The Big Trip: The Marvelous Corn Palace

As I leave Pipestone, I say on the tape, “Ever since St. Paul I thought that everything was new and it was all beginning. It’s getting even newer as I, in a few minutes, cross into South Dakota. All the other states, I’ve been in or driven through before. This is new. This is brand new. I’m going where I feel no one has ever gone, yet it’s only me. I need to know what is true in me, I need to understand what it is I believe, and know what is eternal about what I believe—to know a little bit about the Red Road and know where my own road crosses it.”

The signs for Wall Drug are coming fast and furious now.

• “Wall Drug of South Dakota—Then Mount Rushmore.”
• “Horse ‘Twitches’—Wall Drug.” (I never did learn what horse “twitches” were.)
• “Everything Under the Sun—Wall Drug of South Dakota.”
• “191 Miles to Wall Drug.”
• “All Roads Lead to Wall Drug.”
• “Wall Drug As Told By The Aukland Star.”
• “Free Ice Water—Wall Drug.”

It’s really amazing how I’ve always heard talk about wide open spaces—and now, seeing South Dakota, I understand what they mean. It sort of makes you love the country, love the space. I just can’t get over how terribly cramped the D.C. area seems to me now in my heart.

I took a detour into Hartford, population 1200. The sign at the gas station I stopped at proclaims they are “big on being small.” And two young boys on bicycles stopped and came over to me as I was filling up my gas tank, said hi to me, and asked where I was from. When I told him I was from Washington, D.C., he let out a big whoop of amazement. “Why in the world are you traveling through this town?” he asked. “Why are you on this trip? Where are you going? Do you know people out here? How can you be going someplace where you don’t know a soul?” He peppered me with questions, and seemed slightly mystified.

I found out that he and his family have lived in this town “ever since I came back from the hospital.” They’ve traveled a bit themselves, visiting relatives in Washington state (“it’s really nice out there”). I tell the boys my story, amazed at their friendliness, their unguardedness toward a stranger, delighted with their warmth and interest.

The Big Trip: Pipestone

The Butterfield Café had a terrific breakfast special: 2 eggs, 2 cakes, 2 sausage, 2 bacon, $2.75. The bacon was extraordinary. The waitress wore jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. There were signs for Mountain Dew on several of the walls, reflecting their overuse on the sides of the buildings in this little town, and everyone said, “You bet!”

All the folks in the café were regulars. They helped themselves to coffee, sat in the same seats each day, and the cook would come out and sit with them when he wasn’t busy. I learned that Butterfield’s main industry was its chicken processing plant. These guys slaughtered chickens for a living, killing some 60,000 of them a day, most of them destined for pot pies and such (not Perdue quality chicken, which I learned are mainly processed in Washington state).

Butterfield’s other claim to fame was its annual “Camping Bee” with its “Hiawatha Days,” about which I unfortunately could learn nothing, though there were these ancient steam tractors on permanent display at their fairgrounds. A kid in town said that Butterfield had a population of 900; the visitors I met the previous night while camping said it was around 600. Either way, welcome to small town America.

A murder of crows (I love terms of venery, those collective nouns for groups of animals: a shrewdness of apes, an exaltation of larks, a storytelling of ravens) were congregating over my campground, which I passed on my way out of town. Felt slightly ominous.

The Big Trip: Equinox

After the Inipi ceremony and the evening with Virgil, I needed a day to process everything. I left St. Paul after breakfast, and wandered around southern Minnesota on country roads and headed toward Mankato.

Mankato is a Lakota word meaning “blue earth,” and (perhaps not surprisingly) it’s located in Blue Earth county. Now, I had visited Mankato fifteen, maybe seventeen, years earlier. I lived in St. Croix for my high school and college years, and my summer job for several years running was to work in a Christian bookstore run by a missionary couple, Gary and his wife Marty. So during Thanksgiving break at college one year, I didn’t have enough money to fly back home to St. Croix, so my employers arranged for me to spend the holiday with Marty’s parents on a farm in southwestern Minnesota.

Back then it was a long bus ride from Minneapolis to tiny Mankato, which seemed at the time to be the last outpost of civilization, then an even longer ride to the snowy prairie wilds where Marty’s father gave me a toboggan ride over his fallow cornfields, pulling me along by his tractor. It was a lovely time. The trip back to college, however, was a disaster; my bus to Mankato turned over in a ditch, and we slept on the floor in a bus station overnight.

