Choosing the Unknown – Chapter 4: The Road to Sedona

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Choosing the Unknown Chapter 4

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[00:00:00]

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The Relentless German Advance

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The Germans continue their relentless advance southward.

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1,850,000 soldiers are taken prisoner. Those who have remained in Paris listened to Marshall Betal, the war hero of Al announces that he's seeking an armistice.

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The German radio translates this speech announcing France's Capitulation.

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​

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[00:01:00]

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Introduction to 'Choosing the Unknown'

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Paul Johnson: I'm Paul Johnson, and this is Get Some Each Week One Story. The stories go where they want. We just follow. Our title for this series is Choosing the Unknown.

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The Road to Sedona: Cocodona 250

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Paul Johnson: Today's chapter, the Road to Sedona, part of our special series on the Cocodona 2 50, A 250 mile foot race across Arizona, A race that takes runners from the desert floor near Phoenix, up through the Bradshaw, mountains, past mining towns and empty roads, and eventually.

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To Sedona during Cocodona Runners descend from Jerome through cool air and passing rain, navigating slick trails and muddy roads, crossing a swollen verde river, [00:02:00] and climbing again toward Sedona, where the red rocks rise, like silent witnesses to every runner's choice to keep going when it would be easier to stop.

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Max Ernst: A Journey to Freedom

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Paul Johnson: Sedona was also home to Max Ernst, a German immigrant, and a world renowned artist. The story of Max Ernst reminds me of my fifth grade social studies teacher, a German immigrant named Walter Schreck. Mr. Schreck spoke English with a German accent. He told us how after World War II Germany was divided. And how he was raised in East Germany under communist control.

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One day his family climbed over the wall, bullets flying over their heads, choosing freedom over the certainty of life under a dictatorship. They [00:03:00] made it out and they made it to America. Max Ernst also chose freedom more than once. Leaving Germany when Hitler took power, leaving France when the Nazis came, crossing an ocean to a country he barely knew, and eventually making his way to the Red Rocks of Sedona where he could build and create in peace.

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Today as Cocodona Runners pass through Sedona, we're telling Max's story, a story about choosing the unknown and what it means to keep going when the cost of staying put is too high.

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​

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Cocodona Runners in Sedona

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Paul Johnson: Cocodona runners have crossed the muddy stretches of the Verde Valley. What's usually sun baked and dusty was soaked. Clouds rolled over the valley, dropping rain across the land. The air was [00:04:00] thick and cool. The red dirt had turned to rust colored clay. Now they enter a very different world, Sedona. The Red Rock formations rise suddenly and unmistakably like ancient monuments, half remembered from a dream, but there's no time to admire them.

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The course twists and climbs through single track and slick rock. The terrain is sharp, exposed and mentally disorienting. Just before crossing Oak Creek in the heart of Sedona, runners take a quiet side road and pass. Unknowingly, the rise where a German American Max Ernst built his home, Capricorn Hill, they don't see it.

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Not really. There's no time to look up, but it's there perched like a sentinel of imagination. The place where Max stared out at this same red rock [00:05:00] and carved what he saw in his dreams. You've made it through Sedona. Miles of paved streets, winding neighborhood roads, unexpected turns, underpasses culverts.

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Then dirt twisting red trails that climb steadily toward the back country. The town fades behind you, the elevation rises. The Red Rocks tower, the Scrub holds firm, and then the trail tips upward.

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The Hangover Trail Challenge

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Paul Johnson: This is hangover. The trail that every Cocodona donut runner remembers A narrow undulating spine of sandstone perched above Oak Creek Canyon, a trail that doesn't feel like it should exist.

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Balanced along the edge of Red Rock Cliffs exposed on both sides. Its snakes through spires named teapot, painted dome, and [00:06:00] merry-go-round formation. So strange, they sound invented. There's no protection here. No shade, no railing, just open space and soft light bouncing off sandstone and the footing. It's cruel, sloped, slick rock, loose grit, angles that roll, ankles and steel.

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Confidence every step forward requires a decision. Every glance away carries risk. Runner, stop talking here. The trail demands silence. Precision presence. It's beautiful. Yes, but only if you can hold it together long enough to notice. Most runners are too focused on not falling off the edge of the world.

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Some crawl, some pause, some weep. The trail doesn't care. It's the most surreal stretch of the race. And then as the sandstone begins to recede [00:07:00] the course climbs again. This time onto the Cocodonanino Plateau through a long gravel ascent that grinds upward into ponderosa pine and cooler air. It's a hard earned transition from Sandstone Cathedral to alpine, quiet from sensory overload to open sky, a kind of threshold.

