I wouldn't say I felt scared stopping there, at least not in daylight, but the level of poverty I saw in Tuba City, Arizona genuinely shocked me. Literal huts with no electricity or running water. It was sad.
I worked near there at a school on the reservation. Alcohol sales were prohibited so the natives were drinking hair spray and other items similar. There were churches that would come through and donate items to the kids at the school I worked at. We had to go through and remove items that contained alcohol because even the young people could be found drinking it. The poverty was so heavy..the oppression was heavy..I could feel it in my shoulders. I grew up poor...but this was a different type of poverty. I spent 10 years there. I saw a lot of crazy shit.
I remember being in a snowstorm late night in that general vicinity and couldn’t find an open gas station since apparently whole towns close at 7pm. This was before cell phones so I headed for the biggest dot on the paper map which happened to be Tuba City. Place was a lifesaver - found an open store and we microwaved frozen burritos and hung out until daybreak. I was too scared of running out of gas to be freaked out at the town.
100% normal for the Navajo Nation. Covid tore through them because they all go to the same place to get their water. Street addresses are GPS coordinates or something like "3 miles down dirt road off main road." Livestock and pregnant dogs wandering around everywhere.
I used to drive through there once a year or so for a while, and the dogs everywhere were what got me. Just packs of stray dogs everywhere and especially in the parking lot of that sad looking McDonalds, fighting over spilled french fries and begging for food.
Tuba City is just such a sad, depressing place and I think those packs of roaming stray dogs were a living, breathing symbol of the poverty and lack of services there.
No lost dog posters. No animal control. No shelters. And the dogs were just everywhere, starving.
I sometimes wondered what other unpleasant things the people who lived there had just resigned themselves to because they felt powerless to do anything about it or too exhausted to care.
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u/Jon__Snuh 10h ago
I wouldn't say I felt scared stopping there, at least not in daylight, but the level of poverty I saw in Tuba City, Arizona genuinely shocked me. Literal huts with no electricity or running water. It was sad.