Sonoran Desert Soul-Transit - 2009

 

Sonoran Desert Soul-Transit

On Monday, October 5, 2009, I awoke in Quartzsite, Arizona. By Noon, I was “on the road” toward Black Canyon City, AZ. Not wanting to pull my coach through Phoenix, AZ during rush hour, I avoided Interstate I-10. Instead, I “cut the corner” from Quartzsite to Black Canyon City on Highway U.S. 60, via Wickenburg.

 

If the reader is unfamiliar with the territory, U.S. 60 traverses a wide expanse of Sonoran desert. Along with occasional views of irrigated farm fields, one experiences such desert hotspots as Brenda, (named for an old girl friend), Hope (the eastbound and westbound departure signs both read, “You Are Now Beyond Hope”), Salome (Where she danced) and the lesser burgs of Harcuvar, Aguila and Gladden. After going beyond Hope, it was a relief to reach the cheerful sounding place named Gladden.

 

The previous day, the first cold front of the fall season had passed through the Arizona desert. Departing Quartzsite at midday, the temperature was only 63 f. degrees. Throughout the day, temperatures did not exceed 83 f. degrees. For me, a clear, temperate day in the Arizona desert is a rare treat.

 

As I motored along, the open landscape, clear blue sky and white clouds created a peaceful atmosphere. The desert transit allowed time for me to contemplate where I had been and where I was going in life. The old highway served as allegory to my lifelong transit.

 

How wonderful could a week’s vacation be? If you are like me, you spend the "week prior" preparing for the journey. You spend your vacation week living the vacation in real-time. Upon returning home, you spend the "week following" reliving your vacation. Using that formula, you get three weeks vacation for the price of one.

 

As I drove east, I realized that there were issues to address and challenges to overcome, but such is life. Beginning there in the desert, I concluded that I have no problems in my life. Inside me, something said, “Be on the lookout for anomalies in time. They are ready to escort you to your destiny. If you allow their help, you shall live your dreams sooner than you might otherwise imagine”.

 

Pushing our values on to another person no longer works. It is up to each individual to discover who he or she is. The final step in human ascension is to come to loving terms with self. For many humans, allowing self-love is not easy. The distractions of everyday life alone can separate us from our Source. Many of us live day-to-day, with a “here today and gone tomorrow” attitude. If we do not consciously connect with Mother Earth, our lives can become ephemeral, more dreamlike than visceral.

 

The way to achieve “grounding” is different for each person. If one offers, allows and accepts self-love, one instantly feels grounded. Whether its source is alternating or direct, the grounding of electricity through a wire is a one-way process. For all known living things, the Earth is our ground. Our personal electromagnetheric energy fields seek resolution there. The process is analogous to gravity forcing water to seek its own level. That all energy seeks resolution is universal law. As such, it is undeniable.

 

We no longer need opposing energies in our lives. When dualistic thinking is present, new energy travels to ground, disappearing before it can manifest. In human life, the best interactions are win-win. In the sport of fencing, each contestant might score a simultaneous touché to the other's heart. The result is grounding, from one to the other and out to the universe. Whenever two hearts touch, new energy manifests. As with any other grounding of energy, universal law applies. Put another way, "Thousands of candles may be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Love never decreases by being shared." - Buddha ...

 

As the desert rolled under my truck, my thoughts drifted to Jimmy, the boy I was, over fifty years ago. During that period, my inner child had turned inward, longing for the unchanging security of home and family. Despite my early unrealistic expectations about home, family and security, in my fifties I became a nomad. For two years, I lived on my sailboat, WindSong, laying in Marina del Rey, CA. Later I alternated living quarters between WindSong and my travel trailer. From Catalina Island, CA, to the Four Corners region and throughout the Western U.S., I traveled. If nothing else, it proved to me that my core beliefs about home, and security could change.

 

As I observed the scenery that day, I realized that a desert transit is a uniquely human experience. In my imagination, my inner child sat next to me in the passenger seat. Before sharing our thoughts about the scenery around us, we turned and smiled at each Other. Aloud, I said, “Can you imagine doing what I do for a living, and making money too?”

 

The twin subjects of shortage and abundance had entered my mind. A conceptual path toward monetizing my life’s work eluded me. Taking a deep breath and letting it out, I realized that I did not need to know the details of my future funding sources. My contribution was to keep asking the universe for what I wanted, and then to align my energies with the receiving of what I had asked for.

