The Marvelous A: March 2005 (She Cleans Up Nice)

Probability

If Harrison Ford accidentally stumbled into acting, then I’m living proof it can happen in any career, even Water Treatment and Distribution. I had an unaccountably large amount of fun today flushing my first fire hydrant. I guess it just takes a little imagination, because instead of spending this blustery afternoon on a crumbling sidewalk in the ancient uppity section of a Wyoming railroad town, I was on the corner of a simmering summer street in New York City in 1910, turning that cool water on a pack of ragged immigrant kids. A stretch for you, maybe, but not for me. (I’m inclined to believe I’d be happy for a certain amount of time in any profession. It’s finding the one I can bear for a lifetime that’s proving difficult.)

I’ve always liked fire hydrants. I love how some of the newer ones are a bit rounded and shaped just so, and on Halloween all they need is a polka-dot cape, rainbow wig and knotted pillowcase and voila, they look astonishingly like a little kid tottering down the street in search of free sugar. Not that I’m encouraging you to tamper with hydrants. I never realized how important they are. I could bombard you with intricate details of their ways and workings, or how they’re color-coded by capacity to facilitate the appropriate use by authorized personnel, but that might bore you. Instead I’ll point out that most modern hydrants have a flanged base with about a dozen bolts, so that when hit by a car, the top (“the part you can see,” to the layman) just pops right off and the expensive pipe and underground parts are undamaged and you can just screw the thing back on. They weren’t always like that. Somebody got smart.

But more about why I like them. For one, there are billions of them, and we all know how much cooler things are in multiples. Like in those Chrysler commercials (blech!) where they show a whole fleet of whatever they’re trying to sell (buy G.M.!), and watching the hypnotic maneuvering of that sparkling row of identical overpriced machinery you think “wow, if I had one of those, I’d be as cool as everybody else.” That’s where you’d be wrong. But you can always take advantage of how cool it is to be the one on your street with the hydrant in your yard. Think how many precious seconds are shaved off when your home is in flames and it takes the firefighters that much less time to drag the hose up the street. Of course, hydrants are surely a pain to mow around, and whenever they need flushed those pesky public works employees come out and dig up a circle of your turf about three feet in diameter and a foot or so deep. (This doesn’t matter in Wyoming. We don’t all have grass. We have bark, or pumice. You don’t have to mow or fertilize lava rock!) Another great thing about hydrants is the canine parade they attract, and if you’re a dog lover like me, you’ll be endlessly amused by what shows up on your corner.

Bruce and Dan say Mueller makes by far the best hydrants. I might tell you Mattel does, but what do I know? That’s the reason I get shipped off on gloomy days like today, still groggy from a whopping evil hit-and-run fever that rendered me capable of only one activity for one whole Monday: watching KPBS. But I have to learn, and Bud thinks nothing of shipping my pale, sniffling ass off in the old Ford to take the diffuser box to Bruce and stand shivering in a dry spring blizzard, waiting for that cute little hydrant to drain. Not that I mind. I just don’t like the two-way radio in the truck. (It reminds me of the cab company in Coronado where I dispatched the graveyard shift. This meant that I was on the phones when the sailors got tossed out of the bars at 1:00AM. Goodness, what a drunken boy far from home will say to a faceless girl on the phone! It didn’t help matters that I have an x-rated voice and too much tact and wit to just hang up on them.) One more hot toddy and I’ll have undone the damage sustained standing there with my post-fever head uncovered in the snow. It was still a really good day.

And just for the record, I don’t really despise Chrysler. They’re no more overpriced than anybody else’s brand new cars, and their commercials are no more silly. But if you tell me over the phone “oh, my transmission went out” and I say “wow, your transmission? That’s too bad,” and you hear Dad hollering in the background (I must be at Mom’s) “it’s a Chrysler, right?” and he’s right, well… just don’t tell me he didn’t warn you.

