God bless you, DRob

Sometimes the task of updating my blog towers over me like that of a rental car I've not figured out how to book yet, or the ordeal of unpacking and packing my stuff that I'm yet to tackle since my return to Santa Cruz. You might think this is a good thing - an indicator of how much there is to say; of how many crazy fun experiences I'm having. On the other hand, it could simply be a result of the fact that I don't really feel I have any great insights to share - or at least that my thoughts are too jumbled up to digest them sufficiently to result in any amusing anecdotes or profound reflections. What's most likely to result is either an incoherent stream of consciousness - which might help me to process my experiences but is largely meaningless to anybody else, even my own parents (who probably comprise about 50% of my viewing figures) - or alternatively it will end up as one of those lists of "things I have done recently", the type that Miss Foley used to complain about every week of class 13 when it came to writing our journal.

And I wouldn't like to upset either my mental “Miss Foley” or my literal mother, which makes updating this thing seem (probably unnecessarily) stressful. Ah, woe is me!!! Haha.

Life is good though. I mean, when I think about it, even though I'm tired, it's really very good.

It was strange leaving Catalina: our last breakfast together; digging up my last root; saying goodbye to the small Conservancy community at the Tuesday pot luck (where a beautiful man named Marco, Catalina's school music teacher, persuaded me to play a couple of songs pretty badly on Charlie's guitar). It'll probably feel even stranger tomorrow morning when Amelia and Liz head back to Two Harbors with the new crew and I'm not with them. It had really become a pretty cosy little life for the six of us. We'd become fluent at the “kitchen dance” necessary for all making our breakfast in such a small space every morning. We'd even decorated the walls of the house with our own artwork! And I feel sad that I won't be there ever again. But then I only have to recall that familiar aniseed scent of fennel to remember I'm pretty happy to be moving on as well.

And moving on is always better when it involves a brilliant three-day road trip through some of the most beautiful coastline in the country in a fancy big car. After a six-hour drive to escape Los Angeles and get onto the famous “highway one”, we eventually arrived at Kirk Creek campground, at the southernmost edge of Big Sur. Sitting around the barbecue, drinking a couple of beers in the starlight, the sound of the Pacific waves crashing on the rocks below the camp site, I felt like this might just be the coolest part of my American experience so far.

That night I decided to sleep under the stars. I was slightly unsure about not putting a tent up because I was concerned about the affect of the damp air on the warmth of my down sleeping bag. In fact, it turned out the raccoons that scour the campground for scraps of food were more of a problem. And they're nothing like as cute as in that cartoon that used to be on Live and Kicking on Saturday mornings. As I was just starting to drift off to sleep I was rudely awakened by a raccoon tapping me on the leg to see if I was really asleep. I went to the car to find the tent.

The next day we hit the road again early, taking in the incredible rugged coastline, frequently stopping the car to get a bit closer to the noisy, angry waves that pound the rocks. At one point we found ourselves exploring the beautiful chapel of a small Benedictine monastery where my Jewish friends asked lots of questions that I realised I probably should know the answer to.

That night we cooked steak over the campfire and had another beautiful night, without any raccoons or damp to worry about and just a sky full of shooting stars above our big, open, almost-deserted campground.

Friday we hit the bay town of Monterey where we blew a lot of money on seeing (and not seeing) sea-life. The famous Monterey Aquarium did have some pretty cool sea otters, and an exhibit that makes you wonder how you can have lived on the planet for 25 years without anybody telling you that they make seahorses that grow in the shape of seaweed. The “egg yolk” jellyfish and the huge tuna that randomly shows off its 50kph speeds to the visitors were other highlights.

After exhausting the aquarium for fun we headed to the pier for a three-hour, thirty dollar whale-watching trip during which we saw exactly zero whales, zero dolphins, three seals, and one ten-year-old English girl vomit over the side of the boat.

