My BFF Mike said, "Why would you go snorkeling? You hate water and you're afraid of oogies."
This is true.
But I thought I should try new things, things that lots of normal people enjoy.
So I got in an air-conditioned mini-van and traveled three hours to the attenuated part of Thailand, to Bangsaphan. If Thailand were a Bit O Honey, this would be the yummy part in the middle, if you eat your Bit O Honey the right way.
Then we got on a speed boat, me, a handful of Finns, and an older Dutch couple, and zoomed to Koh Talu. A sort of deserted island. It had a bunch of huts, nice huts, that people could stay overnight in, though why they would want to do that I have no earthly idea.
When I envisioned snorkeling, I thought I would just wade into shallow water and put my face in it. Nope. It never occurred to me that I'd have to jump off a boat.
At least the life jacket made me buoyant. But still, I had to jump into the water. The water was cold. I thought it was cold, anyway.
There were fish. Many, many fish, many colored fish with buggy eyes and opening and closing mouths swarming around me. Coming at me. (I thought that big ones kept biting me in the butt, and yelped a bunch of times, but it turned out that a line from my life vest was doing that.) I yelled at them to go away, and got big gulps of salty water.
We got back on the boat and motored to another spot. More fish. Bigger fish. More water. So damn much water.
The 6 year-old Finnish boy and I both got cold. We stood on the boat shivering, while the normal people laughed at us. The dad told me that it is -20 degrees (Celsius) in Helsinki now. "This is why we need Thailand," he said.
When we got safely to land, I put on my running shoes and went.
I followed a trail that led to a tree that had lengths of string with bunches of coral tied to it, kind of Gilligan's Island-esque. No one could tell me what it meant.
I found the dump. So much for the eco-tourism boasted of by the tour. It was filled with plastic bottles.
I got high. I searched for a trail that would take me to the highest point on the island and was rewarded for my efforts. After about a half hour of climbing, I got a fantastic view.
Lunch was delicious. I ate a huge amount of squid, some pad thai, bunches of prawns, and some kind of fish with black pepper sauce (serves you right, you little swarming fishy bastards, I thought).
It was a good day. No work done. No Nazis. (I no longer take that for granted.)
And when I got back, I went for an hour-long foot massage.
My time here is winding down. Oh dear. Don't know how I'll manage to get back to the cold hard world of real life.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Good Things
Mango and sticky rice for dinner.
Mango and sticky rice for breakfast.
BBQ chicken backs on a stick for 15 cents.
Writing for five hours in the morning and then running on the beach.
Phone call from "landlord" checking in to make sure everything is A-okay.
Being able to tell him it couldn't be better.
Thai massage.
Oil massage.
Foot massage.
Sweet, sentimental, funny e-postcard from southern Utah. I miss u 2, John.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Riding an Elephant
Maybe it was because of “Seymour,” the pony I rode on the beach with the short legs and choppy gait. But when, after spending too much time at the bridge on the river Kwai because the train was delayed for more than an hour, and then riding on the train for another hour of noisy rumbling, past fields of sugar cane and what the Thai guide called “sweet potato”; after a buffet lunch of “Thai and European delicacies” which consisted of pad Thai, Indian sweet curry with unidentifiable (but delicious) meat, and fried chicken and bananas; after getting back in our air-conditioned mini-van (now more appreciated in the afternoon sun); after getting to the elephant park and climbing the stairs to mount, I was disappointed to see that my elephant was not the biggest.
She was not, to be sure, small. And I was still excited to be on her. It was like being at a pony ride at the state fair. A long line of elephants with tourists on their backs and young Thai boys on their necks followed each other on a short path through the jungle. They buckle a seat belt around you, but still, I thought I was going to fall off.
I have sat bucking horses more easily than I remained seated on the elephant’s back. Each step threw me one direction, and the next step the other. I held onto the sides of the bench, my arms aching as I felt each vertebra smash against the (padded) back of the seat. It made the pony ride feel like gliding.
I asked the guide how old the elephant was. He said sixteen.
I asked how old he was. This was a question he was unaccustomed to answering in English and it seemed to take some calculation. Sixteen he said, finally.
Yes, he was a sixteen year old boy, and an asshole in the way that sixteen year old boys often are. He called out to young Asian women as they passed us in the other direction “I love you.” He whooped “Yeehaw” when we went downhill, and cut the line in front of other elephants, urging his—our—steed to go faster by kicking her behind the ears. He and the other guides carried on long and loud conversations that almost killed the buzz of riding an elephant.
Then he stopped, climbed back from her neck, and sat beside me. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, since I saw the sign at the beginning whose second rule, after the customary caution about keeping an eye and a hand on your valuables, was “Not allow to sit on the neck of elephant or other parts except specific place only.” I said to him, “I get to ride on her neck?” He said yes, you want.
