Joining Hands: Navajo Town Makes Sterile Gloves for New York First Responders

The old trading post at Church Rock, New Mexico, the town where I had my first post-college job.

When you have an interest that you pursue on Google, the Google gods remember, and sometimes they surprise you with related news items that pop up on your Google home page.

The Google gods know that I have an interest in a small town named Church Rock (population per 2010 census: 1,128). Church Rock lies in Navajo territory on the outskirts of Gallup, New Mexico.

Google probably doesn’t know (but maybe does) that my interest in Church Rock stems from my having taught in the town my first year out of college, but no matter. Google knew I would be intrigued by an article that came out in the Navajo Times this week. The article’s subject is a nitrile glove factory in Church Rock that is now manufacturing medical gloves and shipping them to health care facilities in the Navajo Nation and other US locales struggling to cope with COVID-19. The locales include my home state of New York. (See Navajo Times article on Navajo glove facility.)

Navajo workers make sterile gloves for the medical front lines in the fight against COVID-19 in Navajoland, New York State and other impacted regions. Photo by Donovan Quintero saved from Navajo Times.

Phase One of a joint venture between the Navajo Nation and a company called Rhino Health, LLC, is primed to make 60 million pairs of blue nitrile gloves a year. Per the Navajo Times piece by reporter Donovan Quintero, the Church Rock factory is now churning out 8,000 pairs of gloves an hour and running around the clock. They are striving to keep up with demand while dealing with a shortage of raw material. (Materials have to be shipped from South Korea, home of Rhino Health’s parent company.)

If gloves could talk: In the Beatles’ 1968 film Yellow Submarine, a blue glove (once a weapon on the side of evil) learns how to join hands in the fight against destruction.

When Phase Two is completed, adding significantly more manufacturing space, Church Rock will be generating 1.3 billion pairs of blue sterile gloves a year for medical use.

Because of the Navajo Times article, I Googled keywords “nitrile” and “Church Rock” and found that in 2018, about two years before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19, the Navajo Nation invested $19 million for Rhino Health LLC to build its Church Rock facility that will eventually employ 350 Navajo workers (the state of New Mexico kicked in another $3 million).

News about the Navajo-Rhino Health joint venture was reported in the Albuquerque Journal, and later in the Navajo-Hopi Observer, but never leaked beyond regional boundaries. In the event other media don’t report how Navajo workers in Church Rock are helping first responders face the battle against the virus by providing protective gloves, I feel compelled to leak it here.

The “Church Rock” that gives the town its name. When I first saw the rock formation when I arrived as a teacher, I thought it looked more like a hand than a church. And while America paid no attention when the town encountered devastation from a uranium mine accident forty years ago, Church Rock is now really lending a hand in the COVID-19 crisis. Photo from TripAdvisor credited to 44dave56.

You may not know this about the Navajo town of Church Rock, but in July 1979, a few months after the famous Three Mile Island nuclear incident, Church Rock suffered a devastating radioactive contamination event courtesy of the United Nuclear Mine Corporation.

In 1979, the dam holding back tailings at United Nuclear’s Church Rock mine ruptured, sending 1100 tons of solid radioactive waste and 94 million gallons of radioactive solution into the local water sources and beyond (as far away as 50 miles downstream).

The spill resulted in the largest release of radioactive material in US history (see US government reports, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Rock_uranium_mill_spill).

In the world at large, the Church Rock United Nuclear incident is second only to Chernobyl in terms of long-lasting devastation.

Today, if you ask the Google gods “What’s the worst nuclear disaster?” your search result will likely bring up a Business Insider article that describes the incidents in Chernobyl and Fukushima, the latter caused by the 2011 Tohuku earthquake and tsunami. The article says that Three Mile Island was not nearly as devastating as those two calamities (see: https://www.businessinsider.com/chernobyl-fukushima-three-mile-island-nuclear-disasters-2019-6).

Warning signs mark contaminated Church Rock areas. Photo saved from www.vice.com article “Church Rock, America’s Forgotten Nuclear Disaster, Is Still Poisoning Navajo Lands 40 Years Later.” Will Ford also wrote a followup story for The Washington Post in January of this year.