So we returned to Santa Cruz slightly dejected at our lack of photos of blue whales, but very happy to have been privileged enough to see some other pretty cool bits of nature's stuff. I found that in the house we can now steal wi-fi from some guy named “DRob”, that I've been promoted and now sleep on a bottom bunk (hooray!). Today I went to visit some giant Redwoods at Henry Cowell State Park, which were pretty cool, and even stood right inside a huge hollowed-out-but-still-living-how-hardcore-is-that tree.

Tuesday I'll leave for my final two weeks with ACE, in Lake Tahoe. Rumour has it that the work there sucks even more than my other two projects, but based on previous experience I guess I'll probably manage to have some fun anyway.

Ready to leave the island I think...

I'm sure it would seem perverse to those of you suffering that familiar descent into gloomy English winter that I could be lying here in the hot sunshine on the lawn outside my fancy condo on a desert island, thinking that I can't wait to get out of here.

Perhaps it's just one of those days. We were supposed to be off this project by now, but due to an administrative mix-up we're here for another week. And not that the prospect of another 40 hours of fennel killing time doesn't fill me with delight, but I think we're all just ready for the next thing now.

But maybe I should focus on my achievements instead of my frustrations.

For example, our weekend in Los Angeles. I'm incredibly proud that I managed to negotiate LA traffic in our rental car without crashing even once (as long as you don't count a slight non-incident downtown -I never did understand the logic of trees in car parks). I learned that you probably shouldn't try and drive in a big city without a road map of some sort. I managed to persuade my friends to come with me for a drink in the bar where Mulder first met Kurtzweil in the first Movie. We stayed at a hostel in Venice Beach with all the skaters and weirdos, just like in Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2. I witnessed my first real live bar fight, in a trendy bar in Orange County, where we watched a girl band play embarrassingly bad music.

And as far as my fennel-killing career is concerned, I have survived a temperature-rise into the high 80s over the past couple of days without *too much* complaint (in my opinion anyway). I am growing more tolerant of the swimming pool-flavoured water that comes out of our taps, and more adept at avoiding cactus spines. I have seen a couple of endemic island foxes on the roadside, and eaten lots of fresh venison steak and burgers hunted by our friend Charlie.

Meanwhile, the world outside goes on. Siblings celebrate birthdays. Friends have babies. I find myself apparently the only person in a thousand-mile radius who's ever even heard of the pop star and Brewin family idol whose sudden and shocking death brings me to tears. I am comfortable enough here with these people, in this place, doing this work, but it's not home. To borrow a clumsy-sounding Timor phrase (it probably sounds better in Hebrew), "Yes, I am happy, but I don't feel myself complete". I guess I'm looking forward to looking back on this experience from the place that just fits me better.

Soldiers, pirates and fennel killing

Well, we've finally made it.

I've just finished my surprisingly good cowboy coffee (which I was forced to learn to make after I broke the coffee jug the other day) on the morning of the first of five glorious days off, for which we have worked moderately hard for the past couple of weeks, putting in ten-hour days (or at least that's what the timesheet's going to say), slowly cleansing the island of its dreaded aniseed-scented nemesis one plant at a time.

On the weekend before last's camping trip at Shark harbour - which I am assuming is named after the fin-shaped rock formations and not the local sea life - I had a somewhat humbling encounter with a young Hawaiian named George.

As happens often on this small friendly island, he and his girlfriend Rhi asked Liz and I what it is we do here on Catalina. I enjoy saying "we work for the Conservancy" - it sounds important, and gets us perks like being able to camp and hike wherever we want without a permit, or ride the once-a-day Safari bus to Avalon for free. After describing with a drama similar to that of my last blog post (see below) the near-100 degree heat of our then eight-hour work days, and the physical demands of killing fennel, and just how hard our job is, I politely returned the question: what do you do?

It turns out George had just come back from serving in Iraq. In a very matter-of-fact manner he described working in the 140-degree heat in the desert. When Liz asked what the food was like, and he said that some days they had enough to eat, other times they would go whole days without eating anything at all. He looked out to the ocean, smiled, and noted how nice it was to be back for the time being at least, musing that he would probably be sent out to Afghanistan sometime soon.

