...
It mostly took place within a building that was part beach and part hotel. I was setting up my camp in a sandy corner, artfully placing crucial bits of driftwood around my sleeping bag for, well, for what? Demarcation? Head rests? But I was also driving up to the store in Brookings again, with, again, a huge plume of smoke in front of me, wondering, again, if the store was burning, wondering even if I could get to my destination, and progress stopping, again, just south of the Chetco River. The hotel seems to be there. On the east side of 101, overlooking the Chetco.
Some conversation with my friend, Peggy, on her property that isn't her property, telling her I was upset because she used to cover me with goodies whenever I visited and now she only orders in takeout. Then, poof, back in my hotel with the sandy rooms and some obnoxious young man trying to commandeer my camp. Then at the entry to the hotel dining room quibbling with the manager about the smoke so visible from the road.
The manager is Vladimir Putin. I keep saying huge billowing cloud of smoke, and he keeps saying mere puffs of smoke... wryly... smilingly. He ushers me over to the doorway into the kitchen and hands me a treat, which I eat half of right away before it strikes me that it's wheat. I immediately tell him I must leave because I will be barfing up my toes in a couple hours. I'm sorry, the treat was fabulous, but I'm allergic to it, and I don't know what caused me to momentarily forget that.
He sends Medvedev with me to gather my things in my beachy spot upstairs. Medvedev is smiling wanly with various of my traveling items in his arms, the obnoxious young man is again trying to stake out my spot, and we're busy trying both to gather my stuff and fend him off until we're done.
Then I am back downstairs with Putin, ready to go. He asks if I will be okay, if I need a ride home. I say I think I've got time enough to drive home before the barfing will start. He doesn't think I should chance it. I immediately defer to his judgment, asking something about where I should wait for whoever is going to take me home. He says, still wryly, "Maybe I will do it myself."
As the happiness was flooding in me, I knew it was going to wake me up, and was starting to get the will not to let it wake me when it woke me and I was all okay, fine, I'm not going to forget this dream.
I didn't.
