Girls' Imagination Gone Wild

(Apologies for the length of this post...) The morning after our guests left, I hopped a plane to Vegas, where my good friend from high school days lives with her husband and baby. When we finally found each other in the airport, my friend had her 10 month old son strapped to her front in a Baby Bjorn, and the spectacle of cuteness was almost too great to bear. In the interest of our "Girls' Weekend," though, we had to abandon the cutie with his grandma, head out for a sophisticated lunch (on a typical Vegasy artificial lake, where the appearance of a pair of Canada geese, which are like pigeons in Minnesota, caused our waiter to get all Audobon Society on us and tell us what a rare treat it was to see them there...), and drive to an off-strip casino to meet some 30-year old gazillionaire who was going to caravan with us up to the "compound" where our Girls' Weekend was to commence. My friend's dad is, I guess, connected around town, and one of the people he has connected with is this young developer guy who, among other things, has a part in this kind of cooperative getaway property that was put together by some famous Vegas real estate family (and a bunch of other well-off folks). Somehow word got out that I needed a place to spend my girls' weekend, and the rest is history.

Actually, I don't really know what went down, but after locating the fellow, we followed his SUV up a very rough dirt road into the foothills of Mt. Charleston, through a gate, and into this, um, compound, I guess. There was a spring fed pond, with a pretty fabulous "boat house," which my friend and I both assumed was the place to stay. But no, we drove further up the road, past the horse paddocks and the caretakers house to the "main lodge," which was palatial, and appeared to have been decorated by Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. Outside the main lodge were three mini-cabins, and up another winding road, a fourth cabin with a loft and a bathroom complete with a glass-walled shower (glass walled to the outside, I mean, so as to titillate the creatures of the brush). The ranch or farm or whatever it was originally is in the high desert, with scrubby trees and bushes, and beautiful views of Mt. Charleston and the valley below.

We decided to stay around the main lodge, and our host (who was actually leaving- he had just driven up with us to make sure we found it and so he could show us the fantastically stocked liquor cabinets- ouch! says the pregnant lady) showed us around the place, and told us that he liked to just sleep upstairs in the murphy bed. After he left, we continued our Girls' Weekend by engaging in the well-known female bonding ritual of photographing each of the many, many dead and stuffed creatures which lived (or, you know, didn't live) in the lodge. I risk sounding ungrateful to the people who, out of sheer generosity of spirit, let two strangers stay at their ridiculously lavish getaway destination free of charge, but I have to say, surely there is a limit to the number of taxidermy elements you should include inside one building. The place, admittedly, was huge (maybe three thousand square feet?), but still: one bearskin rug, one cow skin, one stuffed turkey, a buffalo head, a moose head, an elk head, a deer head, two pheasants, a wolf, and the piece de resistance, a snarling stuffed mountain lion (or bobcat or something) at the top of the stairs in the loft. And let us not forget the towering antler chandeliers, antler wall sconces, and, in the bathroom, antler magazine racks. Both lavish and super creepy.

(One of my new friends...)

We chose the mini cabin closest to the main lodge for convenience, and also because the other two had dead animal wall art (the bust of a snarling badger, for example). Before dinner, there was an extremely slapstick episode wherein we frantically paddleboated away from one of the caretaker's friendly and very mangy dogs, who swam obstinately behind us with the calm determination of that robot cop in the second Terminator movie. After we prepared our yummy dinner in the ginormous kitchen (Which refrigerator has the condiments? Oh, this one over here.), and scrolled through three hundred satellite channels on one of the staggeringly large TV, we decided to head to the little cabin for some magazine reading and chit chat before bed. This is when things began to go, though not horribly wrong, just, I guess, wrong. As I tried to turn on the little TV, an ominous high-pitched whine filled the cabin. OK, so we wouldn't watch the Chris Rock DVD that someone had thoughtfully left in the cabin for us. We climbed up onto the bed plateau, and the whining started again. After which, of course, the lights went out, and despite an army of decorative candles, the lighter was not functional. As good a time as any for sleep, we decided. But as we laid there in the complete darkness, a feeling of unease crept into my consciousness. This feeling was followed by two complementary reflections. One: Was this not a perfect horror movie setup? Two women completely alone in a big nice facility in the middle of nowhere? A "caretaker" who lives on the property with a pack of dogs, that the women haven't met? A door on the cabin with a lock that does not function convincingly? The power going out? Never mind the subtext of women deserving punishment for leaving their husbands and babies behind. Yikes. Two: The Gift of Fear. Which is some book that has been mentioned more than once in an online advice column I read, and the gist of which, I gather, is that you feel freaked out by people or situations for a reason, and you should be grateful and go with that to preserve your safety, since personal safety should trump your wish to be polite and gracious.

So convened the little terror conference in my head, and I asked my friend if she would be bothered (or think I was a freak) if I just moved the rustic chair in front of the door. She agreed that it was not at all a bad idea. Thus fortified, back to bed, pitch dark, and the whining noise started again. Augh! We decided to move back to the main lodge. Which appealed to pregnant me, since that's where the bathrooms were, but still meant walking a whole twenty or thirty yards through the extreme middle of nowhere darkness to a big inviting lodge with twelve unlocked glass doors all the way around. And lots of dead snarling animals. We made the move (and eventually even went back to the cabin for the comforter, together, with a tealight on a bread plate). We went around the inside perimeter, locking all the big glass doors. We convinced ourselves that it was surely a bunny when the motion detector light outside went on, then off, then on again. And we headed upstairs, past the snarling bobcat, to make up the murphy bed and have our pleasant dreams.

So generous was my Gift of Fear that I decided it would be a good idea to just lie quietly as my friend's sleep breathing became obvious, so that when the psychopath did creep up the stairs, I could at least have a moment of perceived agency before the inevitability of my doom solidified. Eventually, sleep prevailed. I have failed to mention in advance my friend's predeliction for terrifying sleeptalking when under stress. So when I was awakened, some time later, by my friend sitting up in bed, pointing to the corner of the room, and shouting, He's over there! He's over there!, it only took me the longest thirty seconds of my life to realize that's what was going on. The logic of the half-asleep convinced me that my friend was going to climb out of bed and go tumbling down the extremely steep stairway, so I patted her hand and asked her if she was OK until she laid back down. Then, another hour of shallow sleep until the sky outside began to lighten.

Unless your horror movie involves highway driving, hitch-hiking, or the like, the sunrise always brings a welcome respite to the terror. And so it was on our Nevada ranch- the sky was blue, the breakfast delicious, the patio perfect, the hammock relaxing, and the fear of dismemberment entirely dissipated. It was easy to feel foolish about the whole thing, and I still do. It was a beautiful place to stay, taxidermy notwithstanding, and there really was no need to muddy up a relaxing getaway with fear for one's life.

(It really was a nice place.)

Oh well. We did laundry, unlocked all the locked doors, tidied up, bid adieu to the menagerie, and headed back to town. After an embarrassingly long nap at my friend's parents' house (where I felt very, very safe, apparently), we fancied up for a formal event that was in honor of my friend's dad, ate some dry salmon and those tiny whittled down carrots that still have the greens on them, and did a couple of songs worth of frightening pregnant lady dancing (in my case) before heading home. My flight was early the next morning. Vegas, Baby!