Travelling by cycle

I just aborted a ten day, 550 km trip by cycle from the capital of Korea, Seoul, to the second largest city, Busan, in the opposite corner of the country.  There is an amazing and perhaps globally unique system of car-free trails that shuttle the cyclist along two major rivers, keeping the trail mostly flat.  Lee Myung Bak, the last president, left it as a legacy to the country which shouted him out of office after a scandal involving free trade and American Beef.

All along the trail, I kept meeting people who seemed to think that the only important thing was completing the whole trail, or arriving at the destination.  I rarely met people who were allowing the weather, the terrain and the sociocultural interest level to dictate their pace of travel.

The Bicycle Museum is right on the actual path, but many cyclists arrive when it is closed.
 I stayed the night so I would be able to check it out, as last time I arrived after its opening hours.

I too, am guilty of not following my own travel ideal, which is sort of epicurean, maximize experience, and if possible, pleasureable experience at the cost of completion or thoroughness.  Honestly, if I had done it right, I would have completely skipped "LG valley, the entire city and outskirts of Gumi, which is 60 km north of third-largest city, Daegu, and serves as a giant Detroit full of flat screen makers and associated industry.  The skyline is mostly smokestacks and there are entire blocks along the river without a single dwelling or corner shop or anything, actually, except factories.

Abandoned factory in Gumi, on the bike trail

It's a spooky sight, especially on a Sunday, and I should just have taken a bus or train from the last good spot, Sangju, to the next, Waegwan, which is mostly interesting because of the tide-turning battle that took place there.  But as Ju-Won ("Juan with an American accent, he told me) put it, Korea is more often efficient than reasonable.  To translate that back to a cycling tour, there was no way to avoid the industrial ugly that is Gumi, without crossing a mountain range or two, because one of Korea's largest manufacturing centers was built along the second longest river in the country, and upstream from perhaps a fifth of its food producing regions.

I had hoped fervently to lead a tour of American cyclists on this miraculous trail from city to city, but it was in Gumi, looking at it honestly with a marketing eye, that I realize I would need some serious tweaking to make this happen in a pleasant way.  Most Americans, though we certainly have worse canker sores like the chemical processing areas in Louisiana, would be decidedly turned off to see where their LCD TVs were coming from.

For the most part, though, the trail winds through some pretty virgin and unspoiled areas, as witnessed by the fishermen we saw fly fishing in every quiet bend of the river, and as confirmed one night when we heard an Asian barking deer, which was barking pretty aggressively after having swum across a 900 meter wide river with a pretty decent current.  Dragonflies and sluggish grasshoppers were our constant companions, and small, annoying gnats which only seemed to exist in the shade, and only became a problem when laboring up a steep grade, which could approach 20%, about the same as most stairways in public places.

So what I'm trying to say here, is that maybe 'Muricans would be as impressed as I am, that nature still managed to struggle through the cracks left it by rapid Korean industrialization, and that despite all the out of control development in places like the endpoints of the trail, Seoul and Busan, there are still plenty of lovely rocks-and-trees-only type vistas, plenty of sleepy towns where the country mile/hour/effort system of guestimation applies.  (In fact, we gave up asking local people distances because they would vary as much as 4 times from person to person.)

So when I aborted my trip at the 350 km mark, still over 200 km short of the 'destination', it was with some sadness and even sort of partial capitulation to someone elses idea of 'victory' and 'defeat'.  I did it because quite simply this marathon of heat was becoming more and more an issue of survival and shrewd discipline and planning, and less about enjoying the countryside.  Even the gorgeous vistas became steamed up with haze so thick as to obscure nearby mountains before 11 in the morning, so that effectively, if one wanted to do this trip, it meant going to bed upon arrival in a town, ideally 8 pm, then getting up at four and hitting the road at 'civilian dawn', which means when ordinary people perceive that the night is ending.

Many people in a hurry miss all the great art center only meters off the trail...

