#an island somewhere in the pacific only one or two behind the front lines

[donutdollie]

“  𝚒 𝚍𝚘𝚗’𝚝 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚠𝚊𝚢 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚢 𝚕𝚘𝚘𝚔 𝚊𝚝 𝚢𝚘𝚞. 𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚑𝚊𝚙𝚜 𝚒’𝚕𝚕 𝚌𝚞𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚒𝚛 𝚎𝚢𝚎𝚜 𝚘𝚞𝚝.  ” [ @e1igius ]

                    snapping wide at the malice dripping from his voice, gaze as blue as the warm waters only yards away darted up from the book propped against her shorts-clad thighs to meet his eyes, following the pointed stare to a gaggle of ogling sailors.   soft brown curls pressed once again into the sand as margaret’s head fell back, book held open to her features, lids slipping shut as she fought to urge to groan.   heaven help her…

                    ❝  you shouldn’t,  ❞     it began as a whisper, the red cross girl peering up at the marine over the edge of her a natural history of australia.     ❝  you’ll have blinded three-quarters of the military before you know it.  ❞    if he didn’t seem so intent, she might’ve delivered the line with a lilting humor, but instead, her tone only held concern.   he wouldn’t, would he?

                    and yet, she’d seen the horror-weary inflict far worse on themselves and others.

                    book having found a safe place centered on where her blouse tucked into those linen shorts, she reached out, fingers splayed against his forearm for the briefest moment.     ❝  i’m probably the first american woman they’ve seen in months, maybe even the only woman outside of a photograph.   as long as all they do is look, that’s part of why the red cross sent me here.  ❞     to be looked at, talked to, even arguably dated… all to remind america’s young men what waited at home.   what harm laid in being gawked over?

                    but if one went too far… she knew who would listen.

[mrsbarnes32557038]

Spectrum - Part 2

Meeting Stark

Warnings - Cursing, alcohol.

Word count - 2,826

2010 – Washington D.C. – Your apartment

“What is this?” you say while looking at the paper you were just handed.

“A job.” Fury says blankly.

“I have a job.” you state while still studying the paper.

“This is a better job.” he responds while turning towards your fridge. He cracks open a beer and slides it across your counter towards you.

Catching it without even looking you take a swig. “A personal chef? I don't believe I'm qualified for this.” you continue to resist.

“Qualified is just a state of mind. You can do this.” he urges.

“CALIFORNIA!? Are you trying to get rid of me?” The hurt in your eyes was hard to mask as a shade of melancholy blue flashed across them.

Fury sighs while taking the paper from your hands and setting it aside so he can look you in the eyes “No Y/N. I'm not trying to get rid of you. When you care about someone you do what is best for them, even if it isn't what is best for you.”

You listen intently to his life lesson making sure to commit it to memory “Got it.” you respond simply. Fury has taught you a lot over the past two years since that fateful day at the diner you work at caused you to catch his attention.

“I can't force you to do anything but your flight takes off in a couple of hours.” he hands you a ticket and starts to leave, with a hand on the door knob he says over his shoulder “Non-refundable.” and with that he was gone.

You sigh looking at the ticket. Fury may not be able to force you to do anything but you'll be damned if you disappoint him. You polish off your beer and head to pack your bag.

———————————————

2010 – California

The next day you are struggling with the GPS in your rental car. “Piece of sh... Ugh! I thought technology was supposed to make things easier…” you mumble to yourself. Accepting your ineptitude you are forced to request assistance from a passer-by “Excuse me sir?”

He seemed innocent enough but he looked you up and down with a definite interest in mind “What can I do for you?”

You weren't worried about him but it never sat right with you when a man looked at you like that, like it was the wrong eyes looking at you. You shook the thought away and did your best to be friendly “Tech and me don't get along and I need directions to a job interview I have this afternoon. Could you please help me out with this GPS?”

“Sure thing. Huh, I think Stark lives somewhere around there. Wouldn't it be cool to meet him?” the man punched in the address and fiddled with the screen for another minute. “I added my address to your GPS too, come by tonight, I promise to show you a real nice time.” he gave you a wink.

“I don't know who that is, thank you for your help though. Gotta go, can't be late!” you could not get out of there fast enough. You might be naive when it came to a lot, you only had three years under your belt after all, but after enough embarrassing and occasionally dangerous encounters with guys like that you had learned what they really meant by a nice time.

You used the drive out to Malibu to clear your head. You really wanted to do a good job today even if moving across the country was a scary notion to you, Fury was right this was a great opportunity. But… what could you really bring to the table here? No pun intended. “No!” you said to yourself “Don't doubt yourself, just follow your instincts.”

“You have arrived at your destination.” the GPS chirped out.

You stared at the house, scratch that, mansion. You got out of the car and headed over to the edge of the bluff to get a better look at the view. “Damn.” you whispered in amazement as you watched the waves of the Pacific crash onto the shore, the smell of salt in the air. You’d always enjoyed the views of the Potomac from around D.C. but this was surreal, little did you know so was the owner of this property.

You started back towards the house but stopped short when a man stormed out the front door “I've never!” he yelled loudly and spat on the ground in front of the entrance. Noticing you he looked you up and down with what you discerned as repugnance “If I, a 3 star Michelin chef, am not good enough for his highness there is certainly no hope for you.” he spat out in his thick French accent and promptly continued to his car and proceeded to peel out of the drive.

“Charming…” you muttered as you collected the grocery bags from your vehicle and headed into the house, the front door still wide open from the previous applicant's tantrum.

Your breath caught in your throat as you looked around. So much space, so much light, so many windows. There were even windows on the ceiling! What are those called again?

“You must be Miss Y/N.” a voice broke your concentration.

You looked around but didn't see anyone. “Yes, I am.” you called out still trying to find the source of the voice.

“My name is J.A.R.V.I.S. and I will be directing you towards the kitchen so you may prepare your menu. Mr. Stark is otherwise occupied.”

Still not seeing a source for the voice you responded “Well Jarvis it is very nice to meet you. But, where are you?”

“I am an AI.” Jarvis says matter-of-factly.

“An… AI?” you had no clue what that even was.

“Artificial Intelligence.”

“I'm not familiar with what that is.” you say honestly.

“The definition of artificial intelligence is as follows: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.” Jarvis rattled off.

“So you are like a computer that can talk? Oh! I hope that doesn't offend you, I don't mean to simplify what you are. Hell, you’re obviously smarter than I am…” you ramble on.

“I am not offended Miss Y/N. If I could feel emotions I believe I would find your concern endearing. Please follow the prompts on the wall and I'll lead you to the kitchen.” he says reassuringly.

“Holy cow!” you exclaim as you enter the kitchen, fingers gliding over the countertops feeling the coolness of the marble. It is easily the nicest kitchen you’d ever seen, very modern just like the rest of the home and top of the line everything.

“You will be preparing Mr. Stark lunch today. Please let me know when you have the meal completed and I will alert him.” Jarvis stated.

“Thank you Jarvis.” Hesitating for a moment you decide to proceed “Jarvis, may I ask you a question?

“Of course Miss Y/N. I am here to help.”

“The man who interviewed before me…” you swallowed, insecurity building inside of you “seemed upset when he left. What happened?”

“Oh, him. Yes. Mr. Stark took one look at his dish and decided to go with someone else.”

“He didn't even taste it!?” you asked incredulously.

“Sir felt that he wouldn't be a good fit. He can be particular.”

Your heart sank a little. “If a three star chef’s food wasn’t even worth tasting I'm not really sure what I can do here.” You say with a defeated shrug. “Anyways, thank you Jarvis, I really appreciate your help.”

“Let me know if I can be of further assistance.”

You take a deep breath trying to collect yourself, you slide a small picture out of your watch pocket and admire it. “Be with me.” you whisper tenderly as you trace your finger over the image of Sargent Barnes. You always kept the picture with you, always. Even though you had learned of his death at the Captain America exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum you couldn't help feeling a connection to him, feeling him, like something kept you tethered together. You tucked the picture safely back in your watch pocket. “Just follow your instincts.” you said to yourself.

You had decided on prawn bruschetta and a kale salad with a lemon vinaigrette. It wasn’t exactly in your wheelhouse of classic diner fare but you wanted to impress and you didn't think a greasy cheeseburger would cut it. You had also brought the staples for one of your personal favorite meals for your own lunch, pizza rolls and beer.

The salad was done including the freshly made croutons and you were just about to get to work on the prawns when the oven dinged signaling your pizza rolls were done. You twirled your way over to the double oven and took out the pizza rolls to cool. You felt almost at home in this kitchen, you could definitely work in this space. As you were getting ready to toss the prawns in the heated oil you were startled by someone coming into the kitchen. Someone who works on the property you assume, maintenance maybe, he had grease staining his clothes.

“Something smells good.” The man said looking around eyes finally settling on the pizza rolls and beer. He rubbed his hands together and went to dive in. “I can have some of these right?” he asked with a pleading grin on his face. “I haven't eaten all day.”

“Of course! I never turn away someone hungry.” you say with a laugh. “Just don't drink all my beer.” You feign a stern tone and point a finger at him.

You continue your work on Mr. Stark’s lunch as the man starts talking again. “So I take it you are one of the applicants for the personal chef position?”

“Yes. To be honest I'm not really sure what I'm doing here. I feel out of my league. Have you seen all the windows in this place? I'm not sure some diner cook could impress who ever lives in a place like this.” you turn around quickly to face the man who is sitting at the island behind you eating pizza rolls off the cookie sheet. “I probably shouldn't have said that out loud! Please don't tell Mr. Stark.”

The man gives you an amused look “Oh I wont tell him.” he says while crossing his heart.

“Thank you.” you release a sigh of relief “What's your name?”

“Tony. So where are you from?”

Turning your attention back to your dish you continue your friendly banter “Washington D.C. What about you?”

“Manhattan. Tell me about yourself, hmm I didn't catch your name.”

“Y/N. Not much to tell really. I live a pretty quiet life, I work at a diner and spend most of my free time either in my apartment or at museums around the city.” you weren't about to confess the amount of time you spend at the Captain America exhibit “I do have my neighbor over for dinner from time to time, he always has the most interesting stories.” You turn to the island to plate the meal and look at the man who has all but demolished your lunch “Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.” he says cleaning his hands with a napkin.

“Shoot what?” you ask quickly but with sincerity.

He can't contain his laughter and you are just confused. Wiping the tears forming in his eyes from laughing so hard he manages to collect himself “It is a colloquial saying. It means go ahead.”

“Shoot means go ahead.” you say out loud to yourself trying to commit this new information to memory. “Got it.”

“You are an interesting woman Y/N. What was your question?”

“Well I was going to ask what Mr. Stark is like but his lunch is ready so I guess I'll find out for myself soon enough.” you look around and ask sheepishly “Jarvis?”

“Yes Miss Y/N?” Jarvis responds.

“Mr. Stark’s lunch is ready. Should I bring it to him or would he like to eat somewhere in particular?”

“That's okay Jarvis. I got this.” Tony chimes in with a smug grin plastered on his face.

“Certainly Sir.” Jarvis replies.

Staring at Tony your jaw agape as you put it all together. You were so focused on making your dish as perfectly as you could manage that you hadn't really put much thought into who your lunch guest really was. You were mad at yourself for getting caught off guard, you should be better than that, you are better than that, little red arcs danced over your fingers, you quickly put your hands behind your back and worked to control your emotions.

“You lied to me.” you accused, still fighting back your anger at yourself.

Tony looked at you full of amusement “I didn't lie. How was I supposed to know that you didn't know who I was?”

“How was I supposed to know who you are?” you snap back.

“Most people do. I guess it’s the whole genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist thing.” he says while gesturing with his hand like it is no big deal.

“I guess I'm not most people then.” you say sharply while starting to gather your things.

Tony smiles and nods in agreement “Yes. You, Y/N, are not most people. In fact your resume, or lack thereof, is what initially intrigued me. However when I tried to dig a little deeper, for security reasons and all, I found pretty much nothing. In fact I couldn't find anything on you prior to three years ago, it is like you are a ghost. You don't even have an email.”

You had stopped gathering your things and just stared, jaw clenched, at the man who already knew too much about you for your comfort. “I'm not sure what you would like me to say.”

“The truth.” Tony said simply.

“I always tell the truth.” you confessed.

“Always?” he asked doubtfully.

“Yes. Unless a promise I've previously made will be broken or someone’s safety would be compromised.” You state earnestly.

“Then let the grilling commence!” he motioned for you to take a seat next to him at the kitchen island.

You look at him puzzled “What would you like me to grill?”

“No. I…” he chuckles and shakes his head at you. “I'm going to ask you some questions. If you are going to work for me I need to know that I can trust you.”

“Okay…” you’re a bit wary but your instincts tell you to give Tony a chance and you always trust your instincts. You take a seat on the stool next to him.

“Are you in witness protection or something? Is that why you’re a ghost story?” he starts off.

You think for a moment “I don't know what that is and I am not a ghost.”

“Okay… Let’s try again. What were you up to before three years ago?”

You shrug. “I don't know.”

It was Tony's turn to be confused “You don't know?”

“Correct.” You nod.

“How can you not know?”

“I am not sure how.”

