I confess that counting the weeks has become tedious and tricky. I’ve resorted to asking the Google AI assistant to conduct the enumeration and find myself trusting it, or her, or them, at least as much as a voting machine.
Gap year. A journey between clinical medicine (though many would accuse a clinical geneticist of practicing something closer to alchemy) and writing.
We have returned from a long road trip in Milton, our Transit Trail campervan. The Sea Trials were successful; Milton passed the Final Official Acceptance Review and has been commissioned: USCV Milton, a Class B recreational vehicle and (simultaneously, paradoxically) not an RV. A particle and a wave.
The skippers and navigators learned a few things about their craft and crew during the 12 thousand mile cruise. Some unimproved roads were narrow and long. “SOS” replaced the reassuring 5G cell signal, and we worried about navigation. Would we need to fall back on our compass, could we shoot an azimuth? More than once we wondered how to turn around on an unpromising road when a 3-point turn looked geometrically impossible. Cliff to the starboard, canyon wall to port. And we were in a rain forest, hard alee.
We found our favorite campsite at Lower Onion Creek Campground on BLM land northeast of Moab, Utah. From the eastern bank of the Colorado River, we saw dawn splash onto the red sandstone mesa wall, a daily transmutation. We hiked to the Fisher Towers, lost the trail a few times on the bare rock, and met a guy starting a solo climb of Cottontail, the middle tower, a thousand feet of Cutler and Moenkopi sandstone. He had 3 days of provisions, clear October skies, and moxie.
The sun set without humility. A rising quarter moon gestured toward a star along the southwest horizon. Was it a star? No, too bright. No other stars were visible in the darker sky in the north and east. Ah, sure – likely just some Martians on their way back to Area 51 from the beach in Mazatlán. Probably stopped by a joint in Moab for some cerveza and brandy.
Could that have been Comet C/2023A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. Who knows for sure?
By the way, the bartender said the Martians just registered to vote.
Scott D. McLean, MD 