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday. Today you’ll see a strange sight: people walking around with smudges on their foreheads, like gray bindis over their third eyes, or like someone stubbed out a cigarette on them. These are people who have come from an Ash Wednesday service that begins the forty days of Lent.

Early in the service, ashes from burned palm fronds, leftovers from the previous year’s Palm Sunday celebration, are placed on the worshipers’ foreheads. Sometimes the smudge looks like a small cross, sometimes it’s just a smudge. As the ashes are imposed, the minister says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.

I never went in for the whole Lenten penitential/self-abnegation thing. For me, Ash Wednesday was more existential. It was a meditation about mortality, about our connection to the earth, about our union with everything that lives, about impermanence. Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.

I also like that it comes the day after Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday,” the day of feasting before the traditional Lenten fast. I like that it’s the last day of the Carnival season, a heady Bacchanalia in most parts of the world. I especially like that “Carnival” is derived from the Latin carne vale: “Farewell, flesh!”—as apt an adieu to physical existence as it is to meat during the fast.

The Big Trip: The Day My Life Changed

The drive itself took, what, fifteen minutes? Twenty at most. At the time, St. Paul was definitely Minneapolis’s poorer, more down-at-heels twin. Now it’s described as a somewhat bookish brother to Minneapolis in that it is festooned with small liberal arts colleges, tightly adherent to tradition, fastidious in its street level presentation, and less interested in the high-rise, glass-sheathed architecture meant to be appreciated by “angels and aviators.”

I arrived early at Mazakute Episcopal Mission, which was named for Paul Mazakute, the first Native American ordained in the Episcopal Church. I nervously entered the small church in the run-down part of town, and searched for the Rev. Virgil Foote, with whom I had scheduled an interview for The Witness magazine (which sadly ceased publication in 2003 at the age of 86). Foote is a Lakota, and his wife Kathleen, also an Episcopal priest, is white. Together they ministered in this little church to a blended congregation: about 70% of them were Native Americans of several different tribes, the rest white, black, and Latino. They said their ministry represented the place where the Red Road and the White Road cross.

The Big Trip: The Minneapolis Drag Show

As I look at the map and retrace my path, I’m rather mystified by the route I took. Some of it makes sense; some of it worked out so well that you know there was some divine synchronicity involved; some of it doesn’t make any sense at all.

Like today’s trip from the Mirror Lake to the Twin Cities. If I were going to stick to the interstates, why wouldn’t I take the one that headed directly there? Why would I head west toward Albert Lea, then due north, if I wasn’t going to take any scenic detours?

In western Wisconsin were some really interesting shale formations. My notes talk about rock towers jutting up out of nowhere, formations that were once little islands, apparently, and mentions Castle Rock by name, though I can’t find any record of such a place online. I drove by a Castle Rock Lake; maybe I saw a sign for it and confused it with the landscape I was seeing. Having my eyes deceive me would become a theme for this leg of the journey.

The Big Trip: Mirror Lake

Day 4 began with me leaving Lake Forest and heading up to Wisconsin. Wisconsin, as close as it was, might as well have been another world; everything in our world centered on Chicago, not points north. I’d avoid the interstates and stick to the smaller, more scenic roads. This one took me to the deliciously tacky Wisconsin Dells, where I hoped to spend the afternoon being silly, then head off to find a campground.

On the way there, I passed André’s Steak House (“Never a Bum Steer!”); a place that sold minnows, and nothing but minnows; L’il Richard’s Bar (“Polka Fest This Saturday!”); End of the Line Caboose Motel; Popeye’s Cocktails and Casual Dining (“Homemade Apple Pie, World’s Best”); and a decidedly surreal sign on the side of a country road that read, “Airplane Crossing Ahead, Watch Out for Low Flying Planes”—with no airfield anywhere in evidence. I wondered if I had started hallucinating.

Interlude

All sorrow comes from fear.
From nothing else.
When you know this,
You become free of it,
And desire melts away.
You become happy
And still.

Ashtavakra Gita 11:5
From The Heart of Awareness: A Translation of the Ashtavakra Gita, by Thomas Byrom

The Big Trip: The Return of Henry VIII

Ah, the flatlands! Driving east from Rockford, I’m finding the prairie very refreshing—all these wide vistas, this great expanse of sky. How I hated the plainness of it all (pun intended) when I went to college up here. Something in me is hungry for boundlessness. Today I’m heading back to my alma mater, Lake Forest College, for a visit with some old friends.

As I drove through McHenry County, farms were absolutely everywhere; the one other place I saw that wasn’t a farm was a tiny house that sold hay and straw.