You can tell he is getting frustrated now as he runs his fingers over his beard in thought. “You have to help me out here a little Y/N. Can you tell me what you do remember about your life? Why can't I find anything on you?”

You close your eyes and take a deep breath. “I am not trying to be secretive Tony. It is just engrained in me. It keeps me safe.”

“Safe from what?” he asks softly.

Your eyes open full of tears “I don't know!” you choke out. Just tell him. Tell him. You think to yourself. You've only told two people about your situation, it like everything in your life was a closely guarded secret. You have always felt a strong urge to stay hidden, it was instinctual really. But in this moment looking in Tony's eyes you see something, something familiar. He has been lost, like you. Please be right about this. “Just like I don't know who I am, where I'm from or what the hell happened to me before.”

“Before what?” Tony gently urges you to continue.

“Before I woke up. Three years ago. Alone. In the middle of nowhere.” you confess. “Maybe I am a ghost.” you whisper under your breath.

Tony thinks for a moment, slaps his hands on his legs and stands up “Okay! I work a lot of odd hours so I'll need you to be available during those odd hours. You can have access to the facilities around the property, gym, pool, tennis courts and so on. Jarvis will alert you to anywhere you do not have access to. I'll have Pepper go over the paperwork and other boring things with you. When can you start?” 

--

Spectrum Masterlist 

[today-we-will-survive]

moodboard made by me

Title: Perfect

Pairing: Namjoon x Reader ft. Dragonite

Genre: Pokemon!au, fluff, crack

Word Count: 1.9K

The sound of your phone receiving a text message cuts through the dark silence of the early morning. You groan, peeling one eye open to glare at your nightstand. Really? You reach over because your curiosity is too strong even in your three-quarters still asleep state. Luckily, “pre-sleep you” was smart enough to dim your screen before going to bed so the dulled brightness is only a little assaulting to your retinas when you push the home button. Immediately, a tired smile spreads your mouth wide, all animosity felt toward the sender diminishing when you see that it’s none other than the boy you’ve been texting nonstop for the past two weeks.

Joonie: hey, r u awake?

Y/N: I am now :)

Joonie: shoot Im sorry …

Y/N: no its okay. I would hav been mad if it was anyone else.

Joonie: well, I promise I hav a reason for texting u this early.

Y/N: yea, u do realize its still dark outside, right?

Joonie: thats actually why I texted u. R u busy?

Y/N: …what do u think?

Joonie: right. duh. sleeping. well…

Joonie: do u want to go for a ride with me?

Y/N: a ride? like a car ride?

Joonie: um…not exactly…how quickly could u get ready?

Y/N: depends on what “ready” means.

Joonie: hmm dress for cold weather.

Y/N: its the middle of summer, joon. Even at 4 in the morning its already prolly 60 degrees out. How cold r we talking here?

Joonie: really cold.

Y/N: Im confused.

Joonie: just trust me.

It feels so wrong to be shrugging on the winter coat you had to dig out of the back of your closet as you head out of your apartment. Luckily, no one else is out at this ungodly hour which saves you from having to endure the confused looks. Though if you did run into someone, they’d see that you’re just as confused. That is, until you make it outside where Namjoon said he’d be to meet you. You expected him to be waiting for you in his car. Even on foot wouldn’t be as surprising as the scene you step into once you’re out the front door of your apartment.

Your eyes settle on the giant, orange dragon standing in the middle of the road. The thing is massive. You’ve seen a few Dragonite in your lifetime but never one as big as this thing. It has to be at least twelve feet tall. And while initially it’s terrifying to see such a giant Pokémon just standing there right outside of your apartment—and staring at you, nonetheless—the fear melts away as you meet its eyes. There’s something gentle about the way it looks at you curiously. Its rounded nose and crinkling eyes almost make it look like the thing is smiling.

“Hey, Y/N!”

You only just now realize that the Dragonite isn’t here by itself and you tear your gaze away from its own to look further back at the boy sitting just above its wings.

“Namjoon?” His own eyes lift along with his mouth into a bright smile and even though it’s dark out—the only light being that from the streetlamp across the street and down a bit—you can still see those deep dimples that had you captivated in the first place. “What are you doing here?”

“I was wondering if you wanted to go for a ride,” he says and reaches up to pat his Dragonite on the head. The Pokémon lets out a contented noise, the sound echoing down the block and you take an intimidated step backward.

“Uh, is it safe?” you ask. That was a dumb question. Obviously it is or Namjoon wouldn’t be offering, right?

“Completely,” he replies then swings his leg out from over its wing and slides down off its back. He holds out a hand to you and smiles wider, those dimples growing impossibly deeper. “I have a surprise for you.”

You look down at his offered hand. You haven’t known Namjoon for very long. You met him only about a month ago when he first started volunteering at the Pokémon Center you work at.

You remember his first day there, how you couldn’t seem to keep your eyes from wandering over to him whenever the two of you were in the same room. How you couldn’t help but go a bit soft when you saw the way he handled each Pokémon with such care and tenderness, how he’d speak so gently to them, how they would visibly relax at his soothing words.

He was nice to you from the get-go. The two of you would exchange playful banter and joke around quite a bit. It was obvious you liked each other and you wanted to address it, but at the same time you were so worried that he was just one of those guys that’s nice to everyone and to say anything would just make things awkward. It was a relief when he finally broke down and asked for your number. You gave it to him maybe a little too eagerly but luckily for you, he thought your excitement was cute—and you blushed when he said as much.

But here he is now, that gentle smile on his handsome face, his eyes sparkling, his hand held out to you and you can’t help but feel intrigue and excitement bubbling up inside you. Even if it weren’t for your overpowering curiosity, what kind of person would pass up the opportunity to ride on the back of a Dragonite? And a giant one nonetheless. These are your last thoughts as you shyly reach up to place your hand in his and smile back at him. His hand is so warm wrapped around yours and so solid as he tugs you toward the giant Pokémon behind him.

You watch as Namjoon climbs back up onto it then he reaches down and you wrap your fingers around his wrist. He grips your own wrist and pulls hard. You can’t help the squeal that escapes as he pulls you up so easily with just his one arm. You scramble up, being careful where you place your feet so you don’t accidentally step on the joint where the wings connect to the dragon Pokémon’s back as you settle down behind Namjoon. He still has ahold of your one hand and now you reach around with the other to join it with the first.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Dragonite as big as this one,” you say. He feels so warm and solid in your arms even through both of your coats.

“I rescued it when it was still just a Dratini from that lab on Cinnabar Island.”

“I’ve heard of that place,” you say. “They do some pretty awful stuff there to Pokémon, don’t they?”

“Yeah,” Namjoon utters and you can hear the anger in his voice. “I’m not sure what they did to it but it was already bigger than any Dratini I’d ever seen before. And I knew that wasn’t normal and that I needed to get it out of there. Luckily, there doesn’t seem to be any other negative effects from whatever they did to it.” Namjoon pats the Pokémon on the head again, eliciting another happy, echoing moan from it.

“You’re amazing,” you utter and immediately feel your cheeks turn red. Did you really just say that out loud?

Namjoon turns his head so he can see you out of the corner of his eye and his cheek lifts in another dimpled grin. “Nah,” he says. “I just try to be a good person, you know?”

You nod and the two of you sit in silence atop the Pokémon for several more moments.

“So, uh,” you finally say. “Is this what you wanted to show me?”

Namjoon perks up. “Oh right,” he says and gives his Dragonite two firm pats on its neck. The Dragonite shifts, dipping its head low and unfolding its wings from either side of you. Then with a hard push against the ground, it kicks up into the air and you squeal, clutching onto the boy in front of you for dear life.

He lets out a chuckle. “It’s okay, Y/N,” he assures you. “Just keep ahold of me and you won’t fall.”

“Will do,” you reply though you don’t think he can hear you over the wind whistling past your ears.

It’s a good thing you’re holding onto him so tightly because as soon as the Dragonite reaches an incredibly terrifying height—the city lights below you now looking more like stars than the actual ones above you—you remember reading that Dragonite can actually fly faster than the speed of sound. And just as you tighten your grip even more on Namjoon’s waist, the dragon Pokémon shoots forward, cutting through the night sky like a bullet. You grit your teeth and press your cheek against Namjoon’s back to keep the wind from stealing your breath away.

Much to your relief, it’s not long before you feel the Dragonite begin to slow down again and when it’s at last going at a more comfortable pace, you lift your head and peer around. It’s still kind of dark out but now the sky is more of a medium blue and the stars have disappeared. Nothing but ocean stretches for miles below you.

“Where are we?” you ask looking around confusedly.

“Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean,” Namjoon replies nonchalantly.

You nod slowly. “And why, exactly are we somewhere over the Pacific Ocean?”

The boy places his hands over your own. They’re much warmer than yours and suddenly you’re glad he told you to dress warmly because it is freaking freezing up there over the ocean. “Because I wanted to show you that,” he says then nods at the horizon in front of him.

You focus farther ahead, past Namjoon’s shoulders and over Dragonite’s head until your eyes land on the line where the ocean ends and the sky begins. At first, you can’t see much of a separation between the two similar shades of blue, but then a sliver of bright orange appears, awakening the sky, shooting streaks of lavender upward. Your breath catches as you watch in silent awe.

The sun rises faster than you thought it would, every inch it gains throwing different colors like buckets of paint across the sky. From dazzling pink to sherbet orange to marigold, and the ocean reflects them all back, the rising sun at the epicenter of this incredible masterpiece being created before you.

You feel tears spring to your eyes and you immediately feel like an absolute dork for being moved to tears by something like a sunrise but the sight along with the feeling of Namjoon’s thumbs rubbing circles across the back of your hand just sends your emotions into overdrive.

This is perfect.

This is perfect and you never want it to end. In a moment of impulsivity, you lean forward and rest your chin on Namjoon’s shoulder. The simple gesture feels so intimate in this silence and maybe he sees it as that too because you hear his breath hitch and his thumb freezes on your skin for a split second before continuing the motion. His own cheek rests against the side of your head and you sigh.

Too perfect.

[betweensceneswriter]

Island Hopper: Chapter 22b- Cave Men

After Tarzan Falls, before Cocos Island, both John and Jamie have to use their raw masculine power.

Island Hopper Table of Contents:

    “So he truly just stayed hidden for twenty-eight years, even though he realized the war had ended?” Jamie looked back at us, swiping aside some bamboo leaves to clear the overgrown pathway for us.

    “The Japanese sense of honor during World War II was incredible,” Seth explained.  “I mean, you'd have to be committed to be a kamikaze pilot and use yourself and your airplane as a bomb, right?”

    We nodded in stunned agreement, sipping from our water bottles and resting in the shade of the glossy green jungle plants beside the path.

    Today’s jaunt was to Yokoi’s cave, the re-creation of the underground hideout dug by a Japanese soldier after the end of World War II.  He had stayed hidden there in the Guam jungle, sneaking out to take food from neighboring farms and fishing in the nearby river, weaving his own clothing from plant fibers.  He was finally found in 1972, almost three decades after the war had ended.

    “For those Japanese soldiers, dying for their country was more important than their own lives,” Joe said, shaking his head.  “That’s incredible devotion.  I mean, I’m a patriotic American, but still!”

    I offered, “I remember that if they were about to be captured, there were some officers who would fall on their swords rather than be captured--what was that called?  Harry Carrie?” I offered hesitantly.

    “Har-A kIr-i” Jamie corrected me.  I turned toward him, raising my eyebrows. Since my arrival out on Arno I’d been corrected by him plenty of times in private, but I wasn’t sure how it felt to be corrected by him in front of other people.  

    “You ken Japan occupied the Marshalls as well, Ri-pālle, and there were Japanese officers in the Marshall Islands when the Allied powers took it back during World War II,” he lectured.  “I’ve lived there four years.  And I also took Pacific History at the college of the Marshall Islands.  Ye ken I’m not a dimwit, don’t you?”

    Joe eyed the two of us, and I felt my cheeks flush at Jamie’s irritated response to me.  It wasn’t like I didn’t think he knew anything, but having spent a number of years growing up on Guam, I’d always felt like a bit of an expert on World War II in the Pacific, impressing stateside college classmates with my knowledge and horrifying them with descriptions of the group suicides of Japanese soldiers when the United States reclaimed Guam, lines of men standing at a cliff’s edge, pushing the next person off, the final officer taking his own life rather than be taken prisoner.

    “I really can’t imagine it,” John said, stepping between me and Jamie in a subtle attempt to dispel the tension.  “Either they believed that the Americans would be truly cruel to prisoners of war, or they were convinced that it would be a horrible shame to surrender or be captured.”

    Shelly was scrolling through something on her phone as she walked slowly ahead on the trail.  "Men had been indoctrinated with the notion that it was dishonorable to be captured,” she read, after which she stumbled on a root, caught her balance and then looked back with a sheepish grin.

    “Ye shouldna text & walk,” Jamie joked, just as Seth said, “Been walking long?”

    “Didja have a nice trip?” added Joe.

    John sighed with a wry smile as Shelly looked to him, eyebrows raised in resignation.  “I’m not in the habit of insulting young ladies,” he intoned, grinning when the three other guys made exasperated noises and Jamie scoffed, backhanding John’s bicep in irritation.

