Olivia's Trek (1) (12 page)
Olivia Carter
Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thum … It’s the sound of the air rushing into the turbine engine of a helicopter. Angry, panicked voices disturb my coma-like sleep. I can tell there’s a load of activity going on before I even open my eyes.
My ears feel warm and there’s a strange ache all over my body. It’s sort of like when I was detoxing when I first got here. My mouth is all dry. I struggle but manage to sit upright, the sunlight making my eyes wince.
Shirley spots me and comes over, screwing her eyes up at me as she gets close, “Missy, that’s one good sleep you had. You okay? You look a bit flushed to me.” She sticks her hand on my forehead. “Shit, you’re hot.”
The whirring above us makes us both look upwards towards the sky.
“What’s going on?”
“Kiddo, our friend Miguel decided to take off sometime in the early morning so a major search-and-rescue effort’s been launched to find him. But let me get you some medicine to help cool you down.”
I watch as she takes off towards her tent but is stopped as a police dog and handler and take off in another direction. I wait, but she doesn’t come back. Guess she must have forgotten about me, so I stand up and start rolling up my sleeping bag.
Gabriel’s voice is describing Miguel to someone on a walkie-talkie, “He’s about six-feet tall and weighs about 150 pounds.” I watch him ruffling the front of his hair the way I’ve seen Dr. Nate Carmichael do. Then he catches me looking at him, his eyes blazing a cobalt blue. The softness of them from last night is gone as he walks towards me. “Listen, Shirley is taking Gillian back with her, we’re going to send Aaron with the chopper back to basecamp so I need you to hike back with me. Do you think you can do that?”
I nod because he’s not really asking me and besides I don’t really want to piss him off anymore than he already appears to be.
“A simple yes would suffice so I know that you’ve heard me.”
Wow, his cage really is rattled. “Sure, Gabriel,” I say, hoping that the throbbing in my ears and head will go away. My hands are warm now, too, but I just don’t want to cause more of a problem.
I learn while we all pack up that there’s a helicopter, two all-terrain vehicles operated by police officers, two police boats and five teams of two officers each on foot looking for Miguel.
Gabriel and I leave all the activity behind us and set off for basecamp, walking beside each other in silence. He looks at me from time to time. I keep thinking he’s going to say something, but he doesn’t. Instead he just puts his earplugs in and whacks his music up full blast like some surly teenager. The thought makes me smile and I wish I knew what song he was listening too. He catches me smiling and looks at me, puzzled, but we still don’t say anything and keep walking.
A wave of nausea overwhelms me and I vomit up bile, my throat and nose stinging from the burn.
“Hey Olivia, did you eat breakfast?”
I can’t tell if he’s irritated. “Uh-huh, I had some dry toast. I didn’t really have much of an appetite.”
“Too much excitement huh? Never mind, have some water and I’ve got some mints in here somewhere,” he says, as his arm disappears down into his giant backpack.
Perhaps because I’m feeling feverish, I blindly trudge on without saying anything to Gabriel about how I’m feeling. As we walk down a path nearly completely covered with overhanging trees, in my delirium I imagine I’m Little Red Riding Hood on my way to Grandma’s … However, the only Big Bad Wolf I’m running from is my own sickness and exhaustion. Lucien has started to fade away.
I’m finding it hard to concentrate on the path, and the air feels thin. My feet are stumbling and black spots start to dance in front of my eyes.
“Olivia, talk to me. What’s wrong?”
I try and move my mouth but I feel paralyzed. I feel myself falling into Gabriel’s arms, holding onto him. My knee is in agony. Someone switches the lights out.
Gabriel Carmichael
Fuck. How didn’t I see that she wasn’t herself? She’s burning hot and I’ve made her hike with a 40 pound backpack. She never complained, not even once. Way to go, Gabriel.
She’s out cold. As I look at her, wiping her forehead, there’s a poignant vulnerability about her that catches in my throat.
I dribble water into her mouth and she starts to blink.
“My knee …” she groans, the slight crookedness of her teeth as endearing as the faded orange hair dye.
I look down and it all starts to fall into place. It’s where she cut herself on the hike the day before. It looks infected.
