Gilligan's Isle, Series Finale

[deep commercial announcer voice] Find your seats ladies and gentlemen. Tonight is the highly anticipated yet bittersweet series finale of Gilligan's Isle: Sands of Egypt. Butter that popcorn; top off your soda because this will be one magnoon (crazy) moment. It just got interesting!


I had fallen asleep at 9:30 the night before, leaving me overly rested. I raced my alarm to 8 a.m. and rose victorious. A day like any other, except I was in the middle of a desert town, somewhere, surviving only by the grace and mercy of the locals and a quirky German speaking Egyptian-wannabe. Good morning, world.

Our rescue vessel, as well rested as I, lounged in its parking spot awaiting our luggage. We piled our bags, pillows, equipment and bodies into the back seat immediately following another imitation breakfast. The sail set for Maadi, we shoved off that tiny desert island.

All of us gazed out our respective windows mused. I don't know what splashed around in the head of my fellow shipmen and maids, but the ripples of the wavy sand drew me into a state of worship. Leaning overboard, I could see my reflection crashing the tides with the rhythm of the craft's bouncing and bobbing. From dust we came, to dust we shall return.

In the distance, I could see enormous, tsunami-sized sand wave that could have been mistaken for a mountain. Repetitions of far off power line towers wobbled in the wake of the ensuing tidals. Mammoth rock formations surfaced to spray out mists of sand from their blow hole.
Smaller, more agile dolphinic dunes leaped and bounded across the tanned expanse. Heat waves added the gloss that transitioned from sea to sky, steps from earth to heaven, Gilligan's Ladder.

My attention rotated back into our vehicle to observe how the rescue captain would give a weary and nearly unnoticeable motion to greet passing travelers. I tinkered through our collection of fossilized and petrified sea shells that had been kicked around by thousands of years of beach bums. Despite the oxymoronic beauty of the desert, the boredom of travel sunk me into a short nap washing me in and out of consciousness.

Startled by the rumble and thump of brick, concrete, and other debris in our path, I reinstated my gaze though this time something new grappled from my peripheral. Glancing left, the colors had changed. A dark gray, perhaps even black now dominated the landscape. Shorter dark waves crested with a light beige floated by on occasion. I rolled right. The same shadowy omnipotence now the glaze. An uniquely extended surf had mutinied for ownership of this shady place. The 40 million year old volcanic rock lingered at the surface to give the same darkness to the wave passively framed by a railroad track (nearly the same age) that foamed a dirty white atop it all. Endless.

The Dark Wave, as I came to call it, exuded old wrecked train cars, land cruisers, and barges that obtruded an drowning warning to any who might attempt to ride the beast. Fierce, merciless, indiscriminate. We past other broken vessels steadily bailing water just to keep afloat. Others thumbing their way home. Nothing was too far from the oil rigs that had been anchored into the inky belly, speckled with trash and veiling oil spills that can only be expected when one crosses the path of "Petroleum Co. -- Welcome to Visitors."

It was about the time my soul started to shake that the tears and traces of attempted communities littered the once purer place. Unfinished or fallen walls. Half piles of bricks forever waiting to be cemented into place. Rod iron bars croaked, hunched out of eroding pillars. It was an combination of Water World and Mad Max with an Arab flavoring. As we inched closer to some semblance of "normal" life, what was once an oasis and sanctuary for burdened travelers had morphed into arid wasteland plundered by garbage, rubbish, sulfur, smoke stacks, and row after row of graying vegetation choked by the popular, prized pollution.
There was a moment when it seemed as if the people we now passed rusted into a functional absorption of the ashen aridity. Even the ruddy flowers tinted of a desert frostbite. Beauty lives by the contrast of a wretched counterpart.

Disgusted, my eyes lifted to notice not only the Great Pyramids of Egypt but also clawing and scratching for attention were the innumerable plastics, papers, and violating trash clustering along kilometers of fence lines. "These people don't deserve claim to such rich culture," I vomited. Just as vomiting relieves the stomach, it also varnishes the mouth with a great distaste for what just spewed.

I tried to secretly steal MaryAnn's ruby red shoes and heal-click my way back to where there's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home...

I couldn't find them.

We left one desert isle only to find ourselves trapped back on another. Oh, the irony.