Continental Drifter

By Marianna Harris

Join Continental Drifter on 12 road trips filled with adventure and revelation of the spirit. The author traveled the road alone throughout the Grand Circle of the Colorado Plateau to bring you the mysteries of the “living landscape” of the American Southwest. Feel the red earth, red rock monoliths, desert sun and summer rainstorms permeate your consciousness and soothe your mind and heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marianna Harris
• Release date: Jun 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452407067

Marianna Harris

Marianna Harris is an actor, teacher and writer. Continental Drifter is the fi rst of her prose works.

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Continental Drifter

by

Marianna Harris

Copyright ©2010

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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"The man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a time in the wilderness. If he is of the proper sort, he will return with a message. It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek, but . . . he will have had a vision or seen a marvel, and these are always worth listening to and thinking about."

Loren Eisele, "The Star Thrower" (1978)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Continental Drifter

Odyssey

My (Burnt) Left Arm

Red Rock Fever

The Road to Perdition

Death Valley Daze

Mirage

Out of the Darkness (Tséyi)

In Amazement: Under the Spell of the Painted Desert

Making an Impact

Hell Hath No Fury: Zion and the Valley of Fire

Fire Dreams: The Wisdom in the Wild

Continental Drifter

Have you ever really looked at the landscapes of the Southwest? The deserts, mountains, rivers and sky? The cacti, mesas, buttes, and sand? Something in the miraculous nature of the red rocks of the Southwest has found its way into my cells, saturating my thoughts and permeating my dreams, stirring the longing for union with the eternal that lives in us all.

I was never what you’d call a Nature Girl. An Ohio upbringing taught me a healthy dislike of mosquitoes and humidity. Ten years in New York City only added fuel to the flame. It wasn’t until my last few years in Los Angeles that I was struck with inexplicable wanderlust. I was flying back to L.A. from Ohio when, from the window of the plane, I noticed the changing topography of the continent as we moved west. From the flat, green farmland patches of Ohio, to the brown plains of Kansas, the Rocky Mountains began suddenly around Colorado, and from them sprang the Colorado Plateau, a thick, elevated, geographical province named for the Colorado river, stretching outward from the Four Corners of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. Located almost entirely in Utah, the Plateau is 130,000 square miles of red rock sandstone comprising 300 million years of geologic history.

The pilot made an announcement: If you’re seated on the right side of the plane, for the next few minutes you can see the Grand Canyon. Years of travel back and forth across the States has since taught me which side of the plane to sit on for a Canyon view, but that day, it was a happy accident. Within seconds, folks from the other side of the plane were cramming themselves into any available seats on my side. A woman with big, blonde Texas hair crawled over the guy in the aisle seat and plopped herself down next to me, bobbing and weaving her very large head at my shoulder. When we hit California, the mountains turned blue and purple; clouds floated above, etched like figures in a fairy tale, plucked from a child’s story book.

I got the fever in earnest in 2001 when I was suddenly compelled to see the Giant Sequoias in the Sierra Mountains of Central California. Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park is located at the top of one of those mountains, seventeen miles up a winding, two-lane canyon road. At the highest point, elevation is about 7,000 feet. My fear of heights told me I couldn’t make it. But I did, and the reward was the knowing that fear is never a good enough excuse not to do what the soul demands.

A few weeks later, I was called to the Grand Canyon. I say called because something was burgeoning within me that I could not yet identify. At the time, it felt like compulsion, but it didn’t matter. I made the only choice I could: I went. The Grand Canyon is, without question, the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen─not that I’ve seen all that much in all my years on this earth, but I cannot imagine anything more spectacular, revelatory or profound. It is a mark of the ages, a doorway to the history not only of mankind but of the planet; an ancient, ever-changing testament to time and the transient nature of our physical lives. That visit reminded me of who I truly am: a part of something bigger, more relevant and more powerful than I could ever have imagined.

