Archangel of Sedona

Chapter 2

Chapter One

God created the Grand Canyon, but He lives in Sedona.

—NY Times.

September 2, 1966, 7:15 p.m.

Northern Courtyard, Chapel of the Holy Cross

South of Uptown Sedona, Arizona

Dan Ostergaard and I teetered on the stone bench facing west. We perched high on the retaining wall that formed the northernmost edge of the courtyard surrounding the chapel. Dangling our legs 50 feet above the next outcropping, we sipped beer and nibbled fried chicken, as we watched the magnificent light show develop on the other side of Scheurman Mountain.

“Tony, you were right. This place is gorgeous. I thought you were full of s**t when you said it was stunning. This is special. I had no idea,” Dan said, while focusing on the miracle above the mountains.

“I told you that you’d like it, dickhead.”

“Eat me,” Dan said, too distracted to engage in serious repartee.

“Blow me,” I said, in the adolescent custom that Dan and I had adopted over our years at Arizona State and Brophy Prep in Phoenix.

S

By the time Dan and I found ourselves drinking beer on the high butte’s cutting edge next to one of Sedona’s spectacular architectural marvels, I’d lived in Arizona for 13 years. My family had moved west in 1953. I’d grown up in Phoenix, as the town evolved from a desert oasis into a major metropolis.

My parents were working class. Mom labored as a tailor and dad drove trucks. Children of the Great Depression and World War Two, neither finished high school. Neither valued education as a ticket to greater opportunity. Anything beyond 12th grade was frivolous. No one in the Giordano family had ever gone to college—I was the first.

They were also devout Catholics. After they purchased our house near Camelback Road and Central Avenue, they installed my older sister and me in St. Francis Xavier Grammar School, so that the nuns could indoctrinate us. After eight years with the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, known as BVMs, I’d found common cause with the victims of the Spanish Inquisition.

In 1960, I contrived to leave all Catholic education in my wake. I’d attend Central High School and join the Army. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a soldier. I also thought about becoming a lawyer. In grammar school, I couldn’t reconcile the two goals.

I took the entrance exam into Brophy Prep because a priest at St. Francis predicted that I would fail. To show him, I took the test. I did well enough to get accepted. I don’t know how I ended up there in 1961. Chalk it up to a divine thread that’s woven through the tapestry of my life. I reject the concept of mere chance or serendipity. Everything happens for a reason.

Brophy turned out to be life-changing. Though separated by 100 yards of classrooms and playgrounds, the Jesuits proved to be the antithesis of the BVMs at St. Francis. The priests, scholastics, and brothers who taught at Brophy were smart, cool, motivated, dedicated, effective, and pious. I blossomed there.

The Jesuits took me most of the way from boy to man. Though I now have three degrees, the faculty at Brophy provided the best educational experience of my life.

Dan’s family migrated to Phoenix from Madison, Wisconsin in 1963. Dan’s dad was an eminent surgeon, who’d taught at the University of Wisconsin. I never learned what caused Dr. Ostergaard to pull up stakes and move to Phoenix to practice medicine.

I met Dan in Latin class junior year. Though he was new, he never sported the profile of a recent transfer. He seemed confident, funny, arrogant, quirky, and intelligent. Despite his modest physical stature and average looks, his main attribute proved to be his magnetism for members of the opposite s*x.

At 16, I hung around with Dan because he always led an entourage of pretty girls from Central High School. His followers adopted a more flexible moral standard and were more cooperative than the girls at Xavier High, Brophy’s co-educational counterpart. After graduation, Dan and I attended Arizona State University, though we pledged different fraternities.

Dan’s parents understood the value of a college education. His dad paid his way and provided him with a liberal allowance. My family and I argued over college. They wanted me to learn a trade. They felt no duty to contribute to my quest for a degree.

Mom gave me the “my way or the highway” speech a week before my 18th birthday in the summer of 1965. I didn’t want a trade. I moved out. I found a room with friends, got a job at Fry’s Food Stores, and enrolled at Arizona State University. I worked summers, took out college loans, and hashed at the main cafeteria during the school year.

