leaving the West

After twelve days of nearly uninterrupted work, with twelve-hour days following ten-hour days and only one afternoon off, I finished what I had come to Colorado to achieve – forty-five minutes before the deadline I had set for heading out of town and towards the Denver airport. It was a mad scramble.

There's no reason to relive the suffering or get fired up again at the sensation of glory because it wouldn't make sense to anyone but me. But let me tell you that it was a great feeling to put down the pipetman, hand the chocolate of gratitude to my colleagues for a week and a bit and a bottle of Black Bush to my host, and close the door behind me one last time.

The last and most important of reactions was still going when I left the lab. It was to be stopped and frozen that night and then sent to London by Overnight Express. There was nothing more I could do, nothing for me to contribute and certainly nothing to break.

Earlier in the week, my thesis adviser had come over from Utah to give a talk at CSU. This was entirely unrelated to my visit but afforded me a nice evening out chatting with my old boss and sharing a beer and a burger. Stories were swapped and anecdotes brought back to life, much to the delight of my host who was also my former boss's host for his talk and had to introduce him the next day. He did that by elaborating my former boss's character with the help of four telling maxims.

Of the four, I know three. The fourth was new to me. I don't recall ever hearing it, though I had read it in the book the lab had put together to commemorate former boss's 50th birthday a year ago. Three people quoted it as their favorite bit of advice. My boss was apparently fond of saying "Don't fuck up!"

As I was nearing the end of my project in Colorado, doing experiments that continued and completed a sequence of half a dozen experiments done in the days before, whittling down precious material with each inefficient step of the epic synthesis, the crude epithet assumed the shine of eternal wisdom. Every time I was about to mix solutions or inject samples into purification instruments, the three words lit up in my head, slowed me down for a second, and focused my mind with the ferociousness of large pliers. I didn't fuck up, and I traveled back in elation, exalted that I had done it.

Rolling down Prospect in the red Focus I had rented, I slowly left Fort Collins behind me, picking up speed only on the interstate. Behind me was a small town that seemed full of promise, low in the sky to my left were hundreds of clouds bunched against the intense blue infinity of the Midwest. On my right, beyond a wide sea of aspen trees burning out their fall colors, rose the Rockies, their bright caps of fresh snow taunting me with spite.

I had seen them every day, in the distance but magnified by sunshine, and I had seen the first snow reported on TV. I hadn't come closer to driving up than on my last day, sitting in my car with my work done. Angry French-Canadians screamed abuse from the speakers and Howard Stern invited me to do my thing, but I couldn't leave the freeway. My departure was less than three hours away and the airport not in sight yet.