Ledes from the Land of Enchantment

A bus, 45 teenagers and 3,600 miles | columnists

I will always remember Omaha as the city where I climbed over the locked stall in the Trailways bus station restroom rather than pay 10 cents to use the toilet. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In late August 1965, Bob and Jeanne Gotwald, both in their 40s, led a busload of 45 teenagers (including me) 1,800 miles from our Methodist church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, to Farmington, New Mexico, to volunteer for two weeks at a Navajo Methodist mission school.

Looking back, I think Bob Gotwald was Moses reincarnated. Moses led the Jews across a suddenly separated sea. Bob and Jeanne Gotwald led 45 teenagers on a two-week, 3,600-mile bus trip. I’ll leave it up to you to decide who had the easier job.

Bob Gotwald was the church’s beloved music minister and senior high youth group leader. This trip was his idea. He planned it decades before the Internet and when it cost money to make long-distance phone calls. The church’s bachelor assistant minister came with us, too. Every time he used the bus restroom, we erupted in song. Our cost for food, travel and lodging for those two weeks was $325.

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The night before we left, we unrolled sleeping bags in the church parlor, but nobody slept. At 4 am we tossed those sleeping bags and suitcases onto the bus and departed. In that first hour, the bus driver knocked a rural mailbox off its post, but he kept going.

We had no backpacks, earbuds, cell phones, Instagram, Twitter or Spotify. None of that had been invented yet. Instead, we talked, giggled, read, sang, and watched the scenery.

We had breakfast in Richmond, Indiana, and lunch in Danville, Illinois. That night we slept on the floor of Tulsa’s Boston Avenue Methodist Church.

In Sayre, Oklahoma, the land was so empty and the sky so enormous that we emptied out of the bus to stand by the side of the road and stare. We then hurried through Amarillo and Albuquerque, and on Tuesday morning, as dawn crept over the desert, Jeanne Gotwald tried to wake us all up to see its beauty. “You kids are missing this!” she begged, but few stirred.

Two hours later, we pulled into the mission school, which was a boarding school for Navajo teenagers. We lugged our suitcases (suitcases didn’t have wheels yet) into the empty dorm rooms — girls on the first floor, boys on the second.

For the next two weeks, we made beds, painted and scrambled up the mesa behind the school to make a sign out of rocks that said Navajo Methodist Mission. It sprawled across the mesa and was so big it was practically visible from space. That was tough labor, especially when red ants suddenly crawled out of the sand and began eating us alive.

On Sunday, we headed into the rugged, nearly roadless Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area to a Navajo worship service held in a Quonset hut. Back home, we worshiped in a majestic sanctuary with stained glass windows and a magnificent pipe organ. Here, blue-jeaned Navajo brought folding chairs, and small children scampered around as the pastor preached in Navajo. That night, we camped in the desert under a star-splashed sky.



Desert scenery: Lightning and thunder

MARY JANE SKALA, KEARNEY HUB Lightning and ominous clouds created dramatic desert storms.


MARY JANE SCALE, KEARNEY HUB

We went to an inter-tribal pow-wow in Gallup, too. The Indians in the crowd (the term “Native American” was not in use yet) stared at the ceremonies in silence. No laughter, chatting or applause. silence

The trip’s only flaw: an intestinal virus flattened two-thirds of our group on the final day.

We threaded through the Rockies as we started home, stopping for the night in a mountain camp run by the grandparents of a teen in our group. As we headed east, we sang “This Land is Your Land.”

Which brings me back to Omaha. From Colorado, that bus sped across I-80 and stopped in Omaha after midnight to change drivers and refuel. Back then, bus stations had pay toilets. Rather than pay to answer nature’s call, we just climbed over the stalls’ locked doors. All the way home, we hollered a new buzzword: “OH-ma-haw.”

I never dreamed that someday I’d live 200 miles from Omaha. I wonder if that bus station still has pay toilets.

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