Fractal Geometries, Quantum Foam

Utahrado

In late 2003 my work situation changed. I accepted a redundancy package and unemployment for the first time in 16 years. The money allowed me to clear my bills, buy some things to improve my life, and to travel.

My plan when I left school was to work a couple of years, save some money and head off to see the world; now, 30+ years later, I would be able to do it in some style.

I had a list of places in which I’d become interested over the years, with prime position being held by the Pyramids. Close second were the Inca ruins at Machu Pichu and third, the American West. I’d dreamed of the Indian lands since I was a kid, inspired by Louis L’Amour’s tales, among various others.

It was a strange interest for me as my big passion was science fiction. But I wanted to see the mesas, the canyons and mountains that were so much a part of the new nation. I love the Australian bush and find peace in the far landscapes of land and sky available where there are unbroken horizons, but our most rugged mountains are slope-shouldered midgets compared to the grandeur of the Rockies.

So, after Peru, my next stop on my world trip was LA. I organised a stay of a couple of days and to pick up a hire car so I could spend my time as I wished as I headed east into the New West. My itinerary was to head over to Four Corners region, explore into the Rockies, then through the Parks in Colorado, Utah and California and drop the car in San Francisco.

I found LA to be rather strange for an Aussie. I would head out to look around, walking mostly and only using buses to reach a particular area. Walking, except for places like Santa Monica Blvd., is not something most LA’ians do. I was often the only person in sight as I wandered around, and on a number of occasions had police cars slow down to check me out as they cruised by.

In Australia, as in most other countries, when you stand at the pedestrian lights, you can look at the people in cars waiting for the green and find most of them looking back at you, or at least gazing around at the sights. I think in 3 days in LA there were only two times where the people I saw were conscious of anything outside their car.

I couldn’t find ‘community’ anywhere in LA. Elsewhere, if you wander around enough, you find a small shopping centre, (not a Mall) with perhaps a few small businesses, maybe a clothes store, drugstore and restaurants. Grab a coffee, sit for a while and you will feel the atmosphere or mood of the area. These small places are where locals define themselves, but in LA, I couldn’t find any, and I was actively looking!

I kept getting lost as I wandered around. I have always had a sense of direction and even if I couldn’t tell you where I was, I could point the direction home. For some reason, in LA I was not just confused as to direction, I kept getting it exactly wrong! I would walk in the direction of the sea and find hills on the horizon in front of me. I tried heading for a steak house near my motel and turned the wrong way in the street.

It took me till the next day to work it out. I was in the northern hemisphere! It came down to the shadows being in the wrong direction. In southern hemisphere locations, outside the Tropics, the sun describes an arc across the sky that is always to the north; the opposite is true for the northern latitudes. Unknowingly, all my life I had been noting the shadows and gaining sense of direction from them.

On my 3 day, I picked up a new Chevvy Monte Carlo, glanced at an LA street map and headed for the freeway out of town. There I met the first US icon – the traffic jam!

I crawled the distance to the next exit, (why don’t they provide a turnoff for those who look at the traffic & decide they’d rather not?) and trusted to my instincts to find my way east. Less than 30 minutes after leaving the ‘freeway’ I was heading into the hills out of LA.

About lunchtime, I stopped at a Mexican restaurant, thinking, ‘I haven’t had Mex food in 20 years.” The waiter brought me a local beer, (I don’t see the point in travel if you always ask for the things you can get at home) and from the menu I chose an entrée of tortillas and the Special Soup of the day, something called Seven Oceans soup.

“Can I suggest you try the starter and then see if you want the soup?” said the waiter, “it is a very big soup!” (in all my travels, the US is the only place where the main course is called an entrée; in all other places it is the course you begin with and usually little more than a snack. My first meal in LA I called the waitress back to ask where they listed the Mains and got a look I became familiar with as the days passed)

Now I have no problem with large meals and it was a soup anyway, so with a ‘bring it on’ attitude, I said, “that’s OK, I’m pretty hungry!”

Entrée done with, I waited for the soup. When I was a kid, we had bowls that were known as custard bowls, large pieces of crockery that would hold maybe 8 or 10 normal-sized bowl contents. The soup came in one of those! AND I could see the seafood mounding over the top, like a mountain rising from the waves!

