Arizona Sonoran DesertThe Owl Head Buttes Connection
“I’m gonna show you the Owl Head Buttes,” said Gum, short for Gumbert, a balding skinny fellow with a leathery tan. “That’s where you want to have your place.”
I’d been searching for land where I could build a yoga and meditation retreat. Now, where Gum and I sat on an old Perisan rug I’d saved from the dump, I held yoga classes in my rental in Tucson, Arizona.
Next day Gum picked me up. While we headed north on Interstate 80 to the Owl Head Buttes, he told me about his time as a dealer at a casino in Las Vegas. “I could count cards, see.” In those days that meant you were invincible at winning. “I was breaking the house when I’d play for myself, so they banned me from playing, but not from dealing, of course. So I used to go places where they didn’t know me. I’d pretend I was drunk. After a few days, they’d catch on and throw me out.”
About ten miles outside Tucson, Gum said, “Get off here! Jesus, we almost missed it.” Then he guided me down a well-graded road, with lush desert vegetation—palo verde trees with yellow blossoms, giant saguaros raising their arms to the sky, ocotillos with their orange flame blossoms at the tips of spiny branches. Flatlands all around, not a house in sight. Tuscon Mountains to the southwest and Mt. Lemon to the southeast.
“There they are,” he said, pointing to three reddish mesas, flat on top, steep rise, maybe 400 feet high. We couldn’t figure out how to get close to them, but close enough for me to know this was where I wanted my yoga retreat. Then one of my favorite desert birds, a cactus wren, whistled its wheet wheet from a mesquite tree, cinching my sense of “right place.”
A week later Gum showed up with the classified section tucked under his arm. “Look here,” he said, snapping the paper open. “Owl Head Buttes. Property for sale.”
The next morning Gum and I met the broker, Mickey, at Dunkin Donuts, and he spirited us off in his new broker's jeep. Mickey was a big guy, football player big, maybe fifty, with snow-white hair that seemed to glow, and eyes translucent blue. I’d been reading Ruth Montgomery’s book Strangers Among Us, about “walk-ins.” Not to beauty parlors, but dead people walking into someone else’s recently-dead body. Meaning there were these souls wandering around bodiless, searching for a body to occupy. If someone died, one of these souls would enter the dead body and suddenly, the person who’d been pronounced dead, would come alive again. Usually the souls that did this, according to Ruth Montgomery, were very advanced beings, compassionate people who hadn’t finished their life-tasks on earth.
While we drove down the interstate, I got this idea that Mickey was a walk-in. I kept looking around at Gum in the back seat, who had no clue what was on my mind. Finally I got up my nerve and asked, “Mickey, are you a walk-in?”
Much later, after I had gotten know Mickey a bit, he confessed he’d nearly driven off the road when I’d asked him that. Now he was silent for a minute. “What makes you ask?”
“Just a feeling.”
“Our instructions were to always tell the truth when asked, though we weren’t necessarily supposed to go around telling the whole world about this. So, yeah, I’m a walk-in. But not the way you think. I’m actually from another planet.”
“Another planet?!” I let that surprise grind around in my throat as Mickey made a right off the graded road, and bumped along over potholes, towards the Buttes.
“We’re almost there,” he said. “I’ll show you the 80-acre parcel that I think you’ll like best for your project. It has a great view out to Picacho Peak, spectacular at sunset.”
Using my trained psychological counselor voice, I said, “Okay, that’s nice, but can you tell me a little more about being a walk-in from another planet?”
My heart lurched as he maneuvered his 4-wheel drive through the deep sand of a fairly wide arroyo. “You won’t have any trouble crossing this in your old Oldsmobile,” he said.
“How’d you know I have an old Oldsmobile?” Gum and I had driven to Dunkin Donuts in Gum’s car.
“It comes with the territory,” he said as he pulled over and got out, and then Gum and I got out, too. Mickey’s face was rugged and kind, not handsome, but pleasant. He stood, thumbs in his jeans pockets, next to a mesquite tree and looked me up and down. “We have x-ray vision, too, and I can see you have some obstruction in your intestines.” It was true. I’d been having indigestion and didn’t know what was wrong. “I don’t mean to scare you,” he said, “ but you wanted to know.”
As we started walking the property, Mickey waved his hand in the direction of the Owl Head Buttes that rose up at the end of the 80 acres. “That flat area to the left of the Buttes, that’s where we’re going to lift people off when the polar axis change happens. No one will be able to survive the winds. So my mission here, as commander of a space fleet, is to lift people off planet Earth. So this won’t be a bad place to have your retreat.”
Good grief, I thought. “Hmm,” I said as I nearly tripped over a barrel cactus.
When Mickey wasn’t looking, Gum raised an eyebrow, while whirling his forefinger around his ear.
“Come on over here,” said Mickey, trudging up a small incline. “This would be a good building site.”
I made my way between two jumping chollas, with their spiny, ball-like growths at the ends of their stems that can suddenly end up on your pant leg, or on an unwary animal’s fur. "Oh, look!" A small herd of javelina, wild desert pigs, were scuttling along through a wash. On the knoll, I surveyed the land’s bumps and gullies, the rich colors of the desert, then took in the view of Picacho Peak, shimmering on the horizon like a spire on a distant planet. “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it, Gum?”
“Yup. It sure is.”
Back at Dunkin Donuts, as soon as Gum and I climbed into Gum’s car, he said, “That guy’s totally whacko.”
“I don’t know. He sure knew his stuff.”
“Sick psychic tricks, just like the ones they’ve got working in Vegas to spot smart card players, or players who are also psychic.”
“I like the idea of living right there at that pick-up spot when all those earth changes happen. Crazy or no, I’m going to purchase that land, but it’ll take a while for my mom’s estate to finalize, and we have a lot of planning to do. Like how are we going to take calls for retreats when there aren’t phone lines out there?”
“There ain’t gonna be no earth changes. Believe me. That stuff doesn’t happen over night, not all over the whole damn planet. Maybe Vesuvius exploding onto Pompeii, yes. One spot or two, now and then, just to keep us on our toes, one year at a time.”
“What about the great deluge of Noah?”
“Yeah, how often have you heard of that happening?”
(Twenty-five years later, Gum’s take on earth changes proved to be true, though it is a known fact that the axis will shift, as is does now and then, perhaps sooner than thought because of how we’ve been messing up the planet. But the “sooner” numbers are in the hundreds of thousands of years, give or take a few. But then there is the ice melt now in 2009, raising the sea level).
Meanwhile, Mickey didn’t want to wait around for me. He sold “my” parcel. I was pissed. But, as it turns out, even if I had bought that land, I’d not have had enough money left over to build a retreat place. But since my belief is that most things happen for the best, I bought an adobe home on Hacienda del Sol Road in Tucson’s Catalina Foothills, on three and a half acres, with a huge great room perfect for classes, and even a swimming pool closed in with an ocotillo fence. A friend of Mickey’s, another walk-in from another planet—not Mickey’s planet—helped me find the place, using his brand of other-worldly talents.
Since the yoga center showed signs of success in the first year and Mickey still had some undesirable land left out there in the middle of nowhere, I took part in his buy and sell scheme, dividing my new 80-acre parcel into three. In short time I doubled my money. Gum had a laugh. “Better than Vegas,” he said.
I invited Mickey to come to my yoga center one night to give a talk about his planet and his mission here on Earth. About forty people showed up. At the end of his talk, he promised he’d let us know in advance when he’d be getting ready to land his ship. And so we all had fun waiting—not on pins and needles—for the Owl Head Buttes lift-off.
No comments:
Post a Comment