ATDTDA (3) My name is Skip, 72-75

[Monte Davis]

"As Merle watched her [Dally] sleep... somewhere off wandering those
dangerous dark fields... He wanted to find a way in, to look out for her at
least,  keep her from the worst if he could."

Pynchon is very good -- flat-out shameless, in fact -- with this despairing
tenderness of the waking:

"Tonight's child has had a long trip here, hasn't slept. Her eyes are red,
her frock wrinkled. Her coat has been a pillow. You feel her
exhaustion.considering only how to shelter her, you are the Traveler's Aid."
(GR 50-51)

Or Jessica a few pages later, "up late at the window while [Roger] sleeps,
lighting another precious cigarette from the coal of the last, filling with
a need to cry because she can see so plainly her limits, knows she can never
protect him as much as she must..." (58)

Or when Advent blows from the sea, cold welcome for the Christ child, and
"you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to
your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if
it were you who could, somehow, save him." (135-136)

***

Merle's glass plates are replaced by film in mass-produced cameras: light
seeking a more ethereal place to rest (waiting to be digits, holograms, some
dense weightless photon-spin format to come).

His skills more than compensate, "calm as a sharpshooter," reminding us that
(as Kodak sez), " 'snapshot' was a 19th century hunting term meaning to
shoot from the hip without careful aim... [first] applied to phtoographs in
1860, but became popular with the introduction of the handheld Kodak box
camera."
 
http://www.pbase.com/shaner/kodak_pony_premo_no_4

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/brownieCam/ (turn up the sound)

***

To make ends meet, Merle moonlights at shingle weaving -- which we can hope
for his sake is used in the roofer's sense, shingles interlocked to form a
waterproof valley:

http://ucce.ucdavis.edu/files/filelibrary/5794/22481.jpg

Rather than this:
 
http://content.lib.washington.edu/pnwlaborweb/images/ssshingledesc.jpg

Then there's frog-bonding, whch is wiring the metal flanges ("frogs") where
streetcar tracks cross or switch.
http://www.qcarcompany.com/information/info/gallery_prototype_trackwork/8101
_BQT_Atlantic_Flatbush.jpg

 Odd: it's not like Pynchon to pass up an opportunity for a pun:

http://www.raygirvan.co.uk/apoth/crapos.jpg

***

There's a nervous edge, maybe a little TRParanoia, in the sudden switch from
the lightning-rod pitch to

"Ball lightning," somebody said after a silence. "That's the kind we worry 
about here. What've you got for that?"

Merle immediately grew sober. "You've had ball lightning out this way?"

http://www.biocrawler.com/encyclopedia/Image:Ball_Lightning.jpg

http://wuff.me.uk/ball%20lightning/ball%20lightning.html

The "cage" is a Faraday cage, generically a solid or mesh metal enclosure
that excludes charge from its interior.

http://jedlik.phy.bme.hu/~hartlein/www.mip.berkeley.edu/images/physics/D+10+
13.gif

http://www.menzelphoto.com/gallery/big/lightning2.htm

There's no reason charging the cage from a battery should make it a better
ball-lightning trap. But since there's no halfway-decent explanation for
Skip and his kind anyway, what the hell.

Gotta love that throwaway  "and of course his hair was standing on end."

http://www.actewagl.com.au/Education/energy/electricity/WhatIsElectricity/St
aticElectricity.aspx

***

Dally's getting old enough to want more in the way of siblings than a night
light. "Foul ball," Merle chides her (think of M&D's "Inexpensive salvo" and
other variations on "cheap shot," "late hit," etc.)

And she's going to want more than the beauty of wind in the grass, that
in-land sea, although it will be in her from now on.

http://www.terragalleria.com/images/np-rockies/wica0578.jpeg

There are lots of ways to look at the land that's coming up. In the first
map here, Colorado coal country is around the last word of "Rocky Mountain
Piedmont;" the Sangre de Cristos are in the purple just west of "Mountain.":

http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/docs/rst/Sect6/Sect6_6.html

Scroll down. Explore. Welcome to Colorado. Watch out for teen-aged redheads.



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