I did my best; I exited bulging and worried if the seat belt would be large enough, but I left more than one Australian bowlful of soup behind.

Las Vegas is not my type of place; I’m not a gambler & I stopped for a night just so I could say I’d seen it. Glitz and very little real glamour is what I saw. I drove through desert for five hours the next day before I felt myself relax inside.

I would be driving across Nevada and into Arizona, crossing briefly into Utah and past Four Corners, into Colorado.

The first night out from Las Vegas, I spent a pleasant night in an Indian-run motel, the Anasazi Inn, tried their food and beer and had some pleasant conversation. I was treated so normally, I’m not sure if the staff knew I had an accent.

In the morning I set off for a day’s touring towards the Grand Canyon, and in the evening, looking for a place to stay, I found another Anasazi Inn. On check in, the lady was all smiles and welcoming until the last moment.

Smiling, she said, “OK, that’s everything. Enjoy your stay.”

“Thanks,” I replied. “Now, where can I get a nice cold beer?”

The smile vanished like beer at a barbie and in a very frosty voice she stated, “NOT on the Reservation!” I Heard The Capitals.

Later, I found the problem. The first Inn, while Indian owned and run, was actually sited in a pocket of non-reservation land reaching into the official area. This one where I’d made the goof was well within reservation borders. Like some of our Aboriginal communities, they are voluntarily ‘dry’ areas.

I loved Mesa Verdi, the desert and the weird rock shapes to be found along the way, but when I got to Cortez in Colorado, I was ready for a night off. I found a cheap motel and walked up the main street to see what was on offer. I found a nice little boutique pub that made their own beer and settled in for a visit.

After trying all their brews and having more than one of the varieties to my taste, and a delicious but huge meal, I was heading back for the motel when I spotted, across the road, a very weird sight.

The building was not a lot larger than a normal house, and at first view, I was left in doubt whether it was a bar or a brothel. Called the Pink Pussy (I think – not sure after a year) there were a number of bikes lined up out front; these were serious bikes, not 250cc jap crap and the oddity of them and the style of the venue drew me in.

I had such a good time that a lot of it remains a blur. They loved having an Aussie in there and apparently didn’t mind a drink themselves; I almost changed my mind about leaving Cortez the next day.

It was around 10AM and I was tooling along into Utah, nursing a surprisingly small hangover and getting hungry. The town of Monticello looked pleasant enough and I spotted an open restaurant, so I pulled in for breakfast.

There was nobody serving but several groups scattered around the tables, so I sat at an empty one and relaxed. After a minute or so, I looked to my left to see the nearest thing I have ever seen to a perfectly oval human coming towards me.

She was quite tall, kinda pointy head, narrow shoulders sloping out to what could have been a 50-inch waist, then tapering in to feet that would have been normal-sized for a 10 year old. In her hand was a coffeepot, something my hangover needed urgently, but that I’d learned was not equal to the restorative powers of Melbourne espresso.

“What can I get you,” she asked.

“Hello,” I said, subtly pointing out her lack of greeting. I turned over a cup on the table, pointed at the coffee and said, “I’ll start with one of those please, and could I have a menu and some milk for the coffee?”

“You mean creamer,” she asked.

“No thanks, I’d prefer milk if you have it.”

“OK,” she replied and waddled away into the kitchen. She returned in a few moments with the menu, and no milk. I repeated my request.

Over the next 5 minutes, she came from the kitchen several times to visit with the other customers, and each time I politely asked for milk. Each time, the response was ‘OK’ and she’d wander off to the kitchen. The third time I also requested coffee, as mine was cold. That was the time she asked if I knew what I wanted. (from the menu)

Now the menu had maybe 20 different meals listed. At least half were varieties of steak and eggs, and prominent at the top was ‘We do Eggs ANY way!’ So I asked for medium steak, (I eat medium rare, but in the US that comes out as what we call rare, and US rare, we call blue) and poached eggs.

The by-now-expected response came and she went back through the swinging doors. This time she immediately came back out as if on a spring. Back to my table, (still no milk or coffee) where she brought her ponderous bulk to a halt and stated, “We got no steak and we don’t poach eggs!”