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Max Ernst's Escape from War

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Paul Johnson: Nearly 80 years earlier, another traveler crossed into Sedona chasing something just as elusive. Max Ernst German surrealist and war exile arrived in Sedona in 1946. He settled just a few feet from where Cocodona runners now pass on a rise of land. They named Capricorn Hill. Capricorn is a surreal bronze sculpture created by Ernst in Sedona.

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The central figure is a seated horned, patriarchal [00:08:00] figure, part goat, part king, part myth, surrounded by other hybrid figures. It reflects Max's fascination with mythology, mystical change, and symbolic power. In astrology, Capricorn is associated with endurance discipline and ascent fitting for both the sculpture and Max's life to Max Sedonas.

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Red rocks weren't just scenery. They were mythic forms. He sculpted them, painted them, and lived among them. Here in this desert, he created some of his most personal and visionary work. But long before Capricorn Hill, long before the desert and the dream, there was a war. And one morning in a quiet village in France, war knocked there is the sound of slow, heavy boots on gravel.

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A door [00:09:00] knocks twice. It's Saturday, September 2, 1939. The day before Germany had invaded Poland, making the official start of World War II. France is preparing to declare war on Germany. The light is just beginning to edge over the hills of Saint-Martin d’Ardèche, a tiny village in southern France.

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​Max Ernst is 48. Lean but strong with an angular build. His hands are long and bony. Fingers stained nails trimmed short knuckles, knobby. His face is narrow with high cheekbones that made him appear hawkish in profile and gray, green eyes. His hair once dark, had begun to gray at the temples and was cut short, swept back and uncombed that morning.

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A few days stubble, shadowed his

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jaw.

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Paul Johnson: Max is wearing a thread bare [00:10:00] gray wool sweater with the elbows worn thin, a white shirt underneath, unbuttoned at the collar and brown corduroy trousers that had faded at the knees. Max had been sitting at a small wooden table under the window. He had a small wooden radio on a shelf near the table.

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Its lacquer peeling at the edges. All night. The soft static crackle of radio Paris filled the small stone room reports cutting in and out. Germany had crossed into Poland. War was no longer a rumor. France was preparing to mobilize. War was here, and it was only a matter of time before they came for him.

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The light was beginning to turn gray blue, and he had paused listening to the quiet. When he heard the boots and the knock at the door outside, two men in blue uniforms, French [00:11:00] gendarmes, stand at his door. Their orders come from Paris under a new wartime decree. All German nationals in France are to be detained as enemy aliens.

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Max knows why they're here As a German national, he had felt the tension in the village. It shifted neighbors who had shared wine with him now avoided eye contact whispers in the market had turned into silence. He had read the papers that declared all German nationals enemy aliens. He had heard that the French authorities were rounding them up for internment when the boots stopped outside his door.

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He knew he did not need them to explain. They don't need to.

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They don't need to handcuff him. He doesn't resist. They step out sin, they step inside, not stiffly.

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He had read the papers that declared all German nationals enemy aliens. He had heard that the French authorities were rounding them up for internment when the boots stu.

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He had read the papers that declared all German nationals enemy aliens. He had heard that French authorities were rounding them up for internment when the boots stepped out. When the boots stopped outside his door, he knew he did not need them to explain. They don't need to handcuff him. He doesn't resist.

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They step inside, nod, stiffly, and tell him to gather what he can Carry. Max Shrugs on a heavy, dark coat. He [00:12:00] wraps the dark scarf once around his neck, pulling it tight against the damp morning air. He picks up the small suitcase in one hand, a notebook tucked under a notebook, tucked under his arm, and steps out into the pale light of dawn.

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Max is alone. No family here. Just his thoughts and the paintings on the walls that might be confiscated or destroyed or lost forever. They walk him to a waiting truck engine idling in the dawn. Other men sit inside silent clutching their hats. Eyes hollow, all Germans. Other men sit inside silent, clutching their hats, eyes hollow, all Germans.

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Six years ago, max Ernst had fled Cologne, Germany. When Hitler came to power, the Nazis had labeled him a subversive artist, seized his paintings, and threatened his freedom, his art.

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Six years ago, max Ernst had fled Cologne, Germany. When Hitler came to power, the Nazis had labeled him a subversive artist, seized his paintings and threatened his freedom, his art, strange dreamlike collages, impossible creatures, worlds that [00:13:00] refused order was everything. The Nazis despised, so he left crossing the border into France, hoping to escape the Nazis.

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In Paris, he found the surrealists, the poets and painters who believed like he did that art could be freedom. France became his refuge until war came. Now in the eyes of France, he's just German and France had declared war on Germany.

