Water. Love it. I mentioned that I spent 2 years on Guam, where you could still see the bottom 300 feet down on a clear day, where every dive was like shooting a Jacques Cousteau movie, where it was possible to find a stretch of white sandy beach that was uninhabited by anything larger that a fiddler crab, and said beach was no more than fifty yards from your front door. The icing on the cake was the Marine Biologist that lived next door who loved to teach. Never, by the way, get talked into a night dive if you suffer from claustrophobia to any degree. Being in ultra clear water at night is much like being in a cave with the lights off, but without the bats. You do get sharks as compensation. I had a place like that on Guam. Down in the south, it is obvious that Guam is the worlds tallest volcano. I say this because Guam sits almost on top of the Mariana Trench, the lowest point on Earth. That makes Guam a good deal taller (if not higher) than Mount Everest. There is a place on the southern shore where the ocean has worn the volcanic rock into a series of extended terraces. You can sit on a finger of an ancient lava flow that extends into the water like a natural stone jetty 50 feet above the surface and watch as the surf falls onto the shore only to flow back down again over the basalt steps. The Japanese must have found it special as well. They left a torji there on the finger denoting the location as a Shinto Shrine. That place is good for the soul. I must admit though, that I am equally attracted to mountains. If I were not mid Atlantic states born and bred (not to mention poor), I would have made my way to the Coast Highway long ago. You know, the one in Australia north of Sidney. Beautiful. One of my rituals at Pennsic was to get up at dawn and sit down away from the camp with a hardy breakfast of coffee and Raman noodles. My camp was near the top of Mount Eisen and I would just sit back and watched it all come alive each day. On the best days the morning mist covered the lower camps like a gray sea, with only an occasional spire or pennant extending above the surface. I watched as the mist thinned and the tents emerged from the depths.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 14:32:16 +0000
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