From Activism to Shamanism
From a very young age, I was aware that there are many things wrong in this world, and I wanted to change them. I was politically active by the time I was eighteen. In 1973 I became an environmental activist, before the average person on the street had any idea that there were serious environmental problems. In 1977, I came out as a lesbian, and I was on the front lines of the feminist movement in England for a number of years, involved in a militant campaign to undermine male chauvinism. I was angry.
Now, in my mid fifties, I call myself a marveling mystic. Although I am still a passionate person, I am rarely angry. I don’t turn up for any kind of demonstration that is against anything, because I believe that whatever we resist persists. I am a Minister of Holistic Healing, active in Earth-based spiritual practices that are intended to empower the individual. I teach shamanic self-growth work. My favorite activity, which I find profoundly zen, is kitesurfing.
What happened?
Although I still wanted to change the world, I stopped being politically active in my thirties, mainly because I was working sixteen hours a day running an organic farm, and living in the boonies of northern California. I was still angry. The intensity of my anger forced me to recognize that it was far beyond any justification in the present moment, and I went into therapy. Thanks to some invaluable help from both paid therapists and good friends, I identified some childhood traumas, and moved beyond them. I began to study Earth-based spiritualities. A year-long training in Angeles Arrien’s The Four Fold Way introduced me to shamanic ritual work that helped me to move through my stuff. This work requires a level of honesty and self-reflection that felt very real and valuable to me. Over the next decade, I did a lot of that kind of introspection. I’ve always had a passion for the truth, and I wanted to get to the truth in everything. I wanted to understand what life is about, I wanted to find Truths that are universal.
Although I stopped being so angry, I was still dissatisfied, which often manifested as impatience and irritation. In my forties, my dissatisfaction and my search for Truth encompassed the whole way I was living life, making me question what life is for. This existential introspection went on for years, becoming quite agonizing at times, as I found no one able to give me answers that went anywhere near deep enough for me.
And then, over a period three or four years, I had some very remarkable experiences. Since these were experiential—in other words, they were on a feeling level, and there were no onlookers to identify any kind of happening—they are very hard to describe. The first of them was precipitated by a head injury that occurred when I was alone in the woods. Unable to walk, and too far from anywhere to be heard calling for help, I was astonished to find myself instantaneously transported a mile to the nearest inhabited house, where there was a person to take care of me and get me to hospital. It was a miracle along the lines of a mother who picks up a car when her child is trapped underneath it. Having done that once, surely I could do it again—and I really wanted to find out how, without having to injure myself.
The second, which occurred when I was driving, was an experience of bliss beyond anything that I had ever previously known. Perhaps it was what some religions refer to as enlightenment or satori. I certainly knew, in those moments, that this world is an incredibly beautiful place, filled with love. I knew that all is well. I knew that changing this world is more about who I am, than anything I can do, because no one could come into contact with me in that moment of my-knowing-of-vastness, without being affected. I understood that to be effective, doing must always arise out of being. All this I knew instantaneously, without thought. I saw that knowing, or wisdom, is a sensation, much greater than anything that can be computed by the rational brain. Even though the radiance of the sensation passed after a few hours, it was now with me forever.
The third occurred when I had a mysterious illness which, even back then, I knew to be a shamanic break—that is, an illness that was intended on some subconscious level, because I had become aware of the possibility of living in joy, and I wanted to change. I still wanted to know who I was. Who had moved my body when I lay sick in the woods? Who had put me here on this planet? In the process of recovering from my illness, I was advised to look into my eyes in a mirror, with the intention of seeing who was looking back at me. What I saw was simply my own face, yet it was shocking. I could not deny the presence of an eternal being, powerful beyond my wildest reckoning. I understood the truth of Marianne Williamson’s words, in her book, A Return to Love: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”
Now that I had met myself, I knew there was no reason to be afraid of anything. I realized that the most useful thing I could do would be to get into alignment with that vast self. Although my rational brain is still prone to fits of anxiety, my belief systems have changed radically. The last few years have been about translating those changes into a different lifestyle, one that is based on joy and trust rather than fear about the future. I sold my house and most of my possessions so that I could be absolutely free. I am choosing to live in joy. That doesn’t mean that I don’t slip into fear. It means that I make sure that I get a daily dose of things that bring me joy, and I don’t allow my fears to motivate me.
Nowadays the doing that arises out of my being is about helping others to access the sensation of inner wisdom. This occurs through my writing and through coaching. The book I am working on now is The Art of Being Human. My existential questioning led me to investigate a number of different spiritual practices: Sufism, Buddhism, Wicca. Since none of them, in themselves, helped me to find answers to my questions, I don’t identify with any of them now. However, shamanic spiritual practices, which are about developing a personal relationship to Nature and learning to work with energy, are right up my alley. I’ve found journeying particularly useful and self-empowering. Journeying is too complicated a concept to explain fully in this article, but the word refers to going to other realms, or planes of existence, to get help and information. Guided visualizations and night-time dreams are about traveling like this. Many people think of it as their imagination. It really doesn’t matter what words you use, it is a way of accessing your own inner truth.
I’m perfectly aware that, on a rational-brain level, none of the above would persuade anyone that I’m talking any sense. This is all simply my experience. I am very sure of myself, yet I cannot communicate my certainty to anyone else, even if they consider themselves seekers, as I did. I certainly haven’t written anything that would change any skeptical minds. That’s not my intention. Life in human form is a personal experience, different for everyone. We all need to be doing whatever we are doing right now, and we are all doing our best. It’s not my job to change anyone else, and I could make myself miserable trying. It’s just my job to be me, as fully and joyfully as I can. My hope is that some people will be moved by my story in a way that will bring more compassion to this glorious world.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Here is the introduction to one of my latest books, Life, Lies, and Sex: a Manual for Living, which will be available in e-book format at the end of this year.
This book is intended as a study of the flow of energy in this Universe, with a view to examining how we as human beings can most comfortably fit into that flow. I was inspired to write because I see so much misunderstanding about the nature of reality, and so few people who are really making sense, while more and more people are searching for what does make sense. Sometimes when I hear or read things said by people who are well-respected teachers, I want to cringe. No wonder so many of us ordinary folks are confused, when our so-called teachers are spouting garbage. And then there are people like James Ray, who are killing us.
There is a tendency to believe that if teachings are really ancient, then they are always profound. We think that they will reflect a depth that is often missing in our modern world. Sometimes that’s true and sometimes it’s not. The teachings that some spiritual leaders are offering just aren’t relevant to this culture any more. They were learned and developed thousands or at least hundreds of years ago, for very different cultures and civilizations. In the West, human life has changed radically in the last fifty to two hundred years. Most of us have moved out of survival mode, and we easily grasp concepts that were impossible for people back then. We are ready for something new and exciting. We’re ready to move on to a completely new way of being in the world. Some of us are chomping at the bit.
How come I think I know any better than other people? Well, perhaps I don’t. Sometimes I’m certain I know nothing at all.
I’ve told the story of how I got this information in the last chapter. In the end, I can sum up my method in a few words: I allow the knowledge to come to me, with some prodding from AMAG (beings in spirit form who speak through Dayana Jon); and I spend a lot of time alone in Nature. If you are reading this book, the chances are high that you can also allow this knowledge to come to you. Some of you will have the same reaction as I did when I got the information I’ve written about: Oh! Now I get it! I know that some of the people who are reading this book will just think I am spouting garbage. That’s life on Planet Earth. A huge diversity of being is represented here, which is a wonderful thing.
This book is intended as a study of the flow of energy in this Universe, with a view to examining how we as human beings can most comfortably fit into that flow. I was inspired to write because I see so much misunderstanding about the nature of reality, and so few people who are really making sense, while more and more people are searching for what does make sense. Sometimes when I hear or read things said by people who are well-respected teachers, I want to cringe. No wonder so many of us ordinary folks are confused, when our so-called teachers are spouting garbage. And then there are people like James Ray, who are killing us.
There is a tendency to believe that if teachings are really ancient, then they are always profound. We think that they will reflect a depth that is often missing in our modern world. Sometimes that’s true and sometimes it’s not. The teachings that some spiritual leaders are offering just aren’t relevant to this culture any more. They were learned and developed thousands or at least hundreds of years ago, for very different cultures and civilizations. In the West, human life has changed radically in the last fifty to two hundred years. Most of us have moved out of survival mode, and we easily grasp concepts that were impossible for people back then. We are ready for something new and exciting. We’re ready to move on to a completely new way of being in the world. Some of us are chomping at the bit.
How come I think I know any better than other people? Well, perhaps I don’t. Sometimes I’m certain I know nothing at all.
I’ve told the story of how I got this information in the last chapter. In the end, I can sum up my method in a few words: I allow the knowledge to come to me, with some prodding from AMAG (beings in spirit form who speak through Dayana Jon); and I spend a lot of time alone in Nature. If you are reading this book, the chances are high that you can also allow this knowledge to come to you. Some of you will have the same reaction as I did when I got the information I’ve written about: Oh! Now I get it! I know that some of the people who are reading this book will just think I am spouting garbage. That’s life on Planet Earth. A huge diversity of being is represented here, which is a wonderful thing.
Friday, January 1, 2010
The Pitfalls of Healing
The Pitfalls of Healing
A few years ago I was ordained as a minister of holistic healing. Since then, I’ve stopped using the word healer to refer to myself because I found that lots of people don’t really want to be fixed, and although I may be certain that I know what someone needs to do, that does not necessarily translate into being helpful. And wanting to be helpful in itself is questionable, since it often stems from an ego need. The truth is that I don’t know what will work for someone else. Sometimes people who read my books and articles get quite a different idea than that which I intended. I’ve learned to trust that they are getting what they need, and it’s not my job to put them right.
This brings me to the question, what is healing? As the Earth shifts into her new way of being, we are presented with a different paradigm. At its most basic, in the old paradigm, healing is simply alleviating discomfort. At the other end of the spectrum, in the new paradigm, I would say that it is about whole-ness, which means being in alignment with all-that-we-are. From that perspective, health is not about overcoming discomfort, because even while we are railing against it, we may (in truth) want to experience discomfort so that we can experience end results which our limited human perspective is incapable of grasping. From the perspective of all-that-we-are, discomfort (even extreme pain) is not a bad thing. In fact, from that perspective, there is nothing the matter with anything.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m into alleviating discomfort — I don’t think it does my body any good to be in acute or chronic states of pain. But whether or not you treat the symptoms, it is necessary to address the cause. Pain is usually a messenger.
There are a number of potential problems for healers in dealing with this changing paradigm. The old question of when to leave well alone and when to step in is just as present as it always has been. I’ve avoided having to make this judgment by writing books—if someone doesn’t get anything from reading my books, they will simply dismiss it as a bad book. They’re not likely to demand their money back. For healers who have all kinds of people coming to them for a myriad of different reasons, it’s not so easy. The healer must remain in that place of knowing that the client knows best, even when she perceives the client as determined to ignore the message. The fact is that all clients must be allowed to do what they want to do.
There have always been different levels of healing but in the new paradigm they are very different. A healer may be presented with situations as varied as helping people who want to stay fast asleep, to helping people who are very wide awake and trying to find a way to remain in human form while being fully aware of the vastness of being. There is nothing wrong with being asleep, it’s just different from being awake. It’s not the healer’s job to decide someone needs to wake up—but it might be her job to judge whether someone is asking for help in waking up or help in staying asleep. And then judge whether she can offer anything appropriate.
