Medicine and Miracles in the High Desert

This vividly written account plunges the reader straight into the author's medical crisis on her first night duty at the Cuba medical centre in northern New Mexico. A Navajo medicine man has been repeatedly run over and is dead on arrival. The conditions of work are appalling and every previous medical director has tried to leave, submerged by lack of support, sleep and overwork. Friends and relatives of the dead man are taken aback by her speaking the language as she compassionately explains the circumstances - then immediately has to deal with life-threatening seizures in a pregnant woman. It is already well past midnight, and work continues until it is daylight and beyond.

Then go back 15 years to the autumn of 1971, when Erica arrives to teach a class consisting mainly of Navajo children. When she greets them, they look down and say nothing. Only later does she realise that this is because of deep shyness and that to avoid her gaze is a gesture of respect. This is her first lesson in 'one of the most impactful and transformative educational experiences of my life.' We disrespectfully impose our worldview on these people, who have their own language, traditions and culture. So the first thing is to learn this very different language, not without its hazards as a slight difference in intonation completely changes the meaning. Erica immerses herself in the culture and language, and it is not long before she is receiving invitations to visit her pupils and their families at the weekend.

This is just the start. She spends the night in the Canyon de Chelly, waking up in her sleeping bag to find that a mountain lion is sniffing her only inches from her face. She freezes in terror, but nothing happens and she wakes up again in broad daylight. Unwittingly, she had done the right thing by not moving, and learns from an old woman that she was in fact really lucky that the lion came to her as a spirit guide to give her 'his courage, strength and intense focus because I would need those for what lay ahead.' She would face many obstacles, but if she lived through them she would have 'a strong heart and powerful medicine to give to the people.' She takes part in many sacred ceremonies, the first for the healing of a sick baby, but later she herself experiences the complete healing of a hard lymph node thought by a specialist to be potentially cancerous. This totally disappears during the ceremony, one of the experiences that 'blew my concept of reality to smithereens.' She learns about the history and devastation in 1863 by the U.S. Army. She encounters magnificent wild horses and other subtle presences in the Canyon. She also learns to share in a culture where individuality is subordinate to the community good.

Some situations she describes are life-threatening. A drunken man smashes a window in her house, leaving shards of glass embedded in the skin. She reluctantly goes off with a friend and two men, only just escaping with her life while her friend is brutally beaten and raped. The friend is so terrified that she does not speak up to police, for fear that she would be stalked and killed in revenge. She learns to weave rugs and arranges to spend the summer of 1973 herding 597 sheep belonging to the parents of her friend Marshall. This proves to be another initiation into the Navajo way of life where she strikes up good relationships with his parents and horse called Jimmy. All this is recorded in graphic daily bulletins written at the time. She marvels at the landscape, sits on Jimmy for hours, sometimes lying on his back to look at the shapes of the clouds and watch them drift by overhead while reflecting on her life purpose. She learns how the sheep are sheared and slaughtered (there are many illustrative black-and-white photos). At the end of the summer, the family expects her to stay and probably to marry Marshall. It was a wrench to leave, but her life had to move on even though she felt an overwhelming sense of grief and loss.

Erica returns to her home in New Hampshire, then volunteers for the next two years in the Peace Corps where she is posted to a remote village in Ecuador. It turns out that her Navajo experience was essential to establishing an empathic connection with these people and she finds herself unwittingly healing people and creating high expectations in this respect; only later does she learn about the placebo in medical school. She revisits Red Rock - Jimmy whinnies when he spots her, nuzzling up against her chest. The book then comes full circle back to the medical centre in Cuba, New Mexico, and two Navajo people offer her a special ceremony in gratitude for her work; she meets Tom Dwyer and they have a son, Barrett. Finally, back to the present where Erica's experience continues to live in the fibre of her soul and depths of her heart. The book conveys a powerful message of indigenous wisdom and empathy, reminding us to go silently within and to walk with beauty and courage on the Sacred Earth. It is a riveting and illuminating read.