Travel and Transformation—Gold: Gods Who Smell Like Goats
Ulrich, a robust 52-year-old pilgrim dressed in a red flannel shirt, told me, “I want to walk through the world without leaving footprints. It’s hard work to be silent.”
Sitting alone inside the walls of the convent of Santa Clara in Carrion de los Condes, Spain, I stretch out my legs under the early summer sun, relax my back into the warmth of the bricks, and listen through the silence to the twelve chimes. A fresh-faced nun in full black habit pokes her head out the door. I lean my head against the wall, close my eyes, sigh.
Ulrich the pilgrim started walking to Spain from his home in Austria. Paul started out from France. Others came from Scotland, Holland, Brazil, North Carolina, and the Czech Republic to walk the Camino de Santiago de Campostella (the Way of St. James). The Camino, which became known in the 12th century, is a key Christian pilgrimage to the believed burial place of the apostle Saint James (Santiago) on the Iberian Peninsula. His bones were happened upon centuries earlier by a shepherd following a field (campo) of stars (estrellas).
The Camino is actually several pilgrimages running across Europe, starting in Holland, France, Germany, Poland, Austria, and Portugal with all paths leading to Santiago. The most popular and developed route starts in the Pyrenees (at St. John Pied de Port in France or Roncesvalles in Spain) and cuts across the North of Spain. This 500-mile route is marked with bright yellow arrows and provides refugios, municipal- and church-sponsored places to stay for only a few pesetas a night.
I set off on the 30-day pilgrimage from Roncesvalles last May with my friend Paige. Both of us had recently stumbled through a life portal (master’s degree for her, academic tenure for me). I wanted to escape for a while from the world of the mind and was attracted to the Camino because it was a physical challenge (a month of walking 15 to 20 miles a day) made comfortable by the promise of a nightly shower and a bed in a beautiful old convent or monastery.
I did not walk the Camino for religious renewal, I did not go to fall in love all over again with my Catholicism, my spiritual birthright, my doctrinal heritage. I did not go planning to spend my days dwelling on the hospitality of Mary Magdalene, smiling into the gentle faces of Benedictine nuns, eating cheese on the warm cement of the convent of Santa Clara, learning to say a slow-paced rosary with imaginary beads. I did not go to hear the Our Father spoken in seven languages nor to have long afternoon conversations about the importance of fe (faith). I did not go to return to a childlike trust in Jesus Christ that I had last felt in third grade with the curly, black-haired Sister Kathleen Marie at Holy Name School.
I went to walk and to clear my head. I went because of the wretched monkey of yearning that never lets me know what exactly it is I am yearning for. Along the way, the innocent faith of an 8-year-old came back to me as I walked without a map or knowledge of the language across the foggy mountains, blue asparagus fields and enigmatic silent villages of Spain.
Day 5: Leaving Estella, we pass tall clay cliffs – vertical shadows long in the morning sun – tromp through fishnets of spider webs bejeweled by water. The May morning air chills my bare knees and licks the top of my ears. A cool constant rush of wind sifts and shakes the heads of silver and green poplars. Midday, the peaks of the blue and purple mountains lined up in the distance are hazed flat in the hot sun; lunch on the side of the road with a million ants, my body balanced by opposites – warm sun-dipped skin with cold-wind goose bumps.
Both young and old people walk the Camino. I met comfortable 60-year-old pilgrims, wise and satisfied with their lives, walking for solitude and sensual pleasure (walking fifteen miles gave even the most penitent pilgrim reason to enjoy a glass of Rioja wine), and uncomfortable old gerophobes anxious and scared of their age, walking to accumulate Catholic merit points as a way to escape hell (and perhaps strengthen their hearts and muscles to give them more years to do so).
Some pilgrims walked the Camino expecting Santiago to give them something — forgiveness for their sins, determination to stop smoking, or something more concrete like a limited edition 1982 Alfa Romeo that one pilgrim said he found in his driveway after his first pilgrimage (this time he was asking for a wife). Many of us were at a turning point in our lives and walked for courage and guidance. Some were deciding about relationships — to have them, to leave them, to change them; others were deciding about jobs — to have them, to leave them, to change them. Rare was the person simply walking to walk. Yet that is what we all did. Walk.
Throughout the day, I follow the etchings of slugs and the footprints of pilgrims — people whose names and stories I learn over the miles and meals, others whose names I never learn because of both language barriers and our common desire to practice solitude and learn silence. Still, we share nods, bits of chocolate, palm swigs of water from the town fountains, and the ritual of praying the Our Father and the excitement of watching the World Cup. I feel a connection to the past, to the centuries of others who stumbled over these same stones, to the tribe of slugs and pilgrims. They make me grin.
Day 10: I feel the Camino through my feet — luscious and extravagant is the earth. I feel the thick red clay that clings to my boots in clumps, globs of dirt that I carry with me from one village to the next. I feel the hard black tar that bruises my soles as I pound along the highway. I feel the hot sun that tans and then burns my skin. I feel my backpack rubbing my outer thighs raw and blistering my back. I feel my hands thicken and my fingers swell with blood. And then one morning, all morning, I feel the brush of flowers crowding my legs.
I am present to my mortality — my muscles, my soles, my ligaments. The hot June sun fatigues me, like a strong wind it slows my steps. Pain slithers through my body up the shin of my right leg, over to my left shoulder, down into the ball of my feet. I am alive. I lighten my pack, throwing out everything that is not necessary.
At night in each village we celebrate together at the Pilgrim’s Mass. I look out over the heads in the cold stone churches but do not find the dark curly hair of Paige. She does not go to mass. She is not Catholic; even more, she is anti-Christian. Having had a dismal, unfulfilling, even abusive experience with Christianity, she has not simply fallen away from Christianity but has run away from, in her view, a misogynistic and Eurocentric religion that defines God as a mean and cruel superego and a church full of people chanting shall nots. Tales told by other people I know suggest that her experiences are not unique. Perhaps this is more typical of my friend’s Southern Baptist version of Christianity, but I have met too many people who define themselves as “recovering Catholics” to dismiss the reality that Catholicism also makes people anti-Christian, anti-religion.
Religion is a nasty word among my peers, tail-end baby boomers, new-agers, twelve-step program followers who explore exotic Vietnamese Buddhism but reject the Christian religion of their youth. Religion, they say, is for people who fear hell; it is institutionalized, exploitative, and, in fact, un-Christianlike. I understand. I agree. When I show movies in my college classrooms of the horrors inflicted on the indigenous peoples of the Americas by Christian missionaries, I cringe and want to deny my religious heritage. It is easy for me to explore religion from a distance as a sociologist, through the works of Max Weber or Jacques Ellul, for example, but up close with my leftist academic peers I keep silent and downplay the fact that I like to go to church and observe the religious holy days. A colleague asks me to take her daughter to church on Easter Sunday and compares the experience to a Grateful Dead concert. I wince, yet understand how she conflates the two events — rituals, motion, incense, followings, ecstasy. Religion is something I submerge even in front of my therapist, who defines my weepiness in church (which I attribute to the presence of the Holy Spirit) as an inability to master my emotions.
In my modern day professional life I am Peter-like in my denial of Christianity, but on the Camino, on my Camino, I fell in love, unashamedly in love, with my religion, Roman Catholicism. I fell in love with the Mass, the rituals, the dogma, the rosary, the Word, the beauty on the faces of the statues expressing pain, joy, sorrow, peace. I sang hymns to the new flowers, clumps of brilliant golden yellow splashed about the mountainside, and kissed the base of crucifixes in the fields to express my gratitude.
Halfway along the route, I leave my friend in order to walk my own pace inside my own head. I walk fast and hard for a week, walking long days over the high flat mesa in the middle of Northern Spain – 25 to 30 miles a day with few stops and little conversation with others. The discipline of walking returns me to the heart. The flatness awakens my mind. The mesa, expansive miles of green, new-growth grain fields, reminds me of my grandpa’s farm in Michigan.
My days take on a soothing uncomplicated rhythm — pack, walk, eat, shower, sleep. Through the monotony of routine, in the space of silence, the demons appear (fears, frailty, the flawed nature of our very being, our humanness — the barren desolate ground of private hags). They develop a body and form that can be addressed, dealt with and then put away. I have a long conversation with my father.
I walk on alone, long long hours alone every day, every day, every day, thinking about my life, my loves, my work, my God. And then the thinking and self-dialogue riff into non-thinking as the rhythm of monotony pulls my soul into the moment. I spend the long hours of slow-motion movement absorbing the blue of the sky and the green of the grass. Days pass in this blue-green mode. Past and future lives funnel into the fulcrum of the horizon and return as the present with the thought that everything I will ever need has already been given to me. God is within. Out on the open mesa of tall green grass and below the endless skies of cloudless blue there is no space for past regrets or time for future worries; for now there is simply the blue and the green.
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh teaches me to live in the moment, an easy thing to do when days are simplified by the repetitious tasks of walking, eating, sleeping, praying. Hours and miles expand when covered by foot, day after day after week after week. The minutes open to the face of God in the green wheat fields against the blue skies.
The Catholic church is not God, and therefore the Church is flawed. The church is the map, and on the Camino I fell in love with the terrain. The Church was made by man. I do not deny nor dismiss the misogyny, the imperialism, the stupidity of past and present church leaders — but they were men, simply men, and the church an institution created by men. Tet, the beauty of the church should not be denied me because of the sins of men. Roman Catholicism is my language, it was given to me to help my search for the face of God.
Catholicism gives me something that Buddhism, Hinduism, animism does not. Not because it is right. I have no idea if it is or not. Catholicism is the religion of my innocence, my childhood. It bypasses my cerebrum and enters my nostrils, floats into my eyes, resounds in my ears. The smell of burning incense, the delicacy of Madonna statues and the gruesome horror of Santiago Matamoros (St. James the Moor Killer), the deep resonance of Angelus bells at noon, the hymns of eating the body and drinking the blood, the brass cylinders of the organ and the chorus of novitiate faces framed in the whiteness of the wimple: I fall to my knees and cry. Cry because it touches something deep inside of me, it touches my child, my soul, the nipples of my breasts.
On the Camino, time reaches back and pulls me forward. The bricks of the old churches are the color of earth — slate, yellow-grey, copper — the color of age, and stand in contrast to the bright newness of poppy orange and spring green. The churches and my religion are old, old like the earth, softened and settled in their dull colors, comfortable in their stability. Yet, I love the bunches of orange poppies and the fleeting chalky-purple butterflies. I find delight in the brilliancy of their colors, the urgency of their temporariness. The church grounds me in the past and prepares my future; the poppies and butterflies center me in the day and I remember to give thanks to the Creator.
The sun slips out from behind a cloud and the heat releases me. I think of being here now, and all the nows that created this moment, and how this now will add to future nows, a string of life beads, each as precious as the next. My worries about what to do with my life recede — but stay with me. So what. They will always be there, like the ants every day when I stop for lunch. I know too little to have big worries.
Day 25: Shrouded in the early morning mist, I climb straight up to the small mountain village of O Cebreiro. The higher I climb the thicker becomes the shroud. My legs are drenched in the dew of outstretched ferns; my neck and hair damp from the wetness of sagging branches. I climb through sleeping hamlets spackled with cow dung, pass regal black stallions munching in yellow-sun pastures. I listen to the wind talking, jabbering through the branches of the poplars; I drink in the little purple heather and the fields of flowing wheat. I wander into ancient churches and stare at the statues; waiting, listening for one to talk to me. I search the rivers of rushing water. I forgive my feet for hurting. I forgive myself for being human, for smelling like a goat.
