Iron Fist

I was in Seattle (briefly) at the end of last month, and counting on my fingers just now discovered that that Saturday was eleven days ago now, which is six and three-quarters months in Internet time (eight months if you’re using the Canadian Internet calendar), which hardly makes for breaking news if I were to write about it now, but — BUT — I had a really good time when I was there, and got to talk with a lot of cool people, some of whom I’d met before and some not, but all of whom were good to spend time with.  Whew!

Oh!  And there was a Starbucks (see FIGURE 1 above).  The first one ever, at the Pike Place Market, which was much more crowded than the last time I was there, but we still had a good time picking our way through the tables and finding sweet things to snack on.

I came away from Seattle, and that awesome meet up full of happy people and cold beer, with a single directive, multiple persons all sending the same request my way: “Write more, you big hairy ape*.”  So, I will.  Honest!  Because I seem to have a fair bit of free time on my hands these days, since in the eleven days since I visited Seattle I seem to have—

—AHHHHHH!!!  Stay tuned.

(*to be fair, I don’t think anyone actually called me a big hairy ape; I usually use this appellation when addressing myself.)

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“What will this do?” I asked the woman in the white lab coat.  She was using her applicator to spread a cool gel on the back of my calf; a shiver went up my leg from the tingling sensation of the fluid.

From the edge of the table, just out of my sight, she answered, “The nanomachines are in solution in this gel.  After I finish applying it they will swim between the cells on your skin and into the tissue of your leg, where they will begin to repair the damaged nerves.”

I spend a moment there laying on my side taking this in, picturing these tiny mites waving their legs of carbon atoms, crawling across cell membranes like spiders skittering across pond water, coming at last to the fine strands of nerve fiber, whereupon they would scavenge what they needed and begin to weave new tissue, trailing the gossamer strands of new neurons behind them as they wrote new sensation into my leg.  I turned to look at her over my shoulder.  “And so…it’ll just work?  They’ll just…fix me?”

She smiled.  “Yes, it will just work,” she said, and yet didn’t say at all.  As before I found that I didn’t really seem to be hearing her words so much as I knew what she was saying.  Certainly her lips never moved.

I turned away from her, thinking about this.  Wondering what it would be like when they were done.  I could sense the doctor starting to walk out of the room, and suddenly it hit me: she’d put the salve on the wrong leg. “Wait-” I said, turning over  –

–and fell some indeterminate distance, falling solidly upon my bed, face down, eyes opening with a start to focus groggily on my pillow.  Oh, no.

There’s a trick I learned some years ago, one that I can’t teach, can’t explain how it works, where I can push myself back into a dream if I do so immediately after waking.

pleasepleasepleaseplease

I close my eyes again, and slide back into the peculiar floating warmth of the dream.  My bed gives way to the operating table.  Blankets disappear, and I’m in the hospital gown again.

you have to come back, it’s the other leg, you need to do the other one

I open my eyes again, see the doctor in her white lab coat walking from the room.  “Wait!” I call out to her, in the same speechless method she used to talk to me.  She stops, turns towards me.  I start to tell her about how it’s the other leg that needs to be treated…

...for all the good that will do me, I realize.  I already know this to be false, these walls only mist, the doctor only a shadow.  The magic is gone, the sudden reappearance of the hospital room no longer a miracle now that it is revealed to only have been the result of a cleverly placed mirror this whole time.  For years I’ve tried to pull things back with me into the waking world, coming out of dreams with fingers locked firmly around newspapers from my hometown, fine china teacups, hot breakfasts, bicycle wheels.  I’ve yet to return to my body anything but empty handed.  Surely this superscience cure of molecule-sized robots will be no different.  “Nothing,” I tell her.  “It doesn’t matter.”

The doctor smiles at me again, and walks out of the room, no doubt dissolving back into sand as soon as she leaves my sight.

I close my eyes, open them again.  Roll over on my back.  Stare up at the ceiling of my bedroom.

I wonder about my dream counterpart, if he ever gets tired of driving up and down highways along the coast, walking through ever-changing yet hauntingly familiar cities, jumping off building tops to float lazily to the ground, if he ever gets weary of never being cold or having swollen joints.  Maybe he’d like to change places for a while, go sit in my chair in the office, stare blankly at a computer screen all day while I ride a tiger through the park.  Maybe.