Ice

Misery Loves Company

Easter morning on Topaz Street, eggs at a reckless boil on the stove, knocking quietly together, Gramma in a handmade cotton apron shaped like a grey tooth with the roots up over her cushioned shoulders and a knot behind her waste. She's dropping a teaspoon of vinegar into the mouths of a row of mismatched mugs. I hear the teakettle whistle and a hollow, persistent pounding. I'm rolling, hot as the water in the screaming pot, until I am forced into awareness and realize the screech is a truck's whining gears at the stopsign outside and the knocking is the intermittent popping of the old planks of wood in the kitchen ceiling of my basement apartment, almost 60 miles from the green house on Topaz. Gramma is just a block or two away from the house (which is now sided in blue), in her bed, fighting the fever we share. Even my follicles are stinging, every inch achy and raw, suffering bouts of chills so extreme my fingernails turn blue and fever so hot my breath sears the hand I'm resting my face on. I'm ravenous but keep forcing down liquids, water, orange juice, a swallow of white plum wine. I worry about Gram, whose nearly 95 years will make it harder to fight this off than my 25. But I also trust the people looking after her and know there's no better place for her to be than in their care. I'm going back to sleep.

Deprivation

You'd faint if you knew how far I have to go to get to a Starbuck's. Their online store locator has a maximum search radius of 50 miles, and I get a nearly blank page with the following message:

United States
The nearest Retail Stores in your area are listed below.

[Sorry, no listings]

Back when I was in high school, one of my favorite Simpsons moments had Bart skateboarding full-throttle through a mall and every other storefront was a Starbuck's. It was funny back then. Now it's just scary, because that's almost the reality. I could have sworn I passed two Starbuck's in the airport on my last trip to San Diego.

Starbuck is the name of a somewhat unsavory and rather controversial character in one of my favorite science fiction novels, Joan D. Vinge's Snow Queen (which I haven't read for years). When Starbuck's hit the urban map I had a really hard time adjusting to finding that word everywhere, because I associated it with a character who had less to do with selling high-class coffee than Marvin the Martian does. Too weird. I suppose I eventually got over it, though.

Anyhow I'm a little sad at my lack of Starbuck's, but my bank account is happy, so I won't complain. I'm just disappointed that since Evanston has no Starbuck's and the odds are 99 to 1 against us ever getting one, we'll probably never get one of these, either, and that's something I just have to see before I die.

Turnaround

And just like that I'm happy and hopeful and expectant again. Aren't hormone swings just wonderful things? My boss won the nearly $1k pot at Kate's Tuesday night. Mr. Jensen is predicting a bull market. Today was my Friday, and I spent it watching Celeste do jar tests and betting on the effectiveness of various doses of a new polymer coagulant, Ultrion 8185. We used water from the reservoir, as opposed to the river, which is still running pretty clean despite the recent thaw causing muddy runoff. The reservoir, however, is always plenty nasty enough to create dramatic results in the jar test. Unless the word "flocculator" is part of yourdaily vocabulary, you may never know how cool it is to watch dirt and organic particles clump together and settle out, leaving behind the clear, pure water that eventually comes out of your tap. And yes, The Flocculator would make a good name for a superhero.

All Hail

I spent a lot of time in the wind today, face up to the sky. My hair is full of snarls and acrid spring air, and the slightly septic smell of the old water plant: the musty stink of thick redwood planks breathing fifty years of captured moisture back into the thirsty atmosphere. I love the old plant. I love its somewhat nautical appeal: the big blue iron valve wheels that open the flumes, the massive propellers suspended in empty concrete bunkers, the space-saving spiral staircase. Right is starboard and left is port when I tread the concrete catwalk down the center of the empty basins on my rounds at night. I swear it looks like I’m in steerage.

The old plant was abandoned only two years ago, when the new plant was finished, and yet it looks like the crew that manned it just up and left one day in the summer of ’84 and never returned. Ashes in the ashtray next to a deck of grimy playing cards, ancient Rolodex poised usefully between K and L, yellowed adding machine paper curling over the desk. Exactly the way I like to picture the desk of Sam Spade. Old boots covered in old mud in the corner next to shelves of frayed ledger books and spindles of red-inked paper wheels from the graph machine and the flow meter. Compared to the old plant, the new plant’s control room looks like the streamlined cockpit of a rocket, or at least a 2004 Cadillac, all mahogany desks and matte black Dell computer hardware and glossy tile. Venetian blinds turned tight against the grey day, adjustable track lighting kept dim. Just once I’d like to answer the phone “White House, Chelsea speaking.”

