The Holiness of Dirt

Published on the blog of The Great Climate March: www.climatemarch.org, May 2014 and the e-magazine www.wildwomanrising.com/category/volume-2-issue-8/

“Pilgrimage: a journey or search of moral or spiritual significance. Typically a journey to a shrine or other location of importance to a person's beliefs and faith, although sometimes it can be a metaphorical journey into someone's own beliefs.” 

     I have joined the Great Climate March on its link between Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico. I trudge breathlessly, head down, toward our next camp: the parking lot of El Santuario de Chimayo. A Roman Catholic Church and National Historic Monument in New Mexico, it is famous for miracles of healing. I look forward to baptising my feet in the pure cold stream that gurgles behind the church. Cattle in the pasture that borders the far edge of the water look up as I limp toward them.  Although I've trained to hike the distances expected on this march, I've not trained to the pace of walkers who have been on the road for two months already. I hurt all over; my joints are stiff; the soles of my feet are burning.

     The High Road sees pilgrims and seekers of many kinds. I have been studying the descantos, the roadside shrines of white crosses, plastic flowers and sometimes stuffed toys which mark a soul's passing after a traffic accident. And I've been avoiding discarded syringes, broken bottles and crushed beer cans all day. My eyes on the red pumice gravel, I nearly run into a marcher holding up a sun-faded rosary he's found on the side of the road. He offers it, and I, who have recently misplaced my Buddhist mala (but not my Hindu mantra, the chanting of which keeps me going on the uphill) know it's meant for me. Every tenth bead is a plastic picture of our Lady of Guadalupe, the Christianized Aztec earth goddess, Tonantzin and Mother Goddess of this land. I remove the broken wooden cross attached and wrap the beads around my wrist, grateful for this symbol of protection.

     It won't rain tonight. I lay out my sleeping bag in the new grass at the edge of the parking lot so as to see the stars. Or even a UFO! I have cheerfully explained to curious east and west coast marchers why the cattle warning road signs we see have flying saucers added. They do not seem to share my delight with paranormal trivia and grim humor when I describe the spate of mysterious cattle mutilations and strange lights that occurred in the 70's and sometimes even now. What lover of myth could not love New Mexico?

     After exchanging a foot massage with a fellow marcher also old enough to remember the Peace March for Nuclear Disarmament in 1986, I explore the shrine. While others cut carrots for dinner, attend a council meeting or play in the stream, I find myself alone in the dim chapel. Its shabby filigree and folk art style portraits of bloody martyrs and saints weave a spell of sadness around me. A small room to the left of the altar holds the crutches of those healed at this place – the “Lourdes of New Mexico”. Ironically, this overnight spot is where I will lose the new trekking pole on which I leaned so heavily today as I tried to keep up. Philosophically, I later think that perhaps the displaced patella of my right knee might be miraculously healed now that the expensive pole has been sacrificed. Maybe my walking stick will end up hanging here among the crutches! Magical thinking (and alien encounters) will eventually get to you if you live in the “Land of Enchantment” long enough.

     In the shrine room, a foot and a half diameter hole in the rock floor invites pilgrims to trowel a bit of the ”holy dirt” to carry with them for luck and health. I like the fact that it is called holy DIRT, not “soil” or “clay”, “caliche” or “sand”, just good old honest “dirt”. I take a pinch for my pocket.

     I asked a marcher one day, how she felt about walking through the back country Pueblo lands without seeing the public, when a goal of the March is to raise awareness. She answered that it was important to experience what we were actually marching for; to experience the bones of the land without its overlay of cities, farms, roads; to get a small taste of what it must be like to have some harmony with natural forces; to feel a little of what we have lost.

     Pilgrimage may be thought of as the experience of finding a holy place. But it is not a journey to Eden. Transcendence does not come without the understanding of suffering. On this march there is cold, exhaustion, pain, arguments, tears, frustration, anger and grief along with the laughter, love, wonder and beauty. Three days hence, children we marchers have met, will have fallen to their deaths in a plane over a New Mexico forest fire. On that same day, a peacock at our ashram campsite will have spread iridescent feathers in challenge to a rainbow. And the ubiquitous LYFs (little yellow flowers) of the desert roadside will remind us that life goes on somehow. It will go on without or despite us. Pilgrimage is an embracing of the holiness of it All: the holiness, you could say, of Dirt.

Winter Ross is a street medic, artist and appreciator of paradigm diversity. She joined the Great Climate March in May of 2014 between Santa Fe and the Taos Mesa where she tends an Earthship home. 

Orienting Heaven

First Place Winner of The New Mexico Press Women's and the Federation of National Press Women's Communications Awards for 2015.  This piece was accepted for publication in the e-magazine " The Adventure Bum" which solicited first person extreme adventure stories and unfortunately disappeared after a couple issues.

     Sometimes it feels like mercury is permanently retrograde. I lean back against the hood of the car - the old one that doesn't run anymore - and look up. The Milky Way arches overhead in a jet black sky, which is what we have out here in the desert miles from town. The cloud-like strip of stars runs parallel to Pataca Canyon behind me. The  canyon once held a river but the undulating bed is bone dry now. The Army Corps of Idiots thought they could dam water that ran over lava caves and the river simply sank underground. Then long years of drought did it in completely. Interesting how the Milky Way lines up above it.

