The Holbrook Chronicles
From James Donahue’s journal:
Perhaps you could describe us as innocent babes. While we knew we were on some kind of spiritual path, we went forward totally unaware of the spiritual warfare raging all around us. And we had no idea just how strange our path was going to be.
Once settled in at the run-down motel we waited in relative peace. For a while it was actually boring. We were confined to a single room, with carpeting so dirty we could feel tiny stones in it when we stepped on it in our bare feet. There was a smell of dirt and fungus. We were in the high desert in autumn, so the days were hot and the nights were cold. The electric wall heater either ran full blast or not at all. There was no thermostat so we either roasted or froze. The mattress on the bed sagged and hurt our backs, but it was the best we could do. There was a kitchenette, but the electric range had only about two working burners. The kitchen cupboards were falling apart. I had a fine assortment of tools in the trunk of the car so I spent time repairing them. It was not the best of work, because I was determined to use only the available materials. But I soon had the cupboards reinforced enough to hold the few dishes we brought. I painted the walls and ceiling to brighten up the room.
There was a desk, on which I put my Macintosh computer. Once I had it running, I devoted a lot of time writing. I kept a constant diary about daily events. That diary, which survived the strange events that followed, has helped put this autobiography together.
I took walks every day. In that area of Arizona all land is open grazing range for cattle. When you go off the expressway you drive over cattle guards, broad metal slats on the road that are designed to prevent cattle hooves from stepping there. Cars and people have no trouble. Thus we were living on an open range. It was common to wake up in the morning, look out our window and find a cow looking back at us. The moving herds traveled in single file, following old established cattle lanes crisscrossing the barren rolling hills around us. In between was wild dry weed, which the cattle apparently fed on. (The beef in Arizona tasted terrible, obviously the result of the stuff these cows were eating. When the time came to become vegetarians, we had no trouble giving up that meat.) I began taking long walks, finding the packed earth on these trails perfect to follow. They were packed like sidewalks but leading to nowhere.
Among the things we brought with us was a microwave with a convection oven, which turned out to be our salvation in that motel. Doris cooked amazing meals in that machine. We also had a small, portable refrigerator, which we used during the last weeks in the Michigan house. We used it in the motel. Consequently, we ate well. Doris produced a wonderful Thanksgiving feast, complete with turkey, dressing, and pumpkin pies which we shared with some of the other renters that drifted in after we took our room.
Glen and his wife kept one of the rooms open as a community gathering place. They put a large Bunn coffee maker there, and the Edwards always had hot coffee available. They dreamed of opening a little restaurant on the grounds to supplement their meager income, but it never happened. Everybody at the motel spent time in the coffee room, however, drinking coffee, snacking on cakes or doughnuts furnished by the tenants, and talking about whatever there was to talk about. The drifters came and went. Some were good at spinning tall tales, and others were thieves and bandits hiding out from the law. The police sometimes visited our establishment in the night and the next morning we would learn that the guy we yapped with over a cup of coffee yesterday was locked today in the local jail.
Gunslingers were everywhere. It was still legal to carry a holstered gun on your side in Arizona, and most people, even the women, were packing. I recall standing in a line at a drug store in Sedona while a female store clerk and the male customer in front of me proudly compared their guns. I had this crazy flashback of the days of my youth when boys took down their pants to compare the sizes of their penises. Surprisingly, we rarely heard of people shooting one another. It was always good judgment in that state to leave other people alone.
There was a post office located in the desert, on the other side of the overpass on the interstate, and we rented a box there. Instead of Holbrook, we had an address in a place called Sun Valley, Arizona. There wasn't a real town of Sun Valley. The place consisted of the post office, our motel, and a building used for weekly livestock auctions located down a dirt road. The invisible town came about because of one of the most successful confidence operations ever perpetrated in that part of the country. It seems that at about the time I-40 was being completed, some fellow bought a large tract of barren desert, subdivided it, planned for streets, sidewalks, utility services and the works, and then started selling the lots to poor people for something like $500. Most of the people who got caught in this trap were too poor to pay that much, so they were allowed to buy the land for $10 down and $10 a month, with interest. Some people actually moved on their lots. There were still a few small mobile homes sitting abandoned. Occasionally, while on my walks, I would find one that was still occupied.
We didn't have a lot to do in Sun Valley. Our daily routine usually consisted of getting up in the morning, making coffee and oatmeal, and then Doris would work her board. I jokingly called it having coffee with Aiwass. There were no television or radio stations operating near us so we had no idea what was going on in the world. I suggested that we ask Aiwass to tell us what was going on in the world. At the time we didn't realize that the spirit world on the Fifth Plane is a timeless place. The entities we visited with really tried to answer our questions and give us news of our time, but they were sometimes a few years off. For example we were told that there was a major effort to impeach President Bill Clinton. This was in the fall of 1995, remember. The Monica Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment vote didn't happen until 1998, three years later.
