Bring Out Your Dead
We buried my sister on Mount Shasta amid sunlight and the sound of shofars. Turns out that shofars aren't typically used at funerals by the Jews but then my sister wasn't Jewish. I suspect she wanted to be.
My sister managed to marry her passion for religion and quarter horses...
The shofar is, of course, a ram's horn used mostly to signal the new moon. Even in the hands of an expert I hesitate to call it a musical instrument. In the hands of my dead sister's friends it was more like the bleating of an aggrieved wildebeest.
I don't really know if they were close friends or merely co-religionists, fellow believers in Jesus the Jew, a rather slippery messianic faith that included singing in Hebrew and the wearing of prayer shawls and white ceremonial dresses. My sister wore such a dress when she took the Glory Ride in 1996.
She was called KaTaHa then (but not by our mother). It sounds rather aboriginal but was actually a loose concatenation of her maiden and married name, Kathleen Thrasher Hunt. The Glory Ride, more commonly called the Pacific Coast Trail, threaded through the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains from Mexico to the Canadian border. It was on horseback. My sister managed to marry her passion for religion and quarter horses in an act of will and imagination that still staggers me with its acrobatic elegance.
I was never very clear on the details of her faith. She used a lot of Hebrew words, referred to God as YHWH and Jesus as Y’shua, and seemed to enjoy street theater. There were a lot of Hebrew words at her funeral and the shofars were purely theatric.
She had lived for years on Mount Shasta, a sanctuary for fringe beliefs. I suspect she had some trouble reconciling her own fringe fundamentalism with the Wiccans and crystal gazers that came as pilgrims to the mountain during the Harmonic Convergence but she was too kind hearted to be vengeful. She would never have made a good televangelist.
When my sister died, he drove her body cross-country in the back of his pickup.
She died suddenly in Colorado, ostensibly of diabetes but I suspect the coffee enemas contributed. It's my ill-advised opinion that you can survive only so many coffee enemas a day and five or six is too damned many! The quack who treated her thought otherwise. His only credentials were a recommendation from my sister's significant other and his own claim that the treatment enabled him to continue drinking when his liver should have long since failed.
Her significant other was named Ron. I don't doubt Ron was dedicated to my sister; I question everything else about him. He was one of those who believe that Federal taxation is a blatant violation of the Constitution, apparently unaware that the Constitution is a living document whose interpretation is continually changing and often contradictory, much like the Bible. Living his beliefs, he went off the grid—no credit cards, no loans, no legal ownership, not even a driver's license. There was no way to connect him to the house he owned in Colorado, the RV he owned in California, or the pickup truck he drove between them. He spent a lot of time in jail for his beliefs, mostly for traffic violations.
When my sister died, he drove her body cross-country in the back of his pickup. I can't begin to imagine what a macabre journey that must have been.
We buried my sister on Mount Shasta amid sunlight and the sound of shofars. She died at the age of 57, a brief life but an interesting one. Perhaps that's all we can hope for reasonably.
December 30, 2007 in The People | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Assassins
The guy in the bar claimed he worked for the CIA north of the DMZ during the war (for me the war is forever Viet Nam) as an assassin targeting high ranking Viet Cong. It may have been true. I was never sure. He worked for me tenuously, marketing a charter boat I was running out of Monterey. For several weeks after I fired him I carried a knife and kept clear of the shadows.
The truly deadly men I've known were unrecognizable. They looked like the guys I surfed with at Rincon and Ventura County Line or the kindly uncle with a Jerry Colonna mustache. They were decent, reasonable sort of men; one of them was in the crowd when Jane Fonda paraded down the streets of Hanoi. He was waiting for the order to pull the trigger.
The kid I roomed with in San Diego was blond, freckled, and quick to smile. He didn't seem haunted by what he had done nor especially proud. If I persisted, he would tell about traveling up the Mekong in a rubber boat to the headquarters of a VC regiment, stealing into a hooch where the officers slept on a bamboo floor, murdering the one in the middle without waking those on either side, and leaving the ace of spades as a calling card. PsyOps they called it. It was supposed to have a more demoralizing effect than a simple body count.
My commanding officer in the 621st Nuclear Artillery Battalion was a lanky, six foot guy named Lt. Bean. In country he had been a LRRP (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol.) They were called lurps and they were deadly. Supposedly every dead lurp cost the enemy 400 of their own dead.