Probably not, though.

Dreams, why must you vex me so?

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On my trip to our Salt Lake City office I arrived to find that they are even more disorganized on the Utah end of the operation than they are at home, and all the company cars were missing and no one seemed to know where they were.  When it came time to call it a day and none of the cars had happened to wander back from where they had gotten themselves lost, there was a bit of a scramble and eventually it was decided that I could take one of the big work trucks for the night.  I sighed in resignation, tossed my overnight bag and laptop across the bench to the passenger side, and climbed up into the cab of the giant GMC truck for the drive into town to my hotel.

After a few hours cooped up in my room I decided that what I really wanted to spend my dinner allowance on was a pizza.  A big, greasy pepperoni and sausage pizza.  Yelp! turned up a few promising places; I picked one that sounded about right for what I had in mind, memorized the directions, and wandered down to the parking lot with the truck keys in hand.

There had been few cars when I checked in, but now the first level of the parking garage was nearly full.  Things were a bit cramped, and the truck was a bit longer of a vehicle than I was used to, but I judged that I shouldn’t have too much trouble backing up and driving off in one straight shot.  I climbed back up into the truck and started the engine, slowly backing up and watching the car parked to my left as I turned the steering wheel.  Satisfied that I wasn’t going to scrape up my neighbor on the way out, I turned to look over my shoulder, only to discover that for some reason a man was standing directly in my way.  And when I say directly, I mean it — if I there had been crosshairs mounted on the rear gate of the truck he would have been dead center in them.  Surprised, I stopped the truck, probably less than two feet from where he was standing.

And the man just stood there, looking down.  I could only see the top half of him, and couldn’t make out quite what he was doing.  Was he drunk and had stopped right there to take a pee?  Held frozen in fear by the sight of a mouse?  Being mugged by a dwarf?  No, it wasn’t any of these things, and after a moment I recognized enough of the tell-tale signs to realize that this was a person Playing With His Mobile Device.  I gave him a minute to notice that hey, there’s a big truck immediately to your left, but when he showed no sign of moving along I brought my hand up to hit the car horn…

…and I wondered.

I wondered what it would take to get him to notice that there was a truck right next to him.  Apparently the nearby rumble of the engine in an enclosed parking garage wouldn’t do it.  The bright red glare of the brake lights wasn’t triggering a response, either.  For as close as I was, the exhaust had to practically be blowing on his legs.  Curious as to what it would take to trigger his proximity sense of HOLY SHIT THERE IS A 2-TON TRUCK RIGHT NEXT TO ME, I began tapping on the brake, letting the truck inch slowly back towards him.  So now, in addition to truck noise, diesel exhaust, and giant mass of slowly encroaching steel, he had the added warning factor of bright flashing red lights as I tapped repeatedly on the brakes.  Closer.  Closer.

How oblivious do you have to be to fail to notice a long bed truck slowly filling up the entirety of your peripheral vision?  How had natural selection let this man down that he was unable to detect an enormous truck inching closer and closer to hitting his legs?  How would someone like this fare against a natural threat more dangerous than a tree stump?  I began to imagine him as a caveman on a savanna in mankind’s distant past.

“Moog.  We need to talk.”

“Hey, Buldar!  I found some sticks!  You know, for the fire.”

“Ah…I see that.  Listen, Moog — you’re a nice caveman and all, but I just don’t think you’re going to cut it here.  You can’t hunt.  You can’t gather.  You don’t seem to be able to make fire on your own.  You even got lost inside the cave once.”

“Hey look, if this is because of what happened on the last hunt–”

“Yes, Moog.  This is because of that last hunt, where we were hunting the mighty cave deer, and you were so engrossed watching some beetles that you didn’t notice that stag nearby and it knocked you over into a ditch.”

“That deer totally snuck up on me, Buldar!”

“How, Moog? You were in the middle of a prairie. It just sauntered right up to until it got close enough to hit you with its antlers.”

“But…but…”

“Look…you’re gonna have to go.  Maybe there will be a time after so many winters have come and gone that no man now alive can count them, and the tribe will have grown so large that they can support someone who looks at shiny pieces of obsidian all day but can’t make a decent spear-head or trap a hare, but the glaciers are coming closer and we need everyone devoted to making sure we survive the long cold ahead, and as such there is no place for you in Buldar’s Tribe.  Sorry.”