It’s maybe not a good idea for someone as obsessive-compulsive as I am to work in a facility made of cinder blocks and tile, with a minimum of two switches for every light. I waste a lot of time in a day counting, grouping, stepping over, and flipping.

I’ve been in perpetually tearful mode this week, punctuated by bouts of preposterous bellicosity. I’m itching for a reason to snarl “don’t start that shit with me” at someone, anyone, and really, really mean it. Too bad everyone’s either been very kind to me or is already in a vile enough situation that to make their day worse would only cause me debilitating guilt.

I opened my ICMA 457 Deferred Compensation account today. I went with the aggressive 40-year horizon All Equity Growth plan, even though I’m positive I won’t be with the City in even 20 years. God willing, I won’t even be in this city. Oh… would that be so bad? Maybe I shouldn’t expect or assume so much. I’m beginning to doubt myself and therefore everyone around me. Things I was sure of a year, even six months ago are shaky hopes now, far too fragile to base so much on. I have such a long way to go and I will probably have to go it alone.

My cats finally recovered from being put under, stopped staggering and hacking. The fun part now is stuffing an antibiotic in their newly clean little mouths twice a day, clamping their jaws shut until they swallow. Oddly enough, it’s easier to give my sister’s neurotic, shaggy spaniel mix, Rosie, her daily thyroid pill even though she’s much bigger. It’s a much simpler task to pry open her larger snout, and her neck doesn’t quite bend in that serpentine way a cat’s does, that feline avoidance. And are pets really that forgiving, or do they just have no short-term memory? Moments after this perceived abuse the cats are back wanting petted, purring. They still think they're getting a treat when I rattle the pill bottle. The vet did say they’re pretty, and I’m proud of them for that, too.

Every time somebody says “Easter weekend” I get the following mental picture: scruffy little Billy Crystal in a beautifully tailored but horribly oversized grey suit, pitching random phrases in tangled Yiddish gangsta-speak in the black leather seat of a limo with the late Joe Viterelli at his slick haired, jowly best, as ‘Jelly.’ I love it when peoples’ nicknames are food.

Dish

Travis thinks They shouldn’t be allowed to say “swing your Grapenuts” on the radio. Magic 99 is a terrible station anyway. On the way into town from dropping the cats off at the vet today, I passed the doublewide on Airport Road that serves as office and studio, right when disco hour was starting. I contemplated arson.

I guess it’s fair to say that I am a much better employee when I don’t have access to the Internet. I think that’s true of a lot of people. I wouldn’t be a very good recruit to the ranks of the self-employed. You’ll find no self-discipline here.

I got my cats back tonight, paid more than a month’s rent (which is astonishingly cheap) for both to have their teeth cleaned and get a cocktail of vaccines, their first in six years. (You’d never believe my rent. Not if you don’t live in Wyoming.) It shouldn’t be such great entertainment to watch them stumble around, back legs crossed and heads lolling, but it is. Before you judge me too harshly, remember that I spent considerable time this evening trying to console two creatures that don’t understand my language and who are inconsolable anyhow. I starved them all night, left them for an hour this morning, came back and stuffed them in a box, drove them out into the country and left them with strangers who poked them with needles. They can’t remember anything after that, but they woke up feeling like crap and their mouths hurt. Then I came and got them, brought them home in the same hated plastic cage, and deposited them on the bed where they lay like dead things. I left them for an hour to go to orchestra, and when I came back I found them sprawled awkwardly on the bathroom floor. Apparently they’ve seen me that way when I’m sick and think it’s the right thing to do. I hope it helped.

Dismal weather is by no means a rare circumstance in March, but this is ridiculous.

I refuse to get the passenger endorsement on my CDL. I wish I knew how to feel about Terri Schiavo. I wish I wasn't constantly bombarded by her name all day. I wouldn't want her to be bombarded by mine if things were the other way around. I’m obsessed with red potatoes. I like the smell of department stores. I know so few things today, except how to calculate the parts per million if you’re adding 90 mg/L of coagulant with a specific gravity of 1.26 into a flow of 1.6329 million gallons of water per day, but that’s not going to help me get through to somebody that’s driving me crazy. I hate that I'm so sensible I can talk myself out of standing up for me. "There's really no point, dear girl. It doesn't matter in the long run." At least the voices in my head are affectionate. A gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds and there are 7.48 gallons of water in a cubic foot. Make use of that if you can. But just in case you can’t, here’s something that I found extraordinarily entertaining.