As a lurp Bean would dress in black pajamas and bamboo hat and spend weeks at a time in North Vietnam. His job was reconnaissance, ambush, and assassination. He was very good at it, so good they gave him a battlefield commission.
What surprises me most is how ordinary these men appeared, and how dangerous they were in reality. They seemed to have transitioned effortless from killing as an occupation. I don't know if they were haunted by nightmares. If so, I suspect they dreamed more of the death of their friends than of their enemies.
Perhaps that is one measure of what we are and the discrepancy between what we wish to become.
October 20, 2007 in The People | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Old Hands
My hands have grown old without me. They seem a strangers hands—wrinkled, weathered, like a desert landscape eroded and seamed by arroyos. They seem roughly familiar but much older than me, as if they had lived a life other than mine. The skin drawn across the back of my hands is thin as the nest of a paper wasp. Old friends. Bookends. A newspaper blown through the grass falls on the 'round toes, the high shoes, of the old friends.
Photo attribution: espoirala
October 15, 2007 in The People | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Darkening Days
The mornings are becoming chill with the Fall. The deciduous trees burn with color. The season of fog and storm is coming.
This year I'm more leery of winter than last. This year I remember the sound of a gale among the Douglas-fir and Western red cedar, the gusts that roared like a north-bound freight, stout timber shattering beneath the weight of wind, the thunder of huge trees striking the ground. The sound of a gale in darkness—whether ashore or at sea—is always more terrifying than in daylight.
That winter storm felled trees that had stood several hundred years, trees that had likely been saplings before the Battle of Bunker Hill. They lay across the road in windrows, isolating our neighborhood. Houses were crushed. Fortunately, no one was killed.
The electricity in our neighborhood failed early in the storm. During that week a cold front settled on Puget Sound. The ground froze hard. There was no heat in the house but the fireplace. It snowed.
We dragged the mattress downstairs and slept in front of the fire, Linda, me and the dogs. Every few hours through successive nights I woke to stoke the fire and keep the cold at bay. Power wasn't restored for more than a week.
Climatologists tell us the storms will become more powerful and frequent. As the sea level rises places like Bangladesh will be inundated. Pacific atolls and the Gulf Coast may become uninhabitable. Wars will be fought over fresh water and arable land. Millions will become climate refugees. People will die, many people.
Is it avoidable? I suppose the answer is yes, even now we could at least ameliorate the effects, if we could take concerted action based upon enlightened self-interest, if we could surrender short-term advantage for the lasting benefit of all. But we have always been better at responding to disaster than avoiding it.
Perhaps I'm just becoming more dour with age but I find the inhumanism of Robinson Jeffers—or Lao Tzu—the only point of calm within the approaching storm.
"To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the
whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history...for contemplation or in fact. . .
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine
beauty of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken."
Robinson Jeffers, The Answer
October 15, 2007 in The Shore | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Day Hike
On a recent holiday we went for a walk in the woods, Linda and I, up the Little Mount Si trail. It's not an exceptionally rigorous trail. It peaks at 1576 feet but most of that elevation is gained in the last half mile on a staircase made of gnarled root and worn stone. Nor is it especially remote, only a half hour drive from our home in Pleasant Valley, through Fall City and Snoqualmie to North Bend, and less than a hour from the streets of Seattle along Interstate 90.
An amazing photo of Mount Si from the Snoqualmie Valley. One (or the other) of the most climbed mountains in the US.
Photo attribution: papalars.
We walked loaded down with 20 pound day packs—a gallon of water, maps, compass, handheld GPS, spare socks, jacket, hat, first aid kit, poncho, emergency survival suit, binoculars, a Brunton barometer, my old Gerber sheath knife. Few people on the trail carried even a coat. One woman carried a Pomeranian. I felt substantially overdressed.
We often walk in the Cascade wilderness where inattention, bad luck, or misjudgment can be disastrous. I once heard that the third in a sequence of mistakes is the one likely to kill you. The first or the second may not be harmless but the third can be be fatal. Like three on a match. My guess is that by the third mistake death has time enough to accurately gauge your range.
The first mistake is underestimating your environment. The second is overestimating your resources.
