Acts of Surrender 21: Stranger in a Strange Land

Fourteen years ago today, I (sort of accidentally) crossed into the U.S. at Baudette, Minnesota, unaware that this unexceptional act would launch me into a new life in a new country.

Although I've written before (in this blog and its predecessor) about other aspects of that 90-day road odyssey, I haven't shared this story. Today is the perfect time to do so.

So here it is, as another excerpt from my memoir-in-progress, Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith.


I didn't know where I was going or why when I drove out of Toronto on the morning of June 19, 1997. All I knew was that I would spent my first night in Washago with Trish Patterson, a teacher and musician I'd met while living in Penetanguishene. Beyond that, the road was wide open.

I felt that open-endedness even more fully when I pulled out of Trish's driveway the next morning and headed north on Route 11, the two-lane road that would take me to the Trans-Canada Highway, around the Great Lakes and west to....whatever.

I didn't get very far that first day. Some 70 miles up the road, I saw an exit for the town of Burk's Falls. Without thinking, I turned off. Actually, I'm not sure I was at all involved in the decision to drive into town. It was as though the car made the turn by itself and I was just along for the ride. It soon became clear that my Dodge Caravan knew more about this journey than I did, and I quickly gave it the freedom to navigate on my behalf.

Even when I saw the Circling Hawks sign above a storefront on Ontario Street, I didn't know that that's what had brought me here. But my explorations of native spirituality had me intrigued enough that I parked and went in. I'm not always the most outgoing person, a legacy of my childhood shyness and insecurity. So I browsed silently at first, admiring the books, crystals, totems and other metaphysical artifacts. Eventually, I warmed to the welcoming energy of the woman behind the counter and began chatting, sharing the store of my just-launched road odyssey.

"If you need a place to stay tonight," Lynette Brooker said, "stay with us. You can camp out in the restored barn we use for gatherings. In fact, we're having a summer solstice gathering there tomorrow night. Stay for that, too, if you want."

Awed by the magic that had brought me to Lynette's store, I readily agreed. Still, I wasn't sure about spending a second night. "Surely," I thought, "I need to keep moving"...though it's hard to say why I would have thought that when I had no particular place to be.

In the end, I did attend the solstice gathering, which offered up even more magical connections. I would spend the next night up the highway in Powassan with a couple I met at the gathering, Reiki Master John Lueck and his wife Ellen. The exquisite Indian feather fan that Ellen would gift me in exchange for the Reiki treatment John and I gave her would travel nearly two thousand miles with me until I reached Medicine Wheel National Historic Landmark high in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains the following month.

Considered integral to Native American spiritual practice, a medicine wheel is generally a rock circle laid flush to the ground. Stone spokes connect this outer ring with a centerpoint, also of stone. Generally, four thicker spokes mark the four cardinal directions. According to archeologists, the Bighorn wheel, with its 28 spokes and 80-foot width, is the largest ancient medicine wheel still intact.

As I climbed from the parking lot to the medicine-wheel site, deep snowbanks still rising from the road in mid-July at this 10,000-foot elevation, I could feel the magnetic pull of this ancient place. And when I reached the summit, waves of emotion pulsed through me. I sat at each of the four directions and wanted to cry, without knowing why.

Back at the car, the engine already running, I saw Ellen's feather fan lodged in the passenger-side sun visor. Somehow, I knew it belonged here. I climbed back up, circled the wheel three more times and wedged the fan in the chain-link fence that protected the site, one of scores of offerings left by visitors.

The other gift of that solstice celebration at Lynette's was Claire Gibb, another Reiki Master who gave the two dozen of us gathered in Lynette's barn a group Reiki attunement as part of the gathering. The moment she walked into the room, I knew I had to speak to her. And once I did, I knew we were family.

"Make sure you look me up if you pass through Sudbury," she said as she was leaving. Six days later, I did.

In the William Rand School, there are four levels of Reiki not three. The third level, which he calls Advanced Reiki Training, or ART, is a prerequisite for Reiki mastery. Claire had been trained in the William Rand School. In exchange for an afternoon's private writing workshop, Claire offered me the ART attunement. (I had received my first- and second-degree attunements previously in Toronto). It was that head start that would make my Reiki mastery so easy to attain, a month later in Missoula, Montana.
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Sioux Narrows Provincial Park sits on one of the thousands of picturesque inlets that comprise Lake of the Woods, a vast lake system that straddles the Ontario-Minnesota border west of Thunder Bay. In the summer its shores are lushly green, and haunting loon calls from mid-lake usher in its otherwise-silent dewy mornings.

That's what I woke to on the morning of July 9, 1997 -- unknowingly, my last as a Canadian resident.