Mary Patrice Erdmans is a professor of Sociology at Central Connecticut State University. The first mountain she ever climbed was in the Himalayans and it has been downhill ever since. She is the author of The Grasinski Girls: The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made (Ohio University Press, 2004) which won the Oskar Halecki Prize in 2005. Her articles and essays have appeared in North American Review, The Sociological Quarterly, Notre Dame Magazine, Polish American Studies, Journal of American Ethnic History, and 2B Quarterly.
Posted on August 6th, 2008 | By: admin | Filed under Funny Story
Men’s Travel—Gold Winner: The Worst Motorcycle in Laos
It was a 100cc Chinese make – a glorified scooter, actually – the type of four speed bike that is ubiquitous throughout Southeast Asia. The horn was burned out, along with the electric starter and both turning signals. The tires were bald. Neither the speedometer nor the gas gauge functioned. The silver-dollar sized mirrors looked as if they had been ripped from makeup compacts and attached to the bike with safety pins, spinning freely on their mounts like reflective whirly-gigs. The black paint job was ancient and covered in deep scratches. The hand brake didn’t work at all, and the foot brake felt as if it was attached with a worn out rubber band. Despite its many flaws, the bike held one advantage over the only other motorcycle to be had in town that day: It started.
FINDING IT
The colonial French had a famous saying:
“The Vietnamese plant the rice. The Cambodians watch it grow. The Lao listen to it grow.”
After my two hour noodle breakfast, I asked the guesthouse if there were any motorbikes available; I was informed that they were all rented out. So I slapped on some sunscreen and decided to walk into the town to try my luck.
Tha Khaek is a provincial capital, so there are some large administrative buildings in town, imposing and looking the part of bastions of communist authority. I walked down the main street towards the river, past pharmacies and dark garages, past women grilling chicken and selling boiled eggs, past young men lounging on their motorbikes and daring each other to try out their English on me. Most of the buildings were low, with faded paint that was cracked or peeling off. The closer I got to the river, the more dilapidated the buildings became, and the more the street became a mixture of paved parts and red dirt patches, as if the town itself was slowly falling into the brown waters of the Mekong. Chickens ran free, and dogs, some with sickeningly-severe mange, laid next to trash mounds and broken concrete on the roadside.
Acting on a tip from the guesthouse, I tracked down SV Rentals, a company that rents out all kinds of equipment for any need in Laos. The company was located in a massive garage near the riverside. Inside were numerous cars – including two brand new shiny Hummers, along with some construction equipment, and two sorry looking 100cc motorbikes. When I asked about the bikes, I was presented with a note, evidently from the guy responsible for renting them to foreigners. It became quickly apparent that this mystery man was the only person in the whole complex who spoke any English at all.
“Dear Sir or Madam,
Today I family out of the town the go. Rent motorbike to leave passport with man and taking key. Sorry to problem.”
After choosing the one bike that ran, I handed over my passport and around $30 in Thai baht and was off, cruising down the cracked road of Tha Khaek and joining the locals, most of whom were riding much nicer-looking bikes. The first thing I did was stop into the nearest garage and have my mirco-mirrors tightened. Little did I know of how many more Lao mechanics’ garages I would see over the next few days. I would experience a real life Zen of motorcycle maintenance, emptying my mind while watching Buddhist after Buddhist labor over my sad machine.
The road heading west out of Tha Khaek was two-laned and mostly paved - a luxury in road-challenged Laos. I opened up the bike and took in the scenery. To my left a turquoise river snaked up the valley – deep cool pools tempted me to stop the bike and have a refreshing swim, but I had just begun the journey and wanted to get some kilometers under my wheels. The road wound through farmland – mainly rice paddies with bored looking water buffaloes or groups of malicious black goats. Huge limestone mountains shot up on both sides of me, looking as if they had been crammed through the Earth by massive hands. The scenery was both stunning and magical. I breathed deeply and took it in with joy, reminding myself that this was why I had come back to Laos.After about thirty minutes of riding, I came upon two other Westerners on 100cc bikes. Their names were Inga and Steve, a couple of Belgian backpackers who had decided to take on The Loop as well. I had actually met them over breakfast while waiting for my no-show noodles. Inga sported tattoos and dreadlocks, displaying a hard edge against Steve’s laid back and smiling demeanor. I would pass them several times on the trip, only to be overtaken by them when I was broken down on the side of the road or in a village. We became companions of sorts, both out to conquer this loop on woefully underequipped machines.It was in the town of Gnomalat, the first real settlement since I left Tha Khaek, where I experienced my initial setback. My foot brake barely worked in the first place, and I noticed it getting even weaker every time I used it. This was of great concern, of course, since it was the only thing which could save me from certain death by water buffalo collision or a nasty plunge into a ravine. As I was crossing a small bridge and leaving the town, it failed entirely. The pedal went straight into the dirt of the road. So I gingerly rode the bike back into the dusty town and stopped at the first mechanic I saw. He was located in a dirt-floored shack at the bottom of a steep embankment. It took both of us to roll the bike down the path and into his shaded shop. The place was littered with grease-covered motorcycle parts, tools, and cigarette buts.The mechanic did some adjusting on the brake pedal and replaced the actual disk while his compatriots stood around, smoked, and commented in sing-songy Lao. With authority he pushed down on the brake and smiled to me as the wheel actually stopped.
“Okay? Okay?” he said.
“Okay,” I responded.
Fifteen minutes and two dollars later, I was once again crossing the bridge and now blazing out of town, heading down a ruler-straight stretch of road which shot up to the Nakai Plateau. My day’s destination was the actual town of Nakai. So I stopped to check the guidebook map to see how far I had to go, and once satisfied that Nakai was only an hour or two off, I happily jumped down on the kick start to continue on my way.
Nothing.
Again.
Nothing.
Again. Again. Again.
The bike was refusing to start. I kicked down on the starter ten more times with no results. I then ran the bike along the road, hopped on, and attempted a pop start. Again, nothing. After several more tries to pop start it, I cursed the sky and began the long, sweaty push back into Gnomalat.
As I toiled underneath the afternoon sun, Inga and Steve - the Belgian duo - putted up. I informed them of my troubles and they shook their heads and rode on, with promises to see me up the road. A few minutes later a local man rode up and gave me a push by placing one of his feet on my passenger peg. I then popped the bike into gear and managed to get it started, albeit with greatly diminished compression and power. My helper smiled and rode away, and I crawled my bike back into the town. As I came upon the bridge, I pushed down on my footbrake, which failed exactly as it did before, in the same spot, even. The pedal went straight into the ground and then kicked back up, right into the flesh of my leg, leaving a nasty bruise and bleeding gash. The bike then died. Again.
Covered in sweat, dust, and annoyance, I was approached by three Westerners on proper dirt bikes.
“You are having some sort of problem?”
From the sound of his accent, I figured him to be French. Laos is full of French people, smoking, gesticulating, and checking up on state of their former colonial holding.
My savior was indeed French, as were his two companions, and he gave me a push back to the mechanic’s, where we immediately handed the bike back over for further work. As I talked to the French trio, I learned that they were living and working in the area. It seems that a massive dam was being constructed on the Nam Hin Bun, a large river in the area. The three were employed by a French company involved with the project. As we waited for the mechanic to replace my faulty sparkplug and once again take on the evil foot brake, one of the Gallic trio sped off on his bike, quickly returning with two cold and glistening bottles of beer Laos. We passed the bottles around and drank - the cold delicious beer a welcome addition in my parched mouth. One wonderful thing about the French is their ability to enjoy a good drink or bit of food, even in the most uninviting conditions.
Before I knew it, the French had departed, and I was back on my bike, which now ran with full force and gusto. I crossed the bridge for what would be the last time, and sped straight up towards the Nakai Plateau.
At one point the semi-paved road gave way to a rought dirt and rocks. According to the guide book and those I talked to, it would stay this way for the next 80 kilometers or so. This slowed my progress, as I had to watch out for large and sharp rocks protruding from the roadway. I had also entered a construction zone, since every two minutes a cement or dump truck, coming from or going to the dam site, would barrel by, kicking up enough dust to bury a small town. I wrapped my scarf around my face and firmly placed my sunglass around my head, braving the huge clouds of dust which regularly obscured my view and took over the whole road. A red and white sign warned me of the obvious hazard in Lao script and English:
“BEWARE THE TREUKS IN-OUT.”
I began to climb up to the plateau, switch backing through verdant jungle, punctuated by small farms growing tobacco and rice. Despite the onslaught of trucks I was making good progress and the bike was running well. Even the hated foot brake felt as if it may hold for the rest of the trip.
Eventually the road stopped winding and climbing and I rolled into a proper town, or what passes for one in remote areas of Laos. Was this Nakai? Had I reached my day’s goal? The roads were dirt and the whole place covered in reddish dust. It had the feel a frontier boomtown – a result of the work the dam project had brought, to be sure. As I entered the town I noticed a large billboard. In English it boldy welcomed me, but the name of the place wasn’t “Nakai.”. I supposed that this was a town not accounted for on the map and decided to press on until I came to the real Nakai.
It wasn’t until it was after dark and a good twenty kilometers up the rough dirt road that I realized my mistake. The night before, around the campfire at the Travel Lodge, an American I met was loudly carrying on about his recent trip on The Loop. I was a bit drunk, more than exhausted, and not paying him the strict attention probably warranted.
“Once you get to the top of the plateau,” he said, “you’ll come to Nakai. Only the locals call it by another name. This happens a lot in Laos. The government has its official names, and the locals have theirs.”
So it was now dark and quite cold and I had overshot my town by over an hour. The next real settlement was at least sixty kilometers down a rocky and unforgiving stretch of road. I would have to turn back.
When I rode back into what I now thought to be Nakai, I was badly in need of some food, not to mention beer and a place to stay. I didn’t see any guesthouses in the town, though I had been told that there was one. What I did see, parked outside of a small restaurant, was a fully decked out 250cc Yamaha dirt bike. I quickly surmised that it did not belong to a local, most of whom prefer the small 100’s, like the one that was under me.
I parked my bike and walked into the restaurant and sat right down next to a Westerner decked out in dirt bike armor and typing away on an expensive-looking laptop. This was in place lit by a fluorescent light bulb with a dirt floor. The incongruity was stark, to say the least.
“Where’s Nakai?” I asked, not bothering to introduce myself.
“You’re in it, man. You’re here. Have a seat and grab a beer.”
His name was Don, and he was American. He was an expat, spending most of his time on his sailboat in Malaysia. Don was living the dream, of sorts, in that he had made enough money to pack it all up, wave goodbye to his friends, buy a boat, and sail halfway around the world. He was in his mid fifties and sported a dirty blond ponytail, which, with his dirt bike getup, took a good fifteen years off his appearance. I ordered a beer and Don immediately set out to show me his state-of-the-art laptop. Using Bluetooth sattelite technology, Don was able to log on to the internet in the most undeveloped areas of Laos, in places where some people have never even seen a computer. But the real reason Don brought such equipment with him had little to do with email or checking his stocks: Don was making maps. He spent four months of the year motorcycling around Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, all the while filling in the details on satellite maps. Every village on every dirt track was meticulously plotted, within thirty foot accuracy, according to him. He claimed to have the most comprehensive and accurate map of Cambodia in existence. He said that he had “finished” the country.
This was Don’s hobby, and he was passionate about it. He told me that it cost him a lot of money and time, and that he hoped to one day financially profit from it. But I could tell that money wasn’t a huge concern for Don, despite that fact that he kept bemoaning the weakness of the dollar versus the strength of the Thai baht.
But soon the coversation switched form cartography to my my own foolhardy quest. He shook his head and laughed.
“You’re gonna try to make it down the rest of this road, all the way to Lak Sao, on a 100cc scooter? You’ll never make it man! I’d turn my ass back if I was you.”
“I know I can do it. These little bikes are tougher than you may think,” I replied. I owned one back in Korea, where I lived, and it served me well.
