HIGHEST TO LOWEST

Last Saturday (January 20), I finished packing up in Monterey, leaving only my rental bed to be picked up later by Rent-a-Center (a convenient way to deal with furniture!). I said goodbye to Li Zhang, my temporary flatmate ($650 for the month there versus over $1000 at a local motel), who had bravely allowed a completely strange man to share her apartment for 3 weeks. (We got along well once she realized I wasn't an axe murderer. Axes are expensive!)

Back in December, I had decided to stop in Bishop on the way back to LA after reading an email from 90-year-old former Aramco pastor Alan Tichenor mentioning in passing that they had found blood in his urine. (See my December 2005 posting on my first trip to visit him.) This had been one of the indications with Dad that his prostate cancer was in its final stages, so my heart sank at the news, and I thought I might not have much time to visit with Alan anymore either. It became a priority.

Alan, along with his wife Ella and kids, had been the first pastor of the Dhahran Protestant Fellowship to reside full-time in Arabia in 1954, and one of his last pastoral deeds in the Kingdom (of Saudi Arabia!) was to baptize me in 1957 before heading back to the US. His wife Ella died in 2004, and he was shuttled from son to daughter until his niece Ruth Nielsen volunteered to take him in permanently. She and her husband live in a mobile home park in Bishop, California, a small town behind Sequoia National Park on the way to the Mammoth ski slopes. Alan has his own private trailer immediately behind Ruth and Max's. The trailer park sits peacefully in a scenic valley with snow-covered Sierras to the west and dry mountains to the east along the Nevada border.

There's no short-cut west to east across California to get from Monterey to Bishop (the Sierras inconveniently get in the way), so you either have to head way north to Reno then down, or go south to Bakersfield, then up. I took the southern route, passing Mt. Whitney, the tallest peak in the 48 states at almost 14,500 feet, on the way north again. It was less snowy and majestic than it had been in '05 on my first trip (and no eerie "Sierra wave" clouds this time, either).

Alan and I visited during his non-nap periods (meals mainly). Ruth said privately that she was afraid his health condition was getting beyond her level of amateur care. He has a doctor's visit this week to discuss some lab tests. He may need a kidney out, they think, and dialysis from then on in a care facility in Bishop.

During Alan's nap on Monday after lunch, I took a little drive way in the back country to the Bristlecone Pine grove up in the Sierras near the Nevada border. Some of these gnarled end-of-the-treeline pines date back over 2000 years! It is claimed that the oldest living life form on earth is a bristlecone back up there somewhere. (No sign next to it, naturally, to prevent vandalism by nature "lovers".) I think I was the only large mammal within 10 square miles that afternoon! Even the park service employee booth was closed for the season. Beautiful day, however.

INDEPENDENCE

I slept on Ruth and Max's sofa bed one night, stayed the next day through dinner, then headed south again on the way home, staying at a historic (1927) small-town California inn, the Winnedumah Hotel, across the street from the Inyo County courthouse in tiny Independence. It had caught my eye on the drive up. Its architecture harks back to an earlier, more genteel day of Western hostelry before motels with parking next to your room door, automatic coffee makers next to your toothbrush, and "lobbies" that resemble a low security federal penitentiary with a bulletproof glass window protecting the low-paid minion working behind it. The Winnedumah's lobby was a real old-fashioned lobby, high-ceilinged and colorful, with a fireplace and grand piano, that made you want to camp there for a month. The inn was old-fashioned, too, in not so pleasant ways in the middle of our unusually cold winter this year (down to 1 degree Fahrenheit in Bishop the week before!). The room was icy cold but came equipped with a noisy plug-in heater and lots of (real) blankets. I wondered half-credulously how many ghosts were rattling about the near empty halls that night as I shivered under the covers in the absolute quiet of the central Owens Valley. (There were only two other guests that night, a couple from Orange County.)

