Filling the Well

Apparently, I almost died Friday afternoon. Here’s why:

What you’re looking at is the scarring (the pale streaks) on a tree that was struck by lightning about twenty minutes before. Near as we can figure, the lightning struck the tree branches and chimney of the house, then may have arced about 15 feet away to the metal bits of the porch.

Ty and I were sitting on the swing at the edge of the porch when it happened. Ty jumped and ran. I curled up and covered my face. We’re still debating which survival technique is optimal.

A minute later we were all inside, debriefing. I asked, “How close was it, really?” Because I thought it struck the house next door. Everyone said, “You pretty much almost died.” I had to take their word for it, because my back was to the whole thing, and I didn’t particularly feel threatened. No feeling of static, no charged hair. Also, it happened very very quickly. Flash, kaboom, curl up. (It turns out that Duck and Cover is a pretty instinctive response when you see the Flash.) No elevated heartbeat, no rush of adrenaline, no aftermath endorphins. So, I had a near death experience but without all the neato biochemistry that goes along with it, which seems rather a shame. But as Walter says, he, Ty, Ian and I now have nifty superpowers, or so we hope. Melinda was in back getting the dogs inside, and so doesn’t get superpowers. Daniel and Kat, the owners of the house, were in their car a mile away and were reported to have said, “Huh, that one looks pretty close. Wonder if it got the house?” Yes. Yes it did.

It was very, very loud. Probably the loudest thing I have ever heard in my life, in fact. My ears hurt, and I had a bit of a headache for the rest of the day. It felt just like the morning after a very loud concert. So, imagine the sound from a very loud concert compressed into half a second. That’s what it was like. My ears still hurt whenever anyone says “lightning.” I’m thinking of claiming to have the most minor case of PTSD in history.

Mostly, I’m trying to figure out how to explain to people why I thought sitting outside during a thunderstorm was a good idea. (I’m from the West, I’ve sat outside to watch thunderstorms hundreds of times.) My answer: We weren’t outside! There was a roof.

I believe I’ve posted this before, but it bears repeating under the circumstances. Klaus Nomi weighs in.

I hope everyone who celebrates July 4 had a lovely weekend. I went camping in Wyoming for a couple of days (for an SCA event). I had a great birdwatching moment: in my morning walk yesterday, I saw a flock of wild turkeys, five of them, just moseying along.

In my Renaissance Festival post I meant to share one of the treasures I came home with from the Festival a couple of years ago. It seemed strangely appropriate and I felt a professional obligation to buy it:

There’s a game that full time writers play. It’s called, “What home repair are you doing when your next check comes in?” (Though sometimes I turn that into, “What trip am I going to take?”)

This time, I was good and did the home repair, replacing the sinks and vanity tops in my two bathrooms. My place is 30 years old. It hasn’t had much remodeling done, so a lot of the stuff is…old. The sinks were the worst. Enamel covered metal sinks in pressboard counter tops. The enamel was cracked, the metal rusting, the faucets leaking. I’d finally had it and ripped it all out, replacing them with cultured marble. Here’s the before picture of one of the bathrooms:

The thing that happens when remodeling a 30 year old place is you discover all the weird patches and repairs that have gone on before. Some of them are inexplicable. Like the fact that the P trap under one sink is 1 1/2 inch pipe when the standard for bathrooms is 1 1/4 inch, so you need a special washer to connect it to the drain. Or that the vanity top is secured by a single screw in the one place that is impossible to reach with a screwdriver. We took three extra trips to the hardware store for parts we didn’t know we needed when we started.

My mom came up to help me with this project, which took a day. A friend of mine came over the next day to help repair the paint, make some final adjustments to the pipes, and haul away the old sinks. The happiest moment was driving away from the old sinks, left behind at Western Disposal’s transfer station. “It’s almost sad,” I said, watching the lonely, displaced sinks recede behind us. “No,” my friend said. “It really isn’t.”

Here’s the after picture, with the new sink, vanity top, and faucet. (I put the same thing in both bathrooms.)

