You folk come through the canyon?”
“Yah.”
“Last night?”
“Yah.”
“In the snow?”
“Yah.”
“Son… ain’t no one ever survived the canyon in such a blizzard before...”
The last 26 miles of Arizona 89A were a flaky white powder that had smothered our 2,000-foot decent from the highway to Sedona, and Ellen, Kristin, and I were mildly dismayed. The nearest town, and lights, were miles back in Flagstaff, which may well have been on Mars. Funny, the locals told us later, they usually close 40 and 89A in a blizzard like this; for a city that draws 17 inches of precipitation a year, the fact that we were drawing a quarter in a few hours was remarkably unsettling.
Behind the wheel, I wasn’t scared of skidding off road per se (lie alert) as I glanced at the GPS every six seconds, but more of a coyote, an elk, or The Shining twins that might be waiting around the next hairpin. “Totus tuus,” Pope John Paul would have surrendered; and when your SUV is running a marathon straight downhill with no civilization, no lights, no space to turn around, and sheer rock face beckoning six feet to your left, theology turns appetizing: Call on God. Ask forgiveness. Thank him you’re not in a Toyota.
Earn this, Sedona cackled.
The night, we deduced later, was a blessing, both since it veiled the rock cliffs abutting the road and the red buttes towering above it, as foreign to a New Englander as the rattlesnake meat on the saloon’s menu. Turns out the buttes are foreign to everyone: their power, or wisdom, heal-iocentricity, or whatever, has turned Sedona from backwater Wild West town – think Hill Valley, 1885 – to gathering ground for new-age mystics and healers where “crystal,” “vortex,” and “you’re f*cking kidding me, right?” dominate local dialect. Miss Cleo, meet Buford Tannen.
Two mornings later, I got my McFly on and decided to explore. Still jetlagged, I snapped awake at 5:30, a wholly unreasonable vacation hour. With few options, I bounded out the door, camera in tow, to see auroral Sedona, capture the sun as it met the red rocks, examine up close the new-age splendour (yes, that deserves a “u”) that the storm two days hence had hidden. For two hours, Sedona teased me incessantly – cute initially, but eventually a man v. foul temptress chicken game that kept me outdoors, matching wits with mountain air, strolling up and down 89A and Jordan Road, in 24-degree pre-dawn cold.
Earn this, Sedona cackled.
Suddenly, dawn awoke, a swell like Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man ripping through the street. The bronze sculptures, the wooden facades roared to life, the ravens pecked around me, as I stood, pallid, a witness to Sedona, tired, frigid, awed...
Twelve hours later, Ellen, Kristin, and I boarded a jeep tour, a last fling with the splendour off-road and personal. The trail, which wound us through buttes, forests, red mud, and bacteria-ridden topsoil, took us up and down 45-degree inclines and around sharp turns. Good evening, red rocks, nice to see you. “This was the bed of a prehistoric ocean. The limestone that starts here forms the Colorado Plateau” our guide explained, “the red you see comes from a 1/10 of 1 percent iron pigment that your is trained to pick up.”
As we stood on Submarine Rock overlooking the eventide, the light bouncing from strange angles illuminating scars of ancient iron, Utah Spruce trees, and (perhaps) mystical vortexes that stretched beyond fault lines and buttes, through the Old West town. Slowly, we headed back downhill to our jeep.
We had earned it.
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