So I slid down, my legs hanging behind each of her ears. Her name I heard as Chopin. I urged her forward, but she drew her trunk to the top of her head and searched for my hands. “She hungry” said the guide, and then mentioned something about 500 or 1000 bhat, as I wished. I’ve been swindled in Thailand before so I said, “Sorry, no money.” Chopin lowered her trunk and took off.
It’s a lot easier to ride on the neck than on the seat. It was thrilling, in fact. My riding muscles are well developed and I respond instinctively with my legs. I no longer feared falling off. I didn’t want to stop. (As was the case of the ponies on the beach, I was the only tourist riding.)
But I had to stop. When you get off the elephant, you are funneled into a line to see on a computer screen the photo that was taken of you at the beginning. I didn’t quite understand why, shortly after boarding, we rode the elephants into the river. I thought (idiotically) that perhaps it was for them to have a chance to cool down and get a drink before we ventured on to a long jungle trek. But no, it was just a good photo op before a short loop around the camp. I have never bought souvenir photos of myself—I am either unphotogenic or simply less attractive than I would like to believe—and wasn’t even going to look at this one, but there I was in line, and there it popped up on the screen.
I looked at it and looked again.
Even at the beginning of the ride, when I was being jolted and tossed by Chopin’s choppy gait, I was clearly delighted. This is why they do pony rides at the state fair; so that children who have never been astride a horse can get a sense of what it’s like. I look happy in the photo, though you can see the tendons in my arms straining as I clutch the sides of the bench. My light orange shirt—I’d bought a button-down Thai schoolgirl shirt to wear because it seemed more modest than my normal tight tee-shirts for the beach—picks up the yellows in the leafy background, compliments the red in the blankets piled underneath the seat.
But the focal point of the photo is not me, and it’s not the elephant. The eye is drawn to the tee-shirt on the guide. This 16 year old Thai boy setting astride the neck of an elephant is wearing a black tee-shirt. In the middle is a swastika, black in a white circle, framed on a red square.
Because I was so excited and looking only at the elephant, I hadn’t noticed the boy’s tee-shirt, not until I saw the photograph. I showed it to the Thai guide. He looked embarrassed and then said it was a symbol in eastern religions.
Yes, I said, I know that symbol. This is not that. Look at the colors. This is a swastika.
The German women on the tour (there were five of us, me and what I suspect were two lesbian couples) came over having just bought prints of their elephant-riding photos. At first they cooed, seeing how happy I looked. Then one of them gasped.
“Not gut,” she said. “This is not gut.” The Thai guy tried again to make his argument about it being a religious symbol, but the quieter of the German ladies delivered a lecture. Yes, she said, there is a symbol like this that you often see in India. It symbolizes new beginnings. But that is not what this is. She shook her head. She kept shaking her head.
Two nights before I had watched the bad movie Valkyrie (with Thai subtitles) about a plot to murder Hitler. Seeing Tom Cruise in a Nazi uniform, even as a member of the resistence was unsettling. Seeing that symbol is like hearing the N word, even in a rap song. It can’t not rattle you.
We’d spent the morning thinking about World World II. Everything we had done and seen that day was tied to the years between 1949 and 1945. Our first stop, after a two and a half hour mini-van ride was a cemetery built by the Thais for the British and Dutch dead. Our second stop the JEATH War Museum in Kanchanaburi.
It was established in 1977 to commemorate the horrors of the construction of the “Death Railway,” as the strategic train line the Japanese built connecting (what was then called) Siam to (what was then called) Burma. Most of us know one small segment of this from an award-winning movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai. That’s pretty much what I knew, when I signed up for this tour. JEATH is a curious acronym of the names of the countries involved: Japan, England, America (and Australia), Thailand, and Holland. As the brochure says, “The Japanese were the controllers of the railway project, Thailand was involved as the conquered country and the other four countries were involved as PoW’s on the actual construction of the 415 kilmetre long Death Railway and the bridge over the River Kwae.” It continues on the next page, “The word JEATH also replaces the word Death because it sounds too horrific.”
The museum consists mainly of a replica bamboo hut with a display of photographs of the POWs, more than 16,000 of whom, plus 100,000 impressed laborers, died during the construction process which Japanese engineers first reckoned to take at least five years. It was completed in sixteen months.
The last paragraph of the brochure reads as follows: “Dear visitors, JEATH museum has been constructed not for the maintenance of the hatred among human beings, especially among the Japanese and allied countries, but to warn and teach us the lesson of HOW TERRIBLE WAR IS.”
I am guilty. For me, WWII has been first about the extermination of the Jews. Then the dropping of the bomb. When I was in my twenties, an editorial assistant at Oxford University Press, I worked on collaborative US-Russian authored book about the collaboration between the US and Russians forces during the war. (In a small world moment, I later dated the US author’s brother.) But I confess to not thinking much about what was happening in Asia during that time.
So yesterday I spent the morning thinking about Asia during WWII and hopped off my elephant and looked smack into the symbol of the Third Reich.
