the island life for me

Sunday, March 23, 2008
the island life for me
Current mood: content
I’m sitting on the edge of an island listening to the waves roll in, watching something that hasn’t become so familiar that I stop appreciating it. I don’t really imagine how that could happen. I’ve been in the states for just over a month. I still look the wrong way when crossing the street, I still speak with an apparently funny accent and strange intonations which I didn’t realize I had until I’d stepped foot out of the country where I’d gained the inflections and back into the familiar soil in the United States.



I’m getting to know the LA airport quite well as I had a 4 hour layover after leaving Auckland but before returning to Dallas, only to return to that same airport 3 days later to start a new job on another island, on Catalina. A week and a half later I return to the same airport for the same LA- Dallas route to be home for my brother’s wedding, and then, after another 3 days, I’m back at the LA airport, back on a ferry headed towards the continuation of a job I’d just started as an instructor with an environmental outdoor education program.


It still feels like I’m as far away as New Zealand sometimes. I have to pre-plan every phone call or text message because my cell phone gets such bad service here. It’s a tease to my homing device. "I’m back in the country!! But I still can’t talk to you!!"


My sister Meredith and her husband Scott just visited me in California. I showed them around the island and we took up a whole bench and rode in a van full of strangers on unpaved windy roads across Catalina island. We kayaked and saw seals and sea lions, we snorkeled, had a campfire, we hiked and I shared my newfound knowledge of Catalina native edible and non-edible plants, native animals, tide pool organisms, composting, and the like. We did a (full) moonlight kayak and paddled straight out towards the mainland, though we could barely see it, until Howland’s Landing cove was almost indistinguishable as darkness seeped in and we watched the moon appear half on the horizon and sat mesmerized on kayaks in the middle of the channel and continued to watch until the orange tinted glowing full moon rose into the sky and I couldn’t feel my toes but I could feel the breeze and feel like I was, again, on the end of the earth.


I don’t have a 3 second delay when speaking to loved ones now that I’m back in the country. And it’s good to be back in the USA.