Snow, Ice, and Wind
May 23, 2026 Filed under Curious
Up, up, towards the snowline we go.
Not much to see at the observation station I’m afraid.
For all I can tell, this is in the middle of San Francisco…
Hmm. I guess there are mountains around here somewhere?
That is a very high road marker.
There have probably been some years with enough snowfall to completely bury this marker.
Steely-eyed pedal-pushing day-glo dork, pausing for breath at a rest stop.
That looks very, very cold.
What’s this Volvo doing all the way up here?
Serious tires for serious weather.
Okay, the red dot has definitely moved since yesterday.
So much for moving to the shoulder when cars come by!
Oh hey the red dot moved again! Not bad for about an hour of cycling.
A slushy pool of cold.
A rock shelter facing a frozen lake. Brrr!
These lunatics are on a ski excursion.
I’m assuming this is the highest point of the road over the pass?
Nick rock! I think I’ll keep it.
The plows work pretty hard around here.
Very slightly different minerals, collecting into slightly different colored pools, I assume.
Hur hurr read my blog
Huh, this number is higher than the earlier one. That wasn’t the highest point of the road? What was it then?
Very fast downhill. There’s the lodge!
Claiming my bunk.
Whew, I was wrong about the moral of the story. (See previous episode.) That’s a relief.
But oh dear; all the armies in the alliance have turned on each other and the war continues. And now we see that wack insane general boy Dilandau is a sort of Ranma 1/2 refugee, and changes between Dilandau and Allen’s long-lost sister. Why? How? Way too late for questions!
So Van and Allen are fighting now because of this absurd premise… I suppose this needed to happen. Then there’s another weird internal spiritual journey for Hitomi and it’s not entirely clear what she decides: She admits her love for Van, then visualizes that as a bunch of tangled string around him, then the string falls away. So is she deciding not to love him, in order to save him and stop the fighting? Was the overall lesson for her character that she shouldn’t try to control her emotions because she can’t, or that she should – for the fate of the world – because she can? It remains frustratingly incoherent.
So, bucking the trend of happily-ever-after, the series ends with her and Van not being together, and hugging but not kissing, and soon enough Hitomi’s back in the “real world” and she swears she’ll never forget him, “even when I’m old.” (And she’ll miss the scarecrow most of all.)
And that’s it. Whole series run, as my journey through Norway is concluding. It really was a show in that classic turgid drama form: “One woman must decide between lovers, set against the backdrop of an unfolding disaster where countless people die.” (Consider “Titanic”, released a year later.) I guess I should have expected that, since it’s a show for teens.
I have more to say about this series in a personal context, but I’ll reserve that for tomorrow.