We carried our packs past the sheer cliff face where the technical climbers practice their skill, past the bench dedicated to a climber who never returned from the summit of Mount Everest. You can see the various pitches by the tracing of pitons and carabineers left in the rock. I wondered if climbers trusted themselves to pitons driven by a stranger. I doubt I would.
I learned to practice distrust as a sailor on a coast that invites shipwreck. It was my job to cultivate negativity, to imagine the disastrous, to embrace the darkness and never be surprised. It is a skill fallen upon hard times lately, disreputed by a generation raised on positive thoughts and benign expectations. But even with practice I'm still surprised, as surprised as the day David Koch went missing.
I met him Tuesday afternoon. He was making a promotional tour for his magazine, DM Review. I was the marketing manager of a small software company that bought his advertising space.
“I was likely the last person to see David alive and know him by name.”
He had a boyish face and thinning hair. His smile seemed expectant, as if someone were about to deliver a punch line. His conversation was softly spoken and hesitant or perhaps merely polite, paced to encourage interruption. He was, after all, from Wisconsin where time flows like glacial ice.
The rock face on Little Mount Si. Photo attribution: tarnalberry.
The Vancouver Sun reported the contents of his rental car left at the base of Grouse Mountain. There was the stuff typical of a business trip—dress shoes, white shirt, black suit, laptop, Blackberry—and the embarrassingly human details—a receipt for a Butterfingers and a nail file. It’s rather startling, like peering from the window of an elevated train into someone’s apartment and witnessing an unguarded moment, a candid gesture or expression that is utterly unimportant and completely human. He liked Butterfingers. It’s simply not something you expect to know about a dead man you met only once.
I was likely one of the last people to see David alive and know him by name. He left my office in Pioneer Square and drove north to Vancouver, British Columbia. He crossed the Canadian border at 6:30 pm. Before checking into his hotel he stopped and bought a ticket for the tram to the top of Grouse Mountain. (The summer day’s are long in these latitudes, lasting until 10:00 pm, and Grouse Mountain is a place to hike convenient to Vancouver.) He didn’t return with the last tram of the day. He was never again seen alive.
“I doubt a day pack would have saved David but it might have made him walk more cautiously.”
They found him eventually. A hiker followed the descending spiral of a bald eagle. The body had apparently been pinned underwater for some time. He had apparently fallen from the steep path above into a river in flood.
I doubt that a day pack would have saved David but it might have made him walk more cautiously, weighted by the gravity of each step. And despite the extra work required to carry all that stuff, despite the complaining joints and stone-bruised heels, I think I'll continue to carry my pack even on casual hikes, if only as a memento mori.
See also: Lost on Grouse Mountain;
Missing, Presumed Lost
September 5, 2007 in The Shore | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
The Round Years: 50
In retrospect, I should not have been surprised. It was a rain forest, after all, the only temperate rain forest in the contiguous U.S. You expect certain kinds of behavior from a rain forest, at least you should, but I was lured by bright sunlight on a glorious day in Forks, Washington. Only later did I come to realize that Forks and sunlight were oxymoronic.
“That, of course, was before Forks became a spaceport.”
The town of Forks lies on the edge of the Hoh Rainforest. It's a town carved from primeval wilderness that has been undone by a small, spotted owl. Not much happens in Forks these days.
There's a novel about a young girl who moved from Phoenix to Forks and fell in love with a vampire. It's an oddly appropriate storyline for a town with empty, echoing streets and a liquor store that sells shotgun shells. (They seem to have identified a market opportunity in drunken hunters.)
Maybe the only thing currently thriving in Forks.
That, of course, was before Forks became a space port. The Rubicon, an entry in the X-Prize competition, was launched from Forks, exploded spectacularly mid-air, and littered the Pacific Ocean with bits of mangled mannequin. The bits later washed up on the beach, puzzling tourists. Since its failure in sub-orbital tourism, Forks has again descended into an unquiet stupor.
Forks was roundly condemned as “a festering wound of a town” by Dave Gilmartin in his book The Absolutely Worst Places to Live in America. That seems harsh; Gilmartin's attitude was likely soured by his subject matter. The research must have been tiresome.
We came to Forks initially to survey a plot of land for a campsite. The land on the Bogachiel River was owned by friends. Since their property was buried in thick forest several hundred yards from the access road, they guided us to the place the week before my 50th birthday.
“How do you explain to an insurance adjuster that your windshield was shattered by a dead fish?”
