Shipwrecked!

Although not my personal shipwreck, this google pic
 does sort of embody the moment.

     A freeze-framed moment. A handful of fragmented moments strung together....
     The moment of the car crash, after the bomb blast. Hollywood has recently gotten good at portraying this with editing techniques.  The moment the world comes undone, when mother adrenaline puts sticky nano-glue between all the microseconds, and reality reveals itself as flattened and two dimensional, as if you were looking down on Flatland.
    So I woke up in the middle of one of these moments.  I woke up, not from unconsciousness, not in the least bit blacked out, but that is the feeling you get if your short term memory tape just misplaces those last few seconds.  In the first few weeks after the accident, I began to get short pieces of that lost tape back: the missing five seconds between the following two events:
    First: I'm sitting on the boat, talking to the Argentine facing me across the narrow deck. Our knees are touching.  We are in heavy seas now, having left the harbor and the smaller winds, waves and storm.  We are now in open seas, and that means two meter swells, and what that means on a five meter long double outrigger canoe is that we are sometimes staring at a wall of water, before successfully riding it up (and slamming down the other side, usually).  Perhaps as a way of relieving the stress, Jose started telling me a story about the last time he was in rough seas in Honduras, and the boat flipped over.  This really wasn't helping, but to give the story a little more stress relieving action, he added that everyone on the boat, especially the captain, was drunk and high, and as an added bonus, it was a dive boat and they were all experienced divers.  No casualties, he said, it was all like a fun little silly accident for people who spent as much time in the water as they did out of it.
    THEN I'm sitting on top of the upside down canoe, straddling the hull with my legs, alone, and holding on to my bag, which is still dry, as am I.  I'm thinking about my ipad inside and the galaxy note 2 in the money pouch around my waist.  Then I notice the other six people below me, treading water like kittens.  We are all of us spouting abuse at the gods of fate for having put us here.  I begin to remember why we are here, then where we are, then oh shit....this is where we are? in the middle of the ocean, in one of the remotest places on earth?
   

Which one of these looks like a weird sea creature?

The odd shape even attracted
the attention of the
Dadaists...

 I had first wanted to go to Sulawesi because, well, it has a weird shape.  Some say it looks like a squid or octopus, some more land based creatures, but it is certainly a shape that doesn't come up much in the geography of large islands, which are mostly bits and bobs.  But the best part is when you tell people where you are going for the vacation.  "What is that?" they almost invariably say.  I mean, for me the boundary between exotic and mundane destinations is the question "WHERE is that?" so Sulawesi exceeds that by several orders of magnitude.

No Longer worth its
weight in gold...

     Of course, this is not just geographical obscurity, part of it might be that Sulawesi underwent a makeover.  It was quite well known in Magellan's time as 'Celebes', or the Spice Islands.  That's right, I had finally achieved what Columbus and countless other government-sponsored explorers had failed to do. (Assuming the main objective was not to actually enslave heathen, which they were pretty good at). And at some point, the value of cloves and nutmeg per kilo started to fall, not because of competition, but because the world correctly identified energy (and unfortunately for us,carbon based forms of it) as the source of civilization and not spices.  But back in the day, and that would be the Dutch Colonial Empire days,
there was a pretty tight lid on the place; originally the Dutch surrounded it and wouldn't let anyone else near it, so they could have the monopoly.  Long before the Dutch were kicked out, though, the monopoly was broken by the usual methods; smuggling plants out and planting them in less tightly controlled tropical areas, but I think it's safe to say that long before that, the Europeans lost their fascination with spices, though it's still interesting to see how these tropical spices (including cardamom) pop up in 'traditional' Northern European cuisine, even though none of these plants will grow even in Mediterreanean climates.
    But I diverge from the boat accident. and the water, and what happened after we all simultaneously realized we had been unceremoniously shipwrecked.  At this point, we didn't fear the boat turning over, we feared death, making the last concerns pretty ridiculous indeed.  Lucky for us, the two meter swells were about as bad as the waves got.  Sometimes you can have a freak wave , say four meters, that would completely destroy you once you are sitting there capsized and helpless.  And indeed, even those two meter swells kept tipping the boat on its side again, threatening to conk us all on the heads with the outrigger booms and pontoons (deadly much more than any amount of waves), so we had to be constantly wary.

Not the actual boat, but pretty darn close.

