from the pen of icarus blake

Paint a picture of the American West for me.  Paint me sprawling yellow deserts and blue mountains reaching to the heavens, arches of red rock and dusty ghost towns beneath stone spires.  Draw me the abandoned mine shafts, the long lonely highways.  I want to hear the sad twang of guitar between that night sky with a strange, silver moon hanging in it.  

And what strange jellyfish swims in that ocean of stars — not the blinking red lights of planes or subtle shimmer of a weather balloon — but something stranger.  It moves like a dragonfly, up then down, then gone.  You blink, and you might think it was simply a figment of your imagination.  A trick of the eye.

But no, sir.  This is the American West, and you know what you saw.

An Unidentified Flying Object is self-explanatory.  It’s a bird I can’t identify, a strange-moving light spotted while under the influence that might have been a drone (maybe not, it’s unidentified), an experimental aircraft near an air force base.  I’ve lived out here my whole life, I’ve seen my fair share.

A month ago, under the sway of Christmas as I was driving on a back highway over wide open fields and sloping hills in broad daylight, I noticed something at the center of my vision.  A glassy sphere against the blue, framed top and bottom by dissipating vapor trails.  I watched it sit still in the air, then, as though aware it was being watched, fade away like the waning moon so that the ocean of sky was suddenly unblemished.  The eye of a giant squid, peeking up above the waves in curiosity and vanishing as soon as it caught glimpse of the alien things in the world above.  I kept driving.

Not even a week ago, I fulfilled the first of my twelve-part New Years Resolution by dragging my partner down to Cripple Creek, CO.  The greatest gold camp in the world is now infested with casinos, the main street a strange liminality dominated by repeating signs for the same three casinos.  The locals grimace when you mention them, the bitterness seeping through.  What isn’t gambling-associated is shuttered, abandoned.  A ghost town propped up with slots and blackjack.

We went for Ice Castles.  A $50 photo op, wasting hundreds of thousands of gallons of water on a maze built out of ice.  We slipped on packice under icy tunnels, took our obligatory photos in the LED-lit crevasses, went down the ice slides a few times, and made our way up to the lookout.  Overlooking the city, the main street lit with glittering lights, I took a photo.  When I looked up, I saw something strange.  Three lights, hovering just above the city in the black sky like a reckoning.  Faint, faint enough that I thought my eyesight was just failing (I don’t have great night vision).  It wouldn’t be until later that I checked those photos, and found that, indeed, that strange shape hovered above the city.

Only one of these stories is true.