The Business Insider article doesn’t once mention what happened in Church Rock, New Mexico forty years ago. In Church Rock, the effects of the accident (effects that include kidney disease, cancer, fear of having children . . . ) are being felt to this day (see August 2019 VICE article on lasting impact of Church Rock mine disaster).

A central tenet of Navajo belief is the uniting principle of K’e, or kinship. It begins with caring for the immediate family, extends to the clan, and from there extends to the community as a whole. K’e, in essence, is the concept of how we are all related and thus responsible for each other.

In 1979, when it came to nuclear disasters creating a sense of community, a sense of K’e, the whole country fretted about the dangers facing Americans who lived near Three Mile Island. But what happened in Church Rock four months later didn’t penetrate the country’s consciousness at all. The national media barely mentioned the accident back in the day. It seemed that the people of Church Rock, who faced overwhelming devastation–dead livestock, contaminated water, early mortality–were outside the realm of Americans’ concern. Today, forty years later, the media is paying more attention. But while HBO’s Chernobyl won a slew of Emmy Awards, I haven’t read that there’s any series planned on what happened at Church Rock within our own nation’s borders.

A group of my 5th graders at Church Rock Elementary School, 1976, three years before the United Nuclear accident turned Church Rock into America’s Chernobyl.

In 2020, we are united in our knowledge that COVID-19 is affecting all of us, that the virus is shaping our immediate if not distant future. New York State may be the US epicenter of the virus, but we know that no region of the country is immune, especially not the Navajo Nation.

On the Navajo reservation, a territory of 27,425 square miles where about 40% of the population have to drive a great distance to get a supply of water, COVID-19 cases are spiking (see LA Times on Navajo COVID-19 crisis and NPR article on COVID-19 and Navajo Nation). Nonetheless, the people of Church Rock are working hard to ensure that the folks on the front lines as far away as New York State are safe.

I just thought you should know.

COVID-19 Report: Vulnerable? Who Me?

Italy in better days, when Italians were allowed to be Italian.

At 66, I find myself branded with a category I never expected at my age. In the days of COVID-19, I feel like I have a sign pinned on my back that says, “over 60 and vulnerable.” I am healthy. I live in a suburban home in a New York State county that as of today has only 63 confirmed cases of the virus (that’s an old news number; 3/27 update: 160), while New York City, where a lot of my family live, has over 9,000 (that’s an old news number; 3/27 update: about 23,000). And let’s not even mention Italy, where a thousand vulnerable citizens died in a day, in part because Italians couldn’t grasp the meaning of social distancing.

My health club is closed on orders from Albany, but I walk 2-4 miles daily. I practice yoga. I confess that I did have a cold this winter, but I can’t remember the last time I had one before that. In short, I certainly don’t feel vulnerable, despite what Dr. Fauci says. (But don’t get me wrong; I thank God for Dr. Fauci.)

Then there’s my husband. His profile checks all the boxes of COVID-19 vulnerability. He’s over 80, diabetic, with a couple of arteries held open by stents. One of his Sunday jobs is organizing his medications for the week. But there he is, taking his daily walks along the nearby canal, cherishing the site of herons diving for fish, the scampering of small dogs on these bright mornings of early spring. He’s not feeling very vulnerable either. Yesterday he got a call from our supermarket pharmacy, which is about a half mile from our house. They called to ask how he was feeling, did he need any medications delivered to our door? “I’m okay,” he said. “I’m really okay.” My husband is from the former Soviet Union. When the call from the pharmacy ended, he said, “Wow. America.”

New York City was different a few weeks ago . . .

The State of New York is essentially under lockdown now. I talk to family and friends often . . . those who live here, in New York, LA, London, North Carolina . . . They’re all okay.