“Listen man – that road is a construction zone. This dam project is a big deal, it’s being financed by the World Bank. The road is nothing but potholes and rocks and dirt and dump trucks roaring by every thirty seconds. And that guide book is telling backpackers to come ride up here? They’re out of their fucking minds.”
We let it rest at that and after a hearty dinner of rice, soup, and some sort of fried meat (Beef? Buffalo? Cat?), Don and I drank a couple more beers, and then he showed me the way to the guesthouse, a sprawling complex around the corner from the restaurant that was mainly being used to house workers on the dam project. I got a room and fell into a deep night’s sleep.
When I left the guesthouse in the morning, Don’s bike was already gone. He was probably halfway to the Vietnamese border, mapping dried riverbeds and counting chickens. I was hungry, so I stopped at a restaurant with a sign in English, usually a strong hint that their menu will be in the same tongue. I was lucky - I could indeed read the menu, so I ordered a bowl of noodle soup that did not take two hours to get to my table. It came right away, actually, as did the two cups of thick Lao coffee that charged me up for an uncertain day’s ride.Day two on The Loop started like day one, with breathtaking scenery, a happy motorbike, and the full body thrill that always comes with cruising down the road in an exotic country. I passed through more rice paddies and thick forests. The trees cast their cool shadows over the road and the truck traffic was minimal. The morning sun warmed my back and everything was bright and good.Of course this bliss was doomed to end, and it did so abruptly, in the form of a large rock in the middle of the road. Crack! My back tire hit it with full force, blasting out all of the air and kicking the rock straight up into the chain, which responded by jumping the sprocket. In less than a second, my peaceful morning cruise was transformed into a roadside stall-out in the middle of nowhere. So I did what I had learned to do the day before in such situations: I pushed.Within ten minutes I was pushing the bike into a small village called Ban Nongboham. The area was dotted with these villages, clusters of wooden huts with thatch roofs, surrounded by fields with crops. All of the buildings were built on stilts – the rainy season was evidently serious business in these parts. As I strained into the village, I came across an open-faced hut with a woman inside. In front of her was one dusty counter with a smattering of goods for sale – a few cans of orange Fanta, some pink rolls of toilet paper, bottles containing gasoline, and unidentifiable foodstuffs packed in plastic wrappers (Nuts? Dates? Insects?). The woman smiled and greeted me loudly with the all-purpose Lao greeting:
“Sabaidee!”
“Sabaidee!” I replied, as I always did. At every village I rode through, the people - adult and child alike - would briefly stop what they were doing, wave, and hit me with their best shout-out.
The woman immediately followed her greeting with a litany of Lao, a language that I could only say “hello” and “thank you” in. She seemed unconcerned with my incomprehension. Surely any foreigner who would ride a motorcycle into this part of the country would be at least semi-facile in the language, she seemed to assume.
I just pointed to the tire and then pointed to the chain, shaking my head as to indicate a problem. She understood at once, and shouted to a dirty-faced little boy who meekly took us in from the other side of the road. She then motioned to the little boy and told me to follow him. Even though I didn’t understand the words, the intent was clear, and for a moment I convinced myself that I could actually understand the language, a self-delusion that I commonly fall into when confused in Asia.
I followed the little boy deeper into the village, past a line of huts. Hairy black pigs rooted in the dirt. Chickens of all ages clucked and ran in terror as I approached. Trash littered the ground, along with half burnt pieces of wood and dried cakes of cow shit. This village was poor. It lacked both running water and electricity. It also seemed to lack men, as the only people observing me were women, the younger of whom held infants to their breasts. It then occurred to me that the men were probably out in the fields – either that or they had recently been rounded up by government troops, taken to a deep part of the forest, and shot. I began to harbor serious doubts that my motorbike could be fixed. These doubts were soon assuaged, however, by the arrival of The Mechanic.
The Mechanic was a man, though one unsuited for farm work. He was deformed, with shriveled and useless legs. He had matted long hair with bits of wood and grass in it and wore an old army jacket so filthy that I had an impulse to yank it off and burn it. He got around on his hands, which seem longer and broader than usual, but perhaps this was only a result of him ambling about on them for a lifetime. He looked like he was in his early 30’s, the perfect age for a prenatal victim of Agent Orange, which the U.S. government mercilessly sprayed over this part of Laos throughout the Indochina War. The Mechanic looked at me, flashed me a smile, lit a cigarette, and made his way to my bike for an inspection. By the look on his face I could tell that the fix would be no problem, and he was soon barking orders to the gang of bored looking boys who had gathered around us to take in the action. One boy scurried up a ladder and into a hut, reappearing with a burlap bag filled with some tools. The Mechanic quickly got to work, ripping off the tired and tube, locating the leak, and patching it up. At one point, when his kid helper couldn’t locate the extra tire patching, The Mechanic climbed up the ladder and into the hut, using only his arms and doing so with the confidence of an expert. He came back down with the patch tube and finished the job.
He easily re-railed the chain, even tightening it up a bit with his wrench. When the bike was ready to go I paid him his fee – one dollar – and went on my way.
The next stretch of road was the most isolated and beautiful on the Nakai Plateau. The villages disappeared, and soon I was riding through untouched forests and jungle. The traffic was light, and I made a steady but reasonable pace down the rocky road. My goal for the day was the town of Lak Sao, the last stop in Lao before the border with Vietnam. Within an hour I was crossing the Nam Hin Bun, which stretched out below me and reflected the noon sun. A new bridge was being built a half of kilometer up, and soon, within a year or two, the river would be dammed (Or should I say “damned?”) and much of what I had seen would be underwater. Ahhhh, progress. The words of Edward Abbey, whose “Desert Solitaire” I had completed just days before, rang in my head:
“Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris.”
Soon I came upon two other riders covered in dust. It was Inga and Steve. They too had stayed in Nakai the night before, but they were at a different guesthouse. They were in good spirits and their bikes had held up for them well. They were incredulous when I told them about my troubles.
I rode with the Belgians for a while, but their pokey pace was a bit too slow for my liking, so I gave them a wave and cranked up the throttle.
The road began to wind down from the Nakai Plateau, and now the string of trucks making their way up and down was intolerable. I rode through Saharan dust clouds and was nearly forced off the road by coffee-jacked truck drivers rushing to make their deliveries in time. As I coughed up dirt and picked dust nuggets from my nose, I thought of a clean shower and hot meal awaiting me in Lak Sao. My fantasy was soon interrupted, however, by another flat tire. The Mechanic had just patched the tube. They had no new ones in the village to sell me. The stress of the road was evidently too much for the tire to bear, and the patch failed. So I pushed the bike down the road, soon passed by the Belgians, who could only laugh and look at me with sympathetic eyes.
Soon I was off of the plateau and into a village. This village was the most developed settlement since Nakai. It may have even had electricity. I pulled off at the first mechanic I spotted and he had a new tube on and inflated within ten minutes. This is the terrific thing about breaking down in Laos. Everyone rides 100cc bikes for transportation, so even the most primitive village has someone who can fix them. Let us give thanks to the invention of interchangeable parts.
After stopping for a brief swim in a cool river, I caught up with the Belgians and accompanied them into Lak Sao. Lak Sao is used as a stop over point on the way to and from Vietnam, so despite the rugged frontier feeling to the place, there are plenty of good places to stay. I got a huge room in a guesthouse in the shadow of and imposing mountain. It even had hot water, though the water was only truly hot at the lowest volume – which was nothing more than a trickle – so I spent the greater part of thirty minutes feeling like I was getting peed on.
I took a wander through the town, which is located at a crossroads with a main, paved route. The worst part of the journey appeared to be over. The rest would be on smooth, sealed roads. I wandered through the market, past stalls selling clothes and food. Meat sat out on tables, unrefrigerated, shining in the periodic bursts of sun. One stall featured several gutted rats and what appeared to be a guinea pig. Lak Sao is located in a mountainous and unspoiled part of the country, and much of the local wildlife was evidently available for consumption at this market, but in recent years there has been less and less to eat, as the hunt went on unchecked. Just rats and pets left, it seemed.
I joined Inga and Steve at the main restaurant in town, aptly named “The Only One.” The menu was vast, containing your usual fried rices and curries, along with a dish puzzlingly named, “Boiled the furniture of bffalo.”
We ordered the chicken and fish.
Soon a man rolled up on a big dirt bike. It was Don, my map making drinking buddy from the night before. He had been all the way up to the border, which is at a high elevation, and was too chilled to continue with his ride. An unnatural and frigid wind blew down from the mountains that day, making motorbike travel a balls-chilling affair. So he joined us and we ordered more food and more beers, continuing our impromptu party well into the night. We were eventually joined by three Aussies who rode in on dirt bikes, as well as a group of about 40 elderly Dutch people from a tour bus staying the night on its way to Vietnam. To see a true trailblazer such as Don and this herd of package tourists in the same room truly represented the two extremes of Southeast Asian travel. By the end, aided by countless bottles of beer, I had made friends with them all. And after nearly falling asleep at the table, I said my goodbyes and stumbled back to my room though the pitch black of the town.
The morning proved to be even more frigid than the night. The wind had intensified and I could see my breath, a phenomenon I hadn’t counted on for this trip to the “tropics.” I put on my pants, two t-shirts, two button-up shirts and my sweater, and proceeded to zip down the road, savoring the smooth surface and quick pace. The dirt track was behind me, and once again I was on smooth and sealed hard surface. Like the two previous days, the ride started out perfectly. I was winding through wide valleys, punctuated by huge mountains. It was dramatic country, reminiscent of scenery found in the American West. I made it about an hour down the road – which was pretty typical for the trip – before my I hit my first patch of trouble. There was a dip in the road and I was heading back up at a pretty steep grade. I had the bike opened up at a good speed, when the engine suddenly started making a terrible high pitch noise, as if it were wheezing. I lost compression and a lot of power, and then the bike just died. By now I had cleared the top of the hill and just coasted it down, pop starting it near the bottom. The engine fired up, but now it sounded weak and unwell, and I was only getting about half the power I was before. This was accompanied by a thick blue smoke belching out of the tail pipe. I was burning oil.I went up a big rise and began to coast it on the other side, spying a village below. I pulled into the gas/mechanic hut and had them get a wrench to check the oil. The cap was so encrusted with petrified dirt that it could not be unscrewed by hand. The mechanic, an ancient crease-faced man, undid the cap and peered into the smoking oil chamber, which was empty. He shook his head and pointed.“No,” he said, displaying the extent of his English.I bought a liter of oil which he poured back in. He then pushed down on the kick start with his hand to pump it through. As he did this, a full stream of oil oozed out of the engine casing. He did it again and looked closely. There was a crack in the casing. The bike had been leaking oil for a long time and I hadn’t spotted it. One of the men who now gathered around mimed a rock jumping up and hitting the casing, causing the crack. The mechanic threw up his arms and told me “No,” once again. Evidently, I was fucked.
I looked up the empty road to the small mountains in front of me. I estimated that I had seventy or eighty kilometers until the road back to Tha Khaek. From there it was another ninety to the town. But within twenty kilometers was the town of Ban Na Hin, which was the site of another dam and gateway to a seven kilomter-long limestone cave, a popular backpacker stop. Surely this town would have a more sophisticated garage. If I could get the bike there, I could get the leak patched and still possibly make it back to Tha Khaek.
So I bought five more liters of oil, started the bike, and putted it down the road and up the mountain, blowing fat ribbons of smoke out the back like the loser of a WWII dogfight. Once the smoke cleared up I knew my oil was gone, so I’d pull over and pour in another pint, praying that I had enough lube to get me to the next stop.
And I did. Soon, at the base of a large mountain, located in a lush valley, the town of Ban Na Hin appeared. I coasted down and wheeled it in the first mechanic I saw, who was a young man in his very early twenties. It took an hour for him to replace the casing, and it set me back $20, which is a small fortune in communist Laos.
