| Mar 13, 2006 @ 2:58 PM |
Dark Lands
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custis
Posts: 1,890
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Darklands
With spring the call comes, this thing that lures me away from the cool green evergreen forests of the west, pulling me to those sere lands east of the mountains where timeless looking plains of silver tipped sagebrush stretch out in surreal silence, broken only by the soft whispers of desert winds.
I have climbed rocky buttes to watch heartrending sunsets of molten gold, scenes that speak a kind of poetry which cannot be written or spoken. Likewise I have stood silent on giant dry lakebeds, watching the shadows of clouds race over the cracked sediment like lost spirits migrating across the sullen face of eternity. It is the call that brings me to these places, drawing me across ancient and deserted landscapes where night winds carry the mournful cries of coyotes and owls. It speaks in murmurs just below the threshold of human understanding
Whether or not spirits exist is not for me to say, but the desert seems like a perfect home for them, a vast abode of echoes and memories, traces of those who came and went, as insubstantial as the dust devils which whirl across the alkali flats. I am reminded of an august morning in Tonopah, Nevada. In a room of some nameless motel, I woke from a troubled sleep hours before dawn. In my dreams the past had haunted my slumber, but upon awakening, the visions of night had become indecipherable shadows in the recesses of my mind, leaving me with feelings of disquiet and lonliness.
Pulling on my levis, I padded half naked to a swivel chair near the foot of my bed where I sat and jolted myself awake with a powerful shot of demon-chasing Rye whiskey from the amber bottle which sat on a small round table. The comforting warmth in my stomach helped to exorcise the dark shades still lurking in the dim corners of my room. I stoppered the bottle lest the genie be tempted to emerge, sliding it into a zippered pouch within my suitcase.
Upon the table I saw my journal, a gold plated inkpen resting across the pages, next to the equally golden pocketwatch, its cover flipped open to reveal the thin, black second hand marching along its endless circular path beneath the crystal. Beyond the book, pen and watch, stood a collection of small antique bottles which I had gleaned from the desert the day before. Some of them were clear, others were of brown glass. One shone in a shade of cobalt blue.
They speak, these relics, in voices that are wistful and sometimes sad. They tell stories which cannot be understood because the language is forgotten, the key to the words is still lost somewhere out on that sunbaked desert. Decades of sun and dust, heat and cold, are written upon the old glass. I picked up a rectangular shaped bottle with a rusted metal cap, turning it slowly in my hands, realizing that it may well adorn someone's mantel a century after the dust of my body has blown away on the winds. On a silly whim I held the object close to my ear, but all I heard was the sound of a truck out on highway 95. The tales will never be told. They are more inaccessable than the sparkling stars of Andromeda who's light started it's journey to earth millions of years before my birth.
Stars. Outside my room they blazed in the predawn sky, sharply brilliant at this altitude. A few yards away the highway sloped up the last gentle rise of the Tonopah Summit before dropping down into the vast bowl of the Mojave. Down there in that dark bowl a different world waited to be discovered. Vast and perhaps a bit frightening, the lower desert expanse sloped southward, broken only by an occassional tiny town left behind by the westward expansion of humanity, most of whom sought more hospitable ground.
As I looked at the sky, a sound startled me. An attractive woman, perhaps somewhere between 35 and 40 years of age hastily loaded things into a small black car. She seemed to be taking care to do so as silently and quickly as possible, casting a wary glance in my direction now and then as well as at the room from whence she has just emerged. I made brief contact with her dark eyes as she got inside the vehicle, letting it roll backwards a few feet before turning the key in the ignition, then swiftly rolling away into the darkness.
What dark shadows do you flee from, I wondered. Is there a man still asleep in that room who will never see you again? And if so, will he be haunted by your memory in the long years to come? Perhaps the room contains only a ghost who disturbed her sleep with unbidden thoughts of people and things past, and yet to come.
I deposited my suitcase in the back of my dusty Camaro. Starlight dimly illuminated the dark hills above town, hills pocked with the tunnels of nineteenth century gold mines, and some that are much more recent. The boom had long since come and gone here, causing Tonopah to be erected out of the dry rock and dust with the coming of the fortune seekers and the clouds of parasites who followed them. Painted women, gunslingers, gamblers, snake oil peddlers and the rest, all gone now except for a few skeletal remnants of what once was. Scorpions crawl in the shadow of a modern supermarket and a couple of small casinos that have been built over the remains of the past.
My old Camaro roared into life and I pulled out past the large and gaudy wagon wheel supporting the motel sign. A skinny Mexican kid filled my gas tank while I purchased a scald
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| Mar 26, 2006 @ 12:55 PM |
Dark Lands |
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cheekymama
Posts: 2
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I've always envied those with such a talent for the written word. *smiles*
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| May 24, 2006 @ 1:47 AM |
Dark Lands
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Orphes1
Posts: 347
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Bequeath thee, thy bold and bountiful beauty of words written not merely by prose, but by melody sent to the Faire Angels of the world. How didst though thine quest for eloquence this obtaineth? And what say thee knave of such wonderous beholdings of that which thee so steadfastly hold true to the damsels so poetically delivered, to this and these wondrous gifts of thine pen?
I say thee "well done, knave" and to thine admirers, hold fast, to thine appreciations and that which thee yearn so, for the love of all, and it, and thine household.
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