Holiday Ranch Apocalypse
Email to Linda Beaver
Sorry, couldn’t call last night. For some reason I was wiped out. Got home about 8, then ate, then went to bed about 9:30, slept till 8:30. I never go to bed before midnight. Don’t know why so tired.
Your dreams were interesting. Maybe because of hearing those I had a doozy myself last night. Involved the whole family plus Hansi, and had epic qualities. We journeyed to a fantastic, beautiful land, traveling on foot and by air, then returned home, and disembarked from our flying machine, at the foot of the loghouse hill, across the grass from our little covered bridge. The river we had watched come into creation, and which we had flown above, came pouring down the hill from the direction of McFarlane’s house, but then it petered away into a little stream and then disappeared completely just before it would have flooded us.
The spot where the otherworld river disappeared into the earth was where those dry, desert-like gullies were we used to play in. I didn’t see the gullies in this dream, but they must have been there, hidden by grass. I guess those gullies had always been there for that purpose — for saving us from a fearsome flood of water out of a heavenly land, when the time came. Those gullies were so dry with crumbly red soil and had those little desert-like ferny weeds I suppose they might have the power to absorb a river, given a little artistic license.
The river continued to pour heavily down our hill and to to soak into the ground, and then something came down the hill riding the river. Not a boat, but a long, old-fashioned train, with the cars alternately painted pink and blue, not shiny but in a matte finish, like the ink illustrations in an old magazine.
The train didn’t crash into us nor get absorbed into the ground. Instead, when it hit the last bend of the river, it failed to make the turn and went flying straight ahead, into the air. The whole train flew over our heads and over the big sycamore tree at the bottom of the loghouse hill, barely clearing that tree, and the whole train crashed into our driveway between where we were standing and the blacktop road.
We had been so glad to get home from the wonderland and its dangers — there had been some difficult walking, and some dangers as we flew through the air — and especially glad, for some reason, to see the farmhouse across the road from us, and those familiar forested hills beyond it, and even the old gray barn — now in a restored condition. But after the train crashed, there was a wave of terrible reality, like a concussion shock. All the land on the other side of the blacktop became hidden by dust and a waviness in the light. Overhead we began to see a terrible turmoil. The sky became dark with storm clouds, with a bright, spinning area almost straight above us. We finally made out that the bright vortex was full of aircraft of every size, all the military aircraft of America being sucked away into airless outer space or someplace even beyond that. It was terrifying.
But when the commotion died away and the dust settled across the road, we saw that Warren County had been remade. A big self-driven vehicle like a very big RV came along slowly enough for us to climb aboard. It took us across the road to where the driveway in front of the old gray barn had been, and continued farther and farther north from there.
The farmhouse and barn were gone. All of our buildings were gone. So was our terrain. The hill beyond our former buildings continued higher and higher and higher, much higher than that landscape really is. And as we travelled north beyond our own land, we saw houses and roads forming into completion. First it all had the raw, recently earth-moved look of a future subdivision, but the trees quickly filled out and the houses finished themselves and everything took on a patina of years. All the houses were lovely, build in slightly futuristic styles, but not the cartoony, overly curvy styles we usually see imagined for the future. It was a very peaceful, civilized subdivision of vast extent. It had spawned at Holiday Ranch, out of our family’s original dream, and developed ever northward and ever higher, surpassing the height and extent of Lake Sherwood by a large, large margin, surpassing anything ever seen for height and extent, yet always with a commonplace modesty and livability about it.
Well, I was the only one who able to see all this, most of the time. I would describe what I was seeing, and all of your others would then see it with your imagination. It was a dream happening to me, but as I told it to you guys and you began to see it, too, it became real. We were all swept away up by the wonder of it and the perfect-ending of it, and Dad said, “Tom, you have a gift. You need to continue and finish this.”
There was one thrilling moment when we were still in the wonderland. Our vehicle had just become airborne, and a stream we had been following through a peaceful cattle-mowed valley of farmland was now becoming a raging river. I described it that way, and you all began to see it in your imaginations, and then Bill said, “I reckon I’d like to see this myself,” and climbed out of the open front window of the aircraft, to sit on the front part of the vehicle — the “hood” of the aircraft — with his feet dangling above the wonderland. I had to pull him back in. When I liked about it was that he seemed at this moment like Tom Sawyer, being curious like that and talking in that way.
Woke up feeling the epic-ness of it and a deep pleasure at having been through experiences of that kind with my family again.
— Tom