In the summer of 1966, I worked full-time at the Sperry Rand factory in Deer Valley. Sperry built computers the size of a small garage. Today the average cell phone has more computing power than the ponderous main frames that I helped to fabricate that summer.

I made enough at Sperry to pay my tuition, fees, books, room, board, and buy a 1962 Chevrolet Corvair. Since Ralph Nader had trashed the Corvair in his book, Unsafe at Any Speed, I bought a neat, white, low-mileage coupe with leather bucket seats for a song. Despite its engineering flaws, I loved that car. I remember how much fun I had driving it.

I bought the Corvair before Labor Day. I arrived at the fraternity the last week of August, as ASU wanted to start the semester so the administration could schedule exams before Christmas. Since few of my fraternity brothers lived in Arizona and most hailed from other states, a couple of the guys showed up the first week. Most of the others chose to stay home through the long weekend.

Bouncing around that empty frat house over Labor Day didn’t appeal to me. I called Dan at his fraternity. We had a mutual friend, John, who attended Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He moonlighted as a night clerk in small hotel near NAU.

Our friend encouraged us to come up. He’d find a room for us. We could hang out in the cooler clime and chase NAU girls all weekend.

I picked Dan up in the afternoon on Friday, September 2, 1966. To prepare for the trip, we went to a Mexican restaurant on the east side of the University that accepted our fake IDs. We had chips, salsa, and a pitcher of beer while we planned our itinerary.

In the three years that Dan had lived in Arizona, he’d never travelled farther north than Black Canyon. I had an inspiration, lubricated by the cold beer.

“You’ve never been to Camp Verde?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Heard of Montezuma’s Castle, Montezuma’s Well, or Tuzigoot?”

“Yep. But I’m not interested in Indian ruins,” Dan said.

“How about Sedona?”

“What about it?

“Dan, Sedona is an incredibly gorgeous place. It’s mindboggling.”

“Come on. That’s over the top.”

“Seriously. There’s something very special about that place.”

“Like what?”

“Well, the buttes are a deep red. There’s lots of scrub pine, juniper, cedar, and manzanitas. Those are very green. The sky is crystal clear and a dark blue. The red, green, brown, and blue have a hypnotic effect. I can’t do it justice. You have to see it.”

“You’ve been smoking a little dope, Tony?”

“No, man. I’m a juicer. You know that.”

“You sound like a hippie on drugs,” Dan said.

“Don’t do drugs,” I said, as I drained my beer and poured another full glass. “Dan, there’s a spiritual thing you should see in Sedona.”

“What now? Are you telling me that I’ll have a religious experience?”

“Maybe.”

“Tony, how do you know so much about this town?”

“There’s a Catholic chapel there. They built it on the side of a mountain, a couple of hundred feet above the valley. It’s spectacular. I’ll show it to you this evening.”

“What’s so spectacular?” Dan asked, sarcasm creeping into his voice.

“You’ll see.”

“How do you know about this chapel?”

“My family attended services there when I was a kid. We’d take Sunday drives up the Black Canyon Highway through Camp Verde to Sedona. We’d go to Mass there once every few months. It’s a mystical place.”

“Now, I’m sure that I don’t want to go. This weekend is for drinking beer and chasing trim at NAU. Don’t try to turn this road trip into a pilgrimage.”

“Dan, you’ll like this place. Parts of the chapel are very controversial.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Frank Lloyd Wright influenced the lady who built the chapel. Its architecture is unconventional. The builder had a sculptor do an unusual version of the crucified Christ for the interior. The priests call it the Christus. It’s very moving, but most people hate it. A friend of my dad’s says that it’s so wrong that it denies Christ’s divinity.”

“Really?” Dan asked, interested in the side trip for the first time.

“Yeah.” I said, as I poured another glass of beer for Dan.

“All right. Let’s go see the chapel, the Christus, Sedona, and the red rocks. Maybe it’ll give me a hard on.”

“Dan, if there’s a female within a hundred yards, you’ll have a hard on.”

I drained my beer and picked up the tab.

