Chapter 5: A Nerd with a Cape
“So, how does one become a nature mage, Davie?” you ask.
Well, I’ll get to that in time. My own path to it wasn’t direct by any means, and my interaction with that side of myself is not a daily thing. I can go weeks without being a mage, as such.
I live in Moab, Utah, a small tourist town right outside Arches National Park, one of the most popular vacation destinations in the US. People come here from around the world. Moab is one of the most bicycle friendly towns in the US, and people do even more biking outside town on the dirt roads and off-road tracks.
There’s also a lot of rafting down the Colorado River, which crosses the town’s main drag to the North. Moab was once known as a river ford town. There’s also a lot of rafting down the Green River, about an hour out of town, which becomes a tributary to the Colorado out in the Canyonlands National Park area, also nearby.
The Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon, so it’s a big river by desert standards. This river feeds the two largest man-made reservoirs in the US, Lake Mead up by Las Vegas and Lake Powell down on the Utah-Arizona border, yet people in wet parts of the world would call the Colorado small.
Third verse: people are…yes, you’ve got it now. Everybody sing!
I moved to Utah from Mumbai in one of those rare reverse recruiting situations, where the Indian IT guy goes to the US for a job, rather than the US IT job getting outsourced to India. It happens. I was working remotely in India for a US company four years ago when I made a good enough impression that they arranged for me to come over to work here in Utah to avoid the time zone lag, and I was able to eventually make the arrangement permanent, becoming a naturalized US citizen a year later.
India is ridiculously crowded, especially in the big cities, and although I grew up there, I never felt comfortable living that way. I wasn’t very close to my family, probably another artifact of my deep introversion, so when the chance came to come to the USA, I jumped at it. I jumped blind, in truth; I didn’t know anything about the country other than what I’d seen on TV, and as it turns out, Hollywood lies, a lot. Salt Lake City is quite a shock to an Indian transplant. It’s a minor high tech hub due to the historical spin-offs from Word Perfect, Novell, and other once-huge computer companies headquartered there. In hindsight, I see that there were better places I could have landed, but if you pass by the chances life deals out blindly to you, the one you really want might never come along, so I don’t regret taking that chance.
After that job dried up, I decided that even the urban sprawl of the greater Salt Lake City area was too dense for me. Its metro area sprawls so much these days that it actually has to go around a mountain about halfway along its 60 mile length. Most of that expanse was farm land a generation or two back, but it’s now almost completely settled, most of it densely by Western US standards.
Through another one of those strange coincidences, I ended up down in Moab, which is lovely most of the year. It’s up in the high desert that covers most of the huge Colorado Plateau, which is about the size of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, or New Mexico, and it spans parts of all four. When you think of “desert,” you’re probably thinking about Death Valley or the Sahara, which are around sea level, but Moab is about 4000 feet above sea level because of that plateau. While it gets hot in the summer, it’s actually not as hot as coastal Mumbai, and it’s a nice dry heat. I have to keep my lip balm on in the hot months and hand cream on in the winter months to avoid getting too dried out, but I like it better here.
There’s a lot of money in Moab for such a small and rural town. All those tourists buying $10 smoothies goes a long way in this sort of economy. That brings a fair bit of entrepreneurship to the town, mostly people catering to the tourists. The business owners get rich, and then they want people to take care of non-core tasks for them, like keeping their computers running, especially the ones they use to milk all that tourist money. And that’s what I do.
I’m not the guy who generally goes out to the site and interfaces directly with the customer. I’m too introverted for that. No, I’m the guy in the back room of the shop who the front-line techs bring the hard problems to. My hours, therefore, are quite flexible. If there’s a lot of work to do, I work until the work is done. If things are slack, I go biking and camping. Tourists being the way they are, things tend to get quite slack in the winter here, and I like winter camping.
Last night was one of the late nights. Some poor soul had gotten their whole store LAN infected with crypto malware, so I was busy into the dark hours restoring machines from backups in hopes that they could reopen for business the next morning. This morning, in fact.
? Beedle bee doo boo bee deee! Beedle bee doo boo bee deee! ?
Mrrrff…
? Beedle bee doo boo bee deee! ?
Einstein’s eyeball! It’s my mobile.
I fumbled for it on the nightstand and hit the green accept-call button. “Yeah?” I croaked.
“Davie, it’s Angela. That store with the virus’d PCs…they’re starting to bring all the machines up after we delivered them early this morning, but their cash registers won’t connect to the server, and they’re yelling about it. Can you get over there and sort them out before start of business, please?”
It was crypto malware, not a virus, but I didn’t say that. Normals misuse computer terms all the time, to my annoyance, but I try not to let it get to me. “Sure, I’ll be rolling shortly. I assume you want me to shower first?”
“Please. Thanks, Davie.” Click
Right on, right on…mad customer, no breakfast, rush job. At least they pay me the big bucks. Big for rural USA, anyway.
I flung off the thin blanket and sheet I used this time of year, then I thumped naked down the stairs from my bedroom into the main part of the house. I live alone, and it’s a desert, so I don’t see much point in wearing anything at home in the warmer months, roughly mid-spring to mid-fall. The way I see it, bedclothes are well-named: they’re the clothes I wear while in bed. I wasn’t naked until I got out of my bedclothes.
I grabbed a quick shower, shaved, brushed my teeth, put a fresh set of underwear on, then put on my work pants from last night so I wouldn’t have to take time to transfer their contents.
I wear cargo pants, and I use all the pockets. Yeah, I’m that guy.
I added a golf shirt suitable to be seen in by a customer, donned socks and shoes, grabbed my bag, and got out the door with my bike 12 minutes after the call.
I normally wear a cycling outfit to work and back, as I had yesterday, but I’d be going straight to the customer’s retail store today, and I didn’t think they’d appreciate me showing up that way and taking time to change outfits before starting work. On the one hand, it’s Moab; rules are different out here. But on the other, it’s a paying customer, and we do not diss the guy writing the checks by showing up in skin-tight bike shorts and a tee shirt. It wasn’t wet out, and I keep a reflective slap bracelet on the bike for wrapping my right pants leg up tight to keep it out of the greasy bike chain when I have to wear pants and not bike shorts. I’d be fine.
30 seconds later, emergency PC rescue services are rollin’ down the highway! They don’t give me any lights and sirens for this, but they sure do call in an awful tizzy when they want me. It’s good to be wanted, though not great to be woken up at 6:20am with a demand to be there right blinking now to get it fixed before business opens at 8am.
I live about three miles out of town down the Kane Creek Boulevard, which follows the Colorado River out of town to the West. I chose Moab to be closer to nature, and I live outside the town limits because I’m serious about that wish. It’s a fairly flat bit of road, so I was able to get up to about 30 mph on my bike without breaking a serious sweat. In town, I was able to keep that speed up, matching the speed limit enforced through most of town, so I’m not much slower than if I was in a car. I was at the customer site 15 minutes after turning onto the highway near my house. Maybe they’ll get me a cape or something.