WINSLOW — Eight hours before curfew, Chris Long and Shannon Monroe hiked to the side of the road and stuck out their thumbs, hoping for a ride into town. Car after car blasted by, their drivers suddenly unwilling to let a stranger slide into their backseat.

“People are scared,” Monroe said, but eventually they climbed into a passing pickup and headed for the border.

Fifteen minutes later, Long and Monroe leapt from the truck bed and into a Walmart parking lot where nearly everybody wore a mask. They asked the driver for a ride home — she said no — and strapped on ivory facemasks. Then they trudged toward the back of a line that stretched along the entire building.

They had come for their final feast.

“We just get what we need,” Monroe said. “What we can carry home.”

The Navajo Nation was going into lockdown. The tribe has confirmed 698 cases of COVID-19 from the novel coronavirus as of Saturday evening. The virus has killed 24 people.

In an extreme attempt to stymie its spread, President Jonathan Nez placed the entire nation under curfew. For 57 hours from Friday night through early Monday, Nez ordered, everybody must stay home.

"It’s imperative that we make smart decisions to protect the ones we love," Nez said, and the Navajo Nation rushed to be ready.

Churches canceled Easter services. Volunteers scrambled to distribute food and water. Tribal police officers prepared to stop, fine and possibly arrest anybody caught traveling without an emergency. A wooden sign announced the restrictions in bright red letters along Route 87, which leads into the heart of the reservation.

And masses of people descended on the nearest border town — Winslow, Page, Gallup — to stock up for what some feared could be a long stay indoors.

Border runs have long been a necessary inconvenience for much of the Navajo Nation, because there's often nowhere else to go. On the 27,000-square-mile reservation, commercial centers are few and far between. A recent study counted only 13 grocery stores.

That's created a mutual dependence between border towns and thousands of families. The towns offer fresh food, car washes and laundromats. In return, Navajo families prop up a chunk of the towns' economies. A long-term lockdown could devastate both sides.

Here in Winslow, a railroad city with about 10,000 people and a boundless supply of Route 66 memorabilia, the usual Friday rush never arrived. Downtown stores sat dark and empty. Streets fell silent. Only one couple stopped to stand on Winslow's famous corner, and they scurried off quickly, like they knew they shouldn't have been there.

But the curfew crowd came in bunches. They were in a hurry, but social distancing made everything slower. Drivers rubbernecked past the Indian Health Care Center, which had been placed on near-total lockdown. Lines wrapped around fast-food joints that only offered drive-thru service. Safeway security guards wouldn’t let shoppers enter until somebody else left. A Walmart greeter warned people that the line took over half an hour to get through.

Long, 32, and Monroe, 30, were willing to wait. This was their last chance to eat fresh food before the curfew locked them inside with nothing but snacks and dried noodles.

They live together in Birdsprings Chapter, far off the main roads, so close to the Little Colorado River that heavy rains sometimes flooded their house. They called it “Jurassic Park,” partly because the trees looked like dinosaurs but mostly because their land was filled with wildlife. It had everything they needed, except for running water or electricity.

In normal times, that presented fewer problems. They couldn’t store any fresh or frozen food, but Winslow was 15 minutes away. If they wanted chicken and jalapeño poppers for dinner, like they did tonight, they could hitchhike to Walmart and pick up enough for the night.

But in just a few hours, they’d have no choice but to fend for themselves.

“Basically, if we go off the rez, we’re going to get arrested,” Long said.

They didn’t want to go out, anyway. Long said he understood why a curfew was necessary, even though he didn’t even know anybody who’d contracted the virus.

“Not yet,” Long said. “It sucks to say it like that, but someone’s going to get it in Birdsprings.”

He looked at his wife. For weeks he’d tried to make sure his family was prepared. He reminded them to wash their hands, to wear a mask, to stay away from other people. He tried to stay off Facebook, where fear of the virus filled his feed with angry gossip. When he saw elders in crowds, he whispered prayers for their safety.

And the virus was still coming.

“I’m scared,” he said.

♦ ♦ ♦

Jessica Stago had been scared for weeks. From the moment she learned the new coronavirus had reached American shores, she knew it could devastate her homeland.

Stago, 42, lives in Winslow, but spent the past few weeks driving north, organizing donation drives and delivering canned water across the reservation. Now the curfew was coming, and she wouldn’t be allowed to travel on her own land. All she could do was wait for it to end, and hope it would work.

“It can be overwhelmingly sorrowful,” she said of the past few weeks. She was sitting in Winslow City Park, just outside the field where her son should’ve been finishing his senior season of high-school baseball.

Stago understood the realities of the reservation. She grew up splitting time between Winslow and Navajo Nation’s Teesto Chapter, and she knew firsthand that her nation had been deprived of resources. Too many people were stranded, waiting for help that was never going to arrive.

Generations of oppression, followed by decades of neglect, had left the reservation especially vulnerable to the virus. The Navajo Nation contains only a handful of hospitals. Thousands of families still don't have electricity. A third of homes have no running water. Families tend to live in tight quarters, with no room for social distancing.

Now the worst was happening, and the curfew was about to cut off Stago's ability to help. The truck she used to deliver pallets of water was only available on the weekends, but the tribal government declined to issue her group a travel waiver. That left her no way to distribute what she knew could be life-saving aid. A warehouse full of water would likely stay that way. And people who were supposed to stay home would face a life-altering decision: Was it better to stay in a home without water, or to fetch it and risk bringing back the virus?

