Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [99]
Sitting beside me along the wall of the hogan were the medicine man and his assistant – a kind of roadie who looked after him on his travels. They lit a little fire by removing some coals from a stove and adding some wood. Then the medicine man opened some leather and hide wallets to reveal ‘male’ and ‘female’ arrowheads (the females had a kind of waist; the males were a traditional diamond shape), sacred stones he’d collected over the years and crystals. Laying the arrowheads, stones and crystals on a mat, he next unpacked fragments of beech ash and threw them on the fire to make smoke. Then he prayed, blew a small whistle, and held a cup of water and some feathers in his hands. There was a lot of praying, meditating and bowing to the four points of the compass, most of which we were not allowed to film. At times, the praying intensified, becoming repetitive, like a mantra, and I found myself quite caught up in it. I’d had the same feeling listening to Tibetan and Hindu chants, and even Catholic recitations of the Psalms.
Next the medicine man consulted the map to see where I had come off my bike. He had to cool the earth where I’d landed. Muttering another prayer and fluttering the feathers, he brought peace to the earth, resettling it back to how it had been before it experienced such violence from me and the bike at the time of the crash. Having realigned the planet, he turned his attention to me. It was time for a cosmic x-ray. While I clenched a wee crystal, about the size of a cigar, in my hand, the medicine man rubbed my rib with a feather and gazed into a much larger, clear crystal – about the size of a clenched fist.
‘There’s a fracture in it and it’s lightning shaped,’ he said. ‘It’s gone along the rib in a lightning shape.’
Then he picked up some hot coals from the fire with a pair of pincers, blew on them and held them near my rib, chanting all the while and waving his feather.
I loved all that stuff. It wasn’t a question of whether I believed it or gave myself over to it. As far as I was concerned, it was all about being in the company of people who did believe it. That was the whole cheese for me, and I felt very privileged to be part of it. When I spoke to Larry afterwards, he was very open minded about it and told me he used both Navajo and Western medicine when he was sick. I thought that was a very healthy attitude.
Midway through the healing ceremony, a drummer arrived. He was a fireman, and had been delayed by a plane crash. Fortunately no one had died, he told us, although the pilot had been in a bit of a state afterwards. No kidding, I thought. Pulling out the most extraordinary drum I’ve ever seen, the fireman got to work, banging out a beat. His drum was actually a wee dumpy iron cooking pot with three wee legs and a skin stretched over the top. Some beads and rattles were arranged on the skin, and the pot was about a third full of water. When the drummer hit it, the beads and rattles moved and the water made the sound resonate. It was extraordinary. He said the sound would carry for several miles.
In the midst of all the chanting, singing and drumming, the medicine man’s mobile phone rang … and he answered it. I thought that was brilliant – the clash (or possibly the merging) of the modern world of the United States and the spiritual world of the Navajo. I’d already seen an example of it when I’d handed over some money to pay for the ceremony. I was fine with that – you have to pay the doctor – and his reaction to the money had been fascinating. He’d taken the notes, straightened them out, made sure all of the heads of Thomas Jefferson on the stack