And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 09:16:50 -0500 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Lynne Moss-Sharman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: electricity Aneth Utah Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Isolated Navajos Finally Flip Switch On eve of 21st century, power lines begin to change lives in remote areas BY PHIL SAHM THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE 3/21/99 ANETH -- Three miles away, down a tangle of dirt roads, Darlene Claw saw a light in the distance. She stopped, gazing for a moment, wondering if her husband was chopping wood in the headlights of their pickup. She drove closer. And the light became clearer. Rounding the last curve, her heart jumped. A yellow globe beamed from a power pole next to their home. The porch light shone and 100-watt bulbs gleamed through the windows. After four years, their home had electricity. The 20th century has come to the Navajo Nation in uneven strides. Comfortable manufactured homes dot the reservation, with nice cars and pickups parked nearby. Yet running water and telephones are scarce on this desert of canyons and mesas in southeastern Utah. Less than a year from the 21st century, the last residents are getting electricity. For those who live by the light of kerosene lamps and keep food in coolers, the coming of power lines is life-changing. "It was so bright inside our house," Claw said. "I still could not believe it two days after it was on." She long will remember driving home from work on Jan. 27 and seeing a light in the distance on Cajon Mesa where she, her husband and three children live. What others do without thinking -- flipping a switch to light a room, turning on an oven to cook dinner -- they know as remarkable. Claw, fortyish, with long dark hair and glasses, spoke softly, thoughtfully about life without electricity. "You have to light a match for everything you do," she said. The day Utah Power crews ran a mile-long line to their house, Claw's husband, Julius, drove 50-or-so miles east to Cortez, Colo., to stock up on 100-watt bulbs. Four days later, the Claws threw a Super Bowl party. Friends and relatives gathered in their comfortably furnished home to cheer the Denver Broncos, crowded around a big-screen television not used since moving to the mesa. Their children, two boys, ages 16 and 13, and a girl, 11, hardly believed they were watching television in their home. Darlene made sure everything looked good for their guests. "I vacuumed my house four times that day," she said. The Claws are among the last 10 to 15 percent of families on the Utah side of the reservation to receive electricity, said Wilbur Cap-itan of the Aneth Chapter of the Utah Navajo. Although Glen Canyon Dam and the Navajo Power Plant supply electricity throughout the West, and lie within 150 miles of the mesa, bringing power to the last dark pockets of the Utah reservation has been tortuous. The project that brought power to the Claws includes 22 families scattered from Cajon Mesa a few miles north of Aneth to the Colorado state line to the San Juan River that snakes through the reservation. Running power lines through canyons and desert will cost $230,000 when the current project is finished, Capitan estimated. For individual homes, the cost can reach almost $30,000, depending on the distance and work required. To bring a 2-mile line to Evelyn Billie's home, for example, cost $18,000 and entailed blasting through rock, Billie said. She lives about four miles east of Aneth, near the San Juan River. After applying for power, she waited three years. Her 13-year-old son, Winston, lived 12 years without electricity before the family received it last year. Her 4-year-old daughter, Austin, is thrilled with simple things, such as making toast in the morning. "There's a whole lot of people who need electricity here," Billie said. To get electricity, families first must receive home-site leases from the tribe. The leases give families the right to locate a home on the reservation. Then they apply for electricity, which means paperwork. Getting applications through the tribal bureaucracy and the Bureau of Indian Affairs can take years. After that, the tribe must find money to pay for the power-line extensions, usually through a combination of federal grants, the Navajo trust fund -- money set aside for the tribe from oil royalties and other sources -- and contributions. After that, land disputes between tribal members can delay applications for years. "People don't understand the process," Capitan said. "They think it happens overnight." Those who waited, and are waiting, know that. Brenda Haskan applied for electricity four years ago. But every year it's put off because money is not available, or for other reasons, Haskan said. Meanwhile, her family lives with the time-consuming chores of life without electricity. She and her husband, Edgar, spend hundreds of dollars a month on unleaded gas for a generator that lights only part of their house. They cannot keep fresh food at home because they cannot run a refrigerator. She makes daily trips to her mother's house, which has electricity, to pick up food. On winter mornings, Haskan rises early to start a propane heater to warm their manufactured home before the children get up. But the heater does not warm the entire house and her children, she said, get sick because of the cold. "In the morning, I would like for my kids to at least eat cereal," she said. "But I don't have the milk." The Claws did not own a generator. They cooked dinner on a propane stove, lighted the house with kerosene lamps and warmed their home with wood. Darlene counsels students at the Aneth Community School, and Julius works for Mobil Oil on the reservation. After spending the day at work, they often came home winter evenings and chopped wood in the headlights of the truck. The mesa has little running water, forcing the Claws and others to drive to Cortez to fill 50-gallon barrels to bring home. For showers, they heat water, five gallons at a time, then mix it with cooler water in a tank. Until 1995, the Claws lived in Montezuma Creek, not far from the mesa near Aneth, where electricity was hooked up. But, like other young couples, they wanted to buy a home, and moved to the mesa. After receiving a home-site lease, they applied for electricity. But another member of the tribe fought the application, saying they located their home where his cattle graze. They finally prevailed, and almost four years later got the power line. Darlene Claw's sister, Cora Tso, received electricity at her home almost a year ago. The mother of three children, ages 3 to 10, she still rents an apartment at the Aneth Community School where she washes the dishes and her family can shower. Tso is saving to buy a water pump, water tanks and septic system for her home so she can stop renting the apartment. Before getting electricity, she and her children ate a lot of canned food and used an ice chest to keep food cool in the summer. "I got tired of canned meat," she said. Despite the hardship, Tso, the Claws and others laughed about the difficulties. Tso joked about driving to Cortez for water, saying, "We get it just for coffee." She cited one advantage of living on the mesa: Miles away from mountain ranges, buildings and other interference, they get great TV reception -- now that they have electricity. They say stations come in all the way from Chicago -- and they don't even have to pay for cable to get them. For some, electricity has arrived. Lights shimmer where only the moon and stars once shone down. But of all the changes those power lines brought, what is the most important? The answer is always the same: It is easier for our children to study and learn than it was for us. San Juan County Commissioner Mark Maryboy grew up on the reservation without electricity. Studying under the light of a kerosene lamp, he was careful not to burn too much fuel. Maryboy went on to earn a history degree from the University of Utah. "Today I have running water in my house," he said. "I have electricity, and my daughter can study." Education, parents say, will give Navajo children the opportunity to be whatever they want, and to go wherever they want, even if it means leaving the reservation. Each Sunday the Claws' two boys catch a bus to go to private school in Arizona. Every Friday their parents pick them up for the weekend. Their daughter, Eudora, is enrolled in the gifted-and-talented program at the Aneth Community School. In their home on the mesa, amid elegant Navajo rugs and family pictures, her paintings hang on the wall. Her mother tells of a school project for which Eudora made a timeline of 30 important events in President Clinton's life. When the work was finished, she sent a copy to the White House. A short time later, a card came back with a note from the president. She even received e-mail at school from the White House. The night electricity lighted their house for the first time, her parents let Eudora watch movies -- "Titanic" and "Beauty and the Beast" -- on the VCR until past midnight. But before the movies, Eudora switched on the computer in the living room. She played an educational game. "She waited four years to turn on that computer," her mother said. "Let Us Consider The Human Brain As A Very Complex Photographic Plate" 1957 G.H. 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