Free David's Inferno by David Blistein Page A

to Gallup, New Mexico (via Canyon de Chelly). 452 Miles
. A lot of people have told me I have to visit Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico to get a sense of Anasazi history and culture and what the local hunter-gatherers were up to back in the B.C .s. They also said I’d be overwhelmed by its mysteries—both geological and human.
    Unfortunately, I keep reading that you have to drive miles on hot, dry, rocky roads to get there—which conjures up images of me crawling, skeleton-like, in some ditch as my poor VW van goes up in flames behind me. I may be a poor man’s Hunter Thompson, but I have no desire to pose for Ralph Steadman.
    So I take the less-traveled road to Canyon de Chelly in Arizona—less spectacular perhaps, but still no slouch in the shock-and-awe department.
    At various times during this trip the universe has conspired to give me privacy. Often, I’ve gone to relatively well-known tourist sites, and there’ll be no one else in sight. But as soon as I leave, people appear. Same here. I’m alone, the only non-native at the bottom of the White House Trail, able to converse with the spirits in peace and quiet. But as I leave, at least a dozen people pass me, talking in loud voices, including a mother and father followed by two pouty teenage girls who also appear to be looking ferociously inside. Hearing an incongruously modern engine, I turn around to see a guide in an open-top jeep with another family, plowingthrough the stream, seemingly oblivious to the silence they’re shattering. On the way out, I stop at “Mummy’s Lookout.” As soon as I arrive, two old women move off the rocks … I have no idea where they disappeared. Generations of Navajos haunt this valley.
    April 5-6, 2006: Gallup, New Mexico to Albuquerque, New Mexico. 140 Miles
. As a famous man once said, “One man’s miracle is another man’s matter of fact … and vice versa.” So I tend to treat the ordinary as if it were extraordinary and the extraordinary as if it were ordinary. Some people think that all petroglyphs were drawn by ancient Native American tribes. Others think they were drawn by, or at the direction of, the kind of aliens that even Arizona can’t deport. Some might be graffiti created by wild packs of drug-crazed teenagers sometime between 1000 A.D . and 1969. This morning, a friend with some serious shamanic chops takes me to see some petroglyphs that she’s experienced as power spots, so I can dig down deep and see what I come up with.
    Picture this: Two relatively normal looking 50-somethings, wearing hiking boots, jeans, and zip-up sweatshirts—no beads, sacred stones, amulets, or feathers in sight—strolling across and occasionally clambering up and down a rocky hillside. They’re catching up, telling stories, laughing—doing what old friends do.
    Every once in a while, she stops: “I know it’s around here somewhere. Ah …” She proceeds to direct me to a rock that has a strange drawing on it. I walk over to said rock and instinctively start issuing your run-of-the-mill blood-curdling screams. After 30 seconds or so, I take a couple of deep breaths and follow her to the next one, continuing our conversation as if nothing’s happened. Perhaps a casual comment: “That was a good one.” We do this a half dozen times, until we’re caught up on marriages, kids, and friends … and I’m spent. Then we go back to her house where I have a cup of coffee and talk to her husband about the stock market.
    From my perspective, screaming with a friend in the desert isn’t a whole lot different from going to some guy I never met, telling him all my problems, and having him give me a pill. Besides,back in the 1970s, a guy named Arthur Janov popularized “primal scream” therapy. And there are almost as many places where you can “rebirth” these days as there are maternity