Now Playing: Colors - Halsey
Return of the big long posts from Yui. Hope this makes up for the lack of pictures and the inactivity. Things have been getting more stressful here in Homestead with conflicts between everyone. But lets get into the post
Do you have any childhood memories that have scarred their way into your inner brain folds in a funny and silly way that isn't highly traumatic but definitely scary for a kid? I have this vivid memory of walking along the highway leaving Homestead with my mom and dad. It was late at night, and one of our tiny itty baby horses had found its way out through a hole in the fence only a bit after being born
My mom wasn’t on horseback because we didn’t want to startle the baby and it couldn’t have gone far and my dad and I had one of our dogs with us. It had just taken off this way so we knew where to go and the dog had a scent it could follow
Pretty soon we passed by an old sign pointing into the desert. My dad brushed away the dust from the sign and made out the description but I didn’t catch it and I mustve not asked because already the dog was taking us in that direction, and I, eight years old, had no idea what to expect as I followed. Secretly I was terrified!!! I mean seriously imagine you’re 5 years old and you’re gotten up in the middle of the night because your parents decide its “learn how to catch that baby you got emotionally attached to bonding experience” time. I thought it was gone forever and I cried until my dad told me this was, apparently, routine at a farm so the more you know
A bit into the desert, past an outcropping of rocks, we followed a wash where there must have been an old dirt road nearby some long time ago, and wound up smack dab in what must’ve been someone’s property, like, years and years and years ago because all that was left was the frame, buckling under its own weight. I was a mega dumb kid (lol definitely why I had no friends) because I continued walking past the frame since I thought I saw something nearby. So I stopped where I was, looked around, and promptly realized my parents must’ve continued on without me because I was all alone
This is the part where I tell you that we did not know that I needed glasses. They weren’t very far from me at all. In fact they were just checking around quietly because the tracks ended nearby. We’d already been further than we thought we would go and my mom had just been complaining and so was my dad so the silence was sudden and new to me
Did I stay put? No see that would have probably been the better response. Instead I baby sprinted ahead to be helpful, trying to be quiet so I wouldn’t scare the other animal baby, but also I realllyyy wanted to call for my parents so it was like a lot of jumbled jangly pebble thoughts and I barely was thinking about where I was going because I thought I was lost. I remember almost hitting something, fumbling for my flashlight, looking up to see what I’d hit anddd
Bam
Giant fucking dinosaur head
So I need you to imagine being like 5 and you’ve never seen a dinosaur before and you’ve only just started to understand anything that makes sense in the world before now because you’ve only been alive so long and suddenly you are directly in front of the biggest lizard-like thing you’ve ever seen and you’re like ohhh that’s probably going to kill me. You don’t need to know what a dinosaur is to know that you’ve never seen this specific thing that looks kind of like the things that bite you in the yard just… Wrong and big and with sharper teeth
So I screamed and curled into a ball until my dad came and found me haha. My mom had the baby and they were just looking for me. I later found out that this place used to be a “digging for fossils” attraction, where they painted pieces of petrified wood and hid them in the sand and said “oh yeah this is bones” and I’d just run into their singular statue. It was a t-rex by the way, paint fading by now. It was from the 60s I believe, according to our local historian
As an adult you don’t really get to scream and cry until someone else makes things okay. Sometimes, you have to make it okay yourself. I hope someone else can relate
You can come see this place if you want. I visited today, and, woah!!! its still intact. Someone restored the paint at some point in like the 70s or 80s or something I forgot which was why it was so vivid when I’d last seen it. It’s almost totally fading now and I don’t trust in my artistic skills to restore it. The digging for fossils area is all gone (wooden house and a ton of monsoons and wind!) but I managed to find a singular piece of petrified wood
No picture because this was kind of just for me but you can come see it
Go from Homestead, past the gas station (we did not realize we’d have to go that far, my parents are great they did not mean to do this haha) and walk straight down the highway on the town-side towards the city. If you manage to get some petrified wood, email me a picture (yuicollins2014@gmail.com)! I’d love to chat with you
[OOC: Not a real email, but IC you can send an email <-- READ THIS OOC]