Couple Take Children on Trip to Their Beginning

PHOTOS COURTESY OF DUNCAN SHAWThe Shaw family - mom, dad and four daughters - hike in Canyon De Chelly in Arizona. BY DUNCAN SHAW (News & Observer, Raleigh NC, 2/6/11)

This is a story of love, of passion, of hardship pushed through and endured. And coming through a trial of hardship, the crucible of a first year of marriage, is love's achievement and love's triumph.

Twenty years ago, Jenny and I spent our newlywed year as volunteer teachers at a tiny school in a tiny town, amid the red rock mesas and deep blue sky of the desert Southwest.

It was a Navajo grade school in New Mexico on the edge of the Navajo Indian reservation. We lived in a ramshackle trailer and worked in dilapidated buildings and were witness to the rampant poverty among Native Americans and the attendant ill of alcoholism.

Our volunteer year also saw Jenny laid low for weeks by a bout of debilitating pneumonia. Despite all the hardship, to this day that year is among the most amazing and gratifying times we have spent together, a year when we awakened each day and felt as if we were helping to save children's lives.

In the two decades since, we raised four of our own children - four smart and beautiful girls - and talked to them countless times about New Mexico and the work and life we loved there.

So in the heat of an American summer, in the wake of the Great Recession, we set out on a road trip west with Sophie, 15; Helena, 13; Fiona, 10; Violet, 3. And like raising children, this 5,000-mile round-trip journey from Hillsborough in a Honda Odyssey was an act of faith.

Our aim was for Jenny and me to come full circle with the girls, to finally, after 20 years of marriage, show them where we began and built the foundation of that fruitful marriage.

Parallels to the Past

For a trip of this scope, we had very little time and very little money. It was 2009, and there was a feeling throughout the country that things might get even worse, so you had better get your fun done now. Plus, our oldest girl was a rising sophomore and we might never get the chance to do this as a family before she was sucked into intensive, time-consuming preparations for college.

The imperativeness of the trip emboldened us - giving me a fiendish driving energy, and giving Jenny a genius for packing our old small van with an engineer's economy. Our traveling route was simple, start in Hillsborough and do a straight shot west on one road - Interstate 40 - that undulating, unwavering ribbon that replaced, and for stretches still closely parallels, Route 66.

I have been fascinated by Route 66, The Mother Road, since I read "The Grapes of Wrath," in 1985, which turns out is the same year that highway was decommissioned. John Steinbeck's novel, set in the Great Depression, is about a migration to the American West.

I thought of parallels between the Great Depression and the Great Recession.

In 1987 I spent three months and 13,000 miles traveling solo by car through the West. I was inspired by John Steinbeck's trip in 1960, chronicled in his book "Travels With Charley: In Search of America," in which he traveled with his dog, Charley, in a camper truck he named Rocinante, the name of Don Quixote's old

but beloved horse on his journey tilting at windmills. Like Quixote's nag, our family vehicle wasn't slick or sleek, but it was loyal and sturdy.

Speaking of windmills, one big change in the cross-country landscape since our Southwest sojourn 20 years ago was the presence of white, gigantic but graceful wind turbines now generating electricity. Beginning in Oklahoma and continuing into Texas, these windmills, with their humming blades gently cutting the big sky air, were an impressive and strangely comforting sight.

After three days of driving, we finally reached New Mexico. We settled into Albuquerque and into our hotel, and the next day visited Acoma Pueblo, a village that has been continuously inhabited for about 1,000 years.

Located atop a mesa a few hundred feet above the surrounding desert, Acoma was enveloped in hammering heat. Leaving Albuquerque the next day, we ripped across the rest of New Mexico and into Arizona to see the Grand Canyon as well as Canyon De Chelly, one of the Navajo people's most sacred places, made famous by photographer Ansel Adams.

Wind turbines dot the landscape from Oklahoma into Texas. Duncan Shaw and his wife, Jenny, took their children from Hillsborough to New Mexico on I-40.

Visiting the School

Leaving Arizona, we ripped back through New Mexico on I-40 and eventually made it to the town of Thoreau, the location of our beloved Navajo school. It was at once eerie and poignant after so many years.

The school complex looked smaller and more congested, with newer buildings replacing some of the dilapidated ones Jenny and I remembered. But the town looked more dilapidated - poorer and more forlorn - wearing on its face the ravages of the recession.

The girls took a photo of Jenny and me standing at the entrance of a field of sagebrush that we would often walk through after a day of teaching, a field that looked east to the sacred Navajo formation, Mount Taylor, and west to the sunset's arcing streamers of lurid-hued light. The field also concealed a remnant of Route 66 that ran along its edge and vanished into a nowhere of dirt and debris.

Jenny and I loved that sagebrush field - and there, 20 years later, our girls with their camera crystallized our full circle.

Duncan Shaw is a freelance writer who lives with his family in Hillsborough.