But I’ve been worried about a Navajo friend of mine who also has all the vulnerability boxes checked. Even before COVID-19 took over the news cycle, where I suppose it will remain for the foreseeable future, my friend was in poor health. She’s over eighty, has diabetes, high blood pressure. She lives alone on the rez, and recently, when she’s called for an ambulance for various non-COVID-19 health crises, she was told an ambulance couldn’t reach her due to road conditions. She lives off US Rte. 64 on a road that I’d experienced a couple of years ago on a good weather day. For fans of bumper cars and pogo sticks, the ride to her house is a rollicking good time. Navajo roads are notoriously awful, preventing kids from getting to school, and, in my friend’s case, the sick from getting to a clinic that could help them get well. You can bet that, regardless of her age and underlying health conditions, my friend is not getting any calls from a pharmacy offering to deliver necessary meds to her door.

A solitary steer in Canyon de Chelly. Social distancing is part of the very fabric of being in the Navajo desert.

I check on my friend by email, text or phone from time to time to see how she’s doing, if she has help, if she might be considering accepting care of relatives off the rez. I checked last week as the COVID-19 collective consciousness swelled, and I didn’t hear from her, and so I fretted. When I read that I am “vulnerable,” I want to shout, “Don’t tell me I’m vulnerable! I know who’s vulnerable!”

Social distancing at Costco, standing 6 ft. behind the person in front of me at the checkout line.

I know Britain toyed with ordering “vulnerable seniors” to stay home until July. Then Governor Gavin Newsom mandated that most Californians stay home. My millennial son is coping with this. Our own Governor Cuomo followed Newsom’s lead. And I’m happy to fall in line and stay home (save trips to buy groceries), maintain social distancing, take my walks and do yoga to free videos on YouTube.

But I think about my Navajo friend. Who’s buying her groceries? I wonder. Who’s making sure she’s safe?

Today, my questions were answered, because my friend replied to my text. She is feeling better and is being careful. She has a mask. She wears gloves when she shops. I had asked her if she was alone. She replied that she had too much company, which she defined as “crows that scold . . . hawks that smirk . . . dogs that beg . . . cats that remind her she forgot milk.” With all the frenzy around social distancing in these days, it’s easy to overlook that living a solitary life is not anathema to many who live in the desert, or in the mountains, or maybe around the corner.

My house is situated near an expressway, where there is usually a rush of traffic that, if I can wax romantic, sounds like ocean waves. But there’s very little traffic now. Now, when I step outside, I can hear the chirping of birds . . . every single chirp. So let’s take stock, breathe the fresh air, pitch our ears to sounds we couldn’t hear before, stay connected while living apart. When we eat through our supply of pasta, we can take heart that we’re not in Italy. We’ll adjust. We’ll give virtual hugs and blow virtual kisses. We’ll get through this.

If this is lockdown, I’m ok with it.

Forrest Fenn and the Art of Taking It with You

My former boss Forrest Fenn with some of his favorite things. Photo saved from pinterest.com

I’ve lived and worked in many cities in my time, and I’ve sat at desks in even more offices. Of all the offices in which I’ve worked, there is only one I wish I could have taken with me. The office that got away was the one I had in a sprawling adobe building filled to the gills with paintings, sculpture, pots, jewelry, artifacts and other treasures. The building sat on Paseo de Peralta in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In my twenties, I was hired by an art dealer named Forrest Fenn to set up a publishing imprint for his gallery, which was at its legendary height at the time I worked there.

You may have heard of Forrest Fenn, who sold his gallery years ago and is now approaching ninety. At the age of eighty, Forrest morphed from a Santa Fe character into a national topic of conversation when he announced that he’d hidden a chest filled with 22 pounds of gold, jewels and relics in the Rockies somewhere between Santa Fe and the Canadian border. He published a pretty clunky, cryptic poem that he says contains the only clues needed to find the treasure, which he claims is worth upwards of $2 million. (The poem is published on many sites. Here’s one: http://fennclues.com/the-poem.html)

The Fenn treasure hunt phenomenon set the news media on fire and thousands of treasure seekers into the wilderness. Fenn uber-fan Dal Neitzel

Photo sourced from forrestfenntreasurechest.wordpress.com

is one of the biggest cheerleaders behind what has become such an intense obsession that four folks have died (make that five, as of 3/26/20) trying to find Fenn’s treasure chest (https://dalneitzel.com/).