Being awake is not as straightforwardly obvious as it might appear. We’ve all heard the phrase, all is well, and most of us have thought, at one time or another, Wake up and look around—clearly everything in this world is not well. The irony is that the people who are sleeping are the ones who are rushing around trying to fix everything, while the ones who are awake know that their only job is to appreciate this amazing planet. The true meaning of health is being awake: coming into alignment with all-that-we-are so that we perceive the truth of the phrase, all is well. True health is a state that does not need healing. We understand that this wonderful diverse planet Earth is a place of duality: peace and war, right and wrong, good and bad are opposites that need each other. Outside of that, when we are awake, we are learning how to choose a state of unity where we can experience peace that is absolutely something else; where the words right and wrong have no meaning. How different would our lives be if we operated from that perspective? Healers who are working on that kind of level can be accused of a lack of ethics by people still operating in the old paradigm, who don’t understand these concepts.
It is always important not to get attached to a particular image of who we are in the world, especially in these rapidly changing times, but because a healer’s job is specifically to divine what is wrong with someone and tell that person what to do about it, they very often get attached to being good at that, and then they are not able to step out of the role of the advice-giver. The healer is expected to know best. I’ve found this a problem with a number of the psychics I know—they assume that I am asking for help when I simply want to discuss how to be in the world. Being attached to the image of being a good healer is particularly tricky, because you are messing with people’s heads.
It is not just her image of herself that a healer needs to be aware of, but also her image of who her client is. Again, we are living in a world where all kinds of new and wonderful things are coming into form. Some of the beings around us do not fit in any standard mold, and yet a healer often learns to operate within a limited awareness of a standard mold. It makes her job easier in general, but she may be making inaccurate judgments of some of her clients. We humans are manifesting our individuality as we never have before. Like a photographer who doesn’t see the beauty because she is so focused on getting exactly the right shot, a healer may not be able to step back and allow new ideas to enter.
As more and more of us come into a daily awareness of the vastness of being, we tend to be dealing with two ongoing problems. The first is how to keep the physical form in good health although it is vibrating at a much lower frequency than that which we are getting in touch with. This gives rise to a lot of unusual physical symptoms that may require treatments very different from those that worked in the past. Moreover, the treatments may be quite different from one client to another. Healers have to be thinking outside of that old box. The second is how to be with other humans (the majority of the population) who are not going through the same kind of intense changes. Most healers, if they understand these questions at all, are busy working out their own answers. We’re all stumbling around in the dark—or rather, the light! We are on the cutting edge, forging our very own paths, and looking for help wherever we can get it. I revere all healers who working towards that knowing of whole-ness, both because it is such a responsibility and because it is so important. In the same breath, I revere all of us who are coming to accept that there is nothing which needs to be healed. We live in paradoxical times!
Bio: Mikaya Heart’s greatest desire is to inspire humans to follow their hearts and live their dreams. Her most recent book, My Sweet Wild Dance, which is in the running for the Lambda Literary Awards, is about a woman who claims her own power in a world where powerful women are not popular. For more information, see www.mikayaheart.org
A few years ago I was ordained as a minister of holistic healing. Since then, I’ve stopped using the word healer to refer to myself because I found that lots of people don’t really want to be fixed, and although I may be certain that I know what someone needs to do, that does not necessarily translate into being helpful. And wanting to be helpful in itself is questionable, since it often stems from an ego need. The truth is that I don’t know what will work for someone else. Sometimes people who read my books and articles get quite a different idea than that which I intended. I’ve learned to trust that they are getting what they need, and it’s not my job to put them right.
This brings me to the question, what is healing? As the Earth shifts into her new way of being, we are presented with a different paradigm. At its most basic, in the old paradigm, healing is simply alleviating discomfort. At the other end of the spectrum, in the new paradigm, I would say that it is about whole-ness, which means being in alignment with all-that-we-are. From that perspective, health is not about overcoming discomfort, because even while we are railing against it, we may (in truth) want to experience discomfort so that we can experience end results which our limited human perspective is incapable of grasping. From the perspective of all-that-we-are, discomfort (even extreme pain) is not a bad thing. In fact, from that perspective, there is nothing the matter with anything.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m into alleviating discomfort — I don’t think it does my body any good to be in acute or chronic states of pain. But whether or not you treat the symptoms, it is necessary to address the cause. Pain is usually a messenger.
There are a number of potential problems for healers in dealing with this changing paradigm. The old question of when to leave well alone and when to step in is just as present as it always has been. I’ve avoided having to make this judgment by writing books—if someone doesn’t get anything from reading my books, they will simply dismiss it as a bad book. They’re not likely to demand their money back. For healers who have all kinds of people coming to them for a myriad of different reasons, it’s not so easy. The healer must remain in that place of knowing that the client knows best, even when she perceives the client as determined to ignore the message. The fact is that all clients must be allowed to do what they want to do.
There have always been different levels of healing but in the new paradigm they are very different. A healer may be presented with situations as varied as helping people who want to stay fast asleep, to helping people who are very wide awake and trying to find a way to remain in human form while being fully aware of the vastness of being. There is nothing wrong with being asleep, it’s just different from being awake. It’s not the healer’s job to decide someone needs to wake up—but it might be her job to judge whether someone is asking for help in waking up or help in staying asleep. And then judge whether she can offer anything appropriate.
Being awake is not as straightforwardly obvious as it might appear. We’ve all heard the phrase, all is well, and most of us have thought, at one time or another, Wake up and look around—clearly everything in this world is not well. The irony is that the people who are sleeping are the ones who are rushing around trying to fix everything, while the ones who are awake know that their only job is to appreciate this amazing planet. The true meaning of health is being awake: coming into alignment with all-that-we-are so that we perceive the truth of the phrase, all is well. True health is a state that does not need healing. We understand that this wonderful diverse planet Earth is a place of duality: peace and war, right and wrong, good and bad are opposites that need each other. Outside of that, when we are awake, we are learning how to choose a state of unity where we can experience peace that is absolutely something else; where the words right and wrong have no meaning. How different would our lives be if we operated from that perspective? Healers who are working on that kind of level can be accused of a lack of ethics by people still operating in the old paradigm, who don’t understand these concepts.
It is always important not to get attached to a particular image of who we are in the world, especially in these rapidly changing times, but because a healer’s job is specifically to divine what is wrong with someone and tell that person what to do about it, they very often get attached to being good at that, and then they are not able to step out of the role of the advice-giver. The healer is expected to know best. I’ve found this a problem with a number of the psychics I know—they assume that I am asking for help when I simply want to discuss how to be in the world. Being attached to the image of being a good healer is particularly tricky, because you are messing with people’s heads.
It is not just her image of herself that a healer needs to be aware of, but also her image of who her client is. Again, we are living in a world where all kinds of new and wonderful things are coming into form. Some of the beings around us do not fit in any standard mold, and yet a healer often learns to operate within a limited awareness of a standard mold. It makes her job easier in general, but she may be making inaccurate judgments of some of her clients. We humans are manifesting our individuality as we never have before. Like a photographer who doesn’t see the beauty because she is so focused on getting exactly the right shot, a healer may not be able to step back and allow new ideas to enter.
As more and more of us come into a daily awareness of the vastness of being, we tend to be dealing with two ongoing problems. The first is how to keep the physical form in good health although it is vibrating at a much lower frequency than that which we are getting in touch with. This gives rise to a lot of unusual physical symptoms that may require treatments very different from those that worked in the past. Moreover, the treatments may be quite different from one client to another. Healers have to be thinking outside of that old box. The second is how to be with other humans (the majority of the population) who are not going through the same kind of intense changes. Most healers, if they understand these questions at all, are busy working out their own answers. We’re all stumbling around in the dark—or rather, the light! We are on the cutting edge, forging our very own paths, and looking for help wherever we can get it. I revere all healers who working towards that knowing of whole-ness, both because it is such a responsibility and because it is so important. In the same breath, I revere all of us who are coming to accept that there is nothing which needs to be healed. We live in paradoxical times!
Bio: Mikaya Heart’s greatest desire is to inspire humans to follow their hearts and live their dreams. Her most recent book, My Sweet Wild Dance, which is in the running for the Lambda Literary Awards, is about a woman who claims her own power in a world where powerful women are not popular. For more information, see www.mikayaheart.org
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Shamanic Journeying
Shamanic drum journeying was and still is utilized extensively by shamans from indigenous cultures all over the world. The sound of the drum carries them to other realms of existence where they can do healing work that affects this so-called ordinary realm of existence. The journey often involves relating to power animals who help to bring back parts of a person’s soul that were lost in the course of that individual’s life, or get rid of negative energies that are making someone sick.
Whether or not one subscribes to a belief in other realms of existence, this method of healing is frequently effective, and the same kind of journeying can be used by individuals who are looking for answers to questions that come up in our ordinary reality. The journey is similar to the kind of dreaming we do when we are asleep. Just as you can ask for an answer to a question before you go to sleep, and then find the answer supplied either in a dream or simply as a knowing that is with you when you wake up, so you can ask a question and then go on a drum journey to find the answer.
Traditionally, people would go to one of three places when they journeyed: the upper world, the lower world, or the middle world, which is simply present reality. In other words, when you go to the middle world, you stay right here, and that means this is right where you need to be. The upper world is a landscape where you are high up, and often flying; the lower world is one where you are down underneath, often underwater or under the ground. None of the three are any better than another. In reality, my journeys are frequently a mix of the upper and lower worlds. They often involve going to some fantastic kind of landscape where I meet interesting beings. Usually I can address these beings with my questions and receive profound answers, either in words or in symbolic actions. Once, as I was swimming underwater — where I found I could breathe easily — a swordfish sliced me open (painlessly) up the middle. This action was repeated four times during the journey. Clearly I was being told I needed to open up.
People journey to other sounds as well: rattles, didjeridoos, and even singing. Tapes of drumming and rattling specifically for journeying are available, although it is often easier to take off when a live person is right there making the sound. A journey into another state of consciousness can be induced by other means than sound—our sleeping dreams, some daydreams, past life regression, hypnotic trances, and guided visualizations are kinds of journeying. A picture, a word, a smell—anything can suddenly transport us to another reality if we have the propensity to go there. I was once catapulted into another reality—or perhaps more accurately, another place and time—by the sound of a Tibetan bowl. I became the sound of the bowl, which was quite an astounding sensation, and then the sound came with me, as an instrument of healing, to a place that needed that healing.
It’s best to start a journey with a specific intention or question. You can always control your journey — if you don’t like the place where you find yourself, you can decide to go somewhere else, and you never have to hang out with any being that you don’t like. It can be a great way to access a power animal or a totem. It’s fine to let your imagination go; it doesn’t matter if you think that everything that occurs on your journey is simply the result of a vivid imagination. It can still be useful.
I recommend journeying in a group, where you all get to talk about your experiences afterwards, since no group comes together by accident, and what others have to say may be very useful for you. I have drummed many times for groups, and I usually do it for twenty minutes. I’ve also drummed for people who are journeying to retrieve soul parts for others, which is sometimes a lot longer than twenty minutes. The first five minutes of drumming is often really hard and I can’t imagine how I will keep it up — then something else takes over, and it’s easy.
Where are these journeys taking us? Most humans believe that this physical world we call Earth is reality. We don’t have the language to explain things that don’t fit into it. Are these really different worlds we are visiting, perhaps different planets—or planes of consciousness? Are they different realms of awareness? Are we time-traveling? Are we going through shifts of consciousness that allow us suddenly to become sentient of other times and places? Are they parallel realities, existing in different dimensions? Are other planes of reality, normally invisible to us, intertwined with this one? And what on Earth (or anywhere else) does all that mean, anyway?