Not my idea of fun, and with all the restrictions, you are only likely to meet really Type A, spandex-breathing Serious Athletes, who have no time to stop and shoot the shit, share a non-reccommendable bottle of booze or other performance killing things like cookies and whatnot, and actually, this will turn your lovely Vacation of Experience into a Grim Army of One.

Nothing quite like coming in sweating buckets to this cool museum

On the bus on the way back, our driver apparently cut off a trucker and really, really pissed him off.  We spent the next hour on the edge of death, as the truck in front tried to box us in the slow lane, swerving dangerously every time our driver attempted to get in the fast lane, and the driver in front consistently drove 20 km under the speed limit, so as to rub salt in our driver's wounds.  It went from being an obvious vindictive revenge, to a very very dangerous game of cat, mouse and chicken, from which I actually started believing was going to be my very last experience in this life.

It all came out well in the end, but it reminded me that I had at least attempted another of my bucket lists, to ride, ride ride until the very end, whether real or fake.

bundled against the x rays of the sun, posing for a shot with the mothership

Jail Cake

     Most would say that jail is not their idea of an adventure.  However , there are certain circumstances under which I would always choose jail as the preferred experience.  For example, if you had a chance to be jailed with other key civil rights protestors in the 1960's, or even in Selma with Martin Luther King, in South Africa with Nelson Mandela, wouldn't you jump at the chance?  Well, we cannot always be so lucky, or so righteous, or persistent, as to have those kind of moments, but I cannot but maintain that this jail experience I had was the best possible use of my tourist self at the time.

     My Jail story really began in Guatemala, where I had been living in the hills of Huehuetenango.  I had gone to Chi Chi (Chichicastenango) for a Mayan festival.  I had been hoping to see some shamanic rituals that I heard about, that might or might not have been related with the ancient Classic Maya and their calendar, whose hieroglyphs I was studying at the time.  It was there that I met Thomas Lang, the war reporter.

     Tomas (Spanish spelling) was a hard drinking, hard playing, down to earth war reporter originally from Chicago, where he had learned his predilection for siding with the underdog.  Working in the mostly black South Side at the time, he had realized that he could transcend his race and become accepted by the locals, which is how he worked his magic as a reporter.  Previous to working in El Salvador as a stringer for an Illinois small city paper, he had covered the Beirut beat, which according to him was far, far more dangerous.
     Tomas said he wouldn't even have made friends with another American, but that I spoke to him for the first time in Spanish (which I confess was more whim than habit), and we shared a small bottle of El Venado aguardiente ('Deer brand' 'firewater', the local hooch, which we all lovingly nicknamed Envenenado , or 'poisoned'), which naturally had to be diluted with coca cola and friendship.

     After passing many of Tomas's litmus tests, such as having lived on the South Side of Chicago, having been the only non-Jewish WhiteBoy in an otherwise 'All-Black' high school, speaking Spanish and a smattering of Maya, but most of all, being able to metabolize Envenenado, he invited me nonchalantly to come to El Salvador, more specifically the capital where he was based.

     "C'mon down to El Salvador, you'll like it.  Especially the parties..." he said , leaving me just enough of a worm wriggling to intrigue me.  Guatemala was really beautiful and deep with indigenous culture, but I had been a little bored recently, I felt the need to move among my own and socialize a little.  I had been cooped up in the hills for far too long.

     So although I had now been living in Guatemala for a full year, making occasional trips to Mexico for Visa purposes, with no definite end in sight, I now started to slowly make plans to tie up loose ends and continue my journey, which had been stagnated by my love of Guatemala.  In fact if it had not been for this catalyst, I might never have reached Argentina, or even Colombia.

    When I got to El Salvador, I checked into a hotel, which is still one of my favorite travel memories, because the ground floor was used as a tobacco curing shed, and the aromatic, heavenly smells of drying tobacco wafted up through the floors and into all the rooms.  Tobacco is not an unpleasant plant; it makes me wonder how much chemical wizardry goes into making it smell as bad as cigarettes do.

