Book: In the Sun's House by Kurt Caswell

Subtitled, My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation.

Kurt Caswell is a man with an unrequited wanderlust. This is his account of a year teaching at the Borrego Pass School in western New Mexico, near the Continental Divide and approximately 100 miles west of Albuquerque. He wrestles with his commitments to Borrego Pass, to the Navajo kids, to his Japanese girlfriend who comes to visit. Borrego Pass is an isolated community and his 6th, 7th and 8th graders know little of the world outside of occasional trips to Gallup or Crownpoint. Kurt comes with ideals as most of us would, arriving in what we would perceive as an impoverished neglected pocket of the American West. Those poor Native Americans, we would think....we romanticize our intentions, our good intentions.

He writes of hogans and potsherds, of hiking with his dog Kuma, of taking the kids to the Eastern Navajo Agency Spelling Bee in Chinle and of trip to Mission: Wolf (www.missionwolf.com) where he also arranges to meet a group of Navajo kids from another school in Ganado, New Mexico, hoping his students will connect with the Ganado kids, hoping to find ways to enrich their lives.

"Out at the edge of the mesa top, where I could see north into the wide word, I found tires stacked in some places and scattered in others, heavy spikes driven into trees on which things had once been hung, coils of brittle wire and rusted chain, and a red flannel shirt tangled in a juniper flying like a war-wounded flag in the breeze."

"In the quiet under the desert sky, I looked up into the countless stars that graced the inight. It was beautiful."

He becomes a student himself, learning from the land and from his students...humbled by his deficiencies, accepting that he makes only a tiny ripple (if any at all) in the ebb and flow of this remote Navajo community.

"I had accepted this job at Borrego only to continue exploring; I never meant to care. And now that some measure of caring about what happened to these kids and this community had penetrated my defenses, I didn't quite how what to do. Caring just caused trouble for me. I could no longer liver here without caring or leave here without regretting."

At the end of the school year, the class reads Romeo and Juliet and he asks them to write something about the play. "What had I been thinking? I am still failing as a teacher, I thought, at least failing to properly gauge my student's competency level and shoot for something just above it, rather than shooting for the moon." But one student does write what Kurt calls an "eighth-grade teacher's dream...[and] I had not expected to be so happy about Renee's good work. I carried those feelings around for days. That, I surmised was the heart of teaching. Perhaps I'd be a teacher after all."

What I liked was the honesty of this book as he writes of his responses to Navajo culture and his students and of his reluctance to stay in one place very long. I certainly can understand this. For some of us, there will always be a new road to travel, a different river to cross, the next experience. His restlessness bothers him though, especially in his relationship with Sakura. He quotes Bruce Chatwin as saying that we all need a "base" (with a nod also to Maria here...), a place to return TO even as we wander about.

Kurt didn't physically stay in Borrego Pass, but something of him remained and he took something with him. This book is about that exchange between him and a small group of Navajo kids...expressed memorably.