Departures: East to the West: Part 9

Our animal pals... The journey home...

Back at the Ranch

Since we were going to be leaving early the next morning, we decided to settle up bills right then. There followed an amusing episode in which Bryan and Brendan tried to split the bill for their room between their credit cards, hampered by the fact that Brendan had already paid for more than half of the total. Wrong charges where made, charges were taken off the wrong cards, corrections were made. Dave groaned and asked if they couldn't just take care of this with cash. Part of me noted that Dave didn't get into a screaming argument about this. Eventually the finances got worked out. Soon we were back in our rooms. It was after ten, and our flight was leaving at six the following morning. I was very glad I'd scheduled a vacation day.

The world's hugest moth was fluttering around inside the bathroom. I tried to ignore it, and failed. This thing was menacing in its ickiness; I knew that if it touched me I wouldn't be able to stop twitching for hours. What to do? I looked around. I was surrounded by an arsenal of towels and washcloths, thoughtfully provided by the Rancho. With the application of water, a corner of terrycloth was turned into a suffocating net of doom. I dumped the ex-moth into the toilet. It stared up with baleful eyes. I looked down at it. I needed to sit on this toilet, but there was no way I was going to sit down with this dead moth looking up at my... uhm, at me. I flushed the toilet. Sure, we were in parched country, but this was an emergency. I sat down, and things were going smoothly when all of the sudden someone tapped me on the shoulder. I looked around wildly. There was no-one. Someone tapped me on the other shoulder. Eep. It must be another moth. It was fluttering around and being icky at me. I, uhm, pinched and got up. I flushed the toilet, so as to be ready for anything. I looked around. There was no moth. There was no nothing. What had tapped me? I looked up. There was water condensed on the ceiling. Water. Water had dripped on my shoulders. Perhaps this was a punishment from the water gods for my previous wastage. I wiped the ceiling, sat, finished, and wiped. It had been a long day. I flushed again, apologizing to the water spirits.

I crawled into bed next to Dave. My ears were still ringing as they had the night before. My nerves were jangly from my bathroom crises. It was still way too quiet. I was still on the wrong side of the bed. There was no way I was ever going to fall asleep. I fell asleep almost immediately.

On Monday morning, the radio started blaring at 4:30. It was time to get up. It was time to go to the airport. It was time to go home. I thought, "The writer rose before dawn/he put his shoes on." I thought, "I need a new joke." I made sure that I'd packed everything. Soon we were on our bleary way.

We sped on towards the Santa Fe airport in the pre-dawn dark. We made the first turn correctly, and knew it as we headed past the house of correction. The road for the airport was harder to spot. There was a sign, but there weren't really stripes drawn down the side of the road, and it wasn't so easy to tell that the thing we were turning onto was really a road; it could have been someone's driveway. Fortunately, there was a sign there telling us that we had, in fact turned the right way. Bryan says that in California, there are signs to tell you when your turn is coming up; in Chicago there are signs that tell you that you've missed your turn. Here in New Mexico they were extra careful--warning you of the turn, and then telling you that you've made it. We achieved the airport, cleaned out the car, checked in at the counter, and sat in the lobby for a while.

For the flight to Denver, we were once again on a little prop-driven plane. This time I was sitting in the back row, shoulder to shoulder with an older gent in a cowboy hat. Somehow, I managed to sit down next to him without either of us getting too confused.

The sun rose during our flight. I watched it for the duration, so I guess that means I watched the sun rise for over an hour. I think this was an appropriate way to spend my time. First, the sky turned red. Then the sun caused the undersides of some streaky clouds to glow white-orange. One realized after a while that a dark mist lay upon the land. A while later, one realized that black mountains rose up from this mist. A very few of these mountains had patches of snow on them. When the sun actually rose, it was tragic--suddenly, the glow was gone from everything; instead one could see the details of the hills; one could see the scruffy growth on the ground; the earth had turned on its bathroom light, revealing that it needed a shave.

I forget the exact point at which the gentleman next to me addressed me: "Pretty sunrise." I thought, "Pretty?" Here was the Earth glowing like a cinder, but not a remnant--no, it was glowing with the blaze to come. A black mountainscape against a black mist; this mixture of the solid and the gaseous which revealed itself to the eye as a contrast between sharp lines and those of a fractally complicated nature. One got a hint as to the age of the mountains in that they were smooth; if the fog had been as old as the mountains, then surely the wind would have worn down its wisps--here was a study of permanence, rendered in mist and rock. I swallowed. This guy seemed nice enough. He wasn't making fun of the sunrise or anything. He just thought it was pretty. "It's mighty fine," I replied. I think I might have been twitching as I said it. He didn't say anything else.

At the Denver airport, our foursome broke up. Having said our goodbyes and passed on our good wishes, Dave and I boarded the plane to San Francisco. The man sitting next to me was an older white guy in a suit reading the Wall Street Journal. Pretty soon after he sat down, his elbow started taking up most of the armrest between us. Since I was sitting in the middle of three seats, and he had an aisle seat, I was ready to take issue with this typical grab-what-you-can selfish capitalist behavior. I started to swell with indignation. He removed his arm from the armrest and grabbed ahold of the seat in front of him, leaving his arm suspended in the air. This was strange behavior. I'd never seen anything like it. I looked at his arm stupidly, then settled in and started reading.

Two geeks were sitting behind us. They seemed to be some kind of mechanical engineering geeks, coming out to check up on a dam or somesuch. Their conversation was interesting. They talked about how things wore away, how things slowly disentegrated, how impacts could break things apart. It seemed that every fifth sentence touched upon the transient nature of structures. It was like the voice of time itself, relentless. I got the impression that these people had a different idea of "solid" objects than I did. In my head, I understand that everything falls apart; they understood it in their hearts.

I spotted Stanford University from the air. We were back in the Bay Area. Soon we were on the ground. There was a slight detour as both Dave and I were wrong about where we'd parked, but this was soon taken care of. Soon Dave had driven me home. Soon I was asleep.

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