S

Other than holiday traffic, the trek through Phoenix went well. We stopped at a convenience store. With the aid of my fake Hawaiian driver’s license, we scored a case of Coors. We hit the Colonel Sander’s and got a bucket of KFC. We had a full tank of gas, money in our pockets, and an open road.

When we arrived at Camp Verde, it was early evening. The sun lay low in the west above the mountains. I turned onto State Road 179 and headed north toward Sedona.

Dan started teasing me about the superlatives that I’d used to describe Sedona. I had grown up in the provinces and didn’t have his opportunities to travel the world. If I’d seen the sights in New York, London, Paris, and Rome, the deep crimson sandstone buttes around Sedona might seem less impressive.

When Dan got his first glimpse of Courthouse Butte, Bell Rock, and Cathedral Rock, he stopped carping. He looked shocked and craned his neck to get better views. I could have stopped, but it was late. I wanted to get up to the Chapel of the Holy Cross by sunset.

A few miles south of town, the chapel loomed above the road to the east. The architects situated it on a promontory, sandwiched in a narrow draw, two or three hundred feet above the road. The chapel is a rectangular arch, encapsulating a vertical cross that’s about a hundred feet high. The sandy-colored chapel—set off by the dark red rock and framed against a deep blue sky—creates a stunning affect.

“Holy f**k!” Dan said, when he first saw the chapel.

“Exactly,” I agreed.

“Unbelievable,” Dan said.

I parked my Corvair in the lot at the bottom of the hill. Dan and I walked up the ramp to the chapel, carrying two six-packs of beer and the bucket of chicken.

After we ascended to the entrance on the chapel’s east side, we put the beer and chicken on the stone benches that surrounded the courtyard. We walked to the main door, trying to be respectful. We were Catholic boys. This was a church.

I tried the door. Someone had locked it.

“What the f**k is this?” Dan asked. “Nobody locks a church.”

“Yeah, it’s locked, all right,” I said, as I rattled the big door.

“We’re in the middle of nowhere. Pilgrims in need of spiritual succor and they lock us out? My immortal soul is in peril and I can’t get no satisfaction,” Dan sang off-key, trying to mimic Mick Jagger.

Dan was pissed. He spent five minutes railing against the bishop of Gallup, New Mexico, who had dominion over the chapel in those days. I’d been drinking with Dan on the way north. I had a mild buzz. Dan’s tirade cracked me up.

“Dan, I doubt that the bishop in New Mexico locked the chapel to spite you. I’m sure that he doesn’t know what the local priest does around here.”

“I wanted to see this Christus,” Dan said.

“Why?”

“You said it was grotesque and controversial, right?”

“It is.”

“Some people think it’s an abomination, correct?”

“Yep—my dad’s lawyer-buddy, for example.”

“I want to experience it,” Dan said, with more passion than I expected.

“Dan, look through this window. You can see the whole thing. It’s a little hard to focus, ’cause the sun is setting behind it and there’s glare through the west-facing windows,” I said, pressing my face against the window that bordered the big chapel door.

Dan went over to the window on the door’s other side. He got as close to the glass as possible, shading his eyes with his right hand. He stared at the Christus for several minutes without speaking. He pulled back, gathering his thoughts.

“You’re right. That’s gross. It’s not Christ-like at all. It’s dark—like it suffered in flames. Is it screaming in agony? It doesn’t look human. The arms are way too long. The legs are too long and skinny. The trunk is too narrow. It resembles a praying mantis that fell into a fire. I can see why no one likes it.”

“I didn’t say no one liked it. I said a lot of people don’t. I think it’s spiritual and conveys the sculptor’s impression of suffering from torture.”

“Jeez, Tony, you get that crap in Art Appreciation 101? The only way that thing could depict Christ is if the Romans stretched him on a rack, burned him at the stake, and then crucified him. That doesn’t fit with the story in the New Testament or the concept of His resurrection. That thing is horrible.”

