By Valerie Brighid Snowden
I grew up in the Midwest. The Midwest isn’t anywhere, it’s a place people come from. If they can. Land-locked, we pretend lakes are great seas and rivers will take us somewhere if only we would go.
I started driving long-distance at a young age. A two-week, three-days-drive each way, solo to California and back to Minnesota between the purchase of my graduation present and the start of my senior year at the University of Minnesota.
I had cornered my father with the indisputable logic that driving the first thousand miles or so on my new engine at a steady 55-60 m.p.h. would break it in perfectly. Perhaps you have never thought about breaking in an engine. I have. I do. I think too much, but then, so did my Dad.
I skillfully led him into a position where “scientifically speaking” or “engineering-wise” he almost had to insist that I drive to California. Science has advantages if you know how to use it.
So I went to California. With my dead grandmother’s pearl-handled Baretta tucked deeply into the glove compartment of my brand-new, bright yellow Honda Civic.
The trip itself was relatively uneventful. The feeling of freedom that open-road-trip gave me was a gift never to be forgotten.
I am from the Midwest. From now being the operative word. I left. There are two types of Midwesterners: those who leave and those who don’t. It is a comfortable place to be from and return to. Fireplaces and hot cocoa with family and friends draw me back even now. Hot tubs and saunas with crystalline flakes falling. Lit by moonlight into diamonds in the air that cut the skin and seize the breath. The beauty of that flat, cold, harshness beyond all reason.
I can’t claim any particular courage in myself in leaving. Hawaii gave me no choice: stay here and heal or go home to die.
The full moon rose over the ocean as I stood on the rocks alone.
The darkness as magnificent as the light shining down. The sound of the ocean ebbing and flowing and as constant as life itself.
Pele spoke to me that night. And challenged me, and in answering her challenge I became hers.
I knew at that moment that I wasn’t leaving Hawaii. That something was happening. That if I had any chance at all of healing from Lyme disease I would find it here. So I stayed.
For four years I followed intuition. I climbed steep paths to hidden temples. I followed streams to sacred waterfalls. I drove down rutted roads to solitary beaches. I watched, I waited, I did what was asked of me, and kept my visions to myself. I saw and felt, ate, drank, and lived Hawaii.
The Shaman had written books and I had read them. Had taught and I had learned. And, in the moment that he put his hands on me in sacred circle, I was healed.
And I stayed.
You can drive around the entire Island of Hawaii in a single day. I know, I have done it. The light of the moon is so bright it makes moonbows in the drizzly night air. You can swim and look up out of the ocean to see the snow on Mauna Kea.
Beauty so intense it would break my heart every day.
But it wasn’t home.
One day I looked out over the elephant grass and thought “That should be corn.” Another day I realized it was December and thought “There should be snow.” I found myself longing to drive for hundreds of miles in a straight line as I had to California so many years ago.
I wanted to go home. So I returned.
To snow and falling leaves, the turning of the seasons so precious and rare. To hot summers and cold winters. To twilight and daylight savings time. To cocoa and fireplaces and family.
When I tell people I have moved back recently, they ask me from where? I ask them not to laugh, but they always do. “Why?” they ask. “It wasn’t home,” I say.
You see, I’m from the Midwest.