Now my oil leak was fixed, though my fear that the engine was significantly damaged was confirmed, as I rode the bike out of the town, spewing smoke and feeling the bike struggle to do its job. As I rode down the level road, I was fine. The bike sounded bad but was still going. It was only when I tried to climb the mountain out of the town that the bike bogged down and died on me once again.
So I turned the bike around and coasted it down the base of the mountain. I had not gotten very far up, but enough to where I was picking up significant speed on the way back down. And it was here that I was revisited by a previous demon: my footbrake failed yet again, only now my wounded bike was shooting straight down the foot of a mountain.
Luckily, I did not die, nor was I even hurt. I got the bike down by putting into low into gear and zigzagging back and forth along the road. This managed to slow me down enough to reasonably pop start the thing. From ther I slowly took it back into town back to my ace mechanic.
This mechanic was more enterprising than the first one who touched the brakes. He at once busted out the welder and went to work, fixing the brake problem once and for all. When I stomped down on it, it felt firm, made of titanium. I knew it would now hold.
So it was back out of town and up the mountain. This time I kept the bike in first the whole time and it did not die. It climbed up, even gaining speed. At the top of the mountain was a turnout, a scenic vista, denoted by a sign. I stopped and took in the view, which was of intricate rock formations on the surrounding mountains, at least from what I could make out. The view was marred, ruined even, by the thick haze of smoke that hung in the air. It was the dry season in Laos, the time when the farmers burn their fields. This was going on all over the country, layering the whole place under a blanket of smoke, stinging the eyes, burning the nostrils.
At this point I closed my eyes to the scenery. The surroundings became secondary to me, as all of my attention was centered on the health of the bike’s engine, which was growing worse by every kilometer. I was still moving forward, going, but I felt the power weaken and the engine’s croak intensify. At one point I even ran out of gas, but manage to push my rapidly dying machine into a village which sold gas. By the time I made it to the road to Tha Khaek, it was barely moving. Still, I took a left and opened up my throttle all the way, which, in fourth gear, added up to what must have been no more than fifteen kilometers an hour. And it was an hour that I got on the road back to town - exactly an hour before the bike finally died, this time for good.
The last eighty kilometers to Tha Khaek were covered in a Japanese pickup truck. I had stuck out my thumb and secured a ride from a Lao man whose name I never got. We loaded the husk of the bike into the back of his truck and rode together in silence. Even if we spoke each other’s language there was nothing to say. The look of defeat on my filthy sunburned face, combined with the uselessly immobile machine with me, said all that was needed.
They took the bike back at the rental agency with little hassle. The English speaking man was there in person this time – no note necessary – and though he looked shocked at the state of me and the machine, he handed over my passport and I handed over his keys. When I told him about the oil leak, he informed me that they had “fixed it before.” I guess that I unfixed it.
Back at the Travel Lodge I related my war stories to those present at the campfire. I sipped my Beer Laos bottles and described gory detail after detail, delighting in the look of amazement on their faces that I could endure such an ordeal.
Late in the night, as I wobbled from the beer, Inga and Steve rolled in, looking defeated. I had not seen them on the road that day. They had evidently taken a dirt track out of Ban Na Hin that led to the limestone cave, thirty kilometers out. They had made it only ten when Steve got a flat tire. They pushed for an hour, but found no village, no mechanic, no rice paddy saviors. Eventually, they turned back toward the town and had it fixed there, choosing to then ride back to Tha Khaek.
When I tell people about the trip, about the plague of breakdowns, most lament my awful luck. What had I done to accrue such bad trip karma? But the mechanical failings, the problems, these forced me to stop along the way in places that I would have hardly given a glance to from the road. I got to spend time in these villages and get a glimpse into real Lao life – not what is packaged and sold to the Khaosan Road hordes. The problems on the trip made me relax, they made slow down. And Laos is a country best viewed in first gear.
Posted on August 6th, 2008 | By: admin | Filed under Funny Story
Travel Memoir—Gold Winner: Crazy Diamond
by Adrian Cole
I couldn’t really ever tell you why I left home. I’d come up with some superficial reasons, of course, but just so that we could avoid an awkward and unhelpful silence. The deeper truth probably lies somewhere in the inherited murkiness of the human psyche, a monkey’s inclination to wander, always, one has to assume, looking for larger bananas, taller trees, and perhaps a place of fewer predators.
Soon after I had arrived in Texas I read the book Bruce Chatwin wrote shortly before succumbing to AIDS: What Am I Doing Here? It did not necessarily answer that particular question for me, nor did it really help me in figuring out the reasons for my perambulations. But it did at least allow me to ask that question of myself, which before I had perceived but never really articulated: What the hell am I doing here? The particular question obviously had existential undertones which were exaggerated by the author’s untimely death, and seemed to refer both to a geographical place and to the human condition itself—the ultimate existential query. Chatwin’s question, presented as the title to a collection of serious travel essays, cast a cloud of shadowy doubt over the whole enterprise of being a stranger, what it means to be away from our family, and to some extent from ourselves, and I found that useful.
Reading about those who had made similar journeys, sometimes in the distant past, clarified one thing: most people voyage with a sense of promise, with a belief or an inkling that there is gold under a distant rainbow, and the inclination often times is sustaining, because people seem to put up with a lot of pain and suffering which, you imagine, could be avoided by staying home. But I was no Cabeza da Vaca, let’s be clear on that. I mean that I did not consider myself intrepid because of this particular sojourn, although I often identified with this luckless sixteenth-century Spanish explorer, and sometimes, navigating my way across the Texas hinterland, I would catch glimpses of human figures on the horizon, reduced by the distance to shimmering stick-men, and I would be struck by their fragility in the maw of the elements. These figures always reminded me of da Vaca and his hopeless companions, lost on a wild and distant continent, and although I too felt somewhat lost, I was grateful that I had a varied diet, a roof over my head and a bank account guaranteeing escape should it become necessary. What in the end did I have in common with him? I could not even speak Spanish. But I did come from the landmass of Europe (or somewhere just off the coast) and I did see America as a New World.
I had been sent to the southwest by a publishing company; my mission was to sell high- quality university textbooks to professors. In the enormity of Texas I came across universities much like a parched desert nomad might happen upon Saharan Wadis, covering huge distances over the semi-arid terrain in my Texan camel, a pearl-white Ford Taurus. I grew to love that car even if at first I had looked at it with something bordering on disdain. After the fist couple of thousand miles I realized that when I beheld it, first thing in the morning, sitting sedately outside my motel room, I was overwhelmed by a sense of comfort, even love—the kind of feeling one might experience when looking at a benign dictator who shows you leniency after a crime, or a dentist who after drilling your teeth speaks soothingly and gives you refreshing liquid with which to gargle. This vehicle was my sanctuary, my fifteen square foot of sovereign space, and its graceful steel curves and its competent wheels guaranteed me a certain insulation from the threateningly foreign environment.
The land over which I guided the car was the same hard land over which Cabeza da Vaca had stumbled five hundred years ago. The ultimate objective of his expedition had been Florida and the riches that everyone believed lay there. After shipwrecks and desertions, most noticeably of the captain and expedition’s leader, da Vaca and a handful of companions were left helpless and adrift in an unfathomably vast and unexplored territory without a map, without language and without even the vaguest hope of rescue. An isolation not unlike someone stranded on the moon with no space ship—a terrible existential imprisonment.
After the rest of his party had disappeared or been killed by local tribes, Cabeza da Vaca was left with three others: Andres Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, and a slave from Morocco called Estevanico. They spent months on end eating nothing but oysters (at this time they were not a delicacy and there was no horseradish or cocktail sauce), shucking them with rocks until their hands bled. And months again eating roots, and sometimes if they were lucky, extremities of dog. These were the good times. They survived off the morsels of flesh scraped from skins; they stayed with nomads who suckled their children until the age of twelve because food was so scarce that otherwise their offspring would stand no chance of surviving. America, as it came to be known, was then a vast amorphous wonderland full of boundless wildness, beauty and barbarism, a fluid world strewn with gaping portals into the afterlife. Those were the days when you really could not count on the recognition that another human being must owe to you—to you as a human being, that is—the recognition that prevents him from otherwise doing you harm, like the Spaniards were doing to the Mesoamericans: tearing them limb from limb, boiling them alive, feeding them to the dogs, hanging children from the legs of their dangling mothers. Most strange fruit. Still, the small group of lost Europeans wandered across the desert landscape of the southwest, sometimes in what would become Mexico, sometimes in the future United States, both sides of the future border equally harsh and unforgiving. Having been separated from his companions, da Vaca, alone in the desert wilderness, would think he had actually died, so profound was his sense of isolation.
Some of the colleges I visited were harboring professors from far-flung places and my arrival occasioned long talks about New England, Old England, and on one occasion a writing instructor in southern New Mexico asked me longingly where I bought my trousers. “Not in this state,” he guessed wistfully. A professor of forensic anthropology in Waco showed me her personal photos of the carnage at the Branch Davidian compound, which she had been in charge of analyzing after the FBI siege.
“See,” she said smilingly, “some shit happens down here too!”
My relative isolation made my identification with da Vaca grow, slowly. I was soon bored selling books to pompous professors; whenever I could I crept off campus early and found desolate rivers in which to bathe, or I walked in arid, dusty hills. Often I found myself far from the nearest habitation and able to contemplate these distant historical eras, without the meddlesome interruption of the present, able to tap in to the raw reality of the lost medieval Spaniards. But more often than not I found that isolation was hard to come by in Texas these days, and just as da Vaca had his fair share of interactions with locals, I had mine too.
On a July afternoon, when, thankfully, the endless American collegiate summer was in full session, I was sitting by a river. It was hot—the kind of heat that drugs you and slows down your metabolism. I had been perched on a rock for a few minutes when a truck drew up behind me. A pair of dogs jumped out of the back then plunged into the water next to me, having inspected me first by pushing their noses into my face. A boy of about ten or eleven soon followed them.
“Is it cold?” he asked me with an English accent. We had a brief conversation in which he didn’t seem to notice my accent—maybe he hadn’t been here long enough to find another English accent strange. Soon an elderly couple came struggling down the bank hauling a large steel canoe, forcing me to move from my rock to avoid being driven into the river at the prow of their vessel. The man, who must have been in his sixties, wore a moustache which drooped on either side of his mouth in Sancho Panza style. His eyes were also characterized by a droopy effect which made him appear either sleepy or in an advanced state of meditation.
“Sorry ta interrupt your readin’,” he said in a sincerely apologetic way. The canoe found the water and bobbed obligingly on its surface. Meanwhile the boy had fitted a mask to his head and began examining the underwater life. The dogs were jumping in and out of the river a little too close to me, occasionally sliding onto my towel with their large mud-filled feet. The woman, overweight, with a ruddy complexion and an ill-fitting bathing suit, stood over me.
“What ya readin’?” she asked in a chummy tone, taking my book by its cover and turning it towards her. I felt myself stiffen instinctively. I told her it was a book about early American history, smiling weakly.
“Which chapter are ya gonna be tested on?” I told her I wasn’t actually reading it for a test, that I was too old for school, unfortunately. She handed it back to me, apparently disappointed. As if history, for its own sake, was an eccentric’s game. She was silent for a couple of beats.
“England or Australia?” she said, fixing me with a piercing stare, beaming now, as if delighted to find another way to extend our conversation.
“England,” I admitted, impressed that she had tumbled my game with so few words being exchanged and feeling all the more of an outsider for it.
“We’re from England too, ain’t that right, Jason?” Jason reared his head out of the water and gave an incomprehensible grunt from inside his mask.
“Yeah, that’s right,” she continued, drinking from a plastic cup which appeared to be brim full of bourbon.
“We’re just slumming it here in Texas!” She gave a gravelly laugh.
