Dear Marf,
It’s doubly appropriate because I’ll need something to do on the roughly 48 hours of bus ride we begin tomorrow. My 31st birthday will be spent on the road, with a bed in
We’ve taken to renting motor bikes and driving all over Hell and Gone. At times I feel great and at other times like the H.S. Thompson-adolescence inside is grappling for the handlebars, still others like I’d better clench those brakes tight because we’re so high we’re looking down at clouds and there ain’t any guardrail between this loose-gravel asphalt and the edge where Air meets Cloud over Nothing. This is all an interesting test of will against impulse. Not to get too symbolic, but…
I have to take an aside here to say that the man bringing us our drinks is rocking the solo ‘stach and has the most beautiful smile, and I wonder at the sources people call upon to keep not just smiling but actually open to humanity, regardless of Life’s firepower leveled against them, and at the exquisite power of beaming that to the world like they are radio towers of nothing but Summertime Singles, kind enough and full of promise enough to be intimidating and inspiring.
-- The H’moung and the mountains. Okay. So we took the motor bike off the beaten track outside of Sapa, fled the mini busses and tour groups and ended up descending the mountain into pyramidal terraces of rice paddies, around and around, and ultimately trekking by foot along a narrow path, followed at the heels by two H’moung girls. Ma is eleven and Tsu is fifteen, and soon we were long, long gone from the Actual Path, wandering through bamboo forests that wash everything green, over waterfalls, up the sides of more mountains where we gave clementine oranges to a band of five snot-nosed kids (all the hill tribe kids were snot-nosed, sick) the youngest two and the oldest not beyond five, no adults even in echoing distance. We broke out of the jungles onto the crest of another mountain and half-a-dozen villages were spread up and down the elevations of the land beneath us, spread so far beneath us that people could not even dream of being specks, and then the endless rice terraces, the endless rows of indigo plants tracing the terraces, clouds cascading down the slope, then blown gone, and it was all so beautiful – too beautiful – and so I have to note My American Studies Friend, my friend who sees the world’s cogs and wheels as I do, that I looked off to my left, up away from those terraces testifying to Man and Woman’s place in the land, and I saw as clear as day in my Mind’s Eye all of it erupt in fire, tilted my head back to the sun and watched jet fighters scream overhead, played in my brain Jesus-man Willem Defoe and Dana Delaney, Mathew Modine grinning like a cat and that dude from Wings scalped on Hamburger Hill, whomever wants to be there, clasping hands, all Outcast Niggers ‘cause it’s real man! and you don’t know! and they’ll never feel lit like you do back home…etc.
It is, I guess, real that the gap between jungle predator and the folks by the living room TV must have been the whole
The thing that doubles the weight is that the Vietnamese obviously see me through a similar lens. No, maybe it’s that they see me through the same instrument of devastation, but the lenses we each use are irrevocably incompatible, mine shaped by artists’ interpretations of a world only a director or a creative consultant knew, the Vietnamese lens shaped by real life. And then what of the lenses of those middle-aged American men who sit off by themselves while their wives bargain at the market with H’moung women, who wait for their turn further south, touring the DMZ? The weights brought to bear on an American sentence ending with the word
-Jay
2 comments:
Happy Belated Birthday Jason. Your stories and trip sound amazing. Keep them coming...
Your old pal,
Joe Basile
"Adulthood is accepting the lost possibilities in the world."
Ouch.
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