This weekend, I returned to my home of Silver Springs, NV; population: approximately 5,000.
I don’t live near these train tracks, but they are an important landmark in my town so I thought I would include them in this journal. Silver Springs has very few, if any, trees and any patch of grass is considered an oasis. I would often take walks on the dirt roads behind my house in the middle of the night and I continued that trend this past weekend.
As I took this walk, I realized that my neighborhood doesn’t contain any landmarks of significance, but when I walk into the field behind my neighborhood, I can see the lights of Reno over the mountains and that backdrop combined with an endless expanse of telephone poles makes for an eerie, zombie apocalypse-esque resemblance. I am okay with this. :)
My closest neighbor is over half a mile away, and though the neighborhood doesn’t talk probably as much as it should, we aware of the others’ existence and we respect their boundaries…..except for my dog Nigel. He will run over to the neighbors’ houses if he sees something interesting and no amount of yelling and cursing will bring him back until he wants to come back.
This is Nigel :)
I do have a very strong sense of familiarity and security with this neighborhood due to living here for 16 years; the town itself, with its fair share of methamphetamines addicts and creepers, is pretty sketchy, but my neighborhood is luckily miles away from all that and I can usually go on my midnight runs undisturbed.
The terrain is very monotone, but there are a few unusual things about my neighborhood that puzzle me. For instance, there were a plethora of construction crews that were leveling the hill beside my house, making room for some kind of structure. They dug up rocks and formed these sand dunes that I would often ride my BMX bike on when I was but a small child. :) Then one day, the crews never returned to finish their project and now the residents of my dirt road have an acre of barren, sagebrush-free sand dunes to stare at.
While surveying the terrain, I am also surveying the night sky which I admittedly take for granted way too much.
This is a shot of the night sky at the Fort Churchill ruins in south Silver Springs.
As I recall, I counted 5 shooting stars during my midnight walk on the night of September 1st, 2012 J (Well, I guess technically if it’s midnight it would be Sept. 2nd already but…..ah well)
My impressions of this area?
-Boring, sure. I grew up here for 16 years, it’s a wonder I came out without some boredom-induced mental illness. As a teenager, it’s definitely a rough place to be in, but one easily takes for granted the dormant beauties that lie in a rural desert community and Silver Springs is no exception.
As kids, my friends and I still joke about how, even if we make out of Springs and halfway across the world, we will be suddenly enveloped by this gusty whirlwind and then….we’re standing back in Springs. No one EVER leaves; even if they think they have escaped…it will find you.
And all jokes aside, despite the lack of any other color than brown and the occasional mattress or rusted Volkswagen sitting in a field, it is a place to be missed.
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