desert medicine wheels - Saturday July 10 1999    

The first order of the day was to smuggle Sophie out of our cabin and remove her to a kennel 20 miles away in the town of Cottonwood. No dogs are allowed at the Briar Patch Inn, you see, and since our particular cabin was directly adjacent to the main office, there was no way we were going to be able to conceal her presence, especially since she was going to need to be walked several times a day. Complicating our departure was the fact that every morning there is a breakfast served outside, just above Oak Creek. All the residents, the manager, a guitar and violin amplified classical duet and several hispanic employees were out there, directly along the path we'd have to take to get to our car. So I concealed Sophie beneath my green flannel shirt and snuck her past the people to our car. We thought maybe we could just leave Sophie in the car and go grab some breakfast, but she wouldn't stand for it. When she started barking, we had no choice, so I stayed with her while Kim went off to fetch us both some breakfast. Loud Radio, the Northern Arizona hard rock radio station, was playing an Iron Maiden song I haven't heard in a very long time.

As we drove through the western fringe of Sedona, "Roundabout" by Yes was on the classic rock radio station. I remembered listening to a couple old Yes albums over and over back in 1988. That was when, on a whim, I boarded up the window of my Oberlin dorm room and spent a fairly large amount of my time in absolute darkness. My circadian rhythmn was all messed up back then and I often had that frazzled nervous feeling that comes with lack of sleep (even though I was getting plenty of sleep by sleeping through my classes). Today, driving the convertible with the top down, listening to that familiar old Yes, I had that same frazzled feeling, the result of staying up late and the excessive repressed emotional stress of yesterday.

Heading west towards Cottonwood on 89A, the red rocks and magical steep pinnacles rapidly drew away leaving a distant ridge of cream-coloured rock and a rolling prairie so apparently lush and deceptively devoid of desert plants as to appear almost agricultural. While it seemed doubtful that it could support any actual crops, I was rather surprised not to see any cattle. There are parts of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia (my former homeland and the driest place in the East) which look more arid.

After some dozen miles or so, we crossed a ridge and could look down into a wide valley edged by an impressive ridge of mountains. At the base of the mountain we could see a large town strewn out like a dusting of white and grey confetti upon the rolling plain. This was Cottonwood, but we had a good ten miles of driving before we'd finally made it there. The thing I was learning about towns in the wild west is that you can see them a very long time before you get to them.

Driving around directionless through the sprawling, relatively sparsely-populated town of Cottonwood trying to find the Doggy Dude Ranch, the kennel where Sophie would be staying (Kim found it on the web!), was not an entirely miserable experience. There was plenty of genuine western imagery for us to see. Unlike Sedona, crammed throughout the weekends by monied tourists from everywhere, Cottonwood is largely untainted by outside forces. In the heat of the day, the streets were quiet and pedestrians were few and far between. We pulled into a farm supply store called Horses Are Us to ask directions, but the teenage boys running the place were so friendly in that polite, folksy western way that Kim didn't come back out for another ten minutes.

The Doggy Dude Ranch was a humble little composite shack on the side of a dusty hill out on the west edge of town. Obstacle courses in the front yard indicated that dog training was one of the Doggy Dude Ranch's principle activities. The lady running the Doggy Dude Ranch was short, thin octogenarian tomboy with a no-nonsense disposition, exactly the sort of person you'd expect to be a rural Arizona dog trainer. Sophie is anything but a well-trained dog, and I didn't expect her to exactly hit it off with her prison keeper over the next twenty eight hours.

Kim often has an unusually good eye for treasure. After we left our sadly yapping Schnauzer child at the Doggy Dude Ranch, Kim wanted to double back to Old Town Cottonwood to further investigate an intriguing general store she'd seen earlier. I wasn't too enthusiastic, but I went along.

It turned out that the point of interest was actually behind the general store in a ramshackled series of sheds. It was a tiny folk art gallery spilling out into the courtyard and reaching tendrils out to the street. (Kim, email me Sallielou's information so I can pimp the guy!) The art was mostly paintings done in bright acrylics. Whimsically-rendered people dashed about in marvelously complex scenes doing... well, it was the artist who had to explain what exactly it was they were doing. The painting that really caught my eye was on an old saw blade. It featured rhinos and other large land animals parading about in a shallow foreground river against a backdrop that might have come from a Sedona red rock postcard. The artist himself, a gaunt grizzled old man with sharp features and few blackened teeth hidden away beneath his beard, was right there in a little room working away at his art, looking at us out the window. Kim quickly engaged him in a conversation, which I joined a short time later.

