There is a place roughly an hour's drive from here.
Well, it's a place, but really it's no place in particular.
A tiny spot on the map says "Oreana."
Maybe Oreana was once an actual town, or maybe it never was much more than it is today.
Nonetheless it is "Town" only in the sense that it is what passes for civilization in a sea of empty desert and scrub land.
Two dirt roads cross here, and maybe six or seven farm-houses, most of which are just double-wide manufactured homes. Up a little ways is another dirt road with a couple more large acreage estates. Down a ways, maybe a quarter mile at the top of a low rise, is an old school house which serves as a community hall, and just beyond that, an ancient Catholic church, looking like something you might see in a Clint Eastwood movie. And that is it. There are no businesses, post office, Starbucks, nail salons, or anything else of note.
Old farm trucks, mongrel dogs, and ancient machinery dot the yards of the few residents who call this place home.
Beyond the edge of town, are a few scattered ranches, and beyond that, nothing.
It's the jumping off point to nowhere.
Nowhere, nothing but empty desert, the wind whipping through the sage.
Although, perhaps not entirely empty. The nearby Owyhee mountains rise in the background. There are deep canyons, and rock walls like fortresses on the heights, and on the sides of the canyons. In some places the rocks make twisted formations, like from a dream. Those "Fat Lizards" scurry around the rocks, and there are coyotes howling in the distance, hawks and birds of prey soaring above.
In the Spring, wildflowers bloom in vivid psychedelic color. White yarrow, red paintbrush flower, yellow Balsamroot, and tiny purple flowers of all description.
Once in a while, your boot will kick up a twig from a sagebrush plant and you will hear a "Chink," and you reach down and pick it up, only to realize the twig has been mineralized all the way through, from being sitting in the desert for so long. And on one windswept plateau, you can reach down and pick up black pebbles that are made entirely of glass. Perhaps nothing is as it seems out here, in the back lands.
But mostly, there is a certain peace, a primitive permanence to this landscape. It is the ultimate escape to nowhere, to be one with nature, with the desert and yourself and your thoughts.
Perhaps that's why, once in a while, I like to come here.