I don’t pretend to know the answers to these questions. My physical brain cannot compute what occurs on these kinds of journeys. I only know that they are a wonderfully empowering source of information, and I delight in taking others on them as much as I do in taking them myself. If you are interested in doing a journey, you can contact me through my website, www.mikayaheart.org
Whether or not one subscribes to a belief in other realms of existence, this method of healing is frequently effective, and the same kind of journeying can be used by individuals who are looking for answers to questions that come up in our ordinary reality. The journey is similar to the kind of dreaming we do when we are asleep. Just as you can ask for an answer to a question before you go to sleep, and then find the answer supplied either in a dream or simply as a knowing that is with you when you wake up, so you can ask a question and then go on a drum journey to find the answer.
Traditionally, people would go to one of three places when they journeyed: the upper world, the lower world, or the middle world, which is simply present reality. In other words, when you go to the middle world, you stay right here, and that means this is right where you need to be. The upper world is a landscape where you are high up, and often flying; the lower world is one where you are down underneath, often underwater or under the ground. None of the three are any better than another. In reality, my journeys are frequently a mix of the upper and lower worlds. They often involve going to some fantastic kind of landscape where I meet interesting beings. Usually I can address these beings with my questions and receive profound answers, either in words or in symbolic actions. Once, as I was swimming underwater — where I found I could breathe easily — a swordfish sliced me open (painlessly) up the middle. This action was repeated four times during the journey. Clearly I was being told I needed to open up.
People journey to other sounds as well: rattles, didjeridoos, and even singing. Tapes of drumming and rattling specifically for journeying are available, although it is often easier to take off when a live person is right there making the sound. A journey into another state of consciousness can be induced by other means than sound—our sleeping dreams, some daydreams, past life regression, hypnotic trances, and guided visualizations are kinds of journeying. A picture, a word, a smell—anything can suddenly transport us to another reality if we have the propensity to go there. I was once catapulted into another reality—or perhaps more accurately, another place and time—by the sound of a Tibetan bowl. I became the sound of the bowl, which was quite an astounding sensation, and then the sound came with me, as an instrument of healing, to a place that needed that healing.
It’s best to start a journey with a specific intention or question. You can always control your journey — if you don’t like the place where you find yourself, you can decide to go somewhere else, and you never have to hang out with any being that you don’t like. It can be a great way to access a power animal or a totem. It’s fine to let your imagination go; it doesn’t matter if you think that everything that occurs on your journey is simply the result of a vivid imagination. It can still be useful.
I recommend journeying in a group, where you all get to talk about your experiences afterwards, since no group comes together by accident, and what others have to say may be very useful for you. I have drummed many times for groups, and I usually do it for twenty minutes. I’ve also drummed for people who are journeying to retrieve soul parts for others, which is sometimes a lot longer than twenty minutes. The first five minutes of drumming is often really hard and I can’t imagine how I will keep it up — then something else takes over, and it’s easy.
Where are these journeys taking us? Most humans believe that this physical world we call Earth is reality. We don’t have the language to explain things that don’t fit into it. Are these really different worlds we are visiting, perhaps different planets—or planes of consciousness? Are they different realms of awareness? Are we time-traveling? Are we going through shifts of consciousness that allow us suddenly to become sentient of other times and places? Are they parallel realities, existing in different dimensions? Are other planes of reality, normally invisible to us, intertwined with this one? And what on Earth (or anywhere else) does all that mean, anyway?
I don’t pretend to know the answers to these questions. My physical brain cannot compute what occurs on these kinds of journeys. I only know that they are a wonderfully empowering source of information, and I delight in taking others on them as much as I do in taking them myself. If you are interested in doing a journey, you can contact me through my website, www.mikayaheart.org
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
An Encounter with Luna - British Columbia
An Encounter with Luna
Vancouver Island is huge and very convoluted round the edges. There are only a few places where the rocky terrain allows easy access to the water, with a road to take you there. So we drove for several hours on a wide dirt track, through the endless forests of Douglas fir, to get to Nootka Sound. We’d picked it out on the map, because it looked remote enough that we would be able to get away on our own.
We drew up finally at a small wooden pier, a very small beach and several small houses. One of them was a store, selling mostly fishing equipment and cans of food. Several cars were parked around the area, and a couple of guys were getting ready to take off in a motorboat, their fishing rods sticking out over the stern.
Unloaded the kayaks by the beach, we sorted what we would need for the night: sleeping bags, warm clothes, cooking equipment, some dried and canned food. I had a sit-on-top, a kayak that is very stable but does not keep you dry, so I donned some waterproof clothes, and stashed my luggage in big plastic bags. Jo had rented an ocean kayak, the kind you sit inside, with a skirt that prevents the water coming into the vessel. The first time she’d got into it, she promptly tipped over sideways, but by this time she was used to distributing her weight with care. If either of us capsized, our luggage would get soaked, but the sea is generally very calm around there, because there are countless wandering inlets dotted with islands, intercepting the Pacific Ocean’s waves and swells. It was a sunny day – with any luck the weather would hold out for us.
We were ready to leave, when an older man with white hair and a slight limp wandered down the path. I saw him coming and thought, he’s got something to tell us. He addressed me with a bemused smile, “You going out into the bay to see the orca?”
I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “I’d love to see an orca, I didn’t know there was one out there. I thought they went around in pods, and stuck to very specific routes.”
“This one’s lost his pod. We just got back from petting him, he’s right out there.” He waved at the bay. “His pod’s gone back to the ocean and they left him here. He’s real friendly!” His tone held a sense of wonder.
“Well, maybe we’ll see her!” We smiled at each other and he departed. Meanwhile Jo had been reading a notice board on the edge of the pier. When she came back, I said, “That guy just told me there is a lone orca out in the bay.”
She nodded. “Yes, there’s a sign about her on that board. Apparently she’s a teenaged female, and they’re hoping the pod will pick her up again when it comes back through the sound. They say you are not to feed her or approach her, they don‘t want her to get used to being with humans.”
“Hmmm!” I grinned. “Well, it would be a treat to see her, anyway. That guy told me he’d been petting her. It was obviously a pretty big experience for him, he’ll be telling his grandkids about it for years to come.”
“Cool! I hope we get to see her. Maybe she will approach us, then we won’t be approaching her!”
We put the kayaks in the water and set off paddling. I always appreciate that feeling of space you get out on the water, it’s such a different perspective from the land. The view was the same – forest covered hills on all sides with stretches of water in between, but somehow the sensation of the water carrying us, and the experience of looking back at land instead of looking out from land gave me a sense of freedom.
A breeze made the clear cold water slightly choppy, but not uncomfortable. We paddled for a couple of hours before we picked out a small uninhabited island with a short stretch of rocky shore where we could beach our kayaks. Once back on land, we went exploring. As I jumped from rock to rock along the edge of the water, I noticed large colonies of some kind of shellfish attached to the rock surface in the intertidal zone. They were shapeless and stone colored, very firmly attached to the rock. I called Jo over to see if she could identify them, and she said immediately, with a smile, “Those are oysters! Do you like oysters?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never had them. How do you get them off the rock?”
She showed me how to prize them off with a knife. We made a fire on the beach with some of the copious downed wood from the forest, to roast them on the coals. As soon as they were hot they automatically opened up so that you could scoop out the jelly like meat. They were an oddly liquid consistency but quite pleasant.
As darkness fell, Jo made a bed for herself in the sand and I lay down on the moss on the forest floor. Although there were a few mosquitoes, I slept well. In the morning we had a quick breakfast of bread and cheese before we set off again just as the sun was peeking through the clouds. We explored the coasts of a few other islands, and paddled along the edge of one shallow sandy beach. “Have you ever collected clams?” Jo asked, looking over the edge of her boat into the water.
“No, have you?”
“Yes, and there seem to be lots of them here. It must be a very low tide, I can see them sticking out of the sand.”
Floating behind her, I could see what she was looking at: there were scores of fat white and brown clam shells, just their tips visible. They were easy to scoop up with our hands, without even getting out of the kayaks. “Do we know for sure they are safe to eat?” I asked.
“Well,” Jo frowned, “I think that in places where there are a lot of people living on the shore, they might be polluted. Here it should be quite safe. Unless there’s a red tide. But I think we would see it if there was a red tide.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s kind of bacteria that stains the water red, and when you get a lot of them they make the shellfish poisonous.”
“Oh!”
She laughed. “Don’t worry about it, I think we would already be sick from eating the oysters if it was going to be a problem!”
“Well, I suppose that’s good, I’m glad you didn’t tell me earlier!”
After filling a couple of bags with clams, we set off again. Because it was Sunday, there were quite a few motorboats in the bay, but it was a large enough area that we weren’t too bothered by the swells or the sounds of engines. Both of us were keeping an eye open for the orca we were meant to avoid, when we noticed a couple of boats stopped in the middle of the bay, a long way from any land. As we paddled towards them to see what was going on, one of them sped away. The other remained, and when we were close enough to be in hearing range we could see the big black and white shape just beneath the water right beside the boat. She was rubbing her big body against the side of the boat, rolling over on her back and standing up on her tail. As we paddled closer, I called over, “I hope you’re not feeding her!”
“Oh no, he just likes the company,” a man in a peaked cap called back. “And we can’t start up our motor to leave because he might be damaged by the propeller. Bang on the side of your kayak, and he’ll come right over to you!”
Without stopping to consider the wisdom of this, I slapped the side of my kayak, and in a couple of seconds, a huge rounded back broke the surface right beside me. She was longer than my kayak. She lay there looking at me with one round black eye.
Hesitantly I reached out to rub her jet-black head. Was this OK? She seemed to like it, and I was delighted to feel her silky smooth skin, thick and almost rubbery. Rolling over on her back, she showed me her white belly, opening her mouth wide. I felt like I could be swallowed whole. It was cavernous, at least two feet across, with a short pink tongue and very neat lines of perfect pyramid teeth, an inch long in the center, getting smaller to either side. “Girl, look at your teeth!” I said, awed. I got the impression she was grinning at me.
Jo called, “I saw a program on TV about them, and it said they like to have their tongues rubbed!”
“I don’t think I want to risk losing my hand, even though you are so friendly,” I told the huge animal. I realized my kayak was moving sideways quite fast — she was leaning on it. As I was wondering if this was cause for concern, she swam underneath me, and I found myself and my boat lifted half out of the water on her huge broad back.
“Hey, baby, you’re gorgeous, but put me down!” I exclaimed in alarm.
“They’ve never been known to attack humans,“ called Jo reassuringly.
“That may be so, but I’d prefer not to be in the water with her!“
Just as the kayak was starting to slide sideways, she dove downwards, dropping me back in the water, and re-surfaced next to Jo, repeating her antics. For a few minutes she swam to and fro playing with each of us in turn. We had plenty of time to examine her: the round dimple on top her head which was her blowhole, the wide black tail that could probably knock our kayaks out of the water, the discolored indentations on her back where she had been hit by something - propellers? Clearly she was enjoying our interest in her. But she was getting more and more bumptious, picking us up and rubbing against us. In spite of her apparently playful intentions, she would capsize one or both of us sooner or later. How were we going to get away from her?
The first motorboat had quickly departed as soon as she’d left them, but now another one stopped nearby. I called over to tell them to slap the side of their boat, and again, she responded to the call immediately. She was obviously lonely, and people were probably the only beings in the bay who were prepared to hang out with her. Fish and seals were potential prey who would make themselves as scarce as they could when she was around.
