Not mine, personally, though such trauma-related ambulance calls certainly took their toll on me. In my career of twelve years as a paramedic, through three states, I had handled perhaps one each year. 1979 was a whole lot different. Not only had I handled five that year, but each and every one of the people involved not only lived long enough to make it to the hospital, but went on living for at least a month each. I can't deny a certain amount of pride in the fact that by the time this call came about, I was damn good at "saving" them, yet, I carried a huge nagging question in my heart of "What have I done?" Knowing damn well at the time that there was no chance of their survival, it was still my duty to do everything I could to keep them alive. The result was producing a series of what we called in the trade, "bookends."
In the two hundred plus square miles of Santa Barbara County during 1979 through 1985, the years that I was a paramedic there, with the exception of that one year, there were maybe three such calls in any one year and they were quite spread out. Perhaps one in the North county, one in the South, and one somewhere in between. During that particular year, however, in that particular section of the county, which was only about 20 square miles, there were five, and I was on each and every one of them.
To make things just a bit more interesting, the last three of those calls occurred within about a four square mile radius. Now the thing that was even more exasperating--and of course I contemplated this for years--was that I could find no sensible, connecting factors amongst them that fell into our normal way of categorizing such incidents. One incident was drug related, one was spousal assault, one was a hunting accident that turned out not to be an accident, and each one occurred within the parameters of different neighborhoods, different socio-economic classes, different circumstances and even different sexes and races. Additionally, there appeared to be no correlation between the character of violence and the presence or absence of natural foliage--the influence of this aspect of nature. The other two calls in other sections of the 20 square mile radius, had the same lack of a clear pattern that would make one think, "Of course, this is what happens here."
The only things that were consistent were the location (a vague yet discernible sense that there were some sort of border or parameter that defined the land area itself), a relatively narrow window of time, and, now that I think of it, that I was there. This last is something that I'll take a closer look at when I become a whole lot more able to handle it!
I can't honestly say that at the time of going to these individual calls I sensed that I was entering what I now call a "hot spot." But in retrospect, I noticed that there was a certain mindlessness to the violence that occurred in this particular area over that period of time: a certain finality of action, as if each of the assailants involved got to a certain point and something else took over that pushed them to make sure their action dealt a fatal blow. I can claim this because in each case, I arrived at the scene early enough to have had contact with each assailant, none of whom carried the aura of a willful murderer, which my experience has taught me to recognize. They were as surprised as their victims. Willful murderers don't seem to register surprise.
In subsequent years as a medic, I started to identify and become more sensitive to certain hot spots--areas that seemed to attract a certain kind of call or violence or medical emergency; certain areas of a roadway that produced fatalities, for example, when there were no visible factors or patterning, like time of day or weather conditions, that would seem to increase the odds. The way this manifested sometimes was an almost comical similarity in the ways in which the participants related to each other, as if, in a particular area of a few blocks, people were compelled to panic in dramatic, boisterous ways. I began to be able to sense that I was entering a space that held a certain energy. Though mostly unable to predict what I would find, looking back I'd sense the connection and see the patterns. It was as if you were to place a hot plate under a flat metal map and then trace the influence of the heat on the behavior of the people, seeing that the heat's influence occurred with no respect to geographical, natural (including weather), political, societal, social, economic, or racial boundaries.
The questions that I ponder and have not been able to answer are: Is it the specific land area that attracts a certain kind of people? Is it a certain type of people--prone to specific behaviors, weaknesses, or self expression--that are drawn close to each other in a certain area? Is there a window in time and place that fosters a specific type of dis-ease, as if a virus descends upon an area and temporarily infects the people there? I have most recently been contemplating this in terms of such things as the troubles in Northern Ireland, the Israeli//Palestinian conflict, and slews of wars, as if a deadly virus that infects the people with hate lives for a while, causes its turmoil, and then leaves, like a plague.
I still don't have an answer. Yet, my experience as a medic launched me into a deeper understanding that, indeed, the environment influences our psychology and actions as much as our psychology and actions influence our environment. Today, I recognize this as one more face of "Mitakuye Oyasin"--all my relations--and must ascribe all the rest to being a part of the "Great Mystery."
While living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (Oglala) in South Dakota, I'd spend hours just sitting on the prairie, staring out over the land. The difference between land populated by the whites and that populated by the Native Americans was physically dramatic. The white-owned land was measured, lined evenly, cultivated, ordered, productive, yet feeling weak--perhaps dependent. Standing on it, I felt like an adjunct, designed to come in with a specific purpose and do something. The land populated by the Oglala was jagged, wild, seemingly unmanageable and unkempt, yet I could sense a certain energy that flowed through it that included me. It asked nothing of me but that I be with it.
