Cue the Eerie Music

While reading cultural anthropologist Loren Eisely's autobiography, All the Strange Hours, a book that had mysteriously appeared on my bookshelf years after I thought I had given it away or lost it I came upon this entry:

"In the year 1975 twenty-one people died in a air crash at the Mayan religious center of Tikal in Guatemala. Strange, is it not, that twenty-one tourists born over a thousand years after the fall of the Mayan Empire, and only aware of it because of the archaeological excavations of the past two decades, should be drawn to that spot and die -- die on a Guatemalan airfield specifically erected to draw the curious to the ruins. . . . Twenty-one people died who might otherwise have gone their separate ways in life. They died from curiosity about an alien city supposedly dead many centuries ago, but now resurrected from oblivion. Ten years earlier the past could not have extended such an arm into the future. Dead gods could not have fed once more on living flesh."

Kind of a spooky thought, but here's what came next. Next time picking up the book, I came across a newspaper clipping stuck into the book many pages after the above excerpt.

The clipping is dated January 19, 1986. Headline: Plane Crashes in Guatemala; All Killed. The clipping appears to be from the local newspaper where I lived at that time, so I likely put it there, though I have no memory of it. In that crash, 87 or 88 people died while flying to "the Mayan ruins of Tikal . . . one of the largest and possibly the oldest of the Mayan cities."

Gives me goosebumps, First the mysterious reappearance of the book . I had often thought about it and wished I had held onto it, especially lately in the context of my recent trip to western Nebraska, a place he held in special esteem:

"I will never forget my first day of registration at the University of Pennsylvania. I had come directly from the . . . Tertiary badlands of western Nebraska. . . Few people outside the realm of paleontology realize these runneled, sunbaked ridges which extend far into South Dakota are one of the great fossil beds of the North American Age of mammals. . . . The place enchanted me. I have almost an eidetic recall for those solitary years."

A description that mirrors my own feelings about the place.

And then there was the recurrence of the same event in Guatemala, which must have struck me nearly 40 years ago but of which I had no memory till tonight.

Either the universe or my mind is playing tricks on me.