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As impactful as our time with Kathy and Walter was, there were other people and places shaping our time at St. Christophers. We took daily trips to the San Juan river to escape the heat and wash the dust away, even if just for a moment. The river was the color of our own Schuylkill river. You could not see your hand even a couple inches beneath the surface, and yet it was refreshing and lovely. We met folks who had driven hours and waited years to get their permit to enter the river here for rafting trips, and learned generally that Bluff was a South West tourist destination along with Bryce Canyon, Monument Valley, Mesa Verde, and so many more spectacular places. We encountered cyclists riding across the country going through our little town, as well as seasonal tourists exploring the general region.

On our first afternoon we visited the local tourist attraction, the “Fort”. It was a recreated fort of tiny cabins in a circle with a makeshift fence around the perimeter to protect its inhabitants. We had already been to our mission site and learned a bit about the native people and community and this “fort” represented a different version of history. It was about the Latter Day Saints community’s discovery of Bluff, Utah along the San Juan river in the early 1880s. It portrayed the native people as threatening and dangerous, and the settlers as civilized. We met some of the volunteers there who were likely in their mid-sixties and had recently transplanted to Bluff from Alberta, Canada to serve the LDS Church. 

They told us stories about the settlers and the natives that directly contradicted what we were coming to understand about the peaceful Diné people, painting a picture of gentle, humble Christian servants being met by violent thieving indians.  Interestingly, the fort volunteers offered to take us dune buggy riding through the canyons and to some incredible cliff dwellings. They described vivid adventures exploring the region at high speeds and even pulled out their iphones to share pictures of groups of them racing dune buggies side by side, others climbing the cliffs and exploring the desert. We would later find out that this was all reservation land, sacred land, and that they were not allowed to be in any of those places unless explicitly invited or chaperoned by the Diné people. 

The LDS community mostly abandoned Bluff in the late 19th century after terrible periods of droughts and floods, after attempts at farming turned into attempts at ranching. They left a handful of Victorian houses and tiny cabins. The picture unfolding to us was of Father Liebler, an Episcopal priest, driving into this discarded town with a handful of brothers and sisters in ministry, and breathing a new kind of Spirit into it; one that more accurately reflects the Gospel as Episcopalians understand it. Instead of hostility he showed hospitality, and interestingly the region and the people welcomed him. There were many conversations about these realizations as the week went along; how carefully we all have to collect information, ask questions, listen discerningly, and begin to understand for ourselves who God is and how God works.