“Sacrilege is in the mind of the beholder,” I said. “I saw a crucifix at the Newman Center at ASU. It had a varnished, mahogany cross. They dressed the Christus in colorful robes. The figure held a scepter in his left hand and gave a blessing with his right. It represented Christ as prophet and king, ignoring the gruesome nature of crucifixion. That sanitized crucifix in Tempe was plain wrong.”

“Enough. I don’t want to talk about religion. I want to get laid. Let’s have a beer, watch the sunset, and head up to Flagstaff,” Dan said, as we walked away from the chapel to fetch our beer and chicken.

After Dan and I settled in on the retaining wall, the sun had begun to drop behind the western mountains. Arizona is renowned for its remarkable sunsets. The one I saw that night could have eclipsed any in recorded history.

Fat, bulbous cumulus clouds drifted from the northwest across the upper Verde Valley. As the sun’s waning rays ricocheted off the stratosphere and pierced the clouds, brilliant colors burst across the dark blue-black sky in an explosion of scarlet, rose, mauve, emerald, sapphire, and gold. Every tone and shade in the band of light made an appearance in that evening sky. The sunset alone was worth the trip.

While we sipped beer and watched the light show, I noticed that a small family had made their way up from the parking lot—a young man, a pretty woman with a toddler, and a dog of mixed pedigree, showing some German shepherd.

By their conversation, the sunset had impressed them too. The mother, carrying her toddler on her hip, walked over to us. She saw that we had beer. “Are you guys old enough to be drinking that beer?”

Before I could respond with a wise-ass remark, Dan reached over, grabbed a fresh can of Coors, pulled out the church key, made two openings in the top of the can, and—without comment—extended the beer to the woman.

Faced with the moral dilemma of becoming an accessory-after-the-fact to underage drinking or adhering to a higher moral standard, the lady reached for the beer with her free hand, held the opened can to her lips, and took a healthy swig.

I opened a second beer and handed it to the husband. The guy was fortunate. His wife had a sensuality that I could feel from ten feet away.

The couple stood behind us sipping their beers, as the sunset bled from the sky and the dark blue evolved into an inky black. Ten minutes later it was black as pitch.

At that altitude, the crystal clear air and the lack of ambient light meant we could see a gazillion stars—even though the clouds continued to pass overhead. I don’t remember a moon.

The husband moved so that he could put his arm around his wife. Dan opened two more beers for them and passed them up. They accepted. They ignored us to engage in a private banter that implied intimacy in their future.

As I opened another beer, a shooting star fired out of the clouds in the north above the Mogollon Rim. It shot at a terrific speed to the south-southwest.

“Bob, isn’t that beautiful?” the wife asked. “What a perfect end to a beautiful evening.”

It would have been, had the light been a shooting star. Both Dan and I had seen the light. We followed its long diagonal track across the valley.

With no warning, the star stopped on a celestial dime, high above the valley to the southwest. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I’d taken physics. It was impossible for a meteorite burning through the stratosphere to stop in midair. The current position of that body violated the law of gravity.

“What the hell!” Dan said as we watched the bright light hover in the distance. “What in the f**k is that?”

“That’s no shooting star,” the husband said.

I said nothing. I watched, mesmerized.

The light hung in the sky for several seconds. Without warning, the light exploded to the northeast at an unfathomable speed. It disappeared over the buttes behind us.

“Jesus, what was that?” Dan asked, as he dropped his can of beer. Two seconds later, I could hear it careening off the rocks below.

“I have no f*****g idea,” I said.

“Bob, are we OK here?” The woman asked, her voice quaking.

“Whatever that was, it’s gone,” Bob said.

The light rematerialized, flashing to the south and seeming to gain altitude until it passed Bell Rock, three or four miles south of the chapel.

“Holy s**t!” Dan shouted. “There it goes again.”

“There’s one thing I’m sure of,” I said. “That’s no meteor.”

“But what is it? No airplane or helicopter could fly so fast, hover, and fly again without making a sound,” Dan said.

“Exactly.” Bob said. “What machine on earth could do that?”

The light made a right-angle turn and shot west across the valley. Before we lost sight of it, the light flipped in an impossible 180-degree turn. It headed for the chapel.