It was a glorious day. Sunlight glinted from the rivers. The air smelled of pine and cedar. When we pulled off the highway onto a dirt road, the car flushed a bald eagle. The eagle was in the middle of the road dismembering a salmon. It was a large salmon, almost too heavy for the eagle to lift. As it struggled to gain altitude, we were closing the distance between us at 30 miles per hour. I braked hard and the eagle swept overhead, its wings laboring, dragging the dead salmon through the air, barely clearing our windshield. (How do you explain to an insurance adjuster that your windshield was shattered by a dead fish?)
We found an ideal campsite on a bend of the Bogachiel, a sand bar backed by towering trees. We scrambled over river stones, ate peanut butter sandwiches, got sunburned—a good day. As it turned out, not a typical day.
My wife, Linda, tends to pack for a camping trip as if it were an invasion. I agree entirely with her preparedness; it's humping all that gear through the woods that's my problem. It was already late in the day and the light was failing before we finished the dozen trips required to move our gear from car to campsite. And it was raining.
Apparently it had been raining since we left the week before. The Bogachiel had inundated our intended campsite—the pleasant sand bar at the bend in the river. Our alternative was a patch of sword ferns beneath Western red cedar dripping with moss. The cedar and Douglas-fir created a canopy that utterly blocked the sky.
By the time we had erected a tent large enough to accommodate a squad of soldiers with battle gear and crawled into our cots (camping with cots is part of preparedness), the dogs were sodden and shivering. Sharing a camp cot with a wet Portuguese Water Dog is an experience I no longer recommend.
“The romantic days of a man and his chainsaw are gone, replaced by a monstrous machine with an awkward name.”
Next day was similar, and the day after that, and the day after that... It rained. It rained hard or soft or sometimes like gossamer but it rained. And for several hours the next day military aircraft streaked across the sky. There were fast attack aircraft, bombers and cargo planes. It went on for hours. A military exercise, likely, but we had no radio, no cell phone coverage, no news of the world. It was disquieting. And then they began dismembering the forest around us.
The ominous Feller Buncher.
The romantic days of a man and his chainsaw are gone, replaced by a monstrous machine with the awkward name of Feller Buncher. The machine began felling and bunching around 8:00 am next morning. The forest echoed with the sound of its circular saw and the crack of trees tossed callously aside by the man in an air-conditioned cab. Like the rain, it continued day after day after...
On the fourth day of a vacation intended to last a week, I broke. It happened after attempting to shower from a black bag suspended from a mossy branch. The blackness of the bag was intended to absorb the warmth of the sun. Unfortunately, there is precious little sunlight in a rain forest. Next day we broke camp and bought a trailer.
Signature stories are those we continue to tell throughout our lives, the stories that define our history and shape our future.
August 31, 2007 in Signature Stories | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Blood Moon
The recent lunar eclipse (August 28, 2007) began on the Pacific Coast around 2:00 am, what was once referred to shipboard as the graveyard watch.
This remarkable montage was taken of the moon sailing over Portland. Click the image to see the detail.
Photo attribution: Ed Williams, Chief Engineer, KPTV/KPDX
If you're not the type to stand graveyard watch, wait six months. The next full eclipse of the moon will be visible at a more civilized hour, 7:00 pm on February 20, 2008.
August 30, 2007 in The Shore | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The Round Years: 40
The twelve cylinder Detroit Diesels rumbled like a muscle car as we approached the dock lined with 40 black balloons. The mate, who had commandeered the PA system, led a deckload of sodden passengers in a chorus of Happy Birthday. The song went rather well, I thought, considering the passengers had just been pelted with sea spray hard as bird shot and witnessed Assateague ponies copulating wildly.
(In all fairness, the ponies were wild and the passengers not above photographing and filming what came naturally.)
Some mothers covered their children's eyes while others zoomed in with their camcorders.
I brought the Sea Rocket alongside the dock and the crew made fast, then discharged our deck load with practiced efficiency. The passengers filed off with wet clothes clinging to their bodies and tennis shoes squelching. They had gotten their money's worth and, in some cases, more.