The moment she left us, we took off towards the nearest shore, paddling as fast as we could. She caught up with us after we had gone a few hundred yards, and swam alongside, leaping in and out of the water in perfect sine waves, with such joyful carefree elegance and effortless ease that I felt quite jealous. When we got closer to the shore, she departed to show off to some other tourists.
In spite of the danger of having a large animal being so friendly, Jo and I were grinning from ear to ear for hours afterwards. There was something very special about being so close to such a delightful character, in such a very different physical form. I understood the bemused expression of the man who had approached me before we set off. It was the kind of encounter you never forgot.
This orca, nicknamed Luna, became very well known in Nootka Sound over the next year or so. “She” turned out to be wrongly labelled female, though the name stuck. His complete lack of fear around humans caused various problems, since he quite often disabled boats, and nearly sank a couple. Of course this ignited a fierce debate over what should be done about him. Finally, the problem was solved when he was killed by the propeller of a big boat. Many mourned and some were relieved, but no one who had been in contact with him was left unmoved.
Vancouver Island is huge and very convoluted round the edges. There are only a few places where the rocky terrain allows easy access to the water, with a road to take you there. So we drove for several hours on a wide dirt track, through the endless forests of Douglas fir, to get to Nootka Sound. We’d picked it out on the map, because it looked remote enough that we would be able to get away on our own.
We drew up finally at a small wooden pier, a very small beach and several small houses. One of them was a store, selling mostly fishing equipment and cans of food. Several cars were parked around the area, and a couple of guys were getting ready to take off in a motorboat, their fishing rods sticking out over the stern.
Unloaded the kayaks by the beach, we sorted what we would need for the night: sleeping bags, warm clothes, cooking equipment, some dried and canned food. I had a sit-on-top, a kayak that is very stable but does not keep you dry, so I donned some waterproof clothes, and stashed my luggage in big plastic bags. Jo had rented an ocean kayak, the kind you sit inside, with a skirt that prevents the water coming into the vessel. The first time she’d got into it, she promptly tipped over sideways, but by this time she was used to distributing her weight with care. If either of us capsized, our luggage would get soaked, but the sea is generally very calm around there, because there are countless wandering inlets dotted with islands, intercepting the Pacific Ocean’s waves and swells. It was a sunny day – with any luck the weather would hold out for us.
We were ready to leave, when an older man with white hair and a slight limp wandered down the path. I saw him coming and thought, he’s got something to tell us. He addressed me with a bemused smile, “You going out into the bay to see the orca?”
I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “I’d love to see an orca, I didn’t know there was one out there. I thought they went around in pods, and stuck to very specific routes.”
“This one’s lost his pod. We just got back from petting him, he’s right out there.” He waved at the bay. “His pod’s gone back to the ocean and they left him here. He’s real friendly!” His tone held a sense of wonder.
“Well, maybe we’ll see her!” We smiled at each other and he departed. Meanwhile Jo had been reading a notice board on the edge of the pier. When she came back, I said, “That guy just told me there is a lone orca out in the bay.”
She nodded. “Yes, there’s a sign about her on that board. Apparently she’s a teenaged female, and they’re hoping the pod will pick her up again when it comes back through the sound. They say you are not to feed her or approach her, they don‘t want her to get used to being with humans.”
“Hmmm!” I grinned. “Well, it would be a treat to see her, anyway. That guy told me he’d been petting her. It was obviously a pretty big experience for him, he’ll be telling his grandkids about it for years to come.”
“Cool! I hope we get to see her. Maybe she will approach us, then we won’t be approaching her!”
We put the kayaks in the water and set off paddling. I always appreciate that feeling of space you get out on the water, it’s such a different perspective from the land. The view was the same – forest covered hills on all sides with stretches of water in between, but somehow the sensation of the water carrying us, and the experience of looking back at land instead of looking out from land gave me a sense of freedom.
A breeze made the clear cold water slightly choppy, but not uncomfortable. We paddled for a couple of hours before we picked out a small uninhabited island with a short stretch of rocky shore where we could beach our kayaks. Once back on land, we went exploring. As I jumped from rock to rock along the edge of the water, I noticed large colonies of some kind of shellfish attached to the rock surface in the intertidal zone. They were shapeless and stone colored, very firmly attached to the rock. I called Jo over to see if she could identify them, and she said immediately, with a smile, “Those are oysters! Do you like oysters?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never had them. How do you get them off the rock?”
She showed me how to prize them off with a knife. We made a fire on the beach with some of the copious downed wood from the forest, to roast them on the coals. As soon as they were hot they automatically opened up so that you could scoop out the jelly like meat. They were an oddly liquid consistency but quite pleasant.
As darkness fell, Jo made a bed for herself in the sand and I lay down on the moss on the forest floor. Although there were a few mosquitoes, I slept well. In the morning we had a quick breakfast of bread and cheese before we set off again just as the sun was peeking through the clouds. We explored the coasts of a few other islands, and paddled along the edge of one shallow sandy beach. “Have you ever collected clams?” Jo asked, looking over the edge of her boat into the water.
“No, have you?”
“Yes, and there seem to be lots of them here. It must be a very low tide, I can see them sticking out of the sand.”
Floating behind her, I could see what she was looking at: there were scores of fat white and brown clam shells, just their tips visible. They were easy to scoop up with our hands, without even getting out of the kayaks. “Do we know for sure they are safe to eat?” I asked.
“Well,” Jo frowned, “I think that in places where there are a lot of people living on the shore, they might be polluted. Here it should be quite safe. Unless there’s a red tide. But I think we would see it if there was a red tide.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s kind of bacteria that stains the water red, and when you get a lot of them they make the shellfish poisonous.”
“Oh!”
She laughed. “Don’t worry about it, I think we would already be sick from eating the oysters if it was going to be a problem!”
“Well, I suppose that’s good, I’m glad you didn’t tell me earlier!”
After filling a couple of bags with clams, we set off again. Because it was Sunday, there were quite a few motorboats in the bay, but it was a large enough area that we weren’t too bothered by the swells or the sounds of engines. Both of us were keeping an eye open for the orca we were meant to avoid, when we noticed a couple of boats stopped in the middle of the bay, a long way from any land. As we paddled towards them to see what was going on, one of them sped away. The other remained, and when we were close enough to be in hearing range we could see the big black and white shape just beneath the water right beside the boat. She was rubbing her big body against the side of the boat, rolling over on her back and standing up on her tail. As we paddled closer, I called over, “I hope you’re not feeding her!”
“Oh no, he just likes the company,” a man in a peaked cap called back. “And we can’t start up our motor to leave because he might be damaged by the propeller. Bang on the side of your kayak, and he’ll come right over to you!”
Without stopping to consider the wisdom of this, I slapped the side of my kayak, and in a couple of seconds, a huge rounded back broke the surface right beside me. She was longer than my kayak. She lay there looking at me with one round black eye.
Hesitantly I reached out to rub her jet-black head. Was this OK? She seemed to like it, and I was delighted to feel her silky smooth skin, thick and almost rubbery. Rolling over on her back, she showed me her white belly, opening her mouth wide. I felt like I could be swallowed whole. It was cavernous, at least two feet across, with a short pink tongue and very neat lines of perfect pyramid teeth, an inch long in the center, getting smaller to either side. “Girl, look at your teeth!” I said, awed. I got the impression she was grinning at me.
Jo called, “I saw a program on TV about them, and it said they like to have their tongues rubbed!”
“I don’t think I want to risk losing my hand, even though you are so friendly,” I told the huge animal. I realized my kayak was moving sideways quite fast — she was leaning on it. As I was wondering if this was cause for concern, she swam underneath me, and I found myself and my boat lifted half out of the water on her huge broad back.
“Hey, baby, you’re gorgeous, but put me down!” I exclaimed in alarm.
“They’ve never been known to attack humans,“ called Jo reassuringly.
“That may be so, but I’d prefer not to be in the water with her!“
Just as the kayak was starting to slide sideways, she dove downwards, dropping me back in the water, and re-surfaced next to Jo, repeating her antics. For a few minutes she swam to and fro playing with each of us in turn. We had plenty of time to examine her: the round dimple on top her head which was her blowhole, the wide black tail that could probably knock our kayaks out of the water, the discolored indentations on her back where she had been hit by something - propellers? Clearly she was enjoying our interest in her. But she was getting more and more bumptious, picking us up and rubbing against us. In spite of her apparently playful intentions, she would capsize one or both of us sooner or later. How were we going to get away from her?
The first motorboat had quickly departed as soon as she’d left them, but now another one stopped nearby. I called over to tell them to slap the side of their boat, and again, she responded to the call immediately. She was obviously lonely, and people were probably the only beings in the bay who were prepared to hang out with her. Fish and seals were potential prey who would make themselves as scarce as they could when she was around.
The moment she left us, we took off towards the nearest shore, paddling as fast as we could. She caught up with us after we had gone a few hundred yards, and swam alongside, leaping in and out of the water in perfect sine waves, with such joyful carefree elegance and effortless ease that I felt quite jealous. When we got closer to the shore, she departed to show off to some other tourists.
In spite of the danger of having a large animal being so friendly, Jo and I were grinning from ear to ear for hours afterwards. There was something very special about being so close to such a delightful character, in such a very different physical form. I understood the bemused expression of the man who had approached me before we set off. It was the kind of encounter you never forgot.
This orca, nicknamed Luna, became very well known in Nootka Sound over the next year or so. “She” turned out to be wrongly labelled female, though the name stuck. His complete lack of fear around humans caused various problems, since he quite often disabled boats, and nearly sank a couple. Of course this ignited a fierce debate over what should be done about him. Finally, the problem was solved when he was killed by the propeller of a big boat. Many mourned and some were relieved, but no one who had been in contact with him was left unmoved.
Hawaii - Pele's Blood
Pele’s Blood
I arrived at Volcano National Park late in the afternoon, and went straight to the Visitor Center. There I consulted a tired looking ranger about the status of the volcano. “I understand there is no flow right now, is that correct?”
“We just heard from the rangers on the coast, that volcanic activity is visible.”
I grinned with delight. “Oh, really? Cool! Thank you, Pele! So I can drive down and see it now? How far is the coast?”
She smiled at my obvious pleasure. “It’s a half hour drive, just follow the road south.”
“Thank you!” I turned to go, then turned back to say, “You look like you need to go to bed!”
She nodded and sighed. “All my allergies are playing up because of the sulfur and other chemicals in the air. I get off work soon, and then I am going to bed.”
I followed the winding road that took me down to sea level. A big lava flow in 1982 covered several miles of the road, so that it’s no longer possible to drive far along the coastline. At the point where the road disappeared abruptly under a thick layer of lava, I found a temporary ranger station. About twenty cars were parked there, full of people who had come down to see the glow of the red lava in the dark. The rangers had telescopes sighted onto the flow, which was probably about a mile away as the crow flies, over piles of cold black rock that extended a long way up the hill. The active flow seemed small -- just a couple of patches and one streak of red. Although dusk was falling, there was still enough daylight that it wasn’t visible to the naked eye. A couple of people were walking out on the cold lava in the direction of the red flow, and I decided to follow them to see if I could get a better view.
There are two quite different kinds of lava in Hawaii. Pahoehoe, which flowed at a higher temperature, is reasonably solid and smooth to walk on, though you certainly have to be careful; a’a’ is piles of loose chunks with very jagged edges, and you never want to try walking on it unless you really have to, because it slides away under your feet. Here, it was pahoehoe, and obviously many people had walked this way already. There were even some red flags, marking a sort of a path.