The German woman urged me to take the photo back.
No, I said, I’m keeping it. I’m Jewish, I added. Somehow, this seemed important to say.
The Thai guy said, “He doesn’t know.”
I don’t know what he knew, that teenager, that elephant riding, trash talking, rambunctious boy. I wanted to ask him, to talk to him, but he had already boarded another tourist onto Chopin. And his English was limited. How much, really, could I have learned from talking to him. And did it matter? Did I want to know what he knew?
I kept the picture. I have been, for years been thinking about the commemoration of atrocity, the idea of having former concentration camps as tourist sites—what this means, how we make sense of it.
I kept the picture because it says so much. I wonder what the best way to engage and educate people about HOW TERRIBLE WAR IS. I wonder if we are somehow failing.
She was not, to be sure, small. And I was still excited to be on her. It was like being at a pony ride at the state fair. A long line of elephants with tourists on their backs and young Thai boys on their necks followed each other on a short path through the jungle. They buckle a seat belt around you, but still, I thought I was going to fall off.
I have sat bucking horses more easily than I remained seated on the elephant’s back. Each step threw me one direction, and the next step the other. I held onto the sides of the bench, my arms aching as I felt each vertebra smash against the (padded) back of the seat. It made the pony ride feel like gliding.
I asked the guide how old the elephant was. He said sixteen.
I asked how old he was. This was a question he was unaccustomed to answering in English and it seemed to take some calculation. Sixteen he said, finally.
Yes, he was a sixteen year old boy, and an asshole in the way that sixteen year old boys often are. He called out to young Asian women as they passed us in the other direction “I love you.” He whooped “Yeehaw” when we went downhill, and cut the line in front of other elephants, urging his—our—steed to go faster by kicking her behind the ears. He and the other guides carried on long and loud conversations that almost killed the buzz of riding an elephant.
Then he stopped, climbed back from her neck, and sat beside me. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, since I saw the sign at the beginning whose second rule, after the customary caution about keeping an eye and a hand on your valuables, was “Not allow to sit on the neck of elephant or other parts except specific place only.” I said to him, “I get to ride on her neck?” He said yes, you want.
So I slid down, my legs hanging behind each of her ears. Her name I heard as Chopin. I urged her forward, but she drew her trunk to the top of her head and searched for my hands. “She hungry” said the guide, and then mentioned something about 500 or 1000 bhat, as I wished. I’ve been swindled in Thailand before so I said, “Sorry, no money.” Chopin lowered her trunk and took off.
It’s a lot easier to ride on the neck than on the seat. It was thrilling, in fact. My riding muscles are well developed and I respond instinctively with my legs. I no longer feared falling off. I didn’t want to stop. (As was the case of the ponies on the beach, I was the only tourist riding.)
But I had to stop. When you get off the elephant, you are funneled into a line to see on a computer screen the photo that was taken of you at the beginning. I didn’t quite understand why, shortly after boarding, we rode the elephants into the river. I thought (idiotically) that perhaps it was for them to have a chance to cool down and get a drink before we ventured on to a long jungle trek. But no, it was just a good photo op before a short loop around the camp. I have never bought souvenir photos of myself—I am either unphotogenic or simply less attractive than I would like to believe—and wasn’t even going to look at this one, but there I was in line, and there it popped up on the screen.
I looked at it and looked again.
Even at the beginning of the ride, when I was being jolted and tossed by Chopin’s choppy gait, I was clearly delighted. This is why they do pony rides at the state fair; so that children who have never been astride a horse can get a sense of what it’s like. I look happy in the photo, though you can see the tendons in my arms straining as I clutch the sides of the bench. My light orange shirt—I’d bought a button-down Thai schoolgirl shirt to wear because it seemed more modest than my normal tight tee-shirts for the beach—picks up the yellows in the leafy background, compliments the red in the blankets piled underneath the seat.
But the focal point of the photo is not me, and it’s not the elephant. The eye is drawn to the tee-shirt on the guide. This 16 year old Thai boy setting astride the neck of an elephant is wearing a black tee-shirt. In the middle is a swastika, black in a white circle, framed on a red square.
Because I was so excited and looking only at the elephant, I hadn’t noticed the boy’s tee-shirt, not until I saw the photograph. I showed it to the Thai guide. He looked embarrassed and then said it was a symbol in eastern religions.
Yes, I said, I know that symbol. This is not that. Look at the colors. This is a swastika.
The German women on the tour (there were five of us, me and what I suspect were two lesbian couples) came over having just bought prints of their elephant-riding photos. At first they cooed, seeing how happy I looked. Then one of them gasped.
“Not gut,” she said. “This is not gut.” The Thai guy tried again to make his argument about it being a religious symbol, but the quieter of the German ladies delivered a lecture. Yes, she said, there is a symbol like this that you often see in India. It symbolizes new beginnings. But that is not what this is. She shook her head. She kept shaking her head.
