Archangel of Sedona (2 page)

Mom gave me the “my way or the highway” speech a week before my 18th birthday in the summer of 1965. I didn’t want a trade. I moved out. I found a room with friends, got a job at Fry’s Food Stores, and enrolled at Arizona State University. I worked
summers, took out college loans, and hashed at the main cafeteria during the school year.

In the summer of 1966, I worked full-time at the Sperry Rand factory in Deer Valley. Sperry built computers the size of a small garage. Today the average cell phone has more computing power than the ponderous main frames that I helped to fabricate that summer.

I made enough at Sperry to pay my tuition, fees, books, room, board, and buy a 1962 Chevrolet Corvair. Since Ralph Nader had trashed the Corvair in his book,
Unsafe at Any Speed
, I bought a neat, white, low-mileage coupe with leather bucket seats for a song. Despite its engineering flaws, I loved that car. I remember how much fun I had driving it.

I bought the Corvair before Labor Day. I arrived at the fraternity the last week of August, as ASU wanted to start the semester so the administration could schedule exams before Christmas. Since few of my fraternity brothers lived in Arizona and most hailed from other states, a couple of the guys showed up the first week. Most of the others chose to stay home through the long weekend.

Bouncing around that empty frat house over Labor Day didn’t appeal to me. I called Dan at his fraternity. We had a mutual friend, John, who attended Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He moonlighted as a night clerk in small hotel near NAU.

Our friend encouraged us to come up. He’d find a room for us. We could hang out in the cooler clime and chase NAU girls all weekend.

I picked Dan up in the afternoon on Friday, September 2, 1966. To prepare for the trip, we went to a Mexican restaurant on the east side of the University that accepted our fake IDs. We had chips, salsa, and a pitcher of beer while we planned our itinerary.

In the three years that Dan had lived in Arizona, he’d never travelled farther north than Black Canyon. I had an inspiration, lubricated by the cold beer.

“You’ve never been to Camp Verde?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Heard of Montezuma’s Castle, Montezuma’s Well, or Tuzigoot?”

“Yep. But I’m not interested in Indian ruins,” Dan said.

“How about Sedona?”

“What about it?

“Dan, Sedona is an incredibly gorgeous place. It’s mindboggling.”

“Come on. That’s over the top.”

“Seriously. There’s something very special about that place.”

“Like what?”

“Well, the buttes are a deep red. There’s lots of scrub pine, juniper, cedar, and manzanitas. Those are very green. The sky is crystal clear and a dark blue. The red, green, brown, and blue have a hypnotic effect. I can’t do it justice. You have to see it.”

“You’ve been smoking a little dope, Tony?”

“No, man. I’m a juicer. You know that.”

“You sound like a hippie on drugs,” Dan said.

“Don’t do drugs,” I said, as I drained my beer and poured another full glass. “Dan, there’s a spiritual thing you should see in Sedona.”

“What now? Are you telling me that I’ll have a religious experience?”

“Maybe.”

“Tony, how do you know so much about this town?”

“There’s a Catholic chapel there. They built it on the side of a mountain, a couple of hundred feet above the valley. It’s spectacular. I’ll show it to you this evening.”

“What’s so spectacular?” Dan asked, sarcasm creeping into his voice.

“You’ll see.”

“How do you know about this chapel?”

“My family attended services there when I was a kid. We’d take Sunday drives up the Black Canyon Highway through Camp Verde to Sedona. We’d go to Mass there once every few months. It’s a mystical place.”

“Now, I’m sure that I don’t want to go. This weekend is for drinking beer and chasing trim at NAU. Don’t try to turn this road trip into a pilgrimage.”

“Dan, you’ll like this place. Parts of the chapel are very controversial.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Frank Lloyd Wright influenced the lady who built the chapel. Its architecture is unconventional. The builder had a sculptor do an unusual version of the crucified Christ for the interior. The priests call it the Christus. It’s very moving, but most people hate it. A friend of my dad’s says that it’s so wrong that it denies Christ’s divinity.”

“Really?” Dan asked, interested in the side trip for the first time.

“Yeah.” I said, as I poured another glass of beer for Dan.

“All right. Let’s go see the chapel, the Christus, Sedona, and the red rocks. Maybe it’ll give me a hard on.”