“Well we’re not English, exactly. But Jason’s dad is. Oh yes, his dad is over there in Dagenham. Do you know Miller Street, that’s where they live, down there by the river. You know what’s it called, Jack?” She appealed to her husband who was busily attempting to mount the canoe.
“What, honey?” He said.
She threw her cigarette butt into the river. “You know, Jack, that pub right there on Miller street, the Dead Duck, Royal Duck, whatjamacallit?” Jack was in the canoe and with his huge belly pointing to the bows he was engaged in extracting the paddles from under the seat.
“The Duck and Rabbit,” he said, causing her to explode with another hoot of laughter. “The Fuck-like-Rabbits, whoops! Excuse my French! That’s right ain’t it Jack?” Jack gave me a long-suffering smile from his position of readiness in the canoe.
“C’mon honey, lets get this ship movin’ and leave this poor guy to his recreation,” he said, encouraging her to lift herself from the rock.
“You’re right. I’m sorry; we’ve just ripped up your nice peaceful afternoon here, lets go to sea—we’re here to have a good time, right Jason?” Jason was face down in the river, too absorbed to be listening. She staggered to her feet and walked gingerly into the water where the canoe awaited her. I was curious—apprehensive even—about how she was, in fact, going to get into the canoe, bearing in mind the characteristic instability of canoes. First of all she lifted her right leg onto the gunwale of the boat like a ballerina stretching on a bar (I was surprised to see that she could perform this maneuver at all without serious damage to ligaments). Then, when it was clear that no other part of her anatomy would cooperate from this position, she decided to start from scratch and with some effort removed her leg from the boat, letting it plop back into the water.
“Here,” Jack offered her his hand, and she suddenly lunged head-first into the canoe causing it to tip drastically towards her. As it did this Jack presciently steadied it by instinctively falling in the other direction, one hand still in hers. Now she was half in and half out, and she wriggled the rest of the way, like a matronly mermaid, to end up lying face-down on the bottom of the vessel. Soon she was seated on the bench and was cradling her cup of whiskey which Jack had been looking after and miraculously had not spilled.
“Hey Jason,” she yelled at the boy who was still engrossed under the surface. “You wanna come over to the other side with us? C’mon, we’re goin’ explorin’!” They were about to set off when one of the dogs reappeared on the bank, whining.
“Oh my baby! I can’t go without my baby!” The dog launched itself at the canoe from the riverbank, and Jack dragged it, bedraggled, into the rapidly-filling canoe. Once Jason was aboard they set off against the current waving to me and promising to return shortly.
With this advance warning I slipped off my rock and swam up-river against the current and found that I was just about moving forward, at a snail’s pace. My identity. Why was it so difficult to get beyond it, beyond the basic fact of difference? With barely any language being exchanged too! It was as if there was an aura around me screaming of foreignness. This had been da Vaca’s curse. The medicine man who had captured him had recognized the vulnerability of his alien identity, which set him apart from others and made him a perfect candidate for life-long servitude (he escaped, of course, after several years). And slavery was no passing concern for da Vaca—it was endemic in the southwest back then, human beings traded as eagerly beads, or skins, or edible meat. And it was not only the Indians who were doing it. The first white men da Vaca saw after all his years of wandering, the first glimpse he had of his very salvation were mounted, Spanish, slave traders patrolling the planes for stray Indians. If he was enslaved, it was to his identity, and what seemed almost more painful than anything to him was the knowledge that he was one of them.
The river was shallow, its flow interrupted by long weeds which reached up from the sandy bottom to float on the surface of the water. I tried to avoid these patches of weed. I never like to touch anything when I’m in the water. However I suddenly found myself caught up in a throng of this vegetation, kicking and thrashing as against an animate enemy. Just as I thought I was free of the river flora, I felt something move in the pocket of my shorts. My shorts have large, billowing pockets, which are actually very inappropriate for swimming, as they balloon outwards when they fill with water and act as water brakes. But something was in my right pocket, and it appeared to be alive. I was filled with a terrible panic. Short of putting my hand into the pocket and pulling out the offending creature, I didn’t know what to do. I grabbed the pocket and its contents and gave it a quick, vicious squeeze—a cowardly, mean reaction to the fear instilled by the thought of a smaller being. Whatever was there was hard and shell-like: Crustacean, I realized. This only increased my terror, to know that a crustacean was in my pocket—a crustacean! In all its primeval, unfathomability, face to face with my most vulnerable and intimate areas.
I sensed stillness now in my pocket, and thought that maybe I had actually killed whatever had been inside—the instinctual fear of further contact with the unknown was coursing through my veins, and enabled me to overcome my scruples about killing. But I needed to take further evasive action, and the only measure left to me was to take the shorts off and shake the creature loose. I did this in one swift movement without even untying the shorts. Treading water as I drifted downstream through yet more weed, I shook the shorts in the air in front of me, and as I did so I almost collided with a family of Mexicans swimming my way. They altered course to give me a wide birth, alarmed by my antics, shepherding their children out of my reach. From the corner of my eye I noticed something float away from the shorts, downstream, of a reddish-green color.
I soon reached a grassy area of river bank where I made landfall and attempted to regain my composure. I noticed a scattering of crawfish remains, as if people had enjoyed an al fresco seafood meal. Clearly these creatures were common in this river. I rooted in the weed on the river bank with a long stick and sure enough I soon encountered the bulbous eyes and spine chilling pincers of a live crawfish. Admittedly, the creature was not large. In fact it was about the size of a small hamster. But a hamster is a rodent and, noxious as some rodents are, they do not belong in the same league as crustaceans. Personal preferences apart, crustaceans are scientifically, typologically, different, and different not just in an equal kind of a way, but indisputably worse. I offered the beast the end of my stick and it backed into the weed with a passivity which surprised me, but its movement made me shiver; its little legs folding midway to embed their spear-like feet into the sand for purchase.
The part of the river where I had alighted was populated by small groups of people who had parked their cars under drooping trees and were sitting on rocks drinking from beer cans and some of them were throwing fishing lines into the slow-moving current. Soon a jeep pulled up on the grass behind me, and two young boys and a man of about fifty stepped out. The boys raced for the water and hurled themselves in, whooping. The man walked over to me. He had a gray beard of medium length, and a face weathered by the sun. He walked with a slight roll, like a sailor, and notwithstanding a fairly muscular, squat build, he had a pronounced belly.
“Me and my boys like to swim here, with the rope and all,” he said. “It be alright if we share the space?” His voice was broad Texas, and deep. He reminded me of Stacy Keatch—a mixture of the rough and ready and the civilized. I told him that there was plenty of space, to feel free. The boys ran back onto the bank and started playing with the rope. The younger one, around ten, said: “We were here before, you know.”
The father now had his shorts on and was gingerly entering the river. He immersed himself up to his waist and stood there, facing the sun and moving his hands around in front of him, in arcs in the water. He turned around to face me.
“Where’re you from, man?” His tone was almost challenging.
“I’m English,” I said after a pause. He scooped the water in his hands and let it run down his chest.
“Oh yeah? Scots Irish Comanche, myself.” He held his head high, and spoke with an air of pride. I wanted to tell him that if he wanted to play the origins game then I would have to start over; we can all identify with the underdog if we dig in our heritage a little. In reality he was American in the same way that I was English. Sure, I might have some Polish-Jewish-Celtic blood, but I don’t bother to pull all of the possible strands out every time I state my nationality. I hold a British passport, I speak English. But it seemed that he wanted to connect with those who had suffered at the hands of the American colonials and those who resisted the English colonial administration. It was a pity and an irony that the Scotch and the Irish were no great improvement over the English, as far as the Comanches were concerned, making their lives nasty, brutish and short and almost wiping them out with their guns and their European diseases. But I got the message.
“So what’s your name, Limey?” He said, after a pause. It was a strange tone—challenging yet friendly. It was as if he had set up his perimeter, established a boundary, and now was exploring it a little.
“My name’s Richard,” he said, and then looked up at the sky, “Richard the Lion heart.” There was only the slightest hint of a grin on his face. Coeur De Leon, I thought to myself, now there’s a true infidel-killing Brit, if ever there was one. He immersed himself in the water and executed a few short strokes, and then came back to the beach and walked out of the river. The boys by this time were busy swinging off the rope.
“Dad, are you gonna swing or what!” The younger one pestered him until he stood on the bank and pulled the rope back, gripping tightly with his hands, and with a delicacy which belied his size but bespoke his age, he swung out over the water, released the rope and plopped the death-defying two feet into water up to his knees. His son was ecstatic and grabbed the rope, handing it back to him: “Again! Do it again!” Richard winced, “Ah, no Sammy, you’re old man’s too fragile for that, why don’t you give it a shot.” He stood on the bank next to where I was sitting and dried himself vaguely with a towel. He was a handsome man and had a knowing gentleness about him. He was old, I observed, to have such young kids and I wondered if he was divorced and this day, Saturday, was his “time.”
He threw down the towel and turned to me: “I ‘m gonna smoke some of Mexico’s finest. Care to join me?” He produced a reefer and ignited it with a Zippo lighter, inhaling sharply before handing me the joint. We passed a few moments enjoying a quiet smoke while the two boys swam, and soon Richard started reminiscing about his time on a war ship, and how he met some British sailors in Jamaica who knew how to drink. Then he talked about working as a roadie for Eric Clapton who, as he pointed out, was one of my compatriots. We passed the joint back and forth. On the bridge a truck had pulled up. Some men got out and started preparing to fish. They left the doors of the truck open and its stereo filled the area around the bridge with the dolorous sounds of classic rock, heavy on the base, which came snaking over the surface of the water to where we sat in the hot sun. I was beginning to get the feeling of being pulled into something, inevitably. He had traveled with rock bands, and drunk with sailors and now here he was swimming with his kids on a hot Saturday afternoon in Texas. He looked out over the river, at the houses up on the opposite bank, perched with the best view in the Texas hill country. Then he was into a story about West Texas some forty years ago, about where he grew up, and the army base which was the original reason for the town’s existence, established mostly for black soldiers to man after the Civil War. They were posted out on the frontier as cannon-fodder, while the “crack” white troops were inland being saved the hardships of the desert. The black soldiers became fed up with the local intolerance of their presence and ransacked the town, pillaging and looting and destroying property. The base had since closed, but the town found that it didn’t need the base as a raison d’etre any more with the arrival of oil. I felt the sense of the conversation drifting away from me. It was all I could do to ask the occasional question, hoping that I was vaguely connecting with his train of thought. We were both sitting on the grass now, Richard with his legs in the water and me leaning back on my elbows. My head was feeling increasingly as if it were boxed in with a three dimensional crystalline structure which shimmied every time I moved it. Sensation had all but fled most of my body; Richard’s eyes had taken on a vaporous quality.
“But things have all changed now,” said Richard. “I’ve changed, I dare say; not the crazy-headed son-of-a-bitch I used to be. Sometimes I can’t believe the things I did when I was young.” And for some reason as he spoke I wondered whether Cabeza da Vaca had remembered who he had been in his life as a Spanish nobleman, when slave traders had galloped up to him in his starving, filthy, crazed state. And did he ever really become that person again, once the dirt was washed off, the hair was cut and he was back in Castile? Did he remember those times when, walking naked, his identity had come to seem like an enigma?
Sammy came sploshing onto the bank, holding a crawfish claw.