Those decisions kept Stago up at night. She wished Navajo Nation didn’t have to rely so heavily on the outside world. Her people had sustained themselves for centuries, before settlers disrupted everything. Why now, in this moment of crisis, did so much aid have to come from off the reservation?

“I think a lot of people didn’t realize what we didn’t have,” she said.

But she believed a movement was stirring: The pandemic was exposing the tribe’s dependencies. That the entire system might come crashing down around them. Maybe this time it could be rebuilt by Navajo people, for Navajo people. She dreamed of a Navajo Nation that provided for itself again, a place that kept its talent and tax dollars inside its borders.

Already she’d cofounded a business incubator in Tuba City, hoping to turn bright Navajo minds into entrepreneurs. She’d heard about start-up farms dedicated to feeding their own communities. People her age who lived off the reservation, she said, were all talking about moving back home.

This wasn’t the opportunity she’d envisioned. But Stago didn't want to let it pass.

Now it was a matter of life and death.

♦ ♦ ♦

It didn’t seem that serious to Wilmer Dickson. He kept forgetting about the nighttime travel ban, which has been in place for a week now. A couple of nights ago, he left his home in “the badlands,” a few miles north of the reservation border, and drove toward nearby Dilkon. He was halfway to the store before he remembered.

“We forget the curfew thing,” Dickson said. “People forget. We’re not used to having a curfew.”

The 57-year-old leaned against his pickup truck, waiting for his wife to emerge from Safeway. He lifted a camouflage cap and rubbed his head. “We’re good,” he said. He knew two people who’d contracted the coronavirus, but it hadn’t yet affected his family. They followed all the rules, he said. He hadn’t felt the need to panic.

But now that he thought about it, he said, things had felt different lately.

He noticed it on the radio. Everybody sounded a little more tense. Listeners kept sending in angry comments, berating the hosts for simply delivering bad news.

“They’re kind of abusive on their language,” Dickson said. “They’re getting out of hand with it.”

That wasn’t what he wanted for his tribe. Emergencies were supposed to bring them together, not drive them apart.

“People don’t listen,” he muttered.

A shopping cart squealed closer. Dickson squinted toward the store. His wife trudged toward him, her face covered in disappointment. They’d come in search of Easter gifts for their grandchildren. They needed eggs to hide and food coloring to dye them. But the store was out of both. The store, she told him, was out of a lot of things.

Dickson let out a long, low, breath. They’d have to check Walmart. They couldn’t show up empty-handed, and they’d promised to visit their grandkids on Easter.

How they were going to get there, considering the curfew? Dickson shrugged.

“We’ll take the back roads,” he said.

♦ ♦ ♦

A few hours later, as the sun sat atop the horizon, Floyd Torivio adjusted his pair of latex gloves and drummed his fingers on a pickup truck. The truck bed was filled with twice as many groceries as he usually bought. He ground a toe into the asphalt. He swung one leg back and forth, back and forth, but kept his eyes locked onto Safeway’s front door. His cousin was still shopping, but they were running out of time.

They had one hour until Navajo Nation curfew.

Technically, they didn’t have a curfew at all. Torivio and his cousin, Desiree Timeche, were citizens of the Hopi Tribe, which hadn’t tightened travel to the same extent as their neighbors. But the Hopi reservation is surrounded on all sides by Navajo land. The only way in is to travel through the Navajo Nation.

Hopi Chairman Timothy L. Nuvangyaoma assured tribal members that they’d be allowed to cross, but Torivio didn’t want to risk it.

“We’re trying to get out of here,” he said. He talked in rapid-fire bursts, never letting his eyes leave the door for more than a few seconds. “When they cut them off, they cut off everything for us, too.”

Nuvangyaoma issued a stay-at-home order on March 23, citing the skyrocketing number of cases on surrounding Navajo lands. Most Hopi communities have now closed to visitors.

The restrictions felt tighter every day. “You can’t do anything,” Torivio said. He couldn’t earn a living, because there was no longer anybody to buy his hand-carved kachina dolls. An unemployment check was on its way. It was crop-planting season, but he couldn’t drive to his fields, so he’d settled for a nice clearing behind his house.

Soon, he worried, he wouldn’t even be able to go to the grocery store. So this time, he loaded his cart with as much as his money could buy: cases of Coca-Cola, oversized boxes of Cheez-Its and a giant case of bottled water. He shopped until he had enough, then kept going until he couldn’t afford anything else.

“What I can get here, it’s all I can get,” he said. “Because I don’t know when I can come back.”

A few minutes later, Timeche speed-walked out of the store, wearing a bright yellow mask and pushing an overstuffed shopping cart. “My card wouldn’t even go through,” she said. Eventually, she made it work.

Floyd reached into the cart and pulled out a 24-pack of instant noodles. “I had to max mine out,” he replied.

Timeche rolled the cart to the front of the store, where a security guard sprayed it with sanitizer. Torivio dropped the last of the groceries into the truck bed and slid into the front seat. Timeche took her place behind the wheel. Their doors slammed shut, the engine roared to life and they took off toward home, with 40 minutes until curfew.

Reach reporter Alden Woods at awoods@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8829. Follow him on Twitter @ac_woods.

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