The Sea Rocket was billed as the world's biggest speed boat. It was marketing hype, admittedly, but at 73 feet she was undeniably large. Except for a slightly raised platform where the helmsman stood, the deck was unobstructed from bow to stern and seated 135 passengers. We boarded those passengers at Gator's dock in Ocean City, carried them across the bay to Assateague Island, then into the open Atlantic. That, at least, was the plan. Sometimes it didn't go according to plan.
The Sea Rocket on a calm day. Note the gratuitous rooster tail. Photo attribution: fstopcove.com
I once ran aground in the soft mud while jockeying for a better view of the ponies. We shifted the passengers like movable ballast, crowding them aft to lighten the bow until we could break free of the mud's suction. The passengers thought it part of the show and gave a cheer when we were once again afloat.
The spray rose from her bow, hung motionless, then fell thundering on the foredeck. It fell relentlessly, torrentially, biblically.
And the ponies weren't always amorous. Sometimes they didn't even show. When they did perform, however, some mothers covered their children's eyes while others zoomed in with their camcorders.
After Assateague Island, I turned the Rocket's bow towards the inlet. The crew began shrugging into their foul weather gear and securing their sun glasses with lanyards like goggles. The passengers often thought it part of the show until I pushed the throttles forward and the trim tabs down.
On the windward leg the Rocket would often bury her bow in the swell, the spray would rise in a parabolic arc then drive into the passengers on the aft deck with the combined speed of the wind and the boat. On a brisk day that could approach 40 knots. Salt spray driven at that speed stings. People tucked their head between their legs in self-defense.
Throughout the windward leg passengers on the foredeck felt themselves protected by special dispensation. The spray arced over their heads, leaving them untouched. They pointed and laughed as their fellow passengers on the aft deck squealed and writhed with each impact until we turned and headed back through the inlet.
The deep ocean waves began to build as they approached the inlet and felt the bottom shoaling beneath them. The Rocket surfed down the face of the waves. The spray rose from her bow, hung motionless, then fell thundering on the foredeck. It fell relentlessly, torrentially, biblically. By the time we returned to the dock decorated with black balloons and the mate singing Happy Birthday, everyone who had bought a ticket was thoroughly soaked.
It was the last trip of the day. The crew at Gator's had a round of drinks waiting for us at the bar—Tequila shooters were popular at the time. It was my fortieth birthday. I don't clearly remember the rest of the night. I think it had something to do with a Ferris wheel. At some point a reporter for the local paper photographed the crew of the Rocket. It's the only photograph I have of us all together—suntanned, grinning, and drunk as sailors.
The crew of the Rocket celebrating my 40th at a bar on Ocean City inlet (I'm the guy with a hat.) Linda, my wife, is the one hoisting a beer. The grainy photo is from a local newspaper. Click for enlarged image.
Related posts: Riding the Rocket
Signature stories are those we continue to tell throughout our lives, the stories that define our history and shape our future.
August 28, 2007 in Signature Stories | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The Round Years: 30
Dan Wallace lived in a sailor's ghetto on the Oakland Estuary where the current turned in sluggish gyres like the Sargasso Sea, laden with flotsam and debris, oil slicks and algae blooms, light bulbs, McDonald's wrappers, and spent condoms. At the bottom of the Estuary the berthing was cheap and Wallace was tight as any Scotsman.
There were certain liabilities associated with a cheap berth in the bottoms. Bums tended to squat on the tidelands and forage on the docks, rotted planks splintered underfoot, and a strong southwester pushing a plus tide could lift the docks higher than the short pilings that anchored them. Large rafts of docks with boats still attached were sometimes set adrift on the Estuary.
On the San Francisco Bay, there are micro-climates drawn as distinctly as a line in a school yard. Cross the line and the playground bully is likely to knock you ass over tea kettle.
Wallace was a BMW (Boat Maintenance Worker), a sanitized term coined by Latitude 38 to replace one more colorful but less printable. He was good at fixing boats which was how we met. I needed boats fixed. I was the maintenance manager for Club Nautique's charter fleet. Since I've always been mechanically inept, Wallace was a valuable resource.
He also became a friend. His caustic sense of humor and fondness for rum were endearing. And we tended to dislike the same people, especially Fast Freddy, the owner of NorCal Yachts.
Wallace bought Freya, a wooden pinky* 30-something feet long, and moved onboard. As mentioned, Wallace was a frugal bastard and he never threw anything away. He still had report cards dating from grammar school. It was a challenge for him to stow all of his stuff in a small wooden boat with a narrow beam. The report cards ended up in the bilge.