     So after a few minutes of shouting at the gods for our lost gear, which turned out to be about 10 thousand dollars worth collectively (no wonder the natives are convinced we are just cash cows walking around waiting to be milked....), we began to think more naturally of survival and just trying to get life started again. One of our group, Gayle of Australia, was a trained rescue swimmer, and she immediately began assessing the situation and the hazards therein. "Is everyone OK? she asked, after we had all finished with the Shit! word.  We all reported in, except Diana, the Argentine's wife, who said with a shaking voice, "I can't swim...".  She was all right for the moment, clinging to a board that had fallen out of the boat.  Gayle swam over and began cracking jokes, like the most natural thing in the world, as if she had just walked out on the stage in Vegas.  This amazed me, because it calmed Diana, and all of us, and then I remembered that Panic is always the main enemy in "Nature vs. Man" kind of situations.
     Gayle was so good at this, and at shepherding Diana to safety, that she completely left out any consideration to her own belongings, none of which had surfaced (in fact she returned to shore without a single possession, but later got all of them back).  By now about half a dozen bags were bobbing in the waves with us, and most of us began collecting them and shepherding them like little sheep, keeping them from drifting, or god forbid, sinking.  My own bag floated almost like a buoy; It had always been so heavy when I carried it, even I was mystified to see it bobbing on the waves.
     Later I discovered that one of my obsessions had kept the bag afloat; not through telekinetic will power, but hermetically sealed bags of green coffee beans.  A coffee freak friend of mine had mentioned that I was passing through one of the world famous coffee growing regions, Kalosi coffee, and so I had done a bit of investigating, and discovered this little grinding/roasting factory outlet there, and honestly, one of my best memories of my travels, olfactory wise, was the moment I opened a barrel of their roasted beans and stuck my entire head in and breathed, as the flavors and colors danced around me.....
     These reveries were really not happening at that time; these are all later reconstructions, in those adrenaline minutes, as we floated out there helplessly, there were a series of steps that we were taking, probably typical in the first minutes after a wreck:
1. People identifying the situation they were in. (In Diana's case, a life and death kind of thing; for us, figuring out how much immediate danger we were in (medium), how much likelihood our 'things' had in this situation (little to none), and how many game plans we had left (one or possibly two- we appeared to be drifting back towards an island, but there was no way of knowing which way the currents would take us)
2. Attempting to flip the boat back over- on the face of it, a splendid idea. But according to mariners I consulted, idiotic.  This outrigger seemed happiest when upside down, especially since our former roof was now serving as an excellent keel.  We wasted what could have been crucial energy and life force trying to rock the pontoons back to the upright position.
3. Standing on the struts and waving and yelling all at the same time- an excellent idea.  It didn't seem to work for the Gilligan's Islanders, but it worked wonders for us.  A boat about three times larger than our boat saw us, and came around in a large circle.  When they came near, THEY nearly flipped over, and judging by the captain's ashen expression, we had better haul our buns quickly aboard.  I added a few new barnacle razor scrapes to my already museum-quality collection as I scrambled aboard.
     When we got back to shore , to the small town capital of the Togeans, aptly named "Togean", there was a small crowd assembled to greet what may have been the first shipwreck that year (or possibly that month).  A kindly soul loaned us their house, and most importantly big barrels of freshwater to wash the salt out of our bodies, clothes, and belongings, and we turned their backyard into an impromptu drying rack.  Hundreds of paper folding money bills, weighted down by rocks, clothes laid out to dry in the sun, on racks, made for a bizarre scene something like what I imagine an airplane disaster scene after ten Obsessive Compulsive people had been at work there.

     As we toiled and grumbled about our recent misfortunes, we were looking at the very dock from which we had taken off; the Alpha of our disaster.  Like a dream, we saw the same people leading four MORE hapless foreigners, loaded down with backpacks, electronics , and possessions, into an identical boat to ours, as if they were preparing to make a new sacrifice to Poseidon, since the last had been thwarted.  We all dropped what we were doing, and frantically ran to the edge of the water, waving our hands and shouting at the new lambs.  "Hey, DON'T GET ON THAT FUCKING BOAT" is what I think most of us shouted.  The foreigners looked at us like we were crazy, and continued to load their things.  

Coming to Terms

Morning on Kelly Creek in the Clearwater National Forest

"There are strange things done 'neath the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold..."
The Cremation of Sam McGee, by Robert Service, my father's favorite poet.

When Dad first asked me to sprinkle his ashes in the Bitterroot mountains of Idaho, I didn't wan't to talk about it.  Fear of death, the unapproachable subject.  It was an odd moment we two were sitting around the table; it came out of the blue, or so I thought.  Maybe he had long been working up to this request; all I remember is that the topic of his passing hadn't been broached, and he didn't even intimate that his health was failing until a few years later when it was written quite plainly on his withered frame.
     So it was that I put it quite out of my mind, and this summer, fully two years after he left his body on the floor of that house, it was with some dread that I approached this task that I had been clearly appointed to.  It's not as if I don't like hiking and camping:  I adore them, and this was clearly the reason I had been chosen.  It's just that there was something of facing up to myself; because although the concept of death was not the focus here, but rather what we make of our lives when a significant influence- in this case, a crutch for my weakness of character, I'd always felt- is suddenly removed.
     At first I must confess I felt a little threatened when all of my siblings and even their families wanted to get involved with this project.  I felt I had been singled out by him to do this, as an honor and also as the sole adjudicator of this part of his verbal will.  At that point I couldn't see all the positives in the form of support and reinforcement that such group participation would bring; I just looked at it as some form of annoying 'horning in on my thing'.
     It was the first time I had been forced to rethink the very nature of this project.  From the time after the funeral when I lifted the cardboard box of ashes - so much heavier than I had imagined - my mental picture of this adventure began to change, and evolved over the next two years as various plans hatched and faded away.
     I'm not sure what it was, but something told me that this summer had to be the one.  As a sugar coating to what by now was seeming like a bitter pill to me, I promised myself a bike trip to sandwich this experience with positive feeling.  Things began to happen almost as soon as I landed.  An older friend, and more experienced than myself with death and dying, told me I was in for a treat, that it was one of the better hiking locations in North America (which proved to be true).  Another friend who also had said goodbye to four people in the last three years reminded me to be mindful when I performed the act, not to let the act be meaningless or hollow, since it was as much for me as for the person I had promised to do it for.
     Then my brother pulled out, which actually made it a much smaller and more easily managed operation, since three less people would be involved.  Two nephews and a niece had expressed strong interest in the project, and another nephew was added around the time of my brother's cancellation, making us a merry band of five hobbits setting off into the forest.  I was a little uneasy at the last change, since I felt I didn't know this last nephew very well at all.  But so much had changed and transmogrified in just the last week that it seemed that one needed to go with the flow if one was to ever leave Bag-end at all, to paraphrase Tolkien.

