Tag: Challenge

I’ve been reading a lot

And at times wish I hadn’t.

Having been a journalist in a previous lifetime, and one that always believed that the truth mattered, it didn’t take long to realise that journalists should never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Newspapers, and all other forms of media, will only write what they believe will sell, or what they think the public wants to read. The truth, sadly, is not the first thing on the readers mind, only that someone is to blame for something they have no control over, and it doesn’t matter who.

And the more outlandish the situation, the more the public will buy into it.

This, I guess, is why we like reading about celebrities and royalty, not for the good they might do, but the fact they stumble and make mistakes, and that somehow makes us feel better about ourselves.

Similarly, if the media can beat up a subject, like the corona-virus, and make it worse that it is, then people will lap up the continuing saga, as it relates to them, and will take one of two stances, that they believe the horror of it, and do as they’re asked, or disbelieve it because nothing can be that bad, and ignore it and the consequences of disobedience. knowing the government will not press too hard against the non compliers simply because of domocracy issues it will stir up.

That is, then the media will get a hold of this angle and push it, and people will start to think disobedience is a good thing not a bad.

So, our problems of trying to get a fair and balanced look at what the coronavirus is all about is nigh on impossible. We are continuously bombarded with both right and wrong information, and the trouble is, both sides are very plausibly supported by facts.

And that’s the next problem we have in reporting. We can get facts to prove anything we want. It;s called the use and abuse of statistics, and was an interest part of the journalism degree I studied for. We were told all about statistics, good and bad, and using them to prove the veracity of our piece.

I remember writing a piece for the tutor extolling the virtues of a particular person who was probably the worst human since Vlad the Impaler, using only the facts that suited my narrative. I also remember the bollocking he gave me for doing so, but had to acknowledge that sometimes that would happen.

Integrity of reporting only went as far as the editor, and if the editor hated something, you had to hate it too. This is infamously covered in various texts where newspaper publishers pick sides, and can influence elections, and governments. It still happens.

So, the bottom line is, when I;m reading an article in the media, I always take it with a grain of salt, and do my own fact checking, remembering, of course, not just to fact check to prove the bias one way of the other, but the get a sense of balance.

You can see at the moment when elections don’t matter, no one is talking about what they’re going to do for us, no one is telling us what their policies are. It’s simply schoolyard tit for tat garbage speak. What happened to the town hall meeting, a long and winding speech encompassing what the government plans to do for its people now, and then genuinely answer questions?

Perhaps we should ban campaigning, and just get each party to write a book about what they intend to do, and keep them away from the papers, the TV, and any other form of media, in other words, don’t let them speak!

And don’t get me started about the drivel they speak in the parliament. Five year olds could do a better job.

OK, rant over.

The cinema of my dreams – It’s a treasure hunt – Episode 35

Here’s the thing…

Every time I close my eyes, I see something different.

I’d like to think the cinema of my dreams is playing a double feature but it’s a bit like a comedy cartoon night on Fox.

But these dreams are nothing to laugh about.

Once again there’s a new installment of an old feature, and we’re back on the treasure hunt.

 

It was an understatement to say I was dreading going to Boggs’ place.

In fact, in the hour it took to get through the morning chores I had time to consider how and why I was in this position.  Boggs was a friend.  We were friends at school and as best we could we had each other’s back when the bullies came out to play.

At times that didn’t amount to much because as everyone knows, bullies hunt in packs.  Six against two wasn’t much of an equation.  And it those days, the teachers spent more time hiding from the students than being in front of them.

It was simply a case of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

It didn’t feel like that, not for a very long time.

But, in the end, misfortune can make strange bedfellows, and in a town that depended on a single industry, it soon became apparent that there were more people against the Benderby’s and the Cossatino’s than for, and in small-town politics, that was more than an evening up.  Out of school and separated from their acolytes, both Alex and Vince found that whatever influence they had once, was now gone, and all that was left was a grunt, and we were basically left alone.

