I said, Man, I don't think I can do this.
Carey looked down at me, smiling the way I expected his esoteric ass might; like a criminal who walked. I came from a place where it seemed almost disingenuous to be happy, and so far I was having a hard time buying into his act. That I had known him for hardly an hour by that point had little if anything to do with it.
I asked him, Aren't you scared right now?
He shook his head no and pointed out a branch for me to grab ahold of, and I did as I was told and was able to ascend another six inches higher. He whispered, Now don’t forget to thank the tree for its help.
I turned back around and said, Thank you for your help, tree.
I had come a long way from eating meat and supporting military intervention.
“But no, really. How are we going to do this?”
I wanted to know. I needed to know.
“The same way we’ve made it this far already. With harmony, between body and spirit.”
He slapped me on the shoulder as if to say, Try and keep up, kid.
It was a beautiful view, of course. I really didn’t have anything to complain about. I was young, still in my twenties, and living in a city I had spent the better part of my life only dreaming about. And when I needed to get away for a little while, I did. I had a motorcycle and the entire state of Arizona for a neighbor. And now I had Carey, too.
And so we climbed higher, and higher, and higher...
“So is this your first time visiting Sedona?”
“Actually, more like my sixth or seventh. In the last year, that is. You?”
“First time,” Carey said, laying down on his belly and giving me his hand. It took everything I had, but I made it over the hardest lip yet. He brushed his stomach off, pointing upwards and to the left. “That’s our best shot, I think.”
“First time to Arizona, too? Or just here.”
“Just here, surprisingly. And now I’m thinking I might never leave.”
Sedona was just about the most beautiful place I had ever seen before. I was still trying to get used to it, to be honest.
We made it another twenty feet higher, Carey telling me all about how his wife had recently left him, and how he had since dedicated himself to clearing his chakras out and winning her back. In the past month alone he had quit his job and traveled some 2,000 miles, pursuing the type of knowledge that only traveling can bring.
“A spiritual advisor in Phoenix told me that my Sacral region is a mess, my second chakra. And here I was this entire time, wasting time with my first. That had been my first mistake, looking back on it now.”
He held one hand just above his navel and the other just below his genitals, and I nodded in response.
“It’s where desire originates from, our sense of pleasure, our sexuality...”
“Oh,” I replied. Well I guess that makes sense.
“And so the first thing I need to do is make peace with the fact that she left me.”
I asked him how all of that had been going so far, and he made a face as if to say, Some days you’re the tire, some days you’re the toad.
When we had made it about halfway up Carey took his pack off and hid it behind a bush, tucking it into a tiny recess there. My pack weighed more than I did and I had been carrying it with me the entire time, because motorcycles don’t have trunks. He ensured me it would be safe there, and when I hesitated he said, Don’t worry, only mountain climbers take this approach.
So that was why people kept beating us to the top. I had simply thought that there must have been an elevator somewhere I wasn’t yet privy too. I had parked my motorcycle and started climbing in the direction most immediate to it, without so much as even trying to scope a trail out. Carey had stumbled upon me a couple minutes later, still very much at the bottom, struggling already. His confidence had become my dilemma.
So we’re on the wrong path then? I asked him.
Not necessarily, he said. Just a slightly harder one.
Harder as in you needed ropes and harnesses and chocks and helmets, the knowledge to tie knots appropriately and the strength to support your own weight in trying positions, all of which we had none. Carey had a bottle of water and I had my leather jacket tied around my waste, with a pack of cigarettes in the pocket.
I looked down and saw my motorcycle as a tiny speck in the distance, squinting to try and see if anybody had stolen my helmet yet.
“We’ll be alright,” Carey said, and surprisingly enough, I realized we would.
I reminded myself to just breathe.
Carey made a short dash up a steep crag that seemed nearly vertical in appearance, and I nearly tripped in the scree that rained down on me. He did a convenient muscle-up over the next lip and looked back to make sure I was keeping up. I took a knee, spitting the dust out of my mouth.
“You’re going to have to help me with this one too,” I said, wiping the sweat from my brow.
There was a rusted piton Carey jumped to try and get ahold of with his bare hands, because it seemed like the only option we had left. We had been pacing the same twenty feet of ledge for the last ten minutes or so, had tried a wide array of grips but none were promising enough to entrust our lives to. The ledge was just wide enough to stand on, too narrow to catch us should we fall. I was still having a hard time wrapping my head around how we had made it this far in the first place.
