Quarter Year

In the station he rose and followed a man to a ticket counter where others stood. He waited for them to finish. Hand prints smeared the window. A customer walked away and two more slid in and another man pressed against the counter. Mike waited patiently behind, above them. A dark man with fresh-smelling hair shouldered Mike’s ribs and nudged him farther back, so he was now separated from the counter by a crowd. Victoria station would not suffocate the young traveler, he was determined. Mike grew into his frame, his wide shoulders and thick chest. He was much larger than the Indian men. He leaned into each shift of the crowd and carved a path to the front.

Later, on the ground again, Mike stared beyond his book at a child’s dirty toes wiggling at him from bare feet. She held out an open hand. He ignored the beggar and he ignored the metallic ache that arrived in his ribs and coiled there. She stood for a minute, hand out, looking at a strand of brown hair curled over Mike’s pink ear.

Bombay is fine during the day, but I haven’t gotten used to the night. I feel so vulnerable then. Really, at night, I wonder whether I’ll make it three months, and at dusk I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I pine to see Westerners; I understand why blacks in the US say there’s a race problem – when you’re the minority it’s so apparent and jarring. Each day feels like a week, that, honestly, I just want to be over. The poverty here is relentless and my wealth is relentless and I can’t close my eyes on either. What am I supposed to do with this? What good is relative fortune? I can pose all the theories I want about giving to beggars but when I shut the hotel door I’d better have it sorted out because I’m tested before I reach the street. Were I brave enough to be vulnerable I’d talk with locals and justify this travel, but I only talk to beggars. I tell them, “No,” because I don’t know what else to say.

The dirty toes turned away and she walked like a ghost with her hands down. What haunts that girl’s body is the want for little and the expectation of nothing. If only she’d be at peace, he thought. The ache smoldered.

He looked past his book now into the eyes of an Indian man suddenly seated on the ground in front of him. The beggar didn’t extend his hand; he examined Mike’s blue eyes. The man’s black hair curled over his dark ears and he looked strong in his frame with wide shoulders and thick chest, though his legs had been cut off below the knees. Crutches lay beside him. Mike knew the man was 25-years-old, and they studied each other.

The kids were young. They appeared to be managed by another young man on shore. I don’t remember exactly how much they asked for the half-hour ride there and back, it was something like one dollar, but we decided to pay five. We immediately regretted it. On the one hand, spreading the wealth is good, but on the other we were encouraging them to be reliant on (and to rip off) tourists, which can ruin a culture in the long run.

When we handed the kids the money they didn’t really give a look of “Thanks!,” rather they seemed to look at the money and say, “How do we hide this from our manager so he doesn’t take a cut?”

You might remember that kids from Bagan were the ones who served us at a tea shop in Yangon when we were contemplating child labor. So I guess, when I put the two situations in perspective, I’d rather give money to the boat kids who can remain home (even if working with tourists) than to tea shops who have taken kids from their families to live and work in the big city because they have no apparent prospects.

Obviously the better solution would be that the government provide adequate education, but that’s not the case right now.

(Then again, if I wasn’t so obsessed with money then maybe it wouldn’t be a central part of this story. That, itself, is counter-productive, I think.)

People fished. Another boat appeared to be dredging the river, its pump making a tremendous noise that didn’t travel too far in the humid air, but was plenty loud close up.

Throughout the trip I worried about my ankles being exposed to mosquitoes in the bottom of the boat, so we lathered up in bug repellent. Myanmar hasn’t rid itself of malaria and dengue fever, so we were constantly conscious of risky situations. Though it’s easy to look back at the pictures and romanticize the trip, a lot of energy in third-world travel is spent on minimizing risk and paying attention to your body. Am I just a little dehydrated, or is this the start of an illness? Though I’m hungry, is this food safe? Can you catch anything from drinking river water? And so on…

This, to me, is what Yangon felt like – wide and quiet streets, air illuminated by the warm sun while people take their time at curbside teashops.

It was illegal to take pictures of government buildings. Sometimes they were marked, but sometimes they weren’t, so Azure slyly took pictures of these behemoths, most likely forbiddenly.

Typical scene on the backstreets.

We were surprised that the TV in our rooms showed international news (BBC) including stories on how the Myanmar government was illegally detaining Nobel Prize winner and opposition politician Aung San Suu Kyi. I wonder how many people inside Myanmar understand English well enough to grasp the newscast.

Downtown mosque.

Hindu shrine with serious guard.