But then things started changing. First I passed an ancient-looking stone silo right next to the road that was being used as a gatehouse for a large and rather grand home; a beautiful and intricately carved wooden door replaced whatever had been there originally. So strange to see this in the middle of farmland.

There were other oddities as well. A gigantic sign in front of an otherwise normal-looking farm proclaimed, “Mink Barn, Furs by Talledis, Fur Barn, 1/2 Mile.” (The sign depicted a woman wearing a fur coat. Not your normal farmer’s togs.) Then there was the sign for Illusion Farm, though the farm itself certainly seemed real enough.

The Big Trip: Illi-noise

I left the idylls of Ohio for the ills of the interstate. At least it went by quickly. The moment I got off the interstate, I saw twenty-five vultures (yes, I counted them: twenty-five turkey vultures) gliding in a vague circle above a stand of trees. Of course my mind immediately goes to the macabre—has the highway killer struck again?—but it was more likely a dead or dying animal in that little grove. Twenty-five of them, just soaring and circling. Waiting.

Then the wind starts whipping up. I had forgotten what the prairie winds are like. Even the big rigs seemed to be having trouble staying where they should be. I was being seriously buffeted.

When I drove through Gary, Indiana, I was shocked to see no smokestacks billowing forth. Fifteen years earlier, the sky was a sickly gray-green from all the pollution, and now—nothing. Clear skies. Clean city. Amazing how things had changed so dramatically. It gave me hope.

Coming back into Chicago gave me a definite thrill. For four years I took the train from Lake Forest into Chicago frequently, once or twice a month at the very least. I saw a stunning production of Equus there the first week I was in town, and I dearly loved the Art Institute and the Chicago Symphony and shopping at Water Tower Place. But I admit I went there most often for more prurient pursuits, and I felt a stranger there from first to last. The city always smelled of desperation to me.

The Big Trip: Day 1

Silver Spring, Maryland, where I lived at the time, is terminally suburban. It creeps up to the border of Washington, D.C., and sprawls for miles into Montgomery County, becoming the second largest city in Maryland after Baltimore.

I grew up one town over, in Takoma Park, but after college, Silver Spring became our home. Not Home in the big sense—that will always be Vermont, despite the fact that I only lived there for two years—but it’s where my parents lived, where my first apartment was, where my father died, where I shared a house with my mother. Leaving Silver Spring on a great adventure was a symbol for leaving an inherited mindset behind and trying to see with new eyes.

It is September 17, a Tuesday. Somehow it’s important that I mark the time of my departure precisely: 11:26 a.m. My trip takes me up route 270, where I visit my great grandmother’s homestead in the tiny town of Boyds, Maryland. My great uncle’s general store there still bears his name. Such a flood of memories: summer nights chasing lightning bugs and drinking black cows, screen doors banging as children ran in and out of the house happily, sitting on back lawns with friendly neighbors, the sound of cicadas buzzing furiously, the feel of the graveyard beneath my feet at the little country church. There was something quietly mystical about that town back then. There still is.

The Big Trip: What Happened the Night Before

When they heard about my impending cross-country trip, my friends Wayne and Sue arranged a Talking Stick ceremony for me. We had done these sorts of gatherings before. Theirs always centered on a single individual who was in need of support. Perhaps someone was facing a health crisis; perhaps another needed counsel and guidance on a particular topic. But most often it was done for someone undergoing a transition in his or her life: the end of a marriage, the beginning of a career. For me, it was this trip, this quest.

Sue invited me over early, and suggested I go down to their basement and take a sauna. It was one of those free-standing sauna rooms that could seat one or two at the most. And it was lovely. I cranked up the heat, way higher than was recommended, leveling off only when I started experiencing an . . . altered state of consciousness. That wasn’t my original intent, but it served as a fitting symbol for the trip to come.

At one point, as I shifted position, I burned my butt on something. Made a serious welt, like I had been branded. As I was majorly communing with the Divine at the time (the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, not the late drag queen of John Waters film fame), I called it God’s Burn for the duration of the trip.

The Big Trip: Prologue

In early 1991, while being smudged with a combination of five herbs sacred to the Yaqui tradition, I had a spontaneous and rather overwhelming out-of-body experience. I met with some deeply spiritual people at church—a very cool Episcopal church in Washington, D.C.—about this experience, and they told they felt God was calling me to do a serious study of shamanism, or was in fact calling me to become a shaman.

