Southwest Gothic II

Southwest Gothic II

jackalopes are funny, but el chupacabra isn’t. and when the coyote howls you wonder if you should be relieved. Something bigger didn’t eat them.

route 66 is still the old post-card of American Nostalgia, except for when you’re driving past and it’s dark and you watch dust devils spin past you on the side of the road as you approach a lone gas station with a flickering street lamp. this place was forgotten long ago, and it’s not pleased to see you.

on that note, route 666 would make even the most staunch atheist uneasy.

you bought a tacky glass paperweight with a scorpion inside, but today you swear it moved

teddy bear cacti.

the ghosts have “types” of course. you know them by heart: miner, native, nun, cowboy, and scorned woman/prostitute.

but nothing can prepare you for the last kind of ghost or spirit – it isn’t a person, it has no one name, but it belongs there and it slides into the bodies of scorpions and under the scales of rattlesnakes, warning you off. Some might call it death itself – the desert’s most powerful ghost, the hallucinations of heatstroke, the dryness in your mouth, the hot, baked air that tempts you to your knees, to rest your head, or to wander off the hiking trail past petroglyphs and towards the glimmer in the distance where other bleached bones lay. death belongs to us, she is ours. and you are hers. take water with you. 

offerings for santa muerta. dia de los muertos – where the whole family goes to clean the graves and ask, not jokingly, did you hear them, mija? (You do. There are always voices on the wind).

the leylines are probably all hooey from snowbirds, but the different tribes all have their own stories about their land and the reservations, and if you’re related, you’ve heard them, and you know. The desert is big and it is alive. you might not “open your chakras” in sedona, but you will listen to your elders. it is in your best interest not to wake anything up you shouldn’t. 

rivers with no water, forests of stone, blood red rocks, sandstorms which overtake you, and the sweet smell of creosote after a rain bringing short relief from anything that might be hungry and waiting.

the ghost towns are empty, except when they aren’t and you need to run.