Is Your Fun Noodle Broken?

I got in an hour-long soak at my favorite little off-the-beaten-path hotspring in Utah today. It was salty, ionic heaven. It was also raining, which cut my fun short. I got edgy when lightning hit so close the sky was still flashing when the thunder sounded. I was alone with an Aquafina in the hottest non-bubbly pool, enjoying the exterior cool of a moderate rainshower. As it was church day, there were only a dozen other bathers, each stewing in different thoughts. Even the two kids that were there were subdued. They floated on purple foam noodles with chunks out of them and stared at my tattoo, which is small but obvious as it's on the rounded frontside of my left shoulder, clearly visible next to my blue Speedo's spaghetti strap. It's a 1.5 inch square bass clef, not an uncommon symbol, but out of the context of a page of music it's baffling. It looks very much like a question mark. I was approached by a bather at Lava in Idaho last February who was a bass guitar player and assumed that's what I was referring to with my ink. He seemed disappointed when I told him it was for the trombone. I wanted to make sure he knew it was bass trombone, the lowest available brass unless you want to play the tuba. It didn't seem to make any difference to him. I couldn't bring myself to tell him that any instrument with visible strings intimidates me; they're just too high-maintenance. As he paddled away he said it was still nice to see a bass clef floating around.

Today was good therapy in more ways than just physical. The drive through canyons on fire with fall foliage was beautiful. Ogden Canyon has a decent river and railroad tracks that wind and divide all along the highway, with symmetrical steel bridges and slim, dark tunnels through solid rock for the trains when the canyon becomes too narrow. There are two jagged ten-foot spines of granite running parallel down the mountain that form a landmark called Devil's Slide; in my mind, the story goes that Christ drove Satan into the mouth of Hell between the walls of the canyon, his heels digging a rut in the rock as the Lord pushed him by the shoulders down toward the pit. There are dusty quarries up the canyon's offshoots and an older hydroelectric plant on the river that blends nicely in old red brick, instead of a glaring industrial eyesore in sheet metal.

For a moment when I got to the Salt Lake valley I wanted to take I-15 South instead of North, just because I know where it ends, and I still occasionally think of that place as home. I love I-15 from I-80 all the way to where it merges with I-5 in south San Diego and disappears, no longer necessary. The best part of that drive is Las Vegas spreading out on the nighttime desert floor, like a sequin on an otherwise simply serviceable garment, but I like the polka-dot of towns (consisting of two dozen hotels and gas stations and just enough year-round residents to operate them) and the drop into a climate of almost unbearable humidity, after a summer in the Wyoming desert, that happens about 45 miles north of the San Bernardino valley. When I was small it seemed like scent started there, that distinctive odor that all of Southern California reeks of: green leaves and stems in various stages of growth and decay, and the dairy farms flanking the freeway in San Bernardino, and the traffic smells from LA and a salty hint of the Pacific beyond. Southern California is blanketed in a wet, hazy layer of bouganvillea perfume and pungent pepper trees and sour eucalyptus, salt sea air and the smoke of burnt rubber and oil. Unpacking things three years after coming back to Wyoming, that smell still rises up out of the cardboard boxes like a phantom, momentarily taking my breath away as I'm bombarded with nearly ten years' worth of memories whose originals were acted out in that tangible fog of scent.

I didn't think of any of that in the mineral soup today. I thought about a few people, and I thought about a few mistakes, and I thought about a few plans. Mostly I looked at the chinks in the kids' purple foam noodles and wondered where the missing pieces are, before realizing that it truly doesn't matter. They still function just fine. And unless you remove a vital organ, so do we. I got home in time to put away last week's clean laundry and paint a miniature vignette of purple storm clouds over the Wasatch range. When I finished and sat back to look, I saw that it was pretty good. Maybe even really good. And the peace it brought proves that I'm still good, even with a few pieces missing. And very likely, as in the past, I'm even better than before.