Typically, darkness prevails at the opening to most caves, but this night, from a small hole in the side of the vast San Jacinto, a spectrum of glowing slivers leaked outward into the open night air.  From far away it may have looked like a powerful star on the horizon exploding into another galaxy, but closer observation would reveal an equally magnificent event occurring within five miles of the desert city’s small central plaza.

A gentle breeze sails through the large boulder and palm singing to the creatures standing alert under the dark blanket covering the sleepy Coachella Valley.  Animals indigenous to the area surround the den’s entrance, finding their posts, alertly guarding against any intrusion to what is evolving inside the bright cave.

It was twenty years ago today, that the two impostors left Mestolio alone to face his fate on the street light above the El Paseo.  Since first flight, The Mestolio had known this day would arrive.  His claws wrapped about the steel girder as he braced for the inevitable.  His expectant eyes fixed straight ahead into the heated vacuum of the desert floor.  He saw the soccer ball,  just as he had dreamed since youth, hauntingly without kick, picking up speed, moving across the vacant playing field toward his perch.  It would soon all be over.  It would soon all begin.

In a fraction of a second, a single great wind fan whirled in a blur of white, a lone yucca tree suddenly bent to the ground and popped back upright, a cluster of sand blew across a small section of highway 111,  the great gust slammed the lone  soccer ball waiting at the field’s edge boardering Tommy’s casa.  This unique chain of events, like dominos falling, revealed the wind’s singular intricate path that would draft the Mestolio into an involuntary sideways vanishing act.

If two decades ago,  I hadn’t diverted my eyes to notice the approach of my beautiful bride, I may have noticed my newly acquired winged friend giving into that incredible force of nature.  For that split second I may have seen the Mestolio zip out of sight like a gnat atop a robust steam.

Who could have known that nature’s elements could have aligned to create such an exacting force, capable of instantly transporting a single defenseless pigeon to a small cave five miles away without witness.

Now, far off the El Paseo, away from the comforts of Tommy’s upstairs patio, in a hole at the base of the San Jacinto, Mestolio would lay dormant for twenty winters until making his return.

As with the wind before, for the years that followed to present, the Ancients had guided the sacred underground waters of the living desert to flow to and through the Mestolio’s ravaged beak.  The secret waters, which had eluded dinosaur and the entrapments of the post cambrian for millennium, were finally finding reprise in their timeless flow.  All that is or will be, was left to the awakening.

But typically, like a man of my years, I’m rambling and getting ahead of myself.

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