Stepping gingerly over the domesticated sastrugi that makes up our deck after two weeks of winter, I unlatch the cover and open it. A moist comforting blanket of fog rises and surrounds me in the chill, dry wind. I slip in. The heat is as bracing as the cold I just left. Leaning back, the vastness of the sky unfolds above me.
Darkness that is the outlines of juniper and pine trees.
West coast air traffic coursing through the sky, navigational lights blinking.
A meteor falling north to south.
Cygnus has almost completed its flight over the western horizon, his beak almost touching the Cascades.
Jupiter shining brightly above China Hat Butte.
My brain soaks in the fact that some of the lights I’m seeing are in real-time, and others have spent billions of years traveling before landing.
Landing in my eyes here in a tub of hot water just west of the middle of nowhere Oregon after a journey across billions of years of space and time.
Makes one wonder.
Chuck, your well-crafted words make me long for the hot tub I used to enjoy, when I lived in Littleton: All the above wonderment, plus the knowledge and deep satisfaction that I was sitting in a “puddle of sunshine.”
The tub was solar heated and even in the depths of winter, it would make it 105F, for my almost daily nighttime dips.
Gotta build me another one, up here….
This is the first time I’ve ever had one on my property. ‘Tis verrry niiice.
If yer interested, contact me in email, and I’ll give you the details to easily make your tub solar heated: for an investment of ~$2500, you can have a largely-heated-by-solar tub, and the payback from the savings is quite remarkable.
And *VERY* niiiice…;)
The tub I built in Littleton (used tub/sled, used panels) was my ‘practice and primer’ solar energy project, and now, 16 years later, it still works perfectly.