Liz engaged him with questions about how the soldiers were received by local Iraqis, and what he thinks about the conflict, and that kind of thing. I just kept quiet and decided I should probably think about George before I started complaining over the coming weeks. I don't think I'd make a very good soldier.

That night I slept ridiculously well in the sand under the stars, warmed by the campfire and lulled by the sound of the waves breaking a few yards away. Only the flies that swarmed over our sleeping bags first thing, with no sense of occasion, failed to recognise just how cool the whole thing was.

The second day of our weekend was pretty badass too. (By the way, "badass" is my new favourite American adjective. You should try it in a sentence, it feels pretty badass to say it.) We got to sample the bright lights of the island's only city, Avalon, where there are all sorts of futuristic things like paved roads and Von's grocery store. We got pizza at this crazy old-movie-themed diner where they have tiny jukeboxes on the tables (a quarter for two songs) and really fascinating magazine articles from the 60s on the walls of the toilets which make people take ages having a wee, we did our food shopping, and then drove the 20-mile, hour and a half drive back to Two Harbors, where Amelia's Dad - possibly one of the coolest Dads ever - who was visiting with a friend on a fishing trip for the weekend took us out on his boat, and I got a seriously badass photo of me diving into the ocean for my Facebook profile picture:

Having mentally prepared myself for more stupidly hot days, I was pleasantly surprised on the Monday that the Santa Ana winds which apparently were responsible for the ridiculous temperatures of the first week's work had dropped, and we found ourselves working in much more bearable conditions. That evening, however, we were landed with the dismal news that we were to change our work patterns: instead of working five eight-our days per week, we were going to be working seven ten-hour days out of the next eight, in order to allow our supervisors the time off to go to a conference on invasive plants (which I imagine is absolutely fascinating, although not in the way that the conference organisers probably think). Don't get me wrong, five days off sounds great, but we had been enjoying so much our afternoons during the week, and I really didn't like the idea of just enduring ridiculously long work days in order to get to that time off.

In fact it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Our breaks became somewhat elongated in order to allow for some quick dips in the ocean, or some quality sunbathing minutes, and we made it to our one-day weekend fairly painlessly. The most traumatic point was probably the day that we woke to find our burly tattooed neighbour Josh, crouching in anguish by his best friend, a huge, soft sixteen-year-old dog who that morning was unable to stand. "I think Bodie's dying," he said sadly. Just before we left for work we watched him carry the helpless dog to his pick-up truck, and then later, as we worked by the roadside, saw him drive past, a shroud covering the body that laid in the bed of the truck.

Our second most traumatic time occurred on the evening before our Saturday off, for last weekend our tiny town of Two Harbors faced an invasion. Seemingly thousands of pirates arrived on our shores, camped out in the fields or slept in their boats, or possibly just under a bush outside the general store, all with bandanas or eye patches, or hooks for hands, or dragging rats on leads. "Buccaneer Day" was quite an experience... and not my kind of experience. At first dressing up like a pirate seemed like a fun idea, and we bought a bottle of rum for the occasion and dressed Timor in a bikini (although I never really understood the pirate link there).

The party, crammed into Two Harbors' only bar, was pretty grotesque. With hindsight I suppose I shouldn't have been too surprised: pirates are after all the original "dirty old man". But after being assaulted one too many times by rich middle-aged Californians acting like teenagers on the dance floor I decided to call it a night and head home. Unfortunately the pirates stayed for about three days, and so on Saturday Timor, Asaf and I decided to get the hell out of Two Harbors.

Our five-mile costal hike to watch the sun set over the ocean was well worth it, and walking back in the moonlight was pretty spectacular. Pictures really don't do it justice - but what the hell:

After that it was back to work for just three days, and now it's time to decide what we want to do with our five days. Thankfully the Conservancy has given me permission to drive the Jeep (which makes me feel pretty badass too), so at least we're not totally stranded here in Two Harbors. I've called a meeting at noon so we can figure it all out. Watch this space!