Golly-gee, Batman, but a lot has happened since the last time I updated this blog. Today’s Sunday here in New Zealand and I arrived last Thursday so this is my fourth day here. But, before I go into all that has happened since I arrived here, I want to go back and deal with all that happened before I left the States.
My last post was about the big storm that hit Western Washington State in the days just before I left. To say it was huge would be an understatement. It broke records left, right and center and caused an awful lot of folks heartache and grief. Sharon and I just saw one small part of what happened but thousands of other folks all had their adventures and trials as well. Sharon told me that the local newspaper in our town had an entire issue primarily dedicated to the storm. if you want to get some sense of just how big all of this was, you can link to the paper on-line here. As I write this, the current issue has the story but, if you read this later and access the link, you will want the 14Nov06 edition.
I left Washington on November 9th bound for a five day visit to Southern California with my son and his family before continuing on to New Zealand.
Amazingly, the storms kept coming even after the one that broke all the records. The last I heard from my wife, they’ve continued to come one after the other with barely a day of decent weather between them. The weather folks are saying that all of this activity is part of a larger pattern which is setting up as the result of a new El Nino forming in the eastern Pacific. The last time we had a big El Nino like this was in 1990 and I remember the storms that year in Western Washington were ferocious as well.
My visit to my son’s place was great. It’s been a year and a half since I’ve seen them last and in that time, they’ve had another child, a little girl named Eden. And their first, a boy named Cody, has grown up into a three year-old full of love and questions and curiosity.
We did so many things during the five days, it’s becoming hard to remember them all. I worked with Dan two days on a patio reconstruction project he’s doing for his boss in Dana Point. I went with him into his office where he works as a loan officer. We went out to Silverado Canyon where Larry Branham lives and saw his place and talked with folks from the Warriors Mountain Bike Club which both dan and Larry are members of.
Dan tends bar at a one-of-a-kind bar named the Swallow’s Inn in San Juan Capistrano and I went in there on Friday night after having a great sushi dinner with one of my wife’s dearest friends and had a few beers and just watched the action until almost closing. The Swallow’s Inn is a piece of true and remarkable Americana. I told Dan that someone ought to take a video camera in there one afternoon when it is quiet and just go around and slowly film and record the walls. There are more than fifty years of scribbles, posters, nick-nacks, discarded bras, cowboy hats and God knows what else layered there. People put up most whatever they want and stuff rarely comes down. Dan told me that in one place, there’s a note by someone under some later posters scrawled there just before he went off to fight in WWII and then just beside it is the note he wrote when he returned four years later. Someday, the Swallows will be gone and I hope someone goes around and captures it all first. In a world plagued by corporate restaurants pretending to be the genuine article, this is, indeed, one of the last real ones and right there in the midst or Orange County in Southern California which is virtually by definition, one of the most affluent and fastest developing areas in the world.
This story wouldn’t be complete without something about Dan. I’m sure most parents love and cherish their children and I’m no different. But I wonder if many of them respect the man their son has grown up to be as much as I do Dan. He is truly an amazing person. I told him my thoughts about this over dinner one night. I told him that even if he wasn’t my son, I would be immensely proud to know him and call him my friend. I think his wife, Ann, perhaps said it best. She said that when she first met him and had watched him for awhile, that it was his genuineness and the fair and even way he treated everyone that impressed her. I couldn’t agree more. I wish that I thought that a lot of what he turned out to be was because of my input – but the truth is that I don’t think so. His mother, Rose, and I loved him truly but beyond that, I think all the magic and steel was in him from birth. And I see this as yet another example of all the blessings I find here in my life.
I’d asked Dan months before I came down if we could go out to Joshua Tree in the high California desert like we used to when he was a teenager. On Sunday morning, after a big family breakfast, he and I took off and drove out there. It’s about three hours from where he lives in Aliso Viejo. I know that the trips we made when he was young made an impression on him because he’s been back there many many times in the years since and he’s explored and hiked a lot of the remoter parts of the place. I’m and older man now than I was back then and I told him I wouldn’t be up for climbing huge rocks and jumping down off of them and making difficult traverses. Just something that an older fellow in decent shape could expect to do without breaking something on the eve of his departure to new Zealand, I said.
Well, he found a good one. We drove to a place called Split Rock and hiked for about an hour and a half up and over a big ridge to enter a valley behind the ridge where he knew of some old mine shafts and a miner’s cabin built into the rocks. it took us awhile to find the shafts and the cabin since it had been five years since he was last there but we did and it was cool.
After exploring it all, we sat down and opened a can of oysters and put them onto crackers and squirted cheese-in-a-can on them and gobbled them up. I had to laugh. He told me that many people just can’t get past the idea of eating something that looks as gross as an oyster out of a can and so many times when he brings them on hikes or mountain bike rides to eat, there are no takers even though folks are starving.
Cody’s a trip. For at least a year now, he’s had a near obsession with ‘plugging things in’. So, after making very sure that he knows the difference between and the rules concerning real electrical plug-in and pretend ones, they gave him his own power strip and extension cord which he drags all over the place plugging them in. He really wants to know how things connect together and how they turn on and off. One of the best things he and I did together was to go through my bags slowly. I was carrying lot of computer gear for use in New Zealand and he was intensely curious about it all.
So, each evening, as a aid to getting him to go to bed without a struggle, we promised him to open my bag and take out one more thing and to see what it was and how it worked. It was hugely popular and before the week was out, he’d seen every bit of computer gear I had and checked out what could and could not plug into it.
On Tuesday the 14th around noon, I left Dan’s and headed north towards Los Angeles to meet Charles, whom I’ve known since college in the early seventies. My flight to new Zealand didn’t take off until 8:30 PM so we had a lot of time to have a late lunch. He lives in a nice area just north of LAX called Culver City. it seems to be undergoing a renaissance and many of the big Hollywood movie studios are establishing themselves there and it’s a vibrant place.
Charles and I have had a running thirty-year philosophical discussion and even if I haven’t see him for years, we always seem to pick it up again and wade in once more better armed than the previous time with all the stuff we’ve learned, experienced and thought in the mean time. This was no exception and I found it as much of a pleasure as I always do. Charles is a brilliant man and I take it as a compliment that he deigns to talk with me. Whereas I pursued natural science in college, he pursued the liberal arts and our careers have diverged wildly. He works these days as the chief political strategist for a California US Congresswoman and he is the one person I know that actually has some real and direct knowledge of what goes on inside the Beltway.
If I had to sum up our afternoon’s philosophical output, it would be that (A) The existence or non-existence of an omnipotent God can neither be proven nor disproven and that therefore we each are free to make an a-priori choice in the matter and none can gainsay us and (B) that now that we’re older men, we find that our weenies have significantly less influence over what we are thinking or doing at any given time and this is not bad.
After lunch, Charles took me around to meet several of his extended family members who all seem to live within just a few miles of his place. I have to say that Charles has one of the most amazing and diverse extended family structures I’ve ever seen and from what’s he’s told me, it all seems to work. It would take several very long paragraphs to try to describe what I know about his family and I think I’ll just leave it at that for now. Everyone I met seemed exceptionally bright and I am not surprised.
This has grown exceptionally long so I’m going to cut it loose now and my next piece will describe what happened after I left Charles and journeyed on to Aotearoa – the land of the Long White Cloud – New Zealand.