I recently moved from the beautiful little town of Caliente Nevada up to Pioche, which sits about 25 miles further north.
It’s a quaint and authentic old mining town steeped in the history of the Old West. This place is pretty as can be and its people are friendly, salt of the earth kind of folks.
Pioche’s elevation is well over six thousand feet. This is a plus for me being that I’m expecting a broiling hot Summer.
It’s almost always ten degrees less here than in Caliente and about twenty degrees lower than the hotter than blazes sweltering Las Vegas Summer heat.
If you’ve ever visited Virginia City then you know what a great old former mining town it is.
Perched high on the mountains with its terraced streets and lingering old western historical charm; it’s a wonderful location to see and experience.
Well Pioche is very much like that for me, minus all the tourists!
It’s a mini version of Virginia City and to this very day you can still feel echoes of its dramatic past somehow suspended in time. Toil, hardship, hunger and cold are just a few of the impressions that may touch you like slight wisps of cobwebs lingering still from days gone by.
But the hope and drive for fortune and fame mixed in with miner’s disputes, claim conflicts, gunfights and death are some of the more pronounced fading memories still hanging in the air. This is especially so in the vicinity of our Boothill.
Well sorry, dear reader, but all of this is just a prelude of what I wanted to tell you - It’s windy up here!
Ever since I got here the wind has been fierce. It has been blowing, whipping and howling on an almost regular basis.
In my mind I’ve begun to picture the wind as an angry female entity with her ever changing moods. Why just late yesterday afternoon as I was sitting on my back door step, I watched her rip around the cemetery grounds bowing over and trying to uproot the pine trees.
And as she tore by me she picked up a fistfull of gravel and threw it in my face. I mean this literally.
As I shielded my eyes I heard the pebbles strike and bounce off the glass on my window behind me.
She seemed to have calmed down some overnite. But she’s huffing and puffing again this morning.
She is whistling under my front door as she shakes and rattles my walls and roof. Wish I could do something to settle her down.
This thought reminds me of the government and the media going on and on about climate change and what we might do to mitigate it. They think that Congress can somehow enact legislation to handle and control the weather.
This, to me, seems like ordering the winds to cease, the heat to reduce, or the tides to change. I think the elements of our physical world have their own individual cycles, timetables and agendas. The best, it appears, we can do is to cooperate and ride along with them.
Of course we could give up growing corn and alfalfa in the desert. Conserving water is just common sense. This is critical being that we have used and abused the life giving waters of the great Colorado River for decades now
And if the rain and snow do not come again soon then our cycle of human development and expansion in the US Southwest will be outpaced and overrun by Mother Nature’s long cycle of drought.
Some forty million people of this Great Basin area have a one way bet running on this outcome. And time is growing short.
The water reserves of Lake Powel and Lake Mead are steadily receding toward “deadpool”. This is as the sprawling city of Las Vegas dries up and bakes in the desert sun.
Those who really realize this pray to the Almighty - “Please, please, please bring on the rain!”
Meanwhile I just sit, watch and listen to the wind blow here in quiet, peaceful Pioche, Nevada.
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