Carey frowned, staring up at it. I wasn’t exactly sure what he would’ve done with the piton even had he been able to reach it. It was rusted and sharp looking and I’m pretty sure requiring a rope of some sort. We had half a bottle of water left, three cigarettes and a camera, but definitely no rope. I had checked. We had been on the mountain for three hours, by that point.
“Listen,” he said, taking a telltale breath. “Don’t panic, but I think the only way out of here is up.”
I tried retracing our steps but couldn’t, agreeing with him.
Like two kittens stuck in a tree, we had raced to the highest limb without the slightest idea on how to get down back down again. You can’t crawl in reverse, was our real problem.
“So what’s the plan?”Carey said worse comes to worse, they would just have to helicopter us out of there. He said they did it all the time, hikers were always getting stuck up on Bell Rock. I said, I thought this was your first time here? and he said, Well, I’ve heard stories.
And so we spent another couple of minutes like that, palming the flat rock and rejoicing in the fact that we weren’t at risk for hypothermia just yet.
Surprisingly, I was the one who thought we should go for it.
“Carey, what about just following this ledge out a little further?”
There was a reason we hadn’t made such an attempt already, but I was cold and hungry and over it.
Carey raised his eyebrows at me and said, You sure?
Yeah, I said. So long as I can remember to keep my mouth shut and not sneeze, I should be fine.
Carey smiled in approval and slapped my arm again, telling me to follow his lead.
“Just stay calm,” he said. “And remember, don’t look down.”
I pressed my forehead up against the rock, sidestepping my way along as the ledge weaned itself narrower and narrower, to a point where my heels were nearly even with the lip.
We were a couple hundred feet up. I was awfully sure I was going to have a heart attack.
My hands shook as I traced them from one pinch to the next, having to crimp my fingers in some spots.
We made it a couple yards out before Carey stopped, looking over his shoulder at me. He nodded, tellingly. We had reached the bees.
“We’re here with you, bees,” is how he went about it.
They darted from their hive and pinged off his chest, Carey simply repeating himself, I’m here with you, bees. I’m here with you.
I had never spewed so many curse words in a single go.
I shuffled another step, closing my mouth, closing my eyes, too. I felt them hitting me like a pellet gun, I cringed with a steady groan in the back of my throat and Carey said, Just keep going kid, you’re almost there. I heard the buzzing loud in my ear like a rumble strip as if I was strapped to the undercarriage. I was convinced the first one to sting me would send me tumbling over the edge, but miraculously, none of them did.
When it was safe to breathe Carey hugged me. I hugged him back, smiling in disbelief. He hugged me a little too long and I subtly dipped out of it, looking back in awe on the pass we had just made.
“I can’t even believe it,” I said.
Carey winked and said, You don’t need other people to hold you up anymore, as if he had known me my entire life.
I slapped him five and said, Hell yeah, and slowly we ascended further on up into the heavens.
We met a man who I would later go on to call the Jew on the mountain. We found him sitting cross-legged on a peninsula of rock jutting out into the ethereal absolute. He told us he had quit his day job and moved to Sedona six years ago to the date, after a local travel agency had shown it to him on VHS and hustled him into booking a trip out there. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, he said. I asked him what it was he had been writing about in his journal there before we so rudely interrupted him, and he told me it was just his theories on the inner workings of cosmic fog and its relation to clandestine governmental time travel.
Carey whispered, Okay, time to go, and I waved goodbye to the Jew on the mountain.
We ran with the energy of kids up a slope as smooth as glass and then slid back down it on our stomachs, only because we were having that much fun. We climbed a little further, and then we made it to the top.
A couple gave us a curious look and the woman said, You came that way? A man in a white suit was conducting a ceremony of some sorts and a young girl was doing Pilates on a patch of smooth rock behind him.
A walk through the car wash couldn’t have wiped the smile from my face.
We had a three-hundred-and-sixty degree view from the top, I could have probably seen home and the Hollywood sign had the clouds not been in my way.
Carey handed me his camera and asked if I wouldn’t mind taking a picture of him. I turned around to put some distance between us and when I turned back again he was standing there stark naked, his clothes resting in a pile on the ground next to him.
I asked him if he was feeling alright and he said, Kid, I’ve never felt better.
“Out here, this is the only way to do it,” he said.
I raised the camera to my face and said, Say Sedona.
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