The Big, Remote Island

Island views, photo by kajmeister outside the condo.

Imagine loading your family, your small tribe, on to a boat along with livestock, vegetables, and water, then rowing 2000 miles. Randomly, hoping you’ll find someplace else to stay because the place you came from was constantly threatened by very bossy other tribes, with bigger machetes. Rationing the food, day by day, slowly wondering if you’d die of thirst, massive waves in the sudden squalls, or in a fight with your neighbor who won’t stop talking about how everything had been better back home. Then, you finally see a shadow to the north that isn’t just another ocean storm.

Even today, the most comfortable direct flight from San Francisco to Hawaii takes five hours, flying over clouds and water and more clouds, more water, until suddenly this brilliant green farmland dotted with windmills suddenly springs beneath. The green turns to a long stretch of black rock and tan scrub that looks recently fire-scorched, then the runway. Out you go from your chilly northern home and air-conditioned plane into that tropical air, refreshing at first, but just you wait. It will soon suck out all your energy, but you won’t care. Palm trees and water will weave their mystical glamor on you. Welcome to the Big Island.

We have come to the islands for a week squeezed in the off-season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The next few blogs should make you hear the roll of surf, the rush of air across the palm fronds, the endless morning birdsong, the morning hedge clippers…. well, there are a lot of hedges and they are always growing.

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The Roots of Dune

Dune, 1990 edition, cover art by Frank Herbert

I give you fair warning: I am a Dune Dork.

I read all the books when I was a kid, i.e. in college. I had a poster for the upcoming 1984 Ridley Scott movie on my dorm room wall, facing my roommate’s life-sized photo of Spock. I owned the Avalon Hill game of Dune, which I regretfully gave away years ago because I thought it was too dorky to own and too complicated to play.

Dune is coming–a fourth movie version–yes! there are four. That’s how dorky I am, that I know about the Jodorowsky version. If you aren’t quite so enamored, I do understand. Some people prefer Xena or Ernest Hemingway. But Dune was a landmark in science fiction history, so I am excited. I will tell you more about Dune, the movie history, in a later blog. And I will review the movie after I see it on October 26th at the 2:40 pm show in seat B9, hoping not to be as disappointed as I was on December 17, 1984 when I saw it at the big dome at the Century Theater in Sacramento.

But wait, there’s more! Because we were out a wanderin’ and came upon the Dune Peninsula. (!!!?!?!!)

The Dune Peninsula

Imagine, if you are a Xena dork, coming upon the location where they filmed the Xena’s death scene–the first one. Or, if you like Ernest Hemingway (for some reason I can’t fathom, but to each his own), his favorite tobacconist in Paris. I own a second edition paperback of The Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones). During a tour of an ancestral home in Scotland, where our tour guide happened to be the Earl of Something, he casually mentioned that they had filmed a scene from Season 3 of the show out on his estate, near the folly. Squeee!

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Go on Home (Day 17, Final Mosey)

One last sunrise left in our Left Coast Mosey. Photo by kajmeister.

“Crap, it’s hot!”

The midmorning autumn sun was lasing into the windows of the Fun Car as we loaded it one last time. It gave me an instant headache. Wasn’t it raining just yesterday? Didn’t we spend all of Oregon trying to choose between windbreaker slicker, Danish raincoat, and umbrella?

Over the Green Pass into Chaparral

We had come over the Siskiyou Pass the previous night, south from Ashland in a setting sun that kept trying to peek through a cloud bank. The Pass is the highest point on I-5 at 4310 feet, and my ears popped coming down as KK, the better driver, carefully navigated among cautious truckers manually downshifting and deathwish sports cars.

I was treated to a stunning view of rolling brown hills of the Cascade-Siskiyou Forest to the east and Klamath to the west, polka-dotted with pumpkin-colored tamaracks. Just after the California border, the trees dropped away into what looks like desert, although this is chaparral, high desert. Central California is full of rolling hills with drought-reistant thickets like manazanitas. It just looks brown compared with the green we’ve left, but this is its own kind of tough and hardy place, as much as the climate and people we’ve left in the north.

Shasta gives us the view that Mt. Hood and Mt. Rainier held back. California knew we were coming home. Photo by kajmeister.
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