Two nights before I had watched the bad movie Valkyrie (with Thai subtitles) about a plot to murder Hitler. Seeing Tom Cruise in a Nazi uniform, even as a member of the resistence was unsettling. Seeing that symbol is like hearing the N word, even in a rap song. It can’t not rattle you.
We’d spent the morning thinking about World World II. Everything we had done and seen that day was tied to the years between 1949 and 1945. Our first stop, after a two and a half hour mini-van ride was a cemetery built by the Thais for the British and Dutch dead. Our second stop the JEATH War Museum in Kanchanaburi.
It was established in 1977 to commemorate the horrors of the construction of the “Death Railway,” as the strategic train line the Japanese built connecting (what was then called) Siam to (what was then called) Burma. Most of us know one small segment of this from an award-winning movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai. That’s pretty much what I knew, when I signed up for this tour. JEATH is a curious acronym of the names of the countries involved: Japan, England, America (and Australia), Thailand, and Holland. As the brochure says, “The Japanese were the controllers of the railway project, Thailand was involved as the conquered country and the other four countries were involved as PoW’s on the actual construction of the 415 kilmetre long Death Railway and the bridge over the River Kwae.” It continues on the next page, “The word JEATH also replaces the word Death because it sounds too horrific.”
The museum consists mainly of a replica bamboo hut with a display of photographs of the POWs, more than 16,000 of whom, plus 100,000 impressed laborers, died during the construction process which Japanese engineers first reckoned to take at least five years. It was completed in sixteen months.
The last paragraph of the brochure reads as follows: “Dear visitors, JEATH museum has been constructed not for the maintenance of the hatred among human beings, especially among the Japanese and allied countries, but to warn and teach us the lesson of HOW TERRIBLE WAR IS.”
I am guilty. For me, WWII has been first about the extermination of the Jews. Then the dropping of the bomb. When I was in my twenties, an editorial assistant at Oxford University Press, I worked on collaborative US-Russian authored book about the collaboration between the US and Russians forces during the war. (In a small world moment, I later dated the US author’s brother.) But I confess to not thinking much about what was happening in Asia during that time.
So yesterday I spent the morning thinking about Asia during WWII and hopped off my elephant and looked smack into the symbol of the Third Reich.
The German woman urged me to take the photo back.
No, I said, I’m keeping it. I’m Jewish, I added. Somehow, this seemed important to say.
The Thai guy said, “He doesn’t know.”
I don’t know what he knew, that teenager, that elephant riding, trash talking, rambunctious boy. I wanted to ask him, to talk to him, but he had already boarded another tourist onto Chopin. And his English was limited. How much, really, could I have learned from talking to him. And did it matter? Did I want to know what he knew?
I kept the picture. I have been, for years been thinking about the commemoration of atrocity, the idea of having former concentration camps as tourist sites—what this means, how we make sense of it.
I kept the picture because it says so much. I wonder what the best way to engage and educate people about HOW TERRIBLE WAR IS. I wonder if we are somehow failing.
Last "Finishing Kick"
My column in Running Times will now be called "Personal Record." And I'll no longer be alternating with my wonderful friend (and the great guru of running) Jim Gerweck.
Here's the last Kick.
Fluke fitness, by the way, is a distant memory. Elephant riding, however, is quite vivid.
Here's the last Kick.
Fluke fitness, by the way, is a distant memory. Elephant riding, however, is quite vivid.
Monday, December 14, 2009
All Work + No Play = Wrong
I have become boring to myself. Despite getting loads of writing done, I realized that I am, in fact, on vacation. So I took today off. Had coffee in town. Wandered around. Ran on the beach for 30 minutes without shoes (a la the Tarahumara runners) and wearing just a jog bra and bikini bottoms. (Hey, it's the beach. It's Thailand.)
Then my feet hurt (big surprise), so I stopped for an hour-long foot massage, which is really foot and leg massage with oil and some Ben-Gay like smelly shit. Had to pony up $7.50 and got a banana and a bottle of cold water at the end.
For tomorrow I booked a day trip to go and see the bridge on the river Kwai (when I get home I'll have to see, again, The Bridge on the River Kwai), some elephant trekking, and what sounds like an unappealing raft ride through the jungle.
This means that I will get no work done. For two days. I'm trying not to freak out. I'm trying not to be such a workaholic freak. If I can't do it here, there's no hope.
My biggest worry is that I won't have time to get a massage tomorrow.
As I said, if I can't relax here, there's no hope.
Then my feet hurt (big surprise), so I stopped for an hour-long foot massage, which is really foot and leg massage with oil and some Ben-Gay like smelly shit. Had to pony up $7.50 and got a banana and a bottle of cold water at the end.
For tomorrow I booked a day trip to go and see the bridge on the river Kwai (when I get home I'll have to see, again, The Bridge on the River Kwai), some elephant trekking, and what sounds like an unappealing raft ride through the jungle.
