Schizophrenic Sedona

For the first few hours all you can see are the red rocks. Rising architectures of iron oxide within layered buttes and columns. They pinnacle and surround you. It’s a little like being at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. You think, how very small I am. How small the cares of today, last year, a hundred years ago. Geologists with advanced degrees from reputable universities will tell you these stunning formations were created by sand and mud and various sediments that accumulated in the shallows of a long-vanished sea. But don’t believe them. This blinding sublime sprung from ancient creation myths, from a crystal’s many chambered prisms, from a Martian imagination.

Once your eyes adjust again to the world of culture, you can’t help but notice that Sedona, Arizona is a town uniquely divided, even in a sharply divided America. There are the many New Age tourists, and the fortune tellers, magic hawkers, and tour guides who cater to them, on one side and the many vacation-villa owning one-to-five percenters, with their Tesla trucks and Trump signs, on the other. In a sense, both are tourists and both are local. At first glance they couldn’t seem more different.

I went to Sedona because I’d interviewed the wonderful Columbian installation and performance artist Rafael Duarte-Uriza in Spain the previous summer, when he was working on a project titled, “Breathe deeply, dwell slowly, walk silently | Georelations and Respiration.” As he explains it in his artist statement, “The Earth’s magnetic field extends far beyond the globe, unfolding ‘invisibly’ before our eyes but not before the senses of some beings”; his art explores “how to recover, reconstruct, or reinvent these strategies of perception as a way of incorporating radical interdependence, coexistence, and regeneration into our daily lives.” Listening to Rafael explain his work with found materials, including local wood and discarded copper wire, was the highlight of a month I spent at the base of Monserrat. In his 40s, Rafael is short and slight, with a gentleness of voice and movement that creates close attention as you watch him walk with L-shaped rods, called divining rods, to sense magnetic energy. His genuine warmth and spiritual expression reminded me a little of Kenny Loggins on the cover of the Keep the Fire album, the one where he looks like Jesus. Kenny’s staring into our eyes, offering us with outstretched arms and all the love in his heart a glowing orb—of sex magic or ecstatic truth—from the shore of an ethereal seascape bannered with a cosmic rainbow and shooting stars. I thought, yeah, This is it.

Magical thinking always seems to make more sense as times become more desperate.

While Rafael’s practice draws on science, he’s open to forms of knowledge beyond easy classification. As am I. But when I returned home to North Carolina, a state full of failing and contaminated wells, I was reminded of the discredited practice of dowsing—by which one Y shaped or two L rods, wood or metal like the ones Rafael had, are used to detect underground water. The unconscious movements of the dowser, called the ideomotor effect, and not a form of water or earth energy, cause the rods to move in one direction or another. Dowsing has been scientifically proven to be no more effective at finding water than random chance. Nevertheless, many still believe in dowsing. I came across an article by the McGill Office for Science and Society about the widely, and not always well, reported return of this pseudoscience as climate change worsens droughts:

It’s been called water witching, radiesthesia, divination or, simply, dowsing. It consists in finding objects, traditionally water, that cannot be detected by our five senses. In a typical write-up, the Boston Globe last fall reported on the increased use of water witching in Massachusetts amid historic droughts. The article sandwiches scientific facts in between anecdotal reports of the “I don’t know how it works but it did” variety. The reader will be left with the impression that if they are ever thirsty for a new source of water on their land, calling upon a dowser would make perfect sense.

Magical thinking always seems to make more sense as times become more desperate, when it seems as if science can’t help us—even if this is because policy makers and the voting public disregarded scientific findings in the first place. The article’s assertion that a dowsing rod is more like a Ouija board than a metal detector makes sense too if you’ve ever watched a dowser at work or read the results of the famous Scheunen experiments—but for some this might simply add to its appeal.

Monserrat is considered by those who believe in them to be a vortex, a place where ley lines, invisible lines of spiritual significance or geomagnetic energy crossing the earth, converge. Now, ley lines are not the same as magnetic lines. Magnetic field lines are a representation of the Earth’s magnetic force running from the North to the South Pole and measure the direction and strength of this force (increasing in density as they approach the poles). Having said that, some who believe in ley lines also believe they are conduits of magnetic or earth energy. Vortexes are said to create energy wells or spouts, and some claim they have healing properties, increasing or unblocking the natural flow of energy within our bodies. Others believe ley lines guide alien spaceships. Monserrat, for example, has been famous since the late 1970s for a dedicated contingent of starship gazers who meet at a nearby hotel and drive to an undisclosed point on the mountain where dozens of sightings have been reported. Monserrat, serrated mountain in Spanish, isn’t really one mountain but a long, jagged multi-peak range that looks like the perfect setting for a science fiction or horror movie—even more so than Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower. And Monserrat is not only impressive and imposing, it also happens to house a thousand-year-old stone monastery where Nazi leadership believed the Holy Grail to be hidden.

