Two Walls and a Roof (55 page)

For the rest of that day
everything went extraordinar
ily well. I
t was as if I was in a kind of crystal zone, and that evening I booked our flights, our car, and the great train journey across America. When I checked on availability for Goulding
’
s Trading Post, it seemed that they had a long waiting list, as did the brand new View Hotel. For us to stay in the middle of Monument Valley, we had to stay in either one and it looked impossible.  Then on checking availability for the Bright Angel Lodge in the Grand Canyon National Park, I also discovered that they too were booked out for the days we planned to be in Arizona. In spite of the seeming impossibility of sleeping in my dream places, I had no worries at all, especially after the earlier events of that day.  I became relaxed a
nd sure in my mind that somehow
we would be staying in Goulding
’
s Trading Post, and we would be sleeping on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Like the funding for our trip, I was happy to leave the Universe or Consciousness to handle the sleeping details as well.  Quite certain of it all then, we would be heading to America at the beginning of October in 2010, the year I turned sixty years of age, and I couldn’t wait for JoAnn to come home and begin the packing.

She returned home and both of us decided that in order to do justice to this adventure
,
we should both lose weight and become fit. The plan was for us to rise every morning at seven thirty, and walk for about an hour or more along the bank of the Blackwater River. We began immediately
,
and soon we were becoming so fit that we could jog part of the way. This walk took us through the woods and along a narrow ledge, and in places it went right down to the water
’
s edge before rising and falling again for much of the journey. It was muddy in many places, and quite dangerous in place
s, and all the time we did this
JoAnn began telling me
that she didn’t like this walk
as she felt one of us would get hurt in this place. I ignored all of this, as I knew it was working and we were definitely fitter. About six weeks before our departure, on a beautiful sunny morning
,
JoAnn was proven right. She had been trailing along behind me when
suddenly I heard her scream out. W
hen I turned around she was lying on the ground with her leg all twisted behind her. She was crying and scared, believing her leg was broken. We were a long way from our car
,
and after doing my best at first aid, I became her crutch, and somehow managed to get her home
. T
hen the ‘ice pack’ days began.

I had hoped that in America JoAnn would do all the driving, as she loved it, and I was scared of it. Now she could not even walk let alone drive, and we were only six weeks away from departure from Shannon Airport.

Rest and ice packs
,
as well as bandaging were all we could do, and instead of getting fitter, we both actually got fatter. It was definitely my fault as I should have taken her advice, but dismissed the Indian ways in her as just unnecessary fears. Weeks of suffering went by, with her slowly improving, but she was always in pain. With a week to go, we decided to visit a healing area in West Cork, and on the way back she got a feeling that something very bad was going to happen in America. It was not that we would die in a plane crash
, but s
he did not know for sure what would happen
. T
his time I believed her, and was half thinking of cancelling the whole trip.

From deep inside me though a kind of gentle voice said over and over,
“I
t will all be wonderful and ye are protected
. G
o ahead, as I have provided the way
”
. This was not a voice inside me,
but a kind of feeling in words;
a ‘word feeling’ is the best way I can describe it. In any case we decided to go ahead.

On the day we were leaving, my son Kyrl drove us to Shannon and everyone wished us so well. JoAnn
’
s foot was not better yet, but she could walk for short periods, and then rest with her ice pack.

From the moment we left Shannon I began to feel wonderful. The journey of my life had begun, and was uneventful until we were flying into Phoenix Airport in the late evening.

The plane had gone into a holding pattern and slowly circled the airport. Then I noticed a violent thunderstorm with fork lightning in the near distance. The plane could not land because the airport was under the weather
,
and we were flying around it. Every so often we would hear the announcement that ‘soon we should be able to land’. Our jet was hanging in the sky
,
and even though it had to be travelling at well over a hundred miles an hour
,
it just seemed to be station
a
ry. JoAnn read and I looked at the storm as some passengers became edgy. Then my wife from ‘Tornado Alley’ said, “
T
his feels like a tornado to me
. I
t
’
s got that kind of feeling in the air”. She was overheard by the old ladies sitting near us, and they veheme
ntly disputed this, telling her,
“
We are in
Arizona now
. W
e rarely if ever get tornados”. JoAnn said
,
“I come from Missouri
,
I know what a tornado feels like, and this has that feeling”. The plane began its decent. Suddenly there was a massive bang. It sounded like a huge hammer had violently hit the entire plane. The shuddering travelled all along the fuselage, scaring the hell ou
t of us all -
me included.
The whole plane shook terribly
and suddenly went into a steep nosedive. Some screaming began, and JoAnn dug a hole in my hand with her nails, feeling
it was all over. In that moment
I too questioned my inner voice, wondering if she had been right about the bad thing happening in America being our untimely death. Then I distinctly heard the ‘word feeling’ say
, “N
o, you are protected and all will be fine”. In that minute the plane levelled off and we landed soon after. By sheer coincidence, the day before we had left I had been reading all about wind she
a
r
and how dangerous it is in the W
est
. I
t had brought down a number of cargo planes before they finally figured out how to deal with it. The symptoms were identical to what had just happe
ned to us. As we left the plane
the captain was standing at the exit, and I said to him
,
“Thank you for your skill
. W
ind she
a
r I think”. He smiled
with a knowing look and said, “I
t was a close one”
. After surviving that incident,
I told JoAnn that no matter what happened next, we would be safe for the rest of the adventure
. F
rom then on I was prepared to enjoy every second, and care nothing for my safety either.

