"Don't forget the funnels."

A message from The Divine at Walmart

I took my teenage son and my elderly, disabled dog to South Dakota last week, and my car started to overheat somewhere between Deadwood and Spearfish. It was 100+ degrees outside. We’d spent the day wandering up and down, in and around, the Black Hills of Spearfish Canyon. Rex, the 70-lb old man dog, only has three working legs, so he can’t go far, especially in the heat. To make the trip doable for him, we gave him breaks in the car, idling with the air conditioner on.

I’d had my vehicle fully serviced two weeks before leaving, and the big mistake I made was not double-checking with my own eyeballs that they had actually topped off all of the fluids, including the coolant, before we left.

Chugging up a long hill around Deadwood toward our rented cabin, I felt my car shift down and become totally unresponsive to my foot on the gas. A notice on the dash popped up that read “Power reduced to lower engine temperature.” My gut dropped.

We coasted down the other side of the hill. The dash alert went away. The temperature gauge looked normal. Maybe it was a fluke. We got back to the cabin. I popped the hood and found the coolant reservoir empty. I also needed oil. Had everything leaked out? Or had the garage not topped off fluids the way they were supposed to? (If I had checked, I’d have known. But I didn’t, and there was nothing to do about it now.)

The next morning I drove cautiously to a Walmart 15 minutes away for coolant and oil. I also told myself out loud that I should get funnels so I wasn’t sloshing everything everywhere. I felt very tense. I scolded myself for not checking levels before leaving. I scolded myself for being irresponsible. I scolded myself for not investing in a better car. I scolded myself for hauling my son and my dog out here without a clear plan or thinking ahead. “This is not how a responsible parent travels.”

And then, somewhere in all of the scolding, another voice — so calm and kind — spoke up and said, “Why would you be any less held traveling with your son than you are when you travel alone?”

Most of my travel has been alone. I’m good at it. I like it. It’s easy. The biggest and best thing I have always taken away from travel has been a clear and present mainline to God, Guides, Guardians, and the Cosmos. I don’t know how to sound any less woo-woo about it. I have never, not one single time, ever thrown myself out into the universe and not been met with a blast of divine benevolence. I have never not felt “held.”

Colorado, Iceland, Europe, New York, Georgia, Canada, Missouri, Minnesota, Wyoming, the Carolinas, the Dakotas, Texas. No matter how near or far, by car, plane, or train, every single time I have ever sent myself into the world alone to wander, I have felt undeniably loved and led by invisible forces. Call it God if you want. Angels. Guardians. I don’t think it matters what you call it. Things that could have gone sour, didn’t. Help arrived from random strangers at exactly the right times. Ideas popped into my head that didn’t feel like my own. Moments of fear passed until I giggled about them. It is my very favorite thing about traveling — the overt reminders that there are other forces at play, that they are GOOD, and that we are plugged into them. I’m not much of a site-seer. I don’t really like being where the crowds are. I just like pulling the rug out from under my own feet sometimes, because it reminds me that I am alive and awake and so is the unseen world around me.

I don’t know why it’s harder to hear it and remember it in day-to-day familiarity, but it is.

When my son was younger-but-not-too-young, it was easier to justify running off alone, because he wouldn’t have appreciated travel, anyway. Now that he’s older, I want to take him with me, because I want him to find that same inroad to the divine. I want him to know the importance of wandering with faith in the network. My travel budget doesn’t allow for extravagant getaways, but you can still tap into the magic a few hours away in a car, especially if your plan is loose.

But…. for some reason, I forget these things when I have company. I become so focused on… I don’t even know what… making plans that other people will enjoy? Trying to create an experience? That I forget the point of everything is to remember that the world is magical (even when you're bored) and that the Divine doesn’t want us to die in ditches.

When I got to Walmart, it took me a while to make sure I was buying the right coolant for my car. Once I had what I needed, I turned toward the checkout lanes. That’s when I spotted two funnels sitting on a shelf in the completely wrong place, like someone had them and then changed their mind and plopped them down on the nearest shelf. It felt like the Universe tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “Hey, don’t forget the funnels.” I smiled and said thank you.

Here is what I think I know right now, today:

Things on that hill outside of Deadwood could have gone badly. The heat gauge itself never actually ticked up. It stayed right there in the middle between Cold and Hot. Maybe it’s stuck. Or… maybe it was a little divine intervention, a heads-up that something under the hood needed tending. I would not have checked otherwise, and would not have seen that I was out of coolant.

Those funnels showed up in the wrong/right place, not because I would have died without funnels, but more likely as a sweet little reminder that we are always in conversation with the Universe, we are never alone, and that he/she/it/they listens.

The rest of the trip, I checked coolant and oil obsessively. Levels never dropped again. The whole area was on “red alert” and a storm with “dry lightning” was on its way, bringing to mind the phrase SCORCHED EARTH. What this meant, I deduced, was that if you exhaled too much hot air, the earth around you would explode. Thankfully, it didn’t. We didn’t even hold our breath.