Hitchhiking Adventures – Part 11

A few hours after leaving Las Vegas it was also time to leave the group of women I was travelling with. Now I stood in the afternoon heat at an intersection in the middle of Arizona. This was the starting point of my hitchhiking adventure. I was ready for the first car to stop for me.

But …

First, I was standing by the road, and nothing. After a while I sat down on my backpack, since nobody stopped. Sometime later, I was sitting on the ground, leaning against my backpack, and still nothing. Finally, I guess I was falling asleep just a meter from the road where the cars were passing by.

I have no idea how long I had been sleeping until I woke up and saw an old man with a cowboy hat, probably around 70, standing next to me, waking me up by tapping my shoulder. He had stopped next to me in his car, got out, woke me up and asked me if I wanted a ride.

About half an hour later I was sitting on a sofa in my driver’s living room with nice cold air-conditioning and some cold water, coffee and cake in front of me. Next to me was the old man and his two sisters who didn’t seem younger than him. My driver introduced himself as a Baptist priest and invited me to stay with him and his sisters for a few days. After finishing the coffee and cake, the priest asked me to help him in finding his rocket. A rocket? Yes, a rocket!

A rocket for his children’s church. He had built one, he had launched it with black powder, and tested it the day before. The launch didn’t go as expected, but the rocket flew far, so he couldn’t find his missile out in the huge meadow behind his house. But now he had me.

We started searching for it. He sat in his pick-up truck and I stood in the loading area. So, we bumped back and forth across a huge meadow for a while, looking for the rocket that we, in the end, didn't find.

We spent the rest of the day making new rockets.

The next morning (it was a Saturday), I went to the children's church with the priest, and he introduced me to the kids. Wow, a real German! I was asked questions such as: “Do you also have refrigerators in Germany?” “Do you have television?” And the kids weren't that young. They were about 10–13 years old, I would guess. I got it already, a lot of Americans don’t have a clue about what’s going on outside of their big God´s country.

Miracle in the sweat lodge

In the afternoon, we sat together and the old priest became serious. He said: "Achim, you want to go to the Indians, right? That's okay. They’re nice people. But you have to be careful. I want to tell you what I’ve experienced myself. I used to be a priest of a Christian church on the Navajo Indian Reservation for some time. And what I'm telling you now is really true. I wasn't part of it, but that's how it happened. There was a Navajo Indian who had broken his arm. It was an accident at work. The arm was broken in several places. Some friends took him to a sweat lodge.

(A sweat lodge looks like an igloo built from willow branches and blankets. In the middle, they put hot stones and pour water on them. It’s dark inside and it becomes very hot. The Indians say it’s a ritual to clean yourself, almost like being reborn. Many Indians say that the sweat lodge represents a mother’s womb. It was also warm and dark inside our mother. When you come out of a sweat lodge, you’re naked, wet and red like a baby, and you’re happy to be able to breathe fresh air and see the sky again.)

They held a ritual with him, according to their own Indian religion. They sat in the sweat lodge with the injured person, they prayed and sang. When the injured person came out after the ceremony, his arm was healed again, he was healed."

I was confused. The good old man already spent one whole day trying to make me believe in the Christian religion and now he told me about this Indian miracle. After this story, it would be wiser for me to adopt the Navajo religion if it’s so powerful.

But then he said: "Achim. Listen, the Indians didn’t worship God, they used their own religion and that’s why they worshiped not God, but the devil. The devil is bad and brings unhappiness and disaster. But sometimes he does something good to win people over and then he shows his real face, gets bad and does bad things to the people."

Now I understood why he warned me to be careful and what he tried to tell me.

He also told me about his own dark days, about his alcohol addiction. He said: "I’ve had bad times, I was an alcoholic. But everyone here knows me. Knows me as the priest. So, it was impossible for me to go and buy alcohol. But you know, there’s a road that directly leads to the Indian reservation in front of my house. The border isn’t far and alcohol isn’t allowed on the reservation. The Indians would often throw the beer cans and bottles of brandy out of the car here in the area before passing the border on their way back home. I would often walk alongside the road, cleaning the roadside and also looking for alcohol.”

Fortunately, these bad times were long over. He was happy now and was a really nice old man.