A purple kite bedevils a gull. The ocean curls its lips like a dog dreaming.
The lips of foam! Like crashes that you want to hear. Crash has such a nasty connotation, but here the crashing makes me want to open another beer. I just did. Leonard Cohen sings about dancing to your beauty. Lili reads her farandula on a deck chair looking out on a tall rock island that is said to be the spiritual center of the Quileute people. They run this joint. Everything is possible: fishing for all kinds of big muscular white fish, whale watching, a Frisbee or bonfire permit. A developing country it’s not, but there are those parallels. Democracy is coming to the USA.
On this tall rock island in the foreground they are said to have buried their dead in canoes high in the trees. This is interesting beyond the obvious because of the Tibetan custom of chopping up their dead and leaving them on mountaintops. This possible descent of tradition is crazy intriguing because of the way that the indigenous people of this region originally came here: on the land bridge from Asia. I’m sure any freshman anthropology student would say “duh” but I maintain that it’s cool.
The Quileute people are also supposedly shape shifters. When my wife told me this we were roaring down the one lane highway to La Push and their land. First, wthe road vanished from the GPS screen. Then, immediately after, we spotted a brown owl sitting in the middle of our lane. The car ahead slowed and swerved and we did the same met his eyes as long as we could, but of course we couldn’t rotate our vertebrae like his ass.
Shape shifters that mainly shape shift to wolf form as I understand it. The enemies of vampires that now, thanks to Twilight, are rumored to exist just outside of the reservation in Forks, WA. Apparently—according to the easy to loathe Stephanie Meyer—these Indians have a deal with the vampires about territory and their integrity is respected, mostly. I wonder if anyone asked or told the Indians about their role in fictional folklore. I’m sure they don’t mind geeks coming through and buying fried clams.
Which is something that pisses me off. There are no fresh oysters or clams out here. The waitress acted like we were exceedingly boring people when we asked her. But they had a hell of a BLT. We did not, however, eat it. My wife is going to work wonders on the kitchenette. And life is good. Beyond good, really. Blessed to such an extent that I start to wonder when the shit is coming down.
They say it’s always twilight here (that’s where the name came from). It’s 8:09 and I could wear my sunglasses, reasonably. I kind of hope I’ll see a wolf or a vampire—or possibly one of each doing battle—silhouetted starkly on the top of that tall rock island of the dead when the moon finally comes out.