He signs his paintings "Sallielou," which sums up a lot about his overall attitude towards the world. It reflects, I think, his sly talent for self-amusement and his vaguely shocking devil-may-care attitude. He knows full well the social implications associated with the perversity of choosing a female stage name, and it no doubt delighted him that people might jump to all sorts of invalid conclusions about him from such a thing. As he told us his story, I got the sense that here was a very intelligent man with formidable talents who was playing the part of the naïve artist.

Sallielou had begun his painting career back east in Pennsylvania, where he had either taken art classes or gone to art school. Some of his early paintings from Pennsylvania showed an incredible command of composition and a readily-apparent knowledge of basic rules of perspective and colour theory. He'd moved to Cottonwood some nine years ago, and, starting with his somewhat formalistic background, he had somehow succeeded in gradually changing to an almost childlike style, with flattened people on perspectives of convenience, all arrayed in perfect composition to tell his twisted stories. But unlike the art of actual children, his paintings demonstrated considerable planning, fussing-over, and multiple revisits, all things far beyond the attention spans of young people. (For those of you younger people in my audience, I'd like to point out that artistic stamina, the thing that permits novelists to write novels and artists to paint paintings, is something that came to me late in my youth, circa 1994, when I was already 26 years old. There was a noticeable a change in my neural wiring at that point and I've had artistic stamina ever since.)

As we spent more and more time chatting with Sallielou, he gradually revealed more and more of his paintings, each with more perversity or unconventionality than the one before. He also had numerous low-relief sculptures carved into cottonwood roots and branches that he'd collected down in the wash. Many of these had large penises or big breasts, some of which were actually detachable. Much of his creative force seem to come from a combination of random textures and his vivid imagination. He'd stare at a knot in a branch or a rough spot on a rock and begin seeing faces, animals, big breasted women, or (one of his biggest fetishes) watermelons. As he'd see them, he'd sketch them in and then colour them and give them life.

The stories each of his paintings told were just as weird as the paintings themselves. In one scene, a light brownish Joseph and Mary are being helped across Judea by an escort of dark black guards, but these guards are all shot full of arrows being fired by an ambush of comically ghostlike Klu Klux Klan members.

Sallielou's marketing technique featured his forming a strong social bond with his buyers. After we decided to buy the saw blade, he wanted us to pose with it while he took our picture (using a hand-decorated plastic camera), which he would be adding to his huge album of similar photos. After we became really chummy, he actually flipped through his customer album telling us stories about all his various customers. I got a vague sense that he was trying to impress us with the wealth of some of those who have bought his paintings. For example, he made a point of telling us which of his customers had Mercedes and which had pleasure vessels. But some of his tales of customer relations were as outlandish as his paintings. In one case, he claimed, a guy had actually threatened to beat him up if he didn't sell a certain painting for $100.

I gradually came to the conclusion that Sallielou might be a genius, but he's also a bit of a wingnut. He no longer drinks booze he says, but he refers to a bad old day before he was sober. He struggles along living as an indigent and selling only enough paintings to get by, but even then he can't make the $350/month rent for his one room apartment/art studio. So instead he pays a constant rent of $5/day late fees for some unknowably large amount of accumulated past-due rent. His landlord has told him that he'll never be evicted no matter what. But Kim figures the landlord will simply confiscate his paintings when he dies and sell them at a great profit.

Because the paintings really are incredibly good. This guy is not only prolific and chillingly imaginative, but he's a great artist. He's sold hundreds of paintings for dirt cheap, but still he lingers on the fringe of obscurity, where he seems fairly content.

A cityscape by folk artist Sallielou.

Cats by Sallielou.

Sallielou telling his stories in his humble one room apartment.

Sallielou with Kim and a painted saw blade.

Kim on the street in Old Town Cottonwood

Sallielou with Kim and a painted mannequin.

Back at our cabin at the Briar Patch Inn, it was extended nap-time to make up for our accumulated sleep deficits.