My new crew: Nephews Joe, Arlen, and John Michael

     I arrived in the hometown, after a brisk drive from the Portland airport to the hometown (Pendleton) with two of the nephews, one of whom I hadn't seen since before the funeral.  The remaining nephew was mustered; the niece having been banned by her brothers for lack of a proper babysitter for her two year old; and suddenly and almost miraculously we were on the road, thankfully not forgetting the ashes behind us.

Mornings at 3500 feet tended to the chilly side

     Even from the first few hours, it was obvious that this journey would not be one of massive contemplation, solitudinous pensiveness or inner reflection.  An old hiker turned green by city living, accompanied by three young men eager for experience were setting out for the mountains, and the weight of this factor shaped our experience more than any custom or social expectation of ash ceremony could possibly have.
We did what a normal group of men would normally do in such circumstances.  We did not form a solemn procession with the ashes in a special bier.  We played Texas Holdem  and swatted tenacious horseflies off each other; we sipped rum and chuffed Cuban cigars around the campfire, which blazed away under a sky afire with starlight, the likes of which none of us had seen in quite some time.
     I did not escape completely from any meaningful contemplation, however.  It occurred to me, almost from the first step of so many along that gentle, smooth trail along the side of Kelly creek, that this 'mission' was not a mission at all- but rather a set of instructions to follow, a formula for a certain kind of experience which was guaranteed to bring about or unlock an insight.  Dad was guiding me to discover a hidden secret- in these mountains and in the experience they were sure to bring, was a side of him I had never seen.  I was rediscovering the father of his youth - not mine- and was granted a feeling of what it must have been like to be him, before fatherhood, before marriage and responsibility chained him to a desk in an unpleasant office far removed from these emerald walls of paradise.
     I could not help feeling that surely my father would have traded stories around this very campfire, would have shared the rum, would have dealt the cards and even chuffed the stogie.  None of these things, in fact, were things I had really done before with any panache, and yet they felt natural- and enjoyable- to all of us, as if we were born to do these things.  This feeling of near-possession didn't stop with our outdoorsy woodsman behavior; it also became evident when we came to the question of the remains.
     My original understanding is that I was to go to Kelly's thumb and 'sprinkle' the ashes there.  When Dad had told me about the mission in the first place, we were in the living room, where a painting of the mountain in question had hung for nearly two decades.  So it was manifest to me for many years that I had to find the place 'of the painting' or 'in the painting' and put it there.
     We carried a digital copy of the painting, and showed it to the nice lady at the reception of the Ranger Station in Orofino nearby.  She recognized the mount, and even expressed admiration for the painting (I later resolved to donate the painting to the station, since she would make sure it hung in a nice, prominent place).  When we rounded a bend in the trail two days after that, we came upon a very similar version of that viewpoint.  We stopped and began to compare our picture with the vista, and concluded that the picture must have been painted from a closer (impossible, since it would be a point in space) and higher-up point of view.  The way up the mountainside was blocked by new growth pine trees, and severely dense undergrowth.  My conclusion was that the painter must have been here when the present mountain (next to the one in the painting) was bald , perhaps during a forest fire, and that he was in that position whilst either fighting a fire , or resting at one of the lookout towers which must have dotted the landscape back then (many of them have been replaced by electronic gadgets or made obsolete by satellite, I'm guessing).

I started to see the beauty around me

     So it began that the original idea, of some special place to put the ashes, began to degrade, and while we spilled a good portion of them on that exact spot, it became really clear to me that what father actually meant by 'Kelly's Thumb' was not the peak, nor the mountain, nor even the painting, but the experience itself..the whole experience of camping in this forest was what he meant, for it was this experience was what brought us close to his 'salad days' of hiking and working these forests, these pleasant green vistas that brought a feeling of peace and beauty to any and all who were lucky enough to see them.
     We began to distribute his remains all over this park, concentrating on the experience instead of a more left-brained idea of what 'location' entails.  We sprinkled him in the beautiful, clear , Kelly creek (was I named for this? I remember he told me he had a friend that he named me for...).  We found an amazing orchard of huckleberries, a fruit so magical that surely it must be the fruit of the faeries and the forest folk...so some of the remains went to nourish the future crops.

an old fashioned campaign tent

We found, at the foot of Kelly's thumb itself, a peaceful and inviting mountain meadow, so pure and aboriginal, that we all felt surely that Grandpa (as my nephews called him) would have been at home and in his element, whether it was the settled and sedentary later-years Grandpa, or the early young-and-restless Grandpa that we never truly knew.  Near the meadows was also a seasonal camp setup, the old-timey kind with the cotton canvas tents, compleat with pot belly stove and real beds (cots, but they look like beds when you've been sleeping on the ground)...that sort of seemed like the camps of Grandpa's stories of the early days.

the meadow at confluence of Kelly Creek and Bear Cub Creek-
over the ridge is Montana and the waters that flow to the Atlantic Ocean

    This idea of Grandpa was a little bit of a new one for me, as well.  Not only was I sharing the mission I thought was mine and mine alone, I soon discovered that I had been sharing my Dad with others for whom he was Gramps- and they had a whole trove of stories of interactions with him that soon had me feeling a twinge of jealousy- in fact, my father had gone on to love an entire another generation of youngsters besides me, a fact I simply had to accept under the rubric of maturity.  Not only was I connecting with pre-me Grandpa, but also another version corresponding to the post-me after I had grown.

