Moon Dance

Last summer, after traveling through southern and central California, then escaping the crowds into the Sierras and the Giant Sequoias, and then availing ourselves of the hospitality of our friends Patti and Matt for 10 days, we headed north to the so-called Lost Coast, and returned to one of our favorite camping sites from our 7-1/2 years on the road: Westport, California.

It's officially a state park, but has minimal amenities, and almost no people, and you camp right on the cliff overlooking the Pacific.

We got our favorite campsite again, popped the top of our Westy, and headed straight down the path to Cocktail Point.

Mistah Schleckah loves Cocktail Point.

It's a gorgeous place to while away a week or two.

The fog rolls in every day,

and one can make quick friends, camping side-by-side.

We met a guy named Mose, and became fast friends, camping with eachother all week.

With Mose we cooked everything on the open driftwood-fire.

We shared lots of great meals, some that doubled as folk art.

Nights would get chilly, but we didn't care. We had a fire . . .
.

. . . and we had Big Brown.

One night, we read we were going to be graced with a Full Lunar Eclipse.

The smart peeps at NPR, reporting from the McDonald Observatory at Fort Davis, Texas, said that in the United States, the further west you could get, the better the viewing.

Since we were on the very edge of the North American continent, we figured we had a pretty good chance of a clear sighting.

The sun set over the Pacific . . .

. . . the ocean water down the cliff swirled . . .

. . . and the moon started rising . . .

. . . and rising . . .

. . . and rising . . .

. . . and rising. By definition, a Full Lunar Eclipse happens the night of a Full Moon, and with no ambient light for miles, that Full Moon Rising in Westort California was pretty spectacular.

.

We had a great time in camp that night, drinking and dancing and yakking and watching the moon and listening to the ocean. Oh and taking photos. Lots and lots of photos. This is Bill's money shot of Mose's camper. It's called SurrealEstate.

We went to sleep under that big fat full bright moon in our respective rigs, and set our alarms cellphones for 4 a.m. When the beep scared us awake in the middle of the night, the first thing Bill said was, "It's dark! The sky must have clouded over!"

Not so. It was dark because the Full Moon was in Full Eclipse, and we 3 sat under it on our lounge chairs, with no fire, and watched that big orb -- what had looked like a flat disk earlier -- go through all the phases of its date with the shadow of the Earth.

Years later, just this past spring, we watched a Full Lunar Eclipse with Mom and Dad in Fort Davis, and Mom invented a new word for this phase, when the moon starts to come out of its full eclipse, and look like a boring old big fat full bright moon again: Declipse.

We went to bed feeling like we'd had a gift from the Heavens.

Bill got up to pee in the morning -- early, before the sun came up -- and that big fat full moon, after such a big night of it, was quietly about to set herself over the Pacific.

Moon set, people.

The next day we drove to Fort Bragg, CA for supplies, and some of the Eclipse photos printed at CVS. On the way back to Westport we stopped to buy firewood. We talked to the couple/owners about the Eclipse, showed them the photos, offered them one, and they were so touched by that -- by our giving them a 19¢ print -- that they opened up their garden to us.

That is a pretty good haul for 19¢.

That night we cooked our veggies, opened another bottle of wine, toasted the sky and the stars and that gorgeous, hard-working moon, and had our last night of raging campfire and philosophical meanderings with our new friend Mose, the crashing waves of the Mighty Pacific providing our background music. In the morning we packed up and said toodle-oo.

Sigh. What a fabulous stay.

If only poor ol' Mose could do something about his drinking . . .