When I had walked for fifteen minutes or so, carefully negotiating the raw rocks, the red flags were history. I stopped and sat on a flat piece of lava to watch with my binoculars. Then I could see that the flow was changing all the time -- of course, it's flowing! It still looked small; clearly my chances of getting close to it that night were nil. I was about to go back when a couple with a kid came walking by.
“Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yes, it certainly is! I’m so glad the flow started up so we could see it.” The guy had a reverential tone to his voice.
”Yes, we were lucky. Are you going further?” I asked.
“Well, it’s pretty tricky going but I think we’ll try to get closer,” the woman replied with a friendly smile.
“I don’t have a flashlight so I think I’d better get back before I can’t see anything underfoot.”
“Oh, we have a couple of flashlights, come with us!”
That’s exactly what you were meant to say. “Thanks, that would be great!”
The four of us walked a considerable way further, until it was quite dark, and we could see a number of glowing streaks ahead of us. The source of the flow still seemed a long way off but the going was getting really hard, so we agreed it was time to turn back. By that time I knew my companions as Peter, Maria, and Robert from Philadelphia. Peter took a bunch of photos, lying down on the lava, and promised to email them to me. A big red glow was visible over the mountains to the left of the flow. That was apparently the source of the vent that was producing the lava we were seeing, which meant that it had flowed underground a long way before it surfaced where we could see it.
“Damn, this is so incredible to see molten lava like this, I wish we could get closer,” said Peter regretfully, as he stood up and put his camera away.
“I think I’ll walk out tomorrow in daylight,” I said.
“I wish I could do that but we’ve got a flight back to Honolulu.” He sounded distinctly bummed. “You’ll have to buy a camera and send us pictures!”
I could sympathize with his frustration – this was certainly one of the most incredible sights I had ever seen.
When we turned around, the lights of the ranger station showed us what direction to take. We saw a couple of flashlights behind us – people who had obviously been much closer to the flow. I was glad we hadn’t gone further - once it got properly dark, you really had to concentrate where you put your feet. The mounds of lava are so irregular, so unpredictably piled and so varied in height -- gently sloping, or stark and sheer up to twelve feet high, or more, off the average floor, which is very far from level anyway -- and there is often a thin layer of loose shale that flakes off when you step on it, so you can easily slip. Edges of big flat plates are often sticking up, where they have been pushed by a second (or third or fourth or fifth or sixth) flow of lava that came from underneath. The lava sometimes contains air bubbles, which may give way under your weight. Usually such air pockets are only a couple of inches but they can be as much as several feet deep. Most treacherous of all are the many fissures, some only an inch or two wide, others gaping open a couple of feet wide, and several feet deep.
In spite of all this, we reached the ranger station safely, except that I was wearing my sandals, so I scraped up my toes on a sharp edge here and there. I hate wearing enclosed shoes in hot weather, but this looked like a situation where it was necessary
I said goodbye to the Philadelphians, and drove back up the hill to the only campsite in the park, way along a remote road. A soft rain fell throughout the night, and the morning was foggy. I put on my good shoes, long pants, and a sweatshirt, and drove down to sea level, stopping once to walk to edge of the ocean. The lava has formed a steep cliff, twenty or more feet high all along that stretch of coast. I’d read that two tourists were killed when the cliff they were standing on collapsed into the water. Another potential danger is sudden eruptions of lava into the ocean below the surface, causing spouts of very hot water and lava to shoot up in the air. A person wouldn’t want to be in the way. Nevertheless, it was very beautiful, watching the water throwing up clouds of brilliantly white yet ethereal spray, as waves hit the cliff.
It wasn't raining at the coast, but plenty of wind and cloud made it pleasantly cool. Since I couldn't see last night's flow, I just set off in the general direction. No one was around, although several helicopters and planes flew overhead as I was hiking. You can take helicopter trips to see the lava lake which is the vent – the source of the red glow I’d seen the night before - but if the cloud is thick you don’t see anything at all. A rich person's gamble.
The lava became more irregular and more treacherous the further I walked. I had to traverse some areas of a'a', walking on lumps of cinder as big as your fist, piled many feet deep, crumbling and shifting under me. I really didn’t relish the idea of falling, since if I caught myself with my hands, my skin would get very scraped up. I managed to stay upright most of the time, although there was one spot where I crawled on all fours. In a few places the lava surface gave way an inch or two as I put my weight on it, and I encountered one area, about twenty feet across and twenty feet deep, which had collapsed in on itself. Assuring myself I was very light, I tried to stick to areas where ferns were beginning to poke their green tips through, figuring they were older flows that might have stabilized. I headed for a swathe of trees where the lava had parted, at the peak of the long slope that led down to the ocean. Once I got to the top of the hill, maybe I would see the vent itself, from which the flow originated.
Three hours and a lot of sweat later, I had to acknowledge that the vent was a long way off. The sea of cold lava stretched endlessly away in the distance, punctuated only by a few groups of sad looking trees. I passed a place where a tree trunk lay along the rock, burnt off at one end, and then I found the tubular hole where it had once stood, about fifteen feet deep.
I decided to give up on the vent, and make my way back to the ranger station. There are no landmarks on the lava, of course, and I was very grateful to be able to see the coast so I could get my bearings. Then, as I retraced my steps, I spied a place below me where steam poured out of the rock, sweeping away in the wind. Hmm, that has potential! I headed towards it. Here were many signs of recent flows, where new lava had surfaced, forming long fingers like lengthening turds, varying in width from two feet to an inch, ending in tight whorls as the flow slowed and cooled, like glue. In places, these whorls were like thick strands of rope; sometimes they were heaped on top of each other, sometimes they were tall, like piles of cloth that should be hanging down but were sticking up instead. In other spots, I could see where the hot lava had thrust its way through the cold lava, pushing it apart, then filling up cracks and holes in the previous flow.
As it ages, the lava seems to settle into a dull blackish color, but when it’s new, the colors are incredible: the edges of the new flows are often iridescent blue, with hints of rainbows. The ends of the smaller fingers are quite weak, pocked with air, easily broken off, and quite stunningly iridescent inside. The surface of the smoother parts is often marked with a kind of white-ish discharge, shaped like the segments on the back of a turtle.
I kept feeling the rock as I was walking to see if any of it was hot, but it all just seemed a little warm from the nonexistent sun. Then I noticed a small red patch a couple of hundred yards to my left: was this really the active flow? I pulled out my binoculars to check it out, but it looked just as though someone had made a red mark on the rock. Then suddenly I realized there were other glowing cracks developing around it. This really was it!
I made my way as close as I dared, about a hundred feet away, and settled down with the binoculars. My elation was mixed with some severe anxiety, but I reassured myself: none of it is moving faster than I can run. Now I could hear the rocks quietly crackling, and I could smell the heat. After a particularly loud crack, I got a great view of red lava pouring from a gaping red hole, streaming down between the existing black rocks. As it started to cool, a grayish crust formed on top, though it stayed red round the outer edges for several yards, then began to slow and pile up in great bulging ribbons, like candle wax, or piles of thick carpet. A single bright red drop, moving faster than the lava underneath, made its way a few feet over the top from the point where the flow began. More red cracks revealed themselves, and grew, in spots up and down in front of me, dying back, and then reviving further down.
This is so incredible, to see molten rock flowing, I am so lucky, thank you, Pele, thank you so much! Satisfied at last, I set off downhill to safety. Then I realized that I was walking right into more hot stuff - I could feel the heat radiating upwards, steam started pouring out in a couple of places in front of me, and a few glowing red spots appeared within fifty feet. Was the ground going to collapse and plunge me into a red-hot crevasse? I increased my speed and took off in a different direction, although that meant I was moving across a'a'. Looking back, I could see the air shimmering with heat in a swathe at least a hundred feet wide, and I could still feel it swirling around me in the wind.
Then I noticed a couple of people -- the first I had seen that day -- carrying tall walking sticks, moving up towards the heat. Thinking I should warn them, I shouted and waved. But they couldn’t hear what I was saying, and walked right over the flow between us to get to me, which wasn’t my intention at all. When they were close enough to hear me, I said, “I was just trying to warn you that the flow is right where you just walked!”
The guy grinned broadly and said, “Oh, we walked right into it way back there!” He waved his stick at the flow. “It’s incredible, these red gaps opening up everywhere, all over the place, all around us!”
He was like an excited schoolboy, barely able to string his sentences together. The woman made more sense, when he wasn’t interrupting her.
“We’d been walking a while,” she said, “and we were about to give up when we saw something red.”
“We thought at first that it was man-made paint of some kind!” he interjected gleefully.
“Yes, that’s what I thought when I first saw the rock glowing,” I said, amused that we’d all had the same initial reaction.
“Well, then we realized it was red-hot rock.”
“It was a skylight, just right there in front of us!”
He used the term ‘skylight’ several times and I gathered it must be a term for an upwelling of lava before it bursts.
The woman continued. “We actually got about twenty feet from it, and walked past it to see if there was any more, when it suddenly bubbled up and burst open, releasing three lava flows. We started taking photos and got quite blasé.”
“One of the flows was only six feet away, and I reached across with my walking stick and poked the end into the red hot rock.”
“Well, what happened when you did that?” I asked. The woman answered my question while he carried on ranting about skylights.
“It formed a little depression that flamed up slightly when he took his stick out, and then it closed over slowly, like molten wax.”
So much for me warning them not to get near the flow! I would have been terrified to be that close, but it was great to talk to someone else who had taken the risk. We walked back to the ranger station, where various tourists, less foolhardy than us, gathered to hear our stories.
“Is it safe to be that close to the lava?” asked one woman doubtfully after we had boasted of our adventures.
“I don’t know, you better ask him,” I laughed, pointing at a ranger standing nearby.
He smiled, and shrugged. “Well, we don’t encourage it. Who knows how thick the crust is? You can never tell when you might fall through. But lots of people go out there, and most of them come back! This volcano is known as the most user-friendly in the world, because it flows so slowly.”
Back at my car, I sank thankfully into the driver’s seat. My little legs felt very weak after that long trek on such rough terrain. I would take it easy for the rest of the afternoon. I was very pleased with the success of my day’s mission: seeing Pele in action, and returning unscarred. In spite of the risk, I knew I would do it again in a hot second – that flowing lava was too hard to imagine, it had to be seen.
I arrived at Volcano National Park late in the afternoon, and went straight to the Visitor Center. There I consulted a tired looking ranger about the status of the volcano. “I understand there is no flow right now, is that correct?”
“We just heard from the rangers on the coast, that volcanic activity is visible.”
I grinned with delight. “Oh, really? Cool! Thank you, Pele! So I can drive down and see it now? How far is the coast?”
She smiled at my obvious pleasure. “It’s a half hour drive, just follow the road south.”
“Thank you!” I turned to go, then turned back to say, “You look like you need to go to bed!”
She nodded and sighed. “All my allergies are playing up because of the sulfur and other chemicals in the air. I get off work soon, and then I am going to bed.”
I followed the winding road that took me down to sea level. A big lava flow in 1982 covered several miles of the road, so that it’s no longer possible to drive far along the coastline. At the point where the road disappeared abruptly under a thick layer of lava, I found a temporary ranger station. About twenty cars were parked there, full of people who had come down to see the glow of the red lava in the dark. The rangers had telescopes sighted onto the flow, which was probably about a mile away as the crow flies, over piles of cold black rock that extended a long way up the hill. The active flow seemed small -- just a couple of patches and one streak of red. Although dusk was falling, there was still enough daylight that it wasn’t visible to the naked eye. A couple of people were walking out on the cold lava in the direction of the red flow, and I decided to follow them to see if I could get a better view.
