Holbrook, Arizona affected her in ways she was not expecting.
It was as if she was familiar with every inch of town before she arrived. She was certain she would know the people she would run into, how cold it would feel at night and in the morning how the sunlight would slant through the window of her motel room.
This was not an anticipation of deju vu. It was the jolt of surrendering the present to the future.
These feelings cast an unsettled shadow over her visit. Everything felt feverish. Taking walks, which she did often, she found herself nervously glancing up at the sky, when her peripheral vision sensed an object soaring through the air was about to hit her.
One morning she rushed out of her motel room in Holbrook, Arizona before she could drink her coffee, before she could watch the sunlight slant through the window
At daybreak she drove to the Meteor Crater. The rangers told her the crater was roughly 50,000 years old. That the meteorite that fell from the sky and sank into the Colorado Plateau was about 160 feet across. That the crater created was about three quarters of a mile across and almost 500 feet deep.
She wasn’t particularly interested in meteors, or how the land had changed over the past 50,000 years. Although she did discover that after visiting the crater, those feelings of something flying through the air and about to hit her went away.
What fascinated her was Holbrook, Arizona proper, the way the town stirred up longings more intense than she was accustomed to. Walking along West Buffalo Street she began to feel drawn back to a time she had never known, an era she had never lived in.
If she had to guess, it would have been back in the 1940s. Probably late spring.
So she visited the Holbrook Public Library to try and find out what was happening around there back then. She started off in May 1940, the month her grandmother was born. Aside from feeling an earthquake centered outside El Centro, California, not much.
Back in her room at the El Rancho Motel she called her sister. She wanted to find out what her sister could remember about their grandmother.
The call went to voicemail.
