Sandman

Driving through an evening desert I remembered it as if it’d never even changed. Like it was that simple. One day they’d promptly fallen asleep. And that was that.

I had a teacher in elementary school who told us that there was really no way to know what they’d looked like way back when. That dinosaurs could have certainly been the greens and browns and maybe even that subtle purplish color you see from time to time. But for all we know, they could very well have been pink or orange, striped or polka dotted or zig-zagged. Maybe even a little bit of everything all rolled into one.

I liked that idea, even if I didn’t really believe it.

It’s absurd though. That I couldn’t accept the possibility of such spectacularly adorned lizards when my own explanation for their sudden departure was just as ludicrous in nature. But one day I laid it all out in my head and it made me happy and sad and maybe a little content all at once and I just knew that I had to be right. That together the scaly beasts curled up against the cold for an evening nap, and never woke up.

And so I loved it most in the back of my mother’s station wagon – you know that hidden seat in the waaaay back that faces the wrong way when you remove it from hiding? Most kids prefer the front, I suppose. But not me. I’d curl up back there on those long desert drives with this old black and blue blanket we’d gotten in Tijuana and press my face up against the rear glass window, watching intently to see if I could detect their breathing beneath the earth. Because that’s what happened, you see? They’d fallen asleep and never woken up, and the wind and the rain pushed the earth up against them and eventually, their bodies were covered beneath layers of dirt and rock and trees and grass. And so they remained hidden. People looking off into the distance and calling them mountains, their faces smug in ignorance. But I knew their secret. Could see the curve of a hip, the roundness of a shoulder, or the jutting out of a horn or a scale or a spike in the dips and curves and shadowy mountainous nooks. My sleeping giants.

I’d turned the barren desert into my own prehistoric village. Where dandelion-esque wind turbines became "wishmills" and electrical towers, with their crisscrossing T-Bars and endless rungs, were dream catchers. Because even the T-Rex deserved peaceful dreams, I’d reasoned. And the naming of my village was Sand Canyon, in my mind and on the maps. Because maybe I was meant to believe these things. That my creatures were being watched over by the keeper of wishes and the peaceful slumber of those who cannot wake for the weight of the world pressing down upon them.

I told my friend about them once. We were fifteen and alone on Red Mountain. Our dirtbikes still warm from hide and seek, headlights illuminating the vast emptiness beneath a black autumn sky.

We’re riding on dinosaurs, I’d whispered, sliding down the tail of an apatosaurus…

But despite my solemn explanation, he’d just smiled. Told me, you always were a weird kid.

But even now it seems I can’t help the memory. Can’t dismiss the love that still breathes within that world. At nearly thirty, I still hold on to the remarkable notion that they are there beneath unremarkable mountaintops. And that if you watch closely, you’ll see them inhale softly beneath the soil. Because the alternative hurts too much. Such large creatures – what hope would that leave us for our future? 

My way’s better, I think. And one day maybe when he tires of all that sand, they’ll awaken with the shake of an old and dusty sneeze and emerge thinking nothing about the passing of so much time. Wishmills will once again become turbines, sending the remaining dirt tumbling down the length of their backs. And the weight will be lifted. The faint memory of a phantom dream tugging on the corner of their sleepy lips.

And if it can happen that way for them, it can happen for us, too, perhaps. Making it through this whole ordeal not with a bang, as hollow men often boast, but a whimper.