September 12 to 18, 2010 - Back Home and the End Days of Summer II

Ah yes, autumn in the Pacific Northwest! Perhaps in October we can go to Skagit or Island County and see the color change before the winds come and blow the leaves off the trees to bare them naked for the winter. We seem to be in a transition where it is too warm for a “hoodie” but cool enough to warrant its use. I love fall in the Pacific Northwest but the rains are coming and it did so the past two days. The arrival of fall also means my birthday at which I quietly non-celebrated this past week.

I added NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Division – Mission Blog site to the links page on the bottom. It logs and is a dairy of the current mission the ship is on. I am not there but always follow what the crew and scientists are doing.

Lately the blog has opened with some sort of reasoning for its non-update statuses or lack of new writing. I have been ashore for nearly a month and took a week off from the office to visit my parents in the San Francisco Bay Area. My mother is not doing well with her advanced stages of dementia and my father is doing his best to uphold a trying spirit of helping her. “L” had helped out my mother when she could and the short visit may have helped them be distracted from everyday realities of getting older and the truth is generations afterwards are not immune from the same fate. “I” had gone to with us to see his grandparents and did most of the driving.

On the way back to Seattle, we stopped off in Newport, Oregon to see if there was something we missed initially that could convince or better put inspire us to change our minds about living there. We did this, in case any hopes of relocating to Hawaii would fail and we had to move to Oregon instead. We bought tuna at Pier Seven from a boat that was in need of maintenance. According to the mate, they were selling fish caught from other boats while they were waiting for parts. The tuna season was at an end and you could see that the docks were depleted of boats gone out for their last catch. The captain of the disabled fishing boat talked to us and asked how much fish we were looking to buy. We told him what we wanted to take back with us and as he was cleaning the fish for us told us of Polynesians, Micronesians and Marshallese who came out on weekends to buy the entire fish for consumption. The same was applied for “L” as she wanted heads and the carcass to eat at which she got.

Perhaps this was the smoking gun that would inspire us to think that Newport would not be a doubtful move. As we left Newport and back to Interstate Five for the trip north to Seattle, “L” and I looked at each other and shook our head negatively. Nope, there was nothing there to change our minds. Not that we have much choice anyway if I wish to remain gainfully employed. Despite that there was nothing to add where we could say “hey it may not be so bad.”

The consensus about the current move was not the same with moving to Dugway, Utah nearly twenty years ago. At that time “T” and I wanted to move out of San Diego. America’s Finest City was in transition in the late 80’s and early 90’s from a retirement community whose economy depended on the Navy to the “cool” metropolis it is now. California for the first time had more people leaving it rather than moving to. In fact in order to find youth in a city at the time, you had to go to San Francisco. Yeah, Los Angeles was 120 miles north but LA is the type of place where you pull off the road, get a burger and continue driving on the interstate. We just wanted out of Southern California as traffic increased along with crime and all the social problems that came with it.

I recall “T” telling me on the CB radio I installed in the cars so we can keep contact while driving during our move in 1991. She reiterated that this was not the rural environment she had envisioned as we drove through the desert on I-15 from Las Vegas to St. George, Utah. We adapted to Utah quickly as many folks made us feel welcomed and “I” was born four months after we arrived. If my ego wasn’t so titanic in 1997, I would likely still be living in Utah. In many ways, this move is one marriage and twenty years too late. Newport would have been the type of place that “T” and I would not have mind calling home. In fact it would be the type of place she had in mind and in 1997 Burlington, Washington fulfilled that but it was not a dream as it turned out.

I never make plans for the long term as today’s economy does not allow that and the concept of home ownership has not kept up with the mobile economy. Gone are the days when you followed your father’s footsteps in any plant and like him, retired from that job too after thirty some odd years. I rejected the concept of and believing the “American Dream” a long time ago. I tend to agree with the late comedian George Carlin that you have to be asleep in order to live it. Unfortunately for many as of late, that dream has turned out to be a spiraling nightmare. If not, a disappointing illusion in converting a myth into reality.