A Planned Community

  Sixteen miles north of Window Rock is the town of Navajo, New Mexico. This town is located on Navajo Highway 12 and sits just inside New Mexico. The town is only about one-third mile from the Arizona border. 
  Navajo was a planned community that was built by Navajo Forest Products Industries in the 1960s to provide housing for employees of the new sawmill that had been built to harvest the lumber from the nearby Chuska Mountains.  The mill went out of business in the 1980s and now sits silent, looking almost spectral, leaving the nearby town to wither away into the dust.  
  The town of Navajo was drawn up on blueprints and was built from scratch in the 
pinon/juniper grassland. Most people do not think of forest land when they think of the Navajo Reservation, but there is, particularly in the Chuska Mountains and  on the Defiance Plateau and in other high elevation locales as well. This is why the sawmill and the accompanying town of Navajo were constructed, to provide a source of income and jobs for the tribe. 
  During its heyday, the town of Navajo had about 3,200 people. Now it has about 1,800, but the population loss has slowed to a trickle. The town perseveres  even though its primary reason for existence has disappeared.  It survives because of the schools. All grades are represented, kindergarten through 12th grade. All of the schools, as well as the school district itself, are called
Navajo Pine. The town also continues to survive because of the rather large supermarket called
Navajo Pine Supermarket. The school district, the gas station and  the supermarket provide the jobs in this impoverished community. Many people commute to other towns to work.
  The most vivid memory I have of Navajo is the non-functional traffic lights at the intersection of
Cleveland Boulevard (Navajo Highway 12) and Cedar Avenue. The traffic lights have been sitting there, turned off and non-operational, for close to ten years that I know of, ever since I went through Navajo for the first time. Seems like they could be taken down instead of just sitting there being exposed to the harsh winters and the summer monsoons. Meanwhile, Cedar Avenue, the street that was once busy enough to warrant traffic lights at the intersection with the highway, runs past mostly abandoned houses now and the street is full of giant potholes, some of them one to two feet deep.
  I am impressed that Navajo, New Mexico survives when its sole reason for existence went out of business nearly thirty years ago.