2010--Thanksgiving
in Southern Nevada was different this year.
A cold front had come through that gave us near-record temperatures in the
20’s. With my wife working both
Thanksgiving and Friday, I had decided to go camping with some friends around
200 miles up north. The following is an excerpt from “162-Degree Turnaround:
How a Cleveland Boy Found Faith, Love and Success Outside Vegas”.
Driving
along at 70 miles an hour, listening to the flute of Coyote Oldman, it was easy
to imagine ancient Indian braves testing themselves amidst the red, purple and
orange rock faces that passed on my right and left. I imagined hearts racing as they themselves
raced each other in some long-forgotten game to get to the top of a peak,
laughing and whooping. Similarly, I was
going to test myself against the frigid cold at 6300 feet up. It was a lonely road, nothing like the bustle
and angry honks in my native Las Vegas. (Definition of ‘native’ in Vegas is
generally known as five years or more in the city—what that says about us, I’m
not quite sure). An occasional car or semi would scream past me going in the
opposite direction, destination unknown.
My destination, the ghost town of Reveille, was still a couple hours
away. First, however, my friend Angel
and his girlfriend Sue wanted to stop at a dry lakebed to search for
meteorites. Just the week before, our planet had made it’s annual trek though
the ‘Perseids’, a meteor shower so named because the comet from which they stem
seems to flow from the constellation Perseus … Our logic was that not many
people would search this far out and being a flat, dry lake we could see
unobstructed in all directions.
After
miles and miles of austere, angular mountains, the road opened up to a flat
meadow, with glimmerings of gold and yellow from the aspen groves huddled
around a beautiful blue lake, desperately clinging to the few leaves that still
graced their white branches as if to say, “You can’t have them, Old Man
Winter,” making believe it was still summer.
The piercing cold said otherwise. The lake was called Pahranagat
Lake. Actually, there was an ‘Upper
Pahranagat ’ and ‘Lower Pahranagat’. Pahranagat is an old Indian word, meaning
“Valley of the Lakes”… Upon reaching the
end of the lake, I saw a flock of white jewels afloat; completing the beautiful
scene before I headed out to the flatlands an hour away that was to be the
beginning of the dry lake bed.
My
reverie was broken as flocks of tiny birds would pass in front of my Jeep, one
or two stragglers always twisting and turning in an effort to avoid my
barreling vehicle if they got too close.
I could just imagine them daring each other in a fun-filled testosterone
fury to see who was the bravest .
Reminded me of my imaginary Indian youths. Off to my left, was the carcass of a
freshly-killed cow, looking like it could just get up and shuffle off if it had
the will to. I wondered if perhaps he
wasn’t fast enough to get across the highway, or maybe he just froze to death
in the overnight record-setting, sub-zero temperatures. Which made me think, the line between
‘bravery’ and ‘stupidity’ is a thin one.
If you survive, you’re brave. If
not, well…
Meteorite
Hunting
The
desert is a wonderful thing. While some
may see an unbroken, muted sameness, I prefer to see it as open and honest,
hiding nothing from those who gaze upon it.
It’s beauty, however, is only hidden if you don’t know how to look. The desert is flora, fauna, geology and
history all in one. Far into the desert,
giant barrel cacti, four and five feet tall look down at us from a
distance. Hidden amongst them are the
lizards and quick little chipmunks that sometimes scurry across the road. Occasionally you’ll see a coyote, fox or
buzzard. All of this life is fed, not by
the skies, but the ground. Nevada is
home to one of the longest underground rivers called the Amargosa river. Occasionally it will bubble up into a spring
or a lake. It was the bones of an
ancient lake that was my immediate destination.
The Perseid meteor shower had occurred a week before and my friend Angel
had reasoned that a dry lake bed, 200 miles north of Las Vegas might be a good
place to look for the little blobs of melted glass and rock that may have
survived the fiery descent.
The
lake bed appeared on our right. It was
discernible by it’s distinct lack of anything living—a light, almost moon-light
white expanse. I wondered if it wasn’t
an old salt lake, having given up the ghost while implanting its mark as a
salient (pardon the pun) reminder of it’s passing.
We
looked for a way in. Fortunately, I had
brought walkie-talkies so we could communicate between our vehicles—cellular
service was non-existent out here.
“Think I saw a road a little ways back” I said into the
walkie-talkie. The walkie-talkie
squawked back “10-4”. We turned
around. We found the ‘road’- if you
could call it that. It was only a road
to the extent that the original moon lander in 1969 left a trail between the
craters it explored. What tipped us off
was the corral and housing structure at the end of it away in the distance,
complete with a windmill that probably was used to pump water from the
ground. As we got closer, we saw that
the ‘house’ was dilapidated; roof semi-collapsed into its interior-no one had
lived here for some time. The corral was
totally open- and a cow stopped and stared at us from it—probably staying there
as much from habit as from it probably being the only water source for miles.
We
parked and got out of our vehicles. The
wind was like sleet without the moisture—intense, biting cold that sliced right
through us. It had been a long trip, so
we were hungry—I made some peanut-butter sandwiches that froze thick on the
bread and in our mouths, so that our tongues were as sluggish as our hands were
quickly becoming. We looked like
moon-men all bundled up in our parkas.
Angel had fashioned a few telescoping ski poles with magnets at the
end—apparently meteorites were magnetic, which made sense. Iron is the last element in the life-span of
a star—it can’t be fused into another element—so it makes sense that iron would
be one of the only elements that could withstand the heat of re-entry into
Earth’s atmosphere. Dotted around the
pasty lake bed was a myriad of small, volcanic-looking rocks. “Find anything ?”
I naively asked. “Not yet,” Angel
smiled. With all of the rocks littering
the expanse, I thought it would be a simple task finding our treasure. An hour later we were still looking. One-by-one, the cold became too much for us,
although I think Angel could have gone on for days. As we pulled away, I was thinking if it was
this cold where we were going to camp, we were in for a long night.
Lights:
Even the fire was stubborn,
almost mocking us. “Fine,” the fire
sputtered,”you’re too stupid to get out of the cold, don’t expect any help from
me”. Come to think about it, perhaps the
cold was a palpable thing, smothering even it’s adversary, fire. It sure felt like it. I had put off saying goodnight for as long as I could, desperate not to leave the
flitting warmth before me. I think my
friends could sense my apprehension as they slipped into their truck to bed
down for the night.
I
was awakened (if I had slept at all) by a brilliant flash, the kind that you
remember seeing when you hit your head especially hard as a kid (or had it hit,
in my case, in the hallways of junior high).
Not sure if it was a dream, and finally realizing I wasn’t about to get
any semblance of real sleep, I stared into the darkness. I didn’t have to wait long. Once again, brilliance filled the inside of
my frigid nylon hovel. And subsided as
quickly as it came. I waited, counting
the seconds to judge the distance, for the thunder that never came. Instead, three more brilliant flashes, in
rapid succession followed. Still, no
sound. I debated going outside to
investigate. We were at least 200 miles
away from anywhere, in a town that once was, it’s present represented by a
small dot on a map, a few organized stones that could have once been a house
foundation…and bright white lights. I
puzzled it over in my mind, but ultimately the cold won out, and I huddled
deeper into my multi-layered cocoon.
The
next morning, I asked Angel and Sue if they enjoyed their picture-taking during
the night…it was the only scenario my frost-bitten brain could come up
with. “What do you mean ?” was Angel’s
reply, to which I recounted the previous night’s occurrences. He pondered a bit, then replied, a crooked
smile on his face, “Well, they DO call it Extraterrestrial Highway”…
No comments:
Post a Comment