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Internment and Escape

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Paul Johnson: They take him to Camp des Milles, an old tile factory near Aix-en-Provence turned into an internment camp.

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Barbed wire wraps around brick walls. Inside there are lice, cold floors, and the constant shuffle of men. He fears he will be sent back to Germany. He fears for his freedom for his life. Imagine this, you leave your homeland, you immigrate [00:14:00] to a new country. Build a business, raise a family. Call this new place home.

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That's what thousands of Japanese immigrants did in America. They settled, started farms, opened shops became part of their communities. But then Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and declared War on America. War changes everything. After Pearl Harbor, over 120,000 Japanese Americans, including many who had lived in the United States for decades, were rounded up and forced into camps behind barbed wire, under armed guard, their crime simply being of Japanese descent during wartime.

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That's what happened to Max Ernst in France. When war came, France looked at his German passport and saw only the country of his [00:15:00] birth. They came to his door, took him away, locked him up in an internment camp Max earned Max Ernst. Spent weeks at Camp des Milles, sleeping on straw, waiting in line for thin meals, sharing space with other Germans.

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But outside the camps, walls, people were working for him. Friends in the French art world, poets, painters, gallery owners began writing letters. They made phone calls, pulled strings, reminded the local authorities that Max was not a threat, that he was an artist who had left Germany because he opposed the Nazis.

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Paul Éluard, the French poet, spoke up for him. So did others in Paris. People with connections to government officials who could sign a paper, make a call, open the gates. [00:16:00] In October, 1939, the camp authorities released Max Ernst. They gave him back what little he had brought a coat, a scarf, a small suitcase, and let him walk out of the gate.

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Max was lucky. Not everyone at Camp des Milles had friends who could speak for them, who could reach into the right offices to secure a release. Many Germans stayed waiting, hoping as the months passed. And the world outside grew more dangerous. But Max Ernst had people who befriended him and they used what influence they had to bring him home.

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He left Camp des Milles, returned to Saint-Martin d’Ardèche back to his brushes, his canvases, and the uncertain days that [00:17:00] lay ahead.

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But freedom never lasts long in a world at war, and Max was about to learn that the knock can always come again In the summer of 1940, France changed overnight. The German army marched in. The French government, fell a new regime. The French Vichy government took over enforcing new rules, new alliances, and new fears. The Vichy government collaborated with Nazi Germany, and in that small village in southern France, max Ernst felt the knock at the door.

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Again, they came quietly, the French Vichy police, but the knock on the door might as well have come from the German Gestapo. France was under German occupation and the French Vichy government was working with [00:18:00] Nazi Germany enforcing policies that aligned with its new masters. Max Ernst wasn't a Nazi. He hadn't supported Germany's war In fact.

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The Nazis had labeled him as a subversive. And his art as subversive. They saw him as an enemy of their regime. His name was known to them, and now the French Vichy authorities eager to align themselves with Nazi Germany, took him into custody. There was no trial, no formal charge, just the reality of war collaboration and the fact that Max Ernst, an artist who had opposed the Nazis, was once again a prisoner.

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But while he waited in detention, others were moving on his behalf. Friends in the art world stepped in. Again, they [00:19:00] had to move fast. France was under German occupation. Bureaucracy was chaotic, inconsistent, and often corrupt. Decisions about who stayed in detention and who got out could hinge on a handshake, a favor, or a discreet payment to the right official.

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Peggy Guggenheim, an American art collector with money and connections, began working quietly to get Max released. She reached out to people who knew which doors to knock on and who to pay In Marseille, France, there was an American named Varian Fry, a journalist from New York. He came to France in 1940 with $3,000.

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A list of names and a promise to help people escape. Before it was too late, Varian Fry set up a small office under the cover of a relief organization. He was building a lifeline, a [00:20:00] network of safe houses, false papers and mountain guides, working to get artists, writers, and intellectuals. Out of Europe before the Gestapo could find them.

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Artists like Mark Chaga, Hannah Ar and Andre Breton. Artists like Mark Chaga, Hannah Arand, and Andre Breton owed their freedom to Fry's quiet operation. So did Max Ernst Guggenheim Fry and their team worked fast, bribing officials when needed slipping, forged documents across desks, moving people at night toward the border.

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While there was still a chance it was dangerous work, the French vii, it was dangerous work. The French Vichy police were watching. The Gestapo was asking questions. But for the people on Fry's list, it was the difference between a prison cell and a ship between capture and a new life.

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And there was luck. Many who didn't have connections or money or foreign [00:21:00] supporters remained in detention or worse. Max Ernst was fortunate and in that narrow window it was enough. As soon as Max was released, Guggenheim and Fry's team in Marseille arranged for him to be sheltered. Safe apartments, false identity papers, exit visas.

