here's life

So, it was friday, and I hurried out of work, and jumped on the turnpike, heading for KC. My flight was leaving about 4 and a half hours, just enough time to get there. I got a call from my mom. My destination in Ohio was getting snow, and flights were being canceled. My dad was in one airport. My grandfather was stuck in Atlanta. Well, I figured I’d just keep driving, and see what I could make of it. But when I got off the phone with my Mom, I had a voicemail, saying that my flight was canceled. Ok, so I dropped off the next exit, paid my 30 cents, and headed for home. I could go back to work. I could try to find a flight from somewhere that would get me there. Sometime, maybe tomorrow….or…
I called up Aduma. “What are you doing this weekend?” “I’m on a mountain, snowboarding. Tomorrow we might go climb a 14er”. An hour later, I had more warm clothes packed, and was heading west instead of east. I drove. And drove. Western Kansas is pretty, but it is long. At dusk I passed a wind farm—fifty turbines spinning slowly. Then it got dark, and all I saw were the white lines. And then, suddenly, I was there, and found a bed, and went to sleep. Well, it wasn’t sudden, but I did have some meaningful times of prayer and singing while riding in my radio-free car.
We got up early, and headed for the mountain. Not quite early enough, it would seem. There was lots of traffic. Well, alot compared to my little big city. And when the right lane ended, all the selfish jerks were driving past everyone on the right, and then merging in, slowing the whole thing to a crawl. I didn’t have the nerve to be a jerk back, so didn’t pull into the right lane and stop. I did try to run over some people who merged in because I wasn’t fast enough to close the gap. Yeah, about that. My car does ok in Kansas, where there is lot of air, and not much hill. But, you get out to the mountains, and it has a hard time. It may have been trying to skip 1st gear, but it would take a while to get going. On the interstate it just annoyed the other drivers. But once we got onto the mountain trails, it became difficult to manage. It was too curvy and slick to go fast enough to keep the turbo pressure up to give the engine enough power to get up the hills. At one point we had to get out and push because the road was too slick and steep, and full throttle just made smoke. Eventually, we got to the parking lot—well, it was where we parked, since the road was blocked with a ten-foot pile of snow. We were a couple miles from the trailhead, and we gave up on climbing the mountain. Instead, we walked up the road (and railing on the road that was level with the snow) and the followed a snow-shoe path to a hill where we did dive-rolls until we were worn out and covered with snow. The trip down was much easier. Except that the car in front of us almost slid sideways into an oncoming car. They both stopped in time, and I was able to run into the drift at the edge of the cliff and stop before running into them. We passed a hydro electric plant with lots of wires, and not much water or drop. Not sure how they managed it. We got milkshakes at the bottom of the hill, in the little town. The lady who ran the milkshake place wasn’t as good at it as the normal lady. Even if she had been doing it all her life, she’d only have gotten a few dozen shakes done. But not to worry because Becky had some spaghetti for us that evening. We had a good time hanging out, and Discussing Important Stuff. Like a name for my car. It earned the title “The Bloviator”. It blows alot of black smoke. But also, in a more sophisticated sense, it looks like an impressive luxury car, and it says alot about driving, but when it come down to it, it didn’t go anywhere. So, it is pretentiously contentless. About that time, we decided to watch UHF. “oh, yeah…they really hate it when you do this!” Shake, Shake, shake.
Sunday we went to church, and heard another excellent message—that makes two out of two. We went for a walk in the afternoon, in the “Impressive Backyard”. I needed to leave, but stopped to get icecream with the others on the way out. But, it was late, and I’d be driving tired, and we wanted to climb another hill in the morning…so I didn’t leave after all. I called a coworker and said I wouldn’t be in. We spent a while wandering around downtown, while part of our party waited for the train. Then aduma and I got supper, and talked about Life. Now I know what to do with my future! I’m going to go live in the woods and eat squirrels. Maybe some rabbits, after the first frost.
Monday started out like another other day. Getting up before sunrise, and heading off—oh, wait, not to work, but to 10732 ft. ASL and then hiking up a snow packed path, and picking our way through unmarked drifts and boulders, and finally summiting at 11722 ft. The view, like all weekend, was excellent. I mean, Kansas is great. It has some nice flat stuff, and some good grass-covered hills. But, it’s not quite like looking down on angled slopes covered with snow-covered trees, and looking over and seeing peaks that are coated with snow. And gazing off the cliff, resisting the urge to jump, hoping that this time, I’ll learn to fly. It sometimes takes a little bit to get the hang of it. Then, it was back down into town, more of the perfect weather we’d had all weekend, and this time I really left. Once aduma got my car started, cranking while I pumped the primer pump. The Bloviator was off and running! I took a scenic route across eastern Colorado, on a two lane that flew past farms and paused in little towns. It was good to see the heart of the communities along the way. It was also a pretty lonely road. I think I went about a half hour without meeting another car. And I drove and I drove. With my sunroof open. And I thought, and I tried to stay awake, and I troubleshooted a kludge of two wireless routers that a friend uses to steal wireless from the neighbors and re-broadcast it. (unplug them both, and then plug them in in cascading order, Does it work now?)
It was dark by the time I got to the windmills this time. They each had a red light on top, and nearly all of them blinked in unison. There was one light that was about half a blink slow. I was driving in the dark and I looked up at the bright stars–so much brighter than in the city, and I inhaled, and smelled…snow. What’s that? Why do I smell snow when I look at the sky? It doesn’t smell like snow in my car if I look out the windshield, but the sky looks like snow smells. It made me think of this page which I read about 4 years ago. It suggest that humans can sense infrared, with lets us see the temperature of an object at a distance. Well, we all know we can tell if some thing is hot or cold without touching it—your skin can easily say “I am in the sun” or “I am in the shade”. But, no, this is something different—or at least feels different to me. That smell of rain or snow. I think it was that I was “seeing” the deep cold of space. Space doesn’t radiate much at all—-sure there are stars, but they are really small compared to the coldness of the nothingness of space. And why do I sense it most when I inhale through my nose? It could be that I am in the habit of associating smells with inhaling through my nose, or it could be it gives me a sample of ambient air to use as a reference. Suppose I have sensors in the skin below my eyes that can tell th e temp of an object straight ahead by checking for heat radiating from it. Now, it might get confused because there is also heat conducting out of the air, throwing off the sensor reading. But if I knew what temp the ambient air was, then I could calibrate the sensor to accurately see how much heat is radiating off the object I’m looking at. And since that is the only way that we ever notice this sense, we think of it as a smell. Maybe we all have special superhuman powers…but we don’t know it. I guess if we all have it, then it’s not superhuman. Oh well.
Well, gotta get to sleep so I can get up and save the world! There are a bunch of planes in a file at work that have my name on them.