Cranes

Every year the Sandhill cranes come to Nebraska to eat as they make their way north. I saw some.

Chickens

Not having had an sufficiently bloggable experiences in Nebraska as of yet, here are some chickens. 

First days/last days

I never published, or only briefly published, my first blog post about Guam.

For those who don't follow the link, the post was about a weekend trip to Jeff's Pirates Cove, a southern bar/restaurant that features heavily in pirate iconography (strangely) and touristy knicknacks, at which my new reporter colleagues and a handful of off-islanders got drunk and merrily detailed Guam's many political and social foibles.

I wrote the piece, but rightly decided that chronicling the first bits of Guam's dirty laundry thrown my way for public consumption would likely not go over too well with my new employers.

Two and a half years later, and no longer in fear of being fired for lack of objectivity, or just generally talking shit about Guam -- although that was about half of our coverage on any given day -- I am revisiting the post.

What's interesting is how so many of my first impressions (or my first impressions based on the drunken cynical bluster of my colleagues) still hold relatively true.

But then, so much of that stuff I first heard came with the territory of reporting, and reporting on the stuff we report on, because that's what we report on.

My job was to see in finer and finer detail all the dysfunctional crap so broadly painted for me during my first few days on the island.

I ingested a whole bunch of it, and spewed it out. And I don't really remember much of it. And am not sure it's really worth remembering. It's all very fuzzy.

But there are other things about Guam that are much less fuzzy: walking my dogs on beaches, swimming at night, a few startling nights of bright stars, New Years' lanterns, sunset, lots of sunset, driving around the island in my beat-up car, or a beaten-up-more truck to go to different beaches. Jungle. Rain. Lots of rain.


On my last day on Guam, I wandered around Tumon Bay by myself, having nowhere to go, nothing to do, and looked at the blue water.

I felt like a tourist, and sort of was a tourist, for a day.

And all that stuff I had learned and carried around and ingested and fretted over was gone.

There was just blue.

similar thoughts about Saipan

I went to Saipan, like, a month and a half ago, but didn't bother posting any photos. I meant to, but the whole moving across the Pacific got in the way.

Most of what I saw were places off which people jumped/committed horrible suicide. There were also some mind-bogglingly tacky (even for Guam) tourist shops, and birds/beaches/jungle.

Here are some photos:

The first notable site we visited was "Banzai Cliff." Cheerily named because a bunch of Japanese families living on Saipan threw themselves (and their children) off the cliffs during World War II, when the American invasion was imminent. This was by far the most crowded of the sites we saw in our two-day Micronesian jaunt. Above: Japanese tourists take photos at sunset.

More Banzai Cliff. There were a lot of nice Buddha statues. This place also had that sort of haunted  feeling. Apparently there are white birds that roost on the cliffs, allegedly (love that word) carrying the souls of the dead.

More Buddha.

Having lived on Guam for so long, where trash is left in all sorts of inappropriate spots, I was at first  annoyed to see all the open bottles of water. And then I realized, oh wait, offerings. Sorry guys.

A view from Banzai Cliff. It should be noted that all that cliff stuff  is made of coral, sharp razor coral.

Which brings me to Suicide Cliff. Some ways up from Banzai Cliff is the aptly named Suicide Cliff. Japanese soldiers jumped off the cliff, otherwise did away with themselves at this spot as the U.S. forces pushed them farther and farther up this hill as they invaded.

Also, a very long way down.

Buddha and sunlight on Suicide Cliff.

This is just this really cool place called "the Grotto" where a bunch of rushing waves hit the rocks in this big cave, and then create a somewhat calm pool at the mouth of the cave.

Bird Island Sanctuary. All the birds died sometime after the war, when the brown tree snake at them all. Apparently they can't swim. And thus, there are still birds in this one place.

From above.

Sunset. The end.

the bomb holes

I went to Tinian to see the atomic bomb holes.

I rationalized going to the island to attend the (8th?) annual boonie pepper festival, which turned out, as I suspected, to be a large(ish) village barbecue, complete with coconut crab races and slippery pigs.

Tinian also hosts some other stuff -- big latte stones, more impressive and certainly more precise, than any I have seen on Guam.

There's a Chinese money-laundering casino, providing the best luxury a 1980s Las Vegas hotel room can offer.

But while being picked up at the airport by a limousine, stocked with the latest in VHS technology, and ferried to your entirely pink-striped room, complete with a pair Lucy-and-Desi appropriate (also pink) twin beds, has a kind of novel appeal, really, the bomb holes are why I came, and probably why most come to the island.

Once a Japanese sugar plantation, and then the center of American bombing operations in the Pacific, the island is green and mostly empty.

San Jose, the bustling urban center, is made up of a few neighborhoods of well-tended flat concrete houses, a convenience store that serves as the island's Wal-Mart, and other things I am sure I missed.

There's a nice beach, an abandoned and deteriorating pier, and some lovely walkways through coconut trees.

Outside the village, signs of domestic life quickly give way to what feels like a large field -- essentially the rest of the island.

Heading north, concrete roads constructed in straight lines become gravel roads constructed in straight lines, the north- and south-bound lanes separated by a wide grass median.

Along the way there are a few notable sites here and there, a Japanese shrine circled by roadway, some memorials to Korean workers enslaved during the war, a rocky ocean geyser.

But the real attraction is what's not there -- an expansive air field long ago carved out, now partly swallowed up by jungle and overgrowth.

Runways have been reduced to pot-holed gravel, and little vines with purple flowers encroach like tarantula legs from the corners of the greenery.

Real spiders, and proliferate wasps nests, have taken over whatever remains of bomb shelters and the buildings that housed Japanese military operations, located in what now look like concrete parking lots.

Maybe it's just that abandoned places are usually abandoned for a reason -- containing pasts better left undisturbed.

And I am, of course, biased. But clusters of large spiders in corners and hallways, and walls matted with brown wasps' mounds seem to signal a place haunted by the deeply wrong -- bellwethers marking things long askew.

Pilgrimages to World War II memorial sites -- or any war memorial sites, but particularly those from the "good war" -- can veer into the "Saving Private Ryan" territory pretty quickly.

Not that it wasn't all tragic, but mindless sap about sacrifice and all that does irk me.

There are World War II sites all over Guam, landing beaches, artillery guns and tanks rotting in the jungle, pill boxes turned into trash cans. But familiarity from tourist buses and dog walks has sapped most of the power from the sites, beyond the satisfied knowledge that Things Happened Here.

This place, however, did not ring of sacrifice or tourist buses.

I am sure Japanese tourists unload every now and then to see the markers of the weapons that ended the war.

But there were few, in fact, none others when we arrived at the site of the two glass caskets enshrining the holes that once held the atomic bombs.

Rationally, I know that we bring to places our own set of notions. We expect and we find. Not always what we expect, but we bring something to the equation that changes what we find.

This place was not like that.

I could have arrived giddy, or bemused or reverent -- I don't think it would have mattered.

Two holes, carved into the ground, with ladders climbed by real people, a plaque or two, some photos, the leftover scars of mechanical uplift -- that's all there was.

And yet, the place throbbed, sadly, deeply.

A weekend in Tinian (in photos)

Tinian from above (in a really small plane full of terrifyingly giddy tourists).

Seriously, you thought I was kidding about the whole 
Lucy and Desi thing.

Pretty beaches!

Kids spent most of the afternoon at the Boonie Pepper festival hanging outside this pen, which housed a soon-to-be unfortunately greased up piglet, and some chickens, for the festival's greased pig/chicken catching contest.

Latte stones.

Scenic blowhole thing.

Ominous wasp decoration at the former Japanese Air Operations
 Building.