Aaaaahhhhh! Shiney! It almost doesn’t feel like my house anymore. Now, when the next check comes in, I’m going to replace the avocado green kitchen appliances. Seriously. I have 1970s avocado appliances. Sigh…

Quite the exciting weekend, I must say. Yesterday I went to the Colorado Renaissance Festival, an event near and dear to my heart. I worked at a food booth there for two and a half summers during college. I’d spend all day behind a counter hawking in a bad English accent (until I came back from living in England, after which I couldn’t do an English accent at all) and come home smelling like grease and cleaning dirt out of my nose. (see faire boogers.) And I loved it. I loved just being at the festival, hearing the music, eating the food, gawking at the wares, meeting the people. I worked right across from one of the stages and learned all the songs (I was at a pub in Dublin and when the band played “Whiskey in the Jar” I started singing along, and the other Americans I was with were like, “How the hell do you know this?”), Ded Bob’s entire act, and could see the royal procession pass. The Festival is all the best parts of pretending to be in a pseudo-historical fantasy world.

I still love it. Only now instead of working I run around and spend money. This year, I listened to more musical acts and even picked up a few CDs, which I’ve never done before. But the music was very good. A drum and bagpipe group called Celtic Legacy did a danceable version of “Amazing Grace” that seriously kicked ass.

It’s fun seeing what’s changed in the 15 years since I worked there. One big thing: “Pirates of the Caribbean” has changed the Festival forever. There’s even a guy dressed like Captain Jack Sparrow running around, singing “A Pirate’s Life For Me” at the pirate tavern. Beowulf clothing used to have basic pants, shirts and vests (basic guy Ren Faire outfit) hanging on display out front, with fancier doublets and such tucked away inside. Now, it’s all frock coats and poet shirts out front. And then at another booth, shaped like a pirate ship, I saw this:

Can someone tell me the difference between real pirate costumes and fake pirate costumes?

While my brother Rob was visiting, we did a totally retro family trip to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Colorado Springs’ way cool zoo perched on a mountain side. The wolves (Mexican subspecies of gray wolf) were out and about. So many idealized artsy pictures of wolves are out there, it’s easy to forget how rangy and scruffy they really are. They’re real tough dudes. Rob took this picture:

Rob is in town for a high school friend’s wedding. (Yay, Holly and Tim! For those of you keeping score, Tim here is the Tim in the dedication to “Kitty Takes a Holiday.”)

To give you an idea about Rob’s and my high school friends, these are the kinds of people who sit around playing Rock Band on the PS2 the night before the wedding. I’d never seen it before (I scoffed at Guitar Hero. Scoffed, I tell you!). But they managed to rope me into it. Here’s Rob on “guitar” and me on “drums.” We look very serious, don’t we? I found it helped to not actually listen to the music…

Saw the Cure at Red Rocks last night. Woot!

So, growing up in the 80’s I remember my parents going to concerts a lot. Acts like Peter Paul and Mary, the Monkees, Herman’s Hermits, Three Dog Night, Jan and Dean. Stuff like that. I used to tease them about clinging to their distant childhood and indulging in nostalgia.

Now, here are the concerts I’ve seen over the last couple of years: Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Cyndi Lauper, Debbie Harry, the Bangles, the Cure. That’s right. I really have turned into my parents, clinging to my childhood and indulging in nostalgia. Sigh. In my defense, most of those acts have recorded new albums in the last 5 years. So they’re still hip, right? Right?

The show was great. Red Rocks was, as always, amazing: to the north, the sunset turned the skyscrapers of downtown golden; to the east, a just past full moon rose during the last half of the show; and forming a backdrop against the stage a lightning storm played out to the northeast. The band played for three hours. Three hours! And they didn’t do much else but play: no big show, Robert Smith barely said a word. And that’s just fine because the band is just that good, the music just that great. Smith’s voice is so iconic, seeing and hearing him live was awesome.

His voice did give out on a couple songs. The last thing he did before leaving stage after the third encore (three!) was apologize for this. I wanted to hug him and say, “Look, you don’t have to apologize, you just sang for three hours at 5000 feet elevation! Go, rest, have some hot tea with honey!”