     Craning my neck back, I can sense myself rolling east with the planet. The realization dizzies me. I almost fall off the car into the sagebrush from the awe of it. To the South is the constellation that looks like a big 7. Scorpius? To the North, hangs the Big Dipper. I'm trying to reorient. Ha…metaphor for my life. How did I get out here, to this lonely earth-ship? There hasn't been rain in weeks and the cistern is low. Sometimes I think I hear river water rushing, but it's the wind scouring the sage.The solar panel on this place only works in the daylight when I don't need it. The old batteries won't hold a charge. If I want more power than a flashlight gives, I have to fire up the gasoline generator. I can't stand that sound. This place is all about silence. It's about old skeletons and wandering spirits. So at night I star gaze. And think…probably too much.

     Tonight the air is soft and the hood of the old Ford is still warm from the afternoon sun. I scoot back on it for a more comfortable angle. The stars nearer the horizon twinkle like holiday lights in a storm. It's the atmosphere: all the pollution and heat waves we have to look through makes them seem to blink on and off. I could never convince my rafting buddy, Fischman, that the big red-blue-yellow ones weren't UFO's. He simply wasn't ready to give up telling the story of his "sighting".

     I'm watching the planes now: the red blink pause blink pause. One's heading toward Colorado, the Springs, I guess. I try not to think of Fischman but it's no use. The blinking lights and shivering stars bring back the memory of that night around the fire at the rafting camp, and the crazy alien stories he'd entertained the tourists with. It was the first night that week, up there in Colorado on the Arkansas, that we'd seen the stars. It had been raining non-stop. I expect mercury was in retrograde then too. Everything seemed to go wrong on that trip: the leaking propane, the blood-thirsty bugs, and Fischman, unprepared for the job of oarsman. Because the water was so high, the orders had been "no paddles for the tourists". One oarsman, seated high up on top of a gear box, would be in control of the little self bailing raft.

     Fischman was rowing the stretch that day and I was along for the ride - right up front - trying to photograph the wave action with a brand new camera. There were five of us: a honeymooning couple from Denver, a macho paramedic from New York City, me and Fischman. 

     It's not like Fischman hadn't done the river many times, but he wasn't used to oars and the waterscape had changed, swollen from the rain. He misjudged the hole. It had probably been a boulder he'd done a run around in the past. When we hit the trough behind the wave head-on, the raft folded and then shot straight up into the air. I remember watching my new Canon arcing out of my hand in slow motion. I sailed after it. I remember being suspended in the blue and then the raft obscuring the sky as it flipped up and over me. I hit the icy water and struggled upward but before I could grab a breath, the gunnel came down on my head, forcing me back under. Disoriented, I tried again for the surface but the raft was still on top me and I was forced down a second time. I started to panic.

     Sometimes when you know you have to figure it out or die, you get it. I had to swim upstream, underwater, away from  the raft as it raced down the river. And with my lungs burning, I did. I came up, gulped air, and turned on my back, feet downstream to save myself from any rocks that might be ahead. The upside-down raft was bouncing away. 

     The Arkansas was narrow here and deep but smooth. I judged I could make shore easily. I looked around for the tourists. The female half of the honeymooners was screaming for her husband. I spotted him upstream from her. An oar drifted by and I grabbed it and shoved it at her. Although her life vest kept her afloat, just having something to hold on to calmed her down enough to stop floundering and listen.

     "He's ok! He's right behind you! Take this oar to shore." So we saved one oar. The three of us dragged it along with an unloosed rubber stuff bag up the bank where we found the paramedic sitting, dazed and pale.

     By this time another raft had caught up with us and the folks in it were scooping up bits of our gear. "Are you OK?" the guide shouted. I waved her on. 

     "Yeah! We're OK. Grab the raft! Where's Fischman? Look for Fischman!"
     They swirled past us. I turned away from the river to take stock of the situation. The bride was sobbing in the groom's arms but he nodded reassurance. The paramedic had stopped shivering and was just staring at the river. I pulled a sleeping bag, still dry, from the sack and tried to put it around his shoulders. He shrugged it off and wobbled to his feet. "I'm fine!"

     "Look at me." I said. He glared. "Do you remember all the symptoms of hypothermia and shock?"

     "What?"

     "You're white as a ghost, your lips are blue, you're too cold to shiver and you're out of it. Now get your life jacket off and wrap up in this." I ordered. "Sit down and put your head between your knees before you faint."

     "Oh…OK…"

     I struggled out of my own vest, staring downstream. The "rescue" raft had beached with the errant boat alongside, still upside down. I could see little figures jumping in and out of the water, hauling both boats ashore. And then over the sound of the rapids I heard a wail, then shouts and saw the tiny figures all come together in a bunch. I ran, tripping over rocks, willow branches whipping my face, falling only once before I reached the group. They'd found Fischman. He'd never made it out from under the raft. On his forehead was a right angle cut where a corner of the gear box had hit him before he drowned. 

     He'd probably gone out like a light. Out like the meteor I just noticed streaking from the Milky Way. Fischman would have insisted it was a UFO, of course, and the stories would have begun. The stars blur with my tears but the wind that has just come roaring in, dries them before they can be shed. I miss Fischman. I miss his stupid stories. I miss the rain and the river and the aspen. But I'm not going anywhere in this drought, not with this old car up on blocks and not on the dry Petaca.

     I'll take that meteor as a sign from him. Native American legend says the Milky Way is the road the soul travels when it journeys to the Ancestors. I think it looks more like a heavenly river. I imagine Fischman swimming against that sparkling white-water star-stream. Or maybe he's not fighting it. Maybe he's just going with the flow back home. Wherever home is.

Winter Ross is an artist, writer and former wilderness EMT who dropped out of Orienteering class before there were cell phones with GPS's.  She is the founder of New Mexico Street Medics and has published in "Pilgrimage: Spirit, Witness, Place" and "EarthFirst Journal."