The last of the Micronesia entries.

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It rained a lot in the night, but was sunny in the morning. Rain-fed Eden. I drove alone about five miles to the Pahn Takai (means Under Rock) waterfall just past the U municipal center. (U is a minimally short place-name.) I met a guide there — Jamie, our hotelier had phoned him — he was a short Pohnpeian named Danny. Wearing mismatched flip-flops and an athletic shirt, he led me into the jungle. Sakau plants lined the path, they have knobby stalks and heart-shaped leaves. Danny said that although he didn't like sakau, in Pohnpei they say if you drink sakau, you're a real man. The same old line laid down everywhere.

We came to some two hundred foot cliffs in the side of the mountain, a hundred yards wide, the rocks slanting out, so that when we walked along the base, the lip beetled way out over us. There was a veil waterfall, waving back and forth in the wind. Caves at the base of the cliff with fruit bats living in them.

On visiting this site, you had to place a fresh leaf on an altar at the base the waterfall, for if you didn't, the cliff would fall on you the next time you came. Danny broke off a fern for me to place.

Danny said he'd like to visit the mainland someday. He has relatives in Kansas City, Missouri, there's a lot of Pohnpeians there! That'll be different from Micronesia, all right. Later Jamie told me that one of the locals had lucked his way into taking over a chain of restaurants there, he'd been working for the owner who, having no heirs, had left his fortune to his favorite worker, and now there's fully three thousand Pohnpeians in KC.

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So now I'm looking at three days of travel to get home. (Day 1) A ten-hour multi-stop island-hop flight to Honolulu via, I think, Kosrae, and then Kwajalein and Majuro in the Marshall Islands, arriving in Honolulu at 2 AM, followed by a twelve-hour layover during which we'll go sleep in a hotel, (Day 2) a five-hour flight to LA which arrives after the last plane to San Jose so, therefore, a night in a hotel at the LA airport, and finally, (Day 3) the quick flight back to good ole San Ho the next morning. It occurs to me, too late, that I would have done better to arrange my tickets to fly direct from Honolulu to San Francisco.

Embry and I had a nice dinner on our last evening here, talking over old times, remembering our boyhoods and our parents. My brother and I. One more brother image: back at the hotel, there's two resident dogs, they always walk around together, sometimes coming to sleep on my porch, one is slightly bigger than the other. And today after our drive I was feeling a little blue to have the trip nearly over, and I was patting them, and when I was patting the bigger one, the smaller one began to growl and nip at the bigger one for getting more attention. That's me and my brother!

During the long trip home we ran into each other again after we thought we'd said good-bye, and we were delighted to meet. The trip's been very good for our relationship. Standing in that waterfall pool with Embry the other day, I was thinking that if I've ever visiting him in the hospital, or vice versa, we'll be reminiscing about this trip. We'll always have this wonderful adventure that we did together.

It's been one of the great trips of my lifetime, right up there with the overland move to California, the trip to Tonga, the trips to Japan, and the time Sylvia and I did a train trip around Europe.

And it's been very good for my head. I feel happy and relaxed. As Melville says at the start of Moby Dick, when you start feeling like calling the undertaker, head for the ocean!

***

I'm proud to have done something so cool to celebrate my retirement. I feel like I'm done with the process of retiring now, and I've done it right. I've made it through another passage.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2005 at 7:00 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.