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Dawn. A fine time to lie in your sleeping bag and observe the development of day, in my opinion, but Duke disagrees. He stood over my sleeping bag, tail wagging, looking down at the small hole through which my face was visible. “Hey buddy,” I said to him. “Good morning.” I thought about telling him to lie down again, but the dog has to spend all day listening to my orders as it is. I hated to give unnecessary instructions. I should be getting up anyway. Duke poked his nose into the hole in my sleeping bag and I turned my face. Duke knows not to lick me, but he dabbed his wet, cold nose against my cheek instead. “Get back,” I said and rolled over on my side. A few minutes later I heard him sniffing. A cold, wet dab against my ear that made me laugh. With some difficulty, I angled a bare arm through the drawstrung hole in my bag and scratched Duke’s head. It wasn’t as cold out as I expected. “Alright,” I told him.
Dawn at the hot springs.
By the time I had our packs loaded, direct sunlight had worked its way from the western edge of the desert, where sunlight first struck when the sun peeked over the Jackson Mountains, to our camp at the hot springs. I shed my long johns, jacket, gloves and fleece hat. Duke didn’t change his attire but waited impatiently as I stuffed my clothes into my pack. To my explanation that being hairless made temperature regulation difficult, he responded with silence. I abandoned the explanation and tucked the hat into my pack. I clipped on his pack and we were underway. We’d walk west around the hill to the north of the hot springs – Alien Aspiration Hill, as I’d named it – then head north to the truck. We found a horse trail leading away from the springs and followed it.
Knowing that I only had seven or eight miles to go, I hiked fast. Blisters wouldn’t matter since they’d have days to heal, and the speed felt good. My hips weren’t packsore. Duke had learned to weave between the creosote shrubs so as to avoid banging his sidesaddle pack against them, and we made good time. I thought about the mysterious black rocks sitting on top of the dry lakebeds – the ones that always sat on top, never buried. Maybe there was a better explanation than alien bombardment. I was sure the rocks wouldn’t float like pumice does – the rocks were igneous, and had empty pockets in them like swiss cheese where gases had been held captive – but they were far denser than water. I kicked a couple, just to confirm that these porous black rocks always sat on top of the lakebed sediment. They moved easily. Maybe the silt that formed the lakebeds, although fine-grained, was actually denser than the black rocks. If that were true, then when the lakebeds flooded, the silt grains might slip underneath the rocks instead of piling up around them in the same way that a small, heavy item like a AAA battery will slip past a lantern or camp stove to the bottom of a backpack.
I was mulling over my theories of lakebottom physics when something clattered up on the hillside. I looked up and there were eight horses trotting north across the shadowy side of the hill, loosing stones as they crossed over rockslides. They were 250 or 300 yards away and clearly moving away from Duke and me. They acted like deer – maybe they were wild. I had heard there were a few wild horses in Nevada. Some paused and looked back. Duke watched them with perked ears. The small herd moved north along the hill until they reached a small ridge extending to the west. Then, following what I supposed to have been the dominant mare, they trotted along the ridge into the sunlight. Their tails and manes whisked behind them; their brown coats caught the morning sun. They stopped. The lead horse snorted at me, then snorted again and stomped her foot. They were 400 or 500 yards away now. Wild for sure. The lead mare snorted 20 or 25 times. Duke had lost interest, but I rested my hands on my shoulder straps and observed her fuss. “There is something about the outside of a horse,” Winston Churchill once said, “that is good for the inside of a man.” I watched until they moved on.
As Duke and I walked along the base of the hill, the horses kept above and ahead of us. I looked east across the two miles of playa that separated the hill from the western edge of the Black Rock Desert and saw another group of three horses. This explains all the horse tracks, I thought as Duke and I stopped for lunch. I sliced salami and cheese, then rolled the slices in a tortilla. The hillside herd had crept in close – 150 yards or so – and only fled when I looked up. They’d gotten curious. The horses probably had no natural predators aside from coyotes, I thought, which are likely too small to threaten a full-grown horse. Probably no wolves left in this country. I dribbled some Tobasco on my tortilla. That also explained the close-cropped grass at the spring – food supply was probably the population-limiting factor.
Duke and I had left the horses and were crossing one last dry lakebed, only a couple miles from the truck, when I saw a different sort of rock lying in the playa dust. Instead of black and porous, this rock was rouge-colored with black streaks. It looked like it had iron in it. Time to test my density theory. I’d see whether this rock was sitting on top of the lakebed sediment or was partially buried – if it was partially buried, then I could conclude that these lakebed rocks were not deposited by aliens but, instead, that the black rocks just sat on top of the sediment because they were less dense than the silt. I kicked the rock. Then I shoved it, then pulled on it. It wouldn’t budge. Partially buried.
Self-satisfied, I continued back toward the truck. To find new things, to question, to theorize, to assemble them into a pattern – such is the drive of man. It’s the thrill of discovery; the satisfaction of knowledge. Maybe that’s why I like wandering. But I don’t think that makes me unique. In fact, I can think of one band of Pacific-bound pioneers who probably shared my impulses.
Back at the truck.
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