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Off/beat

Fighting fear and conspiracy theories on moonlit night

By JAN GLIDEWELL
Published July 18, 2004

I sat, a few nights ago, trying very hard not to think a whole lot about where I was.

It was beautiful in the San Luis Valley in Colorado, with the Sangre De Cristo mountains rising on one side and the kinder, gentler San Juan range on the other.

I watched a full moon, occasionally blocked by scudding black clouds, rise over mountains whose blood-red color resulted in their being named for the blood of Christ, and convinced myself that I was only moderately afraid.

The San Luis Valley is a site well-known to UFO buffs, fans of the supernatural and conspiracy theorists. It is one of the primary UFO sighting locations in the United States, and, when cattle mutilations were the "in" thing with alien invasion buffs, the valley was also the site of more of those than any other area.

And it's not hard to find a few locals or longtime transplants who will tell you about energy vortexes, strange aircraft flying in and out of mountain caves and even, as one guy in a bar in nearby Salida explained to me one night, "gridding."

Gridding is very popular with conspiracy buffs who think gridlike patterns that look to the rest of us like jet contrails are actually signs of mind-control chemicals being dropped on us by the government.

Of course, a government that has been able to sell us some of the things we seem to have swallowed en masse lately doesn't seem to need much in the way of mind control chemicals.

But, back to the things of which I was more immediately afraid.

The fact that I was at a fairly isolated campsite made me wonder, for the first time in years, what would happen if I had a heart attack. Then I convinced myself to calm down and stop borrowing trouble.

It's easy when you haven't done much camping or spent a lot of time in the outdoors in decades to become anxious. What if the hatchet glances off a piece of wood and slices an artery? What if the bears you have heard about roaming the nearby mountain ranges sometimes drop down into the valley looking for Florida license plates so they can stop in for a little Southern food? There must be some reason the campground advertises that it has game meat freezers on the premises.

What if the frequent winds blow the tent away? What if the waterproofing stuff on the tent seams doesn't work and it storms?

I did what I usually do in such circumstances, and shouted, (internally, I didn't want to cry wolf in case I really did need help from campsites within shouting distance) "Hey! Grab the reins. Relax." I reminded myself that I had stopped off for a few days in New Orleans en route from Dade City to Colorado, and walked the French Quarter's streets unmolested, except when a woman popped up from behind Marie Laveau's tomb in broad daylight and asked for a handout. She looked so much like the fabled voodoo priestess buried in the cemetery I was touring that I handed her a whole pocketful of change.

I reminded myself that I had driven 2,000 miles on interstate highways full of massive pieces of truck tire recaps, people who don't understand that merging traffic yields to oncoming traffic, and highways designed by people with no respect for the aging male bladder. I had even faced down gas gougers who will look you in the eye and try to make you believe that you just pumped 23 gallons of gas into a 22-gallon tank when your (working) gas gauge read half-full when you started.

I wondered for a moment if I was just whistling past the graveyard in convincing myself how fearless I was.

Then I congratulated myself that that couldn't be, because there was no graveyard . . . until I remembered the tiny, stark Villa Grove graveyard that I had driven past on the way to my camping spot.

But a bottle of good merlot, a blazing fire and damaged hearing that made me able to believe that every sound I heard was an owl served my jittery nerves well.

It wasn't, I decided, so scary after all and, properly padded with a bag full of dirty laundry, a hatchet actually does make a pretty good pillow.

The only trick for the next several weeks, for me, will be to ignore strange lights in the sky, and to try to get to sleep every night without the word "probe" going through my mind.

[Last modified July 17, 2004, 23:36:24]