Chapter 15: The Mr. Miyagi School of Magic
The next day we called Ranger Kristen, and she agreed to come up for the weekend.
That left us Friday alone with Carlo, which we largely spent finalizing designs and ordering marketing materials. The business cards and brochures we ordered online, the signage we contracted for locally, and the web site Carlo set up for us using a service that would let us maintain it ourselves without needing to bug him further about it.
Carlo ran his professional operation as a consultancy, so he also helped us get our business’ basic legal matters arranged: applying for state tax numbers, filing generic incorporation papers through an online service he recommended, and so on.
By day’s end, we were just about ready to open our little side-business, now needing only those pesky licenses!
We celebrated by watching Carlo’s movie choice, Ronin. I loved it, but Kaitlyn was kind of bleh on it, alas.
Kristen arrived the next morning a few hours after breakfast, having left home with the dawn, a park ranger’s normal starting time.
We spent the rest of that Saturday teaching our shishyas, more focused on bringing Kristen up to speed with the two of us, Carlo struggling to absorb as much of it as he could in passing.
We learned to guru from the premiere training course of the 80s, The Karate Kid, so we taught by dragooning our students as landscaping project labor.
I had to teach Carlo invisibility so we could re-gravel the driveway from the road up to the house by pulling the old gravel back up from where it had been pounded down into the desert soil. Why buy fresh gravel? There’s plenty there already, if you know how to get at it!
Carlo turned out to be a bit worse than Kaitlyn with invisibility. Perhaps that would improve, but his clear forte was earth magic, outstripping even me, so we got the gravel drive done much more quickly than I’d expected.
Kaitlyn worked on sharpening different skills in Kristen by starting her on Carlo’s artistic vision for our front yard’s xeriscaping. As the scope of her earth magic skills grew and she refined her control over them, the three of us joined her in the task, Carlo leading us in rapport, so that by the time we began work on the back yard, his ideas flowed so subtly out to us that we thought they were our own. I suppose we must have added something to the plan, but Carlo would’ve been just as unable to tell us which ideas were his alone.
The result was all natural, beautiful and functional, screening what we wanted screened, drawing eyes where we wanted them to go.
Much of this work involved rearranging the desert plants, mainly junipers and sagebrush, especially along the refreshed driveway and back yard. We cut down no unwanted trees, just moved their entire root systems to the ideal locations, leaving the trees unharmed.
The cleverest bit of our work on the flora was to turn the dense mage-fueled growth blocking access to our backyard into a trivial maze that screened the back yard from visibility while guiding clients from the parking area so we wouldn’t have to take them through the house.
That complete, we then pulled some river rock over from the bed of the Colorado. It ran along the other side of the narrow rural road from our house. Some of it we used to make natural borders along the yards, and some we magically broke into rounded pea-sized pebbles for a parking area and a walkway from there into the back yard. We had reason to expect that we’d have some guests going barefoot from their car to our retreat area and back. Maybe even bare-assed!
There was a single unnatural element in the front yard landscaping, an item not native to the local desert ecosystem: just off the veranda steps, a ceramic sculpture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex stomping through a crowd of tiny garden gnomes, two crushed under one clawed foot, another grasped in one hand claw, a fourth being bloodily crunched in its jaws. It was perfect; it was even posed correctly, the terrible lizard’s body nearly parallel to the ground, its massive tail counterbalancing its torso and head over the sprinting legs, its short forelimbs thus able to grab prey from the ground as it thundered over its domain.
Perfect, I tell you.
Our day’s labors complete, I sat down on the top of the front porch steps, back against the decorative rail’s end-post, and the other three piled into the front porch swing. It started out as Carlo and Kristen, but my wife scooched in on his other side, flushing him with pleasure.
We admired the new landscaping until the sky began to match Carlo’s shade of blush pink.
Kristen spoke over the shishing of the desert breeze, “Can we go out for dinner? Moab’s the big city to me.”
Kristen lived in an unincorporated community that’d grown up around one of Lake Powell’s marinas. There’s a ferry landing, a small park visitor’s center, a convenience store, a restaurant, and a single tiny school for the residents’ kids. The “airport” is a narrow self-serve strip of asphalt paralleling the highway, barely long enough to safely land a small executive jet, used by boat owners too rich to spend time driving cross-country. I doubted the resident population broke double digits.
Contrast Moab: home to well over five thousand permanent residents, wowee! We’re not talking about a bedroom community outside a big city: the next biggest city is two hours’ drive away. Welcome to rural Utah.
I began, “If it was only me, Kristen, I’d be happy to eat out tonight, but those two,” indicating Carlo and my wife, “are each trying to beat a longest-time-nude record. Kaitlyn’s going after my record — twelve days straight — and Carlo’s trying to break a personal best, with the stretch goal of making it through to the end of this trip without dressing.”
She turned to her fellow student and said, “All right, I’ll stay nekkid for you, babe,” and pecked him on the cheek.
Carlo pinked right back up again, but he didn’t object to the endearment.
Interesting.
My wife distracted them from further displays, asking, “Davie, how about you go get some Thai from that place on Main by the park?”
We’d done that occasionally before, one of us lining a bike pannier with a bath towel to keep the food warm on the ride home, so I said, “All right. Y’all call it in while I get ready.”
“Whatcha want?” my wife asked as I was standing from my seat on the porch steps.
I paused in the front doorway, saying, “Gai pad med mamuang himaphan” before disappearing inside.
I left the front door open, so I heard Kristen — the least cosmopolitan of the group — ask, “What in the world is that?”
My wife answered, “Thai version of cashew chicken, spicier than the Chinese version.”
You might be expecting the Indian guy to order curry, but I’m kind of a curry snob. I avoid it in small town America to save my dinner companions from hearing me whine about how they don’t do it like mama back home.
Kaitlyn was just finishing the take-out order when I walked my bike out the front door, down the porch steps, and straddled my bike, foot on the high pedal, ready to dig into the freshly spread gravel, knowing I’d get to the restaurant about the time our order was ready, an automobile providing no meaningful advantage here.
From that perch I said, “I’ll be wanting the backyard shower when I get back, so you three should get yours in while I’m away. Be about half an hour; see ya!”
As I was powering down the thick new gravel bedding, working hard to stay upright, I was happy to be taking advantage of the longer daylight hours, anticipating a good hard sprint into town, wanting to rebuild some of the endurance training I’d let slip through the winter.
Those three must’ve enjoyed our new shower quite a lot, since they were all still wet when I got back with the food!