We're Off To See The Doctor

 Part 6, Getting Lost

          This was all new scenery to me. I hadn’t seen the other end of Luminous yet, so I was looking at everything with interest as we drove northward out of town. It was pretty much like the end of town I had become familiar with. Dusty buildings, mostly unoccupied, with a few little businesses hanging on. I finally saw the little grocery store that Maria had mentioned. Still, no one was out walking around. It seemed strange to see so few out in public. Maybe this town was just a vestigial relic, and the real business of Luminous took place out on farms and ranches in the remote rural areas.

            “Nice car, Mike. I like these things,” I said to break the ice with this exotic character.
            “It’s the doctor’s car. Mine is a gray mare, well, then there is my old pickup.” he said. “Doc figured that if you agreed to come talk to him, I better pick you up in his car."
            Soon it would be dark. I could see that. Late in the year as it was, the sun was low in the sky. Shadows were long.
            “Who is this doctor?” My question hung in the air for a few seconds.
            “Well, Mrs. Renton, he’s a guy who is kind of an expert in the kinds of things you saw up at home. He might be able to help you get back up there safely too. He’ll explain,” said Mike as he drove. He gave me a quick look to see how all this was sitting with me. I was okay with it, it was no worse than the rest of the last few days had been.
            “Call me Jenae, Mike, unless you want me to call you Mr. Flores! Since we’re stuck getting to know each other. Mrs. Renton is my mother-in-law.” One of my tired jokes. I thought of home. That hurt.
            “Did you ever hear about the Luminous Lights, Jenae?”
            “Are they like those other lights? The ones nobody can figure out?” I asked.
            “They’re both mysteries, but these are really weirder, I think. We’ll be out that way just as the sun goes down. You’ll see how Luminous got its name,” he said.
            “How far are we going?” I wondered.
            “Oh, I guess it's about ten miles.”
            He was maintaining a steady 70 mph. Ten miles wasn’t going to take long.
            The scenery was minimalist in the extreme. Tan desert floor, scrub brush, distant mountains. It was just like the photos. I felt like I was inhabiting a fictional place, in a way. I had experienced too many changes in too few days, and the road was making me sleepy.
            The highway changed.  We were heading up an incline into a hilly area. A few high clouds were lit up in fantastical colors by the sun, as it slipped behind a smooth hill.
            “Here we go, Jenae.” He pulled over onto the verge and stopped. “Look over on that hillside. Watch for a few minutes. You’ll see it.”
            I did. Right after the sun dropped, patches of moving glow moved slowly across the low hill. They were not small either. It was like swathes of shimmer, as if it was made of particles of light moving together like those flocks of starling do up where I came from. These murmurations were much slower, and they came in wave after wave. The color changed too. Sometimes gold, sometimes greenish. At one point it looked purplish. It didn’t stop either.
            “Nobody has even been able to find out what does that,” said Mike. “If you go over there, close, you don’t see it. It’s only visible from a distance. There are a couple other places where it happens.”
            “You’re right. That is way more impressive than a couple of balls of light bouncing around once in a while,” I said. I tried, but I couldn’t think of a mundane way what I had witnessed could happen, and yet, there it was.    
            It seemed like an epic metaphor.
            Mike pulled back out onto the highway, and we continued uphill into the Texas night.