“Look dad, I got a Crawdaddy.” Richard took the claw and examined it with interest. “That’s great, son. Yep. Ain’t much left of that poor sucker.” He snapped it at Sammy, who squealed with glee and ran back into the water. I got up and entered the water slowly, feeling its cooling affect rising over my legs, and I began to swim steadily up-river against the persistent current. With the sun ahead of me I had to squint into its rays, and its reflections off the water looked like a field of wheat in the evening light, or a night of bright stars in a clear sky, and I kept on swimming, holding level with the bank, keeping the current at bay. The glass cube which encapsulated my head was floating on the surface of the water, and shards of light refracted around it. On my right I perceived Richard on the bank holding up his fist, and yelling, “He’s gonna make it to the bridge, Goddammit! He’s gonna make it to the bridge, and climb up there like a pirate!” and I noticed after some time had passed that the vibrations coming over the water from the large black truck were in fact the familiar refrains of Pink Floyd—a sound intimately connected to my adolescence in England. The music seemed to encapsulate something essential about me, was even largely responsible for who I was now, for better or for worse, and in that warm canyon, surrounded by Comanches and Mexicans and the ex-roadies, I hovered above the waving river weed captivated by noises produced twenty years before in a studio in London now being echoed around these Texan hills and washed down the river to Austin, and felt buoyed not so much by the water as by the sound, and the light and the heat: Nobody knows where you are. How near or how far: Shine on you crazy diamond.
I am sitting on an underground train leaving Wimbledon station. Rain is gently falling, and the streets of row houses grey under the cloud. I am wearing a pair of blue and white striped drainpipe trousers that I shoplifted three weeks ago, and a pair of black leather winkle-pickers. I have not showered for a number of days and I can feel the grime from the train already lifting itself off the seats and the floor and adhering to my skin, making me feel like the filthy character in Charlie Brown whose name I forget. I open a new packet of cigarettes, enjoying the newness of the shiny silver foil, unmarked, before dropping it on the floor along with the plastic wrapper. I pull one out and light it, dully remembering how I never enjoy cigarettes on the Underground, where I always feel soiled. I blow the smoke against the window and through it I see wet school playing fields.
The train clatters through deserted sidings and empty urban spaces, scattered with used oilcans, rags and pieces of brick. In one old overgrown parking lot stands what seems to be an ancient water tower, rusting, twisted metal lying whale-like, belly-up in the middle of an open field, half tarmac half-feeble blades of grass. We move on at our steady forty miles per hour. The track is elevated now, affording a view of a housing estate below. In front of this is a bowling green surrounded by small sycamore trees, the houses are gray in the rain, semi-detached, Victorian. An industrial chimney belching smoke blocks the view; it has a waist line, like a huge headless woman rooted into the ground standing resolute in front of the houses. Past this there is a pub, standing in an island between two roads looking as if once it were attached to something, now standing like a rock when the tide has washed away the sand. A small white dog sits outside the door and its mouth opens and shuts silently as it barks at the train. Suddenly we are in a station, pulling to a standstill; a number of human beings stand in the rain, randomly arranged on the concrete, some with umbrellas. They shuffle forward as the train stops. I look on as a young skinhead boy skulks away from the train, his Doc Martins splashing in the puddles. On the wall next to him someone has scrawled I suck cock. The man opposite me is wearing red socks; we both stare at each other’s shoes. His are huge shapeless blobs with rounded, bulbous toes. I do not think they signify any particular political persuasion. He is probably a conservative with a small c, an upholder of the status quo; He spends a lot of time in pubs and has an allotment somewhere near here where he goes to escape his ugly wife and tend to his potatoes. He gets out yesterday’s Sun, and opens it to page three. I read on the front cover Stick It Up Yer Junta! Argies Go Home. This is the eighties and Britain is in the Falklands.
Later I am in surrey, with Duncan and James. We drink from cans of beer and talk, and James in his pompous, arrogant way, makes fun of people and speaks far too loud. He always embarrasses me, as he is too obviously a public-school boy. His fine blond hair, his confident look and his booming, hollow voice, which he uses with theatricality that only a public school boy can exhibit. We are in a carriage with a few other individuals in it. We are drunk, James is telling a story, with his cowboy boots up on the seat opposite him. He is holding his cigarette in a way that makes him look gay. An elderly woman sitting behind James has, I notice, been bristling at his words. James has no sense of social difference; everybody, as far as he is concerned is like him, or if they aren’t then they aren’t even worth thinking about. The woman clutches her handbag, and I can see the stern outline of her face, her mouth tight and twisted, ears pinned back and listening, not embarrassed and humble, but aggressive. Luckily the woman chooses the next stop to disembark.
We are on our way to stay in the shell of his parents’ old holiday house in Dorset. The house is an empty, filthy place with an overgrown garden. Five of us are to camp in it, with copious quantities of alcohol. As soon as we arrive at the village we go to the supermarket and buy alcohol, bottles and bottles, and condiments to soak it up, chips, gherkins, pickles, and then we make our way on foot to James’ house and set up camp in the damp, empty living room with sleeping bags. On the first night we are all out in the garden drinking; James, wearing a collarless white shirt, “y-front” underpants and cowboy boots is standing with one foot up on an old urn, a tumbler full of liquor in one hand and cigarette in another, mimicking Hamlet, while the rest of us are sprawled around, stupefied, on the long grass. One of his old neighbors walked into the garden, and with a look of horror encounters James, half naked and very drunk, saying: “Seems, Madam? Nay I know not seems, it is.” The rest of us are howling at him. Facing us with his back to the driveway he has not noticed her, but we all go silent, as this short middle-aged woman shrieks above James’ voice.
“What on earth is going on here?”
James pirouettes on the heel of his boot, spilling liquor from the glass extended in the air, gracefully, and sees the woman. His shirt is long and gives the impression that he is not wearing anything underneath it. Instantly recognizing her he says, “Ah, Mrs. Mullins, how good to see you, I’m James Pembroke, we used to live here, don’t you remember?” She looks suspicious, so he goes on.
“Perhaps you don’t recognize me dressed like this. I assure you I don’t always go around in my underpants, but it is unseasonably warm this evening, don’t you think?” Her silence continues; so does James.
“Would you like some wine?”
She looks increasingly confused. “So you’re the Pembroke lad are you? Good lord, I never thought you would turn out like this! Well it’s all that education I expect.”
James nods dolefully. “Yes, that’s it I s’pose, rum sodomy and the lash, what else is there?” He lets out a high-pitched laugh. She looks around at us variously arranged in the decaying flowerbeds. Duncan, sitting in a pair of filthy shorts, his chunky, thick legs, covered with hair, draped over the remains of a sun chair. He is grotesquely nestling a large beer can in his groin. Of all of us he seems the most at ease in the situation, sitting back, taking it all in with an expressionless face, like some country idiot watching the world go by. It amazes me that he can sit through this bizarre encounter without exhibiting even the first indications of anxiety. Does he really not care? Duncan does not let on, but maintains a strict obliviousness to his environment. Mrs. Mullins, having confronted the beast, is reassured at least that we are not totally unknown devils. She makes her demands for tranquility and James hammers out a bargain with her before she leaves us.
The time between that drunken teenage summer and now seemed like a fold in the fabric of the universe, a black hole of some kind. The place that had formed me so much diluted by the knowledge of so many other, distant places. The people I knew, gone from my life now, left only as fading recollections, and the person I had been was gone too, changed cell by cell, transformed by incomprehensible time into flotsam on a Texas river. By what process this had happened I do not know, the same process that made of da Vaca a wondering ghost on foreign soil.
After what seemed like hours I stopped swimming and let myself be washed back towards the bend in the river where Richard sat. I noticed that the music from the truck had turned into chat on some Austin radio station. On arrival at the riverbank Richard’s kids were still jumping in and out of the water. I walked up the bank and sat down next to him. He was finishing a joint, looking for all the world like one of Cabeza da Vaca’s medicine-man acquaintances. One of his sons came running over holding what seemed to be the claw of a small lobster, “Dad, I found another one!” Richard took it from the boy and turned it around in his hands. “Well, I’d say that’s one dead crawdaddy.” His son leapt back into the water and Richard took the pincer between his fingers and inserted the roach of his joint between the claws, using them as a vice to grip the burning joint as he sucked on it one last time. The whole scene—the father on the bank, the remnant of local fauna, the indigenous drug, the children in the water, splashing, and the hot, hot sun, looked so authentic, as if this was what was done in this place, here was the daily spectacle of life in this particular corner of the world, and the participants, the players, were so naturally a part of the environment, belonged in some organic and indisputable way that I began to think of Chatwin’s question again, began to think of it in terms of the hapless da Vaca first. But then I realized that here was the difference between him and me: He had no choice but to plunge in and take part in whatever form of life was around him. As for me, I wondered whether the answer wasn’t after all obvious: I was a voyeur. I was skirting the perimeter of experience where I could observe the comings and goings of others from a safe distance, and avoid being drawn into close conflict with them; I was walking on the water, afraid to put my foot down in case it should get wet, in case it should sink, and take the rest of me, thrashing and kicking, to the bottom to sleep with the crustaceans, as da Vaca had done, afraid perhaps to see what I was when all else was stripped away. But there were similarities too. For both of us the promise at the end of the voyage had been a mirage—for him far more so than for me. For it only becomes clear who you really are when you leave an find yourself amongst strangers, and by then its too late to go back—you can never go back.
Richard grinned, holding the Crawdaddy’s pincer towards me with the joint still in it: Texaaas, he hissed, exhaling slowly.
Posted on August 6th, 2008 | By: admin | Filed under Funny Story
Family Travel—Silver Winner: Sarajevo Souvenir
Twenty years of global travel have made me pretty choosy about souvenirs, but Milo, at six, is too green to resist the siren song of the colorful wares festooning the tourist trails. Not that his acquisition lust is confined to the kitsch cranked out for foreign visitors. It started in a Budapest subway station, when he caught sight of some Yu-Gi-Oh-ish trading cards in a kiosk window. “How would you have played with them?” I reasoned, as I frog-marched him, howling, toward the turnstile. “They’re in Hungarian.” !”Yeah, and money doesn’t grow on trees, you know,” Milo’s older sister, Inky chimed in, helpfully repeating a shopworn mantra she must have picked up from me. I worry about her, remembering how reticent I once was about expressing anything resembling material desire. If one day she decides to haul off and really want something, loudly, unequivocally, the way her brother does, I don’t think I’ll mind.
Meanwhile, her brother’s magpie tendencies were dragging us down in areas of touristic interest throughout the former Yugoslavia. Things came to a head in Sarajevo’s Turkish bazaar, a charming warren of tea shops, coppersmiths and souvenir stalls. I’d call it a minefield, but that seems a tad insensitive, given what the citizens of this city went through in the early ’90s. Any Sarajevan school kid who endured the siege understands the true meaning of deprivation. For the record, deprivation doesn’t mean your mom refusing to buy you a giant pencil fifteen minutes after buying you an expensive handicraft octopus carved from a palm nut.
I like to think I’m not the only mother who cares whether her child is perceived as a brat. It’s not so much a problem with the girl, but the boy is a trickier prospect, particularly in any setting where money is exchanged for goods. Both children had already been promised a souvenir from the Turkish bazaar, and as far as Milo was concerned, there was nothing to be gained from delayed gratification. I decided that the best way to avoid a scene would be to purchase the first thing he claimed he wanted, with the understanding that there would be no do-overs, no begging for the nextinviting item that caught his eye. There was one other stipulation: I wasn’t going to shell out for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or any flimsy plastic doodad easily procured in Chinatown. This ruled out everything in the toy store’s window display save a just-for-pretend Glock that looked way too much like the real thing to take on a plane. Fortunately, the toy store wasn’t open when we passed. The handicrafts spilling out of the bazaar’s shops weren’t exactly handcrafted in the traditional sense, but this didn’t discourage me from extolling the virtue in choosing something reflective of the local culture, like a brightly painted flute, or some curly-toed slippers, or a poorly-made plaque featuring a shoddy reproduction of the circular brass knockers one sees on the old city’s heavy wooden doors. This last seemed to hold some appeal for my frantic son, who set to banging the first one he could reach as if his life depended on it. Greg was dubious.