    “Tryin’ to make the rest of us look bad, are ye?” he teased.

    “I was saying,” Shelly said insistently, “That Yokoi felt it would be humiliating to go home.  In fact, the Japanese people coined a famous saying from his words on his arrival back in Japan: “It is with much embarrassment that I return.”

    “It is with much embarrassment that I return,” repeated Seth, shamefaced.

    “I don’t know about that,” Joe responded.  “Seems to me being able to avoid detection and capture for nearly thirty years is pretty darn incredible. What did he have to be ashamed of?”

    “Just goes to show you we can’t even comprehend the mind-set of the Japanese soldier,” Jamie concluded.

    We soon reached the re-creation of the original cave, a hole in the ground walled with bamboo.  We leaned over the opening, peering down into the darkness.  To the side, John inspected the primitive diagram of the cave painted on a sign and shuddered.  “It was only 9 feet by three feet,” he said. “I can’t imagine being trapped in a space that small.”

    I looked at the drawing, which depicted Yokoi seated in his cave, a small fire built at one end and a chimney/air hole leading up from it.

    “And this says he came out only at night to avoid detection,” Shelly commented, still reading from her phone.  “So he was stuck in that small space all day every day.”

    I squatted down, trying to see farther into the cave.

    “I just can’t imagine it,” I said.  “I’d get so lonely.”

    A man wearing a khaki uniform stepped toward us, a smile on his face.

    “It was lonely, though Yokoi wasn’t the only Japanese soldier who went into hiding after the war,” he said.  “There were a group of ten originally, though they split up realizing that they’d be too easy to track and find if there were too many of them.  Yokoi had two friends who lived nearby, but after twenty years--still eight years before he was discovered--he went to their cave only to find them dead.”

    My stomach hurt at the thought.  Twenty years spent virtually alone, with eight years of interminable solitude left. I sighed and apparently inched closer to Jamie, only realizing what I’d done when I felt his arm around me and looked up to see him smiling down at me.  

    “Who found him, then?” asked John, stepping forward.

    “Two fishermen who were out on the Talofofo River,” the ranger answered. “They captured him, and though he begged them to kill him, they took him home, fed him some dinner, and then took him to the police.”

    “Did he stay on Guam long after that?” Shelly asked.

    “After discovery, he was only here two weeks.  He went back to Japan to a hero’s welcome.”

    “But he was embarrassed?” Seth asked, forehead wrinkled in confusion.  “Shelly read something that said he was ashamed.”

    “‘It is with much embarrassment, but I have returned?’” the guide quoted with a smile. “Yeah.  I heard you guys talking.  I really don’t understand it any more than you do.”

    “That’s crazy,” Joe said, shaking his head as he looked once again into the bamboo-lined hole.

    “Thanks,” we chorused, as the guide wandered off to the next group to answer questions.

    “Wanna take the monorail?” Seth joked, pointing at the rickety little train mounted with plastic folding chairs.

    “It canna be more than half a kilometer to the trailhead,” Jamie laughed.  “Why anyone would need to ride there is beyond me.”  

   As I followed the others back down the trail, I took one last backward glance at the hole in the ground, no more than a darker spot camouflaged by the sunlight dappling the underbrush. The thought of that unending isolation was heart-wrenching.

    I had just sighed and shook my head when Jamie took my hand in his. I stopped us where we were, put my arms around him, and buried my face in his chest.  He wrapped his arms around me and didn’t let me go, not even when Joe yelled back at us, “Are you guys coming or not?”

      “In a canyon, in a cavern, excavaaaaa-ting for a mine,” I yodeled, the sound of my voice expanding in reverberating echoes. I knew Jamie was somewhere in the eerie darkness, and singing made me feel better, even though I had the sneaking suspicion that any second he might jump out at me.

    “Jamie?” I called out, wading gingerly into the water.  Seth, Shelly, and Joe were behind us and I knew I could wait for them, but I also wanted to catch up to Jamie.  We had been filling our days with multiple touristy experiences--always with other people--and I was beginning to feel disconnected.  We had even been up late several nights in a row, staying up talking or playing games until the wee hours, and we hadn't gotten to bed at the same time in at least three days.  It wasn't very easy to maintain an active sex life when your husband was asleep when you came to bed or gone on an early morning job when you woke up the next morning.

    “Dwelt a miner, forty-niiii-ner,” I sang, splashing a little deeper into the cool water of the wading pool of Pagat Cave.

    Suddenly a large hand came from behind me and after several furtive movements, succeeded in covering my mouth, lips quickly coming beside my ear to whisper, “Jab keroro, Ri-palle.”  He pulled me backward around a rock outcropping and then stopped, his hand still over my mouth.

    Unable to avoid the juvenile impulse, I stuck my tongue out, tasting the salt and dust on Jamie's hand, pushing the tip of my tongue between his fingers.  He squeaked in an unmanly fashion, and suddenly I felt a firm grip on my left breast.

    “Stop it,” I hissed, wrestling my mouth free from his strong hand.

    “Sorry, lass, I slipped,” he fibbed. “‘Twas just an accident.” The subtle caress of his hand stated quite the opposite.

     Light shone against the far wall, and when I peeked around the rocky corner I saw the bobbing approach of a bright blue trio of lights.

    “Claire? Jamie?” the voices called out through the darkness.

    “She was just singing a second ago.” Shelly’s voice carried clearly to us.

    I leaned my head back against Jamie’s chest as he continued with his cave explorations, feeling lightheaded and dying for more time alone, wishing there weren’t three people heading in our direction.

    “You’re going to drive me crazy,” I whispered, letting my breath out in a shudder.

    “That’s my plan precisely,” Jamie murmured, his lips tracing the curve of my neck and shoulder.

     I was feeling faint and just about to reach back and grab something solid to help steady myself when the lights came around the rock.  Jamie released me, moving forward into the center of the channel and only then turning on his flashlight.

    “Hallooooo,” said Seth once his headlamp trained on us.  “We really should be staying together, I think.”

    “It’s not like there are any real arms of the cave where we could get lost,” Shelly offered.

    “Yes, but Pagat Cave is filled with water.  That adds a hazard level of its own,” I added, splashing out of the shadows, only to see several apparent knowing smiles pass between the others.

    “Come on,” Jamie said, turning away from the entrance and lighting the way with his flashlight.  “I think it’s only a wee bit farther to the Lake room.”

    It was slightly challenging to maintain footing on the rocks in the thigh-deep water of the wading pool, but soon we had maneuvered through a narrow passageway that finally opened up into the arched ceiling of the indoor pool.  For a few minutes, we used our flashlights to illuminate the corners of the room.  Several half-melted candles were perched on the sloping rock shoulders of the room and the rock spires sticking up out of the water.  

    I turned off my flashlight and put it on a flattish rock that seemed secure and waded the rest of the way into the pool. It was refreshing and cool, a relief after the humid little hike we’d taken to get there.

    “Wait for me,” Shelly said, putting her flashlight down as well and lowering herself into the water.  

    Soon the rest of the flashlights and headlamps had been stowed, and with the last light turning off, the room plunged into darkness.

    “Marco,” said Shelly.

    We laughed, but I listened intently and swam towards Jamie when he said, “Polo,” in his deep voice. The darkness didn’t feel as oppressive with him next to me.  Still about five minutes was all most of us could handle in the pitch black.  Shelly was the first to cave, paddling back to the entrance rocks and turning her flashlight on, finding the other four of us paddling around in the water.

    It didn’t take long to start feeling completely chilled, even with my natural heater close by with his arms around my waist.  When another group of voices started filtering into the cavern, we decided our turn in the lake room was over and headed back to the entrance again.

    “It’s too bad John couldn’t come,” Joe said offhandedly as we clambered up the steep rocks out of the cave entryway.

    Jamie smiled in response. “He said he would have loved to join us, but he’s a wee bit claustrophobic, AND his nieces had claimed his afternoon for a tea party.”

    “He has my pity,” Shelly said.  “Those girls are adorable, but they were exhausting!”

     As we hiked back up from the caves, I fell into step with Joe. I was dying to be nosy but did my best to show restraint and let the conversation flow--if it was going to.  Of course, a few minutes of silent walking and Joe turned to me, shaking his head. 

    “Go for it,” he said with an eye roll. “Ask me what you’ve been thinking about for the past five minutes… or five days.”

    “Do you like him?” I asked.  “You like, him, don’t you?” I almost skipped in my eagerness to keep up with him and hear his answer.

    “You are so not subtle, honey,” Joe laughed. “I don’t really need you to match-make for me.”

    “He’s such a nice guy,” I campaigned.  “And good-looking, too,” I added.

    Joe shook his head and looked down at the trail, a smile playing around his lips. “Why do you care so much, babe?” he asked. I didn’t answer, so Joe continued, “It’s because he’s in love with your husband, isn’t it?”

    I stopped in my tracks.  “Not still.  Is that what you see?”

    “He is so focused on Jamie I can tell that there’s some history there.  Unrequited, as far as I can tell from Jamie’s vibe.  But I don’t think he’s over him.”

    I frowned and sighed.  “I could swear John seems excited to see you.  I think he likes you.  And you asked about him just a little bit ago, so I know he’s on your mind.”

    “Yeah,” said Joe.  “He’s a great guy.  And gorgeous, too.  But there’s something off. Things are different with gay men.  Usually attraction is a little more straightforward.  We don’t play all those games that women and men have to.  And... I don’t understand, cause he’s not responding to me.”

    “Ohhhh,” I answered, thinking back to the conversation I’d had with John on the field ship. “I think he and Jamie have something in common…”

     This time it was Joe who stopped short.  “He’s a virgin?”

     “In a manner of speaking,” I answered quietly, looking around to make sure no one was in earshot.  “He came from a small island… fell in love with Jamie their freshman year… I just don’t think he has that much experience.”

     “Hm,” Joe grunted, a frown clouding his face.

     “He needs a caveman,” I said.

     Joe looked at me in amused confusion.  “What do you mean by that?”

     “He needs you to take the initiative.  Make it clear what you want… and that it’s him.”

     The frown was back again.  “I’m not going to force myself on him.”

     “That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I can only speak for myself, but here are my thoughts, for what it’s worth.  Sometimes a woman wants a gentleman who woos her.  But sometimes she wants a caveman who drags her to the cave and exerts his strength.”  At the skepticism on Joe’s face, I explained further.  “Not force, not aggression.  Just openly expressed desire and bold action. Something that makes it clear what his intentions are.”

     “And you think that it’s time for me to bring out my inner caveman?” John asked.

     I shrugged, wincing slightly.  “I don’t know, hon. It could be absolutely terrible advice.  You know my track record with relationships.”

    Joe shook his head in amusement, looking ahead toward Jamie who was leading the pack, a good head taller than my siblings.  

     “Worth a shot,” he concluded.

       “Want to watch ‘Elf’ with us, Claire?” Shelly called from the couch.  Joe had made his farewells, so it was just my mom, dad, and Seth who were lounging in the living room with snacks, waiting for the DVD to start.

     “In a minute,” I answered, heading into the kitchen.  Mom had left out the Christmas cookies, along with a tub of multi-flavored popcorn.  I was scrounging in the refrigerator for veggies and dip when two hands suddenly planted themselves firmly on my ass.  

    I shot upright and squeaked, checking the archway into the living room to make sure no one had seen.

    Jamie’s arms went around my waist, pulling me firmly back toward him.

    “Christ, I'm starving for ye, Claire,” he whispered in a husky groan. He let me go long enough to swipe my hair away from my neck so he could nip my ear. 

     Then he whirled me around with his hands on my hips, took the plate from me and set it down on the counter.  “We havena gone this long wi’out being together since we married,” Jamie insisted.  “Well, save for the field ship. But not when we were in the same place.  I must have ye.  Come wi’ me.  Now.”

     It was an order, not a request.  Jamie's eyes were narrowed, his gaze intently on me. And my body was on high alert, my arms peppered with goosebumps, shivers going up my spine. I felt suddenly weak in the knees.

     I stuck my head into the living room.  “I love this movie, guys, but we’ve been hiking and going and doing so much, I really think I should get a good night’s sleep.”

     “Sure, whatever,” said Seth, his eyes not leaving the screen.

     “Night, kiddo,” said my dad.

     My mom looked at me with a knowing smile but waved me away.

     I turned to see Jamie’s intense gaze on me. His words were sparse but his intent completely clear as he ordered me up the stairs.  

     “Come, woman.”

[mirasdarkmaterials]

THE SECRET DOCTRINE - The Atlantean Plan - Chapter 1

ONE: The Fall Of Isla de Pascua

     Shimmering blue-green waves splash endlessly in an open vastness of the Pacific Ocean. The gently churning of the open ocean places the wary mind at rest as the plane rocks back and forward like a boat at sea.

     Ahead, the sea gives way to rocky red earth. A rusty red color breaks the calming ocean blue with white water splashing against the rocks as the waves try to overtake the land but is kept at its limits. The plane pitches against the headwinds that shake the cabin like a tumbler-jar.