There are a gazillion articles on the Fenn treasure phenomenon in publications as varied as Wired, Amtrak’s The National and even an Orthodox Jewish family-friendly publication called Mishpacha. (A comprehensive piece is on the Vox website https://www.vox.com/a/fenn-treasure-hunt-map.)

Over the years, Forrest published a series of memoirs that he says provides some hints. Word to the literary wise: The kind of writing contained in these memoirs is reflected in what Forrest says he wants as his epitaph. I quote him here: “I wish I could have lived to do the things I was attributed to.”

The younger Forrest Fenn who signed my paychecks back in the day assigned me the task of obtaining archives of some late members of the Taos Society of Artists. The archives, said Forrest, would serve to inform future limited edition publications on those legendary painters who had been inspired by the unique light and landscape of northern New Mexico in the early twentieth century.

The Burro, 1929, by Ernest L. Blumenschein, a member of the Taos Society of Artists. Photo saved from amerianart.si.edu.

My twenty-something-year-old gut told me that such documents belonged under university protection, but Forrest Fenn, who liked to brag that he never went to college, insisted that the valuable papers would be better off housed with him rather than be buried in some library vault.

My Fenn Gallery office was small and intimate. One entered my office through beautifully hewn wrought iron gates. Above were ceiling tiles covered with fragments of old Navajo saddle blankets. The built-in bookshelves were populated with art books floor to ceiling. My office had a window. It had a private bathroom.

Forrest was excited to meet Fred Rogers

A stream of celebrities would come by to “meet Forrest” in those days, and some of them stayed in his magnificent guest house, which was a hop, skip and jump from that office of my dreams. Forrest, the perfect host to the rich and famous, would collect their autographs and boast about their visits through the years as though they were part of his list of stellar possessions. (Once I walked into his office, where he was seated holding his constant companion, his dachshund Bip, on his lap. “Mr. Rogers just signed my book,” he said, beaming.)

How, one may ask, could anyone turn her back on an office and an atmosphere like that? And yet I did, I think because I was in the midst of a crazy relationship, and the only thing I thought I could control at that time was my own sense of integrity, a sense that finally led me to telling Forrest Fenn that I didn’t want to work for him anymore.

What was the last straw that pushed me over the edge?

It wasn’t the time Forrest asked me to take a detour from the publishing/archive project and call the Albuquerque Zoo to see how he could acquire penguins to live by the massive pond that he was having built behind the gallery. Inane requests like that were part of the fun times, and there were many, many fun times.

Actually, Forrest was right. Per an article in the Journal of Zoology Studies it may be possible for penguins to adapt to a desert climate (https://journalofzoology.blogspot.com/2014/11/can-penguins-live-in-desert.html).

“I don’t think penguins could survive in this climate, Forrest,” I said.

Forrest smiled, but pressed on. “I gotta believe there’s such a thing as warm weather penguins,” he declared. (Forrest never did acquire any penguins, but he eventually did procure an alligator.)

After the pond was completed, I took a lunch out to enjoy on its banks one day. But my lunch was interrupted by Forrest’s scarlet macaw named Sinbad who had his heart set on my chicken sandwich. (I’d once seen Sinbad gnawing on a chicken leg in his cage that was situated in the gallery for the bird to welcome, and sometimes screech at, gallery visitors as they entered the museum-like gallery rooms.)

Scarlet macaws are beautiful, but watch out.

Being chased by Forrest’s cannibalistic parrot didn’t push me out the office door either.

As I remember, the last straw involved my actually driving to Taos to talk face to face with an artist’s surviving relative in attempt to get papers bequeathed to Forrest’s enterprise. Though Forrest had assured me that the public would always have access to any papers he acquired, when I obtained a verbal commitment from the relative, I felt dirty.

I don’t know if Fenn ever got those particular papers, and I don’t think he ever published any books on the artist they concerned, because he was a minor one in the Taos panoply. But I knew that Fenn wanted the papers because, well, he just wanted them. Like he wanted his Indian headdresses and beaded dresses and dolls and pots and leggings and pre-Colombian artifacts and arrowheads and drums that were in the gallery’s walk-in vault. These items were on view, but not for sale.