     At the end of the road was the realization that we had come here to this green alpine valley, not in search of a final resting place, but in search of a part of ourselves that we barely knew was there.  Guiding and helping us to get there were the last instructions of this man that we shared in common; the recipe was as simple as waking up in the morning, packing your bag, and trudging upward, ever upward, to greener and more pristine vistas, cleaner and cleaner air, less humans and more animals and plants.  If this isn't an ascent toward heaven, then I don't know what is.

Dude, what happened to your Iphone? And your arm....?

     "Dude, what happened to your I-phone screen?" "Oh, that.  It fell out of a hammock at 35 kilometers an hour..."

     This is really not a story about hammocks, or I-phones, although it does mention them.  This is a story about an insidious tree called a Mangrove.

     If you've heard of mangroves before, you are probably in one of two camps: A. you know it has something to do with river deltas or swampy things.  B. you did a post-doctorate internship in one of Costa Ricas national parks where you studied the lifecycle of saline environments, and you could write a 100 page summary of mangroves esssential role in maintaining a delicate ecosystem.

     I'm not really that interested in either, because I nearly lost my life to a Mangrove forest.  That's right; I said the trees were trying to eat me, and I'm about to prove it to you.

     It all started innocently enough when I decided to take a 'shortcut' between Buffalo Bay Beach and Ao Yai Beach in Koh Phayam, which is a lovely, almost 90's style undeveloped island looking directly across the border to the Burmese Maiek Archipelago in the Andaman sea (due east of Calcutta).  

     On the map, these two beaches are separated by a peninsula which juts out less than a kilometer, and I was at the extreme end of Buffalo Bay where it nearly, save this peninsula, stretches out to touch Ao Yai.  So on the tourist map there is a little dotted line connecting them, and itself is less than a kilometer.

     So I followed the beach path until it sort of petered out; it looked as if a new property owner was setting up his fenceline, judging by all the cement posts in a line, waiting for the rest of the fence.  I followed the property line, hoping to catch a glimpse of this legendary trail, about which I had also heard rumors.

     At the end of the very last concrete fencepost, I still hadn't located a trail.  But I could see very clearly through the mangrove forest which began just at its edge, so I was tempted to just follow a straight path into them using the sun as a compass. 

     Mangrove forests are very easy to look through, since they have very dense 'knees', or root systems which stick out like flying buttresses from their trunks, but above that, the trunk is branchless for about three or four meters.  So if you are in a mangrove forest,  at low tide, the knees come up to about waist or chest level.

     It was, in fact, low tide, and the trees were spaced about five meters apart, so that when I entered the forest, I was merely winding my way through them, stepping carefully on the oozy mudflats.  After about twenty minutes, the trees got more and more dense, so that I had to squeeze between them, and then finally really packed in tightly, so that I had to either duck under the knee roots (for really big trees) or clamber over them (for smaller ones).

It wasn't until I had been making my Indiana Jones adventure style jungle traverse for about an hour before I looked back and realized that I was now completely surrounded by a Mangrove forest; that it was just one species from here as far as I could see.  Reasoning that the one kilometer must be at least reduced to two -thirds by now, I continued on.

     It was then that I had my first realization about the nature of mangrove forests.  They grow along the shore, because they can handle the salt water; and in fact they seem to thrive where lots of streams and tidal cuts run inland from the shore.  So it was just such a stream or tidal cut that I encountered in my first hour of what was to later become an ordeal.  I decided to take off my money belt, containing cash dollars, Thai baht, my passport and watch, and sling it around my shoulders.  I was also carrying a flimsy 3rd world plastic bag into which had been heaped a hammock I just bought, the map, and by now my tank top shirt, for I was sweating from all the knee-clambering already.

     This first foray into the water proved to be something of  a small disaster.  The mudflats gave way to alluvial, two feet thick mud that was unsteady as  grounding, so I naturally had to lower myself into the actually quite steep rivulet with the aid of one of the mangrove knees.  The water was quite opaque, being brackish and the color of the mud itself.  I felt the coolness of the water on my sweaty, greasy skin and it was a relief at first.  Then I nearly fell, and grabbed underwater for stability on one of the mangrove roots.  When I raised my arm from the water, it was streaming; no- gushing- blood.

I had passed my forearm across a small colony of razor clams, which apparently were attached to the roots of the mangrove below the waterline.  I looked at the cuts; only one of which was seriously deep and would need medical attention, possibly stitches...later I realized that it missed a vein by about a centimeter and that is why I am here now to tell this story.  The cuts were numerous, however, so it made a much deeper impression on my psyche to see the blood streaming from so many sources.  I washed off the wounds by dipping my arm back in the dirty water, at the same time wondering if there were any species here that might see me as prey.  As far as I could see, the only moving things I had to worry about were crabs and possibly mosquitoes, which strangely had not been a concern up until this time.