I'll Drink to That

St. Patrick’s Day in Evanston dawned dark and low, one of those sinister March mornings that could go either way by noon. It was the first day I really haven’t wanted to be at my new job, a mood having less to do with the work and much more to do with the attitudes of everybody else there. Luckily I have something to daydream about that is proving powerful enough to melt the all ugliness right out of my world, no matter how gruesome the weather.

You may recall that last May I demanded a spring pilgrimage, assuming I’d have to settle for Vegas sometime before August, and instead wound up in Deadwood, South Dakota retrieving Jo’s then-twelve-year-old grandson, Reilly. I did have time to explore the Black Hills and enjoy the Gutzon Borglum museum, shop downtown Rapid City (a surprisingly cosmopolitan and very pleasant place), eat sun-dried tomato bagels, and get a pedicure, all on my own because there was no way I was taking Reilly anywhere public with a two-inch blue mohawk, and there was no way he was going anywhere but straight back to Evanston with one of his grandma’s coworkers, even if I was pretty cool and a damned good poker player. I was also driving Dad’s trusty Buick, which Jo and Deed call the ‘living room on wheels,’ and which probably has a cool factor of negative four. Despite our differences we had a pretty good roadtrip together, since I let him pick the tunes (“watch out or he’ll make you listen to Fifty Cent Piece!” warned Jo). Reilly is a very intelligent but extremely outspoken boy, a guest sports columnist in a local paper in Colorado, and a rabid Democrat, which I only point out because I made the mistake of telling him I was voting for Bush in the November election and you know what we spent the rest of the trip arguing about. I’m sure I got bested in that arena, being pretty much weak in the defense of my stubbornness, but I think I got the last laugh in November, didn’t I? Long story short, I got my roadtrip and learned a lot in the process, especially this: there’s no limit to what you can accomplish when you have loads of dynamite and a whole stone mountainside to play with. Crazy Horse National Monument, anyone? Rushmore?

This spring I’m preparing for an equally enlightening adventure, and I can guarantee you that what is in store for me is going to make South Dakota look like, well, South Dakota… compared to New York City. That’s right, people, the Big Apple beckons! Seven days, six crazy nights, five Broadway shows, landmarks galore, an NBC studio tour, Central Park at night, barhopping with Garrick. Yes! All this with my two favorite cousins and their intrepid, globetrotting don’t-tell-anybody-she’s-a grandmother, who is planning this trip on the heels of a recent Australia/New Zealand/Fiji tour, and her exhausted husband Ed says you couldn’t pay him enough to go to New York. (I suppose this may be confusing because she’s not my grandmother, but her dad was my grandmother’s brother, see, so they’re somehow my cousins… and besides I have three grandmothers- oh wait, I’m down to two, now- so there’s really no point in going into the whole long story, except to tell you that I have a big, remarkable family and I’d go anywhere with any three of them any day, but this trip is going to be really, really great.) So we’re going, and my Vaio and trusty digital Olympus Stylus are going too, and I’ll give you a nightly play-by-play from our room at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square. It’s going to be one hell of a way to celebrate my first whole year of blogging!

Now, some odds-and-ends:

Miss America there on the hayrick is my maternal grandmother Molly (Malka), pitching hay in a dress and probably stockings in the spring of 1938. Yes, that’s snow, and yes, she really was and is that awesome.

Happy belated 26th birthday to Lenny, and I have no excuse for not posting so on the 13th because, believe it or not, I can actually pick up a wireless Internet connection at Mom’s in a town of less than 300 permanent residents (and about 300 transient oilfield workers). I find that unfair because I live in a town of nearly 13,000 and the only place I can log on is at home where I have a wireless router, thanks to said birthday boy, who was, of course, born on a Friday and whose subsequently unlucky life would make even the most skeptical person superstitious. He would tell you it "builds character,” and he would be right. He’s all the proof I need.