     Glancing at the reflection of two blue-grey eyes staring back at the observer, he is aware that his hair has become messy from the on-board air. He brushes back his light brown hair with his long slender fingers. His face looking tired and uncertain. The flight has been a long trip! Over 22 hours from his home in British Columbia to this hot, desert-like island out in the middle of nowhere.

     ‘Isla de Pascua’ Meir thinks as he looks at a geologic map that he has been studying. Meir is what you’d call a free-to-hire geologist. Never working for governments or corporation. People hired him to investigate something geomorphic and, in a month, he usually mails the results to his employer. Meir liked to work unabated, his own boss. But this time he was hired into a group of researchers from around the world. Two names: Jen Kleito, geophysics from Greece and Kiera Azaes, a geology historian from Portugal; were to meet him when he arrives at the airport.

     He almost did not take the job when he learned that he was going to have to work with two other individuals; but he needed the money and the price that his employer was paying was…almost to good to be true! Nevertheless, here he was, about to land on Easter Island.

     Touching down on the ground, he has finally arrived at the Mataveri International Airport. He closes his eyes as he never really liked flying, and the landing-part scared him the most! The plane rolls down the taxiway as it makes a sharp left turn into the terminal’s parking lot. The plane stops as the engines cut out and he looks outside to see a truck bringing a staircase over for the passengers to disembark. He wondered ‘How do you push a person with a disability down those stairs?’ He could not guess at the time, thinking that the stairs must have some type of ramp from the disabled, but luckily there were no wheelchair bound people on this flight today.

     Meir collects his carry-on and exits the plane as he walks over to the luggage being unloaded and takes his two bags; one bag with clothes and one bag with his personal surveying gear. He wipes his forehead as it is hot and muggy outside. It is always hot and muggy on Pascua! He looks ahead, wondering how he is going to find his connection.

     Ahead, there is a tall, six-foot-high woman wearing some loose-fitting bright plaid clothes. Her hair is almost white and tied back in a ponytail! Her skin pale white, like it has not seen the sun. She does not look like anyone that would fit the role of a geologist; but in her hands she holds a sign with one word: ‘Rainier’.

     Meir smiles as he walks over to the woman as he greets her. “Meir Rainier…you must be?”

     She smiles as she puts the penned sign away as she shakes Meir’s hand. “Kiera Azaes.” she says, her voice sounding like it is recovering from a cold.

     “It is nice to finally meet you Mrs. Azaes…” as Kiera takes both of his heavy bags with ease without much word from Meir as he was shocked but just goes with it. He hurries to catch up with Kiera as he looks at his bags “It is okay, I can handle my own bags…” he says as she just smiles as she looks towards her park car.

     She sets the bags down as David hopes nothing got broken in the flight. With the bags placed in the backseat, Meir takes the passenger’s seat as she takes the drivers seat. She hands a small badge to him to wear. He looks at it “What’s this?” as he looks at the tag: MEIR RAINIER ~ OCEANID ON-LAND EXPLORATION. “Okay? So we are striving to look official?”

     Kiera nods as she engages the engine and throws it in drive.

     Meir glances around, noticing they are missing one soul “Where is Miss Kleito?” Meir comments as Kiera fills in him.

     “She is waiting for us at the research site,” she states as she drives on the outskirt road that separates the airport from Hanga Roa. Meir looks out his window to a gentle slope that seems to just end abruptly. “That is…”

     “Rano Kau…” Meir says as he just familiarized himself with the names of all the extinct volcanoes that were wasting away. Easter Island was a dead island, volcanically inactive. At one time, this entire island was covered in vegetation and trees, but deforestation by the ancients have left this place a wasteland. They were heading to the youngest of the volcanoes, Poike.

     Keira studies Meir for awhile and can see that he is uncomfortable. “I take it that you don’t work often with others!” she remarks as he turns and glances at her, his eyes furrowed and mouth crinkled like having bit into a lemon.

     “No,” he says with a deep breath and sighs “my way of getting my answers and how I conduct geology is not…” as he pauses to find the right word.

     “Typical?.” Kiera says as Meir glances at her and lightly smiles. “We all were sought for our ‘odd’ approaches to geology and science. Call it intuition, but we pose talents that the Oceanid…” she pauses and carefully says “…collaboration, needs.” she smiles and adds cheerfully, “Consider us, family!”

     Meir turns back to the mountainside as they follow the airport to the other side of the island, 1.4 miles down the taxiway and make a gentle left-hand turn and follow the coast. They slow down as the road looks in bad shape. Keira and Meir look ahead as the road is barely hanging on…the whole land seemed to have fallen off into the ocean as the waves roll over the basalt rocks. There is a look of concern on Keira’s face as she looks at the road. “Think it is safe?” he asks as Kiera pushes the gas, they will soon find out as they skirt the drop off.

     Meir is left to wonder how much of the road is like this…and from the look of concern on Keira’s face, something tells him that this was once dry land. He takes out his cell phone and calls up his app that he uses to detect earthquakes. The USGS in California collects all the data and in a few minutes’ releases it to the public. Right off the island, somewhere in the water, there is a new squiggly line; ‘It was an earthquake?’ he wonders.

     Clearing the obstacle, they go down the bumpy dirt road as they breathe a sigh of relief. They follow the coast as Meir keeps a weathered eye for any other signs of island collapse and sees small areas that have weathered and worn away, but nothing that looked like that!

     Over ancient flat pahoehoe lava flows, the land is flat and unimpressive. There is a rise in front of them and a series of hills in the north, with the tallest now behind them. Meir looks at the water as his eyes widen. A massive crack opens from the ocean and splits across the landscape, racing from the road. “Look!” as he points to the black crack. Keira shakes her head as she does not know what it means. The crack splits the road, Kiera punches it as she hits the crack with a terrible bump. “What the hell!”

     “We need to go get Jen!” Kiera says as Jen is at the foot of Mount Poike as the ground begins to quiver. The instruments that she had been setting up all morning rattle. In her mind, she says ‘Earthquake?’ as the history of powerful quakes on Easter Island is rare to almost unheard of! Looking to the east, Mount Poike grows, rises as if the whole earth is was growing upward. Off in the Pacific, powerful explosions erupt rocks high into the sky before raining back down. The Tongariki heads in the southwest, near the coast sway back and forward as the ground she is standing on lifts her into the air. Massive cracks split across the landscape as the ocean floods in a hurry.

     The ground buckles and the earth fall back down, knocking over all the heads and the cracks widen and gas explosions from deep within the earth blows lava rocks all over the place. Jen grabs her steel carrying case and covers her head as rocks the size of oranges rain down upon her. Mount Poike begins to collapse, crumbling away in landslides as the ocean splashes against the rocks it 30-foot sprays.

     Keira and Meir look ahead as their brains can’t comprehend what their eyes are seeing. Mount Poike rises into the sky…as if the mountain was swelling, ready to erupt. Massive blocks of earth explode out of the ground as Kiera must dodge walls of old basalt. Meir is death-gripping the seat belt as the earth seems to roll, the road disappearing as they drive down a hill only to hit the gravel hard and be pushed back up.

     “It’s a rolling earthquake!” Meir says as he has read about these in collage and seen one when he was only 7 years old. It happened at his home on the North Pacific coast of Vancouver Island. The ground rolled like waves on the ocean. He rose and fell with the earth, it was very disorienting!

     Kiera lays on her horn as she drives into camp. She and Meir see Jen laying on the ground as they look at Mount Poike sliding away into the sea. Kiera places the car into park and runs over to Jen. Meir gets out to give her a hand...to find that Jen is okay, just a little banged up. The sound of collapsing earth eats away at their nerves as they help Jen to her seat as Meir looks at the mountain break away in blocks, looking as the fractures spread across the island. “We have to move!” he yells at Keira as she looks at what he was looking at, she is frozen with dread. The mountain is gone and the ocean is advancing!

     In their car, she turns back the way they came as she looks in her rear-view mirror to watch the whole island dropping off, the ocean roaring towards them. She throws the car into drive as she flies across the landscape. Orange size rocks bang into the car as it startles them every time. She tosses her phone into Meir’s lap. “Open my contacts and call the airport and have them read the plane!” as he looks through her contacts and finds the only name that looked like it would belong to a plane company.

     By the time they pass the Rano Raraku splatter cone, he was able to get through as he addressed the person on the other line. “I am calling on behalf of Mrs. Azaes…we need you to get the plane ready to take off!” he commands.

     “Who is this?” the man commands in an odd sounding voice.

     Meir looks at Kiera, “He wants to know who I am!” he says, annoyed and glancing out the window to the vanishing earth.

     “Tell him that you work for the Oceanid On-land Exploration…” she tells him as the man on the phone hears Kiera’s voice as his attitude changes.

     “What did Miss Azaes need?”

     “Get the plane ready to take off when we arrive! The whole east side of the island is erupting!” he says as he looks into the mirror and see nothing but water! The ocean is higher then he is as he looks wide eyed at Kiera. “The ocean is…?”

     “Higher…” she answers, “yeah! We are sinking!” she tells him as the ocean looks like a tsunami as the wave takes out everything. Looking ahead, they climb out of the sink, but it seems to follow them!

     Looking ahead, the ocean is racing towards them as the earthquake has taken out the road. Kiera slams on the breaks as she yells. “Damn!” as she looks at Meir. “Wasn’t there a road back there?”

     He thinks and nods as they make a U-turn and head north, across the island as they look east to a massive wall of water racing towards them. “Wave!” he shouts as the roar through farming communities, doing about 80 miles per hour, the road is killing the car! Higher and higher they climb, up the side of the largest volcano on the island, the wave is about two miles away, but thanks to the mountain of basalt, it is splitting into two.

     Coming to the end of the road, they make a hard-left turn as they resume heading west, away from the chaos. With a view of the city below, the road begins to lift high into the sky as they quickly sink and rise again…but this time, continue to rise as they watch the wave roll through the city as the earthquake overloads transformers as they explode. There are fiery explosions as gas mains break and columns of smoke form. The hill they are on begins to sink as they watch cracks cut through the landscape and across the road.

     “It isn’t just the east side!” Kiera says as she punches the gas. They need to get to the airport now! With the airport in view, it was hit bad! The runways are fractured. Kiera continues straight as Meir glances at the turn and realizes that at this speed, they will roll!

     “Oh Kiera...the road...you can't...make that turn!” he says as she isn’t distracted and blows across the road and onto an emergency road for the airport. It is blocked by a gate. “Gate! Gate!” he panics as he sees that she isn’t stopping, and he braces for impact. She cuts off the road and slams through the fence as she feels the car’s under carriage be ripped by lava rocks that are naturally scattered all over the island.

     On the run way, a commercial jet waits, its engines hot as they pull near the plane. The pilot waving them to hurry as his eyes look upon an island tumbling into the sea. Jen, Meir and Kiera exit the car as Jen and Kiera race to the plane; but Meir will not leave his gear behind. Kiera turns and sees that he is collecting the computers and his luggage.

     “Forget it!” Kiera screams. “Leave it!” as the pilot urges her to get onboard. With everything in hand, Meir runs across the taxiway as he begins climbing the stairs, carrying his gear. He feels the ladder shake as the cracks open and fountains of water begin to erupt. He throws the gear into the plane. The ladder falling just as Kiera and Jen grab onto whatever skin they can grab and pull him into the plane.

     “Your one crazy sum-of-a-bitch!” Jen says, still bleeding.

      “Its water!” Meir says as he looks frantic. “Water is exploding out of the earth!” the jet violently rocks as the captain engages the plane as air traffic control calls him in.

     “Passenger jet 377412N 256756W, stand down. You are not clear to go!” the controller commands as the captain ignores the order. He looks ahead, there is nothing in the sky. The plane roars down the runway, being sprayed, pelted and rocked by the airstrips condition as he pitches the jet up and they leave the ground before they expected. Looking out the window, the ground drops off and in front, the ground rises above the plane. The captain white eyed, pulls up as the plane barely makes it over the rise before it falls away and the ocean rolls in.

     They circle around as the whole island seems to fracture and break away into massive blocks. The city of Hanga Roa is swept away into the ocean as the ocean replaces land. Only the summit of Ma′unga Terevaka remains above the ocean as the waters churn like mud. The ships in the area are pulled down with the island as there is a rebound, a shockwave radiates away from where Easter Island was. Soon the water rises on the island of Terevaka. A massive tsunami pulls all the soil and life away from the mountain top, leaving a rocky crag.

     Jen and Meir stare out the window at the empty place where Easter Island once was. All the ancient history, mystery and lore is gone. Resting somewhere under the Pacific Ocean. No one has an answer. Jen shakes her head, the trauma of seeing her own death still raw. “Never in recorded history has a whole island just sank under the waves.”

     “Well, not exactly…” Kiera says as she checks on her passengers “…10 thousand years ago, that happened to the ancient of Atlantis.”

     “Atlantis!” Meir says, tired and aching. “Atlantis is a fictional place made-up by Plato.” he says as Kiera just shakes her head.

     “And they said that plate tectonics was also fiction…” Kiera offers as Meir returns to looking at the ocean as they are traveling east away from the setting sun. Kiera gets up as she can see that they need some time to reflect what they just saw.

     “Where to?” the captain asks as his eyes look to the eastern horizon.

