THE FULL MOON AND GREEN REPLACES WHITE

POST #15
If I had gone into a deep deep sleep since the last time I saw the full moon prior to today, I would most certainly have thought that something very odd had happened in the universe. Because this morning as I watched the moon sink over the horizon, I was actually looking slightly to the north of my current location. Last month I was looking way south. People living here hundreds of years ago would have expected to see a moon that set in a regular location each and every month of the year, but we in the modern society have the advantage (at least for the moment) of jet travel which enables us to cover vast distances in a short amount of time. So much distance in fact, that a moon can set in a very different location from one day to the next. I wonder what the people back then would have thought of the idea that they could cover over 600 miles in about an hour? And I also wonder how in the future some people may ponder the fact that humans of the past (ie us) had these things called jet aircraft that zipped us around the world to wherever we chose to go and in a matter of hours we could go from one side of the world to the other, and not only see the moon in a different place, but see a whole other constellation of stars in the night sky. Now that really is amazing when one thinks about it. But we DON'T think about it that much I suspect. Well some of us who have been studying the energy conundrum that we are facing think about it all the time. But most people don't take the time to do that. Instead, we live in a world where we look at long distance travel as NORMAL and I expect that there would be more than a few souls who look at it as their RIGHT. In this high tech complex world we currently live in, people just book airline tickets as easily as they pour themselves a morning cup of coffee, without much thought into just how amazing it is to be able to do that. Just go online, book the ticket you want, slap down the old credit card number (so you can get those airmiles don't forget) and then sit back and daydream about your upcoming vacation in Hawaii, or Thailand or Australia, or wherever you decide. It's all so simple really. Well, if I use to think that way, I certainly don't anymore, and so in the past few days it seems almost like something akin to a miracle that I could have been way up north in the Yukon on one day, and within a couple of hours, I would be back in Vancouver. Airline travel for me now has become a special event and as a result I now appreciate it much more than I ever did in the past. And a great part of that appreciation for me comes from the fact that I really wonder how many more airline flights I will have the opportunity to take? The way things are going, it seems to be only a matter of time before there will be less airlines, hence less flights, which means the cost of each seat will have to go up. That won't have much of an effect on a small portion of the population, but I think that the masses of people who now take for granted that they can just fly wherever they want, whenever they want, will have to adjust to the new normal, which might mean more ground travel and less air travel.
So where has all this travel talk taken me to? Well, I have returned to the lovely little place on Orcas Island in Washington with my two feline friends, Oscar and Felix. I was here in October at the beginning of my "homeless housesitter" journey, and it's wonderful to be back. The cats seem to be happy that I am back, but how can you really know for sure. "Look Paul, just feed us twice a day and let us sleep alot and we won't give you any hassle." What with doing all these different housesits, one after the other, I am mixing up my pet names, so when I arrived here I was calling one of the cats, Otto, which not only isn't Felix's name, Otto is a dog. You would think that I could at least get the species correct.
Arriving back here after 6 weeks in the Yukon, the most striking thing for me is the colour green everywhere, as opposed to the whiteness I've just come from. (That's one more thing about jet travel, your climate can change in just a matter of hours. But even that, we take for granted). So yes, it's green, green, green, and many degrees warmer for sure. My first night back I walked to the beach and the smell of the ocean was almost overwhelming. I sucked in large breaths, and I had almost forgotten how wonderfully fresh the sea air is.
Now that the snow has been left behind I can now get back out on the bike and spend some time doing the slow travel that a bikeride provides. And this time around I plan to get to some of the other islands near Orcas and take the bike along to explore new places close by.
One other thing before I finish this entry. I was reading a book the other day which has information on all the San Juan islands, so naturally I went straight to the section on Orcas to read up on some history. So let me just quote from the book-
"the 1897 discovery of gold in the Klondike transformed Seattle. Thousands of gold crazed men flooded the town, intent on getting north as quickly as possible. Ships were needed to haul them there and Moran Brothers began building sternwheelers at a furious pace. Eighteen of these-each 175 feet long- were completed in 1898, and Robert Moran himself led the flotilla, starting at Roche harbor on San Juan island and sailing all the way to St. Michael at the mouth of the Yukon river, a distance of 4000 treacherous miles." Robert Moran ran a shipbuilding business in Seattle, until he retired to Orcas island and lived out the remainder of his years.
So a funny coincidence, that having just come back from the Klondike, I find myself in a place that has a link to the Klondike from the past.
The journey back then would have been much more of an arduous one, and certainly taken a lot longer than the one I have just experienced in the past week. The adventurers of old would have seen just a gradual change in the location of the moon, and by the time they reached their destination in the Klondike, it would have seemed to be in the right place to them.
Back here on Orcas, I will have the opportunity to get comfortable with the location of the moon, the rhythm of the ocean tides and the purring of the cats. Life is good.

Paul
The Thoughtful Wanderer