Goin' Up the Country

Rites of Passage is an organization based in Novato, California, which runs vision quests in remote areas throughout the Western states. Groups of adults or adolescents would sign up, and after several prep meetings in Novato a group would be transported by bus to the site for a week of roughing it alone, though within access to a base camp. My group of ten questers was going to Death Valley, in the week between Xmas and New Year's, so we would spend New Year's Eve out in the desert. The idea of the quest was to grow our own rites of passage in a place that took us out of our modern life and faced us with nature, such rites and such connection with the natural world having mostly fallen out of practice in modern life. Rites of Passage founders Stephen and Meredith Foster were our instructors during the preparation, which took place over six weeks, and some of their staff would go with the group to serve as guides and maintain the base camp. We were to stay at base camp for the first couple of nights, exploring the nearby landscape for a personal place to stay and picking a buddy with whom to communicate by leaving messages at an agreed-upon location during our solitary quest.

The bus journey from Novato was guaranteed to bring on my carsickness, so I dosed myself liberally with Dramamine, and spent most of the time either drowsing or asleep. There was some delay when one of the group's two buses broke down in the middle of nowhere, but the refugees from the other bus climbed on to the one I was in, loaded with camping gear, and somehow we managed to shoehorn everyone and their equipment in and continue on our way. We broke for supper after driving since early in the morning at the Homestead Restaurant in Inyokern, last chance for meat in days. The food was old-fashioned small-town American, lavish in quantity and delicious. We ate like pigs. Very happy pigs.

Arriving by moonlight at the drop-off site in Death Valley National Park, we stumbled sleepily off the bus and loaded ourselves with our gear, including food and water in gallon jugs. Then we trailed after our guides on a course perpendicular to the road, heading roughly toward the Funeral Mountains in the east. About a mile from the road we established our base camp, built a fire, and set up our tents. The stars were incredible, and the occasional meteor flashed overhead. The air was chilly, but we were dressed warmly, and the fire cast a comfortable glow on the group as we milled around, trying to dispel the stiffness brought on by fourteen hours on the bus.

Although a lot of the preparatory meetings had been about practical matters, such as the possibility of running into a rattlesnake (pretty slim, as they generally hibernate in the winter) and what to do in case of medical emergency, a large proportion had been devoted to the reasons for taking up this kind of quest. The groups of adolescents Rites of Passage guided through the wilderness were usually at-risk kids, for whom a real rite of passage was lacking in their ordinary life, and for whom, hopefully, this kind of quest would serve to mark their transition from child to adult, and lessen their need to mark their status by getting into trouble. The adult groups, however, were less homogeneous in their motives. There would be people who were in a life-crisis such as widowhood or divorce, women who were facing menopause, people in religious crisis, and so on. I was not precisely in major crisis mode, but the uprooting of my life by a move from San Francisco to the Napa Valley was a frightening prospect. I loved it in San Francisco. I had made myself a life there. I knew nobody in the Valley, and even though it would be relatively easy to transfer my mail-order business to a more rural setting, I felt intimidated. So this vision quest would serve for me as a magickal doorway through which to step and come out the other side better fitted for the challenges of a new life. Well, that was the idea, anyway. But I had to admit I was a bit turned off by the Fosters' emphasis on how wrenchingly painful the process would be. Go out into the desert, check. Be alone three days and nights, check. Fast during the solitary time, check. I could do all that. But "cry for a vision"? Spend the entire time in tears? That seemed a little extreme.