There are two quite different kinds of lava in Hawaii. Pahoehoe, which flowed at a higher temperature, is reasonably solid and smooth to walk on, though you certainly have to be careful; a’a’ is piles of loose chunks with very jagged edges, and you never want to try walking on it unless you really have to, because it slides away under your feet. Here, it was pahoehoe, and obviously many people had walked this way already. There were even some red flags, marking a sort of a path.
When I had walked for fifteen minutes or so, carefully negotiating the raw rocks, the red flags were history. I stopped and sat on a flat piece of lava to watch with my binoculars. Then I could see that the flow was changing all the time -- of course, it's flowing! It still looked small; clearly my chances of getting close to it that night were nil. I was about to go back when a couple with a kid came walking by.
“Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yes, it certainly is! I’m so glad the flow started up so we could see it.” The guy had a reverential tone to his voice.
”Yes, we were lucky. Are you going further?” I asked.
“Well, it’s pretty tricky going but I think we’ll try to get closer,” the woman replied with a friendly smile.
“I don’t have a flashlight so I think I’d better get back before I can’t see anything underfoot.”
“Oh, we have a couple of flashlights, come with us!”
That’s exactly what you were meant to say. “Thanks, that would be great!”
The four of us walked a considerable way further, until it was quite dark, and we could see a number of glowing streaks ahead of us. The source of the flow still seemed a long way off but the going was getting really hard, so we agreed it was time to turn back. By that time I knew my companions as Peter, Maria, and Robert from Philadelphia. Peter took a bunch of photos, lying down on the lava, and promised to email them to me. A big red glow was visible over the mountains to the left of the flow. That was apparently the source of the vent that was producing the lava we were seeing, which meant that it had flowed underground a long way before it surfaced where we could see it.
“Damn, this is so incredible to see molten lava like this, I wish we could get closer,” said Peter regretfully, as he stood up and put his camera away.
“I think I’ll walk out tomorrow in daylight,” I said.
“I wish I could do that but we’ve got a flight back to Honolulu.” He sounded distinctly bummed. “You’ll have to buy a camera and send us pictures!”
I could sympathize with his frustration – this was certainly one of the most incredible sights I had ever seen.
When we turned around, the lights of the ranger station showed us what direction to take. We saw a couple of flashlights behind us – people who had obviously been much closer to the flow. I was glad we hadn’t gone further - once it got properly dark, you really had to concentrate where you put your feet. The mounds of lava are so irregular, so unpredictably piled and so varied in height -- gently sloping, or stark and sheer up to twelve feet high, or more, off the average floor, which is very far from level anyway -- and there is often a thin layer of loose shale that flakes off when you step on it, so you can easily slip. Edges of big flat plates are often sticking up, where they have been pushed by a second (or third or fourth or fifth or sixth) flow of lava that came from underneath. The lava sometimes contains air bubbles, which may give way under your weight. Usually such air pockets are only a couple of inches but they can be as much as several feet deep. Most treacherous of all are the many fissures, some only an inch or two wide, others gaping open a couple of feet wide, and several feet deep.
In spite of all this, we reached the ranger station safely, except that I was wearing my sandals, so I scraped up my toes on a sharp edge here and there. I hate wearing enclosed shoes in hot weather, but this looked like a situation where it was necessary
I said goodbye to the Philadelphians, and drove back up the hill to the only campsite in the park, way along a remote road. A soft rain fell throughout the night, and the morning was foggy. I put on my good shoes, long pants, and a sweatshirt, and drove down to sea level, stopping once to walk to edge of the ocean. The lava has formed a steep cliff, twenty or more feet high all along that stretch of coast. I’d read that two tourists were killed when the cliff they were standing on collapsed into the water. Another potential danger is sudden eruptions of lava into the ocean below the surface, causing spouts of very hot water and lava to shoot up in the air. A person wouldn’t want to be in the way. Nevertheless, it was very beautiful, watching the water throwing up clouds of brilliantly white yet ethereal spray, as waves hit the cliff.
It wasn't raining at the coast, but plenty of wind and cloud made it pleasantly cool. Since I couldn't see last night's flow, I just set off in the general direction. No one was around, although several helicopters and planes flew overhead as I was hiking. You can take helicopter trips to see the lava lake which is the vent – the source of the red glow I’d seen the night before - but if the cloud is thick you don’t see anything at all. A rich person's gamble.
The lava became more irregular and more treacherous the further I walked. I had to traverse some areas of a'a', walking on lumps of cinder as big as your fist, piled many feet deep, crumbling and shifting under me. I really didn’t relish the idea of falling, since if I caught myself with my hands, my skin would get very scraped up. I managed to stay upright most of the time, although there was one spot where I crawled on all fours. In a few places the lava surface gave way an inch or two as I put my weight on it, and I encountered one area, about twenty feet across and twenty feet deep, which had collapsed in on itself. Assuring myself I was very light, I tried to stick to areas where ferns were beginning to poke their green tips through, figuring they were older flows that might have stabilized. I headed for a swathe of trees where the lava had parted, at the peak of the long slope that led down to the ocean. Once I got to the top of the hill, maybe I would see the vent itself, from which the flow originated.
Three hours and a lot of sweat later, I had to acknowledge that the vent was a long way off. The sea of cold lava stretched endlessly away in the distance, punctuated only by a few groups of sad looking trees. I passed a place where a tree trunk lay along the rock, burnt off at one end, and then I found the tubular hole where it had once stood, about fifteen feet deep.
I decided to give up on the vent, and make my way back to the ranger station. There are no landmarks on the lava, of course, and I was very grateful to be able to see the coast so I could get my bearings. Then, as I retraced my steps, I spied a place below me where steam poured out of the rock, sweeping away in the wind. Hmm, that has potential! I headed towards it. Here were many signs of recent flows, where new lava had surfaced, forming long fingers like lengthening turds, varying in width from two feet to an inch, ending in tight whorls as the flow slowed and cooled, like glue. In places, these whorls were like thick strands of rope; sometimes they were heaped on top of each other, sometimes they were tall, like piles of cloth that should be hanging down but were sticking up instead. In other spots, I could see where the hot lava had thrust its way through the cold lava, pushing it apart, then filling up cracks and holes in the previous flow.
As it ages, the lava seems to settle into a dull blackish color, but when it’s new, the colors are incredible: the edges of the new flows are often iridescent blue, with hints of rainbows. The ends of the smaller fingers are quite weak, pocked with air, easily broken off, and quite stunningly iridescent inside. The surface of the smoother parts is often marked with a kind of white-ish discharge, shaped like the segments on the back of a turtle.
I kept feeling the rock as I was walking to see if any of it was hot, but it all just seemed a little warm from the nonexistent sun. Then I noticed a small red patch a couple of hundred yards to my left: was this really the active flow? I pulled out my binoculars to check it out, but it looked just as though someone had made a red mark on the rock. Then suddenly I realized there were other glowing cracks developing around it. This really was it!
I made my way as close as I dared, about a hundred feet away, and settled down with the binoculars. My elation was mixed with some severe anxiety, but I reassured myself: none of it is moving faster than I can run. Now I could hear the rocks quietly crackling, and I could smell the heat. After a particularly loud crack, I got a great view of red lava pouring from a gaping red hole, streaming down between the existing black rocks. As it started to cool, a grayish crust formed on top, though it stayed red round the outer edges for several yards, then began to slow and pile up in great bulging ribbons, like candle wax, or piles of thick carpet. A single bright red drop, moving faster than the lava underneath, made its way a few feet over the top from the point where the flow began. More red cracks revealed themselves, and grew, in spots up and down in front of me, dying back, and then reviving further down.
This is so incredible, to see molten rock flowing, I am so lucky, thank you, Pele, thank you so much! Satisfied at last, I set off downhill to safety. Then I realized that I was walking right into more hot stuff - I could feel the heat radiating upwards, steam started pouring out in a couple of places in front of me, and a few glowing red spots appeared within fifty feet. Was the ground going to collapse and plunge me into a red-hot crevasse? I increased my speed and took off in a different direction, although that meant I was moving across a'a'. Looking back, I could see the air shimmering with heat in a swathe at least a hundred feet wide, and I could still feel it swirling around me in the wind.
Then I noticed a couple of people -- the first I had seen that day -- carrying tall walking sticks, moving up towards the heat. Thinking I should warn them, I shouted and waved. But they couldn’t hear what I was saying, and walked right over the flow between us to get to me, which wasn’t my intention at all. When they were close enough to hear me, I said, “I was just trying to warn you that the flow is right where you just walked!”
The guy grinned broadly and said, “Oh, we walked right into it way back there!” He waved his stick at the flow. “It’s incredible, these red gaps opening up everywhere, all over the place, all around us!”
He was like an excited schoolboy, barely able to string his sentences together. The woman made more sense, when he wasn’t interrupting her.
“We’d been walking a while,” she said, “and we were about to give up when we saw something red.”
“We thought at first that it was man-made paint of some kind!” he interjected gleefully.
“Yes, that’s what I thought when I first saw the rock glowing,” I said, amused that we’d all had the same initial reaction.
“Well, then we realized it was red-hot rock.”
“It was a skylight, just right there in front of us!”
He used the term ‘skylight’ several times and I gathered it must be a term for an upwelling of lava before it bursts.
The woman continued. “We actually got about twenty feet from it, and walked past it to see if there was any more, when it suddenly bubbled up and burst open, releasing three lava flows. We started taking photos and got quite blasé.”
“One of the flows was only six feet away, and I reached across with my walking stick and poked the end into the red hot rock.”
“Well, what happened when you did that?” I asked. The woman answered my question while he carried on ranting about skylights.
“It formed a little depression that flamed up slightly when he took his stick out, and then it closed over slowly, like molten wax.”
So much for me warning them not to get near the flow! I would have been terrified to be that close, but it was great to talk to someone else who had taken the risk. We walked back to the ranger station, where various tourists, less foolhardy than us, gathered to hear our stories.
“Is it safe to be that close to the lava?” asked one woman doubtfully after we had boasted of our adventures.
“I don’t know, you better ask him,” I laughed, pointing at a ranger standing nearby.
He smiled, and shrugged. “Well, we don’t encourage it. Who knows how thick the crust is? You can never tell when you might fall through. But lots of people go out there, and most of them come back! This volcano is known as the most user-friendly in the world, because it flows so slowly.”
Back at my car, I sank thankfully into the driver’s seat. My little legs felt very weak after that long trek on such rough terrain. I would take it easy for the rest of the afternoon. I was very pleased with the success of my day’s mission: seeing Pele in action, and returning unscarred. In spite of the risk, I knew I would do it again in a hot second – that flowing lava was too hard to imagine, it had to be seen.
A Sticky Predicament - Brazil
A Sticky Predicament
I’d heard that Brazilian roads are bad, but no one actually used the words nightmarish, or horrendous, or terrifying, so I assumed they were just - bad. I’d been on bad roads, that was do-able. I also assumed that the roads marked on the map as thick red lines would be better than the thinner red lines. I soon found out that the size of the line had no bearing on how many potholes there were, or how deep the potholes were. The thick red lines had more traffic, and specifically more trucks, which generally meant the potholes were really deep. In Brazil, no matter what the traffic rules might be in writing, the law is: if I’m bigger than you, get out of the damn way. There isn’t much of a concept that traffic coming one way is on one side of the road, and traffic coming the other way is on the other side; it’s more like everyone just zigzags around the road trying to avoid the holes. I was willing – or should I say happy - to get out of the way of the trucks when I could, but at times the road was so strewn with potholes, that it was hard to get out of the way quickly enough. They weren’t just regular potholes, some of them were bottomless pits. I saw more than one car that had been thrown off the road as a result of hitting one at speed. I quite often stopped and reversed when I came to a whole slew of them littered over the highway. The locals drove off the tarred road onto the dirt at the side, for long stretches. It was safer.
