Over-reaching Government Hurts Us All - Part 1



Night in her velvety black shroud surrounds us now. In dim starlight I can make out my companions, gentle Easter Island Polynesians, sitting in the grass, quietly chatting in a lovely, lilting tongue with stuttering soft vowels. We await fishermen returning long after dark with the day’s catch.

Trapped ashore by rising surf after landing my shipmates, a young man sitting next to me says the fishermen will take me back to my sailboat lost in darkness beyond roaring surf. Not expecting to be stranded ashore, I had not switched on any lights aboard ship. My anxiety grows. In my mind I see it drifting away towards Antarctica, my old age draining away as a weary subsistence fisherman.

Earlier in the day, after my shipmates walked off across rolling meadows to find authorities at a distant village, I had wandered sedgy verdant meadows awaiting their return. I soon found myself among oddly shaped brown stones. Eventually it dawned on me these stones were actually the fabled fallen statues, lying akimbo in various broken attitudes, blending perfectly with craggy, fissured rocks above crashing shore surf. A stark, unreal, disconnected empty loneliness hung heavily in the air.

I wandered through a mazy crevassed volcanic landscape towards the shore. In all this lost emptiness an unlikely yellow police-scene tape barred my advance towards a small sunken cavern, some sort of lava sinkhole.



For the complete article see the 07-28-2010 issue.

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