     After a week there, Tomas found me a friend's empty house to stay in, and he proceeded to show me the party life I had dreamed of living up in the hills.  It wasn't sophisticated, no cocktails, nothing but beer, the people were great but not exactly what I would call 'my crowd'.  What set the party apart was that it was taking place during a civil war.  Eat Drink, and Be Merry, for tomorrow some of us could be dead.  Not a cute quip, but a reality in that time and place.  Everything seemed to have more meaning because of it, colors were sharper, sounds more crisp, food more tasty.

     Of course after a few weeks of partying like this, even this began to get a little old, and I yearned for more indigenous folklore, some local culture, and there was this town called La Palma in the hills near the border of Honduras and Guatemala, that was apparently worth it, for the entire town had been turned into this art village by this one visionary artist.  He had this unique and yet teachable naif style of painting that he taught to the villagers, and the entire village was just devoted now to churning out this painting style in a variety of handicrafts; gourds, wall hangings, clothes, etc.

     Unfortunately, travel around the country was simply not a matter of getting a ticket and going.  More than half of the country was more or less in the hands of the guerrilla, and in a losing battle with the hearts and minds of their own people, the government was restricting travel to these areas.  Any place within walking or even horse riding distance of guerrilla territory required a travel permit issued by the Salvadorean High Command, or  salvoconducto, as it is called in Spanish.

      Applying for and successfully receiving a salvoconducto often took more than a week, and often two weeks.  Unfortunately, I was at the end of my visa and wouldn't be able to wait that long.  But Tomas simply told me a little trick:  " These things are always changing, according to the situation of the army and the guerrillas.  So just get on a bus, and sit at the front where you are clearly visible.  If you are not allowed in the area without a salvoconducto, they will pull you off the bus and make you go back to the capital, and if not, if the situation is all clear, they'll allow you to go through.

     So we did just that....because by now I had recruited another person, a very blond looking Norwegian dude, in this adventure plan.  We both sat side by side, doubling our apparent foreignness, in the very front seat of the bus, where the soldiers at the roadblocks could clearly see us.  We passed more than five roadblocks in five hours, and at the end, we couldn't believe that we were entering La Palma, village of artists.

     Once we had gotten off of this magic bus, we sought out a hotel in the center of town, threw our packs down, and headed off to the market to search for dinner.  We found a lovely little vendedor selling pupusas and beer, and we joked about being the whitest guys on the bus and how it had worked like a magic talisman for opening up this lovely city to us.  Once we were here now, most of what there was to do was to go souvenir shopping, and possibly to visit with people and see how the art had affected their lives.  With all these plans, we finished our beers and went back to our hotel to get an early night in, so we could be fresh in the morning.

     When we opened the door of the room, there were three milicos (military police) sitting on our beds, going through our bags.  They looked up at us, without any apology or remorse.  "Good evening, gentlemen" said the one with ray bans, who seemed to be in charge.  "Do you have your salvoconducto to be here?"

     So we explained the whole deal , about how we really wanted to see La Palma, which is internationally famous, but that the salvoconducto required too much time, and how our friend had recommended the method of sitting at the front of the bus.  The commander shook his head when he heard how lazy the roadblock guys had been at doing their job.  We should have been stopped immediately out of the capital if things had been working well.

     He went on to say that this was a restricted area, and that we were actually in a little danger here, and so for our own safety, he insisted, before we could object about all the casual, safe looking people we had seen strolling around the market, 'for our own safety' we would be taken to the military base, and then in the morning, back to the capital by military transport.

La Palma today, reflecting not guerrillas but urban criminals.

     When we got our first look at our new digs for the night, the military base just outside of town, we were a little agog, for the entrance had bullet holes and divots right at about head level, all around the entrance.  Maybe people had even been killed in this deadly entrance.  The entry was not straight, but protected by a bullet pockmarked wall, and behind that wall, where the other walls were higher, there were other pockmarks to show how ill advised it would be to stick your head up during a fight.