But at 5:00PM we had to set out yet again, this time to meet up with Suzanne, a Sedona tour guide. But Suzanne wasn't just any tour guide, she was a practitioner of Earth Magick and the wild ways of the indigenous peoples displaced by the coming of white people such as her own ancestors. Though I knew our tour was to be of sacred medicine wheels, Kim hadn't really warned me that we were headed directly into a serious woo-woo ritual, the likes of which I haven't experienced since April 19th, 1998.

It helped somewhat that we took the time to smoke a bunch of pot while we waited out a sudden cloudburst in the rendezvous parking lot. Suzanne, a spritely middle-aged woman, showed up in a big American van and while she went into the adjacent omelette place to round up one more person who would join us on our "tour," Kim and I looked over the impressive little giftshop tucked neatly between the driver's and passenger's seat. There were little pamphlets, videotapes and audiotapes, all for sale, all made or recorded by Suzanne herself. I'm sure that most of her income results from selling these things in the aftermath of one of her "tours."

The extra guy from Suzanne retrieved from the omelette place was a fat dorky-looking dude who had signed up for a week-long Suzanne-powered "retreat." This was just his first day.

At some point I looked around me and noticed that everyone except me was dressed mostly in purple.

I was in a lethargic mood and was pleased to just chill out during the leisurely drive out to the sacred medicine wheels west of town. Unfortunately, however, Suzanne decided to play one of her tapes during the ride. It was supposed to be calm and spiritually uplifting, but to me it was corny, plain and simple. Layered over mystical swooshes and neeer-neeer-weerawl space noises was Suzanne's voice, proclaiming all kinds of jumbled-up mystical nonsense, something along the lines of:

Feel the energy around you.

The spiral Andromeda Galaxy is sending forth the representative of its star fleet commander.

Feel the 'I am that I am' presence.

Project the power of unconditional love.

Once we parked and started walking up the slope of a low mesa, things were a little more to my liking. Suzanne wasn't, as I'd suspected, strictly interested in the mystical mumbo jumbo of the beautifully inexplicable Sedona scenery. She was actually familiar with the desert plants, which was a valuable thing to me. She revealed her knowledge, as many botanical types do, with a quiz. She pointed to a miserable little shrub with small blue green leaves and asked what we thought it was. I looked closely and saw little green acorns. "It's an oak!" I squealed in delight. Suzanne was impressed; no one had ever gotten that one right before. There were other plants of course, most familiar to me only from my 10-month experience in the west. There were Agave plants, Prickly Pears, Junipers, and a slow growing bush whose name I cannot recall. Eventually I found a suitable Prickly Pear spine with which to pick my teeth, an obsessive habit I've developed fairly recently.

On top of the sacred mesa were a number of "medicine wheels." A medicine wheel is a structure on the ground indicated with stones that consists of two concentric circles with two perpendicular cross hairs, aligned on the East-West and North-South axes. Supposedly they have great mystical "energy."

Before we actually began our ritual, we toured the entire mesa, the bulk of which was a "silent zone" designed for meditation. We were making a point of being so silent that we actually managed to sneak up on a road runner, who, upon seeing us, slipped away silently into the scrub. On the edge of a cliff, we fanned out to "meditate." After we'd done so, Suzanne unexpectedly began singing some sort of meaningless faux Indian song. Her voice drifted out across a the shrub-filled valley and bounced against the rocky walls on the other side. Later I was to learn that this valley is owned by a corporation intent on turning it into a X-hole golf course.

Gradually I became aware that there were actually a few people down in the doomed valley over which Suzanne's songs were carrying. This made me uncomfortable. I was seated on the very edge of a cliff, visible for miles, and here we were doing some kind of hokey earth-based religious ritual. Back in Redneckistan where I come from, it doesn't take much provocation for a Billy Bob in a concealed location to open fire, especially if he's bored (and he usually is).

After the meditation, we all stood in a circle, holding hands and expressing what we'd gained from our "meditation" as well as our "intentions" for the ritual. We did this in a round-robin, introducing ourselves by name, saying our piece, and then concluding with "aho!" which, I take it, is Indian-speak for "amen." I didn't really know what to say, so I just winged it, talking about how beautiful the scenery was and how the clouds looked as solid and powerful as the rocks.

Back at the first medicine wheel, outside the "silent zone," we went through the ritual of "purifying" both ourselves and the wheel. This involved hand waving and the honouring of sky and earth, followed by clockwise and counter-clockwise expeditions around the wheel banging small flat red sandstone rocks together in our hands. I tried to vary the program as much as possible, if only to assert my independence, rubbing my rocks together instead.

