Incidents more than places:
• A autumn "leaf storm" among birch trees at Moore's Meadow park in Prince George, BC. A bright sunny day with a sudden wind that pretty much stripped all of the leaves off the trees and filled the air with them.
• A view of the star-filled night sky in Mid-Pacific from the deck of USS Magoffin, which was transporting my Marine Corps battalion from Long Beach to Okinawa in 1965. The sky was like a clear glass bowl studded with brilliant stars, with this difference: although it was the ship that was rolling in long swells, the ship seemed to be dead still while the sky seemed to swing back and forth, back and forth.
On the same journey, reading on the ship's fantail, watching flying fish bursting from the bow wave and sailing for many yards across the sea before dipping beneath the waves, and albatross skimming the sea, their wingtips seemingly just millimetres from the surface. And, on the same journey, ignoring orders to go below as a squall approached; I found a secluded spot near the bow and revelled in the gale, the bullet-like raindrops, the spume ripping away from wave tops, and ships' bow plunging, plunging, plunging deep into the sea and then climbing, climbing, climbing, up, and up, and up until the next plunge down, and down, and down….
• Flying home to Prince George from Vancouver in a West Jet 737, just after sunset, on a clear day. As we passed over the ferry terminal at Horseshoe Bay, with a ferry leaving for Vancouver Island, we could see the North Shore mountains below us, and then, to the south, West Vancouver, parts of North Vancouver, all of Vancouver and Richmond and on to the U.S.-Canada border, the tiny, isolated peninsula of Point Roberts in Washington State.
• On another 737, flying from Vancouver to Prince George, transitioning from brilliant blue clear sky above and brilliant white clouds below into the dismal grey of stratified clouds and rain, then into the clear between cloud layers, then into the clouds again, then into the clear, and then once more into the clouds, where the flaps (Fowler flaps?) started to extend, giving the appearance that the wing was disassembling itself while we descended lower and lower and lower and and the landing gear rumbled down and the wings seemed more and more like they were loosely assembled from an Erector set, and then the dark grey-green of spruce forest and then the rain-puddled runway and the loud, hard thump of rubber hitting the runway and the sudden roar of the jets as the thrust reversers deployed and forced us against our seatbelts. I was pleased — amazed, really! — to be once again on Mother Earth and trying to imagine what the bright sunlight had been like just minutes before.
• At the Boy Scouts' Camp Tuff Moses in the Gila National Forest, hearing (and seeing) Taps played by a scout bugler who was silhouetted against a brilliant New Mexico sunset.
Bob