It’s my birthday week. Now sixty-nine and officially old, I’ve graduated from a single birthday day. Celebrate loud. Fireworks. Candles, sparklers.
All day the weather people warned of extreme thunderstorms, summer torrents, winds, and possible hurricanes. No matter. I chose to participate in a sweat. My first. What better way to celebrate my birth? So, I googled, how to prepare for a sweat lodge?
The Internet said, hydrate in advance. No alcohol, drugs, or caffeine. Check, check, check. Well morning coffee should be okay.
The Internet said this isn’t a chance to prove my manhood or gain some kind of cultural points. This is to purify, heal, cleanse. Check, I can do that. I can be open, willing, and receptive. Not sure about the heat though.
So, at 6 pm we picked up my son-in-law from his work at a detox centre. He works with the streetiest of street people. For a couple of weeks, his clients trade in their shopping carts and tents for abstinence, medicine, meals. For a couple of weeks a few less purses are stolen, a few car windows aren’t broken. Then back out onto the street and using again they mostly go.
My son-in-law will be our guide. He isn’t the best at directions, but he has done this twice. I drive out of the city onto the Tsuutʼina Nation, past the casinos, past the tax-free gas, and the tax-free Costco.
The land opens to the foothills with the Rockies coming into proud view. Lodgepole pine and spruce open the ground while the summer prairie sky opens to rebut the weather forecast. The evening sky reveals itself endless with radical cloud formations of sea creatures and dragons for miles.
The highway signs are in Sarcee as we get further into the reserve, further from Canada. One large sign is in English, “Permit Required. You Will Be Arrested for Trespassing. Tsuut’ina Nation Police Service.”
After a couple of wrong turns and a couple of gravel roads we find the place. A man named Brad cheerily, if roughly, welcomes us. Dear reader, if ever I wanted a shaman, I’d want him to look like Brad: bald and naked to the waist, covered in tatts. No fat: all sinew and wire, supple branches, his eyes pools of regret and experience and life. Judge Holden, from Blood Meridian, thickly tanned, somehow transformed good, compassionate, soulful.
“My name’s Keith. I am excited to be here.”
“My brother’s name was Keith.” Hint of connection. Hint of sadness. Hint of connecting over sadness. And I wanted to ask him about his brother and I wanted to tell him about losing Steve, but other people arrived and hugged and were getting ready for the sweat.
My wife introduced herself, but they had trouble with Yoshiko. “Call me Mrs Robinson.” Everyone laughed and agreed, “Mrs Robinson” it will be.
“Take off your glasses, Keith. You won’t see a thing anyway.”
My son-in-law carried the granite and slate stones on a pitch fork in from the fire where they heated and Brad distributed them and a woman put herbs and a prayer on the first five.
“We’ll go easy, just twelve stones.”
But the twelve were more like fifty because the heat exploded the twelve, glowing red.
The others sang and prayed along with and echoed Brad’s lead, but Brad’s voice reached out of the sweat and into the prairie sky circling our sightless black lodge. It became hotter than anything I could imagine; my skin and body were inside fire.
The more and louder he sang, the more he laughed and called and cried. And as he sang he poured water on the rocks, vaporizing before hitting the rocks, steam poured inside me, hotter by far than the radiant heat of the stones in my inhale and the heat was in my lungs and out to alveoli and hot red blood and then I was fireworks inside and out.
