Chapter 35: Geology
We loaded up pretty quick, both of us having our bike bags packed from our last trip, needing only to refresh the food and water. I kept the bike rack mounted on mi burro, so all I had to do is lift my bike up, strap it down, and then drive back into town to pick Kaitlyn and her bike up and do the same to it.
We got to the town nearest the proposed mining site and met up with the BLM geologist in his motel’s lobby. Kaitlyn talked with him about the case, and they strategized some. I had little to put in, so I just let them go at it, but I paid attention.
Once they’d squared everything away, we explained that we’d be camping out near the site and that the geologist should just meet us out there with the mining company’s people in the morning. I proposed that we might as well scout out access roads and such, arranging a particular ribbon signal tied to the fenceposts nearest the access point we found. The geologist confirmed the GPS waypoint that Kaitlyn’s boss had given her, so we were set.
We agreed on the plan and a meeting time the next morning, then parted ways.
We were out near the site before 4pm, and we quickly found an access road that teed off from the highway and went out toward the site, so we tried it and found that it took us right past the GPS waypoint. We looked around and saw a likely camping spot several hundred yards away off the road, so I let Kaitlyn out to mark the cattle guard across the gap in the fence we’d used while I proceeded forward carefully in 4WD, crawling over to our camping spot without crushing any more plant life than necessary.
I chose a spot up behind a hill in a saddle between it and another hill, from which I could see another dirt road going off into the sticks, passing by the base of the hill on the other side with no obvious destination.
I started setting up camp. I unrolled the sleeping pads, opened their valves, and tossed them under the truck to self-inflate, hoping they wouldn’t blow away under there. I then started getting the bikes down and had almost finished when Kaitlyn came jogging up my path to the campsite. “Kaitlyn, why don’t we get on our bikes and see where that road goes?” I proposed, pointing out the second road.
“Sounds good. Just let me get changed into my riding clothes,” she agreed.
We were truly out in the middle of nowhere, so we just stripped off right there beside the truck, got our bikes down, unloaded the bags to make the bikes more nimble, and reluctantly got into as little riding clothes as we could get away with.
“I want to stay naked,” Kaitlyn stated firmly. Then she sighed and let out her lament: “Damn boobs. I need the sports bra.”
“I love your boobs, but yeah, biking over rough roads without a bra on those C-cups… Bad plan. I’m not sure whether you could get away without the padding from your shorts, going bottomless with those prominent labia of yours. I suppose you could try it; we could heal you up if it doesn’t work out,” I offered.
She thought a bit about it but then shook her head.
I then continued, “I certainly couldn’t do without my shorts. I wouldn’t get 10 meters down the road before I was whimpering like a baby.” She winced. “I can go topless without any penalty, but I can take that or leave it. And we’ll both need shoes with these cleated pedals.”
Kaitlyn summarized, “All the nice and smooth rides are back in civilization, aren’t they?”
“Alas,” I agreed. “Don’t worry, though: I have plenty of nakey-time scheduled for us today!” I revealed.
“Yay! Let’s go!” she said, brightening.
We went down the road about half an hour without winding up anywhere interesting, so we just turned back around and rode back to camp. It was a nice enough ride, but I’d have liked to find something interesting out there. It must go somewhere, but we gave up before finding the road’s destination. Oh, well.
Back at camp, we stripped our sweaty riding clothes off and draped them over a nearby juniper tree’s branches. It’d nearly hit 80°F today, and we’d ridden pretty hard between the rough road and the rolling countryside we went over.
I tied our clothes to the tree branches with a few lengths of twine from one of the bags while Kaitlyn started dinner. Then finding myself at loose ends, I got the tent set up.
Since I wasn’t in so much of a rush to set the tent up as last time, I got it tacked down nice and tight, all the pieces neatly in place. Then I tossed in the sleeping pads and lay out what I’d taken to calling our tandem sleeping bag. It was nearly June now; it wouldn’t be long before we’d be skipping the bag and sleeping under a blanket at most. It’d be about 55°F overnight, though, too cold to skip the bag on this trip.
We finished our chores at about the same time, so I came over to the fire and sat down on a nearby rock, and we ate our dinner in companionable silence, in that mellow state after a good workout. On finishing, I cleaned the plates with a sand scrub, then turned the sand into a shower for ourselves.
Clean, dry, fed, and exercised, it was time for some relaxation. “Kaitlyn, let’s walk over to the work site. And bring, ummm, let’s see…your phone.”
“Being cryptic again, my guru?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.
“The word is mystical, my shishya. Now shaddap and do it before I spank you, you naughty little girl,” I mock-threatened.
“Now I don’t know whether I want to disobey or not. I’m torn!” she complained.
