Cowboy Enchantment - By Pamela Browning Page 0,5
observed. She’d been surprised to see cattle grazing peacefully as they’d driven through the gates.
“Yeah, I know. That’s the beauty of this place. Well, in the desert, after your valleys, there’s your basins—they’re low places with no outlets, as opposed to a valley, which is a low place with outlets. Basins collect white mineral deposits and become salt flats like the ones dotted with pools of brackish water that we passed after we turned off the interstate. At the edges of some of your basins, there’s rolling dunes, some of ’em right pretty.”
“Like at the beach,” she supplied.
“Except there’s no ocean. Now, apart from all the things I’ve mentioned, scattered around the desert you’ll happen upon such oddities as cinder cones and black lava flows from the days of volcano activity. Oh, and not to forget the strange shapes of the eroded rocks. It’s not always a welcoming place, this desert.”
“I guess that’s why there aren’t many towns. People didn’t want to settle here.” Erica recalled vaguely from history lessons that the nearby Cedrella Pass had been one of the main southern routes to California during the gold rush.
“Oh, people settled here. We’ve got the ghost towns to prove it.” Tony cackled with laughter. “Miners came, found gold, silver, minerals. We’ve got an old abandoned borax mine over on the hill. Shipped a lot of borax out of here in its day.” He pointed toward the north, and she saw bits of equipment strewn over a distant hillside.
She lost sight of the hill when they entered a grove of stately date palms surrounding a series of rock-lined pools. OASIS HOT POOL, said a sign near the biggest one, and several people were soaking in it, almost obscured by rising steam. “These are some of the seven springs right here,” Tony said. “That big pool stays at a constant temperature of 107 degrees, winter and summer.”
Erica took in the rustic benches placed here and there among the palms and a flock of guests drifting down the path toward the recreation hall wearing blue robes bearing the Rancho Encantado crest. “The weather is pleasant at this time of year,” she said. “I don’t think I needed to wear wool.” She’d traveled in a business suit.
“Oh, the temperature in the desert sometimes gets up to 120 degrees in the summer,” Tony told her, “but at this time of year you don’t have to worry about heat stroke. Could have some spring storms with rain, of course, later on.”
When they emerged from the palm grove, she was immediately struck with the grandeur of the scenery. The snowcapped blue mountains in the west loomed beyond a series of golden hills undulating in gentle folds. On the east side of the valley, jagged peaks rose abruptly to a height of eleven thousand feet, their parched flanks eroded into canyons from which boulders and rocks had emerged over the ages to form huge alluvial grades.
“So what do you think of Rancho Encantado so far?” Tony asked with a grin.
“It’s a little overwhelming,” she said honestly, at a loss to explain the infusion of energy she’d felt as soon as she stepped out of the van. She could not imagine how this down-to-earth old cowhand would react if she told him that the earth here seemed to throb with a certain energy, that the mountains seemed to be bending toward her in a gesture of inclusion. Amazingly her hair was infused with curve and body from the dry desert air so that it bounced around her ears and rose around her cheeks to frame her face. For the first time, despite her aversion to New Age anything, she began to wonder if there really was anything to that vortex stuff Charmaine had mentioned.
She knew from Rancho Encantado’s lavish brochure that the guest quarters were located in a series of low adobe buildings with names like Tumbleweed, Cactus Flower, Sagebrush. Erica’s suite was in Desert Rose. As in the other fourplexes, all the suites opened onto a central courtyard, which in the case of Desert Rose was occupied by a rock garden planted with giant cacti.
In one corner, Erica noted, a gnarled Joshua tree shaded a gray cat, which sat washing itself in the waning sunlight. When the cat spotted her, it stared at her for a moment before quickly slipping away toward the line of eucalyptus trees that separated Desert Rose from the stable. Seeing the cat disappear so readily gave Erica an eerie feeling, which she told