There was no way of telling what the road was like until I was on it. I did drive one or two roads that had been recently tarred, with not a pothole to be seen for miles. The truck drivers still hogged the middle of the road – I guess they were just used to it. And I was still nervous that I might come upon a stretch of potholes without any warning, which certainly did happen.
Generally speaking, signposts in Brazil don’t exist – if you don’t already know your way, then you develop your psychic abilities very quickly, get lost a lot and ask the way often. The worst hazard was the roadworks, where guesswork might be fatal. Brazilians are renowned for taking a long time to get things done. Frequently the roadworks had obviously been going on for so long that the road users had just absorbed them; they were part of what that road was like, they weren’t a temporary alteration. So people just knew that you went this side of that red cone when you wanted to get to Sao Roque, and that side when you wanted to get to Belo Horizonte. They knew that these two lanes were for traffic in both directions. They knew that this piece of the road dead-ended abruptly. They knew which way cars would be coming between this line of cones. I didn’t.
In the end I got quite blasé about the driving conditions. I couldn’t afford to drive at the slow speed that would have made it a slightly safer experience, because I would never have got anywhere, and the state of tension that driving produced would have been more protracted. So I drove at medium to high speed when I thought it might be OK, and consequently got it over with faster. Since the worst accidents I saw – cars completely squashed or sheered in half by trucks - were near cities, where there were often roadworks, I stayed away from cities as much as possible. When I did have to negotiate roadworks, I prayed. I often prayed. I sang and prayed, and showered gratitude upon my guardian angels as I drove. In two months I did 3,000 dollars worth of damage to two of my four of the small sedans I rented - chipped windshields, broken mountings, murdered shock absorbers, dents and scratches - but I had no accidents.
After three weeks of driving around the state of Minas Gerais, I thought I had seen the worst of the roads. I was on my way to town of Sao Roque de Minas, near the National Park of Serra da Canastra, and taking a tarred road would have involved driving an extra two hundred kilometers, without any guarantee that it would be an easier drive. So I took a dirt road, not knowing that there had been ten inches of rain in the previous week.
Early on, I came to a T-junction, with no signpost, of course, so I stopped to ponder my options. A man drove by in a pickup, and I waved him down. My Portuguese is pretty poor, but he told me which way to go, and I gathered from what he was saying that there was a very tricky spot ahead, where I should stay to one side.
Sure enough, I came over a small rise and there was a sea of mud ahead of me. It was flat though, and consequently I didn’t take it very seriously, and didn’t gun it quite as much as I should have. Five yards from the end of it, my little VW slowed down and slid sideways, the wheels spinning ineffectively.
I got out to survey the problem. Many times I have dug my way out of mud, but here there was nothing to dig: the surface of the mud was so slick that the wheels were just spinning on top of it. I decided that I needed to wait for someone to push. Bemoaning the fact that I could not push and drive at the same time, I pulled out my little stove and made a cup of tea while I waited for the necessary ‘someone’ to arrive. Since I’m Scottish, tea always calms me down when I’m distressed. There didn’t seem any real reason to worry - this was an agricultural area, and I could see a tractor and house in the near distance. Help was not far away if it didn’t soon transpire right here. My principal concern was that this mud might recur further along the road. Perhaps the sensible thing would be to turn round (when help arrived), and take the tarred road. But how could I know?
As I sat on the verge drinking my tea, a car appeared at the other end of the mud. There was no way the driver could be sure of getting around my car, so I assumed he would stop there and come walking over to check out the situation. I was wrong. After a brief pause he drove on, slipping and sliding to and fro but moving steadily forward. My car was right in his path. I held my breath as he closed in, anticipating that agonizing screech of metal scraping on metal. Surely he would have to stop. No. Somehow he managed to get by, inches between the two vehicles. He reached the end of the mud and picked up speed, soon disappearing round a corner.
I stared after him in annoyed disbelief. How could he fail to help? Did he think I had stopped here for fun? Damn Brazilians, they are so like that, either very helpful or completely callous. Then I thought, if he can do it, so can I. The tires were completely covered in a thick layer of mud, which I removed with a screwdriver. I started up the car, and gunned it. She picked up a little traction. We inched forward. A huge flock of cackling green parrots flew overhead. The car got a grip. We shot off again, onto the hardpack.
With this success under my belt, I certainly wasn’t turning back. I drove on a few miles. At the next bad spot, on a hill, where another car was stuck, without any sign of its owner in the vicinity, my little vehicle made it almost all the way up until she slowed down and stalled. The thick red mud was as slick as any I had ever come across, and I slid onto my butt several times when I got out of the car. Taking my shoes off enabled me to get a better grip with my toes. Since the mud clung to everything it touched, I was already covered with mud from head to toe, and a little more on my feet made no odds. I could see that the tires would have a grip a little further over to the left. I dug a pathway for the car, with my hands, since I had no shovel, and we managed to inch sideways. Once again her tires grabbed, like they were meant to, and we reached the top. Grinning, I patted the dash. Good for you girl, you can do it.
But the terrain was getting hillier. As I slid down one steep hill, narrowly avoiding the huge troughs that had been created by a much bigger vehicle than me, I thought, this puts paid to any chance I had of returning this way, I’d never get back up this hill.
The grass in the fields beside the road was very green and lush; the black and white milking cows were quite presentable, certainly fatter than any I had seen in Brazil so far. I noticed splashes of milk spilt on the road in a couple of places where I stopped. It must be hell getting the milk to town when it rains like this, but if they can get in and out, so can I. Then I looked at my little rental car, and wasn’t so sure. A pickup passed me going the other way, which was reassuring, although I reminded myself that it was a four wheel drive, with much higher clearance than me. Still, some of these small cars have very good traction, and we’ve done very well so far.
I slid down a particularly steep hill to a bridge over a fast flowing muddy river, where a big truck was parked, or stuck, at the side of the road. The driver standing beside it waved me down for a brief conversation. I figured out he was asking me if I had come all the way from the last town. When I said yes, he looked impressed. I asked if this was the road to Sao Roque de Minas, and he gave me the thumbs up. I carried on, negotiating two more tricky uphills, by patrolling them first on foot to see which side of the road looked easiest, and then taking them as fast as I could. The downhills were terrifying since I felt like I had no control, and, indeed, I probably didn’t, since the car would simply slide until she hit a big ridge of mud that stopped her. Finally I got stuck on an uphill where the existing ruts were so slimy and deep, that my little car was saddled on her belly. I considered going to a farm nearby for a shovel to dig myself a pathway, but even if I did manage to dig myself out, how many more hills were like this? I figured I had at least another ten kilometers to go.
Since it was only three thirty in the afternoon, there was a good chance that someone would come by, although I had seen no vehicles going this direction so far. I made another cup of tea, attempting to reassure myself as I waited: I had everything I needed in the car; this wasn’t a bad place to spend the night, with beautiful green folded hills and ridges all around. I constantly imagined I heard vehicles, which kept me on edge, though I probably wouldn’t have had much luck relaxing anyway; my brain was too busy going over possible solutions to my predicament. An hour or so passed before I heard a vehicle that really was coming my way.
It turned out to be a truck with chains on its tires, towing another truck, which was swinging all over the slick surface. The little convoy inched up towards me at about two miles an hour, engines roaring. I stood on tenterhooks by the side of the road, not sure whether to worry most about the possibility that they would not help, or the likelihood that the second vehicle, which appeared to be quite out of control, would smash sideways into my car. I prayed busily, promising that I would never again risk a road like this, almost closing my eyes to avoid seeing the inevitable, and then the driver somehow managed to swing the other way at exactly the right moment. I waved at the driver of the first vehicle, who nodded and waved in return, so I knew he was going to come back for me when he could stop. He’s one of the helpful Brazilians, I am so lucky.
I walked up to meet them at the top of the hill, where they stopped to unhook the towed vehicle, which then set off on its own, leaving the one with chains. In Brazil people are always traveling in the beds of trucks, and a whole gang of women, kids and a couple of guys were standing up in the back of this one, laughing and joking. They eyed me up with puzzled expressions, trying unsuccessfully to pigeonhole this very dirty gray-haired person with tattoos and no shoes, who was traveling alone. I rattled off a few sentences in my bad Portuguese, but what I needed was obvious. The driver, a small man with a sweet smile, backed down to my car, and one of his (male) passengers tied the rope underneath. I started her up and off we went, no problem. At the top we undid the rope and I offered him money along with profuse thanks, but he pointed ahead, saying, “Hasta Sao Roque,” which I took to mean we hadn’t reached safety yet, and he wasn’t going to abandon me. I didn’t try to remonstrate.
We set off again. I slid down a hill behind him, and put my foot on the accelerator to make the corresponding uphill, but didn’t manage it. He backed down again to tow me, and from then on, he kept me in tow. On one hill, even he started losing traction, and as his chained tires spun, they flung up mud, spattering my windshield. I winced at that clicking sound that small stones make when they hit glass. At the top of the hill, we had to stop and clear a space for me to see through. In this way we went about five kilometers, until the road flattened out a little, and ceased to be so deeply rutted. I was greatly relieved not to be towed any more, since the rope was short, which downhills alarming, since sliding into the truck in front was a very real fear.
I followed him, at a safe distance, to a small gas station which was clearly the edge of the town. All his passengers dismounted here to go their own way. Again, I tried to pay him, but he shook his head and asked me if I wanted to go to a hotel. Then he took me to a posada round the corner. Two big jeeps with huge tires were parked outside. He pointed at them and then at me with a laugh, clearly saying, this is what you need. I agreed heartily. He still refused my money, which was a surprise. Brazilians are a strange mixture: some see foreign travelers only as a useful source of cash; others, who have met very few foreigners, see them as weird oddities, not quite human; and yet others, like my rescuer, want to help them. Perhaps it was my obvious plight that made him feel so generous, but the fact that he didn’t use it as an excuse to demand money set him apart from many of his countrymen.
He left me in the care of a shorthaired older woman with a sweet smile. She burst out laughing, throwing her hands in the air, when she saw me all covered in mud, and then was clearly impressed when he explained how I got that way. She showed me to a small room, and I got immediately in the shower, peeling off my clothes under the flow of water. I never did get them completely clean, but I successfully rinsed the mud off my skin. As soon as I was presentable, I walked a couple of blocks up the cobbled street till I found a place that served food, where I ordered a hamburger with all the works. I wolfed it down with gusto. As I ate, a ten minute torrential downpour left the streets pouring with water. I considered my luck, and talked to myself sternly: Really, Mikaya, you need to be more careful, you’re always getting yourself into trouble because you don’t consider things before you do them.
Of its own volition, another voice inside responded: Yes, but you’re fine now, aren’t you? Help always arrives when you need it. And wasn’t it exciting?