By the time we collected our hire car it was about ten thirty at night
,
and JoAnn very nervously got onto Hway 17 heading north, as I did the navigating. We came to a roundabout and she had her first of many panic attacks, stopping right in the middle of the road in a multi
-
lane roundabout. No one honked, or got annoyed, and after the initial screaming and panicking
,
she got round it. We drove on for an hour or so, and then well outside of the city we found our first motel. The room
,
which was awesome
,
was incredibly cheap due to some deal going on, and the manager told us that his people all came from Ireland, and he wanted to go there so bad
ly
.

When I awoke next morning I was greeted by a deep blue sky and a huge cactus just outside the window. I had only
ever seen a huge cactus in the
movies as a child
, and now I was in the desert
looking at thousands of them.

Soon we were back on the road, always heading north, and loving every minute of it all. The desert was quite beautiful, filled with cactus and brush
,
and covered in a kind of red clay. The roads were straight, had little traffic, and it
was easy to navigate using a GPS
and the maps I had printed months earlier on my day of decisions.

Hours later we arrived at a little town called Camp Verde and decided on coffee. In the café, while waiting at the counter, I overheard a woman ordering a slice of cheesecake. Then out of
the blue she told the assistant
that her favourite cheese of all time was Dubliner Cheese. I had not even said a single word, an
d here was a stranger beside me
talking about Irish cheese. When I made my order with my Irish accent, the assistant almost
fa
inted. I smiled a
t her and took it as a sign, so I
immediately persuaded JoAnn to call the Bright Angel Lodge in the Grand Canyon Park
to
see if she could magic a room for us, and she did. We got a ‘cancellation’ at a reduced price in a private log cabin, some forty feet from the rim. The Universe had come good as I suspected, and we booked the cabin immediately. Everywhere we went for the rest of the day, we met people who loved Ireland, who wanted to go there, or who had ancestors from there. That in itself was not too surprising, but while in the he
ritage centre outside of Sedona we bought a famous local
chili
j
am, an
d its manufacturers were Cahill
s from Arizona
. W
hat were the odds of that?

Another thunderstorm hit us. Then
as we entered beautiful Sedona,
the most incredible sunset shone through the windscreen as the storm cleared. It left beh
ind a rainbow of such intensity
that numerous people ran out into the street to see it. I felt we were being welcomed to Arizona by my dad who I always associated with double rainbows
,
and this was the brightest one I had ever seen.

The journey to Sedona had eaten into our time, and next day we had to leave early, as by then I was beginning to feel a great urge to get to the Valley. We did see Bell Rock and Cathedral Rock, as well as a most beautiful church built into the mountains. The Church is called the Chapel of the Holy Cross and no photo can possibly do justice to this church. It has to be seen and experienced, and the de
signer no doubt
was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright. I sat alone in the peace of that place and thanked God for all that I had, especially for my American wife. She was trapped way below in our car, as we could not drive to the doorway, and the steep walk seemed out of the question for her.

The view from the church was beyond description and I so wished for JoAnn to see it. As I turned to leave, there she was slowly making her way up the ramp to join me. The pain in her foot seemed to have been overcome by her longing to see this wonderful place too. I felt incredibly happy as we both sat and just looked out at the view. This area of Arizona is supposed to have places of high energy, good energy that helps heal people mentally and physically, and we saw people climbing way up on the rocks, no doubt searching for these e
nergy centres. They are called v
ortexes
,
but we never felt anything during our brief stay there
. P
erhaps at a future time we might be luckier.

The sheer distances we had travelled so far, and the time it was taking
,
was amazing to me. The scale of America has always impressed me, but after driving and driving we seemed to be making only slow progress. We had certain deadlines that were unchangeable such as the Grand Canyon arrival date, and the day we had to leave on the trai
n journey, but all the rest was
flexible, so north we went again.

Entering Flagstaff I looked up at an intersection sign and saw it say Route 66. We were driving the most famous road in the world in a city basically founded by three brothers with the name of Riordan. They had come south from Chicago, either as Irish emigrants or with Irish parents a
s emigrants. There in Flagstaff
they built up a huge lumber business, a
dam, the Lowell Observatory,
hospitals and churches, finally bequeathing their home to the state so as to help the tourist business. Even though I knew none of this at the time, I felt instinctively welcome there, and would now love to see their home and get to know more about these three brothers. With time catching up on us, we just drove on through the city, still heading north on highway 89, all the time inching closer to my dreams. At Cameron we arrived at the junction for the Grand Canyon, but that was for another day. Today was the day we would first set foot in Monument Valley and I could not wait to get there.