“Thirty-seven konvertible marks for that? You think it’s worth it?”
“To avoid a scene? Yes! Look at him. He’s totally stressed out.”
I put my hand out for the money. “Ayun—” “Greg, he’s on the verge of total meltdown!”
I know how this sounds, but bear in mind that we were in a very small space, presided over by an older woman whose parenting philosophy was composed of sterner stuff than mine. “Let’s think this through.” Steering me by my elbow, Greg herded the entire family to a bench several storefronts away. Milo was one monofilament away from losing it, but Greg implemented some horse-whisperer techniques and laid out a counter-proposal. The way he saw it, each child should be given a set amount, a sort of seed grant to spend as he or she saw fit. I immediately conceded the superiority of his plan, which was not only brilliant, but also educational! It would let me pretend we were doing things to reinforce the homework the kids were allegedly doing in order to keep up with their classmates back home. It sounded good to the designated recipients, too, even Milo, who pocketed his ten-mark bill with something like relief.
After fifteen minutes trolling the bazaar, peacefully examining the merch,we decided that we’d be more effective, i.e. we’d get to the museum Greg and I wanted to visit sooner, if we split up, each parent taking a child. I got Milo.
“Is it okay if I know what I want now?” he asked.
“Sure, it’s your money. Do you remember where you saw it?”
He described a newsstand we had passed earlier that that displayed a few games, toys and puzzles behind glass. I remembered it because of the heartbreak I’d inflicted by refusing to buy any of the items at which Milo had pointed on an earlier pass. All former bets were off, though, now that he had his own money to blow. I navigated us past the carpet shops and coffee stalls of the ancient maze as Milo skipped alongside, singing and occasionally fretting that I wouldn’t be able to find the newsstand, or that we’d get there only to discover that someone else had beaten him to the punch. What a tragedy that would have been, had some lucky local boy walked off with the item Milo desired with such passion, a made-in-China, plastic play set, containing, among other things, two muscle-bound enforcer types and a toy grenade.
You heard me.
Greg’s plan had utterly failed to address my long-standing no-guns policy. It used to be a no-weapons policy, but ownership of fourteen toy swords changed that. Still, though, I have my standards, and only a monster would invoke them now.
“Do I have enough?” Milo asked hopefully.
“You tell me. It’s 8.75 KM.”
He held his breath and counted, the 10 KM bill clutched tight in his eggsized fist.
“I do!” he screamed joyfully.
“That’s right, you do. Now, are you sure this is what you really, really want?”
He flung his arms around my thighs. “Oh, thank you, mama! Thank you! Thank you!” A grandfatherly gentleman strolling nearby honored us with a smile of approving benevolence. If only he knew what occasioned such outand-out gratitude. “Well, it’s your money,” I conceded. Or rather, your money and my reputation — though, technically, the Special Forces Combat Forces gift pack is a gun-free plaything. Not that the flimsy walkie-talkie’s conveniently barrel-shaped antenna can’t convert to a weapon with a simple flick of the wrist. The commandos were wired to a lurid cardboard backdrop featuring a fiery, photo-realistic explosion. Some handcuffs, the grenade and an anemic nightstick fleshed out the possibilities for wholesome playtime fun. It’d be bad enough in Brooklyn, but Sarajevo? The newsstand operator betrayed no particular emotion as she retrieved the little American boy’s selection, and handed it through the window. One hurdle down. Apparently, no plastic bag was forthcoming, which is why I never travel without a nylon shopping bag. The one I had on me was just big enough to contain Milo’s blister-packed apocalypse. I let him carry it himself. He was so happy, he was capering around like a little goat. I told him I was psyched for him, and also that he’d do well to be discreet about the nature of his purchase.
“See, some really bad things happened to the people who live here. There was a war, with real explosions and real guns and a lot of people got killed.”
He nodded, ready to agree to anything now that the wonderful prize was his.
“You and I know it’s just a toy, but it might be the kind of toy that could make the people who live here feel bad. And I know you wouldn’t want to make anybody feel bad.”
Dumbing things down in this way makes me cringe, but Milo, bless his heart, seemed to get the message. When Greg volunteered to schlep the stuff we wouldn’t be needing at the Siege of Sarajevo Museum back to the guest house, while the kids and I stayed in the bazaar for a snack, Milo gave explicit instructions that the contents of the orange nylon shopping bag should be kept under wraps. He didn’t want to risk hurting our hostess, who had introduced him to her pet Dalmation and invited him into the kitchen to help her make pancakes.
As to the museum, it was excellent, though perhaps not so much for children. There are plenty of photos of children on display there, of course, but also photos of people lying in their own blood, a few feet from their toppled bicycles. Milo, who initially was quite taken with the exhibit of munitions used by the Bosnian Resistance, seemed again to get the message.
“I don’t like this museum,” he announced in a quavering voice, and retreated to the stairwell with one of his sister’s Betty and Veronica comics.
Later, in the privacy of the guesthouse, I lay on the bed reading a tongue in cheek guide to surviving the Siege of Sarajevo, while Milo spent the better part of two hours maneuvering his plastic commandos around the bedsheet frontlines, the perilous nature of their missions implied by a non-stop barrage of whispered sound effects. Even though I’ve never been able to make such noises myself, I appreciated this lazy afternoon for the peaceful situation it was.
Posted on August 6th, 2008 | By: admin | Filed under Funny Story
Culture and Ideas—Gold Winner: I Hold High My Beautiful, Luminous Q’uran
How do kids in a rural, West African Muslim village manage to “get krunk” with each other on a Friday night in a culture that doesn’t allow dating, or even holding hands?In mid-November, 2006, my cousin David Agbemabiese and I visited Ghana’s Mole National Park. My agenda for this first trip to Ghana had been unbelievably rich and deep, so this expedition up to a game preserve in the savannah of the far, Muslim north had been only tentatively penciled in… something I’d try to pull off if it didn’t interfere with my primary business. I was here in Ghana because, through DNA-based geneaolog-ical research, I had just recently found and connected with the African family from whom my father’s line had been separated since slavery – a very big deal, indeed. And I had just dived head first into the writing of both a weekly blog and a book about the experience.This fantastic bit of serendipity had turned my first, long-anticipated trip to Africa into something even more special and emotional than I had ever dreamed. I had found a large group of blood relatives here in Ghana, separated from my family in the U.S. by an ocean and about three hundred years of history. And they were anxious to meet me and see, if after all this time and distance, there was anything at all about us that might still make us identifiable to one another as family. We had discovered to our surprise, joy and delight, that yes, indeed, there was. Incredibly, strong physical resemblances had survived; shared interests; attitudes; a dozen different little recognizable traits of family character. Amazing. And there was so much family to meet. Patriarch John Kofi Agbemabiese had, over his long, successful and highly interesting time on earth, sired forty-one children with seven wives. I spent a couple of very intense weeks being escorted around the ancestral Volta region, Accra, and Kumasi, getting introduced by one group of relatives to another. In between, I stole time to write, and occasionally, to be a tourist too.
My cousin David had recently lost his job. When another relative told him of my desire to visit Mole Park, he’d jumped at the chance to accompany me. I was paying, and he had the time. “We don’t do enough internal travel,” he said. “We have so much beauty here, but we Ghanaians, we hardly ever get the chance to see and enjoy our own country.” Travel in west Africa - even in a country like Ghana with much better than average infrastructure – is hard. And it’s not cheap, in a society where the economy just limps along and almost everyone is chronically underpaid.
Mole had held a special allure for me, ever since I first read about it in the process of preparing for this trip. I’d loved every minute of my time on the coast, the hill country; the rain forest. But so much my long-imagined Africa had always been about the savannah too - the land of baobab trees, mud houses and mud mosques; the sahel region at the edge of the great Sahara – the home of magical, mythical towns like Timbuktu and Djenne. And the other savannah; the home of big game and the safari. Mole is one of the only places in all of west Africa where visitors can have that quintessential east African experience of close encounters with some of the big, endangered animals with which Africa is forever linked in the popular imagination. And this is a place where you don’t need to rent a guide and an expensive four-wheel drive vehicle to see the park and its animal life. At Mole, as at some parks in east Africa, you can do your safari as part of a small group led by a ranger, on foot. You can also explore some of the park’s miles of trails by rented bike. The prospect was much too good to resist.
The hotel at Mole is nice. Clean, sunny rooms, but no frills, and the water is only on for a few hours each day. But it’s safe to drink. And there’s a pool. And a decent restaurant with a bar. And just down from the pool, there’s an observation deck, perched in a perfect position for guests to sit and watch the action at the two watering holes on the wild, species-rich savannah below the escarpment on which the hotel sits.
That next morning, just after sunrise, David and I enjoyed a three hour hike with park ranger John, and a very pleasant retired German couple enjoying their second holiday of the year. Our “safari” didn’t disappoint. We got close… almost too close, to elephants and crocodiles. We were treated to close up encounters with three different species of antelope and numerous species of birds. And later in the day, a mere stone’s throw from our hotel door, we watched dozens of baboons and warthogs, as well as green and patas monkeys, go about their daily business as if we weren’t even there at all. Great stuff. I shot a lot of photos and video.
But the most memorable part of our stay happened during the night hours, when all kinds of activity is going on in the park, invisible to all but those who have a great, hidden perch and night vision glasses. David and I lamented the fact that we didn’t have these. But fortunately for us, these are not necessary for night people watching.
Early that evening, a staff person made the announcement that at 6:30, there’d be a graduation ceremony just up the hill in the park rangers’ quarters for several new rangers, and that any guests who wanted to come were very welcome. As soon as we heard, David and I knew we were going. We wanted to support the new rangers, just out of principle. In a region where few good jobs are available, these are good jobs. And local guys like these new graduates are precisely the ones who have the best chance at convincing old friends, family and neighbors not to poach on park grounds; to participate in making this area safer for all the endangered animals and more tourist-friendly at the same time.
I had another reason for wanting to come. The music of this region has always spoken to me in a special way. My cd collection at home is full of the Islamic-flavored music of the sahel: Salif Keita, Thione Seck, Ba Cissoko, Oumou Sangare, Ali Farka Toure, Sekouba Bambino, and Issa Bagayoyo, among others. Wandering through the rangers’ quarters that afternoon, I’d heard intriguing bits and pieces of northern pop music in the air: the
music kids were dancing to while they played, blaring from radios their mothers had placed in windows so they could listen while hanging laundry; wafting out from kitchen doorways while they began work on the evening meal. It was wonderful – melodic; complex; flute and voice driven, with rolling base lines and undulating percussion underneath, and I wanted to hear more. And since every African party is a dance party, I was pretty sure that tonight, at the graduation, I’d get my wish.
When the announced start time of 6:30 rolled around, David and I were the first guests from the hotel to arrive… the only guests for a while. We watched as a couple of local women turned up, matronly, but like butterflies in their brightly colored, party best. As they got the punch bowl and some refreshments arranged on a side table, the DJ set up his turntables and his soundboard, fiddling endlessly with the mix on the microphones that would soon be used for speeches. He started messing around with the speaker mix for the music, and the four nervous ranger graduates got up to shake off their growing anxiety about soon being the center of attention by dancing with one another – tentatively at first, but then with more energy. Soon, a few kids from the rangers’ quarters turned up and began to dance too, around the edges of the outdoor employees’ canteen where the festivities were being held. Before long, they were joined by a growing number of kids who came by bike, on foot and by motorbike from the nearby town of Larabanga, and other smaller villages a little farther up the road. A couple of young European back packers had wandered up there by now as well, but other than David and I, they were the only ones who’d responded to the repeated entreaties to come join the party that had been broadcast down to the hotel over the p.a. system.
An official from the park leaned over the table to speak to the DJ, and within moments, the music came to a crashing halt. Without further ado, the formal program began. It was brief. The four graduates received their diplomas to much applause. Then the music was cranked back up, but this time, it was serious. Now that the obligatory speeches and ceremony were done, it was time to dance.