I’d heard that Brazilian roads are bad, but no one actually used the words nightmarish, or horrendous, or terrifying, so I assumed they were just - bad. I’d been on bad roads, that was do-able. I also assumed that the roads marked on the map as thick red lines would be better than the thinner red lines. I soon found out that the size of the line had no bearing on how many potholes there were, or how deep the potholes were. The thick red lines had more traffic, and specifically more trucks, which generally meant the potholes were really deep. In Brazil, no matter what the traffic rules might be in writing, the law is: if I’m bigger than you, get out of the damn way. There isn’t much of a concept that traffic coming one way is on one side of the road, and traffic coming the other way is on the other side; it’s more like everyone just zigzags around the road trying to avoid the holes. I was willing – or should I say happy - to get out of the way of the trucks when I could, but at times the road was so strewn with potholes, that it was hard to get out of the way quickly enough. They weren’t just regular potholes, some of them were bottomless pits. I saw more than one car that had been thrown off the road as a result of hitting one at speed. I quite often stopped and reversed when I came to a whole slew of them littered over the highway. The locals drove off the tarred road onto the dirt at the side, for long stretches. It was safer.
There was no way of telling what the road was like until I was on it. I did drive one or two roads that had been recently tarred, with not a pothole to be seen for miles. The truck drivers still hogged the middle of the road – I guess they were just used to it. And I was still nervous that I might come upon a stretch of potholes without any warning, which certainly did happen.
Generally speaking, signposts in Brazil don’t exist – if you don’t already know your way, then you develop your psychic abilities very quickly, get lost a lot and ask the way often. The worst hazard was the roadworks, where guesswork might be fatal. Brazilians are renowned for taking a long time to get things done. Frequently the roadworks had obviously been going on for so long that the road users had just absorbed them; they were part of what that road was like, they weren’t a temporary alteration. So people just knew that you went this side of that red cone when you wanted to get to Sao Roque, and that side when you wanted to get to Belo Horizonte. They knew that these two lanes were for traffic in both directions. They knew that this piece of the road dead-ended abruptly. They knew which way cars would be coming between this line of cones. I didn’t.
In the end I got quite blasé about the driving conditions. I couldn’t afford to drive at the slow speed that would have made it a slightly safer experience, because I would never have got anywhere, and the state of tension that driving produced would have been more protracted. So I drove at medium to high speed when I thought it might be OK, and consequently got it over with faster. Since the worst accidents I saw – cars completely squashed or sheered in half by trucks - were near cities, where there were often roadworks, I stayed away from cities as much as possible. When I did have to negotiate roadworks, I prayed. I often prayed. I sang and prayed, and showered gratitude upon my guardian angels as I drove. In two months I did 3,000 dollars worth of damage to two of my four of the small sedans I rented - chipped windshields, broken mountings, murdered shock absorbers, dents and scratches - but I had no accidents.
After three weeks of driving around the state of Minas Gerais, I thought I had seen the worst of the roads. I was on my way to town of Sao Roque de Minas, near the National Park of Serra da Canastra, and taking a tarred road would have involved driving an extra two hundred kilometers, without any guarantee that it would be an easier drive. So I took a dirt road, not knowing that there had been ten inches of rain in the previous week.
Early on, I came to a T-junction, with no signpost, of course, so I stopped to ponder my options. A man drove by in a pickup, and I waved him down. My Portuguese is pretty poor, but he told me which way to go, and I gathered from what he was saying that there was a very tricky spot ahead, where I should stay to one side.
Sure enough, I came over a small rise and there was a sea of mud ahead of me. It was flat though, and consequently I didn’t take it very seriously, and didn’t gun it quite as much as I should have. Five yards from the end of it, my little VW slowed down and slid sideways, the wheels spinning ineffectively.
I got out to survey the problem. Many times I have dug my way out of mud, but here there was nothing to dig: the surface of the mud was so slick that the wheels were just spinning on top of it. I decided that I needed to wait for someone to push. Bemoaning the fact that I could not push and drive at the same time, I pulled out my little stove and made a cup of tea while I waited for the necessary ‘someone’ to arrive. Since I’m Scottish, tea always calms me down when I’m distressed. There didn’t seem any real reason to worry - this was an agricultural area, and I could see a tractor and house in the near distance. Help was not far away if it didn’t soon transpire right here. My principal concern was that this mud might recur further along the road. Perhaps the sensible thing would be to turn round (when help arrived), and take the tarred road. But how could I know?
As I sat on the verge drinking my tea, a car appeared at the other end of the mud. There was no way the driver could be sure of getting around my car, so I assumed he would stop there and come walking over to check out the situation. I was wrong. After a brief pause he drove on, slipping and sliding to and fro but moving steadily forward. My car was right in his path. I held my breath as he closed in, anticipating that agonizing screech of metal scraping on metal. Surely he would have to stop. No. Somehow he managed to get by, inches between the two vehicles. He reached the end of the mud and picked up speed, soon disappearing round a corner.
I stared after him in annoyed disbelief. How could he fail to help? Did he think I had stopped here for fun? Damn Brazilians, they are so like that, either very helpful or completely callous. Then I thought, if he can do it, so can I. The tires were completely covered in a thick layer of mud, which I removed with a screwdriver. I started up the car, and gunned it. She picked up a little traction. We inched forward. A huge flock of cackling green parrots flew overhead. The car got a grip. We shot off again, onto the hardpack.
With this success under my belt, I certainly wasn’t turning back. I drove on a few miles. At the next bad spot, on a hill, where another car was stuck, without any sign of its owner in the vicinity, my little vehicle made it almost all the way up until she slowed down and stalled. The thick red mud was as slick as any I had ever come across, and I slid onto my butt several times when I got out of the car. Taking my shoes off enabled me to get a better grip with my toes. Since the mud clung to everything it touched, I was already covered with mud from head to toe, and a little more on my feet made no odds. I could see that the tires would have a grip a little further over to the left. I dug a pathway for the car, with my hands, since I had no shovel, and we managed to inch sideways. Once again her tires grabbed, like they were meant to, and we reached the top. Grinning, I patted the dash. Good for you girl, you can do it.
But the terrain was getting hillier. As I slid down one steep hill, narrowly avoiding the huge troughs that had been created by a much bigger vehicle than me, I thought, this puts paid to any chance I had of returning this way, I’d never get back up this hill.
The grass in the fields beside the road was very green and lush; the black and white milking cows were quite presentable, certainly fatter than any I had seen in Brazil so far. I noticed splashes of milk spilt on the road in a couple of places where I stopped. It must be hell getting the milk to town when it rains like this, but if they can get in and out, so can I. Then I looked at my little rental car, and wasn’t so sure. A pickup passed me going the other way, which was reassuring, although I reminded myself that it was a four wheel drive, with much higher clearance than me. Still, some of these small cars have very good traction, and we’ve done very well so far.
I slid down a particularly steep hill to a bridge over a fast flowing muddy river, where a big truck was parked, or stuck, at the side of the road. The driver standing beside it waved me down for a brief conversation. I figured out he was asking me if I had come all the way from the last town. When I said yes, he looked impressed. I asked if this was the road to Sao Roque de Minas, and he gave me the thumbs up. I carried on, negotiating two more tricky uphills, by patrolling them first on foot to see which side of the road looked easiest, and then taking them as fast as I could. The downhills were terrifying since I felt like I had no control, and, indeed, I probably didn’t, since the car would simply slide until she hit a big ridge of mud that stopped her. Finally I got stuck on an uphill where the existing ruts were so slimy and deep, that my little car was saddled on her belly. I considered going to a farm nearby for a shovel to dig myself a pathway, but even if I did manage to dig myself out, how many more hills were like this? I figured I had at least another ten kilometers to go.
Since it was only three thirty in the afternoon, there was a good chance that someone would come by, although I had seen no vehicles going this direction so far. I made another cup of tea, attempting to reassure myself as I waited: I had everything I needed in the car; this wasn’t a bad place to spend the night, with beautiful green folded hills and ridges all around. I constantly imagined I heard vehicles, which kept me on edge, though I probably wouldn’t have had much luck relaxing anyway; my brain was too busy going over possible solutions to my predicament. An hour or so passed before I heard a vehicle that really was coming my way.
It turned out to be a truck with chains on its tires, towing another truck, which was swinging all over the slick surface. The little convoy inched up towards me at about two miles an hour, engines roaring. I stood on tenterhooks by the side of the road, not sure whether to worry most about the possibility that they would not help, or the likelihood that the second vehicle, which appeared to be quite out of control, would smash sideways into my car. I prayed busily, promising that I would never again risk a road like this, almost closing my eyes to avoid seeing the inevitable, and then the driver somehow managed to swing the other way at exactly the right moment. I waved at the driver of the first vehicle, who nodded and waved in return, so I knew he was going to come back for me when he could stop. He’s one of the helpful Brazilians, I am so lucky.
I walked up to meet them at the top of the hill, where they stopped to unhook the towed vehicle, which then set off on its own, leaving the one with chains. In Brazil people are always traveling in the beds of trucks, and a whole gang of women, kids and a couple of guys were standing up in the back of this one, laughing and joking. They eyed me up with puzzled expressions, trying unsuccessfully to pigeonhole this very dirty gray-haired person with tattoos and no shoes, who was traveling alone. I rattled off a few sentences in my bad Portuguese, but what I needed was obvious. The driver, a small man with a sweet smile, backed down to my car, and one of his (male) passengers tied the rope underneath. I started her up and off we went, no problem. At the top we undid the rope and I offered him money along with profuse thanks, but he pointed ahead, saying, “Hasta Sao Roque,” which I took to mean we hadn’t reached safety yet, and he wasn’t going to abandon me. I didn’t try to remonstrate.
We set off again. I slid down a hill behind him, and put my foot on the accelerator to make the corresponding uphill, but didn’t manage it. He backed down again to tow me, and from then on, he kept me in tow. On one hill, even he started losing traction, and as his chained tires spun, they flung up mud, spattering my windshield. I winced at that clicking sound that small stones make when they hit glass. At the top of the hill, we had to stop and clear a space for me to see through. In this way we went about five kilometers, until the road flattened out a little, and ceased to be so deeply rutted. I was greatly relieved not to be towed any more, since the rope was short, which downhills alarming, since sliding into the truck in front was a very real fear.
I followed him, at a safe distance, to a small gas station which was clearly the edge of the town. All his passengers dismounted here to go their own way. Again, I tried to pay him, but he shook his head and asked me if I wanted to go to a hotel. Then he took me to a posada round the corner. Two big jeeps with huge tires were parked outside. He pointed at them and then at me with a laugh, clearly saying, this is what you need. I agreed heartily. He still refused my money, which was a surprise. Brazilians are a strange mixture: some see foreign travelers only as a useful source of cash; others, who have met very few foreigners, see them as weird oddities, not quite human; and yet others, like my rescuer, want to help them. Perhaps it was my obvious plight that made him feel so generous, but the fact that he didn’t use it as an excuse to demand money set him apart from many of his countrymen.
He left me in the care of a shorthaired older woman with a sweet smile. She burst out laughing, throwing her hands in the air, when she saw me all covered in mud, and then was clearly impressed when he explained how I got that way. She showed me to a small room, and I got immediately in the shower, peeling off my clothes under the flow of water. I never did get them completely clean, but I successfully rinsed the mud off my skin. As soon as I was presentable, I walked a couple of blocks up the cobbled street till I found a place that served food, where I ordered a hamburger with all the works. I wolfed it down with gusto. As I ate, a ten minute torrential downpour left the streets pouring with water. I considered my luck, and talked to myself sternly: Really, Mikaya, you need to be more careful, you’re always getting yourself into trouble because you don’t consider things before you do them.
Of its own volition, another voice inside responded: Yes, but you’re fine now, aren’t you? Help always arrives when you need it. And wasn’t it exciting?
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