Boggs was the dreamer.

He had idolized his father and when he went missing it broke him.

This map thing was the first signs of Boggs finally coming back to life, but the problem was, it was all pinned on false hopes.  The Sherriff was right.  Boggs was in over his head, playing with the two most vicious families from around here, and it was bad enough that his father had fallen foul of them, the Sherriff was not about to see his son go the same way.  I was going to try and talk Boggs out of it.

Yet, on the other hand, it was people like us who needed a win, just to show there was still hope in this place.  With threats every day that the factory might have to close, there were dark clouds hanging over everyone’s head.

If the factory closed, there was going to be a very large hole in the local economy and a lot of people in financial trouble.  I’m not sure how finding the treasure might solve all of that, but I suspect Boggs’ had something up his sleeve.

I knocked on the door and his mother answered.  She looked harried.  She was a nurse and looked as though she just got home from the night shift at the hospital.  

“Boggs is in his room.”

“How are you this morning?”

“Tired.  And an afternoon shift, which I might not get to if I don’t get some sleep.  You know where he is.  Try not to make any noise.”

“Will do.”

I came in and closed the door, watching her dash off down the passage to the other end of the house.

She could not work endless double shifts for much longer, but like all of us, it was not out of desire but necessity.  She had implored Boggs to get a job and help, but he seemed oblivious to the problem.  I’d tried to speak to him, but he had that insufferable way of just not listening.

Boggs was in his room, sitting on the bed and staring at the ceiling.

I looed up too, but there was nothing there.

“Don’t tell me,” I said, “but you’ve suddenly discovered you’ve got X-Ray vision.”

“If only.  I could use it right now to find something that’s missing>”

“Your cell phone?”  Boggs was always misplacing something, of forgetting it.  I’d lost count how many times he’d misplaced his phone.

“No.  An underground river.”

OK.  That was out of left field.  I had no idea any rivers were missing, or, in fact, they could actually go missing.

Apparently, they could.

“There’s two,” he said.  300 years ago five or take this part of the coastline had several rivers that ran down from the mountain range.  What we now call the hills on the edge of the coastal plain.  There was also a lake, not very large, but it used to have several streams flow into it all year round and had an aqua flow that came out along the coastline.”

“And you figured all of this out from what?  A copy of the treasure map.”

The moment he started quoting rivers, streams, and lakes, I remembered each of those geographical features appeared on several of the map versions.  I had suggested, rather comically, that it would be funny if the treasure was buried in the lake.

It wasn’t all that funny.  It was also possible.

“Imagine this.  Drop anchor out to sea, in other words on the other side of the natural sandbar that formed at the seaward side of the river, get in the longboats and row inshore to the lake, across the lake, up another river to the base of the hills.  Then do a little exploring, north or south, and find a cave.  I reckon the treasure was buried in a cave.  We know there are caves up there, not many, but I think there used to be more.”

“Someone already did a survey with some rather fancy electronic equipment with the same idea in mind.  He found three, not very long, and certainly without treasure.  Two had substantial falls inside, which is why they were buried.”

“There’s more.”

He jumped up off the bed and went over to the robe and opened the door.  Tacked on the back was a copy of an ordnance survey map of this part of the coastline, and a tracing of the treasure map, to the same scale on top.

“As you can see, I think ‘I’ve found the correlation between the real, and what was real 300 years ago.”

Except there’s no rivers and no lake.  And no sand bar as I recall.  There was a small marina in what might have been where the river met the sea, but that’s gone.  They filled it in and build a shopping mall on it.  A huge, now half empty, shopping mall.  A modern wonder 40 years ago that was supposed to bring business and shoppers to the town.  For a few years it did, until another town 50 miles away got the same idea, sold the land for half the price, and made the rents a quarter of what they were here.

They called it progress.

We called it piracy.

