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No doubt it was some mystic force of the cosmos that pulled Martha and me down to the Four Corners region last weekend. As far as my unenlightened consciousness could comprehend, though, there were practical reasons for the trip.
Sanity requires that I get out of town every now and again. Some old friends -- Bruce and Kathy Moss, whom I went to high school with -- had invited us to see them in Cortez. And contrary to what people might think, even adult westerns require research; I needed to see some of Utah for my next pseudonymous contribution to American literature.
My first indication that I'd picked a strange weekend came Friday afternoon in Delta. Right on the main drag was a block-long four-wide line of humanity which looked like a time warp to about 1969, on the Hill in Boulder.
It turned out that Delta's music store had tickets for the Grateful Dead concert in Telluride. Certainly I can understand seeing nostalgic middle-aged degenerates like me in that line -- but most of the folks there were callow youths, barely out of high school.
If 60's nostalgia is popular now, though, they picked a
curious way to celebrate that era on the Western Slope.
Throughout Montrose, motels and liquor stores sported signs
to the effect of Welcome Deadheads.
If this had been
a rural rock festival 20 years ago, the welcome signs would
have been roadblocks manned by local rednecks sporting ax
handles and deer rifles.
The Beehive State, like ours, is eager to attract tourists. Unlike Colorado, Utah goes after foreign tourists, and apparently succeeds. While strolling through Arches National Park and wondering how any place could be that hot and dry, we heard people talking in Japanese, German, Dutch, Spanish, French and New-Age Babble.
One reason I had been so eager to get out of Salida was
that our county had recently been host to a bizarre
gathering. I kept encountering people who explained that
there was a powerful force called Harmonic Convergence
which could be most fully experienced at Mt. Princeton, a
sanctified spot because it's right on the Continental
Divide.
Mt. Princeton is at least a dozen miles away from the Divide, and I'll be damned if I need spiritual guidance from people that can't even read terrestrial maps. I thought they were just some local aberration. However, there is no escape.
The Harmonic Convergers were out in force all over the Southwest last weekend. Many gathered at Chaco Canyon, N.M., and others at Mesa Verde. Presumably those spots hold a mystic significance related to American Indian ways, but why were there New Age zealots at Arches, an area so desolate that the Utes never bothered with it?
One told me it was a holy spot. I granted that it was indeed holy -- it was the holes in the rocks, after all, that made it a national park. But he told me I didn't understand, and that I should open my mind to the forces of the surrounding terrain and be more perceptive.
That got scary as we proceeded toward Cortez. Sometime
Saturday afternoon, we passed a barren spot south of Moab
that was once The Home of Truth,
whereat Jesus
Christ allegedly dictated messages straight to a
typewriter, explaining how to raise the dead.
Nearby Monticello is named for Thomas Jefferson's plantation, which used to appear on the back of the $2 bill, and $2 bills were reputed to be unlucky. Getting from Monticello to Cortez means driving on U.S. 666, a number fraught with beastly omens.
Nothing about the Mosses or their street address struck any dreadful chords. Even so, once I got back home Monday, I felt fortunate in surviving the weekend. I started reading up on Harmonic Convergence, which has its origins in the Mayan calendar.
Down in the jungles of Yucatan centuries ago, the Mayans did develop a very accurate calendar. But most Convergers are also heavy into astrology, which comes from the Babylonians, whose calendar was inaccurate, primarily because they were so fascinated by the number 360 that they kept trying to twist reality so it would fit their contrived cosmic scheme.
I don't see how you can admire astrology and accuracy at the same time. But I did learn one encouraging fact. The enduring mystery of the classic Mayans is that they vanished suddenly. Perhaps their latter-day followers will do us a favor and do the same thing.
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