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.

I believe Sue made me some supper, then the small group gathered. There were three rules to a Talking Stick ceremony: (1) when the stick-holder is speaking, not only is no one else allowed to interrupt, one is asked not to even prepare a comment about or reaction to what is being said until the speaker is finished, ensuring that everyone is completely present at all times and is not off in one’s own head somewhere; (2) one should endeavor to speak the truth (that is, one’s own truth) as fully and completely as one knows it, with great love and compassion; and (3) what is talked about in the circle is sacred, and is not to be discussed outside the circle.

Each person gave me some small token to take on the trip with me. Their words were challenging and nourishing and deeply supportive.

In my journal that night, I wrote:

I think this trip means to be my death; I hope it means it figuratively. I have, however, made out my will, and the sense of death is strong, though I have a curiously peaceful acceptance of whatever is to come. I’ve left the recent issue of the Utne Reader that was all about death on the top of a stack of magazines in my room, just to give everyone a start when they see it after my funeral: Did he know something? I don’t know what I’m to encounter. I think I’ve got most of the details in place, but it will be a bear packing and loading everything into the car, and then that eight-hour drive to Ohio (not counting lunch somewhere)! But right now I have a satisfying peace about it all: no nervousness, and a pleasant sense of expectancy. Is the trip itself the only journey? Am I to encounter something/someone out there, or experience something profound? I’ve tried not to heighten my expectations for fear it will throw the experience, if there is to be one.

Of course, I didn’t realize at the time that the trip would be more emotionally challenging, more fun (and deliciously tacky), more scenically beautiful, more prosaic and mundane, and more spiritually transformative than I could ever have imagined.

Tomorrow’s episode: The Trip Begins.

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.

Along the way, I interviewed a Lakota in Minnesota who was also an Episcopal priest, and was invited to participate in an Inipi, or traditional sweat lodge ceremony. I saw the Corn Palace and Wall Drug in South Dakota, and spent a night lost and terrified in the Black Hills. I lost my wallet for a few days in British Columbia after visiting some of the Canadian glaciers, fell in love with Seattle, had revelatory experiences in Washington’s national forests. And in Montana, where I knew not a soul within its vast 147,046 square miles, I actually bumped into someone I’d eaten dinner with in D.C.

My great friend Indigo Bunting reminded me recently that I had given her a copy of my trip journal, which included a transcription of the tape recordings I had made along the way, the postcards I sent back home to my mother in Maryland, and written journal entries. Superb organizer that I am, I had long since lost my originals, so she was gracious enough to send me a photocopy. I think it’s time to tell the story of that time, that journey that was such a seminal and initatory experience in my life.

I’ll likely interrupt it from time to time with non-trip-related blog entries, and I may take several entries to describe some of the events. I immersed myself in kitsch, had a few bizarre and hilarious encounters, and found a spiritual path that has been profound and transformative.

I hope you will take the trip with me, and will give me your thoughts along the way.

Tomorrow’s episode: What Happened the Night Before.

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?