Isolation Therapy
On June 11, 2019, I moved to the tiny town that’s known as Area 51’s closest neighbor: Rachel, Nevada.
It wasn’t exactly UFOs, conspiracy theories, or the thrill of chasing little green men that brought me here, though.
It was more because I needed… space.
My best friend passed of a random aneurism in January of 2019.
Life hasn’t felt “real” ever since. I was really in the trenches at the time, but the years have dulled it marginally. Ish.
I took a job bartending at the town’s (at the time) only establishment, telling myself I’d stay six months — max.
I couldn’t fathom any event that would posses me to stay out here longer than six months. If I thought about it too much, even that seemed longer than I was comfortable with.
Rachel is quiet in a way that is, at first, unsettling.
But it quickly becomes addictive.
The nights are lit up by the Milky Way.
The night’s silence is only broken by the wind in the brush and the howl of distant coyotes.
The summer brings the monsoons and the smell of wet sage that blows in from the mountains.
Most days in my first month were uneventful, relatively speaking.
I shot a gun for the first time since I was a teenager, and I learned how bizarre it feels to be an hour and a half from the nearest hospital and a solid hour from law enforcement or the nearest grocery store.
You don’t really think about those things until you need them.
Somewhere around week three, I met someone I worked with that happened to be my age. What are the odds, right?
We’d grab a six-pack and head up the Tempiute mountain to watch the sun bleed into the rocks while the sky turned electric with cotton candy colors.
Or lightening, depending on the day.
There’s no cell service up there.
Just this mountain that feels ancient, the wind, and some sort of eerie…..ness. I can’t really explain it.
Those mines and the mountains are creepy in a way that’s hard for me to explain. I could be because I’m from a “city”, or maybe it’s because I’d never spent enough time in the wilderness.
To be clear, I never saw anything strange with my own eyes.
But my cameras? Now, that’s a different story.
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