homecoming

After a hiatus of nearly six years, I'm back in the US working. I haven't changed jobs; I'm still at Imperial. But I was sent to Fort Collins, CO, to pick up some skills that the lab back in London desperately needs. After a ten-hour flight across seven time zones, I spent nine hours in the lab today as if I had never left.

I didn't do my thesis in Colorado, but it felt a bit like coming home. (I even ran into a former classmate.) The lab is small but has the same laid-back intensity about it like my degree lab did. People don't wear lab coats but t-shirts they got as freebies ages ago. They have desks right next to their benches. They come in early and stay late and know how to pass the time in-between. The biggest draw of the departmental seminar this afternoon were the cold Odells. Even the speaker couldn't resist and punctuated his declamations with regular sips.

Reminiscing isn't the point of this trip. I came for work and won't relent until I've learned and produced what I've made the trip for. But there's the odd minute here and there that I look left or right, and what I see fills me with joy and dismay at the same time. I would love to come back and live here again. I would hate to come back and live here.

Fort Collins is spacious and airy. The houses are low and the front yards wide. The streets were laid out, with a sort of Messianic forethought, so that a Suburban towing a trailer with two quad-bikes can do a U-turn without having to negotiate inches. This is not a place made for walking. But the historic center, roughly four blocks by three, a bit narrower by design and full of quirky little shops and fun restaurants, is busy with pedestrians and cyclists.

Quirkiness and littleness are quickly lost away from the center. In fact, it seems that vast space between urban compactness and rural backwardness is one gigantic stripmall, an uninterrupted chain of colorfully and brightly advertised chain stores, providers of culinary monotony, and drive-through financial institutions. What is it with the American fascination for uniformity? When did individualism get lost?

I pondered these questions not just on my drive to campus but also during lunch. The student union refectory looks like the food court of a shopping center that has fallen on hard times. Under harsh neon lighting, a handful of fast-food outlets promise satiation and happiness, and the world's greatest immigrant nation is reduced to Taco Bell and Panda Express.

Had it not been for lunch, my lunch break would have been awesome. The day was gorgeous. The trees were aflame with fall colors, but the sun blasted as if summer had never ended. I wish I could have stretched out on a lawn just out of sight of the lab and dreamed the day away. The thin mountain air was crisp and fresh and felt much warmer than it was.

When I finished work in the evening, things had changed. The sun was gone and with it the warmth of the day. Because the Rockies rise just west of town, the sun disappears behind them long before it gets dark. As I left the lab, the sky still glowed brightly but the city was already plunged into the shadow of the night.