How many special moments do we get in a lifetime? I mean the truly magic moments that stop us in our tracks to marvel, that imbue a sense of awe that we remember forever after. On Friday the 13th, a year ago March, it seemed like a good idea to recall those moments if for no other reason than to remember.
Fort Bowie
Our daughter Jennifer and her husband Matt spent a summer in Tucson, Arizona back in 1993 while Matt interned with the Indian Health Service. We like to go wherever our kids are to see new places and be able to better share their experiences. So off my husband and I went to southeastern Arizona in late June. The heat was blistering, but where we were was so interesting that it didn’t matter, and anyway, Mark and I love the desert, which comes with heat, conveniently or not.
We took a camping trip in Cochise County – territory we could have covered in a day, but there was so much to see we took almost a week. We absorbed as much history as we could as we explored an area saturated with Indian lore. Geronimo, Cochise, and the history of the Apaches gave this little corner of Arizona a spiritual feel. We spent a couple of nights at Chiricahua National Monument, where we took a morning trip to Fort Bowie.
The trail to the fort was incredible – there were tracks from stage coaches
Foundations of the Butterfield Stage Stop from the 1860s
and wagon trains that told the story of fortitude, duress, and the quest for a new future;
Wagon from the 1860s on the trail to Ft. Bowie. This was the site of the Bascom Affair - a massacre.
Pony Express stops and a small cemetery that housed the remains of Geronimo’s young son spoke to the nature of one person’s quest creating another’s tragedy.
Geronimo's son Little Robe was shot in the forehead by soldiers at Ft. Bowie. They also killed Geronimo's wife.
Then there was the fort itself. Fort Bowie was a Civil War fort and there were remnants of many of the walls and buildings.
Sutler's quarters at Ft. Bowie, a Civil War fort
I imagined myself in the time period, felt the tension between soldiers and Indians, the sweat and discomfort of uniforms and closed, small quarters in the heat.
View of Ft. Bowie from the ridge trail
I picked up a nail and a piece of adobe and began the trek back on a high ridge so desolate, so alone, so quiet, that as I stood and surveyed the territory with a small breeze at my back, it was as if “the whole” blew through me. I felt connected to the earth and to history, to the spirits of the Apaches and the entirety of the world.
Words don’t convey the expansiveness of this feeling, this moment, as well as its intimacy. For just that brief instant and for the second time in my life, I felt that no questions needed answers, that soul was connected to soul. It was illuminating, it was magic, and then it was lost as we continued the trek to our car.
Trail leading up the ridge. On the back of the photo, I wrote "Indians walked here."
We almost lost ourselves on that trek as we had failed to bring enough water, not understanding how the 115-degree heat could suck all the moisture out of our bodies. We drank the water we brought, we poured it over our heads and down our shirts and barely made it to the car where we bowed to the vending machine gods. Yet that one transcendent moment lives within me still.