    Once inside the base, they took us to a room no larger than a closet, and locked us in there.  It didn't take long for us  to realize that there were no windows, just the locked steel door, no hope of escape , and possible danger of asphyxiation or being dehydrated to death if it got too hot in here.  We wasted no time nor oxygen in going to sleep. As it turns out, there was just enough air in there for two men to pass a very short night.  In the morning, when they opened our door, we stumbled out, dizzy from lack of oxygen.  It took me all that day to recover my brain function, which I then used to realize how lucky we were they hadn't killed us through incompetence and negligence.  This was how cheap life had become here, apparently.

     They loaded us on the back of a Datsun pickup, with a mounted 50 mm machine gun, the sort of weapon you see now in a lot of middle eastern conflicts, an improvised weapon that is cheap and mobile, and easily switched out with another cheap Japanese pickup when the Datsun breaks down.  The ironic thing about this is that we were now being used by the military as human shields to pass unhindered through what was surely guerrilla territory.   To top it off, the men who were escorting us were out of uniform to increase the confusion for guerrilla snipers. All that day we fantasized that a really talented sniper would pick off the military guys, freeing us and beginning a fantastic adventure.

     But it was a quiet and uneventful ride. The green hills were more like the kind of touristing that we had originally signed up for; only now, we were leaving all of that verdure peace for the bustle of the Big Smoke, where the large and mostly empty prison of the Treasury awaited us.

     My cell was padded and right next to Ulf's as I'll call the Norwegian travel buddy, to protect his real name, in case he is now a cabinet minister or some other politician.  We could communicate by shouting through the little barred windows in our padded doors.  At first I thought we might have mistakenly been taken to some mental institution, the walls were very thick and it would be pretty difficult to hurt yourself by running at them.

    Looking around the cell, I found the answer.  There was a bloody handprint, at about eye level, and the fingers were smeared downward, as if someone had been thrown there.  This was a torture cell, and the padding was to muffle the screams, for as I found out later, this prison (like so many others) was located within earshot of a residential district.

     It was a chilling sight, and steeled my resolve to take this experience seriously.  I was an American passport holder, I reasoned, and so if I didn't give them any reason to kill me, it would be difficult for them to kill me with impunity (poor reasoning, as I found out later, since they killed over two dozen journalists during that conflict, possibly for having seen something they shouldn't have).  Ulf and I kept each other company that first night by shouting back and forth through the bars; both of us were afraid that we might be the last living witness of the other's demise, and it made us uneasy in a way we had no words to express, so we traded stories and Ulf even sang a Norwegian Viking dirge for me.

     The next day, it was time for the military to sort us out.  We had been dumped here by the army, but the actual prison was owned and operated by the Treasury department, which put it in some sort of legal loophole, or at least off of the usual journalistic radar.  It was perhaps for these reasons that this particular prison was actually a locus for torture of suspected communist sympathizers, thus explaining the padded cells and the blood stains.

     My cell door opened, and an interrogator in civilian clothes walked in.  He spoke English.  At that point my Spanish was certainly good enough to travel with, but I think they wanted no mistakes when it came to taking my statement, since the results of that could determine whether they let me live or not.

     He was holding my passport in his hand, and began with a classic itinerary interrogation.  Years later, I would study interrogations in detail for my master's thesis, and though I couldn't have known it at the time, this is one of the oldest and simplest gambits for a cop to catch someone lying.  You have the record of their comings and goings, and you simply jump around on the calendar, hoping they will slip up.  The main problem with this is that over a period of years people's memories are not so perfect.

