[This is a snip from the novel I’m working on. It has nothing to do with the plot, which is one of the reasons I really like it. Jenny is talking to Filt. No time to explain Filt here.]
Jenny looks up, gazing at a far picture playing on a far screen “After Penn, I spent a couple months in Canada, up along the Alberta-British Columbia border, a string of national parks, Banff and Jasper and this one –Yoho.”
“Funny name of anything, ‘cept a candy bar.”
“Indian. I suppose. Anyway, I knew there was a waterfall up there, read about it, Takakaw Falls. Way up the road, gravel road. I could hear it. It’s this low… not a rumble, an undercurrent you pick up and then it gets louder, walking up this gravel road with my backpack. I was hungry, but I hear or I feel the waterfall and I just want to see it. You know? The road ends and there it is –not right there, but a trail going off to 900 feet of water dropping straight down in a strip. One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”
“Bigger than the one in California?”
“Yosemite? Naw, not that high or wide. But Yosemite doesn’t have water part of most years. This was… August? I think August, so Takakaw was thin, but the thinness made it look higher. Like it was up to heaven, if there was a heaven.”
“You don’t think there’s heaven?”
“I don’t so think. I wouldn’t like it anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Fucking angles playing crappy music. You wanta hear about the falls?”
“Sure.”
She leans forward, the old image coming clearer. “It never got real loud, maybe the sound just drifts sideways? And the water – it came down all those hundreds of feet and it was gentle. I went right up to it, stood under the spray – one of those wilderness areas, no dumb concession stands, no parking lot. No people. You’d think there’d be tourists in August? Just me and the water coming down form near the sky. Goddamn. That’s freedom, guy, you and 900 feet of dropping water.”
“That’s it? A lot of water?”
“I’m standing in the spray, facing back down the path, and I turn around, and right from behind the fall, the main drop of water, a tiny figure walks out. Then another and another and another. Kobolds or pixies or… whatthehell? Elementals. First it was, holy shit I think my body wanted me to be scared, but I wasn’t. They moved along, stepped to the side of the falls, the water, and looked at me – not staring, more like I was something they wanted to figure out. The way I was looking at them, I guess. The leader, the one that came out first, hunched up in a yellow poncho, he bowed.” Jenny stands and demonstrates, a simple tilt. “I waved. The… whatever he was bowed again. Then they all linked hands in a circle and started dancing. You know what I thought? I actually thought I was dreaming, some kind of earth figures sprung from a cavern of the mists. Such things aren’t real. Except I’d planned the trip, come up the road, part of the plan, so I must be awake. And I’ve anyway never dreamed with that much clarity, the detail and… sparkle, feel the heat and scatter of water whipping across my shoulders, doesn’t happen in dreams.”
Jenny doesn’t hear Filt at first, old visions filling all the receptor space in her head.
“Hey – so they disappear, float off like, into the sky? What? What happened?”
Jenny starts to snigger. “They stopped dancing, came around front, where I was, introduced themselves, shook my hand. They’re a circus troupe, on their way to Moosejaw, left their car down the road – I remembered seeing it, wondering, funny, nobody around – they’d gone behind the falls when they saw me on the trail. They liked to do that, goof on people. They were a hell of a good bunch, dwarves, like I’d thought at first, but professional dwarves doing their job. Gave me a ride afterwards and told me about the circus, not any Ringling, but kept them alive and on their toes.”
* * * *
This may not be a subject that gets most people’s juices flowing, but I’m continually fascinated by the fundamentals of particle physics.
Thomas Hertog’s On the Origin of Time is the most lucid explanation of the Standard Model of physics I’ve read, and he manages to do it in just a few paragraphs. I have no background in higher math, and am not about to try to glom one this late in life. [I still have to get the laundry done.]
Almost any non-mathematical discussion of the Standard Model cavalierly bumbles through a single aspect of the theory, which, for such a fundamental and complex subject, always leaves me hanging – what the hell is this actually about? Here, we get the whole log, not just a pickled pig’s foot.
Hertog even has me almost understanding the Higgs field, which I thought wasn’t possible [that’s the field involving the Higgs Boson, identified a few years back at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva].
This is an altogether excellent book, mostly about Hertog’s association with Stephen Hawking during Hawking’s final years, and Hawking’s revision of his own theories of time.
* * * *
Trying to gain more info about my chronic lower back pain, I discovered that I might well be suffering from – among other things – lumbosacral radiculopathy.
Well, that doesn’t surprise me in the least. Probably comes from watching too many Looney Tunes cartoons.
* * * *
People do not have values or outlooks because they are Dem or Repub, they become Dem or Repub because of their values or outlooks—a somewhat different way of viewing the political system and its varied supporters.
* * * *
I understand how a person can be termed legally blind. But if I’m put in charge of a government department I have no competence to understand, can I be proved illegally blind?
lickhaven 