"A Wildlife Preserve For Mysterious Entities..."

This is the third installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine. (Scroll down for large version.)

Not long ago, my sister Leah told me about some of the scary dreams she’d been having about the wash. The conversation was a funny reminder that not everyone’s backyard included this particular topographical feature; in the Southwest, a wash (also known as an arroyo) is basically a dry creek bed, formed by centuries of flash floods running down from the nearby mountains after heavy storms. Some of them just look like smooth, sandy pathways through the rocky desert, but others gouge deep, rocky ravines into the earth.

At the site of my childhood home in Apache Junction, Arizona, this latter type of wash severed my parents’ property into two halves: one navigable by adults and their vehicles, and the other appealing strictly to children and wild animals. All we had to do to escape civilization was run to the place thirty feet beyond the back door where the ground suddenly plunged sixty-five degrees straight down, descending straight into a skin-shredding tangle of palo verde trees and sticky creosote. In a few areas there was no slope at all, just rocky cliffs dropping straight down to the floor, which was 20 feet deep in some places.

My sisters and I colonized the wash, burrowing through the bristling canopy, creating encampments in the small clearings we discovered, playing elaborate games of pretend which no one overhead could see or hear. We were loath to do any yardwork whatsoever, yet we’d cheerfully spend hours in the 115-degree summer heat hauling rocks, clearing branches and digging trenches, intent on creating the perfect theater for our fantasies of adventure and mystery. As we grew more daring, we’d venture further down the subterranean highway that the wash carved between houses, invisibly traveling far beyond our own property. When yet another apocalyptic desert sunset began reddening the surface-world, we'd crawl up out of the pit and back to the safety of the dinner table, picking itchy foxtail seeds out of our socks and suddenly feeling the pain from our bloody scratches for the first time all day.

At night, we avoided the place entirely -- its recesses were completely cut off from the cheery patio lights shining somewhere above the rim, and what appeared cozy and familiar by day became lonely and terrifying in the darkness. It wasn’t just that instinctive childish knowledge that there are things out there in the dark, either. Most desert wildlife is nocturnal; after dark, the territory we’d spent all day terraforming would be reclaimed by rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and hungry coyotes. Scorpions and vinegaroons would scoop out new homes beneath the rocks we’d stacked talismanically against the wild. We could still play in the yard, but it was tricky -- if a basketball bounced past the border and rolled down into the wash, it would remain there till morning.

In my sister’s most recent dream, a ghostly young woman had come up out of the wash. “I used to have nightmares about people and things coming up from the wash, but it's been a bazillion years,” Leah told me. It chilled me to hear this, because I’ve had the same dreams many times. My childish impressions of the place have distorted memories, so that in dreams the wash appears as a vast, primal wilderness. Sometimes it’s a dense jungle that I can flee to and hide in; other times it’s a deadly obstacle course. Either way, at some point it became converted into a wildlife preserve for mysterious entities of all flavors. It’s the portal to that other world, the world beyond reason and safety, the one whose ledge our civilized homestead perches vulnerably upon. Though we grew up there together, it never occurred to me that this place might fill the same niche in my sisters' personal symbolic language that it does in mine.

In a broader symbolic sense, cracks, crevices, lakes, ravines, and underground chambers are all gateways into the unconscious mind. I mentioned to Leah that in our dreams, we find all kinds of creatures and interlopers populating these crossroads -- some friendlier than others -- and interacting with them can reveal thoughts, ideas, or memories that otherwise rarely get to see the light of day. We should see their attempt to “come up out of the wash” (or wherever) to meet us as an interesting, potentially illuminating event, but our fear of the unknown prevents this at all costs, distorting our thoughts and emotions beyond recognition. They cry out to us, but we can’t bear to look.

I also told her that if she ever had the chance, she should go down into the wash herself -- whether in a dream, in meditation, or even in real life -- and see what she encounters there. Take a deliberate journey into the realm of the unconscious with the intent of uncovering a symbolic truth; initiate a psychic ordeal in which you keep partial control. It’s a good way to keep in touch with the parts of your psyche that don’t get to come out and play in the daylight. You can always banish them back into the abyss afterward if you prefer.

Was the ghostly girl who came out of the wash trying to tell Leah something? “I think this was probably the first dream where a girl, or maybe even a female, is what come out of the abyss,” she said, mulling it over. Just as I was about to offer an opinion, she added: “I also dreamed about this crazy baby deer that was attacking things, and he had these crazy teeth that had metal spikes on them… He was scary, but I remember having sympathy for him.”

Leah feels safe attributing this latter character to the hot dog she had for dinner the night before. Me? I can’t help thinking back to those times when our imagined demons were at least half-real. With little effort, I recall the high, gobbling laughter of the coyote pack as it convened somewhere nearby (A hundred yards away? Twenty? Ten?). I think of the palo verde beetle's six-inch wingspan. I think of the limbless hunters gliding out of their stolen burrows, and suddenly I’m not so sure.