Midsommar

I've returned to Rochester! I've been gone for a month, an expedition covering five missions in four states. Yesterday I was at Fermilab, currently and for some months more the world's most powerful particle accelerator. With some other students we disassembled an optics experiment, carefully packing lenses and beamsplitters and power supplies for shipment back to Rochester. A gigahertz photodiode and a library book were retrieved. In addition, we retrieved a laser that is, evidentally, mine, as my advisor kept referring to it as "your little laser," with an endearing tone as if it should reside in a terrarium in my hotel room and be checked up on every hour. After all this effort avoiding fermilab as a place to which graduate students are sent and from which they never return, it turns out that it is a nice place, more a pleasant park with verdant prairie grasses, ponds, and bike trails than the industrial park / grad student tarpit you'd expect.

A couple days before I went to Caltech to scope out their 1/100th scale LIGO prototype, a 40-meter interferometer where they design and test future LIGO technologies. One professor I spoke with there with silver hair and darting eyes exclaimed excitedly "These are Class 4 Lasers. They will set things on fire!" He wore a tiedye T-shirt emblazoned with a happy face. In his hand he held a coffee mug bearing in giant cartoon letters the phrase "ROCKET SCIENTIST." I inquired about a job.

Rochester in mid-june is exploding with life, trees huge and green and the whole place a jungle of unrestrained vegetation. This is only partially hyperbole: the hops vine grows up the house an inch an hour. In the evening, fireflies and mosquitoes. It seems (fleetingly) so much a paradise that four months of depression vacate the memory. But for now it is that paradise and we'll take it. Tonight is Midsommar. The summer solstice. Our landlords initiated a bonfire in the backyard and we drank home-made wine, swatted mosquitoes and admired fireflies. I had feared the co-op in disarray, but it seems to be just fine, with a new porch, and we moved the hot tub onto its new foundation (railroad ties!) this evening, and the "wildflower mix" Bree planted last year has shot up now, months later, as brilliant red poppies.

Pierre, a french student who moved in here while I was away, is quizzing me on starting a co-op in Turin when he moves there in a few months. He's taking an Esperanto course too, and was esctatic when I pointed to my Esperanto-English dictionary on the shelf just a few feet from where he was working.

Bree left this morning for her summer job in the Adirondaks, where she was to be a sous chef at Putnam Camp near Keene, NY, but something didn't work out with the hired master chef from Australia, and so Bree has ended up with a promotion to that position. The camp itself is a bit of an enigma. It's a "private family camp" and you have to be invited to stay there. Sigmund Freud once stayed there. The place bears prominantly in the family history of our landlord. It was begun in 1876. In any case I look forward to visiting.

Basin and Range

On the plane to Chicago, and between X-files episodes in the hotel room, and lazily in my room at the co-op, next to the open window, I read John McPhee's Basin and Range. I would describe it as a reasonably good book. Others give it higher praise; it did, for instance, win the Pulitzer, collectively with its brethren in Annals of the Former World. John McPhee has a tendency to use lists. He has a tendency to use foreign words, be they in french or the argot of a particular profession. He has a tendency to use lists of words which I do not know how to pronounce. My internal monologue stumbles. I bought and started La Place De La Concorde Suisse to educate myself on the Swiss army (just prior to my move to Geneva) but it was more than a year before I made the effort to press on beyond the first couple pages. I am not sure how these books are intended to be read. Is the reader to decipher each technical term before proceeding, or are their meanings intended to be inferred through immersion? In Basin and Range the foreign terms are principally geologic eras, all those words like "Jurassic" and so forth.

It is difficult to read technical books in the oxygen-deprived environment of transcontinental jet travel. I opted for the immersive approach. The book tells of the evolution of geology that parallels the evolution of astronomy and biology you've doubtlessly been told many times in school. It also tells the story of the "Basin and Range," the geologic province centered around Nevada and including my recent travels in the Owens Valley of Eastern California. It tells of hot springs that I will in time seek out. Buried in the text we find McPhee describing his observation of a UFO. The book told me that the Great Salt Lake is divided in half by a railroad piling, that the lake level is different on one side than the other. I first learned about this railroad a week earlier when one of our hitchhiking rides told us about it, how the great salt lake it so shallow that they built a railroad across it. Our ride told of hopping a freight train across that track. John McPhee tells how the lake itself was made. It would have helped to read along with a map.

Despite his lapses into extreme dryness (I could not read Coming into the Country), John McPhee is perhaps my favorite contemporary author. I took the train to Davis to see him and the geologist Moores. The Control of Nature is one of my favorite non-fiction books. It could be the geologic counterpart to Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire. Also, Irons in the Fire. These are, in my mind, grand works. It's both the subject matter and the mode of writing that attract me; I imagine this is exactly the sort of thing I would like to do: going out on adventures (missions!), investigating ecclectic matters of interest to me, tagging along with experts and documenting both the people and the places. The subjects are matters of people, natural history, and infrastructure, sort of the place where seismology meets hitchhiking. I expect I will adore his new book, Uncommon Carriers.