Labs and Liminal Spaces
A dystonaut's thoughts.
When does liminal space stop becoming liminal?
Being in the Field Artillery (my first time working for Uncle Sam) gave me an appreciation for just how fast one can go into a liminal space and set up shop. We could typically roll into a position and be operation within a half an hour, with 20 minutes being the time standard if memory serves. (It’s been a while and don’t even think about having me try to handle the Met Monster after not touching it in 25 years.) Our job was relatively simple however compared to something like a field kitchen.
More recently the state DOT is having contractors do bridge work, cleaning off rust and repainting. They bring in these mobile offices and restrooms, and just set them up on the side of the room. Probably takes them all of a day to get up and running. They stay there for a few months working on the bridge, and then pack it up and go off to the next one.
When I was a kid, a few of us among the same age range in the neighborhood used to build forts and assorted structures in the woods behind our houses. They ranged from a simple arrangement of branches placed up against a large boulder, to tree houses made from scrap lumber, to a rather elaborate bridge crossing a stream that was straight out of the Boy Scout Fieldbook. That last one accompanied the start of a trail network to and from various cool places in our side of the woods, to be eventually linked up to another network of bridle trails on the opposite side. This ambitious project came to an incomplete end when the youngest of us entered High School and found other way to occupy our time. The eventual abandonment of the Hundred-Twenty Acre Wood was a good thing because I was getting a couple notions, and didn’t want “peers” who couldn’t keep their mouths shut discovering or otherwise knowing about my early attempts at finding Interzone. Not that I knew about Interzone, just that such a place existed.
Certain hobbyist attempts are best done away from home. Making your own fireworks and smoke bombs is one of them. Dad brought home one of those 1950s or 60s vintage chemistry sets that was 90% complete, and there were all those early 1980s era Ninja movies to get inspiration from. While all my contemporaries were making smoke by puffing on the end of a Marlboro, I was making smoke by mixing together zinc and sulfur. That makes a hellofa smoke bomb mix that resulted in a device much better than the little ceramic balls you bought from the lady at the flea market who also had all the martial arts weapons you technically had to be 18 to buy, but could get at a much younger age if you had the cash and didn’t look like a troublemaker. Still not as good as an M18 though. Didn’t want to blow anything or anyone up. Just wanted some of those cool Ninja flash/smoke pellets from the movies. I should have gotten into stagecraft or stage magic I suppose, but opportunities were limited and the stage kids were too boring and sedate for me.
I had yet to read Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Hell, it was a couple years before I discovered Atlas Shrugged. In Anthem, the protagonist sets up a lab in an abandoned subway tunnel using scrounged discarded materials. I didn’t have an abandoned subway tunnel handy, but I did have a Hundred-Twenty Acre Wood that only saw limited use during hunting season by a few people who didn’t wander much. I found a little hollow between two boulders, and set up shop. All my lab materials were scrounged or bought dirt cheap from tag sales. During the summer I’d put on some surplus army fatigues, toss consumables in a field pack, and hike out to the lab. Got the zine/sulfur mixture down pat, and learned that the solid propellant you could scrounge out of Estes model rocket motors had a really nice “woomph!” factor. Never did get the impact ignition thing down, but resources were limited. It was enough fun trying to get the local pharmacist to sell you Saltpeter. Had to go out of town to a pharmacy in a nearby shopping mall. The pharmacist there looked at me, told me to be careful, and suggested I get some heavy-duty work gloves and safety goggles from the hardware store on the other side of the plaza. Eventually chemistry was supplanted by computers which were supposed to be a safer form of marginal hobbyist activity. That’s not only debatable, but also a story for another time.