“Fine!  Whatever, Buldar!  I’ll leave, but I’m totally taking these sticks with me!”

“That’s actually part of an antelope thigh bone and a piece of dried mastodon turd, but you’re welcome to them.  Good day to you, Moog.”

I had to be less than a foot away from him now, and still: nothing.  Concerned that I might actually knock him over, I stopped.  And waited.  And when it seemed that I was going to have to hit the horn and scare the bejeezus out of him, Moog came to the last of his emails and looked up, and then to his left, and made the face that meant WHERE THE FUCK DID THIS TRUCK COME FROM?  Properly embarrassed, he ran around to the passenger window, waving his Blackberry in weak apology.  ”Ha ha, you know how these things are!” he said.  I rolled my eyes and nodded, and continued backing up now that he had vacated the last two feet of empty space I needed to finish backing up.  In an effort to make amends he ran back towards the rear of the truck, windmilling his arms in the direction I was already moving, calling out “YOU’VE GOT PLENTY OF ROOM!  YOU CAN BACK UP MORE YOU HAVE ROOM!”

I shifted gears and gave an absent-minded wave through the rear windshield as I drove away, not sparing another glance for that lousiest of cavemen, hoping that another tribe would take him and his Blackberry in before he froze to death in the coming winter.

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“Check it out, Landon,” I said, holding my compass at eye level and sighting along the top of it to a point out on the water.  “You decide on where you want to go, and then turn this bezel thus, and then we’re going to swim out in that net direction, and when we’re ready to come back home we just line up the compass arrow with this pointer and it will lead us straight back here.  Get it?”

“I think so…”

“It’s the same as vector addition!  Trust me!  I’ve got it all figured out.”  It was the second day of our open-water dive certification, and my diving partner and I were the two top students in the class.  We’d out-swam every one else, done perfectly on all the tests so far, and were now on the shore just to the south of the pier at our dive site, preparing to submerge into what was for us as-yet-uncharted waters, right about here.  This was going to be our fourth and final dive for the weekend, and the first without our instructors.  In keeping with our trend of being the best, we’d decided we were going to swim deeper and farther than anyone else.  So far in our dives this weekend we hadn’t come close to the maximum depth of 60 feet at which we were rated at our level — on this dive we intended to go that deep, and see what there was to see that we hadn’t seen yet.

“If this is the right box,” Landon said, tracing his finger around on the little plastic dive table he carried, “then at a max depth of 60 feet we’ve got fifteen minutes for this dive.  That’s not a long time.”

“No,” I agreed.  “How do you feel about this – instead of submerging right away like we’ve been doing, what if we swim out to the buoy there before switching to our tanks and diving straight down?  It’ll give us more time to spend that deep, and we can swim back in the normal way, right back up the shore.  What do you say?”

“I like it!  Check my gear, buddy!”  We spent a minute or so checking each other’s tanks, straps, buoyancy compensators, respirators, and all the other things that were supposed to keep  us alive underwater.  Another few minutes spent hefting our scuba gear onto our backs and strapping into it, and we were ready to go, waddling awkwardly towards the water where we’d be much more free to move.  Fins on, masks cleared, we sighted on the orange buoy about forty feet from shore before biting down on our snorkels and kicking away from the land where most sane people spend their lives.  Once at the buoy, we swapped out our snorkels for regulators, took a few test breaths to make sure our air was working, and after flashing the A-OK sign to each other, jack-knifed ourselves heads down like ducks diving under the water and let the air out of our BCs, heading straight down towards the unseen bottom of Hood Canal.

It wasn’t long before the rocks and seaweed and sponges that line the bottom of the ocean came into view, and I started fiddling with my BC, trying to let just the right amount of my precious breathing air into its air bladders to keep me just buoyant enough to float a few feet above the sand.  I looked around to make sure Landon was still with me, and then checked my diving gauge.  Forty-two feet.  Another A-OK sign flashed at each other to indicate that neither of us was in imminent danger of drowning, and then my dive partner and I swam further away from land, following the gentle slope of the land down towards our target depth, kicking hard because the clock was ticking.

