As I said yesterday, when you spend this much time on the road alone, living in your silences, living in your thoughts, you start listening to things you never would have before. You start doing things that would not make sense otherwise. And that is where magic lives.
Today, I awoke with an even louder message in my head – “Reach Sedona at 3pm. You will meet a woman there and she will have something important to tell you.”
With a nervous glance at the clock, I grumbled awake and sprinted through my normal routine, hitting the road in a frenzy and driving, driving, driving. Deserts flashed by. The awesome site of Zion National Park filled my vision screen. The desolation of the low, dry hills lulled me into a dead zone.
Somewhere along the way, my car suffered what I hope is a minor injury brought on by the rough terrain of mountains and dirt roads. A sharp whining clank and rattle started blasting through the car every time I exceeded 35mph. I have a feeling that sound will be with me until I reach Seattle or until I break down along some deserted stretch of highway.
I decided for the moment to ignore the problem until it could be dealt with properly. Maybe it will go away, or maybe I will end up having to trudge several miles to a service station in southern California, leaving everything I own at the mercy of bandits and ruffians. But what else really could I really do but keep going?
I drove and drove, hours and hours, miles and miles, all a blur. As I got closer, as the minutes ticked by, as the clock grew older, this sinking, desperate feeling rose in me. I was going to be almost an hour late. I had failed the message by going the long way to reach Flagstaff. Whatever was waiting for me would be long gone.
My car was clattering and my patience was at an end. So, nearly in tears, I pulled into a service station half way between Flagstaff and Sedona to figure out my next steps.
It was 4pm. I hadn’t made it.
I filled up my tank in a foul mood, tired and defeated. But it was then that I noticed the clocks around me. All of them read 3pm. I made a check of the clock inside the friendly Food Mart. 3pm. I knew that I wasn’t in the Pacific time zone, but it was obviously 3pm. Perhaps, I thought, Flagstaff is a place that doesn’t believe in the evil Daylight Saving Time conspiracy. I had no other explanation for this phenomena.
Nevertheless, there was no denying that folks around Flagstaff believed that it was 3pm and I was close enough to Sedona for the message I was following to have weight. I was thinking about this as I went inside to pay for my gas, only to end up in line next to a young woman I’d seen earlier who had ben filling up a bright yellow VW Bus a few pumps next to me.
The hairs on my neck stood up. I glanced over at the bus and noticed for the first time that it had Washington license plates. This was it.
Very soon after, Jill and I got to talking. She was extremely friendly and we made an instant connection there in a lonely service station on the road to Sedona. She was from Bainbridge Island, the second synchronistic encounter with somebody from that area on this journey. I told her my story, and about how tired I was feeling. Her welcoming energy, all the brightness about her – it healed something in me. That’s the best way to explain it. As we spoke, I thought about the man from Cahokia and the woman at Devil’s Tower, and all three of them were connected in this sacred trio. And together they had a message for me, loud and clear.
The wandering is over. It is time to go home to Seattle.
Route: Eh, I don’t know. A whole lotta Utah on some numbered route going South and then wandering around in the Utah and Arizona desert on some other numbered route. I’m in Flagstaff, Arizona now if that helps.