navajos like Lily Crookedfinger, 90, and the Tsosie brothers were less fortunate: they died of exposure in the high country. Sheepherder Joe Shaggy, 25, weathered the blast though several of his woolies froze to death.

Some Southwesterners, in the harsh, half-forgotten tradition of the Old West, refused to be awed by the natural disaster. Speaking of the eight deaths on the Navajo Reservation, Presbyterian Missionary Harold Borhauer, 45, said: "I bury more than that at the opening of the pinon season"--the autumn harvest of protein-rich pinon nuts, during which Indians have been known to die of respiratory ailments contracted in the chilly mountains. Adee Dodge, a Navajo painter, added a peculiarly Indian note of resignation: "We publicly thank all the dear gods of this world for having caused such a windfall of moisture, much needed in this arid country."

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