One day, while just being with the prairie on 640 acres that was ceded to the progeny of Crazy Horse's Medicine Man, I had a bodily sense of what may very well be a piece of the puzzle: the land I was on had been looked upon as sacred for the last anywhere from one-hundred to thousand-plus years by its inhabitants and it reflected that view (whereas the white-owned land had its continuity broken). I was taught that if you ask this land and the living things upon it for help or cooperation--and ALL is considered living by the Traditionals--you would be answered as clearly as if you entered into conversation with another human being.
It became natural for me to find such simple things as the wind shifting to help me while I arranged blankets on the Inipi (sweat lodge) upon my request. Once, while tending sacred fire for a young woman stricken with cancer while she was doing Vision Quest for her healing (placed down into a six foot wide by eight foot deep pit wearing nothing more than a blanket, a half mile away from me and at about 2 a.m.), I knew from the fire that she was having a particularly difficult time. I prayed to the Tunkasilas (Grandfathers) for mercy for her. Within a half hour I felt a significant rise in temperature from, I'd estimate, around 35 to 45 degrees. The next day, she confirmed my experience, stating that the turning point for her Quest happened at right about that same time; she, too, was praying for strength and relief from the cold. Another time, a rattlesnake, startled by my sudden appearance, stopped its rattling and calmly turned and slithered away after I addressed it as a Brother. Once again, I emphasize that at the time I didn't sense that I was particularly special. All of these things were normal by-products of having an intimate relationship with what is.
It was there that I learned that when you move as if you are a part of nature, nature will bend over backwards to confirm this as truth.
My experience in South Dakota allowed me to experience a balanced give and take. Most of my experience as a medic had me cleaning up after others after they had been enveloped by influences beyond themselves, but there was one day as a medic, when I was buffeted around as clearly as my patients, and it changed the course of my life.
This one day, in Volusia County, Florida, a deep dark cloud cover had descended over the whole county, which stretches from just south of St. Petersburg in the north to just above Cape Kennedy in the south and 60 miles inland. The air was charged with ozone that made me a little light-headed. There were lightening bolts flashing in the clouds; not meeting the earth, but streaking across the blackness. There was no rain, though the air was particularly thick. I had not experienced a day like this before nor since.
From the beginning of my shift at 8:00 a.m. until the end of it 24 hours later, I ran four calls. Each call took place at different ends of the county--I'd estimate that there was an average of at least 30 miles in between each call, in towns separated by not only miles but cultures. One after another, I found myself in a situation where someone was at a crisis point, and, at the brink of realizing that they were about to do something awful, either they or someone close to them called for an ambulance. Once I got there, each patient requested that I bring them to a psychiatric ward for admission. Not once did I have to ask or "take" them against their will, which, as part of my training, I was empowered to do if I determined that they were a potential threat to themselves or others.
Still charged by the unchanging, hovering cloud cover, with each incident I became more manic. This was just too freaky, I said to myself, all these people suddenly coming to face the truth about themselves. Not one medical call or scheduled transport. After the third call I checked in with dispatch to find that none of the other ambulances--though everyone was busy, accounting for my being dispatched from one end of the county to the other, almost in a circle around its perimeter--had been handling such calls.
By number four, in Daytona Beach, where an elderly man had been speaking to his dead brother who told him he ought to check himself in and he decided to take his advice, I knew that there was something in my life that I could no longer avoid also. I had fallen in love with a girl who had just left for Los Angeles to visit her mom before going on to pre-med college in Illinois and I just had to know what was true.
As I wheeled the patient in through the emergency room, the manic energy surged through me. We dropped the patient off in the same psychiatric ward we'd been coming back and forth to all day, and then, on the way out, by the intake desk, there was a man in his twenties being interviewed by a nurse. He had all these little slips of toilet paper stuck to scratches in his face from a razor. He was telling the nurse, "I've been talking to the Devil all morning and he told me to cut myself up. Can you lock me up for a while?"
Pulling my partner out through the doors into the street, I looked up to the sky--unchanged all day, lightning still flashing, and the air still pulsing with ozone--I screamed to the heavens, "All right, Dammit!!!"
My partner, I realized, hadn't been having one millionth of the reaction that I was having this day. This sky, those clouds, that ozone, those patients were all configured to give me a personal message. At that point, I didn't give a damn if he dragged me back up to the psych ward and checked me in. As I got into the shotgun seat of the ambulance I let him know that, even though I had never even seriously thought of visiting California, I was going to close out my life in Florida, pack up my motorcycle, and go there.
Seven days later I was gone. Three days after that, after finding that what was true with the girl was not what I wanted to know, I moved to Santa Barbara where I ended up living for twenty years. Upon my arrival in Santa Barbara, I learned that the day I left Florida the biggest earthquake the region had seen since the '20s had shaken it to its core.
Russ Reina's most recent contemplation in these realms has to do with the fact that between 1969 and 1989 around 100,000 people came through the land that Lost Valley is on (when it was headquarters for a former community/cult called Shiloh), believing that it would be the site of Jesus' Second Coming.
©2002 Talking Leaves
Summer 2002
Volume 12, Number 2
Ecopsychology, Self and Place