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Couriers came and went quietly delivering documents and instructions when the paperwork was ready. Guides took max by train and car, avoiding checkpoints where they could traveling south toward the French border near the Pyrenees Mountains. At night under cloud cover. In silence, he joined a group of refugees.

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Locals smugglers shepherds resistance Sympathizers led them up through the narrow paths. No map, no light, just whispers, footfalls, and the sound [00:22:00] of wind scraping over rock. Eventually in darkness and exhaustion, they descended into Spain. From there, max made his way to Lisbon, a gateway for refugees fleeing Europe.

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He boarded a Boeing three 14 at Lisbon's Harbor. Not a ship, but a flying boat. They took off from water, not runway, and delivered its passengers across the ocean In about 24 hours, stopping in the Azores and Bermuda, the clipper descended into New York Harbor. From the window, max could see the Statue of Liberty rising from the mist.

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He was part of an escape. A rescue behind him. War Max Ernst stepped onto the dock. He was no longer running. He had arrived. But even in America, max wasn't done choosing. In [00:23:00] fact, his boldest choice was still ahead. One that would take him deep into the desert.

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Max Ernst's New Life in America

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Paul Johnson: max Ernst arrived in America with his art, his ideas, the memory of doors closing and opening, and of the people who helped him walk through them when he needed it most. Max Ernst arrived in New York City in 1941, but he didn't stay there long. In 1943, he joined photographer Lee Miller and Artist Roland Penrose on a planned road trip across the American Southwest.

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They traveled by car stopping in Arizona and New Mexico exploring deserts and canyon country in Sedona, Arizona. They camped near the Red Rock formations. They hiked through Oak Creek Canyon. Ernst collected rocks and sand from the landscape examining the colors and [00:24:00] textures he might use in his work. The trip was part of a larger exploration.

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But Sedona stood out. The climate, the isolation, the geological shapes. It stayed with Ernst. In 1946, max Ernst left New York and moved to Sedona. He bought land near the Red Rock formations he had seen during his earlier trip. Sedona was a small town with only a few hundred residents and dirt roads. Land was inexpensive.

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The climate allowed for year round, outdoor work. He built a modest house himself using local stone and materials, living without electricity or running water in the early months while he worked. The house included an outdoor studio area where Ernst could work on large sculptures and experimental techniques without space constraints.

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The house included an outdoor studio area [00:25:00] where Ernst could work on large sculptures and experimental techniques without space constraints. In Sedona Max Ernst focused on large scale sculptures, painting and collages in Sedona Max Ernst focused on large scale sculptures, paintings, and collages.

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In Sedona Max Ernst focused on large scale sculptures, paintings, and collages. He used local sand and rocks in his materials. One of his most significant projects during this time was Capricorn, a large outdoor sculpture created from cement and local stones. Ernst working in the Arizona sun mixing cement by hand, assembling Capricorn piece by piece.

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The sculpture featured a king and a queen seated on a throne with smaller animal figures around them. The sculpture stood outside his Sedona home for years, becoming a landmark for visitors and locals. But no one should go looking for Capricorn in Sedona today. When Ernst left Sedona and moved back to France after the war, he couldn't [00:26:00] take the sculpture with him.

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It was too large, too heavy, and too much a part of the ground. It stood on. He left it behind, exposed to the weather and time. Over the years, it began to break down. Pieces eroded, crumpled, eventually turned to rubble. The original Capricorn is gone before they left. Ernst made before he left. Ernst made a plaster model to preserve the work.

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Years later. In 1975, a bronze cast was made from that model. If you want to see Capricorn today, you can find it in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC where it has been preserved and protected. But in Sedona, the place where Ernst built it, all that remains is the memory of a sculpture made from the desert itself, returned to the desert.[00:27:00]

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During his years in Sedona, Ernst worked pursuing his art. He occasionally hosted other artists and visitors who passed through the desert on their way west, but much of his time was spent working quietly in the open air surrounded by the Red Rocks. Sedona provided Max Ernst with the space light and materials he needed to transition fully into sculpture while continuing to paint.

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It was a place where he could work on his own terms away from galleries and cities with a landscape itself shaping his art. Sedona would be where Max Ernst set down roots in America. And where he would create some of his most significant sculptures and paintings.

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Max Ernst's life was shaped by choices, but they weren't easy choices. In 1933 when Hitler came to power, Ernst left Germany for France. Staying in Germany would've meant censorship or worse. Leaving meant in 1933 when Hitler [00:28:00] came to power, Ernst left Germany. For France, staying in Germany would've meant censorship or worse, leaving meant uncertainty, exile, and starting over as an artist in a new country when the Nazis occupied France in 1940, Ernst faced the same question again.