Not long after our arrival, the first personal assault came. I had a minor stroke. I believe it was caused by a sinus infection that I had in Michigan and was still fighting, although I was not seeing a doctor and was no longer taking antibiotics. Another factor was the extreme change in altitude. We moved from almost sea level to an altitude of 5,000 feet, sometimes traveling to areas that were 7,000 feet or higher. I was on blood pressure medicine when we moved to Arizona, but I never dreamed that altitude would affect blood pressure. It just never crossed my mind.
We had driven up to Keams Canyon on the First Mesa on the Hope Reservation and checked into a motel for the night. It was another clap-trap of a place, not much better than the Edwards establishment at Sun Valley, but a motel just the same. We were there because Doris wanted to apply for a job at a government hospital operating in that little community. She did not get a job but I developed a terrible headache. By the time we were returning to Holbrook the next day, I not only had a headache, but I was starting to lose the feeling in my left arm and left foot and my left eye was drooping.
We drove right into Holbrook and pulled up to the front door of the only doctor's office we could find. It was located in a building that once served as the town's hospital. The doctor there took me right in and shoved a strong vassal dilator under my tongue. If I thought I had a headache before that, the medicine I was given kicked off a real brain burner. I keeled over from the pain, but it lowered my blood pressure in a hurry. The doctor prescribed this medicine and was about to send me on my way, but I objected. I wanted him to find a better way of controlling my blood pressure. I told him I was not about to go through the rest of my life taking pills that set off explosions of dynamite in my brain.
The doctor said he had a heart specialist coming to his office in a few days. He said to stay on the medicine until I could be examined by this man. I did this. It was a literal week of hell. By the time I was back in the doctor's office, I was determined to go off the pills and stroke out rather than continue on with absolutely no quality of life. The specialist examined me, put me on another regime of about three different types of blood pressure medicine that did not give me a headache. I also was given an appointment to return to his office in Phoenix in another month for a full examination.
After all of the examinations, and after thousands of dollars spent in medical bills (thank goodness we still had health insurance), the diagnosis was that the change in altitude caused my blood pressure to shift. An EEG showed no permanent brain damage, but I ended up with a drooping left eye lid. The feeling in my left foot eventually returned.
From James Donahue’s journal:
Perhaps you could describe us as innocent babes. While we knew we were on some kind of spiritual path, we went forward totally unaware of the spiritual warfare raging all around us. And we had no idea just how strange our path was going to be.
Once settled in at the run-down motel we waited in relative peace. For a while it was actually boring. We were confined to a single room, with carpeting so dirty we could feel tiny stones in it when we stepped on it in our bare feet. There was a smell of dirt and fungus. We were in the high desert in autumn, so the days were hot and the nights were cold. The electric wall heater either ran full blast or not at all. There was no thermostat so we either roasted or froze. The mattress on the bed sagged and hurt our backs, but it was the best we could do. There was a kitchenette, but the electric range had only about two working burners. The kitchen cupboards were falling apart. I had a fine assortment of tools in the trunk of the car so I spent time repairing them. It was not the best of work, because I was determined to use only the available materials. But I soon had the cupboards reinforced enough to hold the few dishes we brought. I painted the walls and ceiling to brighten up the room.
There was a desk, on which I put my Macintosh computer. Once I had it running, I devoted a lot of time writing. I kept a constant diary about daily events. That diary, which survived the strange events that followed, has helped put this autobiography together.
I took walks every day. In that area of Arizona all land is open grazing range for cattle. When you go off the expressway you drive over cattle guards, broad metal slats on the road that are designed to prevent cattle hooves from stepping there. Cars and people have no trouble. Thus we were living on an open range. It was common to wake up in the morning, look out our window and find a cow looking back at us. The moving herds traveled in single file, following old established cattle lanes crisscrossing the barren rolling hills around us. In between was wild dry weed, which the cattle apparently fed on. (The beef in Arizona tasted terrible, obviously the result of the stuff these cows were eating. When the time came to become vegetarians, we had no trouble giving up that meat.) I began taking long walks, finding the packed earth on these trails perfect to follow. They were packed like sidewalks but leading to nowhere.
Among the things we brought with us was a microwave with a convection oven, which turned out to be our salvation in that motel. Doris cooked amazing meals in that machine. We also had a small, portable refrigerator, which we used during the last weeks in the Michigan house. We used it in the motel. Consequently, we ate well. Doris produced a wonderful Thanksgiving feast, complete with turkey, dressing, and pumpkin pies which we shared with some of the other renters that drifted in after we took our room.