“Dan, if there’s a female within a hundred yards, you’ll have a hard on.”

I drained my beer and picked up the tab.

Other than holiday traffic, the trek through Phoenix went well. We stopped at a convenience store. With the aid of my fake Hawaiian driver’s license, we scored a case of Coors. We hit the Colonel Sander’s and got a bucket of KFC. We had a full tank of gas, money in our pockets, and an open road.

When we arrived at Camp Verde, it was early evening. The sun lay low in the west above the mountains. I turned onto State Road 179 and headed north toward Sedona.

Dan started teasing me about the superlatives that I’d used to describe Sedona. I had grown up in the provinces and didn’t have his opportunities to travel the world. If I’d seen the sights in New York, London, Paris, and Rome, the deep crimson sandstone buttes around Sedona might seem less impressive.

When Dan got his first glimpse of Courthouse Butte, Bell Rock, and Cathedral Rock, he stopped carping. He looked shocked and craned his neck to get better views. I could have stopped, but it was late. I wanted to get up to the Chapel of the Holy Cross by sunset.

A few miles south of town, the chapel loomed above the road to the east. The architects situated it on a promontory, sandwiched in a narrow draw, two or three hundred feet above the road. The chapel is a rectangular arch, encapsulating a vertical cross that’s about a hundred feet high. The sandy-colored chapel—set off by the dark red rock and framed against a deep blue sky—creates a stunning affect.

“Holy fuck!” Dan said, when he first saw the chapel.

“Exactly,” I agreed.

“Unbelievable,” Dan said.

I parked my Corvair in the lot at the bottom of the hill. Dan and I walked up the ramp to the chapel, carrying two six-packs of beer and the bucket of chicken.

After we ascended to the entrance on the chapel’s east side, we put the beer and chicken on the stone benches that surrounded the courtyard. We walked to the main door, trying to be respectful. We were Catholic boys. This was a church.

I tried the door. Someone had locked it.

“What the fuck is this?” Dan asked. “Nobody locks a church.”

“Yeah, it’s locked, all right,” I said, as I rattled the big door.

“We’re in the middle of nowhere. Pilgrims in need of spiritual succor and they lock us out? My immortal soul is in peril and I can’t get no satisfaction,” Dan sang off-key, trying to mimic Mick Jagger.

Dan was pissed. He spent five minutes railing against the bishop of Gallup, New Mexico, who had dominion over the chapel in those days. I’d been drinking with Dan on the way north. I had a mild buzz. Dan’s tirade cracked me up.

“Dan, I doubt that the bishop in New Mexico locked the chapel to spite you. I’m sure that he doesn’t know what the local priest does around here.”

“I wanted to see this Christus,” Dan said.

“Why?”

“You said it was grotesque and controversial, right?”

“It is.”

“Some people think it’s an abomination, correct?”

“Yep—my dad’s lawyer-buddy, for example.”

“I want to experience it,” Dan said, with more passion than I expected.

“Dan, look through this window. You can see the whole thing. It’s a little hard to focus, ’cause the sun is setting behind it and there’s glare through the west-facing windows,” I said, pressing my face against the window that bordered the big chapel door.

Dan went over to the window on the door’s other side. He got as close to the glass as possible, shading his eyes with his right hand. He stared at the Christus for several minutes without speaking. He pulled back, gathering his thoughts.

“You’re right. That’s gross. It’s not Christ-like at all. It’s dark—like it suffered in flames. Is it screaming in agony? It doesn’t look human. The arms are way too long. The legs are too long and skinny. The trunk is too narrow. It resembles a praying mantis that fell into a fire. I can see why no one likes it.”

“I didn’t say no one liked it. I said a lot of people don’t. I think it’s spiritual and conveys the sculptor’s impression of suffering from torture.”

“Jeez, Tony, you get that crap in Art Appreciation 101? The only way that thing could depict Christ is if the Romans stretched him on a rack, burned him at the stake, and then crucified him. That doesn’t fit with the story in the New Testament or the concept of His resurrection. That thing is horrible.”