Travel of course, requires patience─the planning stage alone can be daunting. But travel can also teach patience. I used to think it was a trick, something I had to talk myself into. Lately I think of it not as a thing, but as a conscious act involving trust; trust that the timing, the money, and all the elements involved in any effort will fall into place. When I am able to open doors in my head so often closed by reason and allow myself to nurture possibility, the muscle of intuition grows stronger, leading my body and mind where they believed, rationally, they could not go. In those moments of trust, of surrender, the veil of things as they are becomes less opaque, more like a scrim through which I am given glimpses of the source of my true power. Patience arrives like an unexpected but welcome visitor and my vision of the world and my place in it becomes clear. Time then ceases to be linear, no longer measured by numbers on a calendar or by physical changes, but by the knowledge and experience I have acquired by listening to what is within.

Patience comes to me sporadically, episodically, and oftentimes must be coaxed to extend its stay, for even though I was called next to Monument Valley, it would be three years before I was finally able to get there. The longing to see God’s earth had taken root in me and grown like ivy, weaving a path in and out of my conscious and unconscious mind, guiding me to the place I would go next. My trips left me forever changed and it was clearly time for another shift. A stretch of Navajo tribal land straddling Utah and Arizona, Monument Valley looks like what might be left had God taken a giant mallet to a mesa and hammered away. The huge sandstone monoliths stand like the Pyramids of Egypt in a red desert, except that they were made by God, not by man. This land is sacred not only to the Navajo, but to anyone with an innate sense of his own divinity and an acquaintance with the promise of eternal life.

It looks like I’m Hopscotching my way east. I can’t say yet what’s next, but a call will no doubt be made and I’ll answer. Surely, we like to think things happen for a reason, perhaps because it helps life make sense. But each time I venture into unknown territory, I find treasure beyond what I could ever have hoped for.

July 2005

"All that is gold does not glitter. Not all those who wander are lost."

J.R.R. Tolkien

Odyssey

In the middle of July 2001, I began to feel an obsessive desire to see the Giant Sequoias of Central California. The best of the lot are only a four-hour drive from Los Angeles, and while I was never a lover of trees or nature in general, I was suddenly compelled to see them. The urgency I felt I did not understand. But, there were a lot of things I didn’t understand and on the scale of things, what was one more?

It was an impromptu decision for one who had never taken a lone road trip before. On July 4th weekend, I rented a car and after a restless night’s sleep, drove to Exeter, California, a town nearby─all the hotels close to Sequoia National Park were booked─checked into the Best Western¹, and set out to familiarize myself with the lay of the land for the next day’s jaunt. How far away was I from the actual Park? Where were the trees? How long would it take to get there? I wasn’t about to miss the opportunity to walk among the world’s largest living things out of a misguided sense of laissez faire.

I dumped my bag at the hotel and drove the twenty-five miles to the park. I got there at 5:00, bought my weekly pass, and asked the Park Ranger, So where are the trees?

He seemed amused as he stepped out of the booth at the park entrance, and with a gaze upward─the back of his head nearly perpendicular to his spine─pointed to a boulder behind him, said You see that rock up there? Beyond that rock.

I stepped out of the car and followed his gaze.

AND JUST HOW IN SAM HILL AM I SUPPOSED TO GET UP THERE?

I must have looked as though I was going to throw up because he quickly assured me, Don’t worry. It’s worth it. Giant Forest, as it is called, is seventeen miles up a mountain, and the only way to get there is to take the narrow, twisting, two-lane road to the top.

Okay. Thanks. I replied, daunted. I got back into the rental car, legs shaking and short of breath. I wondered if it was best to tackle it there and then, or make it back to the hotel before dark. I had a quarter of a tank of gas left.

SO WHAT?

I got about half-way up the mountain that day and thought I might run out of gas before I made it to the Forest, so I turned and came back down. I was deflated to find I had gone only eight miles up and would have to double that the next day. Looking out over the road to the drop below had made me feel nauseous. Heart in my throat, chest flirting with fire, I was amazed to see people zip by me every time I pulled into a turnoff to let them pass. The speed limit was ten miles per hour; they had to be going at least forty.