This means that I will get no work done. For two days. I'm trying not to freak out. I'm trying not to be such a workaholic freak. If I can't do it here, there's no hope.
My biggest worry is that I won't have time to get a massage tomorrow.
As I said, if I can't relax here, there's no hope.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
On Going on a Run While Listening to Hazlitt’s On Going on a Journey
Yesterday morning, before setting out to run, I thought about what would be the perfect way to travel. To go someplace warm and beautiful (check), to spend the mornings writing (check), to spend the afternoons running and exploring (check) and then to have an interesting companion with whom to dine (oops) and enjoy other nocturnal entertainments (oops).
I like the solitude of being in a foreign place, and I like seeing sights under the power of my own endurance-fit legs. But I was thinking, yesterday morning, that it would be nice to have a partner here in my tropical paradise; someone who would know to give me space enough to create, allow me time to be alone with my thoughts, but who could join me at the end of the day (or earlier, on days when the work is not going well).
Then I went for a long run. I ran along the beach until I ran out of beach, and ran through town until I ran out of town. I looked up and saw a hill, and knew that was where I wanted to go. I ran past an encampment of monkeys attacking a turned over garage bucket, and past many bored dogs.
If I knew what frangipani was, I might have seen some. For days I’ve experienced how the fancy people stay in this Thai beach resort; on my run I was able to catch a glimpse into the homes and lives of those less fortunate.
As I ran I listened to my iPod. Currently I am nearing the end of a collection called “Favourite Essays.” It starts with Montaigne, goes through Bacon, the dirty Dean Swift, The Spectator’s Addison and Steele, Johnson, Goldsmith up through Dickens and ends with Chesterton—the greatest hits, really, of mostly English 18th and 19th century writers (and thinkers—what makes them such good writers is that most of them were such good thinkers).
Yesterday I started out by listening, again, to Charles Lamb’s wonderful “Old China,” a meditation on the struggles of having enough money, on aging and youth, on the value and beauty of material things. And then I was on to Hazlitt. And then my whole experience of being in Thailand changed.
“On Going on a Journey” starts out “One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to do it myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company for me.” Hazlitt goes on to extol the virtues of solitary travel in a way that is playful, insightful, and delicious. He continues, “The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others.”
The only thing worth talking about when traveling, according to Hazlitt, is what to eat for dinner. Amen, brother.
“I should not feel confident in venturing on a journey in a foreign country without a companion,” Hazlitt writes. “I should want at intervals to hear the sound of my own language. There is an involuntary antipathy in the mind of an Englishmen to foreign manners and notions that requires the assistance of social sympathy to carry it off. As the distance from home increases, this relief, which was at first a luxury, becomes a passion and an appetite.”
I am still at the luxury stage of this foreign travel, and hearing the words of Hazlitt in the voice of a good English reader became more than enough company for me yesterday. What a companionable way, really, to pass an afternoon. After my run, I ended up three hours later back on the beach, where I paid seven dollars for an hour of massage. I walked back to my apartment at dusk.
I’ve thought about why I wanted to do this trip the way I have, to plan what is in fact a dull and boring vacation. I realized that, like so many things have been in recent months, this trip is about my dead mother.
Thanksgiving was my first holiday without her, the holiday, in fact, that our family celebrated most vigorously. The Thankgiving Wars usually started around August. Where would we do it? Between three of us, my mother, my brother and me, you wouldn’t think it would have been that hard. But you would be wrong. For many years, it was that hard. And then, for the years she was sick, we went, my brother and I, without question, to her.
Thanksgiving, like many things involving family, was often better in the anticipation than in the reality. There were minor squabbles and major blow ups. My brother always cooked, but menu planning could become blood sport. Often there were ancillary invitees, spouses, step-siblings, friends. There were usually equal amounts of fun and irritation.
This year I dreaded the coming of November.
I had said to a friend that I wished I could leave the country for Thanksgiving, to go somewhere it wasn’t a holiday. My desire became a plan, my wish a reality. We drove a handful of hours north to Canada.
My friend’s wife had died of cancer two years before on Thanksgiving Day; it was the holiday most likely to make me feel motherless. What a sad pair we could have been. But there were no tears, no irritation, even.
I ate sable that Thursday night. I didn’t know that you could get fresh sable; it was a fish of my youth, always smoked, always consumed in my grandparents’ Manhattan apartment with lox and whitefish on bagels and bialys. We hiked in mountains through snow and then soaked for hours in hot springs. I ate a whole lot of Canadian candy bars. We had fun. We had a surprising amount of fun. I got through the holiday and remembered that I could have fun.
When I was invited to come to the Singapore marathon I realized that I could make the trip coincide with my winter break and that, for the first time in five years, I could take a vacation to someplace other than to Ithaca, where my mother had lived.
I wanted to leave, and to not leave. I wanted to work, but to be in a different place. I was frazzled from a hard quarter, tired of trying to get back to feeling normal, and was still unmoored—without family, with close friends too far away. I wanted to be alone.