After a bit we came to a little upside down boat, startling a school of fish that had been hiding underneath it.  We swam around it, Landon pointing his flashlight at a crab that went skittering sideways away from us, and I remembered to check my dive gauge again.  Sixty feet.  Finally. I grabbed Landon’s shoulder, and pointed at my gauge, and then pointed roughly south.  He understood, and as we’d planned we were going to swim parallel to the shore to keep from going any deeper for as long as we could before hitting the half-way time for our dive and turning reluctantly in the direction of land again.  Or, that had been the plan – in my mind this sunken boat was a good landmark to find again, since we were swimming directly away from it.  All we have to do is reverse course, find this boat again, and then hang a left and we’ll end up right where we left the shore. Sweet! Of course, there was no way to communicate this insight and change of plan to Landon while underwater.  I was in charge of time-keeping and navigation, though, so I’d just point us back this way when the time came.  He’d see the point of it all later.

I don’t know what we’d hoped to see down there, deeper than any of our classmates had gone.  There’s not much sixty feet down in Hood Canal, just eel grass and sand, and the occasional sponge.  Most fish seemed to keep to a shallower depth, and even the crabs had left us.  Not much light penetrates the deep, so our whole world shrank to a bubble about fifteen feet across.  It’s sort of barren and spooky, to be honest, and it somehow seems even quieter, although there’s little to hear when scuba diving beyond one’s own labored breathing anyway.  I was sort of glad to be able to put this bleak landscape behind me when I checked my watch and noted that we were at the halfway point for our dive.  I swatted at Landon’s flipper, and when he turned to look at me I pointed at my watch.  He nodded, looked at his compass, and pointed in the direction that would take us back.  I shook my head, and in a complicated series of gestures said No dude, check it: we’re going to just go back this way that we’ve been swimming, find that boat, and then hang a left.  It’ll be cool!  That’s how we’ll know we’re lined up to go straight back towards where we left the land.  See?

He looked down at his compass, looked up at me, and pointed at the shore again, saying: Should we not trust in science and the instructions of our teachers to find the way back?  Weren’t you the one who told me how this navigation thing worked at that these compasses would guide us safely home?  Are you high or something?

I shook my head and gestured again.  Goddammit, look at what I am trying to tell you with my hands here.  Us.  Boat.  Hang a left.  Land.  It’ll be rad. Though little of my face was visible through the tiny circle of glass on my mask, I tried my best to make an expression that conveyed TRUST ME I TOTALLY KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT, I’M LIKE A GENIUS OR SOMETHING AND SOON WE WILL BE EATING HOT SANDWICHES.  He shrugged, and we swam back the way I was pointing.  Kicking hard, keeping Landon in my peripheral vision, I waited for the little boat to materialize from the gloom.

I never saw the boat again.

With such low visibility, I would not have had to have been too far off course to have sailed right past it.  It seemed big enough that it should have jumped out us, a welcoming beacon showing us the way home, but we didn’t have to be more than twenty feet away from it for it to have been completely invisible.  I looked down at my watch, realizing that we should have seen the boat by now.  Eleven minutes of dive time left.  I grabbed at my compass, guessed at our location, oriented us towards land, and started kicking even harder.  A minor setback!  We’re still the best scuba divers in this class!

I was hoping we’d see something encouraging to show that we were getting closer, though I don’t know what.  A familiar rock?  A sponge that I might recognize from a previous dive?  Other divers from our class?  It was a big ocean and we were only able to see ten or so feet of it at a time.  At least we seemed to be heading back up, although with out any reference points it was hard to tell.  Worried, I re-checked our direction on my compass, and my depth gauge.  Eighty feet. I stopped in the water, looked around.  Shit shit shit!  Had I really screwed up, pointed us in the wrong direction completely?  We were getting deeper. Were we headed out deeper into Hood Canal, farther from land? I shook my compass in case it was lying to me, checked our direction, and resumed kicking.  This should be the right direction, but we weren’t supposed to have hit eighty feet!  I had no idea where that put us on the dive tables for maximum safe submerged time.  Those tables had a bit of a fudge factor built in, but I shaved two minutes off our time remaining anyway.  Seven minutes.