It was clear that my boss Forrest Fenn wanted to own a history that didn’t belong to him. And through the years, it seems, he hasn’t changed. During a TV interview in 2011, a question was posed to Forrest regarding who owns the past. “Who owns the past?” Forrest said excitedly. “The guy who has the title!” (Title is an important word for Forrest. The last line of his poem reads “I give you title to the gold.”)

A view of San Lazaro Pueblo ruins. Photo saved from oldsantafetradingco.com

Some years after I left Santa Fe, Fenn actually bought property that included a large pueblo ruin so he could do his own digging without getting into trouble with the Feds. “What’ll archeologists do? They’ll just stick things in a drawer!” he said during the same 2011 interview.

To hear Forrest tell it in many interviews, the idea of the treasure chest came about after he had a visit from designer Ralph Lauren. Lauren wanted to buy a headdress out of Forrest’s collection, and Forrest told him it wasn’t for sale. “Why not?” the designer asked. “You’ve got so many, and, anyway, you can’t take it with you.”

Forrest says he thought about this comment and then asked himself why not? Why couldn’t he take it with him? He’d been diagnosed with what he’d been told was likely terminal cancer, and he made a decision that, yes, when he went, he would go holding onto a box filled with a piece of his bounty. But a problem arose with the plan, which was that he lived. But then he decided to take the treasure chest to the spot where he had planned to end things and send the world off on a chase to find it. That was in 2010. As of late 2019, folks were still posting videos on youtube (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAloXCAdzdQ posted August, 2019 by “Mr. Luxury”) and articles online. High Country News posted a 2019 April Fool’s Day article stating that the treasure had been found (https://www.hcn.org/articles/april-fools-the-forrest-fenn-treasure-has-been-found).

UPDATE: On June 7, 2020, Forrest announced on his website (https://www.oldsantafetradingco.com/) that his treasure has been found for real ” . . . under a canopy of stars in the lush, forested vegetation of the Rocky Mountains and had not moved from the spot where I hid it more than 10 years ago.”

Around the corner from my dream office was a dream library. It was cavernous, with something like a 20 foot ceiling. There was a ladder on wheels that allowed folks to access books on the top shelf. The library was decorated with stunning pots and drums and other Indian relics.

One day, Forrest’s father came to visit. The old man, who’d been a poor school principal in a small Texas town, traveled in a small Airstream trailer that he parked in Forrest’s driveway. He was, like Forrest, an outdoorsman. He was so much an outdoorsman that when Forrest encouraged him to sleep in the celebrity guest house, he refused. He preferred the comforts of his little trailer.

I was working in the library when the old man walked in. He stood in the middle of the room and surveyed the shelves and the entire space, which was dwarfing.

“Let me ask you something, young lady,” he said to me in his Texas drawl. “Can you tell me, what’s all this for?”

I smiled at him. “I’ll be honest,” I said. “I really don’t know.”

The pond behind the gallery, now Nedra Matteucci Galleries, as seen in 2018.

In the autumn of 2018, I entered the doors of my old workplace, which is now the Nedra Matteucci Gallery, and I made a beeline for my old office. The wrought iron and the ceiling were there, as were the bookshelves, but they were mostly empty (it’s computer days, after all). And the feeling of the gallery itself, where many of the same artists are represented on the walls like in the old days, had a formality to it that made it hard to believe that a macaw and a dachshund and even an alligator once held court. Forrest Fenn’s uniform was always a short sleeved shirt and a pair of jeans, and jeans were de rigueur among the staff when he ruled. At Matteucci, the sales staff dressed like money. The pond is pristine, its banks populated only with nice sculptures. If you had a chicken sandwich out there, you wouldn’t be afraid of being chased by a parrot, but you’d be afraid to drop any crumbs on the manicured lawn.

In short, the place was not the same. When he sold the gallery, rapscallion Forrest Fenn, now lord of the treasure hunt, had taken something with him.

My old office at Fenn Galleries, revisited in 2018.