Roads From the Ashes. Megan Edwards
How had he crossed the room so fast? We went back inside the house.
Suddenly, we were part of the group. The Roadman, it turned out, was a Navajo from Phoenix. Other Native Americans had come even farther distances. Many participants were Caucasians who attended meetings of the Native American Church regularly. One woman had built a sweat lodge in her backyard. One man, a Hopi who lived in North Hollywood, had lost his apartment in the earthquake. “But I still have my truck,” he said. “And my grandfather told me to come to this meeting.” His grandfather had died three years before.
We feasted on the food everyone had brought, and finally the real time to leave arrived. Feeling much better than we had a few hours before, we climbed into our car and headed east, the opposite direction from which we had come.
Just why we drove off in the wrong direction is unclear to me now. Maybe it was difficult to turn around, and we thought we could “go around the block.” Maybe it was the peyote. In any event, we found ourselves driving over the mountains in a dense fog. When visibility returned, we couldn’t have been more surprised to find ourselves at Buttonwillow, a traveler’s oasis on Interstate 5 about two hundred miles from any place we wanted to be. “We better not ever tell anybody about this,” said Mark. We decided to rent a motel room and sleep.
Our rumps were still numb. The motel had a whirlpool, but even a half-hour soak failed to bring them back to life. They stayed numb for three days. By the time sensation returned, we’d begun to fear we’d never feel anything in our hind quarters again.
As we drove back to Pasadena the next morning, we agreed that the Indian meeting had been a transforming experience. “I have no idea in what way I was transformed,” I said, “But something definitely happened.”
“I still can’t figure out how that Roadman knew we were leaving,” said Mark. “Or how he got out onto the front porch so fast.”
“I don’t see how he did it, either,” I agreed, “But then, I don’t understand most of what happened there. Like how does a grandfather who’s been dead for three years tell you to go on a road trip?”
But then again, maybe I do understand. It may be my imagination, it may be only a demon in a fireplace, but I swear there are times I hear my own grandfathers speak. I hear the voices of those who crossed the plains in wagons, and the older ones who crossed the Atlantic in sailing ships. It’s not my own idea to hit the road. It’s in my blood.
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