Travel, Again

Breaking with tradition, we stayed an extra night in Phoenix instead of getting directly in the car after the ceremony finished. This was apparently the plan all along, but I must have missed hearing that -- I'd already checked out of my hotel room.

Once that was sorted out, Wayne and Marlin and I (Marlin came back, by the way) went out to dinner and had our fifth consecutive chicken meal. Chicken seems popular out here, and we'd all missed breakfast that morning. As chickens go, the meal was pretty good. After that we wandered around Phoenix a little bit -- it's nicer when the sun sinks a little -- and hit up a DQ for some frozen goodness. We talked about the friendly lady at the Al-Anon booth, how getting good opening speakers makes a world of difference, and of our plans for the next few days. On the way back, something odd happened. We passed an AA meeting that was happening in one of the Phoenix branches, and both guys decided to stop in.

I know that these meetings are available for all AA members, but it struck me as very odd that they would want to 'swing in' to a meeting in Phoenix full of strangers they'll never see again. The thought rattled around my head for the next two hours as I re-packed my van and cleaned some of my equipment before it finally stuck to an idea.

As is well known, alcoholism is rampant in Indian country. The fight against it in an individual's life is a psychically draining, wrenching process that makes people stronger, wiser, more complete human beings. It's almost impossible to do alone, and requires the support of communities like AA, building lifelong bonds and creating a powerful shared experience between all recovered and recovering alcoholics. That shared experience is strong enough that my companions had no doubts about stopping in to a room full of strangers to say hi for the evening.

And maybe that's a problem.

This titanic personal struggle has become so common in some communities that it starts to look like a rite-of-passage. Drinking provides a social boost twice: once when you're young and fit in to all the parties, and once when you're a sober adult and can form instant social connections with other sober adults. Trust and comfort can normally take years to develop, but suddenly there's this shortcut where you can say, "You've done one of the hardest things to do in your life. So have I, and I know where you're coming from." Then it's okay to cry and share stories. This is a good thing.

However if you've always been sober, you've got neither of those social boosts. There are no instant friends in strange towns where you can just stop by and be greeted with open arms. You're just another passing stranger, a nobody. Then, when you go home, what if all your friends and neighbors share this bond that you don't?


I hesitated about posting this for a long time. AA is an amazing organization, and overcoming
alcoholism is a brutally difficult thing to do; I don't want to dismiss either of those or diminish them in any way. I suppose my real point is that when a community, as a whole, becomes saturated with alcohol, even removing the alcoholism doesn't fix everything. Strange community problems still linger, even in the solutions, and the sober ones aren't exempt.


After a good night's sleep, we set off on an entire day of traveling east, some 12 hours or so. I had a few thoughts about the scenery. First, it's amazing how quickly the ecosystem can change. From flat nothing, to flat green, to sudden hills, to cactus forests, to mini-mountains, to dry mini-mountains, back to flat nothing... in the space of a mile everything about an area can change, and sometimes the change is even more abrupt than that.

Secondly, cactuses are really weird. They're way taller than I expected, and go from being shriveled, highly-ribbed posts in the dryer areas, to bulbous, nearly-bursting growths in the damper areas. Plus, their 'arms' are so randomly placed and look for all the world like new, cancerous cactuses spilling out of the main stalk -- some cross between the parasites of "Alien" and mutation science gone wrong. Seriously, though, they're tall. Like 10-15 feet straight up.

I was the only one who ate dinner, mostly because Wayne was so upset that the diner we stopped at only served two kinds of hamburgers (I don't know, ask him), and it gave me an unfortunate stomache-ache. When we pulled in late at night in Santa Fe, I fell asleep immediately after nearly tearing the roof off my van in a stupid parking garage. I had no more patience that day for careful parking. Sleep came quickly.