     On the other side of the bank I determined to make a very hard push to get to the other side of the mangrove forest, where my bungalow, a fifth of Burmese rum, and sympathetic friends would all be awaiting me.  So I ignored the bleeding arm, hoping it would stop soon, and pushed on through the thicket of knees.

     Things just got worse.  I now realized that not only was this central part of the mangrove forest more thick than the outskirts had been, it was also ten times more difficult to traverse.  There was a mix of young, old, dying and half dying trees all side by side, so that now, traversing  them meant climbing up on the knees, then reaching out for the trunk of the next tree, and half-leaping across to the rickety knees of that tree.  Unfortunately this could be disastrous if the tree was old, half rotten or otherwise dying, since the trunk might be stable enough, but an old half rotten knee would give way and bring me crashing down.  More than once I reached out with my leg to test a knee, then hear it crunch and give way, while I pulled my leg back.

I should also mention that I was not at my physical peak.  Not only have I gotten older than I can ever remember being, but I also had a sports accident where both biceps tendons were ripped off the bone, and had to be stapled back on with surgery.  This was just six months prior, and the doctor had cleared me for 'normal activity ', by which I suppose he meant bathing myself, washing dishes, carrying a backpack with a few books, not lunging through a half rotten murderous mangrove forest, clinging like a monkey to the few good limbs left, my hammock by now suspended doggy style in my mouth, the map long gone, the t-shirt floated away on the stream.  No, I didn't suppose that it was normal behavior, but I was quickly approaching the point where this was just survival, to preserve the whole organism I must risk the parts, right?

     I took stock of my situation.  I had been slogging through this forest now for about two hours, though my digital watch had taken a soaking and now had this black ooze slowly eating up the time display.  My heart, however, was ticking along just fine, in fact I was keenly aware of it, as if it were beating outside of my ribcage, and it was then I realized I had a dangerously high heartbeat, somewhere in the 200 beats/minute region, a speed I had only ever achieved before with adrenaline.  I was, I realized, in the state of mind in which people grow confused and make bad decisions leading to their death.  In fact, all I needed was to fall through a rotten knee and put my eye out with a broken root, in order to be that much closer to incapacitated and doomed to die in this miserable tree-hell.

     I took time to catch my breath and let my heart slow down, trying hard to grab the reins of my runaway paranoia; If I could get control of my mind, I at least had a fighting chance of getting out of this with minor injuries, as I would surely see my still bleeding arm.  I looked down at my legs and realized that they had also miraculously escaped a break, sprain or ligamental tear, since every time I stepped on a branch that either wobbled out of the way or came crashing down, my ankles had been subjected to the worst sort of multi-stick squeezing, scraping, and thwacking, and my ankle area was now bleeding and bruised and looked even worse than the razor clam cuts.  Worst of all, it was getting dark and I would soon lose the only advantage I had; the sun was both illumination and direction finding for me.

     Considering my situation carefully I realized the folly of my original quest; that it was now time for an all-out-push to return to simply the place from which I came.  Thinking even more carefully, I realized that it was actually the waterways which presented the easiest way of moving through this impossible pick-up-sticks forest.  True, there were the deadly razor clams to contend with, but if I proceeded more slowly and carefully avoided the roots underwater, I could avoid them.

     So I realized that probably the most important thing, after my life and well being, was the functioning of my phone, so I took the iphone out, wrapped it in many layers of hammock, and slung the hammock in a high branch well above the high tide line.  If I survived this I could at least return at high tide in a boat, and hopefully there wouldn't be other conditions (a torrential rain, a human who could somehow come here to salvage it? no, it seemed impossible) that would ruin it.  I found a broken branch about three meters long, broken down to two, made a good stabilization/depth tester for the water which was now well at chest level as I eased myself into the water, hoping that blood-smelling sharks would never dream of coming so far inland...

     I headed upstream, since it was back in the general direction of whence I came. After losing my shoes several times to the nearly two feet of soft, oozy mud in some places, I came to another split in the stream, and as it veered off to the left, it looked as if possibly there might be some grass growing between the mangroves, and even enough space to easily get between the trees.  I squeezed my way up on the bank, feeling hopeful but not daring to think this was the way out until, about a meter from the bank, I glimpsed what was at the time the most beautiful thing I thought I had ever seen:  Human garbage.  All in a pile.  Think about it....human garbage.  Someone had put that there.....and that someone had come by road or trail.....

     It was an unusual stroke of luck.  I had found the single best, shortest route back to where I had begun this ordeal.  I looked at the watch, whose display was now totally eaten up by the black ooze.  Useless.  I decided I had enough strength and wits to go back for the hammock and iphone, and when I got the iphone back safely on the dry garbage bank, I realized that the whole ordeal had lasted just under four hours, I had probably lost several kilos in sweat alone, and my top speed I modestly estimated at one hundred meters per hour through the forest.

     Thinking these things distracted me from all the pain my body was giving me;  ankles smarted from all the scratching and beating they had taken in their crashing journey to the mudflats criss crossed with treacherous mangrove roots, alive, dead and half rotten.  I was determined not to look at the worst gash until I reached the clinic or hospital of the island, which I prayed would be open and not subject to some perverse siesta hours.

