A sea of snow and mud
The ‘old ways’ help Nia Francisco survive

By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

Nia Francisco of Crystal must walk 3.5 miles each way to get from her home to her vehicle in order to get to work everyday. "Survival is the beauty of everything. This is my survival," she said of her daily journey. [Photo by Brian Leddy/Independent]

WINDOW ROCK — It didn’t take long after that infamous groundhog in Pennsylvania saw his shadow for folks in Arizona to feel the wrath of six more weeks of winter.

On Monday, Feb. 4, after the “big snow,” Crystal Delegate Ralph Bennett arrived at a Budget and Finance Committee meeting, saying the snow was 2 and 3 feet deep in places within his chapter. Despite that, he said, one woman, Nia Francisco, walked more than three miles just to get to her job at Social Services.

Nobody was more surprised than her boss, Betty Delrow.
“It just threw me because I thought she would take leave, but she was here at work Monday morning. I don’t know how she did it, but she said, ‘Oh, yes, I left at 6 o’clock this morning and I walked down.’ Six o’clock, it’s still dark.

Talk about being committed and dedicated!” Delrow said.
Francisco, who turned “55-plus” on Groundhog Day, lives “in the North Pole” at the foothills of the Chuska Mountains.

She walks in and out on a dirt wood-hauling road to stay at the family homestead, surrounded by her dogs and the tranquility that comes from living simply. Because of her demanding schedule, sometimes she is forced to stay with friends in Fort Defiance.

When she’s on the mountain, Francisco’s day starts around 4 a.m.

“I get up, build a fire, make my instant coffee, feed the dogs, and if there’s snow in the front, sweep or shovel some of that. I pack a load of wood in my arms, or sometimes I even have to dig it out, and get ready for that evening when I should be coming back, and then I start walking. I just start walking, and if my legs can get me to my car that’s like three miles away, I see the morning light. Actually the snow reflects a lot of light in the morning, so I don’t even need a flashlight.”

When the roads are not snow-covered, it takes about 40 minutes to get to her vehicle, she said.

After the initial snow, the temperatures dropped, the snow froze and walking was worse.

“Now I know why the Eskimos, or people that live where it snows all the time very deep, why they wear snow shoes — very practical and very common sense. Because walking in about 3 feet of snow, even though where the road is cleared, it is so-o-o tiring.”

The walk is good for her, however, because she has diabetes, and it also gives her a chance to do a lot of self-talk, and to look at the trees, the snow, the beauty, she said.

Several days after the snow hit, it was still up to her thighs in front of the house and she planned to take leave the next day to shovel.

“It’s humbling, I think, because we get really cocky about life. Everything is handed to us. Everything is so conveniently there, we forget that there are hardships that our kids or grandkids won’t go through.

“But there are people who survived,” she said. It reminds her of The Long Walk. “What did my grandparents go through when they were walking to Fort Sumner and back? I feel like it’s kind of a reminder that we’re survivors of those times. They say that the snow is actually our ancestors telling us, ‘Remember us.’ So this is a big reminder.”

She said the Navajo people tend to look at the beauty of things and forget that there’s also the other side, something that’s harmful.

“And that’s pretty much what the snow is like. We have to respect that.”

To deal with the harmful aspects of walking through the snow takes preparation.

“When it’s freshly fallen, you can just move your legs along and plow through, but when it’s frozen, you have to break it. This morning (Feb. 6) it was above my boots. My boots are about 14 inches high. So what I did was I put on two pairs of pants, one was tucked in and the other was laid over, so none of the snow was falling into my boots,” she said. The previous day, when she was walking back home from her vehicle, she was not prepared.

“All of the snow started packing into my boots and when I got back to the house I had snow inside my boots and my pants were all wet and frozen above my calves.”

Francisco has a small backpack and uses it to pack in small amounts of food and whatever else she can carry.

“It’s better to backpack than to hand-carry. In the morning when I leave, I put in flashlights and gloves.”

She chops her own firewood and has been melting snow to get water for dishes and bathing.

“That’s what my grandmothers did. Lately I’ve been putting in a little Clorox and boiling it with that because I don’t trust what is falling down with the snow. I don’t eat it.”

As she was walking in the white stillness of the early morning Feb. 6, she was thinking, “They tell us that our Mother Earth ages from youth to old age.” Looking at the snow, “I thought, ‘Wow, she’s really reached her old age.

Her hair is so white and she’s so beautiful.” Francisco was thankful, because she got to see this.

“The chapter has been really supportive toward me, as one living in their community. It felt so good the first time the snow fell, to see the grader come to my house. I was inside and I was all warm, and here this big, huge grader came, clearing.

“That’s when we thought that was our major snow, but we never knew that this one was coming. It made me feel like I belonged, and I was so happy, I got choked up. It’s good the chapter remembers that we’re out here in the boonies.

When they go out and help people, they don’t know how much they impact them — instead of saying, ‘well, they have to come in and ask for help.’”