Yesterday, while running, I had to stop and listen twice to the end of Hazlitt’s essay. There’s a phrase I repeat often to my students, to remind them of how their work is likely to be received. “The reader is always in it for herself,” I say, over and over, when someone asks that there be more about the grandma (“I want—I need—to hear more about the grandma” they’ll say, and will add that they had a grandma much like the one in the piece).
The truth is, the reader is always in it for herself. The best you can hope for is that your insights will resonate, even if the stories—the grandmas—are different.
And so this is how Hazlitt ends his 1822 essay “On Going on a Journey”:
“Dr. Johnson remarked how little foreign travel added to the facilities of conversation in those who had been abroad. In fact, the time we have spent there is both delightful and in one sense, instructive; but it appears to be cut out of our substantial, downright existence, and never to join kindly on to it. We are not the same, but another, and perhaps more enviable individual, all the time we are out of our own country. We are lost to ourselves, as well as our friends. So the poet somewhat quaintly sings,
"Out of my country and myself I go."
Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent themselves of a while from the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!”
I like the solitude of being in a foreign place, and I like seeing sights under the power of my own endurance-fit legs. But I was thinking, yesterday morning, that it would be nice to have a partner here in my tropical paradise; someone who would know to give me space enough to create, allow me time to be alone with my thoughts, but who could join me at the end of the day (or earlier, on days when the work is not going well).
Then I went for a long run. I ran along the beach until I ran out of beach, and ran through town until I ran out of town. I looked up and saw a hill, and knew that was where I wanted to go. I ran past an encampment of monkeys attacking a turned over garage bucket, and past many bored dogs.
If I knew what frangipani was, I might have seen some. For days I’ve experienced how the fancy people stay in this Thai beach resort; on my run I was able to catch a glimpse into the homes and lives of those less fortunate.
As I ran I listened to my iPod. Currently I am nearing the end of a collection called “Favourite Essays.” It starts with Montaigne, goes through Bacon, the dirty Dean Swift, The Spectator’s Addison and Steele, Johnson, Goldsmith up through Dickens and ends with Chesterton—the greatest hits, really, of mostly English 18th and 19th century writers (and thinkers—what makes them such good writers is that most of them were such good thinkers).
Yesterday I started out by listening, again, to Charles Lamb’s wonderful “Old China,” a meditation on the struggles of having enough money, on aging and youth, on the value and beauty of material things. And then I was on to Hazlitt. And then my whole experience of being in Thailand changed.
“On Going on a Journey” starts out “One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to do it myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company for me.” Hazlitt goes on to extol the virtues of solitary travel in a way that is playful, insightful, and delicious. He continues, “The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others.”
The only thing worth talking about when traveling, according to Hazlitt, is what to eat for dinner. Amen, brother.
“I should not feel confident in venturing on a journey in a foreign country without a companion,” Hazlitt writes. “I should want at intervals to hear the sound of my own language. There is an involuntary antipathy in the mind of an Englishmen to foreign manners and notions that requires the assistance of social sympathy to carry it off. As the distance from home increases, this relief, which was at first a luxury, becomes a passion and an appetite.”
I am still at the luxury stage of this foreign travel, and hearing the words of Hazlitt in the voice of a good English reader became more than enough company for me yesterday. What a companionable way, really, to pass an afternoon. After my run, I ended up three hours later back on the beach, where I paid seven dollars for an hour of massage. I walked back to my apartment at dusk.
I’ve thought about why I wanted to do this trip the way I have, to plan what is in fact a dull and boring vacation. I realized that, like so many things have been in recent months, this trip is about my dead mother.
Thanksgiving was my first holiday without her, the holiday, in fact, that our family celebrated most vigorously. The Thankgiving Wars usually started around August. Where would we do it? Between three of us, my mother, my brother and me, you wouldn’t think it would have been that hard. But you would be wrong. For many years, it was that hard. And then, for the years she was sick, we went, my brother and I, without question, to her.
Thanksgiving, like many things involving family, was often better in the anticipation than in the reality. There were minor squabbles and major blow ups. My brother always cooked, but menu planning could become blood sport. Often there were ancillary invitees, spouses, step-siblings, friends. There were usually equal amounts of fun and irritation.
This year I dreaded the coming of November.
I had said to a friend that I wished I could leave the country for Thanksgiving, to go somewhere it wasn’t a holiday. My desire became a plan, my wish a reality. We drove a handful of hours north to Canada.
My friend’s wife had died of cancer two years before on Thanksgiving Day; it was the holiday most likely to make me feel motherless. What a sad pair we could have been. But there were no tears, no irritation, even.
I ate sable that Thursday night. I didn’t know that you could get fresh sable; it was a fish of my youth, always smoked, always consumed in my grandparents’ Manhattan apartment with lox and whitefish on bagels and bialys. We hiked in mountains through snow and then soaked for hours in hot springs. I ate a whole lot of Canadian candy bars. We had fun. We had a surprising amount of fun. I got through the holiday and remembered that I could have fun.
