Swirling in the vortex

 

   
     As someone fascinated by the 1912 sinking of the Titanic — who isn't? — you'd think the 1997 blockbuster movie "Titanic" would be right up my alley. But it wasn't, and a quarter century since I last viewed the film, I can still point to the moment when director James Cameron lost me: the chase with a handgun, a bit of business added to goose the story further. I remember thinking, "The ship sinking isn't drama enough? They need a gunfight?" It seemed gilding the lily. 

     That moment flashed back when I was standing in the Coconino National Forest Red Rock Ranger Station, going over potential hikes with Rhett, a helpful volunteer. He was pointing out trails on the map, when I noticed a spot labeled "Airport vortex." 

     "Airport vortex?" I asked.

      It turns out that being set in an absolutely stunning physical vista — really, the place makes Boulder look like Kansas — isn't enough. The paranormal powers of the universe have to be summoned like a pack of performing dogs and ordered to do tricks upon command. 

     "They say there are seven natural vortexes in the world, and Sedona has nine of them," Rhett said, neatly summarizing the local attitude toward the New Age hooha forming here like moss on a stone..

     Not that this spiritual claptrap bothered me, per se. Life is hard, the night is long, people need to conjure up all sorts of rococo nonsense to comfort themselves. I get it. So long as they don't use the laws of the country to force their particular brand of gauzy flimflam upon others, it's a free world. It's when you use your personal fairy tale, hardened by the passage of time, to vet the books at the school library, that I feel the need to disagree.

     I wish upon a star, sometimes. I do not, however, insist you get your medical care by appealing to the indifferent cosmos. It is, I believe, an important distinction.

     I never thought about any of this at all while we were hiking. Heads on swivels, trying not to blunder over a cliff while gawping at a mesa, butte or range. But one evening, we decided to go explore the town of Sedona, and found — at least in the Uptown section — an Estes Park-caliber hellscape of carny come-ons. Crystal shops and palmists, vortex vendors. It being offseason and late in the day, we were about the only tourists, and owners stood in the doorways of their establishments, trying to ballyhoo us in. 

     A man in a knit cap and a swami-length beard urged us inside for a "sound bath," and interpretive reading, an offer so strange I was tempted to inquire about what that might be. But I knew if I made eye contact with them man he'd wrap his arms around my knees and we'd never get away.

      We have friends ... treading carefully here ...  whose broad-minded approach to life allows them explore realms that I'm too narrow to consider. So we hit a few of the shops, looking for presents. Again, the patient work of a thousand millennia, the intense physical forces that formed these quartzes and gemstones, doesn't do the trick, apparently, for some. It isn't enough. These materials also have to heal you if you, oh I don't know, rub them on your afflicted parts — your head, I imagine. Merely being malachite won't satisfy some folks; it has to cure you too. I very much wanted to challenge one of the employees, to say, "If this stuff works, if you're so centered and purified and healed and enriched, spiritually, then why are you hawking wildly overpriced pebbles in a strip mall in Arizona?" But I'm a kind soul, we all struggle. Besides, then I'd be harassing clerks in tourist trap curio shops, and what good is moral clarity if you use it to browbeat people? An insight I wish I could magically impart to my friends on the left.

      The place depressed us. But fortunately I heard music coming out of a restaurant — Agave 89 — a pair of guitarists and a drummer doing Latino-tinged tunes. We slipped in and sat down. The music perked us right the hell up — it so strange that people would feel the need to conjure up all these wild and imaginary claims for inert stones. When a spiritual force that really does refresh and redeem your spirit is always available to anyone who can whistle. Maybe the problem is, music is free. Or at least quite reasonable ready to be rented for the price of an NA beer and a really quite good mushroom quesadilla.