“Bongo time!” I proclaimed, then wrapped her in a low hug, my face in her cleavage and my hands on her buns, which I drummed like I did a few weeks ago out at Mage Arch. Pattapattapat!
“Ooooh!” she exclaimed, squirming against me. I began grinning widely.
“To work, young lady!” I directed.
“Yes, guru,” she said, putting on a poor fakery of obedience and modesty. I loved it.
As we walked out naked across the rough desert plain, me confidently, she tenderly, I turned to ask her, “Do you think you could figure out the sole-toughening trick on your own?”
“Hmmm, maybe. It’s an application of healing, isn’t it? Instead of just fixing these scratches and jabs I’ve been getting, I’d accelerate the development of calluses as if I’d gained them naturally, right?”
“Bingo. Give me the phone, sit, and start trying to work on it so we can get out to the work site before sundown,” I teased.
She stuck out her tongue at me, but gave me the phone and did as I asked.
While she was working, I opened up the camera app on her phone and took a few low-angle shots of her there in her meditation pose, utterly naked among the sagebrush, the FJ and tent behind her in what I thought was a pretty nice composition. It was a layered shot with some distant mesas beyond the hills, plus some nice puffy clouds. I’d put it on my computer background, for sure. (My personal computer, not my work computer!)
“Is this an attempt at training me to meditate through distractions, or are you just being intentionally annoying?” she said in a low tone, bordering on a growl.
“Both. I’m also asking for a pounding, but I run faster, so good luck with that,” I snarked back at her.
“I know where you’re sleeping tonight, bub. Or at least, where you hope to sleep,” she returned threateningly.
“They’re great photos. You’ll love them.” SNICK went another one. I saw her take visible control of herself and deepen her meditation, slipping into trance.
I walked around and got some nice side and back shots. Several had the sun behind her either putting her in silhouette or creating an artistic flare around her body. This was some great stuff.
“I think I’m getting it, Davie. Which means I can now run fast over this terrain. Do you really want to continue taking photos without asking?”
I put on my serious guru tone, saying, “This is a demonstration of your growing control in the face of nearby technology. Let us make an experiment of it. I am, let us say, 3 meters away from you right now. Hang on, I think I can get your camera app to tell me that based on its focusing data.” I poked around in the app’s menus a bit, found the metadata read-out I wanted and pronounced, “Yes, 3.1 meters, good. Now I want you to maintain a visible and steady spell.”
I looked around for a suitable subject and found a nice round pebble. “Here, take this and direct a smooth steady stream of air at it from beneath, at about a 45 degree angle upward. If you do it right, modulating the distance and air pressure properly, you can balance the stone’s tendency to fall with the uplift from the air. You want to hold onto the stone as you lower it slowly it into the airstream, adjusting the airflow until the stone feels nearly weightless in your fingers, then roll it gently into the stream. When you get it right, the stone will continuously roll down the airstream as the air pushes back up on it, stabilizing it in place, the forces balanced.”
It took her a few minutes to pick up the trick of it, but she got the stone spinning steadily in mid-air, suspended only in a jet of air she pulled up using her magic.
“Nicely done, shishya!” I said exuberantly. “Now keep that up, and I will slowly approach with the phone in hand and see how close I can get before your magic cuts off, making you drop the stone.”
We played with that for maybe 15 minutes before I’d mapped out a nearly circular area around her. At about 1.4 meters, she’d reliably drop the stone…and I’d take a picture, purely in order to get the distance data from the photo metadata, no other reason at all. Why else would I want photos of my gorgeous naked girlfriend?
“Now let me try,” I said. We swapped places, and I got the stone up pretty quickly, having done this several times before, first with ping-pong balls and a vacuum cleaner rigged in reverse to blow instead of suck — high times in the geek dorm back at college! — and then later with the same sort of stone I’d found for Kaitlyn. I’d reacquired the skill out in the desert, messing about with my newly developing skills a few years back. I found it to be a good control exercise: you have to keep the air flowing just so to make it work.
It turned out that Kaitlyn could approach to almost half a meter from my body before I dropped the stone. For this test, my power reserve didn’t really matter: I was solidly connected to Gaia, sitting bare on the desert like that, so I had access to all the power I wanted, but as soon as that pinnacle of modern high technology got too close, I just couldn’t hold onto the spell any more.
“Well, that’s interesting,” I commented once we’d finished collecting data. “Almost as interesting as those photos.”
Kaitlyn colored a bit and quickly started going through her photo album. “Hmmm… These really aren’t bad, Davie.”
“I had a wonderful subject in a beautiful setting. You know, not many people would say this desert is beautiful, but it’s growing on me. I assume you love it even more deeply than I do, given that you grew up with it as ‘normal’ and chose to stay here,” I observed.
“Could be you’re right,” she allowed. “I take it you want some of these photos, Davie?”
“All of them, yes.”
