Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [100]
Shortly after the phone call, the ceremony came to an end. It had all been done with a sincerity that I think is missing in Western religions, and I’m really glad I took part in it. But my rib felt no different the next day. Then again – who knows – maybe it would have felt worse if the medicine man hadn’t intervened? I didn’t really care either way, because he was great company. The last time I saw him, he was sitting on my trike, laughing and enjoying having his picture taken.
Larry took us back into Monument Valley just before dawn the following morning, but this time into the sacred part that the Navajo owned and controlled. They are deeply attached to the environment, and don’t allow anyone to climb the buttes and mesas here. Because of their care, it’s in wonderful shape – a truly moving and magnificent place.
At one point, a big beetle came over to me. I was just about to nudge it when Larry said it was a stink beetle that squirted a kind of urine if it was irritated. Apparently it’s very smelly stuff, but it’s used by the Navajo to treat mouth diseases in babies. Larry also told me about the huge tarantulas that come to Monument Valley from the plains each year to mate. I would have loved to see that.
His next story was about the Navajo code talkers, a band of young men recruited by the US Marine Corps in the Second World War to transmit secret messages. At a time when America’s best cryptographers were searching for ways to keep ahead of the Japanese code breakers, these modest Navajo farmers and herdsmen constructed the most successful code in military history. Even now, it hasn’t been broken. With a complex grammar and no written form, Navajo is the most complicated of all Native American languages, and it is spoken only on the Navajo territories in New Mexico and Arizona. In 1941, when America entered the war, fewer than thirty non-Navajos were thought to be able to understand the intricate syntax, tonal qualities and dialects of the language. So it was the perfect foundation for a code.
However, there were few Navajo equivalents for many modern military terms, so the code talkers had to be inventive. For instance, the Navajo word for tortoise was used to mean tank, and the Navajo for potato signified a grenade. Equipped with their mental dictionary of terms, the code talkers joined the marines on the battlefield and were able to encode, transmit and decode messages at lightning speed. They could pass on a three-line communiqué in just twenty seconds, while conventional coding methods took more than half an hour. Their importance was highlighted when the commanding officer of the marines’ signals division at the crucial Battle of Iwo Jima said that the island would not have been taken without the Navajo’s efforts.
The code talkers were also used in Korea and Vietnam, but then knowledge of the code started to die out and now many Americans are unaware of the vital role the Navajo played in so much of their country’s recent history. Partly this is because the US government kept the Navajo’s work secret for many years, just in case their unique abilities might be needed again. And partly it’s because the Navajo are very modest, quiet, unassuming people.
Bumping around Monument Valley with Larry, I listened to more of his stories – such as how John Ford came to film in the Navajo’s sacred place. Larry said it was all due to a rancher called Harry Goulding, who had been living in a tent in Monument Valley since the 1920s. In the late 1930s Goulding heard that Ford was making a big new Western called Stagecoach. Convinced that Monument Valley would be ideal for the film, he enlisted a photographer to take some pictures. Then this uneducated man of the wilderness packed up his bedroll, his coffee pot and some grub and made his way to California. Arriving in Hollywood, he hoped to talk to Ford in person, to try to convince him to come and film in Monument Valley. While his wife