Path of the Blazing Sarong stutters to life again, born, as usual, of frustration and wonderment. Without that feeling, it seems I have nothing to say. Since last November, I've devoted myself to the project of learning to write fiction, which is something I suck at. So, I haven't been writing much of anything else because that is so impossibly hard and takes all my willpower and time stolen from the rest of my life. This amorphous thing, motherhood, seems in fact to have unlocked any fragile/occasional talent (today is a day for pessimism, tristes tropiques), which is something I should write down. Anyway, my attempts to develop a plot recently devolved into a multiple choice game, one like How to Survive a Disaster, which I found in the children's section of the local library.
Why did the man disappear?
a) He was murdered.
b) He was having an affair.
c) No real reason--he was always unreliable.
I should have a firm grasp of whatever logic is at the heart of this story, and everything should be turning inevitably on that fulcrum, as solid as industrial steel, be taking shape as ineluctably as sea water turning into rain. The other world has to be real. Oh well.
Now we have passed through Tortola and Virgin Gorda, the bliss of coral sand and aquamarine the Caribbean sells. On an isolated beach across the sound from Richard Branson's private island, I rushed into the surf, which constantly renewed its clarity. Tallulah and I roamed the beach, finding shampoo bottles and shoes obscured by vegetation at the high tide mark.
Sea Wolf is back in Moorea, still for sale, and we've had the good luck to become custodians of a Bahamian ketch, a former charter boat 45 feet long and 14 feet wide. Headroom.
At the moment, and likely for months to come, we are anchored in a bay in Culebra next to the island's only town, called simply el pueblo, rather than the name Dewey which, unpleasant in English, was forced on this settlement by the US Marines. We've been here for two or three weeks and my knowledge is superficial. I walk past the small houses of families who might have lived on the island for a hundred years, their doors open to catch the night air, gathering words here and there, windows, or your sister, or a package of galletas, the everyday things that people say to each other and I feel the familiar longing to share in their understanding of what things mean, to be initiated so that the way the s's tumble off the ends of the words might perfectly express my own relation to the world. Tallulah used to go and stand next to people we'd encounter and look at them, waiting, as if to say, Tell me what you know. Give me your culture. I look on with the desperate irritation of unrequited love. And yet I find I have come to accept myself as bourgeois, occasionally amusing, and awkward. It fits as comfortably as anything else, one of my disguises.

Tongariro crossing

Billed as one of the greatest day hikes on the planet--how could I resist?


We most definitely did!
For the eye of Sauron lay heavy on our hearts.


Follow the black cinder trail.Hobbit sign.


Whenever the Path takes us to foreign lands, we always try to go a little native. In New Zealand, this has meant visiting sheep-shearing exhibits and thermal pools, etc. But when given the opportunity to hunt a real hobbit, I, of course, jumped at it. The Tongariro area is one of the last places where hobbits can still be found in the wild. And, even though it means a significant hike and uncertain success, this was definitely on.
Finally spotted one:
He didn't get away.
Near the summit my native guide, Dan, winged one with his first shot. By the third arrow, this hobbit was down and out.
We grilled him back at camp, and as the guest, I was given the dubious honor of eating the "tenderloin." It was quite juicy, surprisingly filling and delicious! Now I feel like a real New Zealander.
Oh, and the hike wasn't bad either.

lifeonland

glass 3/4 full
visualize
firepower or lookout jojo
grampadan & T
grammadonna & T
singalong interuptus
first jet flight out of Rotorua: we were there
T is stunned, needs to be dragged home

Rotorua, New Zealand

Walking in the woods finding fascinating fungi.

A couple of days ago Tallulah said, "Thank you for making our dinner, mom." She's talking like crazy! But she was NOT talking about this particular dinner, Thanksgiving dinner #1. The fish and chips place was closed and I ended up steaming a pile of incompatible frozen vegetables, because that was all there was, and putting raw garlic on it out of sheer spite. Even with the dateline, I just knew something was wrong. Pushing aside our half-eaten food we figured it out.

At Mt. Manganui.

(I will be writing more about our adventures once I finally finish this fiction project aka novel about New Orleans that's been dogging me for at least two years. Personal deadline is January 1.)

Saying good-bye to Cook's Bay, and Sea Wolf.

Captain Lon is our new role model. This man personifies the phrase "positive attitude." A huge thank you to the crew of Askari for their instant warmth and friendship. Lon, Rosie, Emma, and Adrian--we hope you guys know just how great you are.

A seven-minute flight to Papeete passes over Sea Wolf's new home in Marina Vaiare (the best deal in French Polynesia!).

We' ve been attending the weekly "Tahitian dance show" at the Club Bali Hai here in Baie de Cook. Every Wednesday the plastic chairs under the palm trees fill with honeymooners and timesharers, their faces eager, expectant. I think of Captain Cook's sailors leaping into their rowboats and making for these same verdant shores, brownskinned women beckoning from the beaches. The beat of the drums accelerates and the dancers appear, their sexuality unembarrassed, sly, hilarious. Young girls are adorned with fragrant couronnes de fleurs, holding bouquets of ferns like castanets. The dancers smile at each other, singing, playing to the audience but mostly caught up in a world of their own making from which we are joyously excluded. During the audience participation segment near the end of the performance, awkward and untrained westerners become the stiff colonial mirrors of the dancers' vivid jerks and fluid rotations. Tourists who want to unbend, who, prodded by the dancers (“You get up here, now!” the MC barks one evening at a reluctant young man in the back. “And you too!”) sway, a little drunk, goggling at the energetic bursts of their native partners, unable to, even uninterested in controlling their self-conscious expressions. Is the point of this to shame or to liberate? To liberate through shame? And those eighteenth-century perfumed Tahitians, what were they thinking as they welcomed Cook's hungry, unwashed crew? Tallulah leaps from her chair, rushing to an open space in which she spins. As the dancers exit she runs across the grassy expanse of the performance space, lit by a crescent moon under the black cliffs, gathering the waxen frangipani blossoms that tumbled from the dancers' sinous bodies. (The frangipani has no economy, is profligate with its scent, lies broken on the roadsides after heavy wind.) Nelly is on duty at the reception desk tonight. She often wanders, chainsmoking, shouting into her cellphone. I try to pay her but she waves my money away. “Bof!” she says, as if we are old friends.

Walking alongside the market in Papeete, its high-ceilinged acres, I glimpsed tiers of mangoes, unattended, on tables in the dim warmth of late afternoon. I went toward them, stopped, stood waiting for someone to appear. “Tiare!” a voice called from the shadows, and in a moment a vision burst forth, one arm upraised, fingers snapping as if the aisle between the clusters of mangoes were the runway of a Harlem drag ball. “Oui?” she inquired with a moue, a raised eyebrow, having caught all the laughter in the world, just barely. So radiant that I stumbled over my words, trying to explain that I wanted some mangoes, not too green. She chose three for me, palpating them gently, putting them into a plastic bag. As she disappeared again the way she had come, she called to me over her shoulder. “If you want them to ripen quickly,” she said, “keep them in the shadows. Les fruits mûrissent le soir." Fruit ripens at night.