     “Sao Miguel…” Kiera says as she takes a seat in the copilot’s seat and stares across the vast Pacific Ocean as they soar through the clouds. The knowledge of what has happened on Easter Island still fresh in her mind. She has much to be grateful, if it wasn’t for Meir’s selfless actions back on the taxiway, all the research and data would have been lost. Years of research, gone. She leans back in the seat as she closes her eyes as the captain glances at her.

     “You can go back and get some sleep, I’ll call you once we cross over the Atlantic.” he offers as she shakes her head taking out a needle and vial of blue fluid as she draws some of the fluid into the needle and pushes it into the base of her neck.

     Rubbing her sore skin, “I don’t think I could honestly sleep…right now!” as the faces of terror on the people’s faces are still fresh in her memory. No salvation for the people of Easter Island, only death! The captain can see the ethical turmoil in her eyes as he looks back out the window as he stares out across the skyline, watching for other planes and things that might damage his plane.

     In the back of the plane, Meir and Jen sit quietly, just staring out the windows as they look out upon the Pacific Ocean. The ocean looks so peaceful and serene. Unaware of the devastation that just occurred on a remote island that most have never visited before.

     Meir grows bored of watching the endless blue, so he takes out his phone and pulls up the USGS site to see if they registered the earthquake at Isla de Pascua. He would call to warn someone, but cell service was non-existent out here and only internet was provided by the plane...and it was spotty at time. He looks at a map of the South Pacific Ocean and finds the tiny island of Pascua and sees a massive red alert near the island. It was a massive 9.9, shallow earthquake. Another quake registers near the city of Hanga Hoa as a 9.8 and right under the island, a powerful quake that has the word: ERROR. ‘Error?’ Meir wonders as he pulls up the records and sees that the seismographs were recording a 9.9 before all the graphs abruptly…end. ‘They don’t know what happened to the island!’ he realizes. He then ponders. ‘They think that it was isolated earthquakes, not that the whole island got sucked under the ocean! That much water displacement...’ he realizes that the horror isn’t over as he quickly opens his Facebook app as he can’t text or call and will have to hope someone is reading his page.

‘Just Escaped Easter Island…The Whole Island Is Gone! Massive Seismic Disturbance Has Caused The Island To Disappear Into The Ocean. Please Alert Authorities Of Possible Mega-Tsunami For The South American, Central American, North American, Australia And Asia Coast - Rainier.’

     As he hits send, he waits for the message to upload as they near the Galapagos Islands. Meir takes his phone, looking out the window. If there was a mega-tsunami out there…he should see evidence of it here.

     In the cockpit, the captain and Keira look out the window as they look across the ocean to the Galapagos Islands. Keira stares at the green island as the white-water lapping at the black rocks begins to pull back rapidly. The shoreline from Isabela Island reaches out for the expanding shoreline of Fernandina Island. Meir, sitting in the cabin watches the water begin to crest as he snaps some pictures of the receding water and the growing tsunami as he jumps out of his seat, startling Jen, as he rushes to the cockpit.

     “There is a tsunami!” he shouts as he looks out the window at the islands of Isabela and Fernandina, the water has drawn back so far that now the island of Fernandina is reconnected back to Isabela, where there was once a 50-foot-deep passage. The water begins to rise as the wave seems to rise towards the plane. At an estimated height of around 3000 feet, it is the largest mega-tsunami ever seen by human eyes! The wave rolls up the shore with devastating results as it scours the earth, obliterating old outcrops and throwing rocks the size of houses around.

     The wave hits the active volcano of Cerro Azul, the spray impressive as the water explodes high over the summit. Unable to crest the 5000-foot volcano, the wave wraps around the volcano as the tsunami rolls over the lowlands of Isabela Island. On Fernandina island, the water rolls up the gentle slope of the island with little to no obstacles as the water poured into the caldera as the wave rolled through the harbor and crested against the shore of Isabela Island

     Flying over Isabela Island, the green earth with its cold black lava flows disappeared under an azul blue wave that towered over the land by almost 2000 feet as it races towards the tiny village of Santo Tomas. Serra Negra volcano cut the strength out of the wave as the volcano completely disappeared under the wave as the force of the wave was split to the north and to the south, right towards the lightly populated city of Puerto Villamil. The city was washed away under a wave that towered over the city by almost 1300 feet as the wave raced towards the airstrip. The captain steers up as a plane rolls down the run way, trying to take off. The wave seems to explode and swallows the plane as it disappears in the tsunami.

     Meri is shock shocked that he forgot to take photographs as the devastation is complete. He finally realizes his error as he snaps a few photographs from the cockpit as the wave is now behind the main tsunami. The tsunami overtakes the island of Santa Cruz, wiping the five towns off the map. Meir has seen enough as he leaves the cockpit as Jen stands there at the door, equally devastated as she looks emotionally sick.

     “All those poor people!” Jen whispers as Meir looks at his Facebook post, not a single comment! All these people could have been warned. He thinks about the lives in his hometown. By the time the tsunami reaches them, it would have weakened, but still have a wave of around 300 feet! That is pretty much Victoria and his town at Crystal Cove. He uploads the pictures from the Galapagos to his site as they immediately receive views and the comments begin to roll in.

‘Where Is This?’

‘Were You There?’

‘How Tall Is That Wave?’

‘Is This Connected To The Easter Island Earthquake You Mentioned?’

     Meir sits down as he looks out the window as they fly over the location of San Cristobal. Only the summit of El Junco rises above the waters surface as the ocean looks muddy. He closes his eyes as he has seen enough. He loves a good disaster, but to watch the world end, it was too much to bear! To watch a 3000-foot wave wipe away everything man has created makes him feel so small. He thinks about all that he has seen, all that he has been through as his thoughts go back years; to a time when he was addressing a pretentious employer from Alaska:

     ‘What is the likelihood of a mega-tsunami hitting our rig?’ his employer asks him as he never considered mega-tsunami’s much of a threat. They were especially rare in the field of geosciences and hardly studied as the likelihood of one happening is about once every 25 thousand years. The last mega-tsunami to occur was back in 1980 at the Mount St. Helens eruption sent a landslide into Spirit Lake, causing a 853 foot tsunami to race across the lake. But that mega-tsunami was nothing compared to the 1958 Lituya Bay mega-tsunami that was over 1,710 feet high.

     ‘You have a better chance of winning the lottery and dying the same day by choking on a piece of cauliflower then seeing a mega-tsunami…’ Meir says as the employer interrupts him.

     ‘So…not a threat then!’

     Meir shakes his head. He has learned that predicting anything in the field of science is strongly frowned upon. It isn’t science when you guess or predict, that stuff is left to the nut-jobs and supposedly gifted folks. He gives an example. ‘Anything and everything can be a threat if the scenario is just right! Take for example, there is an island in the Canary Archipelago called La Palma. On that island is a volcano called Cumbre Vieja.’ as he draws the island and places an ‘X’ for the volcano. ‘Now, let’s say that the western half of the volcano has a volume of 500 cubic kilometers with a mass of 1.5 trillion metric tons and it slide into the ocean all at once…’ as he slashes the image with his marker. ‘…that displacement would create a wave 3,280 high…’

     ‘Three thousand!’ he says as the volume is incomprehensible.

     Meir nods, ‘3,300-foot-tall wave! The greater the displacement, the greater the wave. By the time the time the wave rolled upon the eastern seaboard, it would still be 164 feet tall! Cities like Halifax, Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Miami and Havana…devastated! Cities in Europe and Africa would be completely wiped off the map! Vanish from history...like Atlantis and Crete...!’ Meir says as his words leave a chill in the room.

     ‘Is there anything in the Pacific that could do this to us here?’

     Meir thinks of any localized threats and can’t think of one. His mind goes to the one-of-many Aleutian volcanoes…they have produced tsunami’s in the past, but nothing of massive scale. His thoughts go south and think of a paper he read. ‘Mauna Loa!’ he says as he deliberates ‘About 110,000 years ago, a massive block of the volcano fell into the ocean and triggered a mega-tsunami that inundated the Hawaiian Islands to about 1,600 feet, as evident on the slopes of Kohala volcano. Let’s say, that a part of Maui or Hawaii Island were to collapse today…about, oh lets says 20 minutes ago…we’d have about 10 minutes to get to high ground. Every city on the west coast of North America and South America, below 300 feet would be destroyed! The cities closest to the ocean, completely gone!’

     Meir opens his eyes as his phone is constantly vibrating, people finally taking his comments serious. He scrolls through the comments until he sees one from a fellow colleague at Menlo Park:

‘How Much Of Easter Island Slide Into The Ocean?’

Meir texts back:

‘All Of It…The Whole Damn Island!’ he adds ‘The Galapagos Islands Were Just Hit. Many Of The Islands Are Just Gone! Underwater Now! Reference Pictures…’

Second later:

‘Can You Come To Menlo Park?’

Meir wants to go, but he quickly types his warning.

‘Mega-Tsunami In Pacific Ocean, Heading Towards The West Coast Of America’s. You Need To Evacuate!’

     He warns as he does not hear anything for awhile and considers that the conversation was purposely dropped. About an hour later, his phone vibrates again. This time it is from a friend in Alaska.

‘Meri, Don’t Come To West Coast! Tsunami Warning Issued…It Is Chaos Here! Give Me A Call When You Get This Message! - Melusine-Siyokoy’ 

     Stories are coming into his Facebook feed about the tsunami that just devastated Panama. Looking out the windows, they are sopped in a thick cloud bank as rain pelts the window. The plane rocks hard as the air is turbulent, but soon they break through the storm and are approaching the coastline as Jen calls out for Meir.

     “Meir!” Jen cries out as he snaps out of his day-dreaming and walks over to the cockpit as they soar through the clouds. The skyline opening as new clouds rise in the horizon. Black clouds rising from the ground as the city of Panama is on fire! The tsunami had arrived, and multiple waves continue to rip the city apart. About ten miles into the mainland, there are massive ships resting against the hillsides where the wave lost its power…the canal, gone. The people of Panama shall never awake from this nightmare!

[mrcoreymonroe]

Flying Through The Picture-Perfect Southwest

Lift off from Runway 25 at Four Corners Regional Airport in Farmington, New Mexico, turn slightly west to point the spinner at Shiprock, and you’re on track for some of the most remarkable views in America.

If you’re a fan of old John Wayne westerns, you will already have seen the dramatic rock formations of Monument Valley on the big screen many times. Take away the screen altogether and translate those geologic images to reality, however, and you’ll gain a whole new perspective on what many pilots regard as the most spectacular terrain in the Mountain West.

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Columbia Aircraft had hired me to fly one of the longest and most challenging air-to-air photo formation missions I could ever imagine. Back in 2005, Columbia hoped to compile a library of dramatic inflight images of its then-new Columbia 300, and my job was to put the Columbia 300 wherever the photographer needed it to be to secure the best shots of the airplane with the Southwest U.S. in the background. Our trip turned out to be a 1,800 nm, 20-flight-hour marathon.

The Cessna was flown by the pre-eminent lead pilot above the planet, the now-late John Kounis. At the time, John was editor of Pilot Getaways Magazine, and we’d worked together on a dozen or so photo missions.

The photographer was John’s brother, George, one of the acknowledged experts on air-to-air photography. George was shooting with the door removed, because, as he put it, “There wasn’t much sense in using a pair of $3,000 cameras and lenses to shoot through a $50 piece of Plexiglas.”

Columbia Aircraft was not pinching pennies on this mission. It’d hired a beautiful Hollywood model to ride right seat and smile for the camera while I tried to hide behind the windshield frame.

Unfortunately, no one bothered to ask her if she knew anything about general aviation airplanes. Even worse, her introduction to the western sky would be flying on the wing of another airplane on a circuitous, three-day mission over much of California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.

Sure enough, she was understandably apprehensive about flying in “one of those little airplanes” above some of the roughest mountain terrain in North America. We flew at 110 knots, often 500 feet off the ground, but looking for smooth air wherever we could find it. Apparently, our model needed the work, so she shrugged, smiled bravely and did her job. This was obviously not her first rodeo.

As we droned around the Southwest trying to find the perfect sun line, smooth skies and photogenic terrain below, she gradually relaxed and began to enjoy the experience. She commented that she’d done many yacht and sailboat advertising shoots when she was living in South Florida, and this job at least allowed her to wear something more comfortable than a bikini.

We’d departed Long Beach, California, two days before, flown out to Catalina, circled the “Island of Romance” and made several approaches to the famous “Airport In The Sky,” then routed back across the Los Angeles Basin to the dramatic Owens Valley.

Our two-plane flight followed the Owens north past the tall, knife-edge terrain of the Sierra Nevada, climbing all the while to reach the snow level. I trailed John’s Cessna below the summit of Mt. Whitney and on to Mono Lake and Tahoe.

During the flight north, the roomy Columbia 300 trucked along as if unconcerned with the semi-vertical rock faces below. Never mind what my model passenger thought about the sharp peaks and broken, jagged rock fields, the airplane was easy to hold in formation, despite the fact that it used a left-side stick for roll and pitch control.

Side sticks seem to be favored more and more these days. The Columbia’s is light and responsive, though it ignores the fact that 90 percent of the pilot population is right-handed.

