Rains on Everything

Our deck boards are stretched out in the rain right now, under tarps, waiting to be put on. Some of the framing is up waiting to be connected to a little bit more so that the metal roof can go on. Tools and supplies have been procured by Barbara and Claude yet key items are missing which requires them to go into Tahiti again for more stuff. Everything costs much more than anywhere else I have ever been, and workers want to be paid more too, yet the island climate makes the work go slower. I am fortunate now to have the indoor finish jobs, as hard as that is on a breeze clear blue day, when it is pouring warm and wet out side I don’t mind at all. In Washington work would go on as usual, as if it were a warm breezy clear day outside, here, as in California, this work will stop, the guys aren’t going to be wearing head to toe rain gear.

Our departure date is approaching rapidly, less than two weeks away, and as expected the job is in full swing with many tasks in the pipeline. That’s why we worked Saturday and Sunday, it wasn’t bad, les boys weren’t here to add to the confusion. Roger did show up Friday to do some painting, brought his two younger kids along with him (wife’s day off) and a supply of cigarettes and beers too. The kids were very sweet, the three year old spoke only French, probably Tahitian too, but understood some English, the eight-year-old girl spoke Tahitian, French, and a very strongly accented English. She was a quiet and helpful girl who was obviously very well trained, Barbara told me she said that she does the cooking at home.

Outside the sound they hunker down and in a very pleasant way make their way through the ever present bullshit. I have learned much more about the French mentality since visiting here, I was always a bit prejudiced anyway from my time living in Quebec, that cold place far in the north that they abandoned and left to the English. Quebecois people have very little in common with the French, even the languages are clearly different. French law, when it is enforced, is also quite different than what we Anglophones are accustomed to. Basically here, or in le Metropole (mainland France) you are guilty and must prove yourself innocent, where as in the English speaking countries you are innocent until proven guilty (as I occasionally glance at the International Herald Tribune headlines it is beginning to appear that in the US the French, or Roman, attitude of guilt first ask questions later is becoming the norm).

I remember for so many years saying of the rain is increasing, too bad, oh well; this too will come to pass. The deck will get finished, the veranda roof will go on. Claude and Barbara are very positive and determined people, that yeah, Bob Dylan was right, a hard rain is going to fall, yet at the same time consumer goods were pouring out, military-industrial trickle-down prosperity was gushing, the weather was good, and Americans weren’t so hated. My kids or sibling always gave me such a hard time when I would say the end is near kind of stuff, or the roses of our American abundance and resource abuse don’t smell so sweet. Now the statistics are in, and the candy coating of the real news has become so pathetically thick and cheesy that the house of cards can almost be seen. It doesn’t take much to pull up one of the blinds and see that clearly a hard rain is falling out there, and worse yet, what goes around comes around. If it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, and tastes like a duck, it is a duck, and the ducks of the so-called American dream are quacking their death quack these days as the 2000 and 9/11 coup d’etat becomes more evident to the common man.