When most people picture Sedona, they picture paradise. But, one Arizona writer says the picture is a bit more complicated.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: Kathleen Bryant is a writer who spent many years living in Sedona, and she says there's this feeling people sometimes get, the first time they visit Sedona.
KATHLEEN BRYANT: Oh, Red Rock fever. You fall in love with the landscape, and it's like being enchanted. And the red rocks can be really seductive and magnetic. They'll pull you out of your vehicle before you even think about water or the right shoes or a map.
DINGMAN: Red Rock fever can be a serious condition. Bryant wrote a piece for Crime Reads recently about Sedona's long history of unexplained disappearances. For decades now, people have been seduced by the red rocks, not to mention the town's reputation as a hub of mystical energies, and sometimes they wander into the wilderness. And they don't come back.
Bryant tells a fictionalized version of one such story in her latest novel, “Over the Edge,” where a writer named Dell Cooper confronts the darker side of Sedona. It's based partly on Bryant's real life, as she told me recently, the day she moved to Sedona, she turned on her car radio and heard a report that there was a murderer on the loose.
BRYANT: When I drove up to my apartment and started unpacking. The landlord came out and warned me, he said, you know, be sure you lock your doors because there's this escapee on the loose and you need to be careful.
DINGMAN: That's like your first few minutes in town, right?
BRYANT: Yeah, I, I hadn't even gotten out of the, you know, gotten into the apartment yet or into my space and I was learning that it wasn't quite what I thought it was going to be.
DINGMAN: It's such a great illustration of the, the tension that seems to float in the air in Sedona in your formulation and that's a big part of the story that you're telling in “Over the Edge.” What's interesting to you about that tension?
BRYANT: Sedona is, it can just be so charming, you know, it's got the small town charm. It's a community that's known for its spiritual side, for its artistic residence. So you can kind of lose sight or get a false sense of security about what dangers there might be out there in the wilderness.
Wilson Mountain is named after a man who was killed by a grizzly bear, and then years later someone's claimed to have seen his ghost. So there's always been these stories about hauntings or criminals out on the forest. It was a hideout for bootleggers now and then when I was out hiking on a trail, I'd come across parts of a still, that kind of thing. Sterling Pass is named after a counterfeiter who hid, hid out in the wilderness. Yeah, a lot of these stories.
DINGMAN: Counterfeiter is particularly interesting in the context of what we're talking about and and of your book because in the book, Dell Cooper, again, your heroine, has, to my mind at least, a, a pretty healthy skepticism about the faux spiritual element of Sedona, the people who are there to try to sell you, you know, fake crystals and that sort of thing.
But in a way, Dell is also there for similar reasons to the seekers whose reasons she might see as, as somewhat shallow. She's there to run away from this terrible thing that happened to her in her life back East, and she's sort of trying to reinvent herself.
So, you know, reasons or methodology for, for self-discovery aside, do you think Sedona is a uniquely opportune place to reinvent yourself?
BRYANT: I do, although I think that it depends on the person. I'm really nature-oriented, so I find my sense of balance and healing when I'm outdoors walking in nature and, you know, other people might be drawn to a past life regression or some kind of healing ceremony and in Sedona, you can, you can have both.
DINGMAN: That's true. When you got there and you had this first interaction with your landlord who was like, “lock your doors, there's a murderer on the loose.” What did you think in that moment?
BRYANT: I, I think I took it with a grain of salt. I thought it was a situation that would pass, and mostly I was just excited to be there. I couldn't wait to get out on the trails, and I don't remember being afraid to go out hiking by myself even during that time period.
DINGMAN: Well, it's, it's interesting you're talking about how being out in nature is restorative for you.
BRYANT: Absolutely.
DINGMAN: Because there's a really haunting part of the book for me. It's one of my favorite sequences where Dell goes out into the wilderness to look for one of the other characters in the book, Jane. And she gets just like totally overwhelmed, and she's out there and she has all these questions about this murder that has happened and who in her circle might be connected to it and that she's surrounded by all the rocks and all the winding trails. And she just kind of folds in on herself a little bit and I'm just curious to know where that, where did that sequence come from for you? It was so vivid.
BRYANT: I have to say that a lot of things that happened to Dell in the book, I, I experienced at some point while I lived in Sedona. And there was one hike that I went on, it was late in the day, like not long before sunset. Way out, you know, like, quite a few miles off the beaten track, just driving to get to the trailhead and then I was, I went on a side trail that also was very remote and while I was there, I heard footsteps.
So I did start running back to the car. You know, hoping not to hear those footsteps, and I just didn't know what was following me or who.
DINGMAN: Yeah, boy, that's a that's a very chilling scene that you you've just described and it, it makes me think about in your, in your piece for Crime Reads, you conclude it by saying that you wrote the book “Over the Edge” for all the people who have gone missing in Sedona over the decades and hearing you tell that story, I, I almost get the sense that in a moment like that, you're confronted with the fact that it could be easy for one of those people to be you.
BRYANT: Absolutely. Things can change so quickly when you're out there, especially if you're out there alone. And that's why, you know, you shouldn't hike alone. And I know that, and yet I love that quiet and solitude of hiking by myself, so I would violate my own number one rule and go out on my own, even knowing that something could happen. And yeah, I had some close calls.
DINGMAN: Yeah. But you, but you kept going on the hikes, right?
BRYANT: Yeah, I did. Like I said, it's absolutely seductive. It is such an enchanting landscape. I think Dell is intuitive and she just doesn't realize it yet that she has more in common with some of the psychics and spiritual people than she realizes. And you can't always separate creativity and spirituality. For a lot of people, those are the same things. And risk can be part of beauty. Just the fact that you're opening yourself up, whether it's to your muse or to experiences. There's a certain element of risk in being that vulnerable.