Everyone, save the toddler, uttered an expletive. The little boy whined and hid his face in his mother’s shoulder. The dog bared his teeth and growled after inserting himself between the oncoming light and his family.

As the light neared the chapel, it executed a series of right-angle turns, figure eights, and aerial maneuvers so complex that I can’t describe them. The light continued its behavior for several minutes. We watched in awe.

The light stopped, moved over the chapel, and descended until it hovered over us, revealing a blurry round disk. It emitted a pale light twice the intensity of a full harvest moon. The disk illuminated the courtyard, the family, Dan, and me.

“Bob, get Rommel,” his wife said, referring to the dog that had been running all over the courtyard, barking at the disk above us.

It took three days of running this incident over in my mind for me to realize that the woman had named her shepherd after the notorious German Field Marshal. Bob picked up the dog and held him tight in his arms. Carrying the child and the dog, the couple disappeared down the ramp, heading toward the parking lot below.

Dan and I remained in the courtyard, though we’d gotten up from our perch on the wall. We looked up, gaping at the spectacle.

I remember being apprehensive, but not frightened. I later became a Paratrooper and served in Vietnam. I know fear. I experienced no fear that night.

After many minutes, the light gained altitude. It blasted across the valley to the northwest. After it cleared the mountains, the disk turned north. I watched it until it faded into the blackness. We waited in silence for another 30 minutes. The disk did not return.

S

Dan and I cleaned up the garbage around us. We walked down to the parking lot without discussion. After we settled into my Corvair, I pulled out of the lot and headed north toward State Road 89A, which intersects with SR 179 south of Uptown Sedona. SR 89A continues north, up Oak Creek Canyon, and clears the lip of the Mogollon Rim 15 miles outside of town.

During the day, the ride up or down Oak Creek Canyon is a delight. It’s a beautiful, tree-lined passage that includes ponderosa pines, oaks, and aspens along with the other species from the valley below. It parallels the creek. There are places where the view is beyond picturesque. The canyon loses much of this ambiance in the dark.

After the unexplained phenomenon, neither Dan nor I appreciated the canyon’s beauty. We’d become lost in the metaphysical moment.

“Dan, we’ve got to tell someone.” I said, as we passed Slide Rock.

“Tell who about what?” Dan asked, with an angry tone.

“Come on. You know what I’m talking about. The lights over the chapel.”

“I didn’t see any lights. I didn’t see anything tonight. If you say you did, I’ll tell them you were drunk.”

“What the f**k is the matter with you, Dan?”

“Nothing. I didn’t see a thing.”

“Why are you being so obtuse?”

“Tony, what are you going to do? Go to the Sheriff? Stop a Highway Patrolman? Would you tell them that you saw a f*****g UFO?”

“Sure, why not?” I asked, though I knew I wouldn’t.

“Then you’re as stupid as you look. Do you remember what happened to those folks in Michigan, who saw the UFO last March?”

“No, I don’t.”

“A couple of cops and several citizens claimed that they saw a UFO. It was on the national news. Everybody thinks they’re crazy. The Air Force investigated and concluded that it was swamp gas.”

“Dan, we’re in the high desert on the border of the Mogollon Rim and a huge forest. There’s no swamp gas around here.”

“Tony, who cares? We’ve been drinking all afternoon. We’re 19 years old. No one will take us seriously. The Sheriff of this hick county will conclude that you’re drunk, driving a car, and delusional. That’ll look great on your record. Might even get you tossed out of ASU. You’ll lose your draft deferment. They’ll send your crazy ass to Vietnam. You’re an i***t. I didn’t see a f*****g thing.”

Dan’s tirade pissed me off. We passed the next 20 miles in silence as we drove to Flagstaff. When we got to town, we found the small hotel where John worked.

As promised, he’d gotten us a room. Despite his efforts, no beautiful coeds materialized. The three of us got trashed in the hotel room. Neither Dan nor I spoke of the incident at the chapel then—or at any other time.

After we returned to ASU, Dan and I saw little of each other over the next two semesters. I kept the event to myself. I didn’t speak of it with anyone for over three decades.