Next came the ritual proper. We circled the medicine wheel again and then landed one of the four directions, depending on whether it "drew" us. Theoretically we could have all landed on the same, but of course we all ended up on different ones. I was the East, resented by the crafty coyote and the element fire and Kim was the West, represented by the element water and some domicile animal. Suzanne was the south and Big Fat Guy was the north. From there Suzanne led each of us in telling about the compass point we represented, though we got to add our own little bit at the end. At the end, each of us stood in the little circle at the center of the wheel and gave praise to father sky and mother earth and then gave a gift of a hair from our heads. In all the extemporaneous speaking I did, I focused on beauty and geologic history as opposed to spiritual matters, since I don't believe in spirits. I was willing to play along, in a sort of tongue-in-cheek sardonic way, but I couldn't bring myself to talk the true lingo of woo-woo spirituality.

The medicine wheel grounds were actually rather busy on this Saturday evening, and random people kept coming by and looking over at us as we went about our hokey antics. For a guy who likes to play it as cool as I like to, it was definitely an embarrassing situation. I'm just glad no random people saw what happened at the end, when we circled the medicine wheel several times chanting "Thank you, thank you, thank you..." as if we were a bunch of Indians.

After the ritual, we all again stood in a circle holding hands, telling what we had gained from the experience. Here's where the Big Fat Guy showed how complex his spirituality really is. Said he, "Now I can truly see that Christ is everywhere and in everything."

Suzanne drove us back into Sedona, again playing her mystical tapes of confused spiritual messages. She did her best to try to sell tapes to Kim and the Big Fat Guy, even using such time-honoured techniques as "I feel this tape resonating with you" as she handed Kim a 40 dollar videotape, the most expensive item she sells. Kim did buy a tape and a few pamphlets, it seemed more out of a sense of obligation than anything else.

By this point, Kim was ravenously hungry and she was hankering, as usual, for sushi.

We ended up driving a dozen miles or so south of town in pursuit of a specific place, but somewhere out in the boonies, Kim decided we should go no further, that there could be no sushi place this far out of town. So we tried another option, a fancy campus-like resort near downtown Sedona. But as we wandered around looking for a suitable restaurant we realized that we'd never be happy sitting down to an overpriced dinner at a restaurant in a resort. Imagine the embarrassment I'd feel at this point if I actually had to write an account eating in dinner at such an existential void.

What we finally did for dinner involved parking on the wrong side of 89A West (on the western Sedona commercial strip), smoking a bunch of pot, and then crossing over to a hopping little joint called The Red Planet Diner. In addition to everything else weird about Sedona, it has a bit of a reputation for being a place where UFOs like to land. It's mostly, I've been told, something to do with the alien landforms (which were reportedly very influential for Walt Disney when he was conceiving Fantasia and Disneyland). So it should come as no surprise that Sedona would be home to at least one alien-themed diner. The Red Planet Diner also capitalizes on the ruddy hue of the rocks of Sedona, which could be said to resemble the appearance of those on Mars.

In front of the Red Planet was a water fountain featuring a UFO seeming to hover by means of a column of water falling like a jet of flame beneath it. Inside, there were too much alien decorations to immediately take in, but it was all so low-key and subtle that someone interested only in his dinner might easily miss them. In the middle of the ceiling was a mural of a space scene with a hovering flying saucer at the center, the white overhead light serving as its single jet engine. Floating around the spacecraft, hanging just beneath the night sky surface of the ceiling, were little alien action figures, looking exactly the way aliens are supposed to look. Around the periphery of the room were the low-relief faces of famous space-related people, such as Einstein, Dr.Spock and Obiwan Kenobi. Just above them was a faint deep space scene with all the constellation figurines painted lightly in thin ghostly white.

Everything about the restaurant was space-related down to the smallest detail. When it came to Margaritas, you could order either a "Shuttlecraft" or the whole friggin' "Mothership." Polite little signs on the wall informed smokers that they could only smoke out on the "Launching Pad." And the even the bathroom was made to look like some sort of intergalactic cabin, complete with futuristic faux-industrial metal panels here and there at random places on the painted plaster walls.