Stunned, I stared at her for a moment, comments about Christ saying ‘as you treat strangers, so do you treat me’ or the like floating through my head, but instead I said, “OK” in exactly her tone of voice, grabbed my phone and left. Moab was not far, and it was a tourist-oriented city, so I would get my breakfast there. I could just picture a bigoted red-neck Mormon, loitering inside the kitchen with his 12-gauge, just waiting the chance to blow away an ignorant tourist.

In Moab, things looked hopeful. I followed a couple of locals into a large diner. The waitress sat me at the table next to them. One of them ordered steak and eggs with no demur from her, so I tried my ‘medium steak and poached eggs’ and got no objections.

Out came the food for the next table. The steak was good and thick, the plate a full dinner plate and the meal filled it. ‘Yum,’ thought I, ‘do I ever need this!’

I sat for nearly a minute, gazing in dismay at what I received. His steak was the size of my plate! My meat was about ¼ of an inch thick and made creditable shoe leather. The poached eggs could have been dribbled the length of a court and slam dunked through the hoop without undue wear and tear.

I politely sat trying to get the attention of the staff, but they constantly managed to be looking the other way. Finally the bill came and I thought about objecting, but instead, placed the exact money on the bill and waiting for the staff to look, carefully added 2 cents to the amount. I figured if I left nothing, they wouldn’t know I was being insulting rather than just ignorant of US ways.

I turned my car and took my cash back to Colorado. I even regretted the $7.02 they did get from me.

The next 2 days were fine & sunny and I spent the time getting to know Cortez and environs. I spoke to folk in the café where I had lunch and drove out around the farms, and in the evenings, sampled the social life. Nice people with a love for things Aussie and able to laugh at themselves. To a (wo)man, they couldn’t work out my treatment in Utah. I put it down to the Mormons being instantly able to tell I wasn’t of the faithful because of my accent.

On the second day, I headed into the mountains, taking the road to Durango, then up to Silverton. I thought about lunch there, but I’d had a large, late breakfast & Ouray was only 20 miles further on. The mountains, still covered with snow in most places, were magnificent. In cold crystal-clear air, the peaks and valleys were everything I’d dreamed. The winding roads were no problem & traffic light.

I was following a woman driving alone in a red 4WD, or SUV around hairpin bends with a precipitous drop to one side & solid mountain on the other. As she vanished around a tight bend in front of me, I just caught the flash of brakelights, and lifted my foot. Had I not been slowing as I came around the corner, I would have pushed her under the rock slide that crashed onto the road literally a couple of yards from where she’d panic-stopped.

I’d had trucks roar past me out on the highways, & the sound insulation of the Chevvy was good enough that I never heard more than a whisper of sound; the rock slide drowned out the music on my radio? Even at a full stop, my car jittered on the road as the ground shook. Even as I reached for the door handle, an irreverent thought ran through my mind; “God can’t be a Mormon or he’d have better aim!”
With a grin to myself mixing nicely with the feeling of awe at what I’d just seen, I left the car to try & help the shocked and distraught lady who was very shakily climbing from the SUV.

I had her calmed considerably before another SUV came around the corner, stopped behind my car and discharged 4 inebriated young guys, who promptly started yelling & throwing rocks around, as well as over the side. After looking over the edge and seeing a road far below, I put a stop to that.
Then they wanted to use the SUV’s to move the rocks so they could continue. I pointed out the nearer of the huge boulders blocking the road and asked if they thought their SUV could handle 200+ tonnes of rock? The rock in question, while only about 3 feet thick, was around twice the length and half again the width of their vehicle.

I left them to wait there while I went back to Silverton looking for authorities who could organise heavy machinery. I found an office that serviced the tourists into the area & they got the clearing organised while I continued into Silverton to let the Sheriff know. She seemed more disappointed than anything else. I asked why (subtly) and found that, in 20 years in Silverton, while she’d often had to clear them, she’d never actually seen a rockslide.

After lunch in Silverton, where I’d asked a local about other roads, I headed back into the hills, circling east from where I’d originally planned, then south and back to Durango. A couple of days later, I left Cortez, with regrets, heading south into Arizona to continue my trip. I will return one day to Colorado, but Utah should have a fence around it.