     "So in April you entered Mexico at the border of Zapotal, Chiapas?"
     I thought for a second.  April was nearly a year ago.  I had left HueHue to get my visa renewed, that time had been a quick crossing just to reset the visa clock.
     "I believe so, yes"
     "And then in July, you re-entered Guatemala from Belize?"
     I was trying to figure out his game.  Was he just trying to get me to slip up on itineraries, or was he referring to my pattern of travel in Guatemala, which had been, just before leaving, to go to remote jungle zones, which just happened to be Guatemalan guerrilla country.  Indeed, that time, instead of turning around and coming right back, I had made a loop through Palenque, Aguas Azules, and the Yucatan Peninsula before returning to Guatemala through the Peten, which is where most of the guerrilla operate.
   "Oh, yeah, maybe I confused that with another time", I said.
     The interrogator furrowed his brow.  Clearly he had just caught me in a slip up, but something else seemed to be happening. He clearly seemed bored with this routine, and this line of questioning was not leading where he wanted it to.
     "So, earlier, it looks like actually a year earlier, you left Mexico and re entered from the U.S. border.
     "Yes".   (trying to recall this distant event)
     "So what were you doing that time?"
     "It must have been Nogales, Arizona.  I went to visit my friends in Tucson"
     "You have friends in Arizona?  Is that where you were living ?"
     "No, actually I was living in California before that.  San Francisco."
     His posture relaxed, and his demeanor shifted.  He parked one leg cross one knee, and said conversationally  "So how is California?  Are there plenty of jobs nowadays?"
     I could barely believe my ears.  The government itself is abandoning the country, I thought. This war is completely lost, I felt my head thinking autonomously.
     Seeing my chance, I shifted my gears also and began making polite conversation, following his lead.  Do you have relatives in California? I asked, knowing that it was a popular place for Salvadoreans to immigrate to.  How are they liking it?  I continued, trying to draw the attention away from me and my travels.
     We continued that way for another twenty minutes, and by now his mood had lightened considerably.  He went away, leaving the door open for the longest time, a really deadly pause, during which I considered, are they doing this so I'll attempt escape, and they can shoot me down as target practice?- thoughts which I later discovered were not so fantastic or out of touch with the reality of that grim time.
     After this long pause, with the door swinging on its hinges in the late afternoon breeze, not knowing whether this serendipity had bought my life or not, he then reappeared with a generous slice of cake with pink and white frosting.  I wasn't particularly in the mood for cake, but like so many other offered gifts from tribes and what not, I knew there was no option to refuse or even to put off eating it till later.  I don't know how to evaluate cake, but eating it there, with all the padding and blood stains around me, it tasted like absurdity.
     Ulf, the Norwegian, was released that day, but I had to spend another night, because even though there was no Norwegian embassy at that time, the Norwegian Charge D'Affairs businessman came and got him as soon as he was informed; whereas my American attaché; of whatever department is responsible to come and sign for Americans abroad imprisoned by accident, decided to stay at a Saturday night cocktail party a little later and come for me on Monday instead, because as it turned out, it was a weekend, and so the pink 'jail cake' had been given me on a Saturday.
     Walking out of that place, I decided the best way to decompress from the whole experience was to sit down at some café or restaurant, have some coffee or food, and get my bearings slowly, while feeling what it was like not to be in a blood-stained, padded eight by eight cell for a while.  I found a nice little street place directly across from the prison, and the woman was pleasant, taking my order for pupusas and eggs and sausages.  Pupusas are like giant, fat steaks of the corn masa that is used all over Central America for making tortillas.  They sometimes come stuffed with cheese or meat, but they are the emblem of El Salvador, a unique cuisine that stands in for the nation, like Kimchi does for Korean nationality.
     After she brought me my food, the lady was bored and a little curious, since I was her only customer, and a foreigner.  From her face I could tell she hadn't had many foreign guests in her little café. Between eggs and pupusa, I stopped to give her an explanation.  "I just got out of there", indicating the jail across the street, and then I saw the clouds of confusion cross her face, so I gave her a brief rundown of my weekend activities at the Torture Hotel.
     When I tried to pay, she said "No charge!" and held up her hands strongly as if Elvis himself had just eaten from her menu and it was an honor she would treasure forever.  As I would later find out from other Salvadoreans, I was one of few people ever to walk out of that place.