HOW DO THEY DO THAT?

I made it back to town before sunset. Exeter’s main street had about three motels, a restaurant, convenience store and a couple of gas stations. Unless there was an exquisite suburb somewhere at the end of one of the endless side streets of old, small single-story homes, that was it. A genuine desert bump-in-the-road. With any luck, I’d see some cowboys mosey into town for a gunfight. I stopped at the convenience store in search of food. I gathered a bag of trail mix, an apple and some bottled water, paid and left.

I was back in my room in about a minute and a half. There is something to be said for a motel room all to one’s self. No sharing of the bathroom. No ‘lights out’ when the other party was ready for bed. And I actually had cable tv. I flipped the channels and watched about four episodes of Law and Order.² In a little while, I was tired, and slept.

The next day, I woke late. It surprised me how good it felt to be out of Los Angeles, even if I was in a town the size of a thumbtack. The drive to Exeter had been just long enough. California Interstate 5 is not scenic from Los Angeles to Sacramento, but off that beaten path lay wonders beyond anything I had seen to date. I dressed in khaki shorts and t-shirt--it was surprisingly hot--and, armed with an iron will, made it to the top of that mountain. It took about thirty-five minutes to get there, but as the ranger had said, it was definitely worth it.

When you enter Giant forest, you are greeted on either side of a paved road by two gigantic Sequoias. They take your breath away. You may never have never seen any natural thing so big, so glorious as these trees, their arms stretching to heaven. You marvel at how such immense beauty could live and flourish for three thousand years on this earth we seem so hell-bent on destroying. Their presence catapults you into a state of wonder; you find yourself walking among them, talking to them, listening to them; touching the ones you’re allowed to touch and respecting the boundaries of the ones you are not. Some are as tall as a twenty-five-story building and thick enough to cover two lanes of traffic. Everyone has a camera, but some things I find, cannot be done justice by paint or film or any other invention meant to capture an image that lingers in the mind. On my way down those seventeen miles, I am still nervous, but make a promise to myself to never allow fear to stand in the way of my doing anything.

Fast Forward. I had my first mammogram on August 3rd of that year, which showed something (WHAT?) unusual in both breasts. I was advised to have a second mammogram. I went back on the 17th and after two hours of smashing my breasts in their machines and rolling an ultrasound wand over me, all they could tell me was that what was in the right breast was a cyst and nothing to worry about, but in the left, there was an unusual density of tissue.

The radiologist said haltingly, I think you’ll be all right. But then again, cancer can look like that, too.

SAY WHAT?

I have a face that’s easy to read. She responded timidly, Would you like to talk to your doctor about it?

DUH.

My OB/GYN referred me to a surgeon, a nine-year-old (looking) knife-happy little man who was eager to get in there and see what it was. He closed my file with a confident toss, and sat back in his chair, twisting a pen in his hand.

I’LL BET YOU’D BE TWISTING YOUR MUSTACHE IF YOU WERE OLD ENOUGH TO GROW ONE.

Eighty percent of these biopsies turn out to be nothing at all, but it’s best to be on the safe side and go in and have a look.

Will this be a needle biopsy? I could deal with a little pinprick keloid scar.

No, it’s not that kind of biopsy. We’ll make an incision, about this long. He held up two fingers about an inch or more apart. His nonchalant, dismissive manner made me want to choke him.

DON’T YOU KNOW HOW BLACK PEOPLE SCAR, FOOL?

I think I should get a second opinion.

BITE ME.

You could do that, he remarked, glancing up at me, opening another file. But don’t wait too long. You don’t’ want to waste time trying to get someone to say what you want to hear.

YOU KINDERGARTEN-LOOKIN’, SENSITIVE-AS-AN ALLIGATOR, JUST-FINISHED- SLASHIN’-SOMEBODY-UP-IN-SURGERY DAWG.

I said, I want a second opinion, Junior. Then I slapped him and left. (Well, not really, but you know what I mean . . .) I wanted to see a woman surgeon. Someone who would treat my body as she