As soon as the sun rose, however, all the tribulations of the night before vanished, and I showered and dressed for the Bed and Breakfast's breakfast - a huge buffet with a heaping portion of scrambled eggs, bacon and banana-nut pancakes! I chatted with the new owners, a pleasant Hispanic couple, the Montoya's from Oxnard, on the coast. They were wondering what to do about the hotel's 80th anniversary coming up in April. They had invited the son of the original owners to fly down and be a guest for the occasion. I insisted they had a duty to play it up as a local booster event (small towns need every gasp of fame they can legitimately lay claim to): have a formal evening gathering where the owners' son could talk about his memories of the old days (Bing Crosby and John Wayne were only two early Hollywood notables who had stayed there) along with speeches by a local historian, the mayor, head of the chamber of commerce, former owners, etc. Of course, they would need coverage in local papers, the LA Times Travel section, the AAA travel magazine, etc. I think they were getting inspired ...

DEATH VALLEY

My second-to-last day, I had got it into my head to pass by the *lowest* point in the Western Hemisphere, too, in Death Valley, lying just behind the mountain range to the east. At over 200 feet below sea level, the salt plain by the Badwater turn-out is less than 100 miles from the *highest* point in the 48 states. (Odd juxtaposition.) I figured with summer temperatures over 120 degrees in Death Valley, January was the ideal time to visit. It was a major detour on my way back to LA, making for a very long day behind the wheel, but it was my first (and probably only) time to visit one of California's major tourist draws. I finally pulled into my garage in Torrance about 7 pm Tuesday evening. Home, sweet home!

MONTEREY

This latest update comes to you from the first capital of California. In fact, our class building is just across the street from the first capital building of the California Republic in Gold Rush times. I'm at the Monterey Institute for International Studies (not connected with the military) finishing up a 3-week intensive course in Arabic.

It's easy for people to get into trouble over totally innocent things these days. We just learned that the Arabic word for baseball is "kurat al-qaida" - ball of the base (Al-Qaida means "the Base".) Computer snoopers looking for suspicious "chatter" by terrorists might well unintentially pick up electronic messages in Arabic talking about baseball! And the name Osama is as common in Muslim countries as John in America. (That doesn't stop the hundreds of unfortunate Arab men in this country named Osama from having to find nicknames as a cover to keep from alarming people!) It's the "bin Laden" part that is really distinctive. The family originally comes from Yemen. (I mean, thousands of Europeans used to be named Adolph - though not as many since WWII. Hitler as a surname has kind of died out, however.)

I'm by far the farthest ahead in my intermediate Arabic class of five. Which is fine. I mainly wanted an excuse to concentrate on nothing but Arabic for a sold stretch, and any exposure for hours a day, even if review and slowed down a bit for the others, is fine. Our teacher is from Baghdad, having left there in 1980. He's Sunni and very dismayed at the chaos that has befallen his homeland. He was no great fan of Saddam's, but he misses the stability and only state-organized violence.

When I get back to Torrance around the 22nd of January, I'll be right back into teaching, at least teachers' orientation. I told CSU-Long Beach that since most of my job possiblities involve Fall '07, I would be able to commit for this spring semester. They're giving me only two mornings a week - Tuesday/Thursday 9-12 - to teach Grammar and Spelling to Saudi students (they need it!).

But I'll be supplementing that with flex hours at the West Semitic Research Project, where I started as a part-time research/office assistant just before Christmas. Their goal is making quality digital images of all the important early Semitic texts (papyri, cuneiform tablets, Dead Sea Scrolls, etc.) to create an online database for linguists, archeologists and Biblical scholars to use anywhere in the world. One of their most recent photography expeditions was to the Berlin Museum to photograph their goodly portion (40%) of the Amarna Tablets from Egypt - cuneiform tablets from Canaan, Phoenicia, etc. from before the establishment of the Israelites. The main benefit at the WSRP is that there's no homework or prepping. I work while at the office in Palos Verdes (up the hill from Torrance), and take home nothing. Yea!

I'll write more in later updates. Just wanted to catch everyone up.

Happy 2007!