They Are Already Here by Sarah Scoles

Author:Sarah Scoles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Pegasus Books

When we crest Hancock Summit, the last high point on the way to our destination, we look down on the darkened Amargosa Valley. This plain has menacing topography. It lies a mountain ridge over from Groom Lake, where Area 51 is. Also, it’s near Yucca Mountain, where since the 1980s the government has on-and-off planned to deposit the nation’s nuclear waste, making it potentially uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years—so long that the Department of Energy had to hire linguists and anthropologists to determine how best to communicate “Skin-melting poison! Steer clear!” to people who won’t be born till 12,020 c.e.

Waste from human violence and power make a good metaphor, but you can’t actually see Yucca Mountain from here. And given that it’s nighttime, we can’t see any other mountains either. The geography here, though, looks strange to the eyes of people who grew up “back East.” There, mountains are gentle and grow leaves. Here, they are sharp mounds of semi-permanent dirt, hydrodynamically eroded into caverns and cones, rising from nothing. Their low brush, cacti, and Mormon Tea plants feel exotic, their beauty austere and distanced. Over there, mountains seem to want life to exist. Here, everything about them (even without the gun-toting guards) screams, “Get out!” And, because “hard to get” has, historically, held a certain appeal, I like them a lot.

But all these contours pass us by unseen as we search for roadside pull offs where we could camp. Much of the property around Area 51 belongs to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the governmental organization that deals with one-tenth of the country’s landmass, some 245 million acres. On that acreage, you’re generally allowed to camp anywhere you’re not contaminating a water source, of which there are not many here.

Finally, we choose a pull-off that Arnu has labeled—on the map he hosts on Dreamland Resort—“Gravel Parking.” It’s a wide rectangle with rounded corners. An interpretive sign on one side explains that there are two kinds of Joshua trees: tall and lanky ones, short and squatty ones. Just a single species of moth pollinates each. Without this hyperspecialized symbiosis, these trees wouldn’t exist at all. What relationships of convenience might alien environments have forced on other planets? Just as I’m contemplating that, headlights from a distant car appear down the road. They are the first ground-based illumination we’ve seen in a long time.

“Let’s wait for it to go by,” says Carolyn, wary of setting up camp when a stranger could whiz by and note exactly where three women are camping alone.

So we get out and kick around some pebbles, pretending we are about to head somewhere else in the universe. But the lights seem to stay exactly where they are. You could say they hover, if you were inclined to use such a word. Then, with nary a flicker, they disappear.

Maybe the person has turned off onto a side road, or perhaps to their own gravel campsite.

“Turn on your lights and pretend to leave,” Carolyn urges, craning toward the window.

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