We soared along in our gloomy bubble, around odd clusters of kelp, the ground racing along underneath us, kicking up silt in our wakes.  Fish sensed us and schools veered out of our way.  The cold was seeping in through my wetsuit, numbing my limbs.  If my breathing regulator wasn’t in my mouth I’m sure my teeth would have been chattering.  Sixty feet again.  Four minutes.

I had no idea where we were, why we weren’t ascending faster, or why the pier I had been hoping to see some sign of hadn’t appeared or where we were in relation to the shore.  And who gets lost underwater on a navigation exercise, anyway?  Fifty-four feet.  Two minutes.

I began to despair that we were not headed in the right direction at all, that despite the compass pointing us in the known direction of land we were just swimming away from everything, either deeper out into the water or farther north, because Jesus Christ we were swimming as fast as we could and surely could have gotten to the next town along the shore by now much less found land and where the hell were we?  Fifty-one feet.  Time’s up.

I reached for Landon and shook his arm; when he was looking at me, I pointed at my watch, jerked my thumb towards the surface.  We’re out of time!  Bail out!  Emergency ascent! He nodded understanding, and we both raised the inflation controls on our BCs and began feeding them air from our tanks to begin our escape towards the surface.

Or at least, I thought that’s what we were both doing.  Mask pointed up as I watched for the light of the surface, I was probably twenty feet up before I realized my dive partner wasn’t with me.  I looked down, and saw him still at the bottom of the sea, unmoving.  I flipped over and kicked towards the bottom, wondering what the hell he was doing.  Please, please don’t let him be going into nitrogen narcosis or any of the other potentially nasty complications of breathing compressed air.  Shaking him to get his attention, I made a complicated series of gestures meaning Goddammit, what do you think you’re doing?  We have exceeded our maximum safe submersion time at this depth and need to ascend!  Do you want the fucking bends or something?!  Here, do what I am showing you with exaggerated gestures and put some air into your BC so we can start heading for the surface. He nodded again, moved his thumb over the control, and together we began to rise, watching the stream of bubbles from our steady and prolonged exhalations to make sure that we were not rising any faster than was safe.

The normal safe rate of ascent is one foot every two seconds, though in an emergency ascent you could rise twice as fast.  The best way to judge this speed was to watch your bubbles as you breathed out and not rise any faster than this.  And breathing out almost the entire time is important during the ascent is important as you get firsthand experience with Boyle’s Law: as the pressure outside decreases, the volume of air in your lungs increases, and you find that you are miraculously able to keep exhaling far beyond what life experience has previously told you should be possible.  It’s like trying to deflate an air mattress while some joker keeps pumping it full of air from the other end.  What would happen if you didn’t breathe out?  Well, take as deep a breath as you can, completely filling your lungs with air, and hold it.  Now imagine you had twice as much air in your lungs.  Seems like it would be messy, doesn’t it?

Eventually the water around us became lighter, and we broke the surface some distance out from the end of the pier, and on the other side of it from where we’d started.  Our instructor, standing at the end of the pier, saw us emerge far from where we’d planned at called out to us.  “Hey!  You guys okay?”

Breathing in the sweet, freezing December air, we waved our arms in the universal scuba signal for We are just fine and not quite as fucked as our unplanned emergency ascent might lead you to believe, thanks. Given the distance involved and how tired we were, it turned out to be easier to roll over onto our backs and kick lazily back towards land.  Landon recovered enough air to say, “Got this whole navigation figured out, huh?”

“Yeah, something like that.  Ugh.”

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I got out of town last weekend, dragging myself from the computer and far out of the way of any cell phone antennas, which made me realize how damn often it is that I plug myself into the internet in one form or another.  I twitched a few times from not being able to see what was happening on the twitter, but with the constant calming sound of a waterfall right next to our campsite I soon happily forgot that there was any world beyond what we could see through the trees.

It’s nice to check out every now and again, especially to spend time with some of your best friends.

It reminded me that I haven’t gotten in anywhere near the amount of recreation I’ve been wanting to this year, which is something I’ll have to remedy soon, because this whole showing up to work thing?  Not real rewarding lately.

But you know, I’m happy places like this still exist and that the Pacific Northwest is still as rugged and beautiful as it is. Next summer is going to need far more days like the ones I had this weekend.

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