The side of a Hindu temple.

A very recognizable tea shop.

Many restaurants and food stalls cooked at outdoor kitchens like this one. I’m glad we got a shot of this because sometimes, when traveling, something novel might be so ubiquitous that you never take the time to get a shot of it.

That hat isn’t as stupid as it looks – there’s a mosquito net that folds into a pouch above the bill.

Anyway, the whole time I was taking pictures here I felt like I was trying to draw blood from a stone. I mean, I know this place is beautiful, but opulence is ugly. It’s enough to make a monk take to the forest.

The Structure

I do have to admit, though, that the entrance was pretty exciting. It made you feel like maybe you were about to walk out onto the court for Game 7 of the NBA Finals, the only thing missing was the roar of the crowd.

People

Pagodas seem to be spirituality-centered gathering places. Locals were just hanging out, chatting, some even had food with them. Many were deep in meditation or prayer, and nobody seemed to mind having their picture taken. I wonder if this was due to the general, “I’m OK, You’re OK”ness of Buddhism.

I was on the fence about including this picture because it’s not gorgeous or well-executed or anything, and the kid is an idiot, but I was so moved by this woman, apparently exhausted by her devotion, that I could never bring myself to cut it during the editing process.

This man is pulling a rope that rings a bell. Note that there’s a Buddha statue in front of him.

This was our trusty guide. He just started talking to us and we didn’t have the heart to tell him to leave us alone (I think that’s how it’s done here, anyway), but he was a nice guy. He spoke good English and had been a professor his whole life, but the government forced him to retire because he could remember the time before their regime. That made him dangerous, of course, because he had a broad perspective of the government’s lies. He told us not to talk about it, though, and also not to trust just any monk – some of them, apparently, are government spies. The government’s main resistance comes from within the monasteries.

TRAITOR!!

This little girl is wearing the traditional face paint, tanakh, I think. Most children and many women wore it. Men didn’t tend to wear it, for whatever reason. Apparently it works as sunscreen, though I think it’s primarily appreciated as make-up. It’s incredibly endearing.

Us.

Azure pouring water on the Tuesday Buddha.

Me pouring water on the Saturday dragon. If anyone knows what this symbolizes maybe you can leave the info in a comment.

My favorite of this whole set – Azure back at Tuesday with the guide

Anyway, I’m glad to finally have the pictures up and done with, they’d been blocking up my system for over six months! (Ew!) We’re going through our Myanmar pictures right now, so expect more in the days to come.

Of course the monk isn’t going to ask straight out for anything, because he shouldn’t want in the first place (he should just present himself without expectations)… but the kid wanted money. We were uneasy giving him money because the practice isn’t supposed to be about that, we thought. That’s more like begging.

Wasn’t it the point that Buddhist monks be happy with whatever they’re offered? Wasn’t it the point that they not be choosy about food, that they only accept alms to keep their body going so it can house the life-force?

We were getting a little upset about the apparent corruption of what we thought were pretty straight-forward Buddhist values – and the fact that we’d met some unimpressive, certainly unenlightened monks a few nights earlier. One was possessive of us, which is again out of sync with what we understand to be Buddhism.

Azure and I spent the morning trying to figure out if we had misunderstood the practice or if we were seeing it misapplied somehow.

Sitting at another tea shop, an English teacher – I don’t remember his name, but it starts with Oo Oo – noticed I was wearing the traditional Myanmar longhi, and he commented on it. He sat down to talk with us. His long white hair was in a top knot and there were long, white wisps coming off, as I imagine a schoolteacher from the 1820s old west might look. He had a whiskery mustache and no beard. His white shirt was buttoned up to the collarless top, and he wore the same traditional longhi, of course. I asked him why he dressed like this while few others did. He said that he wanted to keep the traditions alive. Yes! Why are there so few who understand this?

We took advantage of his English-speaking to ask him about the Buddhists. He said he was a Buddhist, though he only lasted as a monk for 10 days. He said that we should give money to nuns – they need it. They’re not well-taken care of by the monasteries, monetarily. They only receive raw rice then have to cook everything themselves.

On the other hand – and we sensed this – monks don’t need the money at all. They get donations and eat very well, everything is prepared for them, so they don’t even take food when it’s offered. He said there are a lot of "fake" monks who only put the robes on then don’t change anything. They have a plan to start a business or something, so they throw the robes on, collect money while taking English classes and internet classes, then when they have enough they quit and start some computer store or whatever.