“Then we can hardly row our boat inshore and up the stream, if it’s not there.”

I hated to state the obvious.

“But,” he said, looking like the cat who’d swallowed the canary.  “What if it is still there, but we just can’t see it?”

© Charles Heath 2020

A twitter biography

Every year I come back to revisit this, and each year it becomes a harder issue to deal with.  All that’s recently changed is the number of characters you can use

I’ve been trawling the endless collection of twitter descriptions provided by their users, noting that there is a restriction of 280 characters.

How do you sum yourself up in 280 characters?

I don’t think I can, so we tend to put down a few catchphrases, something that will draw followers.  I’m thinking the word ‘aspiring’ will be my catchword.

I’m aspiring to be a writer, or is that author?  Is there a difference, like for instance, one publishes ebooks on Amazon, one publishes hard copies in the traditional manner?

Is there a guide to what I can call myself?

Quite simply put, but in more than 140 characters, married happily, two wonderful children, three amazing grandchildren, and a wealth of experience acquired over the years.

Actually, that sounds rather boring, doesn’t it?

Perhaps it would be better if I was a retired policeman, a retired lawyer, a retired sheriff, a retired private investigator, a retired doctor, someone who had an occupation that was a rich mine of information from which to draw upon.

Retired computer programmers, supermarket shelf stackers, night cleaners, accounts clerks and general dogsbody s don’t quite cut the mustard.

I have also become fascinated with the expression ‘killer biography’.  Does it mean that I have to be a ‘killer’?

Better than the self-confession above.  Should we try to embellish our personal history in order to make it more appealing?

It’s much the same as writing about daily life.  No one wants to read about it, people want to be taken out of the humdrum of normalcy and be taken into a world where they can become the character in the book.

And there you have it, in a nutshell, why I write.

 

The cinema of my dreams – It’s a treasure hunt – Episode 36

Here’s the thing…

Every time I close my eyes, I see something different.

I’d like to think the cinema of my dreams is playing a double feature but it’s a bit like a comedy cartoon night on Fox.

But these dreams are nothing to laugh about.

Once again there’s a new installment of an old feature, and we’re back on the treasure hunt.

 

“How long have you been working on this?”

“A week. Lying in bed is boring, so I decided to look at everything I’ve got again, and then again. There were some old maps of the coastline stored with the treasure maps, so I think my father was trying to find the actual location his treasure maps were based on and came up against the same problem. Physical landmarks on the treasure maps are no longer there, and if you didn’t know any better, I would think you were looking in the wrong place.”

“So, in actual fact, what you’re saying now is that your father had no idea where the treasure was buried, that he was just producing maps for the Cossatino’s’ to sell.”

That, of course, could be looked at from a different angle, one that I wasn’t going to suggest right then because Boggs was not ready to hear it. I think the real maps Boggs had found with eh treasure maps were the basis for the treasure maps, that is, his father had to give them real-life elements to keep the punters interested.

“No, not necessarily. I think he knew it was somewhere along this coastline give or take a hundred miles, because of its proximity to the Spanish Maine, but essentially you’re right. He probably had no idea.”

So, he hadn’t come to the same conclusion I had. Yet.

And if I could come to that conclusion, surely Cossatino also would, after all, he was the one who got Boggs senior to make the maps. Why all of a sudden did he think that there was a real treasure map. It couldn’t be simply because Boggs had said there was one. He’d have to know that anything Boggs junior found was an invention commissioned by him,

Or hadn’t Vince told his father what he was doing? Surely the father would have told the son about the treasure map scam.

As for Benderby, senior could base his assumption of the fact that he’d found some old coins off the coast nearby that could be part of the trove. Alex then may have decided to usurp his father’s search with one of his own, conveniently forgetting the treasure maps were an invention of the Cossatino’s. IT was a tangled web of lies deceit and one-upmanship, one that was going to leave a trail of human wreckage in its wake.