During the two nights the group spent at base camp, there was a lot of this sort of talk. I didn't say so, but I felt that people were making it harder on themselves than necessary. Important dreams and visions weren't that difficult to get, especially if one was off in this otherworldly place, alone, fasting. I had been trying for visions and trances for years, with varying levels of success. The desert seemed like a natural place to look for this kind of magickal experience. So when I went off by myself on the first day after arrival to look for a place to stay, I simply ignored everything I had been taught and went with my intuition. I found a flat little plain with one upright rock sticking out of it, facing a row of cliffs with little caves in them, and decided to make a magick circle there. I had arranged with my buddy to leave daily signals at a rock shelf halfway between my site and the base camp. If one of us didn't leave her signal, the other one was to report to base camp and the guides would initiate a search. We didn't know where each other's site was, but we would never be more than 24 hours from help. As it turned out, my site was the closest to base camp of anyone's in the group; some people went miles into the desert, but I liked my little valley. Besides, we had to trek in with all the water we would need for two days and three nights, about a gallon a day, and a gallon jug of water weighs 16 pounds. I was not about to lug all that halfway to the Funeral Mountains.

We also took our sleeping bags and tarps, a tin cup, matches, a Swiss Army knife, and a lemon. Over my sweatshirt, jacket, and warm pants, I wore my home-made black hooded robe with the tassel made of flax that I had grown and dyed myself, and the eucalyptus wood staff that I had found in Golden Gate park and peeled of bark and decorated with beads, thongs, paint, and feathers. One of the other questers gave me a terrycloth headband with devil's horns attached, and, horns protruding from under my Goodwill knitted cap to which I had fastened a shell (well, I was on pilgrimage, after all), I set off with my buddy to the signal rock, said farewell and went on to my valley. If there were giants, I was ready.

There were plenty of rocks of all different colors in the area, and I scraped the area of my circle out with my feet, because it was easier than bending down and picking up all those rocks. At the edges I made a rim of rocks, color-matched to the directions: yellow for the East, red for the South, black for the West, and white for the North. The single standing stone was inside the circle toward the North, and I set up my sleeping area with my back to it, facing the cliff. At the exact point of each direction I placed stones which seemed to symbolize those directions: fossils from the long-ago ocean which once covered the valley, spirals and heart shapes and circles and squares. There was such a profusion of really wonderful stones to use that they might have been waiting all those centuries for me to come and organize them.

The weather was cold at night but days were quite mild, with temperatures in the sixties, and for the duration of my solitary time I enjoyed wandering around the immediate area, looking for rocks, or sitting in the winter sun making gods-eyes out of the yarn and sticks I had brought with me, or writing voluminously in my journal. I dreamed a lot at night, dreams I considered to be significant, and much of my journaling was devoted to describing and analyzing the meaning of these dreams. One dream was of being taken in off the cold bitter street by the Wolf Mother and comforted by her, put to bed like the little child my dreamself was, and fed. In daylight I was quite encouraged by the nature of these dreams, which seemed to be a validation of my own way of doing spiritual things. I didn't have to cry for a vision: the reality of the landscape was vision enough. I was a part of it, just as much as the rattlesnakes sleeping in their holes or the creosote bushes from which I gathered twigs to make my tiny fire in the morning, or the fire itself. The night sky was cold and distant and awesome, but I belonged to it and to the rocks. They knew me and I knew them.

On the night of New Year's Eve I had been told to sit up and stay awake all night, as this was the last night of the three. I wrapped myself in my sleeping bag and then in a layer of plastic tarp, and sat with my back to the standing rock, which protected me somewhat from the wind, which was biting. The sky was perfectly clear, and it was very cold. I had saved a bit of my lemon and put it in my tin cup with some water I heated over a minuscule fire, and sipped at it whenever I felt chilled. There were many meteorites that night, and the moon shone on the face of the cliff, showing the little caves like dark eyes in the rock watching me. Gradually the stars wheeled above me. The only discomfort I felt was that after sitting for several hours my butt was paralyzed, but I remedied that by getting up every so often, still encased in my sleeping bag and tarp, and jumping up and down (which must have looked pretty silly). Whenever I had to pee I dashed outside the circle, disarranged as few garments as absolutely necessary, did my business, and dashed back to the sleeping bag as fast as possible. The second time, I noticed that my first little puddle had frozen solid, so the temperature was somewhere below 32°. My plastic-wrapped cocoon was warm and comfortable, however, and I felt quite happy to be there. For all that I had always tended to avoid being alone as a continual state in life, I was content with my own company.