When I was invited to come to the Singapore marathon I realized that I could make the trip coincide with my winter break and that, for the first time in five years, I could take a vacation to someplace other than to Ithaca, where my mother had lived.
I wanted to leave, and to not leave. I wanted to work, but to be in a different place. I was frazzled from a hard quarter, tired of trying to get back to feeling normal, and was still unmoored—without family, with close friends too far away. I wanted to be alone.
Yesterday, while running, I had to stop and listen twice to the end of Hazlitt’s essay. There’s a phrase I repeat often to my students, to remind them of how their work is likely to be received. “The reader is always in it for herself,” I say, over and over, when someone asks that there be more about the grandma (“I want—I need—to hear more about the grandma” they’ll say, and will add that they had a grandma much like the one in the piece).
The truth is, the reader is always in it for herself. The best you can hope for is that your insights will resonate, even if the stories—the grandmas—are different.
And so this is how Hazlitt ends his 1822 essay “On Going on a Journey”:
“Dr. Johnson remarked how little foreign travel added to the facilities of conversation in those who had been abroad. In fact, the time we have spent there is both delightful and in one sense, instructive; but it appears to be cut out of our substantial, downright existence, and never to join kindly on to it. We are not the same, but another, and perhaps more enviable individual, all the time we are out of our own country. We are lost to ourselves, as well as our friends. So the poet somewhat quaintly sings,
"Out of my country and myself I go."
Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent themselves of a while from the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!”
Friday, December 11, 2009
The Most Boring Asian Vacation Ever
Here I am, day three in paradise, and I'm exhausted, lonely and bored. Well, not bored so much--more on that later. But I have, by design, planned a stay in Asia that is about as dull as it can get.
During the fall quarter, I got very little writing done. I traveled a lot for work (as much as running marathons and then writing about them can be considered work), taught one undergraduate course and one graduate writing workshop, and also did a course at the state prison. I embarked on the terrifying and time-consuming project of being in a romantic relationship and have been reminded of the many rewards of this normal (if occasionally terrifying) human endeavor.
But I have two regular deadlines to meet. The Chronicle of Higher Education column is due once a month and the one for Running Times every other month. Because I am a neurotic producer, I get twitchy if I don't have a couple in reserve (there's always a possibility that an editor won't like one, and if so, I don't ever want to have to produce at the last minute). That leaves little time to work on other stuff.
So when I was offered a trip to Singapore for the marathon, I decided that it would be good to take advantage of the warm weather to hang out in this part of the world for a while. I've always been most productive when I go away by myself to a place where I know no one. I wrote my first book while house-sitting in a dull suburb of Santa Cruz. I'd write in the mornings, go for a run on the beach at noon, and read in the afternoons (and evenings, and nights). I wrote my second book while house-sitting in the suburbs of Nevada City, CA, living in a tiny miner's shack, looking after some horses, a one-eyed dog, and a one-eyed cat. I'd work in the mornings, go for a run around noon, and read in the afternoons (evenings, and nights). I wrote my third book while house-sitting in Missoula, MT. You can probably guess what my schedule was like, though since I had lived there before, it was a bit more social. And truth be told, I prefer running in the mountains to the beach.
While I'm not yet ready to commit to another book project, I decided to take advantage of a borrowed condo to do the same thing here in Thailand. It's working. I am just as exhausted, lonely and bored as I was in Santa Cruz that first summer as a writer. There my longest conversations were "Thank you very much. You have a nice day too." In a country where little English is spoken, my interactions here are mostly a nodding of the head, hands pressed together, and a quick Kob Kun Ka, which usually inspires a giggle.
I've been writing in the mornings. Today, for example, I banged out a 5000 word first draft of an essay about creative nonfiction, journalism, and the essayists of the 18th and 19th centuries. I've been reading a lot of The Spectator, The Idler, and Ben Franklin. It makes for a certain amount of cognitive dissonance when rambling around (oh, yes, The Rambler, as well) Hua Hin, but I'm okay with that.
To clear my head I have been running--though everyone stares at me, as I tend not to run on the beach like the other tourists, but try to use my runs as opportunities to explore. Yesterday, for example, I ran out of town through a local fishing market. It was smelly. Then I ran up a big honkin' hill and found a temple on top. I didn't go into the temple (running clothes are not appropriate for religious sites), but I spent a lot of time watching the monkeys. There were a whole lot of monkeys.
They mostly ignored me, except for some of the kids, who, like typical kids, were simultaneously interested and frightened, until one mother started charging at me. I got kind of scared. Then she ran right past me. I realized she has seen a tuk-tuk, an open air touristy bus, pull up and was headed right for it. Then a whole swarm of monkeys joined her. They had learned that tourists come bearing bags of bananas. It was fascinating and repulsive to watch this.