“I can see a Navajo hogan in the distance. We’ll head there and get some rest.”
“A what?”
“Never mind, just lean on me and let me take your weight. We’ll leave our backpacks here. Just sip the water slowly.” I really try, but I can’t stop myself from stroking the side of her face.
We slowly make our way down the path, but I can feel Olivia start to shiver. Damn, I’ve left the backpacks and they’ve got my first aid kit in them, “Not long to go now, Olivia.” I don’t like how pale she looks.
As we get closer, there’s two elderly women sitting outside the hogan, one who looks like she’s weaving a rug. A bunch of small boys are playing nearby. The boys reach me just in time for Olivia to start rigoring, before she collapses.
I’m sitting on a humble metal chair inside a traditional eight-sided Native American hogan made with wood planks and packed dirt, trying to work up the courage to ask an intimidating Navajo medicine man if he has the power to help me with Olivia. Jesus, the sun must have got to me, too.
The rich, deep red clay floor reminds me of a tennis court. A wooly sheepskin rug lies before us, a small American flag is hung on the wall, and there’s a loom with a colorful Navajo rug in the corner.
Over by the door, which faces to the east, the direction of the morning light, where Navajos believe that all good things come from, is a wood-burning stove. The smell of burning cedar fills the crisp winter air and the crackling of the fire punctuates the gaps in our conversation. Even I admit there is an almost mystical aura to the place.
Olivia’s in bad shape. She’s got an out of control skin infection in her left knee and I’m really worried that the infection has seeped into her blood. Miguel going missing is the least of my dad’s problems.
So here I am, surgeon on gardening leave because I went beserk in the operating theatre when I couldn’t save a road traffic accident victim. Delayed grief they all called it after my fiancée Sophie died in a car accident. I was put on enforced bereavement leave and Dad stepped in, telling me his freaking wilderness therapy would help me, too. I admit that helping all these drug-addicted, self-harming, lost adolescents has helped. Being out here, doing all the hikes, seeing reality and nature for what they are have put everything back into perspective for me. But shit, really? Is this what has happened to me? I’m now so desperate that I need to ask a medicine man for his help. I’m scared. I’ll do anything this time.
Sitting in front of me is a seventy-two year old Navajo medicine man, and his grandson, who serves as an interpreter. He speaks some English, but is more comfortable speaking Navajo, an oddly melodic tongue. The baby-faced young man, who I would put at about fourteen years old, is wearing a beanie hat, reminding me of Eminem. He smiles easily when I ask his grandfather questions.
Medicine man is a serious-faced man wearing a blue bandana, a long turquoise necklace and elaborate bracelets. His bulky medicine bag is on the floor between us and it looks like the sort of briefcase a pharmaceutical rep would schlep around hospitals and office parks. Each time I ask a question, he closes his eyes, grimaces and turns his head skyward before relaying his answer in Navajo, often using hand gestures to reinforce his points. It isn’t clear if my questions are annoying him or if he’s channeling some sort of spiritual guidance.
“The girl was hit by lightning, which disturbed her spirit,” he says, when asked about Olivia. “She must not see a dead body. We Navajo are very superstitious, so when we go to a funeral, that interferes with our spirit.”
“So how would you treat someone who is struck by lightning?” I ask.
Medicine man grimaces, tightens his jaw, exhales deeply and is silent for several moments. I can hear the crackling of the fire and a bird squawking in the distance as the anticipation builds.
I ask him if he refers very sick patients to medical doctors and he shakes his head dismissively.
“Most of the time I don’t,” he says. “I can remove and fight witchcraft and illness. I’m a crystal gazer and a hand trembler. I help a lot of patients, even people with cancer. I’m so positive about my ceremonies that I don’t usually recommend doctors.”
Great. I’d better not tell him what I do for a living then.
“There is a ceremony that can be done for this,” he says. “I will go to the Sacred Mountain and ask the elements, all the different gods how to treat the girl. And I will get all those herbs and plants, bring them home and I will give you the medicine bundle. And I will build a fire and talk to the different gods to invite them to the hogan. I will look in my crystal and X-ray the girl with my crystal, from the bottom of her feet to the top of the girl’s head and that’s where these elements and different gods will talk to me and tell me how to treat her.”
