The Lost Prince of Death Valley

It happened in Death Valley, although I can’t swear that every detail is true. Time has a way of draping old memories in a thin veil of haze, softening the sharp edges until fact and imagination begin to overlap. As the years pass, forgotten details are quietly replaced by the inventions of an overactive mind. Memory becomes less a faithful record of events than a chain of fractured fairy tales linked together by moments that actually happened. So I’ll tell this story exactly as I remember it. The reader can decide for themselves where memory ends and imagination begins.

Death Valley, Nevada 

It was late summer 1984. We had just crossed into Death Valley, about two hours outside Las Vegas. I was eleven years old. My older brother, Christian, was twelve; my sister, Shannah, was nine; and Aaron, the youngest of us, was a mischievous six. We had spent the summer with our dad in Anaheim, California, and were now making the long drive back to Iowa in one of those wood-paneled Chevrolet Malibu Classic station wagons that seemed to define the era.

(more…)
Posted in North America, Tall Tales and Big Fish Stories and tagged , .