Boggs and I were two of the first three. We had lived to tell about it, Frobisher was the first casualty.

But what I suppose was more despairing was how taken Boggs was with the notion that the treasure was real, hidden out there somewhere, and that his father had ‘the’ map. I was loath to label him delusional, but his pathological desire to prove his father’s so-called legacy was going to not end well, especially when we found nothing.

And, yet, I had to admire the lengths he had gone to, to prove his case. Even now, looking at the overlaid maps, there was no guarantee we’d find anything, but at first look, the evidence was compelling.

Except I had a feeling Boggs had something up his sleeve. I had to ask the question. “Where did you get the idea of matching the treasure map to the real map?”

“My father’s journal. It was tossed in the bottom of a box of his other stuff. There are about ten boxes stacked in the shed, stuff my mother just couldn’t be bothered sorting through after he disappeared. Again, boredom pushed me into going through everything over and over just in case I missed something.”

He reached in under the mattress of his bed and pulled out an old leather-bound notebook. It had a strap that bound it together, and by the look of it had extra papers inserted or glued to pages, as well as papers at the start and back of the volume, making it look about twice the original size.

He handed it to me. The leather was old, cracked, and had that distinctive aroma of the hide. I loosened the strap and the top cover opened. The first page was a newspaper cutting, a small piece about some old coins being found about a hundred yards offshore by some surfers. Were these the same coins that Benderby had claimed were part to the trove?

“Benderby was getting that antiquarian that was murdered to identify some coins,” I said after a quick glance through the article.

“I spoke to one of the surfers the other day,” Boggs said. “He told me he came off his board on a big wave and as he was going down saw something glinting on the seabed. He managed to pull up three coins. There were more but he had to come up for air. When he went down again, he realized he’d been dragged away by the current.”

Tides and currents along this part of the coast were particularly bad, and the undertow, at times could get surfers and swimmers alike into a lot of trouble. I’d been caught out once in a dinghy myself, finishing up ten miles further down the coast that I expected to be.

“Then, I take it he can’t remember the exact spot so he could go back.”

“He tried, but alas no. Said he sold the coins to old man Benderby for a hundred apiece and told him approximately where he thought the others were, but nothing’s been found since.”

Not that Benderby would tell anyone if he did. But it explained where the coins came from that he gave to Frobisher.

“Except we can assume that it’s off our coastline somewhere, right?”

“Five miles of coastline to be precise. He and his mate always had a few reefers before they went out, made the ride more interesting he said. He could have been off the coast of Peru for all he knew.”

Surfers, drugs and a colorful story.

“It explains why Benderby and a team of divers have been out in his new boat,” Boggs added, “probably trying to either find the location or line up landmarks on his map from the seaward side at the same time. But he doesn’t know what we know.”

What did we know? I leafed through a few more pages of the diary, but the scrawled notes were almost illegible. I picked up various words, like a marina, underground river, dry lakebed, but none of it made any sense.

“Which map did we give to Alex?”

Boggs went over to a drawer in the wardrobe and leafed through the papers in it and pulled out one and gave it to me. Like the rest it showed the shore, the hills, the lake, and two what looked to be rivers flowing into the sea. Each of the maps had those same features but in different places.

I didn’t want to say it, but it seemed to me we were playing a very dangerous game. The maps might look different in some respects, but the chances were, if Alex was smart enough to hire an expert, that we might run across him out there, and, to be honest, he would be the last person I’d want to see.

“You do realize our paths are going to cross at some point.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

A shiver went down my spine, an omen I thought. Boggs has something up his sleeve, and I really didn’t want to know.

Not right then.

 

© Charles Heath 2020

Memories of the conversations with my cat – 16

As some may be aware, but many not, Chester, my faithful writing assistant, mice catcher, and general pain in the neck, passed away some months ago.

Recently I was running a series based on his adventures, under the title of Past Conversations with my cat.

