Motel Nirvana. Melanie McGrath

though the plans have come to me.

      ‘Like to share a ride?’ She sits down in the chair opposite and begins sipping her juice.

      ‘Uh …’

      ‘Great, nine o’clock outside here?’

      Nine o’clock it is then.

      Nine o’clock sharp the next morning, the woman in beads looks as though she’s already been up hours. Caboose and I, on the other hand, are not good in the mornings. I am generally in a foul temper of one kind or another before ten and Caboose requires consideration until its engine has been running a while. Today it can barely cough up sufficient horsepower to get us past the University and on to the Paradise Cafe, even though I’ve had the decency to fill it up with super unleaded. The ingrate has also switched on one of its warning lights, the one with a picture of a triangle on it. Damned if I have the least clue what that means. Less troublesome to ignore it.

      Half an hour on the road and it becomes clear that the woman in beads has two modes of conversation: interrogative and mystical.

      ‘You been to Sedona before?’

      I shake my head.

      ‘Sedona is the most magical, powerful place in the world.’

      ‘Uh-huh.’

      ‘After Lhasa. Have you been to Tibet?’

      I shake my head

      ‘One of the most amazing experiences of my life. And the monks have been put down and suppressed. Like, you must go. You English?’

      And so on. Eventually I ask her to read to me from my guidebook.

      Sedona, Arizona is an isolated miniature sprawl in the upland Arizona desert, trapped picturesquely between scarlet, highwalled bluffs and the sky. Beyond Sedona the Colorado Plateau runs as far as the Utah mountains three hundred miles to the north. Between its southern most edge and Manti, Utah is a natural Maginot Line of trenches cut from rock by the Colorado River, the greatest and most splendid of which is the Grand Canyon. The region’s brilliant red buttes and monumental rocks have long been valued by Hollywood directors and location managers looking for backdrops to western shoot-outs. More recently, crowds have begun to migrate north in summer to the cooler uplands of Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon from Phoenix and the Sonora desert. And for those on a higher spiritual and mental plane Sedona, Arizona, also happens to be the New Age capital of the United States.

      JUST WHO WERE YOU IN YOUR PAST LIVES?

      New Agers began turning up in Sedona some time in the seventies, drawn by the apparent discovery of power ‘vortices’ in among the rocks. These spots, not visible to the eye, were proclaimed to be centres of great electrical and magnetic energy, capable of producing minor miracles. The word spread and a remote little town, which was once nothing more than a thirsty farming outpost of the Verde Valley, rapidly gained its current reputation as a curative mecca for victims of chronic post-sixties syndrome. Sedona became an Oz, geographically and symbolically speaking; an oasis of colour and cool and metaphor in the immense desert Kansases to the south and east. What Mount Rushmore is to the spirit of democracy, Red Rock country is to the universal spirit, the cosmic all, the divine within. In August 1988 thousands of New Agers met in Sedona over a weekend with the avowed aim of activating the power of the vortices and lifting the planet to a new level of consciousness, a level without war, or hunger or brutality. For the three days of the Harmonic Convergence they held hands and hugged and chanted and banged out New Age rhythms on drums.

      The woman with musky hair puts down my guidebook.

      ‘Then, only a year after the Harmonic Convergence, communism fell,’ she concludes, adding

      ‘Well, thanks for the ride,’ as we draw into Sedona. She topples out of Caboose beads first, then pokes her head with its musky hair back inside. ‘You should get that dash light fixed. See you around, maybe?’ No, I’m thinking, you will not. I am still in a terrible mood.

      MAKE A QUANTUM LEAP IN YOUR

      CONSCIOUSNESS TODAY!

      I find a room to rent with a sofa bed, the use of the refrigerator and a shelf in the bathroom out in West Sedona at Sakina Bluestar’s place on Pinon Jay Drive. Sakina is not my first choice. My first choice is Dionne, who comes with the recommendation of the cashier at the New Age Drop-in Center. Dionne wants to know if I chant loudly, smoke alien substances or have Virgo in my ascendant. I admit to the alien substances, but am happy to say that Sagittarius is my ascendant. Dionne finds that her spare room is booked after all. So I throw in my lot with a woman called Sakina, who thinks she’s an alien, and her lodger Santara, who thinks she’s an angel, and a man named Solar who lives in a van parked out in the yard. Sakina Bluestar, without whom this chapter would not have been written, is dedicated to Sedona’s mysterious energies. They notified her one evening about ten years ago that she was to give herself up to the Great Spirit.

      One of Sakina’s most pleasing characteristics is that she makes absolutely no apologies for herself. She accepts she has unusual tastes and asks you to take her as you find her. For example, she has a taste for Barbie dolls and has made a large collection of them. Several dozen blonde Barbies, brunette Barbies, Kens and Sams make her house their home. Some are dressed as mermaids and mermen, others as hippies and cosmic adventurers, but they are all, according to Sakina, first and foremost spirit people, walking spiritual paths, with needs, desires and disappointments like our own.

      ‘They keep me company,’ she says, showing me to my room.

      Throughout the spring and summer Sakina takes in lodgers like me so that she can afford to head off to California in the autumn and set up psychic workshops.

      The room she has to offer is airless and hot, but the light comes in all day, so with a breeze it could almost be pleasant. An old chromium blade fan sits broken in one corner, behind a bookcase. Along the window ledge are a few pictures of Sakina and postcards of the theosophical Ascended Masters done out in lurid colours like Catholic devotional pictures – St Germain, Buddha, Jesus, a woman in white grecian robes, whose profile is hand-labelled in pen underneath, ‘The Lady Cavendish’. A photogravure of Byron in Turkish costume sits on its side in a cheap frame between the window ledge and a little table.

      Nota bene: if this were a work of fiction you might not believe in Sakina and her friends, but I lived among them and I am simply reporting what I saw. That it is bizarre is undeniable, but then, at the time I had only an occasional sense of just how strange my circumstances were. I don’t think anyone is immune to implausible beliefs, however rational and wilful they think themselves to be. It is an easy matter to deny everything you thought you knew and to believe its contradiction rather than to live out your days in bottomless isolation. Only the most rare of individuals will stand up for a belief when all around are declaring its opposite, for most of us feel more anxious to be at ease with each other than we do with ourselves.

      A mechanic in a mom-and-pop garage next to the Circle K in West Sedona says that it will take a while to fix Caboose’s angry flashing dashboard triangle and cost $150. Since I have not yet eaten I wander over to a restaurant and order the once-through, self-serve salad bar. There is a trick to maximizing the pile of food you can fit on the plate. I can’t quite recall how I learned it, only that it is one of those little pieces of informational camaraderie that get passed around among impoverished travellers. The salad bar proprietor, his eye set to turning a profit, puts all the space-taking lettuce and ancient potato salad and so on at the beginning of the bar, and all the expensive ingredients such as meats at the end, in the hope that you will pile your plate up high with trash before hitting the pastrami. Bearing that single fact in mind it is easily possible to make two days’ meals from a single walk through, by first constructing a plate extension using celery and carrot sticks on the cantilever principle then stabilizing it by gluing the bits of carrot down with mayo and weighting the ends with cherry tomatoes. You pile the plate, starting with potatoes, pasta and so forth and following with fruits and vegetables which will stick onto the mayonnaise in the pasta and heap up nicely. Having eaten as much as you are able, you ask for a doggie bag. This is the part when all may be lost, for if your waitperson snitches