Whether or not the aliens who visit northeast Spain are here to unblock our energy or harness it for their own purposes (to serve man is, as The Twilight Zone suggests, an ambiguous statement), I couldn’t say, though I and two other curious gringos tried on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the month—their locally reported meeting date and time—to find these guys and hitch a ride to the secret spot on the mountain. We waited in the pleasantly dingy and empty restaurant of the hotel for hours. When a likely-looking group finally showed up, we tried in our best schoolkid Spanish to translate our keen interest in their activities. They smiled and nodded. But when we asked for a ride up to see the extraterrestre, they pretended not to have any idea what we were talking about. Extraterrestres? ¿qué extraterrestres? We must have been sniffed out as unbelievers. I am not quite sure what gave us away—our scribbled notebooks or our anthropological expressions.

According to those who claim to know, Sedona is uniquely blessed with a plethora of powerful vortexes, anywhere from seven to twelve, depending on where you get your information; the most generally recognized are Airport Mesa, Bell Rock, Boynton Canyon, Cathedral Rock, Chapel of the Holy Cross, Courthouse Butte, and Schnebly Hill Road. I set myself the goal of hiking to all seven in four days; while this seemed at the outset like magical thinking, I did make it to them all. The biggest obstacle wasn’t, as you might suspect, heat or distance, but all the other people with the very same itinerary, and the New Age guides packing in as many as possible during daylight hours—which is why I climbed to several spots in the dark. Bell Rock has to be one of the most beautiful places in the world to watch the sun rise, but also one of the most dangerous to climb to see it.

In the pitch black ascent I saw no one at all. I could barely see my own hand reaching for holds in the rock. But as I climbed higher, I heard voices speaking Russian, one male and two female. I was momentarily surprised that anyone else was equally foolhardy. But I was very glad of these fellow travelers, not only because Russian is a beautiful language but because as the light diffused in the sky, I realized I might need serious help getting down (I began to wonder what hand gestures would convey the need for a helicopter). I sat a little distance away from the group, who became quiet at my approach. We were all there to see the sun rise in silence and we did. But as the sun continued to rise people began streaming up the rockface, first one couple, then a solo hiker, then another, then hordes of adventure bros, including one with a video contraption affixed to his body. In time, these were followed by elderly but remarkably fit hippies with crystals swinging from their hiking poles, then tie-dyed tour guides and their groups. While it was quiet I wrote at the vortexes, one journal entry scribbled at each spot. I planned on mining this dusty work but, like so many fine pieces of literature I’ve produced on drugs or alcohol, they’re nothing much to look at in the light of sobriety. I covered a lot of paper with Rorschach-like associations of cloud and rock formations (including one not listed above known locally as Coffee Pot) and overly generous assessments of the inner lives of the strangers around me. This may be the strongest evidence yet of the existence and power of ley lines.

New Age energy worshippers and fascist Musk-Trump idolators both represent the failure of community and shared culture.

I wish I could say I saw pastel lights of the close encounter kind moving erratically over Bell Rock or Coffee Pot, but it’s possible I just wasn’t looking for aliens in the right place or with the right equipment. If you go to Sedona and have more time and money than I do, you can take a UFO tour too. For “from $110,” the “Best UFO Tour of Sedona” would have provided me with an hour and a half of “stories and information on UFOs that you're unlikely to hear elsewhere on an evening tour of Sedona that increases your chance of spotting an unidentified flying object,” the use of military-grade night goggles, and a guide to direct my attention “to what could be alien life.” Not only that, guests will also “learn the TRUTH about the UFO phenomena and will receive insider information about what's going on behind the scenes in both Sedona as well as in our Secret Space Program.”

There are supposedly a few vortices here in North Carolina, around Asheville, Boone, Black Mountain, Pilot Mountain, and some place called the “Devil’s Tramping Ground,” according to VortexHunters.com. Clearly, there’s no shortage of strangeness in my own backyard, including flags the size of football fields and black bears that raid peanut crops. The bearded and weather-beaten man I encountered with a large gun strapped across his chest wearing duct-taped pants and a bright red Trump hat when I veered off a trail near Courthouse Butte I could have easily run into in the woods of eastern or western North Carolina. Did I need to go to Oz to learn who I am, value what I love, and see in color? No, but I did learn more about the perceptual line between science and pseudoscience, between real magic (the kind that tells us something about the meaning of home, such as ecology) and the man behind the curtain (the snake oil salesman). This blurry boundary is the difference between sanity and the American psyche. Sedona isn’t simply a microcosm of a disconnected liberal left and radical right. It’s two aspects of one irrationalism that has taken hold us. The New Age energy worshippers and the fascist Musk-Trump idolators both represent the failure of community and shared culture. Both are concerned primarily with themselves—their self-actualization or their wealth. Both see the world as a means to an end. No amount of “manifesting,” through crystals or the stock market, will trickle down to the collective good. And, of course, without the collective good there’s no context, no safeguard, for any individual good. While there may very well be many forms of intelligent life out there, it’s overwhelmingly, mathematically, likely that no one’s going to save us from ourselves.

It may take one person with a rod to dowse, but it takes a community to dig a well—or at least, in this day and age, the equipment and know-how it takes a community to create to find water in the desert. In this country of indigenous peoples, settlers, and immigrants, a community is a heterogenous group who can agree on what constitutes a fact and what values must be shared to work toward common goals. Increasingly all fifty states are coming to look more and more like Sedona—just without the gorgeous views.