“We’ll see.”
I just smiled. And then she started taking photos of me! I posed like a trouper, taking directions until she started getting silly.
To stop things from going too far, I said, “Kaitlyn, how about you go set that phone down on that rock over yon, then come with me.” While she walked away, I got up and moved out about halfway between that rock and the fence running along the road. I lay down on the ground and spread out in a star. As Kaitlyn was coming back, she quickly figured out the plan and assumed the mirror position to mine.
I noticed her walking more confidently through the abrasive desert. “How’s the feet?” I asked her.
“Much better. They still need work before I’ll be able to threaten the Nike empire like you, but I’ll get there pretty quickly, I think,” she reported. “It feels about like wearing a pair of suede slippers, the kind without a rubber sole.”
“Good. Now slip into a trance, and let’s do a bit of pre-inspection of this site.”
We spread out and delved the land as deep and far as we could, limited on one side by where Kaitlyn had set down her phone and by the roadside cattle fence on another side. That swath was enough to give us a good look at the depth and shape of this section of the coal seam. We could see that it agreed pretty well with the geologist’s data. We then checked around for anything unusual in the biosphere and didn’t find anything that stood out. That meant we probably weren’t going to wreck some endangered critter’s habitat. Good. We spent about an hour total studying the site, probably learning more in that time than a multidisciplinary team of scientists could in a month.
“Now that’s what I call geology, Kaitlyn: the study of the Earth!”
“Mmmm,” was her answer. I could tell through the Gaia bond that she wholly agreed. The sound was a politeness, not a necessary conveyor of information.
“It’s getting dark,” I observed. Then I announced, “Work time is over, Kaitlyn. It’s play time now.” I felt an eager glow come through the bond, then an anticipatory shiver.
We got up without any more words, held each others’ hands, and walked over to retrieve Kaitlyn’s phone… Which promptly collapsed our rapport state, by Minsky’s missing mustache! But we couldn’t leave the phone out here overnight; there was a small chance of rain overnight, and she’d have been annoyed to lose the phone.
We walked back to camp, locked the phone in the truck, and walked out into the saddle between the two hills, bare as newborns. We then spent a good hour there simply boning our brains out, back in rapport with Gaia and each other.
When we were both thoroughly satisfied, we peeled ourselves off the ground before we could fall asleep, got back to the tent, slipped into the sleeping bag, zipped it and the tent around us, and fell asleep spooning, blissfully naked together.
We woke with the dawn.
Kaitlyn’s first words to me that morning were not the most romantic I’d ever heard. “You don’t snore, Davie.” This was apparently a revelation to her.
“I used to,” I replied. “You remember what I told you about fixing my eyes? Well, there’s this patch of loose flesh between the roof of your mouth and the back of your throat.”
“The soft palate,” she supplied.
“Right. Anyway, when you relax in sleep, that can vibrate with your breathing, which is what causes snoring. Since being with you, I’ve started to tighten that up occasionally. About every few weeks, I feel it getting loose again, so I tighten it back up again. I figure it gives me a better chance to keep you in little-spoon position if I don’t snore.”
“Awww, that’s so romantic!” she sighed, snuggling back into me.
Women: a strange species.
We slid out into the cool morning air, and I put Kaitlyn on sand shower duty. She was getting better. I did breakfast, we cleaned up, dressed reluctantly, and sat looking out over the site until we saw our people coming down the road, so we hiked out to meet them.
There’s not much to say about the meeting, except that Kaitlyn got several approving looks from the geologist and respectful ones from the mining company’s people. Sure, they were checking her out a bit, but these looks mostly came when she popped out with some fact about the site that was clearly well outside her area of expertise. She drew heavily on our pre-inspection results, and that impressed everyone greatly. I think she got her way a lot more than she otherwise might if she’d been seen as just another low-level bureaucrat.
Other than that, the meeting went much as I’d projected: the mining people listed their wishes and dreams, and either the geologist or Kaitlyn would have to rein them back in on either legal, regulatory, or physical grounds. I tried to play the “concerned citizen” role, dropping in comments about, “My, I wonder how that would play in the media” and such. They got the message. I decided this was probably going to be a good public/private partnership. And if not, we’d smack ‘em back into line.
I popped into work for a few hours after getting back to town, sweeping the decks of the jobs built up in my brief absence, then I went home and started writing the first new program I’d begun in a long time: a Jupyter notebook data model based on the proximity data we collected out in the field with Kaitlyn’s mobile phone. It ended up awfully rough; we’d need a lot more data before the model could make useful predictions, but I thought we might be onto something.
We’ll see.
As I was evaluating my progress so far that evening, an email came in from Kaitlyn. It said, “23 photos attached.” I quickly checked my work into the version control system, knowing I was definitely finished for the night now. It was play time again.