As Fate

Would Have It

I Hear

The Siren’s Song

By the late 1950s I was living the life of a teen-ager in Southern California - school, homework, music, music, music.

“Let’s go to the kitchen and practice dancing for the sock hop,” my sister Carol suggested. “It’s time for some new moves.” Turning the radio volume up high, she grabbed my hand and twirled me around. Elvis’ booming voice began to rock ’n roll us all over the room. Friday nights were all about football games, dances and time with friends. Beyond the fun we were taught to be super responsible, and on Saturdays there was more homework, housework and yard work. We couldn’t be with our friends again over the week-end until everything was done.  

With a smile, I remember my first kiss. I was only thirteen, but that didn’t keep me from having dreamy eyes all day long, fantasizing about a boy I met on summer vacation. Larry McLaughlin was my Canadian heartthrob. Photos from that time suggest I was falling off the face of the earth in a dizzy swirl of puppy love. My mind was anywhere but on Arizona. In fact, I’d never been there. Long put aside were my View Master and my fantasy adventures in the red rocks. Then one day Sedona called to me again through the beauty of an enchanting canyon. 

The California morning was hot with Santa Ana winds moving through our neighborhood. They dried out everything in sight and knocked down fences. I walked against the unyielding  air and leaned into  it to see how far I could bend without falling over. When it swirled in another direction and moved behind me, I enjoyed the extra burst of forward motion. By the time I got to my friend’s house my hair was twisted into spikes. Marcia opened her front door and laughed at the sight of me. 

“I know I’m early. I can just wait here.” I stood in the entry, ready to catch my daily ride to high school with her.

“You can wait in my dad’s study.” She followed me into a room with floor to ceiling shelves, filled with books. The room had an air of peaceful respect about it. “These books are by Zane Grey. My dad has the whole set. I bet you’d like them. Take a look at this one, and I’ll check with Dad to see if you can borrow it.”  I was very surprised that one of his books was in my hands. It was part of an expensive-looking set. I looked at the cloth and leather-bound Call of the Canyon. The pages were thick with rough, uneven edges. The table of contents listed twelve unnamed chapters. Turning to the first one and reading a few pages I noticed something familiar, the name Flagstaff. My sister Carol had just applied to a college in Flagstaff, Arizona. I wondered if this was the same place.

After school, I usually hid out in my room to read whatever fascinating book or magazine I could get my hands on. Today it was Call of the Canyon. With eagerness I started reading. The story was about a young woman who was traveling to northern Arizona in the early 1900s. She was going there to reunite with her beloved fiancé. When questioned by her family about the wisdom of embarking on such a wild adventure, she said she was following the voice in her soul.   

Zane Grey’s description of the San Francisco Peaks, volcanic mountains topped with glistening snow, drew me into the setting. Something about them caught my breath in remembrance. He described how the peaks emerged from the flat lands around Flagstaff. I ignored the fact that the bareness was created when the Ponderosa Pine forest was clear-cut to develop the lumber industry in that part of the country. It was reassuring to me that vast woodlands of the same trees existed just outside the city limits. What I couldn’t ignore were his descriptions of Navajo people, walking near the train as it came into Flagstaff. They were very thin, and dressed in torn, ragged, dusty clothing. This reality touched my heart.

I could hardly put the book down and picked it up again when I went to bed that night. We had to turn our lights off at ten o’clock during school nights, so I read under the covers with a flashlight. Waking up early the next morning, I opened the book again.  Towering walls of golden red rocks were depicted in Oak Creek Canyon, south of Flagstaff. The sound of the creek traveling the length of the canyon, and the wind in the pines, were inviting. Over and over, beautiful scenes of wild nature were described. I wanted so much to be there, to see the colors, hear the sounds of the canyon and smell every fragrance. The canyon sang to me from some distant past, inviting me to live there again one day, and to experience nature in her transforming beauty.