My life is full of adventure and good things. Tonight is “Iron Man.” Last night was Pink Martini, with the Colorado Symphony, bringing that whole retro ’50s cabaret dance band sound to the modern era. So awesome.

The set started with Ravel’s “Bolero,” but with a dancy latin kick. You know, bongos and congas and marimbas and stuff. Like the soundtrack of a 1950’s adventure flick. So I instantly get this story in my head: It’s right after World War II, we’re in a seedy bar in Brazil. The kind of place with bamboo furniture and a ceiling fan cutting through columns of cigarette smoke. A couple of dirty men are in the corner, playing poker with damp, wrinkled cash. A large, suspicious man, wearing a panama hat and smoking a cigar, sits in a shadow, holding a tumbler of bourbon that he isn’t drinking. At the bar is an exotic-looking woman, with an orchid in her dark hair. She’s wearing a tight floral dress and watching the door. She doesn’t look happy. In the distance there’s the sound of a diesel engine — a boat motoring up the river. The engine stops, and a moment later two men enter. They might be German. Just something about the look in their eyes, the way their stiff bodies ought to be wearing uniforms. One of them is carrying a black leather satchel. They go meet the man in the panama hat. But the woman at the bar has been waiting. She gives a signal. Five more men leap out of hiding, determined to steal away the smuggled diamonds in the satchel. There’s a fight, then gunfire — and so on.

Yeah. I had a really good time. I had stories playing in my head all night because the music sent me to another world. Music does that to me a lot. As a special treat, Lauderdale played Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” after the intermission. And then there was all that great singing. Hmmmm….

I have a couple of video links for you.

Joseph Kittinger free falls from space.

A longer version, with a lot of really cool footage of the preparation and balloon ascent, but with a cheesy soundtrack.

This is my favorite story from US aerospace history. In 1960, as part of a set of tests designed to record the effects of high altitude on the human body, Air Force test pilot Joseph Kittinger rode a helium balloon to an altitude of 102,000 feet. (For reference, most commercial airplanes don’t get higher than about 40,000 ft.) That’s 20 miles up. Then, he jumped. He wanted to prove pilots and astronauts could bail out safely, using a special multi-stage parachute. This feat hasn’t gotten nearly the press as the Mercury 7 or the Apollo moon landing. In fact, not many people know about it at all. But I think Kittinger’s jump is mind-blowingly unreal. And it’s never been equaled, in almost 50 years.

I encountered the story through Craig Ryan’s book The Pre Astronauts and only found film clips of the jump later. But ooh, boy. The film is MIND BLOWING. He’s jumping. FROM SPACE. Falling at over 600 mph! He’s high enough to see the curvature of the Earth. And HE’S FALLING. According to Kittinger, he couldn’t feel himself falling. He had to look back at the balloon to realize he was moving away from it. The image of this tiny human body (captured by a remote camera in the gondola) falling against the backdrop of far distant clouds makes me catch my breath every time. The longer clip has a bit I hadn’t seen before: a little further into the fall (about the 5:18 mark), Kittinger pulls himself into a jackknife, to better control his freefall. There’s a test pilot for you.

As you might imagine, this went into my idea file, and I wrote a story, “This is the Highest Step in the World.” (It’s in an anthology called All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories.) I got the title from the sign placed on the door of Kittinger’s balloon gondola. You can see it in the longer video.

I got a few weird reactions when I told people I’d be spending a week in Belize. It’s like the country has two separate reputations. First: tropical paradise famous for scuba diving, fishing, birdwatching, eco-tourism, etc. Second: another one of those dangerous third world Latin American countries where people get kidnapped. Some people asked, grimacing, “Why are you going there?”

Er, yeah. Okay. I wasn’t really aware of the second reputation. I think it speaks to a bad attitude about travel in general. I concentrated on the scuba diving. I started the PADI certification process at a dive shop in Boulder and went to Belize to complete the open water dives in a place a lot more interesting than Carter Lake. Because the water in Carter Lake is cold. The water in Belize? Constant 80 degrees F. Oh yeah.

