The Last Days of Summer

Okay, so by far the coolest thing I've seen in Wellington: this afternoon I hit a snag on the screenplay I’m rewriting. It was a gorgeous Sunday, perhaps the last sunny day before winter blows in. And so I put on my bathing suit and walked to the little beach at Oriental Bay, just downtown. I'm strolling along the beach, and all of a sudden everybody starts running to the water's edge. I think, oh God, someone's drowning. Then I see a bunch of frightened teenagers huddled close together on a floating raft, and a Maori lifeguard running to the water with a longboard over his head. And then I see it: a pod of Orcas, swimming toward the teens. The pod splits, half on either side of the raft. I think of those videos where the killer whale swim up onto the beach, grabs a seal and shimmies back into the water. The whales idle at the raft, some turn on their sides, enormous fins high in the air. The lifeguard's now right out there with them. Some other guy starts swimming out toward the raft. Everyone on the beach is freaking out. But the whales just swim on, away.

I’m a day or two away from finishing a rewrite of a horror script I did back in 2002. Based on a true story, Los Diablos is about a carload of University of Texas students who road trip down to Nuevo Laredo and get caught up in a demonic cult. It’s been giving me the creeps writing it, and between that and all the earthquakes, I’ve been having some pretty strange dreams. A few nights ago, I dreamed that I was standing in a big empty room with Jeff Norton, and we were watching an eggplant the size of a sofa, floating in the air. He says to me, “Go on, touch it,” and I reach out this long elastic arm and I touch the eggplant and my hand comes away with a bright gold band around my wedding finger.

I’ve just walked to Oriental Bay and back so that I could get some pics of where the whales were, the same beach where I did my 9 a.m. swim on New Year’s morning. On the way home, I saw my friend Flora from the university library. Though Wellington has around 350,000 citizens, walking across town I usually recognize somebody I know. Soon, I will say goodbye to summer. Last year at this time, I was in sunny Curacao for Spring Break, one of the best trips ever: days spent snorkeling in soothing Gulf waters, lazy night strolls beneath a tropical moon. Now, late afternoon, mid-March, on the other side of the world, clouds move in, the temperature drops. Lights come on in surrounding apartments. From my very large window, the city looks immaculate, like a model railroad town, placed here by caring hands. If someone were looking at it from above, they would smile and say it’s the close of a very good day.