Columnist Susan Snyder: Springs are a cauldron of activity

Monday, Aug. 4, 2003 | 8:09 a.m.

It's hard to believe the Cactus Springs Station tavern caused a community ruckus.

It stands vacant and lonely looking on the east side of U.S. 95, three miles north of Indian Springs, which is about 45 miles north of Las Vegas. Four years ago its owners drew the ire of residents from the other side of the highway who opposed the owners' request for a liquor license.

They obtained the license, opened, then closed after struggling for a couple of years. Patricia Pearlman, who led the march against the liquor license, took a drag on her cigar and smiled a little.

"When you cross a witch, see what happens? Bad karma."

She was kidding -- about the implications of crossing a witch, anyway. Pearlman doesn't do things out of spite or for retribution.

She is, however, a self-described witch who works as priestess and caretaker of the Goddess Temple, a small rotunda a few hundred yards from her home. It's just one piece of this puzzling part of the desert just beyond the Las Vegas Valley's urban fringe.

There's Indian Springs, which is a trailer-park town with three churches, two schools and one casino where the blackjack tables stand covered during the day.

Cactus Springs is home to the witch, her partner, a Western Shoshone Indian and the 10-year-old temple dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. The temple hosts rituals for such events as new moons, full moons and equinoxes. It revolves around a pagan religion that Pearlman simply calls "the old way."

"We follow the old tradition. My great-grandmother introduced me to it. I was 3," the 63-year-old Pearlman said. "My aunts, my grandmother, grandfather and mother worked the path. We were considered 'superstitious.' That's the word they used back then."

Around here, folks might call her a busybody. Pearlman not only fought the tavern across the road, she fought creation of a gravel pit farther up the road, the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository across the desert and the black-powder rifle enthusiasts who practiced over the area's only spring, next to the temple.

Bureau of Land Management officials weren't even aware there was a spring in that spot. It wasn't on federal maps, Pearlman said, until she escorted a BLM official to its edges. The agency cleaned it out and fenced it off. Rabbits, coyotes and birds now are its only visitors.

Even the airspace is odd. Fat crows make lazy loops with Predator surveillance aircraft and fighter jets from nearby Nellis Air Force Base. When the jets fly too low, Pearlman calls the Air Force.

"People say to me, 'What do you do out there? Don't you get bored?' But I've got many cauldrons on my stove," she said.

She offers spiritual guidance to inmates at the state men's and women's prisons several times a month. And she spent last Wednesday morning baking bread for Friday evening's Lammas ritual, which celebrates the first of three fall harvests. The faithful travel from all areas of the valley. One regular drives up from Laughlin.

"It's amazing how many people in Las Vegas don't have the slightest idea we're out here," Pearlman said. "But then, I knew a lot of New Yorkers who never went to the Empire State Building."