I may go down to Kate’s and have green beer tonight and risk being seen with my boss, or by my boss, because if Utah State didn’t play well today he’s going to be pretty cranky (there’s an Evanston kid on the team). Or I may stay home and gather up more things to put in the yard sale Kindra’s going to have to earn $ for State (art club trip). I have to attend defensive driving tomorrow, not because I’ve done anything wrong, but because it’s required for Public Works employees and I’ve sold my soul. This Saturday is the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation banquet and auction in Rock Springs, which means another late night, and I have to work Sunday, but even the midnight drive alone on I-80 will be worth it. My family has two tables (so far) and there’s no party quite like a Bertoncelj party.

My Level I Operator’s Certification test is still coming up in May, and I’m getting a bit nervous despite all the studying and hands-on experience I’m getting. I can label the parts of a peristaltic pump, test chlorinated water for Trihalomethanes, color, pH, turbidity (spellchecker hates that word!), and lots of other things that would probably make you less inclined to drink bottled water. (That’s right class, most bottled water is just filtered tap water and sometimes it even exceeds the E.P.A.’s standard Maximum Contaminant Levels. So much for Evian, right? Did you ever notice it’s ‘naïve’ spelled backwards?) I’m finally learning to speak Jeff (“bein’s this here tank’s empty, I’d say wim gotter” or “mimquisitive ‘bout thisser ting”), I can “batch out” solutions of polymer coagulants that smell like model glue and act like honey, and convert things from English to Metric so fast it would really impress my smelly high school math teacher. He tormented me for three years because, even as easy and enjoyable as the rest of school was for me, I absolutely hated math “with the heat of a nova,” a line I had to appropriate from Brent because my God, I’m sure I couldn’t come up with anything as wonderfully expressive. At any rate, it’s important that you wish me luck because a big part of the test is math, and I’m starting to get it but even so, I’m worried. The only thing I really have down is calculating foot-pounds of torque, and that’s only because I read Car and Driver. And so help me, if they call the Mitsubishi Montero an “ugly mutt” one more time I’m going to cancel my subscription. Even if it isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing vehicle on four tires, it’s going to drive that VW Touareg into the ground.

Life is going unbearably fast and I’m certainly not steering, but I wouldn’t change that. There are a lot of things I wouldn’t change. My perpetual crush on Richard Dean Anderson, for one thing, and the seasons in Wyoming, for another. Sure I complain about them; no native doesn’t. But this ugly, awful brown month is going to go out like a lamb and melt into an unmatchable Wyoming spring, and then we’ll have three precious months of beautiful prairie summer.

And in closing, I spotted the most ridiculous bumper sticker on Grace Z.'s lipstick-red Exterra yesterday: "If God is not a Broncos fan, then why are sunsets orange?"

Startled the Herd

Water in the Desert

Melting, running, pouring, coursing, pooling on the sandy soil and reflecting prairie sunsets. The ground is still frozen, so the snow, melting under the onslaught of sunlight pouring from the overwhelming sky, is making a mess of my world. Small culverts under the lonely back highways I travel, in the company of eighteen wheelers and diesel DOT duallies, can't handle the runoff. Mobile oil rigs lit like scattered tiny cities in the night, man camps in rows and sheep camps on trailers, the old Fontonelle (locals say Fot-on-el) store up the cliff from Weeping Rock, which must be sobbing great springs of tears from its sandstone layers, and the drowned sagebrush stretching for miles. All this water has nowhere to go but down, tumbling into the spring-muddied Green River and on into Flaming Gorge.

Mom and I bravely forded a low point in the road in the Buick yesterday on the way home from visiting at Point of Rocks, eight-inch deep rushing water and a terrific churning wind, the asphalt still stable but the gravel-and-sand shoulder washed away. Hollering at her, hydroplaning closer to the edge of the gaping ravine in the chilly dusk, I was reminded of the gradeschool lessons regarding the Oregon Trail and horrific illustrations of disastrous river crossings: families in wagons washed away, wooden trunks capsizing, soggy canvas covers billowing, wild-eyed oxen drowning. We were mere miles from the hallowed ruts of the Oregon Trail, grim tracks I have often walked. How those poor Easterners, accustomed to the mild green damp, must have hated our arid flats, our miles of pungent, spiny brush, the red dust that forever sifted from everything they owned.