For those who have not had the chance to read about all of his exploits I will run the series again from Episode 1

These are the memories of our time together…

Character development

20161008_135142

This is Chester, he thinks he is an expert on people

He has meandered in checking out what I’m doing, or maybe he’s here because the room is cooler.

He gives me the ‘What are you doing’ look.

It doesn’t matter how many times I’m a writer, it’s like talking to a brick wall.

I say I’m working on developing a new character.

Name?

I’m thinking of John.

A shake of the head and the eyes roll.  Can you be a little more inventive, like, well, Chester?

Predictable.  How about Xavier?

Would you call your kid Xavier?  He’s going to have a very rough time of it at school.  Unless this character has a tortured soul.

Good point.  How about William?

Bill, that’s what you get in the mail.  Another shake of the head.  You’re not very good at this, are you?

Apparently not.  Haven’t you got some mice to catch?

He yawns, then curls up on the seat.  Wake me when you’ve got some better ideas.

Maybe not.  I’ve come up with a name, Daniel, and I don’t care what he thinks.

For now.

Searchings for locations: Oreti Village – No two sunrises are the same – 1

Oreti village, Pukawa Bay, North Island, New Zealand

On the southern tip of Lake Taupo

Our first morning there, a Saturday.  Winter.  Cold.  And a beautiful sunrise.

20180812_073230

This was taken from the balcony, overlooking the lake.

The sun is just creeping up over the horizon

20180812_073241

It gradually gets lighter, and then the sun breaks free of the low cloud

It lights up the balcony

20180811_074651

And the trees just beyond, a cascade of colorful ferns.

20180811_074622

It looks like its going to be a fine day, our first for this trip, and we will be heading to the mountains to see snow, for the first time for two of our granddaughters.

Memories of the conversations with my cat – 16

As some may be aware, but many not, Chester, my faithful writing assistant, mice catcher, and general pain in the neck, passed away some months ago.

Recently I was running a series based on his adventures, under the title of Past Conversations with my cat.

For those who have not had the chance to read about all of his exploits I will run the series again from Episode 1

These are the memories of our time together…

Character development

20161008_135142

This is Chester, he thinks he is an expert on people

He has meandered in checking out what I’m doing, or maybe he’s here because the room is cooler.

He gives me the ‘What are you doing’ look.

It doesn’t matter how many times I’m a writer, it’s like talking to a brick wall.

I say I’m working on developing a new character.

Name?

I’m thinking of John.

A shake of the head and the eyes roll.  Can you be a little more inventive, like, well, Chester?

Predictable.  How about Xavier?

Would you call your kid Xavier?  He’s going to have a very rough time of it at school.  Unless this character has a tortured soul.

Good point.  How about William?

Bill, that’s what you get in the mail.  Another shake of the head.  You’re not very good at this, are you?

Apparently not.  Haven’t you got some mice to catch?

He yawns, then curls up on the seat.  Wake me when you’ve got some better ideas.

Maybe not.  I’ve come up with a name, Daniel, and I don’t care what he thinks.

For now.

I’ve been reading a lot

And at times wish I hadn’t.

Having been a journalist in a previous lifetime, and one that always believed that the truth mattered, it didn’t take long to realise that journalists should never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Newspapers, and all other forms of media, will only write what they believe will sell, or what they think the public wants to read. The truth, sadly, is not the first thing on the readers mind, only that someone is to blame for something they have no control over, and it doesn’t matter who.

And the more outlandish the situation, the more the public will buy into it.

This, I guess, is why we like reading about celebrities and royalty, not for the good they might do, but the fact they stumble and make mistakes, and that somehow makes us feel better about ourselves.

Similarly, if the media can beat up a subject, like the corona-virus, and make it worse that it is, then people will lap up the continuing saga, as it relates to them, and will take one of two stances, that they believe the horror of it, and do as they’re asked, or disbelieve it because nothing can be that bad, and ignore it and the consequences of disobedience. knowing the government will not press too hard against the non compliers simply because of domocracy issues it will stir up.