     I passed a few foreigners on foot, and too much in shock and dazed, I continued on, thinking that I could return to the last place I had taken a Thai massage a little further on, and seek help there in reaching the clinic.  Half an hour later, there was no one there, and it was the victim of a siesta tsunami, since neither were guests visible in the guest houses below.  I used the bathroom to wash a few things with slightly cleaner water than the swamp and continued on.  Before long I reached a place where  a thai man was laying in a hammock while a fire burned nearby.  He immediately jumped up and helped me, but said he couldn't take me to the hospital, 'because he was sick' - apparently suffering a bad fever himself, he just gave me a lift to the next house, where he gave orders to take me to the hospital, and somewhat ironically having taken care of me, he ran back to his motorcycle and retreated in the direction of his hammock.

     On the road to the hospital, with my new chauffeur, I heard a terrible clattering sound, and as we both looked back, I glimpsed my iphone on the road.  I got off, ran back and retrieved it.  The plastic screen shield had kept all the glass from falling out and further penetrating the LCD screen, so weirdly, it still worked.  Maybe the phone was just being sympathetic; I had also nearly lost my eyes, my life, but for just the kind of luck that prevents a small accident from snowballing and becoming a truly large catastrophe, I had been spared.

     The doctors and nurses in the clinic couldn't understand the story I tried to relate to them.  They had seen a hundred motorcycle accidents that looked something like I did, maybe if the rider had been catapulted into the bushes, but when I drew very ridiculous and childish drawings of clams, accompanied by probably culturally inappropriate hand motions of clams opening and closing, their eyes just went wider. 

     Further drawings of mangroves and their nasty knees produced more confusion, but finally when a nurse with slightly better English came in, the word 'clam' at least got translated into something they could understand, and, unable to make any more sense of the issue, they gave up...in fact, in the following days when I returned there to change the bandages, I sensed that I had some kind of 'celebrity status', the man with the mystery accident.

 To be continued....

A Gothic Tale of Feral Cats...

My neighborhood is plagued with feral cats; many neighborhoods of this country are, as pet abandonment is as prevalent as rice over here.  My house is sort of a magnet for the roving cat gangs, since I have nice balcony ledges which make nice launching/landing pads for inter-house leaps.
The other night I came home, actually it was just pre-dusk, but a little bit darkish, and while climbing the steep stairs that lead out of the darkened garden up to my top-floor of the 3 story house, when out of the corner of my eye I spy what seems to be a squashed rat.  Not wanting to directly 'see' this horror, I kept moving, but as I entered my house, my brain continued to churn the image over and over; it seemed like there had definately been squiggly guts all over, and the creature was splayed out like a dead dog.
Now all I could think about was that, how I was looking at a major cleanup job, and that I had no shovel, only a one-foot midget broom, that would probably need itself to be cleaned or thrown away.  Plus there would be gore and the smell, depending on how long I procrastinated.
I decided to put it out of my mind.  I would find a way, somehow.  Maybe the neighbors whose door it was closer to would man up and do the job.  But no, I'd seen dogshit right in front of their door and they did nothing.  They were hopeless.  But maybe a rapacious cat, not necessarily the mother, would eat the damn thing...it was meat, after all.  Don't cats eat weird shit like dogs do?
So after just letting all these thoughts fester in my mind for a while, and trying to busy myself to keep those images out, I had to go out again for shopping.  This time I assiduously avoided any direct gaze, but again, in order to avoid stepping on the thing, I had to catch at least a part of it out of the corner of my eye.
Hurrying out of my house, my mind began reprocessing the eyecorner image, like Nasa scientists poring over the latest shots of Mars...actually my incessantly morbid mind was now coming to a new conclusion; those squiggly bits were not guts splayed, but actually it was a stillborn cat fetus, and the squiggly thing was umbilical cord, and the non squiggly bit must have been a placenta.  I'm not sure the idea of a stillborn fetus was any less unsettling than a squashed rat, but somehow at least the idea of cleanup began to appear more cheerful.
I stayed out shopping an unusually long time, not wanting to have to go home and deal with the fetal removal by cruelly short broom implement....Somehow in the back of my mind I kept clinging to the 'roving scavenger' theory- although in all my time in Seoul I had never witnessed an eagle or a hawk, I was never more ready to witness a raptor swooping in than now, sort of like people in North Dakota waiting to see the UFO's....
So on the way back in my house it was dark, and I had to get my little red keychain light out, had to be very careful not to squash the fetus, or I would be back to square one on the cleanup nightmare.  So I stepped gingerly through the garden, and this time it was almost impossible not to look directly at the pile of meat on my step, if I wanted to be sure to avoid stepping on it, plus the spotlight effect of the light in the dark, and then i shit my pants.....

THE THING WAS MOVING!  A little head reared in the red light like a demon from hell....

I rushed back upstairs to pour myself a whiskey.  Now I really had a mess- I have to 'put it out of its misery AND clean it up! I sat there for an hour, thinking hard about how NOT to think about this...maybe a nighttime scavenger would still come and eat the thing, but I really hoped it didn't make a mess or even a horrorific sound as it did so....