I blink incredulously, not at them but at my own self. I have clearly lost my sanity. I need to get back to Olivia who is lying in some sweat hut with a bunch of women she doesn’t know. I know she’ll be terrified if she wakes up and I’m not there.
“After the ceremony, she will have four days where she cannot shower,” he says, after a long pause. “The girl will be covered in herbs and medicines and given some prayers and songs. They will put her back together in one piece. No more broken sheep. All the evil, the taboo will be left behind. It’s helped a lot of people.”
“Sheep?”
“The Navajo way of describing body parts is to use sheep, the main meat source on the reservation,” the kid says.
I’m a skeptic by nature and I’m really not the ‘sit in a circle and bang a tribal drum with people wearing tie-dye and taking peyote’ type of guy. I believe in science and drugs, not spiritualism and native healing. Fuck injectable medications, I’m in the Navajo Nation now.
“Great, let’s get started. Can I go and see her now?” I ask, turning away before they can see doubt written all over my face.
“No, men and women are not permitted in the sweat lodge at the same time. She good. You come and have a beer.”
I go sit outside the sweat lodge, with my beer, listening the an old woman sing.
“He put it down. He put it down.
First Man put down the sweat house.
On the edge of the hole where they come up,
He put down the Son of the She Dark.
He built it of valuable soft materials.
Everlasting and peaceful, he put it there.
He put it there.”
A small boy comes and sits beside me. He looks happy, his toothy grin taking over his whole face. Poor Olivia didn’t have this happiness and a shiver goes through me as I try to put thoughts of her scavenging around garbage bins in the middle of the night out of my mind.
I ruffle the boy’s hair and he pipes up, “Mister, she not be long now. Four verses of the Sweat Bath Song must be sung before a Navajo can leave the sweat hogan. She not be sick no more.”
“Oh. Okay kid, if you say so.” I wink at him.
Someone yells, “Get him more beer.” I don’t argue. We’re stuck here, no phone signal, no phone battery, no medicine, no electricity and I doubt that any search could find us.
Dad, if you could see me now.
*
Something’s just not right. I can feel it inside of me, my gut, whatever. I have a deep respect for the Navajos and their traditions, but I’m from another world, another culture, and I haven’t got time for any more reasons or excuses. I just want to push my way into that sweat hut and see what the hell is going on.
It’s been four hours now and no one has come out. The medicine man’s rattle is starting to go right through me. I can’t take it anymore and, as I head towards the front door of the hogan, the medicine man’s nephew comes out.
“Your friend. She walks the Other Path. We must wait.”
“I don’t understand. What Other Path?”
“She must find her way. She walks the Path of Madness but my uncle is helping her. She must not choose the Path of Death. Come, we go.”
“I’m not leaving her any longer. I need to see her.” My intestines feel as if they have dropped out on the floor at my stupidity of coming here. Panic surges inside my chest making me catch my breath.
“Please, my friend, come. The sun must find her awake to count her among the living. My uncle will stay until that time.”
We stand opposite each other. Medicine man’s nephew isn’t going to let me go in and I’m not going anywhere. I hear a low rhythmic chant coming from the door. Soon the melodious rhythm grows in volume and began to echo all around us. The echoes join to form a ghostly chorus that send chills up my spine. I let nephew, who I have now learnt is called Harold, walk me away from Olivia.
We return to the home of Harold’s parents. This round log house, an adobe, built in the shape of an Eskimo igloo, is plastered over with a red-sand. And only has one small door and a smoke hole at the center of the roof. It would be my primitive accommodation for the night. There is a small fire in the center of the hogan and I help spread sleeping bags on the soft sandy floor. Harold’s mother brings us a hearty meal of Navajo tacos and bids us goodnight. In the corner lie our backpacks which someone must have kindly collected for us.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I awake to the sound of a distant coyote howl and silently slip out the door. I marvel at the spectacular display of brilliant stars spread across an inky black desert sky. The wind swirling smoke-like wisps of sand across the desert floor, and a tumbleweed silently rolls by. I wipe my cheek to find that it is wet. I don’t know how long I have been crying.