After eleven days of walking, we dropped our backpacks on the ground overlooking the Hopi pueblo of Moenkopi. It was late spring, 1976. The four of us had been following the route taken by a Spanish priest centuries before, staying south of the Grand Canyon on a branch of the old Moqui Trail.
My knowledge of the trail began when I started guiding in the Grand Canyon. Clients expected a guide to know something, and during my research I came across references to an ancient route running 140 miles between the Hopi mesas and the Havasupai homeland. Early travel writer George Warton James described it as, “One of the most noted aboriginal trails in the western United States.” But by 1910 most of the trail had been abandoned.
In 1976 I was given a chance to follow the old trail to commemorate America’s Bicentennial. The Museum of Northern Arizona had a group of us retrace on foot the journey taken by a Franciscan explorer, Francisco Garcés, 200-years earlier. His most likely route followed parts of the Moqui Trail.
My wife Sandy and Lisa Whitney, an intern at the museum, signed on. We were joined by Terry Gustafson, a wilderness ranger who had some free time before the snows melted in the High Sierra. He spent summers in the mountains, then wintered at his home in Tucson. During the trek Terry always got up an hour before the rest of us. He pulled on a heavy down jacket, tightened the drawstring until only his nose was showing, then propped himself against a juniper to meditate.
Stories unfolded as we covered the long miles, and at one point we prodded Terry into telling us about the Beatles. In 1967 he was working as a ranger in Sequoia National Park and had just gone through a bitter divorce. He left the mountains to visit friends at the Gathering of the Tribes in Golden Gate Park, and he soon discovered Transcendental Meditation. The next year he traveled to India to the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi where the Beatles were working on new songs and learning to meditate.
The late Sixties marked the height of the psychedelic era. “John Lennon wore a paisley cape,” Terry said, “an Indian shirt, a red sash around his waist, exaggerated white bell-bottoms, and green Egyptian slippers with curled-up toes. One time he dyed his hair several different colors – purple, red, green. And he had these strobe-like glasses with little flashing lights. He’d walk into the lecture hall with his cape flowing behind him. It was quite dim and dark, and you’d see these flashing glasses coming down the aisle.”
Wearing his hair short and dressed in khakis, Terry didn’t fit in. “Lennon gave me a bad time about how different I was. ‘Look at you!’ he said, ‘look at you! One of us don’t belong here.’ He just kept ribbing me day after day. ‘Why don’t you get back to your bloody forest?’ he asked. ‘Get back to Tucson, Arizona, where you belong!’” It became a running joke, and whenever they crossed paths Lennon would tell him to get back to where he belonged.
A few months after returning from India, Terry was sitting in the Yankee Doodle Pizza Parlor in Tucson. A guy put a quarter in the jukebox, and for the first time he heard a new Beatles’ song called “Get Back.”
Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona
For some California grass.
Get back, get back,
Get back to where you once belonged. . . .
Our trek along the Moqui Trail ended at Moenkopi. Now all we had left to do was get back to where we once belonged.