     Years later, while married to a Korean, I would end up living in one of the Salvadorean enclaves in Los Angeles, and as I chatted to my neighbors in Spanish, I wondered if I should bring up the story of the ride to La Palma, the Prison cake, and the free Pupusas...better not, I thought, it would bring up bad memories for most; my good fortune in having this adventure would be made absurd and  meaningless by all the horrors of war that had gone on.  While remembering this story, I did some basic research on the civil war, and it remains one of the most horrific conflicts a country has survived in modern times.

  

I dedicate this story to all the martyrs of that conflict and to the longsuffering Salvadorean people in general.

Hippy Roots

My Hippy Roots.

The legend goes that if you dance long
and hard enough, the Fire Faerie will appear

It's been the fashion to make fun of hippies pretty much since the first time someone dodged the draft for peace reasons (which would be maybe 1770 something) or smoked hemp (again, the same period), or put flowers in their hair (since maybe 1000 A.D., when it fell out of fashion), or claimed that the government is involved in a conspiracy to enslave the people (since the invention of democracy, because before that time, the slavery was transparent).  But there's an aspect often overlooked about hippies, that they perform an important function as the heart and conscience at the root of our culture.

Recently I had a chance to revisit my hippy roots (not so deep, since I was raised as a Southern Baptist, went to John Birch Camp, and my parents actually denounced Reagan as a liberal) in a 'gathering', as they are called.  Many people think that gatherings are just gigantic drug fueled orgies of people out of control.  That's pretty much the propaganda that's been around since Charlie Manson first inspired other hippies to stick forks in pregnant ladies bellies (yes, that actually happened).  Dirty, dangerous, out of control.
But this gathering was unique, since it was completely drug free, unless of course you consider alcohol to be a dangerous drug, which most do except the government of South Korea.  Korea is an Alcoholic Nation, and other drugs are simply not available.  So what does a hippy gathering do without drugs?  They spread different manifestations of love; hugs, music, dance, gifts, and most important to the process, the rhetoric of love.  When one feels love for a fellow human, they need to change most of the language structures and habits that are common to 'normal' discourse.  Many of the things we say to each other are said without love, and are cynical, critical, and ultimately un-self-loving.
Now this is usually the point when my more cynical or analytical friends are quick to point out the many contradictions and hypocrisies that hippies are well known for: smoking (a herb) while talking about air pollution or the many toxins in our foods, claiming that appearance is immaterial and then being clearly biased about people wearing suits or other 'conformist' clothing.  Most people just think of hippies as people who don't bathe enough and are clearly full of shit.  Which is fine, even though I have adopted them since about the age of 18 as my people, my family, my tribe; because even hippies themselves have recognized the problem among themselves and have coined a word for the most egregious trespassers on the sum of our common senses: trustafarians, a new portmanteau of 'trust fund hippy' and 'rastafarian' to signify a new breed of douchebag who uses dreadlocks as a ticket to trample upon every one else around them, and generally act entitled.  In other words, the outward appearance of hippies is far too easily mimicked, just as the word 'natural' is too easily hijacked and subverted by the food industry.
Taking all of this into account, I realize it's dangerous to my social standing to even be associated with these people - but at the same time, I cannot but help standing with them, because even though they often fail at their stated goal of peace and love, though they be infiltrated with lazy, useless, parasites who are seemingly rotten to the core, at the very least they are people attempting to make the world a better place, in their own imperfect way.  I honestly don't want to live in a world where people are simply following the Adam Smithian copout of "self interest economics dominates all", which is ultimately based on incomplete observations of the world, and as we are now learning, doesn't jibe with biology, either.
What's even more important to me, is to look at the history of the world since 1960 and realize that actually most of the things that hippies advocated for, which were considered weird, ridiculous, and just plain obscure, are now a standard part of our world; organic foods, whole grain products, almost all things that are now acknowledged to be 'healthy' were things that were 'fringe' and 'bad science' in the 'better-living-through-chemistry' era that spawned them.  Judged by the standards of those times, we'd all have to admit that 90% of us would be considered hippies by at least one of the things we eat, believe, or language that we use.
So I'm not saying you should stop making fun of hippies, who were actually so used to the public ridicule in the 1960's that they rejected the word 'hippy' in 1968, rebranding themselves as 'freaks' (sort of like the activist use of 'queer') and even holding a funeral for the 'hippy' , complete with a coffin and procession down Haight-Ashbury.   By all means, if you need an easy target, go ahead and make fun of these imperfect futurists, because your children will all be just like them eventually, and it may be your last chance to make fun of your own family.
But what I had really hoped is that you might entertain the notion that they actually have a function in our society; that they play an important part in helping us to regain what was lost in the industrialization and fragmentation of our societies over the last few centuries.  I'm sure many anthropologists would have a lot to say about this crude analogy to tribalism, but then again, who has ever met a happy anthropologist? Hypocrites who enjoy the tribal hospitality, only to travel back to the world that is crushing their subjects out of existence, write a book about it and make some coin or further their career...I don't see any of them being called 'lazy idealists', and mostly they are respected because they maintain a distance between the observer and the observed.
Imagine now, for a minute that we are all anthropologists, and that we are living among tribes, only one of which is the hippies.  Other tribes are the sportists, those whose temple is a surfboard and a wave, churchists, those who find communion with others in a building and some magic words, even cynics must be acknowledged as a tribe, since they gather wherever an open conspiracy theory is proposed, stamping out the fire of ideas with their words.
I don't know where this essay is going, so you could just put that inability to finish down to the classic crazed and fruitless hippy way of being, or accept my 'square' version when I say that I'm a little run down and have just run out of coffee.