That means it’s almost impossible to trade off control from left hand to right hand. That’s one reason the military continues to equip its aircraft with either a center stick, yoke or a right-side stick. It would be interesting to hear a fighter pilot’s take on a left side stick. Of course, you could always solve the problem by moving to the right seat, though the instrument presentation would remain left-based.

Despite that one little glitch, the Columbia is/was still a nice-flying airplane.

Throughout it all, the big Continental IO-550 out front seemed totally oblivious to the dynamic earth below and ran like an aviation version of a Turbo Porsche with a continuous variable transmission. The engine on this demonstrator showed 30 hours on the meter, so it was well past the infant mortality stage, one less thing to worry about.

As many readers may know, the Columbia was a slick, composite design, conceived by aeronautical designer Lance Neibauer initially as a homebuilt, called the Lancair ES, and later redesigned and certified as a production aircraft. The Columbia 300, later to be renamed the Corvalis and then TTx under the Cessna banner, was strikingly similar to the Cirrus SR22 in design and performance. In fact, it was so similar in appearance, it was often mistaken for a Cirrus on our fuel stops. The airplane was fast and comfortable, and I was happy to have the three-day opportunity to fly the new model over much of the Southwest.

We circumnavigated the bottomless blue of Lake Tahoe and continued west toward the San Francisco Bay area. Our backdrop of choice was the Golden Gate Bridge, one of the Bay’s most iconic, scenic landmarks from above or from sea level.

Circling the Golden Gate, I was reminded of another photo shoot I flew in early October 2001. I’d flown a new Piper Saratoga HP on a much shorter air-to-air mission above the Golden Gate, this time for Plane & Pilot. The bridge director spotted us overhead, called the FAA and complained that two “suspicious” airplanes were circling his bridge.

The director’s paranoia was understandable considering what had just happened three weeks before in New York City, but his concern was misplaced. Our lead pilot on that shoot was talking to Bay Approach throughout our photo flight, though Bay had advised him the airspace above the bridge was not restricted at our altitude.

We made several circles near the bridge, arced out to Alcatraz and shot the spectacular San Francisco skyline in the background, then turned back out over the Pacific and headed to our perch at the Piper dealership in Palo Alto.

In a classic demonstration of government left hand/right hand confusion, the FAA called the Air Force, and they scrambled two F-16s to intercept us. Apparently, they arrived about 15 minutes later, after we were long gone. No one bothered to call Bay Approach and ask if they knew anything about two airplanes circling the bridge.

My photographer, Jim Lawrence, and I landed back at Palo Alto, transferred to my Mooney, and flew home to Long Beach. The following morning, I received a call from the FBI, which’d already sorted out the details and determined that we hadn’t done anything wrong.

Taking pity on me for what I might be thinking, the congenial agent opened the conversation with, “Mr. Cox, this is agent James Henderson with the FBI (gulp!), and no, you’re not in trouble.”

A predictably well-dressed woman agent came by the house two days later, and took my statement, reiterating that we’d done nothing wrong but that the Bureau had to investigate so they could close the file. As she was leaving, she asked if I’d seen the video. Apparently, a San Francisco TV station had been shooting a story at Fisherman’s Wharf, near the base of the bridge, and had captured us circling overhead. I never saw the video, but I still wonder if somewhere back in Washington, D.C., there’s a file stored with my name on it.

Fast forward to 2005. We flew down the Pacific coast to Monterey and Big Sur and, finally, hopped back across the Sierra Nevada to Las Vegas for the first night.

The next morning, we were up well before the sun broke the horizon for a short run down the Las Vegas Strip to get photos of glitzy Vegas with the sun in the background and the Columbia out front. Photo ship pilot John Kounis had been up late coordinating our plan to depart very early and fly a semi-night formation down the Strip, then make a right turn across Sunrise Mountain and depart the area over Lake Mead.

We drifted east along the north side of the Grand Canyon, crossed over to the south side, then made a colorful levitation above Arizona’s Painted Desert. Again, John Kounis kept us out of trouble with the feds. We continued into Santa Fe for fuel and a late lunch, then departed northwest to Taos and finally Farmington, New Mexico, for the second round.

On the final day of the Columbia shoot, we leaped out of Farmington and headed back to Long Beach by a zigzag route across Monument Valley and over the domed edifice of Navajo Mountain and the other-worldly movie location Lake Powell, made famous in the Charlton Heston sci-fi hit “Planet of the Apes.”

From there, it was back across the Grand Canyon, south to Arizona’s Meteor Crater and Sedona, home of the most dramatic late-afternoon red cliffs you’ve ever seen.

My passenger had a few minor bouts of queasy stomach on the first day, but after that, she settled down and began to actually enjoy what we were doing. Like most people, she’d only witnessed the Earth from 35,000 feet or higher; she’d never had the opportunity to see the views we take for granted in the bottom 10,000 feet of sky. From that low station or less, she was entranced by the mystical Lake Powell and the overwhelming spectacle of the Grand Canyon.

Photographer George Kounis got something like 4,000 photos of the Columbia 300 traversing some of the most spectacular mountain and desert terrain in the West. He showed our model some of the photo outtakes over Catalina, Lake Tahoe and Sedona’s Oak Creek Canyon, and she was dutifully impressed.

We were, too, but most importantly, so was Columbia. For me, it was some of the most challenging formation flying I’d done, operating a relatively new breed of aircraft in an unusual mode of flight.

Little did I know that a few months later, the successful photo mission would lead to a chance to ferry another new Columbia from Bend, Oregon, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

But that’s another story.

Check out more Cross-Country Log flying stories from ferry pilot and Senior Editor Bill Cox.

  The post Flying Through The Picture-Perfect Southwest appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

from Plane & Pilot Magazine http://bit.ly/2RuEJkW

[thirstypanda]

NOTE: I’ll be doing up a small blog for each brewery we visited so that you don’t fall asleep reading an unnecessarily long diatribe. 

With a population of 81,000, Bellingham, WA (BLI) is an island of a city on the I-5. By this I mean it’s surrounded by farmland, sprawling green hills, the Pacific Ocean, and the Cascade Mountain range, so it’s pretty much all on its own.

Although not really connected like other urban style cities (you kind of have to live here to understand), it’s super close to roughly 3 million Canadians – many of whom love good craft beer but aren’t particularly fond of border lineups or a 70 cent dollar.

Currently boasting 11 breweries, with a 12th opening shortly, Bellingham offers 10 times the number of breweries per capita than my home town of Abbotsford, BC (which explains the popularity of Field House Brewing), AND more per capita than Portland, Seattle and Vancouver.

Weekend Getaway

Seeming like an eternity since Sandra and I had been on a weekend getaway, we decided to escape somewhere for a couple of days. And, quite frankly, it really didn’t matter where.

Being both super close and super affordable, Bellingham seemed like a good choice. We thought we would do some shopping, wander around the old downtown area, enjoy the farmer’s market, and check-in to a brewpub or two (or three, or four).

After some quick research I was utterly shocked to find that there were 11 breweries in BLI alone. I was aware of a couple of them… But 11?

That was a game changer. Looks like the handful of visits was going to turn into a full blown holiday tap tour!!!

Gathering up a list of places of interest and breweries , I pinned them on a Google map, and a rough agenda was planned out.

Here We Go

We started the day off at the Farmer’s Market in the heart of downtown Bellingham. This turned into a real find, as Atwood Ales had a small stand showing off some of their crazy brews featuring locally sourced ingredients. Spent a good amount of time talking to them, savouring the samples they brought, and picked up a Triticale Brett Saison that will be going into the cellar for some conditioning. Look forward to checking out one of their brewery tours in the not to distant future.

To make this even more fun, we came across a local “Tap Trail Passport” (see below) at the “tourist desk” . With a map provided, it lists a number of supporting breweries, cideries, and tap houses where you get a unique stamp when you visit and purchase a pint. Collect enough stamps and you get a reward to acknowledge your dedication to the cause. The rewards are far from luxurious, but they are a fun incentive just the same.

Jumping back into the Prius, we headed a couple miles south down the I-5 to the Fairhaven district – a quaint area with some hip shops, restaurants, and a bit of culture. After a lazy wander around, we located Stone’s Throw Brewing, which could be easily mistaken for someone’s home, and stepped in for our first pint of the journey (11:30am – not bad). It was the perfect beginning to a perfect weekend, I enjoyed a nicely brewed pilsner lager, Sandra had a ginger ale they brew themselves, and we planned out the rest of our day.

Spending some more time in the shops, we ended up a the Filling Station restaurant for another pint ( a very nice Ten Pin Brewing Gutter Ball Hazy Pale Ale) and some lunch. This was a real jewel of a find (although not too hard to find), as the service was outstanding, the food was very good, super cool decor, and they ONLY SERVE regional craft beer.

Back to the Big City

Trekking back into Downtown Bellingham, we bounced around on foot to Gruff Brewing, Boundary Bay Brewery and Bistro, Chuckanut Brewery and Kitchen, Aslan Brewing, Structures Brewing, and finishing off the day at Wander Brewing.

Turns out the Downtown Bellingham area is less than stellar for shopping. Sadly, even on a Saturday afternoon, more often than not the stores were closed or empty.

After a grueling, and thirst quenching day, we grabbed some relatively average Chinese takeout and headed back to the hotel. With luck, Armageddon, one of the all time great end-of-the-world apocalypse movies was just starting. The perfect movie to fall asleep to.

Day 2

With leftovers on the breakfast menu (who doesn’t love leftover Chinese food?), we checked out, relaxed at a Woods Coffee across the way, and mapped out our day.

Having a current affinity for sours, we ended up going to BevMo to scour the Belgian saison selection. Although I was hoping to find an Orval circa 2018 or 2016 (already have a 2017), a Saison Dupont Farmhouse Ale, circa 2016, more than fit the bill. If you’ve never been to the BevMo in Bellingham, and you like craft beer, this is a must.  They have a very good selection of domestic craft beer, and imported goodies.

Following a pilgrimage to the new Costco, we headed down Meridian Street to Menace Brewing for the first beer of the day. Ben, the fellow behind the counter, was super obliging, letting me taste every single beer they had on tap plus one from a fermentor that they were going to be bottling shortly (an oh so nice Chile Bravo Lager).

Super tasty food and some nice beers at Aslan Brewing.

The next stop took us a few blocks down the road to Melvin Brewing for a flight and some garlic fries. Followed by a tasty lunch and pint at Aslan, a relaxing beverage at Kulshan, Illiminati for a pint of pilsner, and down the 542 to North Fork Brewing for a pizza and a closing flight before heading home.

In Closing

There were a few things that the Mrs. and I got out of our weekend getaway. The first thing we noticed was how family and dog friendly many of the places were. Waiting in line at Gruff I was greeted by a wagging tale, while the toddlers seemed just as at home at Wander Brewing as they would at a daycare. This was a definitely a reflection of the clientele and the relaxed the settings.

Second, we were amazed at how spread out Bellingham is. With only 81,000 people, there was definitely more space than human beings. This was quite evident during our wanderings of the barren Downtown district.

Finally, we were pleasantly surprised by the craft beer scene and everything it had to offer. The community seems to have embraced it, supporting everything from street parties, to a weekend brew tour bus that will escort you around to the various brewery areas for a mere $10 / person for the whole day. The taprooms and stores (even Costco) are also big supporters of the local breweries, putting their products front and centre.

There is a very good chance we’ll be making our way back to the BLI for another weekend, to enjoy the exceptional craft beer scene and maybe some of the cultural activities in the area.

Well that’s it for now, gonna go quench that panda sized thirst… Cheers!

Bellingham Tap Trail: A hophead’s paradise NOTE: I'll be doing up a small blog for each brewery we visited so that you don't fall asleep reading an unnecessarily long diatribe. 

[derechointernacionalpublico]

Bolivia and Chile in The Hague: Can They Quiet the Ghosts of the Pacific War, and Thrive Together in the 21st Century?

Bolivia and Chile in The Hague: Can They Quiet the Ghosts of the Pacific War, and Thrive Together in the 21st Century?

by Monica Feria-Tinta and Simon Milnes

[Monica Feria-Tinta is a barrister specialising in Public International Law, at the Bar of England and Wales and Simon Milnes is a barrister specialising in international environmental law and the business/ human rights nexus.]

The Americas’ proud heritage of settling disputes through international law entered a new chapter this week, as arguments opened in Obligation to Negotiate Access to the Pacific Ocean (Bolivia v. Chile), a claim by Bolivia to regain access to the sea lost in 1879. Brilliant legal minds will cross swords over the coming days, over whether Chile is obliged to sit down and negotiate with Bolivia. But, whoever prevails in Court, negotiations could prove a win-win by healing a troubled relationship.

Bolivia lost its 200-mile coast after humiliating defeat in the 1879-83 ‘War of the Pacific’ that broke out after an earthquake forced Bolivia to impose taxes on Chilean exporters of nitrate and saltpetre. Even as Bolivia’s port of Antofagasta fell, Chile’s foreign minister, Domingo Santa María, argued that “we cannot suffocate Bolivia … we must somehow provide it with its own port, a front door …”. In 1904, a Chile-Bolivia peace treaty agreed the coastal territories now belonged to Chile “in perpetuity.” Yet sentiments like Santa María’s have echoed down the years. Bolivia contends that from the totality of these assurances, Chile has given a solemn undertaking to negotiate a sovereign access to the sea.