“Sacrilege is in the mind of the beholder,” I said. “I saw a crucifix at the Newman Center at ASU. It had a varnished, mahogany cross. They dressed the Christus in colorful robes. The figure held a scepter in his left hand and gave a blessing with his right. It represented Christ as prophet and king, ignoring the gruesome nature of crucifixion. That sanitized crucifix in Tempe was plain wrong.”

“Enough. I don’t want to talk about religion. I want to get laid. Let’s have a beer, watch the sunset, and head up to Flagstaff,” Dan said, as we walked away from the chapel to fetch our beer and chicken.

After Dan and I settled in on the retaining wall, the sun had begun to drop behind the western mountains. Arizona is renowned for its remarkable sunsets. The one I saw that night could have eclipsed any in recorded history.

Fat, bulbous cumulus clouds drifted from the northwest across the upper Verde Valley. As the sun’s waning rays ricocheted off the stratosphere and pierced the clouds, brilliant colors burst across the dark blue-black sky in an explosion of scarlet, rose, mauve, emerald, sapphire, and gold. Every tone and shade in the band of light made an appearance in that evening sky. The sunset alone was worth the trip.

While we sipped beer and watched the light show, I noticed that a small family had made their way up from the parking lot—a young man, a pretty woman with a toddler, and a dog of mixed pedigree, showing some German shepherd.

By their conversation, the sunset had impressed them too. The mother, carrying her toddler on her hip, walked over to us. She saw that we had beer. “Are you guys old enough to be drinking that beer?”

Before I could respond with a wise-ass remark, Dan reached over, grabbed a fresh can of Coors, pulled out the church key, made two openings in the top of the can, and—without comment—extended the beer to the woman.

Faced with the moral dilemma of becoming an accessory-after-the-fact to underage drinking or adhering to a higher moral standard, the lady reached for the beer with her free hand, held the opened can to her lips, and took a healthy swig.

I opened a second beer and handed it to the husband. The guy was fortunate. His wife had a sensuality that I could feel from ten feet away.

The couple stood behind us sipping their beers, as the sunset bled from the sky and the dark blue evolved into an inky black. Ten minutes later it was black as pitch.

At that altitude, the crystal clear air and the lack of ambient light meant we could see a gazillion stars—even though the clouds continued to pass overhead. I don’t remember a moon.

The husband moved so that he could put his arm around his wife. Dan opened two more beers for them and passed them up. They accepted. They ignored us to engage in a private banter that implied intimacy in their future.

As I opened another beer, a shooting star fired out of the clouds in the north above the Mogollon Rim. It shot at a terrific speed to the south-southwest.

“Bob, isn’t that beautiful?” the wife asked. “What a perfect end to a beautiful evening.”

It would have been, had the light been a shooting star. Both Dan and I had seen the light. We followed its long diagonal track across the valley.

With no warning, the star stopped on a celestial dime, high above the valley to the southwest. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I’d taken physics. It was impossible for a meteorite burning through the stratosphere to stop in midair. The current position of that body violated the law of gravity.

“What the hell!” Dan said as we watched the bright light hover in the distance. “What in the fuck is that?”

“That’s no shooting star,” the husband said.

I said nothing. I watched, mesmerized.

The light hung in the sky for several seconds. Without warning, the light exploded to the northeast at an unfathomable speed. It disappeared over the buttes behind us.

“Jesus, what was that?” Dan asked, as he dropped his can of beer. Two seconds later, I could hear it careening off the rocks below.

“I have no fucking idea,” I said.

“Bob, are we OK here?” The woman asked, her voice quaking.

“Whatever that was, it’s gone,” Bob said.

The light rematerialized, flashing to the south and seeming to gain altitude until it passed Bell Rock, three or four miles south of the chapel.

“Holy shit!” Dan shouted. “There it goes again.”

“There’s one thing I’m sure of,” I said. “That’s no meteor.”

“But what is it? No airplane or helicopter could fly so fast, hover, and fly again without making a sound,” Dan said.

“Exactly.” Bob said. “What machine on earth could do that?”

The light made a right-angle turn and shot west across the valley. Before we lost sight of it, the light flipped in an impossible 180-degree turn. It headed for the chapel.

Everyone, save the toddler, uttered an expletive. The little boy whined and hid his face in his mother’s shoulder. The dog bared his teeth and growled after inserting himself between the oncoming light and his family.