Posted on: September 30, 2003

"The Battle of Dry Lake"
 - by Jon Baas

The warm afternoon sun shines down upon Dry Lake. A young boy sits on the sandy shore, gazing out over it's sparkling calm. It's a beautiful day, warm, and perfect for a swim.... perhaps to the other side.

The boy's arms are stong, his swimming skillful, but he tires somewhere near the middle of the lake. So, resting for a moment, he drifts peacefully in the cool comforting water. He listens to the environment around him. All is calm. All is peaceful. When he finally feels refreshed, he resumes his journey. But something hard hits his leg just below the surface, and he stops.

Cursing the pain in his knee, yet filled with boyish curiousity, he dives below the waves to see what stationary object he ran into. He soon discovers, however, that the object is the broken mast from a sailing ship -- perhaps a schooner sunken in days gone by. Rising for air, and returning below the surface, his curiousity reveals that this mast does indeed belong to a wooden ship -- a warship -- mangled and torn in battle.

Swimming down around the hull, he surveys the haunting wreck. Down here the depths are still illuminated by the sun above, and the waters themselves are not as deep as he would have thought. Curiousity unbridled, he swims down further, alighting for a moment on the lake's bottom. This strange find intruiges him. He wants to learn more. Looking around, he sees that the lake bed is barren and upturned. There is no plantlife; no fish; no one but him. Death and emptiness are everywhere.

Then, as if his presence had been expected, the waters vanish. Air slowly fills the young boy's lungs, and be begins to breathe normally. His curiousity has free reign, and he continues to explore. He wanders around the wreck. The illumination from above has disappeared, the waters are gone, and the same lake bed is now dry and brittle. A cloudy night sky resides overhead.

Wide-eyed and growing frightened, the boy looks around in the dark at his new surroundings. Strange shapes of metal and upturned earth join the still-present wreck of the wooden warship. The shadows cast monsters in the moonlight, and the strange shapes reveal themselves to be old war machines jutting haphazardly from the pitted earth. Death and darkness permeate the landscape, and the moon bounces earily off the rusting vehicles. The ground cold, the air is warm. A battlefield surrounds the young boy.... A battlefield long forgotten at the bottom of Dry Lake.

Curious, yet fearful, the boy inches slowly toward a nearby trench of earth. A twisted metal vehicle thrusts itself skyward. The ground is hard, caked by years of no rain, and evidence of old mud entombs anything unlucky to reside within. Half-buried skeletal remains -- untouched for years -- litter the field, left to memorialize a battlefield no one remembers.

The frightened boy's eyes dart about the shadows. He hears a sound. Off in the distance, a coyote crawls out from beneath the shell of an old vehicle, another visiter to this broken past. Fear and curiousity surge within the boy. He hears another sound. He looks down. Near his feet the dry clodded earth moves, and he jumps back. In place of the skeletal remains rests a bedraggled soldier. The body moves. The eyes open, and the man sits up. He pays no attention to the wide-eyed youth nearby, but rather unearths his weapon, dusts off his bloody helmet, and crawls to his feet.

The young boy, paralyzed with fear, his bare feet glued to the dusty earth, watches as the ancient soldier rises slowly and makes his way toward a series of earthworks further ahead. He is not the only soldier brought to life. Others join him. Men of two distinct armies quietly... slowly... hauntingly rise from the dust and move to opposite ends of the field. The only sounds are those of shuffled movement and the whispering of the wind through the formations of earth and steel.

Mustering what little strength he can, the young boy slinks through the sea of soldiers to an area beyond the trench. He finds a large upturned tree trunk and hides behind it, watching as the long line of trenches silently fill with life. The moon passes behind a cloud, the shadows slither away. The boy is shaking. He's cold. He's frightened. He cannot speak.

The cloud passes and the shadows return. The jagged earth is empty now. The trenches are full, the troops ready for battle. Men climb onto artillery barrels, loading them with empty shells. Vehicles, no longer covered in dirt and rust, remove themselves from their crusty tombs and lumber painfully toward positions of battle. What was once a silent grave, has now become a field of war.

A man silently loads another shell into a nearby cannon, and ducks below the rim of the earth. The scene falls silent. Minutes pass. Long minutes. Nothing moves.

Then, with a sudden burst of energy, and a deafening roar of sound, the battlefield errupts into conflict. Shells explode everywhere throwing volcanos of dust and debris into the air. Shouts of battle pierce the night. Screams of the wounded crawl across the ground. Metal tank treads marr the earth, and the repeated popping of gunfire becomes a thunderous roar. The young boy thrusts himself deeper into the safety of his overturned tree and buries his head beneath his legs. He wills himself into uncontiousness. Everything falls dark as the battle around him intensifies.

Time passes, and the darkness subsides. The boy awakes. All is silent. He waits, afraid to raise his head. Then, as curousity grows within him yet again, he pokes his head out from behind the shredded tree and surveys his surroundings. The smoke of battle is drifting away. Nothing moves. The sky has grown lighter, but the clouds still hold out the morning sun. The battle is over, and the trenches are quiet. The stillness returns. Death and emptiness are everywhere.

For reasons unknown, yet with a boldness of curiousity, the boy crawls out from behind his tree. He surveys the unmoving environment around him. The war vehicles rest hauntingly thrust into the morning sky, rust covering them as before. The ground is pitted by battle, and the bodies are gone, replaced by skeletal remains half buried in caked earth. Once again, the scene has returned to the way the boy had found it.

Slowly he emerges and walks out into the past. He returns to the place he had first looked upon. All is as it was before. After a few minutes, the air begins to grow thin, and it becomes hard to breathe. The waters return, and the boy is once again swiming around the wreck of the old wooden warship. The twisted mounds of earth are shadowed on the lakebed, illumnated by the sparkling light from above, and the old rusted shapes jut upwards -- reaching to be remembered.

The boy feels his lungs call for air and he slowly rises alongside the broken mast. He breaks through the surface into the warm sunny air and once again finds himself drifting in the middle of the lake. Lost in thought, he decides not to continue his journey across the water. He turns around, returns to the sandy shore, and crawls up onto the grass, laying there in the peaceful afternoon sun. He watches the pristine calm of the lake and begins to wonder.... What was that? Dream or twisted reality? Or, had he just been witness to a history no one remembered?

Years pass, and time once again continues it's slow march forward. The young boy grows up, becomes a man, and moves on to more complicated things in life. The secrets of Dry Lake are forgotten.

Then, come one warm summer afternoon, a young boy sits with his friend on the grassy shore, looking out over the pristine waters of the lake. The sun shines down, and all is beautiful. The boy smiles at his friend, challenging him to a race. His friend accepts, and the two go for a swim -- a swim to the other side of Dry Lake.
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