It snowed again last night, big bright flakes tossed on raucious Spring wind, swarming around streetlights like angry moths. It won't stay, is in fact already melting from sunny plateaus and flooding through high desert canyons, baring rocks that once saw the footfall of Sioux and Blackfoot, that shelter antelope and elk and smaller desert animals year-round. My way home won't be affected; I'll go over the top. Round Mountain and down into Kemmerer where I'll relate our adventures to Grandma, who spent her share of wet springs up here before Buicks with big, tough engines and radial tires. She could really tell you about things washing away, when Wyoming got more than twice the snow we do now.

It really is Spring. Leaving my sister's house at lunch the other day, I glanced down and saw the remnants of the ragged ten-foot evergreen garland that adorned her white door over the holidays. I joked that it looked like she had poached, skinned and hung the Grinch on her new pale butter-yellow vinyl siding. Poking out of the red-brown needles were several blades of astonishingly green grass, amazing at least to eyes accustomed to months of grey, brown, and dirty white. I stared, remembering childhood Christmas trips to San Diego and the shock of passing suddenly out of our black-and-white world into the brilliant palette of a southern coastal desert: green grass and palms, bright bouganvillia and poppies and daisies, empress lilies, blue-green sea, lovely gold-streaked sand. God, I miss that place. The tulip blades pushing up out of cedar chips in front of the local Post Office just don't do it for me.

It's Nascar time, the Las Vegas race that half the people I know are attending, and I promised to watch for Dave and Tony, Mike, Russ and Ronda in the crowd. I love a good race, even if all they do is turn left. And I really love a good wreck. We were watching the Figure-Eight Train Races in Salt Lake City last night and were sadly disappointed by the lack of collisions. Those races always take me back to thickly hot nights spent squirming on the splintery wooden tiers at the El Cajon Speedway in East San Diego, Dad laughing, pointing out the comic desperation of the brakemen swinging in the third car, me clinging to Dad's arm as people went up and down the rickety stairs splashing warm beer. And I am sorely ready for summer.

Punch Bowl

I am impatient, distracted, and any number of uncomfortable things. I’m drinking a little and walking a lot and perusing my emotions over things that may or may not happen soon. I am playing the piano alone at noon, winter-dry skin slipping over glossy keys, pretty walnut wood pock-marked from over fifteen years of my fingernails gouging the soft panel above the black keys. Angry, desperate, betrayed, hopeful... however intensely I feel, I play that spinet harder than it was designed to endure, and I am only sad that I can't reward its loyalty, because each stroke still resonates with the heartwarming mellowness I first knew when I fell in love with it. A tuning here, a polish there. I wish I could reward all the objects that sustain me these days. A trusty vehicle, a faithful camera, my favorite paintbrush whose bristles splay awkwardly from years of thumping just-right foliage onto canvas, useful like an overused toothbrush. Nothing gets into the cracks of forty-year-old linoleum like a retired and reincarnated Oral-B.

I've tried to appease anyone who might occasionally revisit my blog by posting photos. Sometimes it's just too hard to share what I have to say, assuming anybody would care to read it. And yet, here you are, and now you know that I love all aspects of lemons, despise raw tomatoes, and sleep on my face, still and silent and cold as a corpse. Isn't blogging a wonderful thing?

I saw The Phantom of the Opera last Sunday night, a nearly private showing at the single-screen Strand Theatre on Main Street, all faded opulence and home-town charm. And I loved it, Phantom, as I always love it in any way, shape, or form. I love a melody that soars, a dischordant strain that pauses in agony and then sails, reborn harmonious, into the atmosphere, and Phantom has plenty of that. I don't even mind if, after that, it fades; music is loveliest by far when there is contrast, surely the true source of its power. The cast was fine; I'm no critic. I'm just glad they didn't mess with it, try to make it more film-friendly. They just made a movie of the elaborate, almost kitschy musical, and it's nice enough for me. Maybe I admire Andrew Lloyd Weber's consistency in the face of popular opinion, almost as much as I admire Tim Burton's. And I guess I like a little 'dark' once in a while, or maybe more often that not. Phantom is the right kind of time-out fairytale, that get-me-out-of-now 'dark,' the breath of fresh air I need after days of being naturally sunny and positive (but not in that annoying way, I'm just happy). But still, any day of the week I can be caught humming Christine's wistful aria Think of Me, or the quietly regretful song she sings to a long-dead father. There's nothing like 'too late' to get the tear ducts working.