About an hour later, I stumbled down the stairs to re-assess the situation, prepared for the worst, and the kitten was gone!  Apparently the mother had just chosen the WORLD'S WORST NEWBORN PARKING spot while she recovered from partum- I remembered that cats are always doing that, moving their babies all over Shit-dom.

Later after the second whiskey back in my house, I realized I had missed my chance....now there was one more feral cat in my neighborhood....

NAKED Breakfast Experiment.

I remember learning, a long time ago in school of some sort, that the difference between Naked and Nude was that Nude meant you had intended to be seen naked, as in Nude beaches, Nude art, etc.  Naked was a synonym of unprotected where the viewer's gaze was unwelcome and even uninvited.
I found little evidence of this distinction remaining in my breakfast experiment this morning, where a recent news blurb from wacky Florida  got me thinking:  Is there a gender distinction when we say Naked Man/Naked Woman or Nude Man/Nude Woman?
As is often the case with Breakfast Experiments, asking the question simply opened up deeper questions :
Experimental Proceedure:
Coffee:  100 g. of Panama 'Boquete' green beans was open flame-roasted in a skillet three days prior to the experiment and set aside.  On the morning of the experiment, an aliquot of the same beans were ground and extracted with boiling H2O using a crude beaker/filter arrangement.  Milk and sugar were titrated generously in preparation for the next phase.
Data:  A web portal-search engine service known as "Google" was consulted for the four combinations of phrases, both with and without quotation marks to act as controls.
Perusal of the headlines often led to some amusing/ironic examples such as
"Man Caught Making Coffee Naked in His Home." (wait, can they see me through internet?), as well as some disturbing examples, such as:
"Naked Sultan Woman Waving Severed Dog's Head Arrested and..." -in such instances as the latter, coffee was diluted with single-malt whiskey to help assimilate the information.  The author will leave it to the reader to fill in the ellipsis.

The results are shown in Table 3, below:

Gender	“Man”	“Woman”	Ratio
Naked X arrested	4,600,000	1,800,000	39%
Nude X arrested	6,320,000	1,630,000	25%
“Naked X arrested” (with quotes)	1,410,000	416,000	29.5%
“Nude X arrested”(with quotes)	268,000	93,400	34%

What is interesting is that, consistently, there are about 3 to 4 Naked or Nude Men for every Naked/Nude woman.  Curiously, this confirms the author's casual observations on nude beaches at various locations around the world.  The question that it arouses, however, is whether this gender differential is more of a language, cultural, social, or biological function.  That is, are there actually more Nude/Naked men arrested because they are naked, or because they are men? Another way of phrasing this is, Do more men than women get naked in public in the first place, or is it more illegal for a man to be naked in public?


Any thoughts on the reasons behind this phenom? or is it just an artifact?

another WTF moment from Google maps....swimming pools IN the DMZ?

recently while looking at North Korea on Google, I found what appears to be not one, but two giant swimming pools on the South Korean side of the DMZ....they look nicer (e.g. emptier) than anything else in the republic....maybe I should sign up for the army so I don't have to bump elbows in the pool all the time...
Google gave the address as San 168 Jajak-ri, Jangnam-myeon, Yeoncheon-gun, Gyeonggi-do but I think you'll have better luck with the coordinates. (37.991794,126.840302 )  The two pools are literally 'across the street' from the DMZ (that denuded border running along the north of them is the southern limit of the 'strip' aka The No Man Zone, which also allegedly has deer and other mammalian fauna pretty much extinct in the two Koreas...

Non zero sum games, Relativity, and other ramblings....

I haven't posted in some time, but the recent rumblings of warmongering in the north (Yong Pyeong Island, 2 minutes by artillery shell from my house) have given me some momenti mori, and reminded me that it might be my last chance to blog (I know, it's a waste of one's last moments)....
Recently in class we were covering a chapter about the environment (titled "Carbon Footprint"), which was actually a lot of fun to do with Chemistry and Engineering majors, since they actually are studying Thermodynamics and Entropy in English and actually 'understand' that our options are severely limited as we pass into the period of Peak Oil...it boils down to that the best battery we've ever known, millions of years of solar energy built into Carbon single and double bonds in the form of dead flora/dinosaurs trapped under the earth, is running out.
If the age of Industrialism and Post Modernism could be said to be limited only by imagination, increasingly we must concede that we are being limited by resources; space, energy, water, etc. These sorts of limitations naturally lend themselves to the stringent qualities of the Prisoner's dilemma, The Peace-War game, the dilemma of the Commons, and so forth. While I don't want to go into the nitty gritty of the P. dilemma here, what interests me is that precisely it becomes more relevant as we run into resource limitations here on this planet.
How does Relativity come into all of this? Well, it seemed to me that just as two people cannot observe the same phenomenon in exactly the same way unless they are in the same reference frame, so we humans seem unable to observe the world from another person's viewpoint, or more importantly, from the external viewpoint of what is best for the human race, namely to avert a self-created climate change disaster scenario. This larger dilemma is repeated in so many micro dilemmas, such as the one which confronts this country and their more aggressive brothers to the north.