So I Bought a Little House Lion...

Taming HouseLions

.....So I bought a little HouseLion.  All my friends had one, it seemed.
HouseLions were popular for a reason.  They were very convenient in going about your daily business.  Having a HouseLion sometimes meant you could get twice as much done, especially if you had a lot of pesky-type errands to accompish.  Girls looked at you with that special look when they found out you had a HouseLion.  If you didn't know what that special look meant, then a HouseLion was totally wasted on the likes of you.

HouseLions were great on transport

     Now, some of you may object, saying that a house is no place for a lion, that cages are not good either, most people would just wash their hands of lions altogether, saying that lions and people should not mix.  Women, in particular, with their typical fears of everything from spiders to cheezy horror films, seemed to regard them with a mixture of terror and awe.  Remember, some of these girls were the same ones who had been eyeing us when they saw us going down the street with our new HouseLion, so this kind of ambivalence was only to be expected.  Guys with HouseLions tended to end up with the kind of women who had the ability to tolerate the HouseLion as part of their life, and the more fanatical scaredycats just went out of their life completely.

Now, the fans of HouseLions insisted that this is not the case, that HouseLions were made for people, and that people just needed to be careful, and there would be no problem.  At first, I guess I was one of the people sitting on the fence of this issue; it seemed to me that there were both safe HouseLions and unsafe HouseLions.  At the time, it seemed like a little HouseLion was going to be safer than a big one, and they were cheaper, so I bought a little one.  In fact, most of my friends were quite happy with their house lions.
   

HouseLions had all changed our lives, and we were proud of that fact.  So proud, in actuality, that we thought that it made us belong to a defacto brotherhood.  A club of sorts, where HouseLions were welcome to prowl around together , while we  drank and talked and laughed as if there were no tomorrow.  We laughed at all the people without HouseLions as if they were some sort of inferior species, and that we, the lucky ones, could see more clearly than they that a Life without HouseLions was not a life worth living.  Some of us even began wearing what looked like Clubhouse uniforms...