Several features of the case are likely to fascinate international lawyers.

Non-treaty commitments

First, while most international cases centre on treaties or customary rules, here Bolivia cites mostly political declarations, diplomatic notes and resolutions. Are such statements mere ‘soft law’ lacking binding effect? Or do they create some enforceable obligation? At the heart of this question is the problem of how to decide what the sources of international law are (beyond the most orthodox categories in the ICJ Statute). The ICJ’s own case law establishes that an agreement involving states may be binding even if it is not a treaty (Anglo-Iranian Oil Case), and that unilateral declarations of a State can create binding obligations (Nuclear Tests (Australia v. France), also considered in the UK/Ireland OSPAR arbitration (2003)). But the ICJ also cautioned that declarations that do so “may be, and often are very specific”, and that a “restrictive interpretation” is called for (Nuclear Tests, Australia v. France).

Good faith, conduct and result

Second, is Bolivia’s claim pushing the envelope by linking negotiations to a specific result? Or is it only an ‘obligation of conduct’ (i.e. to discuss, without prejudging the outcome)?

Good faith is overarching and ever-present in international law, with a long legal pedigree. The Venezuelan Preferential Claims Case (1904) affirmed that good faith “ought to govern international relations“. Indeed, the Tacna-Arica arbitration (1925), also arising from the War of the Pacific, was one of the earliest decisions on the legal duty to negotiate in good faith. In the Right of Passage over Indian Territory Case (1960), Judge ad hoc Fernandes called it “the most general and the most essential of the general principles of law”, while in the celebrated WTO case US-Shrimp, the Appellate Body described it as “at once a general principle of law and a general principle of international law”. Yet, as Bin Cheng put it in his 1953 classic, General Principles of Law, “[w]hat exactly this principle implies is perhaps difficult to define”. It usually does its work through other legal rules, not as a freestanding source of obligations.

International law has not shrunk back from finding states to be under obligations to negotiate “in good faith”. As regards the conduct element – manner, modalities, and attitude – it is already clear that no ‘box-ticking’ exercise would suffice. In North Sea Continental Shelf (Germany v. Denmark), the ICJ held that international law on the delimitation of continental shelf boundaries required the two states to negotiate sincerely and to make real efforts to equitably accommodate one another’s interests (“to enter into negotiations with a view to arriving at an agreement . . . [and] so to conduct themselves that the negotiations are meaningful, which will not be the case when either of them insists upon its own position without contemplating any modification of it . . .”). Thus, if the ICJ finds that Chile bound itself to negotiate, this will likely include a duty to make negotiations “meaningful”, including contemplating modifications to its position and identifying what concessions from Bolivia could be an acceptable price for access to the ocean.

As regards the result element, this is perhaps the most complex and difficult aspect. In the PCIJ advisory opinion on Railway Traffic between Lithuania and Poland, the two states had concurred in accepting a recommendation to “enter into direct negotiations as soon as possible” so as to establish “the good understanding between nations upon which peace depends” – theoretically a ‘result’ obligation, but perhaps so broadly worded that it is dubious whether it could be enforceable. (Such doubts nonetheless call to mind the observations of Judge Lauterpacht in his Separate Opinion in South-West Africa Voting Procedure: “however rudimentary, elastic, and imperfect” the content of a binding resolution may be, it does not lose its nature as a legal obligation. Discussing this Opinion, O’Connor wrote that Lauterpacht emphasized “the legal nature” of the obligation to act in good faith, even where “it was difficult to draw the dividing line between a legal obligation and a non-legal obligation.”)

Contrastingly, in the ICJ’s 1996 Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion, the Court held that all parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty had bound themselves absolutely to achieve “a precise result” – complete denuclearization – with good faith negotiations as the means.

Bolivia’s contentions fall somewhere in between the two. Unlike “good understanding” (Railway Traffic), the concept of “a fully sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean” has some irreducible substantive content; on the other hand, unlike the single “precise result” required in Nuclear Weapons, there are many possible permutations for how it could be achieved, and what Bolivia could offer in return.

In the Fisheries Jurisdiction Cases (UK v Iceland), the Court held that negotiating in good faith required the parties to “reasonable regard to the legal rights of the other”. But to what extent could good faith require regard for considerations beyond “hard law”, such as justice and equity?

Whilst some consider equity an extra-legal notion, others regard it a general principle of international law. Indeed in the Tunesia/Lybia Continental Shelf Case, the ICJ made it clear that equity is a general principle “directly applicable as law” [1982] ICJ. Rep p. 60.

Context – the obligation to use pacific means to settle international disputes

Third, the dispute throws into relief the ways that general principles – like the obligation to use ‘pacific means’ to settle disputes, ‘good neighborliness’ (reflected in Article 74 of the UN Charter), and equity or justice – may shape concrete legal duties. Equity plays a role, though limited, in deciding existing borders (Frontier Dispute, Burkina Faso/Mali), but questions of negotiating to move frontier lines are uncharted territory.

While the legal questions are difficult, Bolivia’s confinement appears (in layman’s terms) so unfair that a negotiated change would seem to offer better prospects all round. Objective data shows that landlocked countries suffer impediments to development. In today’s global economy, a coastline with a port means the chance to develop a whole ‘ecosystem’ of production and service industries which support one another, increasing GNP: freight-forwarding, chartering, ship repairs, marine fuels, insurance, etc, not to mention fisheries and the ‘Blue Economy’ [openknowledge.worldbank.org].

What does Chile have to gain, if it were to negotiate Bolivia’s access to the sea? More cordial relations, clearly – but probably much more: strong demand for Bolivia’s natural gas, and a prolonged drought in Chile, with water supply to the Santiago region expected to fall by 40% over the next half-century, could increase the value of Bolivia’s potential gas and water exports to Chile.

Recent examples justify optimism. Last week, Timor-Leste and Australia put years of acrimony behind them with a new maritime boundary treaty. In Latin America, the Pulp Mills dispute (Argentina/Uruguay) is an encouraging precedent: within 6 months of the ICJ’s 2010 judgment they had negotiated new environmental protection arrangements for the River Uruguay. Across the world, Singapore and Malaysia experienced frictions over a railway track owned by Malaysia that bisected its island neighbour; in 2010 they negotiated to swap the railway land for stakes in prestigious real estate. Today, the tracks that generated so much discord are a much-loved nature trail.

In short, governments who get around a table with a will to find solutions can surprise themselves. Vision and pragmatism on both sides could transform Bolivia’s economic future, see Chile recompensed, and demonstrate the strength of the Americas’ distinctive tradition of peace and law in international affairs.

[via Opinio Juris]

https://www.dipublico.org/109159/bolivia-and-chile-in-the-hague-can-they-quiet-the-ghosts-of-the-pacific-war-and-thrive-together-in-the-21st-century/

[viralhottopics]

After the flood: ‘No tourists please. Help welcome’

On a journey through northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, Warren Murray meets locals contending with the aftermath of Cyclone Debbie

Light to moderate traffic is easing along the Pacific motorway connecting the Gold Coast and the Tweed, with no particular sign of storm damage or delays. But in Chinderah, just inside New South Wales and just off the highway, John Anderson is in full-tilt disaster recovery mode, contending with the aftermath of the flooding rains that ex-cyclone Debbie sent south.

At the Gateway Lifestyle Tweed Shores over-50s community, in between dealing with a stream of tradies coming in and out the office door Righto mate, do what youve gotta do, well pay for it Anderson describes how last week the water went through probably 140 cabin-style homes in this complex that he manages.

On Thursday the tide met the downstream flooding and we were inundated with a metre, metre and a half of water not a flood, but slowly rising water.

By Friday afternoon evacuation was well under way for those residents happy to go.

Gas bottles ripped off their moorings, leaking gas, electricity in residences filled with salt water, Anderson recalls. By 10 oclock Saturday night the park was basically isolated and only accessible by rubber ducky. He and his wife, Beth, opted to stay and keep an eye on things, sleeping on foam mattresses on the upper level of their manufactured home, with water swilling around on the floor below, until they could get out and about to assess the damage.

Days later, theres still so much to be done before things even faintly resemble normality. A jotting on the desk blotter says Copper gas line missing gone. Andersons mobile rings and flashes up the caller details: Shade Sail Andrew.

Out front of the park is a pile of ruined possessions that stretches for maybe 100 metres down the road. It represents in a lot of cases everything that people own, or did own. The villas are about 85% privately owned, 15% rented. Some people are insured, a lot are not because of the cost, being flood-prone.

Anderson lauds a magnificent response from the community, individuals who are pitching in to help out. The ladies from nearby Cudgen public school have been turning up with hot food, and in the top bit of the Gateway park where the water couldnt reach we had ladies there cooking sausage rolls and bringing them round. Just the most magnificent response.

Cleaning up after the flooding in Tumbulgum on the Tweed river, northern New South Wales. Photograph: Warren Murray for the Guardian

Double whammy

A short drive away in Tumbulgum its clear from the comprehensive inventory of household goods in jumbled heaps at the end of every driveway that some people lost more or less everything. A woman throws her hands up in resignation as a man adds more ruined belongings to one such growing pile. Everywhere is silt and sludge. At the entry to Riverside Drive a chalked sign says Please stop to help residents. Nearby a woman, looking newly arrived on the scene, unloads from her car a little yellow water blaster. It seems hopelessly dinky for the mammoth job at hand, but every bit helps and you know she will not go unthanked.

Compounding the heartbreak for Tumbulgum is the death on its doorstep of Stephanie King, 43, her son Jacob, 7, and daugher Ella Jane, 11, after their car plunged off Dulguigan Road and into the swollen Tweed on Monday afternoon. Daughter Chloe May, 8, managed to escape from the sinking car. I arrive on the other side of the river at 11.45am on Tuesday and line up with the rest of the media in a sludgy riverside park. We are being kept at bay as police divers continue their work after having to stop overnight. Even at this distance the water can be seen roiling with bubbles from their difficult work in the murk.

Pixie Bennett clutches a Jack Daniels in a can as she stands near me watching the recovery effort. Like everyone else she was stranded by the waters and stripped of everything that she couldnt get upstairs.

Sorry were drinking in the middle of the day but were still in shock its a double whammy for the little town of Tumbulgum, she says, nodding towards the emergency services at work on the opposite bank. She moved her car on to a high bridge before the water came but lost boxes of possessions when the water rose two steps from the top of our 13 steps. A plastic box floated past and she grabbed it, to find a Barbie dolls clothes packed inside. Our neighbour rowed over in a canoe and rowed us back next door so we could have dinner with them.

Further back from the river in Bawden Street, earthmoving contractor Ben May is opening the jaws of his Bobcat loader, plunging it into those roadside piles, clamping down on whatever he can pick up a fridge, a hot water system and then mechanically hoiking it into his tip-truck. Hes guided by concreter Geoff Percy, a 16-year Tumbulgum resident.

John Anderson, manager of the Gateway residential complex, with ruined belongings piled along the roadside waiting for collection. Photograph: Warren Murray for the Guardian

Good over-the-road mates, they have both been badly hit I lost my ute, lots of white goods, it was about seven feet deep through here on Friday but have turned away from their own troubles to help others. Nah, well be right, says Percy. The tip-truck went under but once the water receded Ben just changed all the oils and got it going. Well do this load and then head further up the street.

The words and phrases that come out at these times like resilience and community spirit can sound like cliches until you walk into the sort of situation that gives rise to them.

Two ancient pinball machines sit outside a neighbours place waiting for disposal. In their heyday, Duotron and Firepower cost you 20 cents a go. The owner bustles back and forth clearing up, not wanting to be photographed. Hes had enough, says Percy. Here for 18 years. Hes leaving. Had enough of the floods.

Three quarters of an hour after I arrived, the grim task down by the riverside is more or less done. The bodies have been removed and a crane waits to fish out the still-sunken family car. For a while this site has been the focus of the east coast flood story. Now the cameras will swing north to Rockhampton, where the Fitzroy river is approaching its flood peak.

Everyone in Tumbulgum has been at it for days cleaning up. But it looks like they have only just started. It smells like a muddy cattleyard from my country boyhood. Leaving town theres a hedgerow of household debris tangled in trees along the riverbank.

On the road towards Murwillumbah, through Condong, the same scene repeats itself over and over. Flood-ravaged sugarcane paddocks, pile after roadside pile of everything from barbecues to microwaves to baby strollers to chests of drawers and other buggered stuff. It is like an endless waterlogged forlorn jumble sale. Where will the council ever bury it all?

The makeshift sign in bedraggled Condong is a bit more firm than the one in Tumbulgum. No tourists please. Help welcome. Understandable in the circumstances.

Geoff Percy at work cleaning up in Tumbulgum, with his mate Ben May working the loader. Photograph: Warren Murray for the Guardian

Above the floodline

A floodline can be a thin topographical boundary between chaos and business as usual. This is brought home when I pull into Murwillumbah. Nearest the river there are familiar scenes of mopping up. Competition for parking spaces pushes me further up the main street than I would have otherwise gone, until I find a spot in front of the old-fashioned Austral Cafe (Established 1919).

