Captain Pike's Ship Log II

I sit in my nook, reading the last of Robinson Crusoe (two syllables, by the way); the part where he travels by land now. He's had it with the Sea -- understandable. Anyway, I sit here, alone, with my grown-up son's abandoned but powerful computer humming away, and my big screen, my flatscreen monitor -- I chart his course of 400 years ago using Google's mapping software. I can imagine the French Pyrenees, separating the little villages of France and Spain -- hell, I can see them, photographs by recent travelers, uploaded to the sites like Panoramio and Flickr. One of them offers me an e-mail link, "e-mail a friend".

I can send this image of the hazy, jagged mountains, rising up angrily, as if to hold this little Shangri-La of a village, prisoner from the rest of the world. I e-mail my wife -- she's on the road today, training for her company, for her career. The sun shines in on my face, temporarily making it hard to see the screen, just like this picture I see now, looking west and south from a small town in France at the base of these great mountains.

I can imagine showing up there in the late afternoon, in need of coffee. Rickety cafés around the corner on decrepit brick pathways, maybe terra-cotta roofs and rough cobble roads traveled much the same as in days of old. I am seized with a feeling of wanderlust. 50 years old, in a wheelchair, reflecting on my life, my freedom up till now. You'll never know what you've got till it's gone. I am alive, so anything is possible, right? Yet, some of the declining years seem like the decline might be a little steeper, I hope my brakes work -- wouldn't want to rush through the rest of this life, or would I?

Captain Pike, wanderer at large, reporting from his small but brightly colored office/nook -- an adjunct of our "master bedroom", part of the new home of the luckiest man alive.
Photograph "vue depuis Osse " used without permission from aspe64.