Glen and his wife kept one of the rooms open as a community gathering place. They put a large Bunn coffee maker there, and the Edwards always had hot coffee available. They dreamed of opening a little restaurant on the grounds to supplement their meager income, but it never happened. Everybody at the motel spent time in the coffee room, however, drinking coffee, snacking on cakes or doughnuts furnished by the tenants, and talking about whatever there was to talk about. The drifters came and went. Some were good at spinning tall tales, and others were thieves and bandits hiding out from the law. The police sometimes visited our establishment in the night and the next morning we would learn that the guy we yapped with over a cup of coffee yesterday was locked today in the local jail.
Gunslingers were everywhere. It was still legal to carry a holstered gun on your side in Arizona, and most people, even the women, were packing. I recall standing in a line at a drug store in Sedona while a female store clerk and the male customer in front of me proudly compared their guns. I had this crazy flashback of the days of my youth when boys took down their pants to compare the sizes of their penises. Surprisingly, we rarely heard of people shooting one another. It was always good judgment in that state to leave other people alone.
There was a post office located in the desert, on the other side of the overpass on the interstate, and we rented a box there. Instead of Holbrook, we had an address in a place called Sun Valley, Arizona. There wasn't a real town of Sun Valley. The place consisted of the post office, our motel, and a building used for weekly livestock auctions located down a dirt road. The invisible town came about because of one of the most successful confidence operations ever perpetrated in that part of the country. It seems that at about the time I-40 was being completed, some fellow bought a large tract of barren desert, subdivided it, planned for streets, sidewalks, utility services and the works, and then started selling the lots to poor people for something like $500. Most of the people who got caught in this trap were too poor to pay that much, so they were allowed to buy the land for $10 down and $10 a month, with interest. Some people actually moved on their lots. There were still a few small mobile homes sitting abandoned. Occasionally, while on my walks, I would find one that was still occupied.
We didn't have a lot to do in Sun Valley. Our daily routine usually consisted of getting up in the morning, making coffee and oatmeal, and then Doris would work her board. I jokingly called it having coffee with Aiwass. There were no television or radio stations operating near us so we had no idea what was going on in the world. I suggested that we ask Aiwass to tell us what was going on in the world. At the time we didn't realize that the spirit world on the Fifth Plane is a timeless place. The entities we visited with really tried to answer our questions and give us news of our time, but they were sometimes a few years off. For example we were told that there was a major effort to impeach President Bill Clinton. This was in the fall of 1995, remember. The Monica Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment vote didn't happen until 1998, three years later.
Not long after our arrival, the first personal assault came. I had a minor stroke. I believe it was caused by a sinus infection that I had in Michigan and was still fighting, although I was not seeing a doctor and was no longer taking antibiotics. Another factor was the extreme change in altitude. We moved from almost sea level to an altitude of 5,000 feet, sometimes traveling to areas that were 7,000 feet or higher. I was on blood pressure medicine when we moved to Arizona, but I never dreamed that altitude would affect blood pressure. It just never crossed my mind.
We had driven up to Keams Canyon on the First Mesa on the Hope Reservation and checked into a motel for the night. It was another clap-trap of a place, not much better than the Edwards establishment at Sun Valley, but a motel just the same. We were there because Doris wanted to apply for a job at a government hospital operating in that little community. She did not get a job but I developed a terrible headache. By the time we were returning to Holbrook the next day, I not only had a headache, but I was starting to lose the feeling in my left arm and left foot and my left eye was drooping.
We drove right into Holbrook and pulled up to the front door of the only doctor's office we could find. It was located in a building that once served as the town's hospital. The doctor there took me right in and shoved a strong vassal dilator under my tongue. If I thought I had a headache before that, the medicine I was given kicked off a real brain burner. I keeled over from the pain, but it lowered my blood pressure in a hurry. The doctor prescribed this medicine and was about to send me on my way, but I objected. I wanted him to find a better way of controlling my blood pressure. I told him I was not about to go through the rest of my life taking pills that set off explosions of dynamite in my brain.
The doctor said he had a heart specialist coming to his office in a few days. He said to stay on the medicine until I could be examined by this man. I did this. It was a literal week of hell. By the time I was back in the doctor's office, I was determined to go off the pills and stroke out rather than continue on with absolutely no quality of life. The specialist examined me, put me on another regime of about three different types of blood pressure medicine that did not give me a headache. I also was given an appointment to return to his office in Phoenix in another month for a full examination.
After all of the examinations, and after thousands of dollars spent in medical bills (thank goodness we still had health insurance), the diagnosis was that the change in altitude caused my blood pressure to shift. An EEG showed no permanent brain damage, but I ended up with a drooping left eye lid. The feeling in my left foot eventually returned.