That is, then the media will get a hold of this angle and push it, and people will start to think disobedience is a good thing not a bad.

So, our problems of trying to get a fair and balanced look at what the coronavirus is all about is nigh on impossible. We are continuously bombarded with both right and wrong information, and the trouble is, both sides are very plausibly supported by facts.

And that’s the next problem we have in reporting. We can get facts to prove anything we want. It;s called the use and abuse of statistics, and was an interest part of the journalism degree I studied for. We were told all about statistics, good and bad, and using them to prove the veracity of our piece.

I remember writing a piece for the tutor extolling the virtues of a particular person who was probably the worst human since Vlad the Impaler, using only the facts that suited my narrative. I also remember the bollocking he gave me for doing so, but had to acknowledge that sometimes that would happen.

Integrity of reporting only went as far as the editor, and if the editor hated something, you had to hate it too. This is infamously covered in various texts where newspaper publishers pick sides, and can influence elections, and governments. It still happens.

So, the bottom line is, when I;m reading an article in the media, I always take it with a grain of salt, and do my own fact checking, remembering, of course, not just to fact check to prove the bias one way of the other, but the get a sense of balance.

You can see at the moment when elections don’t matter, no one is talking about what they’re going to do for us, no one is telling us what their policies are. It’s simply schoolyard tit for tat garbage speak. What happened to the town hall meeting, a long and winding speech encompassing what the government plans to do for its people now, and then genuinely answer questions?

Perhaps we should ban campaigning, and just get each party to write a book about what they intend to do, and keep them away from the papers, the TV, and any other form of media, in other words, don’t let them speak!

And don’t get me started about the drivel they speak in the parliament. Five year olds could do a better job.

OK, rant over.

The cinema of my dreams – It’s a treasure hunt – Episode 35

Here’s the thing…

Every time I close my eyes, I see something different.

I’d like to think the cinema of my dreams is playing a double feature but it’s a bit like a comedy cartoon night on Fox.

But these dreams are nothing to laugh about.

Once again there’s a new installment of an old feature, and we’re back on the treasure hunt.

 

It was an understatement to say I was dreading going to Boggs’ place.

In fact, in the hour it took to get through the morning chores I had time to consider how and why I was in this position.  Boggs was a friend.  We were friends at school and as best we could we had each other’s back when the bullies came out to play.

At times that didn’t amount to much because as everyone knows, bullies hunt in packs.  Six against two wasn’t much of an equation.  And it those days, the teachers spent more time hiding from the students than being in front of them.

It was simply a case of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

It didn’t feel like that, not for a very long time.

But, in the end, misfortune can make strange bedfellows, and in a town that depended on a single industry, it soon became apparent that there were more people against the Benderby’s and the Cossatino’s than for, and in small-town politics, that was more than an evening up.  Out of school and separated from their acolytes, both Alex and Vince found that whatever influence they had once, was now gone, and all that was left was a grunt, and we were basically left alone.

Boggs was the dreamer.

He had idolized his father and when he went missing it broke him.

This map thing was the first signs of Boggs finally coming back to life, but the problem was, it was all pinned on false hopes.  The Sherriff was right.  Boggs was in over his head, playing with the two most vicious families from around here, and it was bad enough that his father had fallen foul of them, the Sherriff was not about to see his son go the same way.  I was going to try and talk Boggs out of it.

Yet, on the other hand, it was people like us who needed a win, just to show there was still hope in this place.  With threats every day that the factory might have to close, there were dark clouds hanging over everyone’s head.

If the factory closed, there was going to be a very large hole in the local economy and a lot of people in financial trouble.  I’m not sure how finding the treasure might solve all of that, but I suspect Boggs’ had something up his sleeve.

I knocked on the door and his mother answered.  She looked harried.  She was a nurse and looked as though she just got home from the night shift at the hospital.  