 

A feeling of happiness and contentment washed over me. If ever there was a place where the universe listens to requests, it had to be the Sonoran desert. I spent that afternoon asking aloud for all of that which I desired. Looking as my inner child had imagined it so many years ago, the visual backdrop to my requests was the living desert.

 

In the late afternoon, I reached Black Canyon City, AZ. At the RV Park, I detached my coach, put on my running shorts and drove a mile to the High Desert Nature Park. After two year’s absence from the park, I ran a course made familiar during my two winters living in Black Canyon City. My running course included a desert-garden pathway, which loops around the seventy-five acre preserve. Other than drought, which blankets the Four Corners with its dust, little had changed in the park since I first visited there in March 2005. In defiance of drought, were the Saguaro cacti a bit bigger now?

 

At sunset, from atop that hill, I could feel cool Arctic air pushing south towards Mexico. I was happy to feel that Mother Nature's natural chiller still worked.

 

If our collective consciousness requests it, we may yet see glaciers return to the high country of our Rocky Mountains. Not so long ago, Glacier National Park, MT, had many active glaciers within its borders. If we request new glaciers, can group consciousness create them? Ultimately, the gloomy-doomers may win the day with their global warming scenarios, but I hereby request new glaciers.

 

That night, it was clear and cold in Black Canyon City. Later, I read that Grand Junction, CO had eclipsed by three degrees their low-temperature record for that date. In the Four Corners, autumn 2009 had started cold. Might it also be wet?

 

Events at our next stop, Navajo National Monument, AZ hinted at a possible answer to that question.

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By James McGillis at 03:46 PM | Travel | Comments (0) | Link

U.S. Highway 60 to Salome, Arizona - "Where She Danced" - 2008

Traveling East on Interstate I-10 and U.S. Highway 60 to Salome, Arizona - "Where She Danced"

Midday on May 15, 2008, I departed from Los Angeles, California, traveling that day to the little town of Quartzsite, Arizona.  Located on Interstate Highway I-10, just twenty miles east of the Colorado River and the border that the mighty river forms between Blythe, California and Ehrenberg, Arizona, Quartzsite often represents no more than a handy gas stop for those who travel between Los Angeles and Phoenix, Arizona.

 

As with many towns and cities in the Southwest, the population of Quartzsite flexes with the season.  The “snow birds” start arriving from Canada and the northern tier of states right after Thanksgiving and many stay until February or March of the following year.  During the winter season, the population swells to the point that hundreds, if not thousands of RVs, campers and travel-trailers stay in the open land that surrounds the town.  Swap meets and entire RV dealerships spring up over night, then disappear as the weather warms in the spring.

 

Arriving as I did in mid-May, the town seemed deserted, with only a hardy few souls holed-up in RVs that have been permanently rooted to the ground.  Arriving just at sundown, I captured the beautiful evening sky, as the light began to fade.

 

Jack Kerouac, in his classic novel, “On the Road”, published in 1957, had this to say about driving the old Highway 60, replaced by I-10 in the late 1960s: “Off we went.  I began recognizing towns in Arizona I’d passed in 1947 --- Wickenburg, Salome (where she danced), Quartzsite.”

 

Rather than taking I-10 into Phoenix the next day, I backtracked over Jack Kerouac’s old route, enjoying the mostly two-lane US Highway 60 through the Sonoran Desert.  All that afternoon, I watched puffy white clouds drift across the skyline while I headed on a beeline towards the old west town of Wickenburg, Arizona.

 

For some reason, no one can say the word “Salome” without following it with the phrase, “where she danced”.  Looking into this subject, I discovered the following historical account: “The town of Salome was established in late 1904 by Charles H. Pratt.  Pratt was speculating on where the railroad would lay its tracks, and missed it by a mile, so that the community had to be moved to its present location.  In the venture with Pratt were Earnest and Dick Wick Hall, the latter a widely known wit.  Dick Wick Hall was responsible for the story that the town was named because Mrs. Grace Salome Pratt, on taking off her shoes, found the sand burned her feet, hence the slogan, “Salome where she danced.”  As you can see in the accompanying picture, Salome is still famous as the place, “where she danced”.

 

For anyone traveling between Los Angeles and northern Arizona, I recommend old US Highway 60 as a great way to bypass Phoenix all together.  Any motorist who has arrived in Phoenix during rush hour (which lasts from 6:00 AM until 7:00 PM) will love the uncrowded old highway and its many charming vistas and decrepit little towns.  With their old time motels and abandoned brick buildings, one feels like they really are traveling back in time to the 1940s.

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By James McGillis at 07:21 PM | Travel | Comments (0) | Link