As I had been doing most nights on the road when someone hadn't offered to put me up, I had been camping. I don't remember what drew me to this tiny park off the main road. It was about 40 miles south of Route 17, the Trans-Canada Highway route that had carried me west over Lake Huron and Lake Superior, the same route I expected to travel into Manitoba. But here I was.

After I scribbled a few postcards to friends, I broke camp and drove five minutes south to the town of Sioux Narrows to mail the cards. My plan was to return to westbound Route 17 and the Winnipeg Folk Festival.

Once again, though, my car had its own plans. Without thinking, I turned right instead of left, heading for Minnesota, the United States and, unbeknownst to me, my new country.

"Where are you going?" the border guard asked me at the crossing into Baudette, Minnesota. His demeanor was all business, but his eyes were kind.

"Camping trip," I replied nervously. It doesn't matter how innocent I am, I don't do well with authority figures.

He looked me over, taking in my East Indian cottons and longish hair. He looked into the back of the minivan, packed with all I owned. He looked at my blonde cocker spaniel, Roxy, perched attentively in the passenger seat.

"Canadian citizen?"

I nodded.

He peered into the van again, then pointed to a parking lot alongside the customs building.

"Pull in over there," he said, almost apologetically. His name, I'd learn later, was David.

Shit, I thought. He sees all my stuff and thinks I'm trying to move illegally into the country.

A stocky, Marine-like customs official met me in the parking lot. Unsmilingly, he asked me to take Roxy and get out of the car. His eyes weren't kind.

An hour and a thorough search later, which included a call to the Sudbury Travelodge to confirm that I'd really stayed there, I realized it wasn't about why I was entering the country. It was about drugs.

One of my ever-present travel tools in those pre-9/11 days was a Swiss Army knife that I kept in a small, black leather pouch. When my Marine found it in the glove compartment, he pulled out the knife, and peered into the pouch. He wiggled his finger inside. Then he tipped it over and tapped it from the top. No drugs.

Of course not. I'd never done drugs. Even when friends had passed a joint around, I'd declined. Not from any prudishness. Whatever else drugs were about, they were about loss of control. And until my conscious spiritual path and the first draft of The MoonQuest forced me away from there, "control" had been my watchword.

When the Marine first started poking through the car, I was anxious. What if they send me back? Ironically, the longer he took, the calmer I got. Then I'll go back. That's all.

I clipped Roxy's leash to her collar and walked as far from the "search site" as I could. Baudette isn't a busy crossing, and after a while, David and I began chatting. We had a great conversation -- about metaphysics and spirituality, which he was opening to, and about his job, which he hated. And when the Marine clumsily replaced the wooden wine crate filled with crystals that was my makeshift traveling altar, David reproached him.

"That's fragile stuff," he exclaimed.

Even after I crossed the border, I still considered this a temporary detour. I studied my road atlas and found a series of back roads that would loop me back into Canada within a few hours. America was a great place to visit, but why would I want to stay? Even if I did, it wasn't legally possible. Better to keep to my folk-festival plans and find my way back up to Winnipeg.

One of my issues with the movie The Secret and many metaphysical manifestation techniques is that, in suggesting we "call in" what we want, they ignore the fact that we're often unaware of our most deeply held desires. Writing, for example, is among my most profound passions. Yet, for so many years, I was so frightened of my creative potential that I could never have done anything to consciously act on it...let alone call in relevant opportunities.

Clearly, living in the U.S. fell into a similar category, as I would discover even more eloquently in the months to come.

On that July morning, though, I simply pointed the car vaguely west out of Baudette. Soon, I found myself under a canopy of trees and on a right-angled maze of Forest Service dirt roads. Ninety minutes later, I wasn't 90 minutes west. I was back in Baudette.

I don't know how I got there, but once I did, something told me to forget the folk festival. Instead of retracing my steps, I headed -- or, rather, the car pulled me -- toward southbound I-71.

Whether at home or in the car, the radio service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had long been my favorite audio companion. And with Baudette so close to the border, the CBC signal was still powerful in the car.

That morning, as most mornings, I was tuned to Peter Gzowski's Morningside program, a three-hour, magazine-style celebration of things Canadian.

The signal started strong. But as I continued southwest toward Bemidji, Morningside grew weaker and weaker. Finally, Gzowski's voice stuttered into solid static.

Canada was gone.

In that emotional moment, I knew that I was, too -- for good.

Photos of Medicine Wheel National Historic Landmark, Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming; and CN Tower, Toronto by Mark David Gerson .

Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.

Recent Acts of Surrender excerpts:
• October 23
• October 29
• November 15
• March 7
• May 22
• June 12

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