changing messages

Sipping coffee and listening to the BBC for most of an hour.

I'm on the first lek at 05:27, thirty-two minutes before sunrise. I can hear the sage grouse strutting, but it's too dark to get a good count, so I sit in the quiet and wait for the day to begin.

I count 32 cocks on the lek, but the light is too poor to see hens. Since not all grouse gather exactly on the lek, I sweep to the left and right with the binocs. And off to the right, at my two o'clock (the lek at the usual nine o'clock position) I see...

Something.

And I mean, some thing. Some white thing, alone out there in the sage. Clearly too big for a pronghorn, my first thought was a white feral horse. There's plenty of horses around this part of the desert.

As I watch, it changes shape! Like a special effect in an old Star Trek, this white blob stays put, but changes shape!

My next thought was, a plastic shopping bag, snagged on the sagebrush, blowing in the wind.

But it's too big for a shopping bag.

And there is no wind. None. Not a whisper.

I mean, if you ever imagined what ghosts would look like, if they didn't look like people...

They would look like this.

Soooo. What to do? My apparition keeps wavering and swaying, but it doesn't look like it's moving. Certainly not getting any closer.

I eat my doughnuts, sip my coffee, and wait for the sun to rise.

By 05:39 I can count 44 grouse on the lek. Another check to the southwest finds my "ghost" unmoved, and still shapeshifting. But a closer look finally yields an explanation:

Balloons. My ghost is a cluster of white balloons. Hardly the first time I've found someone's helium-filled toys settling down out here in the desert. Since these occasionally have notes attached, I am sorely tempted to hike over and check them out. But I have four or five more strutting grounds I'd like to check, with over forty miles of dirt road to cover.

Gotta go. With luck, the balloon cluster will still be here when I get back.

And, a little over three hours later, they are.

I have been pondering whose balloons these might be. A white cluster might be from a wedding or, this time of year, graduation or prom. They could even be a classroom project, which I have found before. So when I hike over to the cluster, I am not that surprised to see an envelope attached.

Suspecting the balloons' launchers might want to know where their traveler ended up, I trek back to the truck for the GPS, and photograph the coordinates in situ.

And take a couple shots of the local scenery as well.

Only then do I untangle the string, and slit open the envelope. Inside I find a letter.

It is not what I expected.

I cannot imagine expecting this.

Ummmm, okay. I'm gonna go out a limb and say this was written by a young male.

A disturbed young, early teenaged male. Someone with a lot of hate inside.

The good news is, the envelope was still sealed. No one else ever received this message in the wind. But I have a hard time imagining why it was written, and why it was sent out into the wild.

But. Here it is. Tainting hundreds of miles of empty, pure countryside.

The sun has been up for several hours now, and the helium inside the remaining balloons is swelling, trying to rise.

This cluster of balloons is eager to get aloft again. So I let them go.

But not with their message of hate... no, I kept that here.

And added a short note of my own.