This turned out to be a great way to finish the certification because I was doing actual real diving right out of the gate, instead of trundling into the water, fulfilling a few requirements, then trundling out again, shivering like a wet cat. I trundled into the water for the very first time, saw a school of seven 6-foot long nurse sharks circling under me, fulfilled a few requirements, then swam around for another 30 minutes. I already have my best diving story for the rest of my life. (Who sees a school of nurse sharks on their very first dive?) Oh, the sharks were very very cool, not at all scary. Nurse sharks are slow bottom feeders, and these weren’t interested in me at all. They were circling, swimming very slowly and gracefully. I could have watched them for hours.

I’ve been going to big aquariums my whole life, all the really good ones: Monterey, Baltimore, Georgia. I’d stand in front of the huge coral reef tanks with the dozens of multicolored fish, thinking it can’t possibly be like this in real life. In the wild I wouldn’t see all these different fish together, and there wouldn’t be so many.

It turns out, actually, I would. In fact, I’d see more. And bigger. Foot long parrot fish. Angelfish as big as pizzas. Schools and schools of tang, damsel fish, parrot fish, butterfly fish, all swimming together, and coral reef in all directions, as far as I could see. Snapper swimming above, groupers lurking below. Occasional sharks, morays, lobsters, crabs, puffers, triggerfish, barracuda. I’d sit in a current and just drift past the reef, seeing fish the whole time. And the old timers kept talking about how there weren’t as many fish as there used to be.

I did 10 dives all week, including a night dive, and feel like I’m a much more solid diver than I would have been if I had done the certification without the trip.

I went on the Blue Hole trip, but I didn’t dive the Blue Hole because 120 ft sounded just a little too scary for a brand-new diver like me. I snorkeled the edges instead, and it was awesome. Here, the reef is close to the surface and the sunlight brought out all the colors. The Blue Hole is a collapsed limestone cavern about sixty miles off the coast. It’s over 400 ft deep and seems bottomless. Mainly, I loved being out on the water in the atolls, which are oases of calm, turquoise water in the middle of rough seas.

Here’s me diving. Cool, huh?

I stayed in San Pedro on Ambergris Caye, which is apparently the island Madonna was singing about in “La Isla Bonita.” (I just watched the video. That’s not the Belize San Pedro.) There’s a cool mix of cultures here: Ambergris felt Caribbean, but there’s a strong Latin American influence — lots of Spanish spoken on the streets, a lot of Mayan heritage, and the country was a British colony until 1981 and English is the official language. You’ll hear people speaking Spanish, Creole, and English, everywhere. I’ve been to towns on Caribbean islands that isolated the tourists — in cruise ship ports, the passengers all get funneled to one or two streets with all the shopping. Two blocks away are all the local shops and local shoppers, with no tourists in sight. It’s not like that in San Pedro. Everything is all together. Locals sit on the beach smoking cigarettes right next to the hotel, and the local grocery store is right next to the tourist t-shirt/gift shop. At the hotel, the bartender would ask me where I had dinner and we’d trade opinions on the local restaurants.

Also: Pirates stayed here in the seventeenth century. Arrrrrrr! I have a pirate book I want to write.

Favorite Meal: Conch chowder and a margarita at Elvi’s.

Best Wildlife Moment: Three spotted eagle rays, huge, swimming in formation about twenty feet below me, along a coral wall at Turneffe Atoll. Oh, and the hawksbill turtles were awesome. Oh, then there was the red-footed booby sanctuary on Half Moon Caye, where the male magnificent frigatebirds were in full red balloon display… You get the idea.

The pier at Half Moon Caye. I have a lot of photos of palm trees, white beaches, blue sky, and impossibly blue water.

I also made a trip into the mainland to visit the Mayan ruins at Xunantunich, near the Guatemalan border. Very impressive, well-cared for ruins. And no crowds. My group almost had the place to ourselves.

This is El Castillo, the main temple at Xunantunich:

I have a lot of photos, a lot of stories. But the bottom line is I had exactly the trip I wanted: I relaxed, I saw a good slice of a country I’d never been too, I became a certified diver in probably the coolest way possible, and I returned home energized and ready to get back to work.

Life is good.