Mitt liv som Tobin

Who knew, there is a piece of France nestled amongst the Canadian maritime provinces?

The American view of Europe has mainly to do with history and human culture. Old churches, kings and wars, Napoleon and Hitler, the Reinheitsgebot. How about some geography instead? Let us begin by staring at this map of the watersheds of Europe, in which regions are identified by the rivers that carry their rainfall to the sea.

(To pre-empt possible confusion, yes, it's labeled in German: Donau = Danube, etc.)

Looking west from Sequoia national park, over the basin of California's central valley, filled with tule fog.

I particularly enjoyed the fluvial wanderings of the Mississippi. It looks like a dragon!

http://pruned.blogspot.com/, prunedrss

Mt. Whitney (to the right). Feb 19, 2006.

The ponds at Green Lakes State Park are curiously green. Wikipedia tells me that they are interesting for being "meromictic," meaning that different layers of water in the lake never mix. The ponds are pretty super deep, nearly 200 feet, or again so says Wikipedia. The most spectacular thing, though, is these freshwater reefs. Pictured here is "Deadman's Point," so named, I'm told, because somebody drowned when they swam under and got stuck under the reef. Now they're pretty serious about you not swimming there—signs threaten two weeks in jail. As if in compensation, topless bathing is permitted at the nearby beach.

I just uploaded my pictures from Sinai (Egypt) to Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobin/tags/dahab/

Climbing Mt. Sinai was really a peak experience of my life (no pun intended). It was a spur-of-the-moment deal. I was staying at the travelers' paradise that is Dahab, on the coast of Gulf of Aqaba, Sinai, and saw that the camp where I was staying offered a nocturnal trip up the mountain for a few dollars... so I put on my long corrdorroy trousers, the same ones that would, in a spectacular pants emergency, burst apart at all possible seams as I stepped off the bus in Latvia a year later, grabbed my water bottle, and off we went.

All I had on this escapade across Arabia was either on my person or in my little Jansport school backpack. Two t-shirts that I'd picked up on the streets of Rehovot, boots with worn-through soles bought in Sweden, a pair of trousers and a pair of shorts, and a "fleece" pullover, and about $250 in Israeli Shekels. Traveling so light is a sense of freedom.

At dusk the guy from the camp dropped us off at St. Catherines, at the base of Mt. Sinai, gestured off into the distance as the way to the mountain, and said he'd be back to pick us up in the morning. So off we went.

We were in the middle of the desert in the middle of August and with the night, with no city lights for hundreds of miles, it quickly became very, very dark. I hiked mainly alone, by the starlight, generally stumbling in the right direction on what was basically a one-lane dirt road up the mountain, sensing my way up the trail blindly, sensing the the sillhouettes of the huge rock formations against the starry sky, of hikers up ahead. At one point a camel sneezed, and only then did I sense the presense of a group of them looming in space just beside me--I could reach out and touch them. So here we are, ships passing in the night in the middle of the desert in the middle of August.

And then something amazing began to happen. It was the middle of August, we were in the middle of the desert. This is when the Earth hurtles through the trail of some deceased comet... Flying through all these little bits of cometdust, we here on Earth experience the Perseid meteor shower, and there is probably no better place to see them than on a mountain in the middle of the desert. So here I was, stumbling up the mountain, the sky swimming in meteors, bursting with stars, passing the occassional sleeping camel or stoic Bedouin.

I turned a corner near the top of the mountain and was suddenly able to look down over the trail I had traverssed, and I was surprised to see it glimmering in light, as if a trail of candles traced back over the last few miles. I'd thought there were only ten or a dozen of us climbing the mountain that night, but then I saw that there were hundreds behind us, their flashlights lighting the trail and dancing as they walked, as they trudged up the mountain in silence.

It was very cold on the mountain top, and we strangers huddled together against each other in crevices of the rock, sleeping by way of each others' warmth, and awaited the dawn.


View from Mt. Sinai at dawn