David excused himself, reminding me not to stay too long because we had to get up well before the sun to catch a 4 a.m. bus into Tamale the next morning. I said I’d be along soon, but I’d been anxious to hear some more of this music, and now, here it was.
The dancing, which had been confined, except for the graduates, to the outside perimeter of the open-air canteen area, now took over the entire space. Anyone who’s ever been to Africa will tell you, there’s no such thing as a wallflower at a party. Even non-dancers with their amateur anthropologist hats on like me will eventually have to get up and dance. In my case, it was young Latif who called me out. He’d seen me smiling at him and some of the other youth as they warmed up to take the floor, and they’d been curious about where I was from. After I gave them a good laugh with my spirited but Cosby-esque gyrations on the floor, we talked – shouted at each other – over the booming, compelling sounds of the pop music of their native land.
It was a big deal to them that I was from the U.S. Huge. When they asked me about my work and I told them I’m a writer, mostly a screenwriter and playwright, they got really pumped. Now, the excited, rapid-fire inquiries were all about who I know. “Damn,” they were thinking, “Brotherman must know all kinds of incredible people we’ve heard of.” I hemmed and hawed… and it hurt me to watch creeping disappointment suddenly dull the bright, expectant sparkle that had lit up all their faces just moments before. I was losing major cool points by the millisecond. I rattled off a few people they might know, before the well ran pretty dry. I had to dig deep for stories from friends and associates who have at least been in the same room with some of the people they’ve heard of. This did the trick. Very quickly, joy returned because, just like that, the huge space between them and the epicenter of all things cool had shrunk considerably, and they were basking in the glow of how it suddenly felt to be a mere two degrees of separation from Tupac, Snoop, Jay-Z, J-Lo and Oprah.
As my official host, my new friend Latif had just scored major cool points too, and I could see it in his eyes as he drank in their admiration – especially the awed expressions of the girls on the periphery of the action here. An already pretty good party was suddenly much fuller of intriguing possibilities for him. He spoke mostly in rapid fire Gonja, but the sense of it was easy enough to understand. “See, I told you he was cool,” he was saying.
And as I scanned their beautiful, sparkling faces, it hit me like a ton of bricks – about a third or more of the people gathered there were female, but so far, between the graduates, the emcee, the DJ, and the dancers, it had been an all-male show. The grown women had been in the background applauding the speeches, serving food; watching the kids. But in the dark fringes of this outdoor café turned party room, they had literally become invisible now. And the girls – all in hijab; all in colorful party clothes – they’d hung together in a pack, in their own space out on the edge of things, their eyes on the boys they knew, watching their moves, tittering back and forth with each other about them like birds on a wire.
Suddenly, my eye caught something else that turned my attention entirely away from them. Into the party walked a lanky youth whose t-shirt sported a very familiar face. Back in Accra, I’d seen several side walk stalls that silkscreen images onto plain white “Ts” for you. It seemed to be the same basic choices everywhere. You could get white Jesus, brown Jesus, Nelson Mandela, Bob Marley or, interestingly, Osama Bin Laden. I’d been thinking, if I had a spur of the moment opportunity, that I’d buy that brown Jesus. No lame, schlocky t-shirt Jesus, he, with his deep, beautiful eyes. And he wasn’t merely the white Jesus, but tinted brown, either. He had his own face; his own impressively deep persona. So… brown Jesus, Nelson Mandela and Bob Marley, I was thinking. One of them for me; the others for gifts. I’d had yet to actually see anybody sporting one of these shirts, so ubiquitous at the street stalls. But now here came Osama, big as life, rippling like a limp flag on the chest of this gangly, dust-covered kid from the village.
Before he could advance even a few steps from the entryway, Latif shot like a bolt to his side and pushed him up against the fence. I was alarmed. I stood up to see what was going on back there where almost no light managed to seep over from the dance floor and the area around the refreshment table. But it didn’t feel like a fight. Nobody back there seemed to feel it was necessary to separate them. All I knew for sure was that Latif was speaking to him very urgently about something, then gesturing back towards me. And then I watched Osama remove his shirt, turn it inside out, and put it back on. Latif seemed satisfied and returned to the area near where I’d been sitting. Now I understood. Latif was looking out for me. He hadn’t wanted me to feel offended by the sight of a local kid sporting a Bin Laden t-shirt.
I caught “Osama”’s eye and called him over. Now, in the light, I could see something that I’d only caught a tiny glimmer of when I’d first spotted him in the near darkness of the entryway. It was the way he moved. It wasn’t just the awkward gangliness of an adolescent who hasn’t quite grown into his suddenly larger frame yet. He seemed to me now an oddity of nature – someone whose every joint is not merely double, but entirely elastic – a rubber man. As he approached, I smiled broadly at him. “Hey, kid, your t-shirt’s on inside out. That the new style or something?” He grinned sheepishly and looked down at his feet. “I saw you have Osama on your shirt.” He looked confused. “Osama… Bin Laden. I saw you have his picture on your shirt.” Latif spit some terse words at him in Gonja. “Oh,” said Osama. “The shirt. You saw.”
“Yeah, I saw. You a big Bin Laden fan?”
Osama shrugged. “He fight for Islam.”
“Hmmm. Well, there’s all kinds of ways to stand up for your faith without killing folks, don’t you think?”
He nodded slowly, his eyes never rising to meet mine.
“And him and his kind, they don’t like music and dancing, you know? If they ran this town, they’d never allow it.”
He looked a little sheepish and shrugged. I got it. I wasn’t going to break this kid’s balls over his damned t-shirt. It occurred to me that for kids in this part of the world, wearing a portrait of Bin Laden on your chest might mean you want the world to know he’s your personal hero, but I’d bet my last dollar that for most, it’s probably much more about wearing a big “F.U.” on your chest… a way, like anywhere else on earth, for a kid to wave the flag of rebel youth in the face of every adult who crosses his path, the point being to offend or piss off as many people as possible. Osama was no heavily-politicized young jihadi. He was just a kid who likes to dance, looking for a little action on a Friday night in a place where there’s generally little action to be found.
“You like to dance, huh?”
For the first time, he gave me his eyes, and they sparkled. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Let’s see your moves then,” I said. “Let’s see what you’re all about.”
He cracked a wry grin. “Let’s see yours first.”
“I already did mine,” I said. “You missed it.”
Latif backed me up. “He was funny.”
The DJ was into a furious mix now; wonderful stuff; and the crowd was eating it up, girls in their corner and the guys in theirs - parallel universes – a guys’ party and a girls’ party, sharing the same space, but, at least on the surface, only tentatively connected to and aware of each other. Yet all were dancing, on fire, to the same relentless, throbbing beat.
Watching them made me think of other kids in other places on earth on this Friday night, eagerly looking, even within the mannered confines of a well-chaperoned dance, for the hot, electric thrill only a little proximity with the opposite sex can give.
From time immemorial, when men and women have partnered up to dance, dance has been a metaphor – a meditation in motion – encompassing every aspect of our relationship with one another: communication, both spoken and unspoken; nurture; longing and desire; sex. The European tradition is full of slow, courtly dances which leave a lot to the imagination. Subtlety is the point. Boys and girls taught to dance in this tradition learn, literally, to turn slow, cautious circles around each other as they take their first baby steps toward deciphering the deeper mysteries of intimacy between men and
women. Generations of youth have taken some of their most important and memorable steps toward adulthood as they promenaded awkwardly onto the floor with a partner at a middle school dance, watchful adults in the wings making sure that all major body parts remained a respectable distance apart.
But Africa, the original Land of A Thousand Dances, is the home of the beat that created rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and jazz, and funk. The dances people do to this music are more primal and leave a lot less to the imagination. Some are an exuberant and unapologetic celebration of sex and desire. Just as changing beliefs and understandings about sex in western culture gradually freed love-making from the insanely limiting confines of “the missionary position,” dances eagerly adopted in the West from the Afro-Caribbean-Latin tradition have profoundly energized and underscored a liberated consciousness that there are, indeed, many, many wonderful ways to make whoopee.
Yet even with their evolution into styles which are, at base, a celebration of all things carnal, the dances which have sprung from this tradition have still left at least something to the imagination. But lately, as any adult who’s recently chaperoned a dance will tell you, one popular style, even with the middle school set, is nothing more and nothing less than just raw, simulated sex. No matter where parents find themselves between the extreme right and the extreme left of the culture wars continuum, there is, generally, a feeling that this trend away from at least a thin veneer of subtlety has drifted too far.
So, I was intensely curious about how this concern over what is widely perceived as a coarsening of world youth culture might play out in a rural village where fundamentalist Islam holds sway. How much would these kids care to mimic the styles they see in American and European hip-hop videos? How far would their adult chaperones let them go in a culture which forbids both close dancing and dating as we know it?
It dawned on me, as I strained to hear and understand the lyrics of the music being played that a big part of what made this dancing halal (like saying “kosher”, or theologically acceptable) was the lyrical content of these songs. I speak very little Hausa, and no Gonja, the languages of many of these lyrics, but as I listened, the chorus of my favorite song of the evening so far seemed to be saying, “Whatever I do in this life, I know I’m alright as long as stick to my glorious Q’uran.” I checked this out with one of the new ranger graduates when he passed my way to grab himself another cup of punch.
“Yes, yes, exactly so,” he said. “It says, ‘I know I can never stray too far in life as long as I hold high my beautiful, luminous Q’uran.’” As I surveyed the enthusiastic dancers, many of them were singing, some shouting this chorus. So, that was it. As long as the sentiments being expressed by the music were not only innocent, but positively righteous, and the boys and girls were not dancing together, the dancing could be whatever the kids wanted and needed for it to be. And the style they were into was furious and intense.
As the kids with whom I was sitting and I watched, the competition on the floor between the boys was heating up. The dynamic that revealed itself was that one boy or man would make a move toward the center of the pack and then, all eyes on him, he’d bust his best moves, holding the floor for half a minute before fading on back into the pack.
Some of the boys who’d been holding it down on the floor began to look at Osama expectantly. He and Latif gave each other a look, and then rose in unison, heading straight for the center of the action.
They were both really, really good… fluid; athletic; artful. But Osama’s odd body type gave him another whole set of tools, and he used them well. What he was doing out there is hard to describe, simply because I’ve never seen a human being move like that. It was urgent; crazy… like what krunk strives to be, but isn’t quite. His moves were like a rapid-fire ritual in which his purpose was to remove his own skin, not out of some tragic and bizarre self-loathing, but out of sheer joy – as if he wanted to say, “Hey, y’all ain’t gonna believe what I got inside of here! Now, watch; I’m’a show you. Stand back!” Like that.
As he danced on into the next song, neither he nor Latif faded back into the group to let someone else step up into the center. It didn’t feel like a selfish choice on their part. It was as if the collective mindset of the entire male group was, “Hey, the competition’s over, and we all know who won; let’s just dance.” And dance on, they did, letting these two bring the energy of the whole group up to a fever pitch while the chorus of the current tune raved on, “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!” (God is great), their arms flailing; fists pumping skyward to accentuate the words.
I glanced at the time on my cell phone and frowned. The evening was young yet, but I had to pack, and try to get some sleep before rising at 3:00 a.m. to catch that 4 o’clock bus to Tamale. I waded onto the dance floor, gamely shaking my rump, shouting to my new friends that I had to leave.
Night falls early and hard in this part of the world. I stumbled and twisted each ankle more than once as I made my way back down the pitch dark gravel road to my room. I washed; I packed, and then I fell heavily onto my bed. It had been a very good day, and the party had provided a perfect ending. Now, there was a knock on my door. It was my cousin David, saying he’d come wake me at 3:15 if he didn’t see my light on. We wis