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Stay and risk, imprisonment or death or leave. If you could find a way. With the help of friends, he escaped across the Pyrenees through Spain to Lisbon and from there, New York. Each move was a choice between the life he knew and the unknown between freedom and the threat of prison. And even after the war when he could have stayed in New York, he chose to leave again this time heading west.

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To Sedona, Arizona there in a quiet desert town. Under Red Rocks, he found a place where he could work on his own terms, building sculptures in the open air, creating without waiting for the next dock. [00:29:00] Building sculptures in the open air creating without waiting for the next knock on the door. For Max Ernst.

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Choosing the unknown wasn't about adventure, it was about survival. And about protecting the one thing he couldn't give up his art.

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The Final Stretch: Cocodona 250

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Paul Johnson: The sandstone is behind them now. Up Schnebly Hill Road over ledges and loose rock, through trail confusion and the long ramp onto the Coconino plateau. This is where the race begins to thin people out.

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It gets quiet, more internal. What was, once desert and dream has become forest and fact, at over 7,000 feet, the air is thinner, the wind cooler, the trees taller. The ponderosa pines rise now straight and unmoving a cathedral of bark and silence. [00:30:00] At around 175 miles in every mile forward, costs more than the last.

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After Sedona, the elevation continues to rise. They reach a remote water section. They reach a remote water station, no aid, just a refill. The temperature may be cooler, but the margin is thinner. Each minute begins to matter. Vision blurs. Landmarks deceive what looks like a figure in the distance. May just be a tree.

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What sounds like help may just be wind in the branches. Runners reach Foxboro Ranch, a wide meadow beside a small lake bordered by pine and sky. It's beautiful, but there's no time to linger. No room to drift. Cutoffs now hover just behind and just ahead. As night falls, the temperature drops, headlamps switch [00:31:00] on short.

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Trail naps become acts of survival. Every stretch of runnable ground must be used. Pacing is calculated. Keep moving. Hold the line. By now conversation fades. Thoughts loop the lines between hallucination and perception blurs. The line between hallucination and perception blurs and the final stretch is still ahead.

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This is the final threshold. Flagstaff waits on the far side of fatigue between here and the finished line.

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This is the final threshold. Flagstaff waits on the far side of fatigue between here and the finish lies everything. The race has yet to test, resolve timing, and whatever is left in the tank. Cocodona was never about ease. It was never about speed.

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Conclusion and Next Episode Teaser

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Paul Johnson: It was about crossing into unknown spaces within and without, and finding in those spaces something unshakeable That's it [00:32:00] for chapter four of choosing the Unknown. Thanks for spending time with us. Let me know what you thought of today's episode in the comments, and if you've got a story you think we should tell, reach out, share a few details. It might end up in a future episode, max Ernst walked through war, across borders and into a desert that gave him silence, light, and space to create.

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He chose the unknown because staying was never an option.

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A reminder that choosing the unknown isn't about wanderlust, it's about preservation. It's about becoming, not escaping, and sometimes it's about making something beautiful where destruction once lived. Next time we stay in Arizona, but we step out of history and into memory.

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The Cocodona course climbs through the [00:33:00] forest outside Flagstaff, near a place called Sheep Hill. It's quiet there, peaceful until it isn't. In 1988, a little girl vanished near those same trails and one detective Bill Trimble refused to let the case go cold. It was a manhunt, a mystery, and a race to find justice before it was too late.

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That's next time on Get Some.

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Get some is written, produced and hosted by me, Paul Johnson.

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You can find photos, show notes, and previous episodes@getsomepodcast.com or on our YouTube channel.

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If you're enjoying the series, leave a review or share it with a friend. It helps others find these stories.

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Thanks for being here.

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And remember, today is the best day of your life. Now go get some.

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Get some is written, produced and hosted by me, Paul Johnson. Music and Sound, designed by Epidemic Sound. You can find photos, show notes, and previous episodes at getsomepodcast.com or on our YouTube channel.

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Get some is written, produced, and hosted by me, Paul Johnson. Music and Sound, designed by Epidemic Sound. You can find photos, show notes, and previous episodes at getsomepodcast.com or on our YouTube channel. If you're enjoying the series, leave a review or share it with a friend. [00:34:00] It helps others find these stories.

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Thanks for being here.

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And remember, today is the best day of your life. Now go get some.

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Paul Johnson: and if you've got a story you think,

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and if you've got a story you think we should tell, reach out.

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And if you've got a story and if, and if you've got a story you think, And remember, today is the best day of your life. Now go get some.