The condo is located between the Chiva Som International Health Resort (favorite of movie stars) and the Hyatt (way ritzy). So it's a high end kind of place. The pool meanders for about 100 meters, maybe more, and goes almost up to the beach. On the beach each day about 50 guys troll on horseback (well, many are on pony-back) for tourists who want a ride. Mostly there are no takers. When there are, you see the Thai guys dragging their horses by the bridle, with people uncomfortably perched atop, wearing bathing suits and looking happy only for the camera.
The first day I was here, one of the guys approached me. It was late in the day, and the surf was in. I told him I'd go the next day. The next day, as I was walking on the beach, he found me. We negotiated an hour ride for an astronomical sum of 500 bhat. (It costs 200-250 bhat for an hour massage.) That's fifteen bucks! But I said okay, as long as I could take the horse by myself.
Then I realized that this wasn't a horse, but a pony. The guy told me that the horses are more expensive because they are easier.
If I had a pony, I'd ride it on a boat. Because that would be more comfortable than riding a pony. The little guy (whose name I heard as Seymour, which can't be right because it's isn't very Thai, but it amuses me to think he's named after my great uncle)had an egg-beater choppy gait. His tiny hooves moved so quickly I could barely post a trot (and certainly couldn't sit one), so I urged him into a canter, which was slightly less uncomfortable. So for an hour, we cantered up and then back down the beach. It was like being in a condom commercial, splashing through the surf, my mane and his tail flying, all romantic and shit. Except, of course, that I was alone.
Then the stirrup leathers started to cut into my (bare) legs. I've been riding in shorts for a long time, but usually on an endurance saddle covered with fleece. I'd forgotten what chafing is like. So I crossed the stirrups over Seymour's little neck and rode the rest of the way without.
When I cantered back up to the guy, he said "You cowboy."
I said, "You right."
Then I was exhausted and had to get another Thai massage.
Which isn't as relaxing as you'd think. It's kind of like yoga without having to do any of the work. Which could be relaxing, unless your leg muscles are as tight as mine. So it manages to hurt and to make me yelp, which makes the Thai ladies laugh, which makes me laugh, and then we're all laughing but I'm still hurting.
The other massage options are an oil massage, which is less painful but also, for a runner, less useful, a facial, and a foot massage--which is reflexology. The last time I was in Thailand I had a foot massage and remember feeling like an hour was too long. But I'm game to try again. You can't walk more than a few yards without hitting another massage place.
As usual, I think I'm invisible when I run. It always surprises me when I'm in Spokane and someone says "Oh, I saw you running yesterday." I think that if I don't notice others, they won't notice me. This is, apparently, not the case. I suspect that I stand out a bit more here than I do in Spokane. This was confirmed when I went to a massage place on the main drag here, not far from the (gated) entrance to the condo. Before she started working on me (and make no mistake, these women work hard for their 250 bhat an hour) she said, "I see you jogging all the time." Now I'm going to feel guilty every time I pass and don't go in for a massage.
The first day I was here, I overate exotic Thai fruits I love so much. I never thought it would be possible, but I can't look at another mangosteen or rambutan. Yesterday when I went to the shiny fancy shopping mall to get supplies (water, pretzels, Oreos) I stopped at a stand and got mango with sticky rice. I've become a little leery of eating out. Not because I'm not a fearless eater (though just looking at some of the grilled meats on carts on the streets can make me queasy) but because I am so reactive to MSG.
On the beach the other day I had an amazing lunch of spicy green papaya salad with dried prawns and tom yum soup. It was so spicy I had tears coming down my face. It was delicious. But after a few bites, I also had a familiar tightening in my jaw. Because it was so good, and because I am a pig, I kept eating. Then I got the full-on headache and it lingered for the rest of the day and night. So I'm trying to be careful. I've got a lot of work to do and can't afford to be wiped out by a migraine.
It's now 1:30 in the afternoon. It's sunny out again, and quite warm (I have a balcony; I can tell). Warm enough, in fact, to go for a trot. So I'll head out to explore. If I get lost, I know I'm good for about four hours of running before I get really tired. (Yesterday I bought two bottles of water at the halfway point to get myself home.) The Singapore marathon took more out of me than I had expected, so I'm still taking it pretty easy. Just "jogging" around, poking about, seeing what I can see.
Then I'll go have a massage. This time on the beach. This time, with oil. After writing all morning, I've had enough pain for the day.
Friends, if you are reading this, please send email. As William Carlos Williams wrote in "Danse Russe":
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
Oh, a note: I find it nearly impossible to proofread these blog posts. There will be typos. Maybe even mindos. I apologize.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
In case you missed the last reference
I often have lines of Wallace Stevens' poetry running through my head. Last Sunday morning, during the Singapore Marathon, it was "Sunday Morning." It took over my mind like a jingle.
Here it is, for those who have somehow missed this beautiful poem.
Here it is, for those who have somehow missed this beautiful poem.
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