ALL IS NOT AS IT APPEARS
ALL IS NOT AS IT APPEARS
For the past four days and nights here in Las Vegas, Nevada there has been constant rainfall. It varies between light and gentle to hard and furious. The streets are flooding, some of them are closed. Some of the phone lines have gone out, there are power outages and many fender benders. The news is warning of flash flooding which can sweep away cars and trucks and people die in these relentless rains that come every four to five years to the desert.
I watched a large home crumple and slide into the Virgin River right outside Mesquite, Nevada. There had been no huge shaking of the earth, or tornado or hurricane, just this mostly gentle, continuous rainfall. This rain does not call to mind danger or violence, in fact yesterday I took a walk with an umbrella and the gentle drops all around me were in a strange way relaxing and seemingly very peaceful. Yet the power that these rains generate is anything but gentle and peaceful.
And I am always amazed at how a desert landscape can be so completely wiped out and recreated, as though a celestial artist is at work busily creating a foreign landscape before my very eyes. Last night around midnight I glanced outside to see fog so dense I could barely make out my neighbors homes and the street lamps. As I stared I saw a scene that could be in London, or San Francisco. It did not seem to be my same old street in the middle of the desert, anymore.
I’ve always felt a certain mystical undercurrent to the desert. And after reading Carlos Castaneda’s writings again, (I started reading his work in the sixties and every ten years or so I reconnect once again with his books), I am even more convinced that the desert holds many secrets, both manmade and metaphysical.
Looking at the range of mountains called the Spring Mountains, not far from where I live, I have to wonder if there are secret rooms carved inside them. Or are they bunkers where the heads of state will hold up in the event of a nuclear world war? Some have said that extraterrestrials live in the mountains and are monitoring us.
And Area 51, the base that officially does not exist has many underground bunkers, and who knows what? Sometimes I think there are more mysteries all around me in this desert than are in the public library. What about your home? What mysterious things have you noticed? Do you incorporate them in your writing?
Nancy Niles is the author of Vendetta: A Deadly Win, and Lethal Echoes.
My father in law used to be at Area 51. He says it looks NOTHING like it did in Independence Day.