Inside, not so far above that fateful floodline, I get to enjoy a midday breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast varnished with butter, all in perfectly dry surroundings. The walls are fittingly decorated with historical pictures of the districts past floods and fires, putting the current events in context.

Theres friendly chatter and laughter amid the tinkle of cutlery on crockery in the Austral. But snatches of the days inevitable conversations reach me as well. They found some of his gear on South Stradbroke Island It went floating past the boat ramp He slept through it, which is probably for the best Thats the hardest part. I mean were lucky, but

I think about the people in Tumbulgum making the most of their sausages on bread and whatever else neighbours have chucked together, volunteers have brought, or providence has left unspoiled. I hope they can dine somewhere like this when its all over.

The scenic route back from Murwillumbah to the Gold Coast is over the Queensland road that crosses the mountains via Tomewin to the Currumbin Valley. The road is damaged and open to local traffic only, but when a Falcon station wagon hoons impatiently past me and around the road closed sign, I decide to chance it. I have taken the route plenty of times on my motorbike, I know it well, Im in an all-wheel drive, it cant be too bad. And a trek back to the motorway through that landscape of muddied piles of ex-goods and former chattels doesnt appeal.

Its a mistake. The weather that caused all the devastation down below has left fallen trees, debris and landslips littering the road up here. Council crews are doing what they can to clear the way through, but like everywhere in these parts they are mere days into what looks like weeks or months of work.

At one blockage I wait behind a campervan for a bit, but then people start getting out of their cars, so I pull a U-turn. On the way down theres a Toyota 4WD lying on its roof at the bottom of an embankment. The Stop/Go man with one of the road gangs says things are better on the Numbinbah Valley Road, another of my favourite motorbike routes back to the Gold Coast. There are bad patches, he reckons, but you can get through.

And the road is indeed passable, but only just. It is still partly blocked or extremely damaged in sections. I find myself having to steer around tonnes of earth that a saturated hillside has disgorged into my path, or skirt patches where chunks of bitumen have been torn out by whooshing waters, or dodge areas where the road verges have collapsed away, leaving gashes that could swallow the car. On this familiar route it would be easy to lapse into an accustomed pace and come to grief. I remind myself to take it easy.

Theres a rural version of the recovery effort that is happening back in the Tweed Valley. Unsalvageable belongings being put out for collection, busted fences being put right. In one spot a little Suzuki ute is being used to pay out a coil of barbed wire along a boundary. Flooding has wrecked the road in areas where you wouldnt even have noticed a waterway before. Trees lie flattened in creek beds.

Not far short of Numinbah village theres been a huge cascade of boulders that looks like it should have swept the whole road away. Its down to one lane, marked by temporary guide posts. From the ridge above, the little waterfall that no doubt swelled to a roar and caused all this damage has shrunk back down to an innocuous trickle over the rocks.

Two pinball machines that finally met their match when the swollen Tweed river flooded into Tumbulgum. Photograph: Warren Murray for the Guardian

Things arent fantastic further west in the Scenic Rim country either. Beaudeserts state MP, Jon Krause, has been on ABC 612 radio reminding us that rural communities are likewise dealing with the effects of this natural disaster. Crops have been lost and ruined paddocks will take a lot of work to rehabilitate before they can be planted again.

Pretty soon Im back in suburban Nerang and not far from home. Theres the odd tree lying on the ground here and there, whipped down in the high winds of the previous days, roots having given up their grip on the soaked ground. Wed already had more than a week of downpours when the remnants of Debbie arrived and upped the tempo.

In the park across the road from my house a council crew is mucking out the kids sandpit. But thats about as devastated as it gets round here. The park is part of the local stormwater drainage system, and when the rain arrives the boogie boards come out.

Last year we put on a new roof on our late 70s, early 80s brick-veneer bungalow, and consequently had to follow the 21st-century regulations. That meant threading steel cyclone rods down through the walls, tying the roof to the concrete slab foundation.

Many of the houses around us in this brick-and-tile suburb are of a similar era, but still have their original roofs. Which means they dont have those rods. This time around the winds were less than cyclonic. If more of north Queenslands most extreme weather comes south in future years as feared, we may see those structures tested. To the north, the south and the west of us, there are thousands of people dealing with such consequences in the here and now.

Read more: http://bit.ly/2oBtEju

from After the flood: ‘No tourists please. Help welcome’

[mrcoreymonroe]

Flying Through The Picture-Perfect Southwest

Lift off from Runway 25 at Four Corners Regional Airport in Farmington, New Mexico, turn slightly west to point the spinner at Shiprock, and you’re on track for some of the most remarkable views in America.

If you’re a fan of old John Wayne westerns, you will already have seen the dramatic rock formations of Monument Valley on the big screen many times. Take away the screen altogether and translate those geologic images to reality, however, and you’ll gain a whole new perspective on what many pilots regard as the most spectacular terrain in the Mountain West.

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Columbia Aircraft had hired me to fly one of the longest and most challenging air-to-air photo formation missions I could ever imagine. Back in 2005, Columbia hoped to compile a library of dramatic inflight images of its then-new Columbia 300, and my job was to put the Columbia 300 wherever the photographer needed it to be to secure the best shots of the airplane with the Southwest U.S. in the background. Our trip turned out to be a 1,800 nm, 20-flight-hour marathon.

The Cessna was flown by the pre-eminent lead pilot above the planet, the now-late John Kounis. At the time, John was editor of Pilot Getaways Magazine, and we’d worked together on a dozen or so photo missions.

The photographer was John’s brother, George, one of the acknowledged experts on air-to-air photography. George was shooting with the door removed, because, as he put it, “There wasn’t much sense in using a pair of $3,000 cameras and lenses to shoot through a $50 piece of Plexiglas.”

Columbia Aircraft was not pinching pennies on this mission. It’d hired a beautiful Hollywood model to ride right seat and smile for the camera while I tried to hide behind the windshield frame.

Unfortunately, no one bothered to ask her if she knew anything about general aviation airplanes. Even worse, her introduction to the western sky would be flying on the wing of another airplane on a circuitous, three-day mission over much of California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.

Sure enough, she was understandably apprehensive about flying in “one of those little airplanes” above some of the roughest mountain terrain in North America. We flew at 110 knots, often 500 feet off the ground, but looking for smooth air wherever we could find it. Apparently, our model needed the work, so she shrugged, smiled bravely and did her job. This was obviously not her first rodeo.

As we droned around the Southwest trying to find the perfect sun line, smooth skies and photogenic terrain below, she gradually relaxed and began to enjoy the experience. She commented that she’d done many yacht and sailboat advertising shoots when she was living in South Florida, and this job at least allowed her to wear something more comfortable than a bikini.

We’d departed Long Beach, California, two days before, flown out to Catalina, circled the “Island of Romance” and made several approaches to the famous “Airport In The Sky,” then routed back across the Los Angeles Basin to the dramatic Owens Valley.

Our two-plane flight followed the Owens north past the tall, knife-edge terrain of the Sierra Nevada, climbing all the while to reach the snow level. I trailed John’s Cessna below the summit of Mt. Whitney and on to Mono Lake and Tahoe.

During the flight north, the roomy Columbia 300 trucked along as if unconcerned with the semi-vertical rock faces below. Never mind what my model passenger thought about the sharp peaks and broken, jagged rock fields, the airplane was easy to hold in formation, despite the fact that it used a left-side stick for roll and pitch control.

Side sticks seem to be favored more and more these days. The Columbia’s is light and responsive, though it ignores the fact that 90 percent of the pilot population is right-handed.

That means it’s almost impossible to trade off control from left hand to right hand. That’s one reason the military continues to equip its aircraft with either a center stick, yoke or a right-side stick. It would be interesting to hear a fighter pilot’s take on a left side stick. Of course, you could always solve the problem by moving to the right seat, though the instrument presentation would remain left-based.

Despite that one little glitch, the Columbia is/was still a nice-flying airplane.

Throughout it all, the big Continental IO-550 out front seemed totally oblivious to the dynamic earth below and ran like an aviation version of a Turbo Porsche with a continuous variable transmission. The engine on this demonstrator showed 30 hours on the meter, so it was well past the infant mortality stage, one less thing to worry about.

As many readers may know, the Columbia was a slick, composite design, conceived by aeronautical designer Lance Neibauer initially as a homebuilt, called the Lancair ES, and later redesigned and certified as a production aircraft. The Columbia 300, later to be renamed the Corvalis and then TTx under the Cessna banner, was strikingly similar to the Cirrus SR22 in design and performance. In fact, it was so similar in appearance, it was often mistaken for a Cirrus on our fuel stops. The airplane was fast and comfortable, and I was happy to have the three-day opportunity to fly the new model over much of the Southwest.

We circumnavigated the bottomless blue of Lake Tahoe and continued west toward the San Francisco Bay area. Our backdrop of choice was the Golden Gate Bridge, one of the Bay’s most iconic, scenic landmarks from above or from sea level.

Circling the Golden Gate, I was reminded of another photo shoot I flew in early October 2001. I’d flown a new Piper Saratoga HP on a much shorter air-to-air mission above the Golden Gate, this time for Plane & Pilot. The bridge director spotted us overhead, called the FAA and complained that two “suspicious” airplanes were circling his bridge.

The director’s paranoia was understandable considering what had just happened three weeks before in New York City, but his concern was misplaced. Our lead pilot on that shoot was talking to Bay Approach throughout our photo flight, though Bay had advised him the airspace above the bridge was not restricted at our altitude.

We made several circles near the bridge, arced out to Alcatraz and shot the spectacular San Francisco skyline in the background, then turned back out over the Pacific and headed to our perch at the Piper dealership in Palo Alto.

In a classic demonstration of government left hand/right hand confusion, the FAA called the Air Force, and they scrambled two F-16s to intercept us. Apparently, they arrived about 15 minutes later, after we were long gone. No one bothered to call Bay Approach and ask if they knew anything about two airplanes circling the bridge.

My photographer, Jim Lawrence, and I landed back at Palo Alto, transferred to my Mooney, and flew home to Long Beach. The following morning, I received a call from the FBI, which’d already sorted out the details and determined that we hadn’t done anything wrong.

Taking pity on me for what I might be thinking, the congenial agent opened the conversation with, “Mr. Cox, this is agent James Henderson with the FBI (gulp!), and no, you’re not in trouble.”

A predictably well-dressed woman agent came by the house two days later, and took my statement, reiterating that we’d done nothing wrong but that the Bureau had to investigate so they could close the file. As she was leaving, she asked if I’d seen the video. Apparently, a San Francisco TV station had been shooting a story at Fisherman’s Wharf, near the base of the bridge, and had captured us circling overhead. I never saw the video, but I still wonder if somewhere back in Washington, D.C., there’s a file stored with my name on it.

Fast forward to 2005. We flew down the Pacific coast to Monterey and Big Sur and, finally, hopped back across the Sierra Nevada to Las Vegas for the first night.

The next morning, we were up well before the sun broke the horizon for a short run down the Las Vegas Strip to get photos of glitzy Vegas with the sun in the background and the Columbia out front. Photo ship pilot John Kounis had been up late coordinating our plan to depart very early and fly a semi-night formation down the Strip, then make a right turn across Sunrise Mountain and depart the area over Lake Mead.

We drifted east along the north side of the Grand Canyon, crossed over to the south side, then made a colorful levitation above Arizona’s Painted Desert. Again, John Kounis kept us out of trouble with the feds. We continued into Santa Fe for fuel and a late lunch, then departed northwest to Taos and finally Farmington, New Mexico, for the second round.

On the final day of the Columbia shoot, we leaped out of Farmington and headed back to Long Beach by a zigzag route across Monument Valley and over the domed edifice of Navajo Mountain and the other-worldly movie location Lake Powell, made famous in the Charlton Heston sci-fi hit “Planet of the Apes.”

From there, it was back across the Grand Canyon, south to Arizona’s Meteor Crater and Sedona, home of the most dramatic late-afternoon red cliffs you’ve ever seen.

My passenger had a few minor bouts of queasy stomach on the first day, but after that, she settled down and began to actually enjoy what we were doing. Like most people, she’d only witnessed the Earth from 35,000 feet or higher; she’d never had the opportunity to see the views we take for granted in the bottom 10,000 feet of sky. From that low station or less, she was entranced by the mystical Lake Powell and the overwhelming spectacle of the Grand Canyon.

Photographer George Kounis got something like 4,000 photos of the Columbia 300 traversing some of the most spectacular mountain and desert terrain in the West. He showed our model some of the photo outtakes over Catalina, Lake Tahoe and Sedona’s Oak Creek Canyon, and she was dutifully impressed.

We were, too, but most importantly, so was Columbia. For me, it was some of the most challenging formation flying I’d done, operating a relatively new breed of aircraft in an unusual mode of flight.

Little did I know that a few months later, the successful photo mission would lead to a chance to ferry another new Columbia from Bend, Oregon, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

But that’s another story.

Check out more Cross-Country Log flying stories from ferry pilot and Senior Editor Bill Cox.

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