In the space of a few short minutes Kim created several stirs. The moment we'd come through the door, we'd been assigned a booth, but it was so big that Kim impulsively picked a different one, which a waiter, one of those stylish former-geeks cursed with a stick up his ass, rudely informed us was for someone else, a couple of alterna-young adults who glared at us occasionally for the rest of the meal. Then suddenly Kim got the notion to sit at the bar, but for some still unknown reason she abandoned it immediately, but not before a couple of guys grabbed the booth we'd just abandoned. So of course we had to evict them.

Who knows why, but Kim decided to order meatloaf. I normally try to avoid meatloaf whenever I eat at the houses of the parents of friends, so I can't imagine paying money for it in a restaurant. I ordered a burger instead and it may well have been the best burger I've ever eaten in my entire life. Who cares if it was made of the meat of slaughtered aliens harvested by human conquerers on other worlds?

The only real weirdness in this deliberately weird place, a place that only seemed to play music which Kim had in her CD collection, was coming from a little blond girl several tables away who had, like an adorably fluffy kitten, begun a game of peek-a-boo with me. I played along for awhile, but the game was quickly becoming a disciplinary problem for her parents, especially once she began shrieking to remind me to keep playing. I tried to keep from looking, to break the cycle, but I was kind of stoned, so both my short term memory and my resolve were weak, and it was nearly impossible to avoid perpetuating the situation.

As we were leaving, we looked in at a new expansion onto the side of the Red Planet Diner. It was an alien-themed bar, complete with a huge three-rocket space ship and more weird aliens and more weird alien murals.

Back at the Briar Patch Inn, Kim and I found ourselves hanging out down on a pleasant little shelf just above Oak Creek. There was something about the vegetation around us hauntingly reminiscent of the East. There were sycamores, ashes, oaks and other familiar species. Suddenly it occurred to me that these plants in this valley might by a lingering remnant of the forests that had once covered this land back when it was less arid. Their relatively trivial differences from the familiar plants of the East might simply be the result of genetic drift from the island effect. These valleys were, after all, long narrow islands of water availability in a sea of desert. It also occurred to me that perhaps even the plants of the desert were, at least in some cases, adapted from descendants of the original forest trees. The scrub oak, for example, might well have evolved from a proud forest tree. On the other hand, century tree, yucca and other arid plants have been arid plants for a very long time and they probably moved in from other arid areas as the climate of northern Arizona became dryer. Whether new plants come in from elsewhere or adapt in place is a complex issue depending on many factors, including type and rapidity of climatic shift, adaptability of native plants, proximity of regions with a climate similar to the one being shifted to, and the type and abundance of other necessities and predators.

The situation is actually analogous to the movement of human populations and linguistic groups. In a case such as that at the Mexico-United States border (or across the Atlantic Ocean back during the post-Revolution settling of North America), where millions of impoverished people of one language filter relatively slowly across a border to a land with plentiful opportunities, chances are good that the immigrants from the poor land will gradually come to dominate the rich land while also adopting their language and culture. Over time, the population is largely comprised of descendants of people from the poor countries speaking the language and largely having the culture of the rich country. In other cases the invasion is much more rapid, often into a relatively underpopulated or depopulated land. In these cases the invaded country's culture is largely destroyed. Examples of this include the pre-Revolutionary settlement of North America by Europeans, the invasion of the north Balkans by the Magyars, and the invasion of Britain by Germanic tribes. A third example is when an elite class invades a populous nation, seizes power, and then over time is absorbed by the conquered people's culture. Examples of this include the Norman invasion of Britain, the Mongol invasion of China, the post-Roman Teutonic invasion of North Africa and, perhaps to an extent in some isolated parts of Mexico, the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

Later on, Kim and I were lounging around our sweet-smelling cabin sipping Jack Daniels left over from the ill-fated Cyclefly no-show celebration of Kim's 29th birthday. We were in an unusually jovial mood, reminiscing about Matt Roger's performance at a theatrical event held in Ann Arbor. The funny thing, the thing that had us laughing so hard tonight, was that we'd missed the entire performance but still we saw everything we'd come to see and it hadn't changed a thing we knew about Matt Rogers. All we had to do was see the body language, the non-verbal rapport, between Matt Rogers and the overly serious women with whom he'd performed. "Poor Matt Rogers!" we sighed.

Winding 89A north of Sedona, looking south.

One of the rocky ridges near Sedona.

This wild arid valley below the sacred Medicine Wheel Plateau is owned by a corporation which intends to make it into a golf course.