In fact, so zesty was this thirst for membership, that many of us drank deeply of this new, intoxicating idea.  Some of us began to include HouseLions as part of our core identity, as part of who we were as men.  It filled us up and made us into an improved and better man than all the rest.  But of course it did not end there, it never does.  When we saw others in the club get rid of their tiny HouseLions and get larger, sleeker, sexier ones, we envied them and counted the days until we could get our own.  It was considered the ultimate acheivement to wait until someone was leaving town for good, and then to buy their great big HouseLion at a discount.   All of of the HouseLion upsizing was accompanied by a new change of thinking; in fact, it was the tinier HouseLions that were more dangerous and difficult to domesticate; in reality, it was the bigger and more expensive ones who were easy and not really so dangerous.  True, they were bigger, but they just moved slower and so you (probably) had time to avert a disaster in case of the unthinkable happening....
     All of this was really difficult to verify or even discuss properly, partly because the statistics were so unavailable to us, or because it was sort of taboo for us to talk about it when in the presence of HouseLionClub members.  In fact, there didn't seem to be a reason to bring it up because everyone knew it was a really rare occurrence, anyways, and that there were other things more important to talk about, like who the latest HouseLionClub member was, and where he got his HouseLion, and whether it was a good deal or not, and whether it was the right kind of HouseLion for his lifestyle, what his wife thought about the HouseLion in the House, and so on....
     By this time, I was on my third, bigger and better HouseLion, and pretty proud of myself.  All my friends had either gotten bigger and better ones, and were also now higher status in the HouseLionClub, both as a result of their HouseLion status, and also the fact they had been members for so long.  Every now and then someone would drop quietly out, usually because they got married, or had kids, or were doing the usual thing of leaving town for good.  Sometimes people would drop out so quietly, that no one would notice.  We'd be sitting around the HouseLionClub and then someone would say, "Oh, I haven't seen B around with that HouseLion of his for some time now, does anyone know if he's still around?"  These sorts of observations were met with dead silence.  Sometimes, it might have been genuinely because nobody had seen B, but I think a lot of times, we were contemplating the sliver of the possibility that his HouseLion had gotten wild, and had gotten hold of him, and that was so terrible nobody wanted to go there.
     I remember the first time one of the HouseLion club members had his animal turn on him, and it was really something to remember.  Nobody could believe it; he was a strong, stalwart man in the prime of his life, no enemies of anykind, and so no one could believe his HouseLion had gone and done a thing like that.  It just made no sense, and what was worse, the memory of it stuck like a fart in an elevator, for years it was hard to go out in Public with your HouseLion without remembering that this was the same species that had done poor old T in.

Just an abstraction...

     The second time it happened, we all almost laughed it off.  It was a tiny little HouseLion that was responsible, hardly housebroken at all, and so the guy was fairly asking for it.  Sure, it was horrible and all, just not horrible AND senseless like the first, larger and shinier HouseLion had broken with the ranks.  Somehow the second HouseLion incident was easier to swallow, like a chaser at a bar.  The whole incident became abstracted, just as we had gradually come to abstract HouseLions themselves, they were no longer domesticated wild beasts, in fact they were just the idea of doing such a thing.  Most of us couldn't even draw a realistic picture of one if our life depended on it.
     The Third time a HouseLion attacked, it really took the wind out of our sails.  After telling a whole meeting of the elders of the HouseLionClub that I quit, I stormed out of the club and began making plans to get rid of my HouseLion in a humane, but orderly fashion.  The other HouseLionClub members looked at me as if I was Rasputin attempting to strangle the life out of the Czar.  It was simply not good form to renounce membership in the HouseLionClub. People did that quietly; they went away out of town, or they made quiet plans to relinquish their HouseLion on Craigslist, and then conveniently forgot to get another one.  But it wasn't the fact that three is a magic number, or even a number at all, it could have been three thousand.  It was when I received a photo of the incident that it really made me SEE for the first time what an Actual HouseLion looked like from a HouseLion perspective.  All this time I thought the HouseLions had been this separate animal, and only then did I realize that not only did it become part of your identity, it actually ATE you, from the inside out, and then was usually so hungry that it would eat everyone else around you as well.
RIP Lex.

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....