A Mickey Mouse operation

You've probably never heard of Tommy Yazzie, but if you've driven between Greasewood Springs and Bitahochee on Navajo Route 15, you've seen his art.

And you have probably wondered why a smiling Mickey Mouse is giving you the thumbs up from a rock face in the middle of nowhere.

It's a story Tommy and his daughter Tanisha never get tired of telling. Which is good, since they've had to tell it more than a hundred times over the past nine years to people like this reporter, who finally got curious enough to knock on their door.

Rock Art Mickey dates back nine years to Tanisha's seventh birthday.

Like all 7-year-olds, Tanisha dreamed of going to Disneyland. Except she literally had a dream about going to Disneyland.

"I dreamed I traveled to California, and Mickey Mouse ran up to me to welcome me," recalled Tanisha, now a shy 16-year-old.

Just as Mickey was about to embrace her, she woke up.

Now, most grown-ups would shrug off a dream starring a fictional cartoon character as so much mental white noise. But to the 7-year-old Tanisha, it had the aura of a mystical vision.

A Mickey for all time

Shortly thereafter, Tommy asked his little girl what she would like for her birthday.

"I expected her to say 'a bike,' or 'a pony,'" he recalled.

Instead, she asked for a picture of Mickey Mouse.

No problem, thought Tommy, a construction worker who paints well enough to sell the occasional piece to tourists. He started to prepare a canvas.

"No, Daddy," said Tanisha. "I want a picture of Mickey Mouse on that rock that fell off the mountain."

She was talking about a 25-foot-diameter boulder that had flaked off a rocky outcrop and settled within sight of the road near their home.

"You want me to paint Mickey on the rock?" asked Tommy. "Isn't that like graffiti?"

"No, Daddy," Tanisha responded firmly. "It will be a nice picture of Mickey Mouse that will last forever."

Well, Tommy had asked and Tanisha had answered.

"Now you have to do it," ordered his wife.

To the delight of his daughter, Tommy got out his paints and climbed the hillside to the rock.

Shortly after he completed a likeness of a smiling Mickey giving the thumbs-up sign, he was surprised to see people stopping their cars, hiking up the hillside and taking pictures of it. Visiting the site a few months later, he noticed a well-worn trail and a place where people had pried apart a barbed-wire fence to sneak in for a closer look.

After the painting had been up a couple of years, Tommy was astonished to hear over his police scanner police officers and truckers refer to the rocky outcrop as "Mickey Mouse Point."

"It got to be so people used it as a landmark," he said. "A trucker would say, 'I'm almost home. Just passed the Mickey Mouse.'"

A man collecting cans along the road told Tommy he had picked up three dollars in change under the mural.

"I guess people throw coins at it like a good luck charm or something," Tommy theorized.

Meanwhile, Tanisha was growing up. Finally, at age 12, she got a chance to go to Disneyland. Just like in her dream, there was Mickey Mouse to greet her.

"I couldn't say anything. I just stared at him," she recalled. The family showed the guy in the Mickey Mouse suit a Polaroid picture of Rock Art Mickey.

"He didn't know what to say," Tommy chuckled. "It probably didn't make any sense to him."

Meanwhile, the Yazzies had become minor celebrities. Once a month or so, a curious passerby would knock on their door asking about Rock Art Mickey. Sometimes they would drag Tommy or Tanisha out to the rock to pose for a photograph.

"Once these people from Korea came by," Tommy recalled. "They could barely speak English. They kept pointing to Mickey saying, 'Very famous. Very famous.'"
Tommy figures Rock Art Mickey's photograph has been to just about every country in the world.

As unique as Rock Art Mickey is, he almost had a companion piece. Shortly after word got around about Mickey, an elderly gentleman knocked on Tommy's door. He wanted the artist to paint a mural of Wile E. Coyote chasing Roadrunner on a 30-foot-high cliff behind the Yazzie compound.

"He said he was Coyote Pass Clan and had always identified with Ma'ii," Tommy explained. "He said the coyote chasing the roadrunner would represent him chasing his dreams."

An old man's dream

Tommy wondered what dreams such an old man could have left, but dutifully agreed to paint the mural. But only, he cautioned his new client, if he could figure out a way to do it so he wouldn't fall off the steep cliff and hurt himself.

Tommy went back to Globe, Ariz., where he was helping build a church for his day job. As he was working, he puzzled over the new art project and envisioned a series of climbing ropes anchored to the top of the cliff. He could tie himself to each rope as he painted different sections of the mural so he wouldn't have to worry about falling.

He came home ready to start work on Coyote and Roadrunner. But his wife informed him that the old man's son had come by to tell him the elder had died.

Oh well, thought Tommy, I'll do the painting in his memory.

Then one day the family was eating breakfast outside when, out of nowhere, a lightning bolt struck the cliff and started a rockslide.

"Navajo way, we don't go to a place where lightning has struck," Tommy said. "I told my wife, 'Maybe it's the old man calling me a liar.' She said, 'Be a liar then. Don't go up there.'"

So Rock Art Mickey stands alone in all his bizarre glory. To Tommy, he represents the magic that can happen when adults actually listen to children. To Tanisha, now a student at Holbrook High, he's a reminder of how much her daddy loves her. And an inspiration.

"I think I'd like to be an artist some day," she mused with a shy smile. Maybe she, too, will get her turn to make a child's dream come true.

Back to top ^