“People don’t take trips, trips take people.” – Travels with Charley: In Search of America, John Steinbeck
It was a desolate and stunningly beautiful evening at Salinas River State Beach, between Monterrey and Santa Cruz, California. A light fog bank had moved in from the sea and a gentle glow lit up the evening sky. With just seabirds for company, we had the seashore to ourselves. This was John Steinbeck country, the 1962 Nobel Prize winning author having been born in the town of Salinas, just a few miles away. In classics like The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck explored the fate of "downtrodden or everyman protagonists" and the plight of the working class during the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.
Despite the beauty of our surroundings, I was feeling quite downtrodden myself that day. For a few months now, I'd been suffering from a mysterious pain in the hip and sacral area which had eluded explanation despite multiple scans and x-rays. Limping at every step, I wondered how I would cope with the hikes we'd planned at Point Reyes and John Muir Woods for later that week, and if this was to be a permanent feature of my life moving forward. The doctors back in Seattle had suggested surgery, an option that I did not have any appetite for. It was in this despondent frame of mind I found myself as we walked back to the nearly deserted parking lot.
Salinas River State Beach Image Credits: Kris Shankar
That's when I saw the man in the pickup truck, middle-aged and vaguely Hispanic in appearance, with a broad cowboy hat on his head. He gazed at me intently as I limped past him towards our rental car, and then as if making up his mind, spoke out "You have a problem with your sacral iliac joint, no?" I nodded, taken aback by this precise diagnosis. "Whatever you do, don't go in for surgery. That will make it worse." He consulted a pair of copper dowsing rods mounted on the dashboard in front of an icon of Mother Mary, speaking softly to himself as he did so. They swung apart asymmetrically, as if reflecting the misalignment in my hips. He then jumped out of his truck and spread a towel on the ground, beckoning me to sit down. "Do you mind if I take a look?" Not knowing what to think, I obeyed. Bhavna had walked ahead with the kids to the port-a-potty. She was back now and watching the proceedings with increasing alarm.
Icon and Dowsing Rods Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons
Here I was sitting cross-legged in empty parking lot with a complete stranger pushing down on my knees. He bade me stand up on one leg, then the other, assessing my balance. With my permission, he then placed his palm in the small of my back. After a minute, he asked if I felt anything. "Not a thing", I replied. He reached back into his truck and handed me a business card. "I perform healings for immigrant laborers in the Bay Area" he said, "If you want to come back for another healing, get in touch." I thanked him more out of politeness than anything as Bhavna bade me hurry. The sun was low and we had a long drive ahead of us to my cousin's apartment in San Francisco. I limped back to the car and got in, tossing the card into the glove compartment without so much looking at it. "What were you thinking" Bhavna chided me on the drive back, "putting yourself in the hands that stranger?"
The next morning, as we prepared for our trip to Point Reyes, I noticed I wasn't in any discomfort. I walked for about 10 hours that day. And the next day. And the next. After six months or more, the pain and the limp had vanished, inexplicably. When we cleaned out our rental car at SFO airport prior to returning it, I found the card in the glove compartment and glanced at it for the first time. It was the calling card of a working man, the kind of man that John Steinbeck wrote about, offering "Landscaping and Yard Cleaning Services, Free Estimates". Further down it read, "Reiki Healer, spiritual healing for injuries and pain." In a turn of events that Carlos Castaneda would approve of, Don Ortiz - for I shall call him that - had healed me and opened me to possibilities I'd never imagined.
Gilberto Ortiz, Reiki Healer Image Credits: Kris Shankar
Post-Script: The events described here occurred in 2008. After we returned to Seattle, I called Senior Ortiz to thank him and mailed him a check for $120, though he never once did ask for money. My hip bothered me again some months later and I tried his number, but it had been disconnected.
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