* * * *

Within a few months I’d read three books by Zane Grey - Call of the Canyon, Vanishing American and Riders of the Purple Sage. The setting for all of them was Northern Arizona. At the end of summer my family took a road trip there to deliver my sister Carol to her first day of school at Arizona State College in Flagstaff. We bypassed Oak Creek Canyon on that trip, coming into town from the west on a state highway. I couldn’t convince my parents to go the longer route. They reminded me it was Carol’s special trip to college after all, not mine. 

It was 1959, almost forty years after Zane Grey had written about Flagstaff in Call of the Canyon. Some things remained unchanged from that time, some were changing. Buckboard wagons lined the state highway across from the train station. They belonged to Navajo people who came into town to sell their handmade blankets and jewelry.  With their horses tied to antique iron hitching posts at the edge of the sidewalk, they stood silently beside their wagons. The women were dressed in colorful velvet and satin blouses and skirts of rich purples, blues and reds. The men wore Levis and cotton shirts. They were all adorned with heavy silver and turquoise jewelry. The scene of buckboards, horses and Navajo people dressed in their best was very romantic.   

I’d heard about them in elementary school when a missionary came to our class after Christmas one year and asked us to donate our favorite gift to the Navajo children, described as very poor. My best present was a small doll with green hair and glassy green eyes. She came with a white trunk, edges trimmed in red, with brass corners. Inside were dresses and several pairs of tiny shoes. It was a sacrifice for me to give it all away. Many years later, when I was part of a charitable group that donated to Navajo families through giveaway circles, I heard first-hand from some of the elders how they felt about the dolls they’d received when they were  children.

 “Remember how we got ‘dolly sickness’ from all the glassy-eyed dolls given to us by missionaries?” a woman asked her childhood friends in the circle. They all laughed, but I remained silently embarrassed, remembering my donated doll that had seemed so special to me. 

But with my first glimpse of the Navajo people in Flagstaff, I fell in love with their quiet ways, colorful clothing and silver jewelry with sky-blue stones. Their long hair, coiled with yarn into a bun at the back of the neck, was both beautiful and functional in their desert environment. I felt that I just had to see more of their life and convinced my dad to drive me to their Reservation late one afternoon while my mom and sister Pat got Carol settled into her dorm room. 

It was just Dad and me and he was always a man of few words. He drove us silently to the east for about an hour toward the silhouette of a pastel mountain range. In the distance, we saw a family in a buckboard leaving a trail of dust behind them as they returned home from a day in Flagstaff.  We slowly passed through a small town, eerie in its silence. Where the state highway ended, a whirling dust devil roamed across the dirt road and disappeared into the clear blue sky. There were no people in sight, just herds of curly-headed sheep inside branch fences. Small homes were dotted across the land, and some of them, made of earth and wood, were round in shape.

When the evening sky began to dim, Dad turned the truck toward the west. The sight of the San Francisco Peaks, with the sun shining in rays of light behind them, stilled my thoughts. Softly stunned into complete awe, I opened the window and breathed in the high desert air and the life all around us. As I absorbed this moment of being one with the earth, one with the mountains and one with the sky, a feeling of pure happiness and love engulfed me. My heart had opened into the Oneness of all Creation.

 * * * *

Over the years I would return many times to the San Francisco Peaks and the Navajo Reservation. On some of my journeys to their land, I met elders who greeted me by touching my hand with their weathered hands, soft as a feather. From their presence and their stories I learned of their gentle way of being, even in the midst of their harsh desert lives.

Meditation

Breath of Life

Sit quietly and close your eyes.  Become aware of your breathing.  Create a deeper breath, letting your abdomen gently expand and relax.  Continue to breathe this way for awhile.

Imagine a beautiful place where you feel close to nature.  Now you’re there again, breathing in the fresh air and connecting to the earth with all your senses.  You’re aware of fragrances, colors, sounds and sensations. 

You become the earth, the sky and nature all around you, blending with the illuminated particles of light that are the essence of life.

As your awareness expands let your heart open into the Oneness of all Creation.