“Boggs is in his room.”

“How are you this morning?”

“Tired.  And an afternoon shift, which I might not get to if I don’t get some sleep.  You know where he is.  Try not to make any noise.”

“Will do.”

I came in and closed the door, watching her dash off down the passage to the other end of the house.

She could not work endless double shifts for much longer, but like all of us, it was not out of desire but necessity.  She had implored Boggs to get a job and help, but he seemed oblivious to the problem.  I’d tried to speak to him, but he had that insufferable way of just not listening.

Boggs was in his room, sitting on the bed and staring at the ceiling.

I looed up too, but there was nothing there.

“Don’t tell me,” I said, “but you’ve suddenly discovered you’ve got X-Ray vision.”

“If only.  I could use it right now to find something that’s missing>”

“Your cell phone?”  Boggs was always misplacing something, of forgetting it.  I’d lost count how many times he’d misplaced his phone.

“No.  An underground river.”

OK.  That was out of left field.  I had no idea any rivers were missing, or, in fact, they could actually go missing.

Apparently, they could.

“There’s two,” he said.  300 years ago five or take this part of the coastline had several rivers that ran down from the mountain range.  What we now call the hills on the edge of the coastal plain.  There was also a lake, not very large, but it used to have several streams flow into it all year round and had an aqua flow that came out along the coastline.”

“And you figured all of this out from what?  A copy of the treasure map.”

The moment he started quoting rivers, streams, and lakes, I remembered each of those geographical features appeared on several of the map versions.  I had suggested, rather comically, that it would be funny if the treasure was buried in the lake.

It wasn’t all that funny.  It was also possible.

“Imagine this.  Drop anchor out to sea, in other words on the other side of the natural sandbar that formed at the seaward side of the river, get in the longboats and row inshore to the lake, across the lake, up another river to the base of the hills.  Then do a little exploring, north or south, and find a cave.  I reckon the treasure was buried in a cave.  We know there are caves up there, not many, but I think there used to be more.”

“Someone already did a survey with some rather fancy electronic equipment with the same idea in mind.  He found three, not very long, and certainly without treasure.  Two had substantial falls inside, which is why they were buried.”

“There’s more.”

He jumped up off the bed and went over to the robe and opened the door.  Tacked on the back was a copy of an ordnance survey map of this part of the coastline, and a tracing of the treasure map, to the same scale on top.

“As you can see, I think ‘I’ve found the correlation between the real, and what was real 300 years ago.”

Except there’s no rivers and no lake.  And no sand bar as I recall.  There was a small marina in what might have been where the river met the sea, but that’s gone.  They filled it in and build a shopping mall on it.  A huge, now half empty, shopping mall.  A modern wonder 40 years ago that was supposed to bring business and shoppers to the town.  For a few years it did, until another town 50 miles away got the same idea, sold the land for half the price, and made the rents a quarter of what they were here.

They called it progress.

We called it piracy.

“Then we can hardly row our boat inshore and up the stream, if it’s not there.”

I hated to state the obvious.

“But,” he said, looking like the cat who’d swallowed the canary.  “What if it is still there, but we just can’t see it?”

© Charles Heath 2020

Searchings for locations: Oreti Village – No two sunrises are the same – 1

Oreti village, Pukawa Bay, North Island, New Zealand

On the southern tip of Lake Taupo

Our first morning there, a Saturday.  Winter.  Cold.  And a beautiful sunrise.

20180812_073230

This was taken from the balcony, overlooking the lake.

The sun is just creeping up over the horizon

20180812_073241

It gradually gets lighter, and then the sun breaks free of the low cloud

It lights up the balcony

20180811_074651

And the trees just beyond, a cascade of colorful ferns.

20180811_074622

It looks like its going to be a fine day, our first for this trip, and we will be heading to the mountains to see snow, for the first time for two of our granddaughters.