The fact that Freya's maiden voyage was on my 30th birthday was coincidental but meaningful—Jung's definition of synchronicity—but, 25 years later, I have yet to puzzle out the meaning.
The boat's engine didn't work so we sailed her from the slip, short-tacking out the Estuary until we reached open water and the East Bay. By the time we sailed beneath the Bay Bridge we had broached a bottle of Mt Gay rum and were feeling well-pleased with ourselves. Then the wind filled in.
If you've never sailed the San Francisco Bay, there are micro-climates drawn as distinctly as a line in a school yard. Cross the line and the playground bully is likely to knock you ass over tea kettle.
Turns out that when a wooden boat is left out of the water, it shrivels like an old lime forgotten in the refrigerator—or the manhood of a San Francisco sailor.
One of those lines is drawn between Yerba Buena Island and the San Francisco city front. In other words, the Bay Bridge. On one side of the bridge it's warm and embracing, like drinking a mellow Chardonnay in a hot bath. On the other side it's likely blowing great guns and small arms and cold enough to shrivel your manhood.
Neither Wallace nor I knew much about wooden boats. Turns out that when a wooden boat is left out of the water, it shrivels like an old lime forgotten in the refrigerator—or the manhood of a San Francisco sailor. It takes some time sitting in salt water before a boat rehydrates. Appropriately, the process is called pickling.
When the wind first struck Freya, the boat flinched like a wounded animal, the hull groaned, and the seams between the planks gaped. The hull was subject to conflicting forces. It was like a taffy pull. No doubt we would have been more concerned if we had been less drunk.
At the time we were preoccupied with keeping our feet and fighting the atrocious weather helm. Wallace had his sea boots braced against the cockpit coaming and the tiller beneath his chin trying to keep the boat from rounding to weather. I was handing sail like a washerwoman.
“I'm no expert but I think we're sinking.”
When I finally did go below for another tumbler of rum, I could see daylight between seams on the weather side of the boat. Sea water was flowing down the inside of the hull to leeward. The cabin sole was awash. Wallace's grammar school grades, parking tickets, love letters and restraining orders were surging back and forth on a rising tide. Even his sleeping bag was sodden.
"Yo, Wallace," I shouted from below decks. "I'm no expert but I think we're sinking."
The pumps were able to keep up with the incoming water for a while until they clogged on paper pulp. Wallace's history had become an amorphous mushy mass sloshing across the cabin sole and fouling the bilge pumps. He took it hard.
"Christ, man" I said unkindly. "Why are you crying like an old woman? I'm the one that's 30 years old."
*According to The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, a pinky is one of the oldest types of New England fishing and trading vessels. Built with a Baltic hull form having a pointed stern similar to the bow over which a false stern was carried beyond the rudder like a square counter.
Example of a pinky with false stern carried beyond the rudder. Freya looked much like this but without the gaffs.
Signature stories are those we continue to tell throughout our lives, the stories that define our history and shape our future.
August 24, 2007 in Signature Stories | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Long, Strange Trip
I stood on a manicured lawn that sloped to an architecturally precise creek designed especially for Microsoft. I drank white wine, ate peanuts, and listened to Toad the Wet Sprocket on stage. A pair of osprey circled effortlessly overhead, rising on a column of heated air. No one seemed to notice. Clouds massed on the eastern horizon above the Cascades and I had one of those disconcerting moments when the commonplace becomes oddly unfamiliar like looking into a store front window and mistaking your own reflection for that of a stranger. How the hell did I get here?
I have those moments periodically—once on the deck of a Valiant 40 anchored at Hanalei Bay, drinking Tanqueray and tonic just prior to my first Trans-Pacific delivery; another reading Carlos Castenada in a six-wheeled vehicle while on maneuvers with the Fourth Mechanized Division across the high plains of Colorado; and again while living on a beach in Baja California, watching the body of a sea lion slowly erode week after week. How the hell did I get here?
I've come to the conclusion that there's no possible way to predict where my life will lead me. (Half the time I'm not even sure where I've been.) I had no inkling that I would become a yacht captain or launch nuclear rockets from a truck bed or work for Microsoft. It's just too weird to be credible.
The Grateful Dead always said it best.
August 16, 2007 in The People | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
