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"According to the teachings of the native elders, and according to the teachings that have come through the Ywahoo lineage, the Earth will not be destroyed by man's armaments and munitions.

"If the Earth should decide to shake people free, it would be the fire burning -- the fire that comes to purify the aggressive tendencies of mind." 

- Dhyani Ywahoo

Day 191 – Saturday, December 30, 1995 - Most of the walkers are sick. A flu has hit the camp, just as it has hit much of Arizona and the Southwest. The symptoms are fever, vomiting, and diarrhea—total purging, total misery.

Influenza virus

I’m among those sick with flu, and so is Jacki. She drove up from Arizona the other day in her Jeep Cherokee, to pick me up at the Las Vegas airport, and drive me back down south to hook up with the walk.

Before we left town, we walked around the strip and the casinos to see and feel the place directly. It was overwhelming—the intensity, the pulsing, the neon lights, the cacaphonous ring of the slot machines, the hyper honky tonk that pervades the strip. We felt overpowered by it. As we walked we remembered that the power to light the strip and to run the slot machines ultimately comes from the coal dug from the breast of our Earth Mother at Black Mesa.

Maybe we were too open, too sensitive from all the walk's purification rituals, or maybe the flu bug was just everywhere. Whatever the case, we hadn’t driven more than 40 miles from Las Vegas toward the walk when it hit us. Me first, then Jacki. We both got woefully, vomitously sick.

Our woes were incapacitating. We had to stop, rest, and regain equilibrium before traveling the rest of the way to Aquila, where the main band of walkers is encamped, joining flu to flu.

I talked with Joe for a while on the phone. He told me that Tom has been spreading word that our camp has dysentery. That's a falsehood. We have the flu; many of the walkers are already recovering.

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Copyright 2006 by Steven McFadden

Read Day 192 -- Odyssey of the 8th Fire