Pyramid Lake

Aside from gambling, most people take Nevada for granted, but it is ancient. Pyramid Lake was once a part of the pre-historic Lake Lahontan and some of the oldest pretroglyphs in North America have been discovered there. It is located about 35 miles NE of Reno.

I mentioned on another page one of the strange experiences I had at the lake with what sounded like a banshee, but there was another time we were boating there and I happened to get out into the water.

Wearing a life vest, I stayed close to a friend’s boat and looked around the dark water. The water was so blackened that I could not see any part of my body below the surface.

What I felt was foreboding. The only fish I knew to be in the water were trout and the cu-ui but it felt as though I was waiting for a predator. Someone was talking to me from the side of the boat, but I could not take my eyes off the water. I glanced around and tried to keep my body very still.

Now this isn’t to say I have not had any run-ins with fish. There was a time when I went on a fishing trip with my grandparents to either Lake Lahontan or Indian Lake and I borrowed a large black inflatable round tube to take into the water. Of course, I fell right through the middle. My body folded slightly and I was under the water. The water was brownish-yellow and sediment floated all around me. My only thought was getting back to the surface. But just as I was about to reach the top, something bit me. I say it bit me but it honestly felt like I had been pinched straight on the right cheek of my rear-end.  Coming out of the water, I looked around to see if someone might have been playing a trick on me. No one was there.

While I was treading water in Pyramid, nothing bit me or even seemed to come near but it felt as though it could at any moment. The lake is huge. It covers 125,000 acres and is 344-feet deep. I wondered about the stories of the water-babies and the mermaids that roam the lake. Then I remembered when I was working at a law office during after high-school, one of the secretaries told me stories about her summer job at the lake. She liked to scuba dive and so she was hired to fish bodies out of the water. We would hypothesize about inversion layers and various reasons bodies wouldn’t float to the top. But it was her old saying that rang through my head that day, in the glaring sun, as I dangled half of my body into the cold water, “Pyramid keeps her dead.”

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41712169

https://scvnews.com/divers-searching-pyramid-lake-after-possible-drowning/

Interestingly, the origin story of the Numa is similar to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. There is also mention of a second wife and that the first might have been a mermaid. Additionally, the story also points to a set of wild children with the mermaid that the creator sent away and were lost, as well as children with the second wife that populated the earth.