Almost immediately I had a driving desire to go to the Pacific Northwest to see the places I had visited in my OOBE. Some of this may well have had to do with the confluence of two television programs, Northern Exposure, a show that had thoroughly stolen my heart and which, though set in Alaska, was filmed in the little town of Roslyn, Washington; and Twin Peaks, the beautiful and deeply twisted drama from David Lynch, which was filmed in the towns of Snoqualmie and North Bend, about an hour from Roslyn. Of course I had to visit these towns as well.

It would take a month. I had $2,000, and a car that had no business being on the road, much less driving across the country and back again. I would spend many nights camping in the national parks and forests, despite the fact that I had previously done only two overnight camping trips before, both of them close to my home, and had a body that was built for comfort, not for sleeping on the ground in a tent.

When Holly Died

Holly was my friend, probably my best friend for a while, in college. She appeared sometime during my sophomore year. She was a little whiff of a thing, so thin that a strong gust could blow her away. I don’t recall how we met, exactly, but we were inseparable.

The only problem was the hole in her heart. Her blue lips should have been the give-away.

She was born with that hole in her heart, and though she’d had an operation as a baby, it wasn’t entirely successful, and her doctors were certain she wouldn’t survive another one. She could only walk five hundred feet or so before she’d have to stop for a bit and catch her breath. But she treated it all with a characteristic light touch. “And when I faint—which I almost certainly will, it happens a couple of times a year—try to keep me from hurting myself when I hit the ground, and just let me lie there for a while. I’ll ‘come to’ after fifteen minutes or so.”

Well, the one time she fainted with me, she never “came to.”

I would stop by her room on the way to dinner, and we’d walk the rest of the way together. This one evening we were heading down the hall in her dorm when she collapsed. I waited four, maybe five, minutes for her to revive, then called 911. The paramedics came and worked diligently.

For the past thirty years I’ve told everyone that she never regained consciousness, that she died peacefully in my arms. I’ve been lying all this time. She did revive, briefly, as the paramedics were working on her. And she screamed. Her eyes flew open in abject horror, her face contorted with fear and pain, and she screamed a long and terrifying and (dare I say it?) blood-curdling scream, then died.

They worked on her for another hour, mostly at the hospital, but to no avail, of course.

That scream has haunted me all these years. At the time I interpreted it as some carry-over from whatever place her soul had gone while she was unconscious; I was devoutly Evangelical in those days, and as she hadn’t Given Her Live to Christ in any formal way, I was sure that she had seen a glimpse of the fires of Hell. And now she was dead, and it was too late.

Three days after her funeral (a surprisingly jolly affair, considering, though some of the humor was unintentional—her family and friends came from Ottowa, Illinois, which they kept pronouncing as Aaaaaaaaaaattawa Ellenoise, and they drank melk rather than milk), my friend Frances had a dream.

She was walking in a beautiful field of wildflowers, and Holly appeared, looking marvelously healthy and full of life. At one point in their conversation, Holly said, “Let’s run!”

Frances protested: “But you have a hole in your heart—you can’t run!”

Holly dashed away and called over her shoulder, “Catch me!” The dream ended with Holly’s laughter lingering on the breeze.

That dream gave me enormous peace. I knew with great certainty that she was now with God, and whole, and happy. But the memory of that scream just before she died has remained shocking and upsetting to me, and because it didn’t fit in with the happy ending, I’ve simply deleted it from the story as I’ve told it over the years.

It’s taken me a long time to recognize the power of the human spirit in fighting to live, or in becoming resigned to death. Sometimes the clinging to life seems inappropriate (I’ve worked shamanically for more than one person who should clearly unclench their hold on this world and go gently into that good night); sometimes the resignation seems entirely too premature. I now think that Holly was struggling to breathe, fighting with every fiber of her being to live, like a drowning person desperately trying to break the surface of the water. And she did, for a moment. She gasped in a final lung of air, eyes wide, and perhaps frightened, before sinking back into the sea.

Now when I see that screaming face, which is still incredibly vivid in my memory even thirty-two years later, I see the human struggle toward life, the will and desire and power of the spirit. I’ve come to believe that survival isn’t always so important, but that struggle, the wrestling with life and death that is the essence of our physical existence, is (pardon the pun) vital.

Maybe it’s being 51 and realizing that life is short. Maybe it’s finally saying, to God or to myself, “I want to live. I choose to live. Maybe for the first time in my life, I really want to be here.” But whatever the reason, I now see the moments before Holly died in a different light. It’s time to honor that struggle, that scream, instead of running from it.

Thoughts? Comments?