Best case scenario 1: nothing significant will happen. North Korea will achieve its mysterious goals of either garnering the West's attention, achieving greater internal solidarity, or the successful coronation of a new prince (Kim Jong Eun)in the dynasty. Or, they will attack in a similar manner a few weeks or months down the road. (I give this one more than 80% probability)
Best case scenario 2 (from a Hollywood film, actually Moon Over Parador):
Kim Jong Eun will take the helm and lead the country in an unexpected direction of openness to the West and democracy. (I give this about 1% probability, like most Hollywood plots)

Worst case scenario 1: nothing significant will happen....minor escalation in the form of iterated, isolated attacks and counter attacks from North and South, or in the form of increased sanctioning. I give this one about 18%
Worst case scenario 2: (from a Video Game plotline): North Korea goes balls-out for invasion and ultimately their own extermination, including a possible scene involving the first-since 1945 use of nuclear devices on a battlefield. (this one gets the other 1% probability). I also find this one interesting considering the most recent history of sneak attacks:

1. Serb separatist assasinates Archduke Ferdinand- (Semi-Fail!) Greater Serbia did become a reality (e.g. Yugoslavia) only forty years later, but look at it now....still messed up...)
2. Hitler invades Russia (Uber-Fail!)
3. Pearl Harbor (won the battle, lost the war)
4. 9-11 (garnered enormous sympathy for the US in Europe and elsewhere, goodwill soon squandered by George W.) - but ultimately too soon to decide if this sneak attack was successful - far more successful than the actual attack has been the reaction of the US to label a priori all of its own citizens as terrorists (AQ FTW so far).

So if Kim Jeong Eun decides to start lobbing shells at us in the wee hours when I'm watching Boardwalk Empire, well, then, I have to say, you got me there...but it seems rather improbable statistically, so I'll stick to the big killers here, and by way of comparison:

Traffic: (2 friends killed in last ten years)
North Korea: (1 cousin once removed killed in the last sixty years)
Pollution: (ongoing, statistics murky)

aint she beautiful?

happening in our town....

Would you ride this?

So far, Ive had nothing but positive experiences riding the low- cost carriers. But when I saw this Pegasus Airlines plane I had a few....hesitations shall we say?

Sunset over the Golden Horn

Sunset with, fittingly, a mosque minaret and a modern light fixture (unless you chose to see the resemblance to the monsters in War of The Worlds) with the seagulls massing overhead (or The Birds, if you prefer to see that movie)

Taken from the North side of the bridge linking the two sides of the Golden Horn, the river that divides the European side of Istanbul in two *(Istanbul is further divided into Europe and Asia by the Bosporus)
(Dedicated to Mutlu, that gentlest of geniuses)

Yın Yang Converted

A unique pattern on a Ming (or was it earlier?) dynasty pottery at Topkapi Palace, Istanbul

Istanbul, Crossroads between east and west

This Turkish girl is wearing a half-length jean jacket, cut with a high midriff. Since I often proofread for people involved with Korean traditional clothing, I couldn't help but notice the striking similarity of this style with Koreas 'hanbok' jackets, which are also cut with a high midriff.

Stuffed Bell Pepper (Paprika)

A Turkish chef greets customers at a 'See Your Food' type cafeteria establishment on Istiklal Street, in the Manhattanesque Taxmin Square district of Istanbul. These bell peppers are stuffed with meat and rice, and topped with cheese and tomato....they taste as good as they look; but eating in a cafeteria is by no means cheap....a typical meal here costs about 7 euros, or about 10 dollars.

an angel, not sure which one, from the left side of the altar inside of the Greek Ortho church, which was full of images of St. Theodisius

the gate of a Greek Orthodox church near my apartment in Istanbul - loaded with symbols (does anyone know what the triangle is?)- I believe the swastika is the doing of 'turkmen aryan' skinheads - that is, not aryans per se, but turkish borrowing from Hitler's pure race ideology. They may have chosen this church to deface because the Greeks, their hated enemies historically, are actually the same bunch of people, give or take a few empires...probably causes their skin-tight heads to ache a little bit.

Baba Joe, AKA Banana Joe

This Classic Trash Film poster decorates the room I now rent in Istanbul. Someday I will have to obtain this film just to see what sort of Neocolonial Exploits Banana Joe gets up to (by the way, those of you who have seen the way bananas grow on a 'branch', and who have attempted to lift one of these branches, probably realize that the load of bananas depicted is not only too heavy (about 100 kilos) but would never balance (three stems in evidence) on one shoulder, no matter how wide.

I'm not the only one.....

Yes, its a bottle of fermented carrot juice. And you thought I was strange.....

parade of the Ottomans

A random parade on Istiklal street in Istanbul, is headed up by some local 'boys' dressed in some of the traditional Cashew-fruit hat, and carrying the curvy scimitar that we always associate with arabs, but which actually belong more to the period after the middle ages...

This guy has got a bit of a beer belly but is a great example of the helmet with the neck covered by chain mail *(as is the rest of the corpulescense)

From the rear a good example of the tiny tiny shield and bow, which apparently was an adaptation of the powerful mongol bows, but just before gunpowder made the whole outfit rather redundant. So in between the period that knights roamed the earth and the appearance of armorless musketmen, these guys were wreaking havoc in the east (and they stopped at the gates of Vienna, thus changing the history of the West forever). This was also about the time of the French Rout in Agincourt, where the supremacy of the English longbow and of guerilla strategy over the might of the horseman was proved once and for all- that is, until the Nazi tanks cut down the Polish cavalry in 1939.