*Note* The following post was written in Honolulu on the 24th. After writing this post, I have made it into Taupo without incident, and have been running errands, and doing just a bit of socializing. On the docket this morning is foraging for food, then cell phone, then some time for exploring my new surroundings.
I am sitting in the Honolulu airport, it is hot, muggy and crowded, and the internet is not free. Thus, this may not be posted until Auckland. It all depends on how cheap and bored I feel (ah, the scales of frugality vs. boredom).
I left Chicken early. The story is interesting, but I do not know if changing names is enough for me to feel comfortable posting it publicly. The skinny of it is that after a summer of my complacency putting myself at greater and greater risk in the field, I had a false sense of security working with a partner. The second day after I had a bear encounter (previous post), working in the same area, there was another bear encounter. It was between one of the employees who was working alone and a bear, and he took a shot at it. I will never know what actually happened. A radio call came through, then a shot rang out a moment later. What little procedures we had were not followed, were not sufficient and people clearly had insufficient training to be working in bear country (“we were trying to be quiet so the bears wouldn't hear us”). After the shot was fired, my field partner spotted a bear running straight at us at high speed. The bear ran at us for 20-30 seconds before being deterred by our noise making. It is not clear if the bear that was shot at was hit, but it was definitely not killed in a responsible manner if it was hit.
In the aftermath of this incident it was clear that the other employees and the company were not interested in working safely, following industry standards for field work, or taking the appropriate actions. Further, the fieldwork was set to continue in the same area the next day. One other employee and I declined to continue working under such conditions, and left for home, rather than for the field the next morning. Allowing me to spend a week and a half in Delta.
The extra time in Delta allowed me to say good bye to the Delta “family,” and my parents, made making final arrangements a bit easier, afforded me some great runs, a hike and bike rides with my parents, and easy to neglect Faux Social. I am at what can best be described as halfway, here in Honolulu, and it still seems, not unreal, but unfathomable, I suppose. I have never had a contract this long, I have never moved to a place I knew no one, and I have not ever sat in an airport this hot typing about what I have never done before.
I posit that the surreal feeling about this is that I am so accustomed to the “temporary” attitude towards everything, that even a long period, like two years, has been temporary for me for the last six years or so. It seems like I have always been preparing to leave, and this last year has been defined by preparing to leave wherever I just arrived. I think this has made me feel stuck in between moving somewhere, and heading off to another temporary life, with temporary people in temporary accommodations. Hopefully I will be able to snap out of this, and settle into a life that looks like what I want my life to be.
It is time to stretch, refill water, and figure out what time it is.
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