Rain in Guadalajara

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The semester goes well. I teach sustainability concepts. I use a few places I visit as case studies—Angkor Wat, Singapore, Micronesia. I have a good time taking students through societal and ecological features. I lead great hikes. It’s not enough. Two positions open up. The provost and vice provost are happy, but the department passes me over.

I am sad to leave. I have a good time here with students and colleagues. I win the fan of the year award from the college sports program. I get about ten thousand dollars for a summer research project. I run experiments with students. The project works very well.

We freeze blocks of salted ice with various compositions. We freeze electrodes in, and measure voltage as the ice accelerates and deforms. We spin the blocks on a lazy susan built for sculpture. A strand of fifty pound fishing line is wrapped around like a yoyo’s lead. Ellis is our puller. The ice spins around. I hold the base of the turntable and get a little wet. The ice flies off sometimes and breaks. Sometimes it hits me. The students and I have a great time.

We get enough data to show how life maybe develops in an icy world billions of years ago, when Earth has thick sheets of ice from equator to pole. The moon is about twenty times closer than today. Tidal forces are much, much stronger. Glaciers grind rock to dust, and tidal forces provide electrical energy to make some phosphate reactions run—a precursor to the ADP/ATP cycle. Apatite-rich rock ground to flour in a volcanic region covered in ice sheets are a spot of interest. We get some numbers.

I pack up the lab and give away most of the extra supplies to a friend in the sculpture/art department. I clear out the office. I take stacks of photocopies of journal articles and classwork and pull out one of each. I borrow the department suburban and pick up some four-inch pipe and end caps and make a time capsule. I costs about $65 for supplies. I put papers inside and bury them in the middle of the night. I feel like a grave robber in the cool air with shovel and moonlight. I go down a few feet. The soil gets harder. I put in the cask and bury it. No one is any wiser. Perhaps it will be dug up in a year or two. Perhaps in a few millennia. I think about it for years beforehand—a simple way to pass on our photocopied mess to the future. I am happy to finally try it.

Packing is easy. Saying goodbye is hard. I care about the people I meet here. My neighbors have a place in my heart, and my congregation, my zumba class, my colleagues, too. July 4 comes and I dance like mad at Barnet Park to a band called Steel-Toe Stiletto, from Greenville. People come and dance with me. It is a good ending. I take an Amtrak at 3 am to Charlotte a few days later. The train is two hours late. I catch a bus to the transit center, and then another bus to the airport. It is a short hop then to Atlanta before three hours on a flight to Guadalajara.

I find the hostel and then walk to Chapultepec. The sky is bright with flashes of lightning. I duck into a club where the music blares. I drink mango nectar and dance through the storm. I find a dentist the next day. I like the dentist. Gentle hands and it is a bit wild to do the entire exam and discussion in my halting Spanish. She does two fillings and then I head to the symphony.

It is Bruckner's Eighth Symphony and I get sat six rows back, front and center. The music is wonderful. The horn section is brighter than any I recall. And the first viola reminds me of mariachi in his manner. The concert is amazing, full of passion. The conductor comes out for three ovations. I walk back to my hostel in the light rain. Now I head again to the dentist, a new day, bright.