People (and all the monks) can tell the difference between genuine monks and fake monks. Some genuine monks – as I suspected – become forest monks. It’s just in their nature, he said, to go and be alone and meditate in a cave or under a tree. Some genuine monks will stay in the temples as teachers. Monks are not respected here unless they deserve respect, it seems, and people know the difference.

Before meals the monks pray. They say, “This food is for my body, not for enjoyment.” I think it’s ok to enjoy while you’re eating, but if you shove someone aside so you can have your favorite food then that’s just not right.

The other day someone said, in all seriousness, “I’m just trying to survive.” Business was slow, and though their ‘survival’ was at stake, they were using their money to pay me to wash the windows of their large home. We have a funny concept of survival. Their life isn’t at stake, their lifestyle is. A lot of us confuse the two, and since lifestyle is an extension of identity, the idea of changing it is equated with some kind of death. But it’s not death, it’s pride or vanity that causes the pain.

Food abounds. What if we ate what we had, not what we sought? And what if that was satisfactory?

I see why the monks warn us about enjoying food: Some of us buy our favorite food – even if we’re supporting companies that harm people – because we’re addicted to our lifestyles. I don’t think happiness depends on what we eat, so that’s not an excuse. When we’re addicted to something, we make compromises to secure it.

When you eat a meal you eat a place.¹ Not only are you physically becoming part of the food and its soil, but you’re spiritually saturating your body with the terroir.²

This will blow your mind. Have you ever heard of camas or salal? Well, let me tell you about them, friend. Camas is a plant with an edible root that seems to be somewhere between an onion and a potato. (It has a bad-ass brother named, death camas, which isn’t nearly as fun to eat.) And salal is a low shrub that you’ve definitely seen around the NW if you’ve spent any time here. It lives under tall trees, near water and it makes little black-purple berries. You’ve definitely seen it.

Both these plants are native to the Pacific Northwest. Along with salmon they were the staple foods of the Northwest native peoples.

I have lived here my whole life. I wouldn’t say I know everything about Western Washington botany, but I pay as much attention as anyone else. Until a few months ago, I had never even heard of the two plants that were the pillars of people’s diets, right here, for the last 10,000 years. And it’s not like I’m six years old; I’m thirty! Over thirty!

So, what does this have to do with anything? I’m not really sure myself, I’m a little drunk.

I guess what I’m getting at is that Presence/Attention/Awareness is about more than just focusing on the moment, it’s also about engaging with this place where we are.³ Because we eat many times a day, we have many opportunities to engage with the terroir, to be sensually present in this physical Place and let the rain become our blood. We should eat food with which we share terroir, with which we have a common rhythm.

Salal and camas evolved here, so where are they in our diets? Maybe they taste bad, I don’t know, I’ll tell you this summer, but maybe they were pushed off our plates by cheap food from other places. If we are where we eat, then most of us are geographic Frankensteins.

Where it rains so much that there’s rain in my dreams and my knees can feel it and it narrates Sunday mornings, do I eat the onion that drank the rain that wet my hair weeks before?⁴

—

¹ “Terroir” technically refers only to food and drink (and the official distinction doesn’t even require that the food be organic), but I like to think of it as applying to other things as well – clothing and building materials immediately come to mind.

Art made with local materials is, I think, something different. Of course food and clothes and structures can be created with inspiration to become more than just necessities of survival – they can become expressions of place through person – but the timing of the creative process may or may not coincide with the need for food or shelter, and those two things are going to be taken care of regardless.

² Not to mention the spirit with which the farmer grows, treats and harvests the food.

³ Travel is, essentially, the experience of and engagement with Place. Which is why these food posts have a place on a travel blog.

⁴ This is what I thought about when praying before each meal in France, how our bodies mix with the earth and why I can taste Marguerite’s biceps in her wine.

When the animal is dead, the Mazzeri rolls it over and looks into its face. They recognize a person they know in the face of the animal, and the next morning, they announce to the town that the person they saw will die within a year. Even if it’s a family member, they are compelled – by Quellu Quassu, the Corsican “Some Thing” more vague than the Christian God – to hunt it and kill it, against their own will. The Mazzeri do not choose the person, they’re simply death’s messengers.

The hunt takes place in dreams, but Corsicans consider dreams to be a parallel and relevant world: the prophesied deaths occur within the year.^{1}

Of course, this tradition died out half a century ago.

I arrived on Corsica among the skeptical majority, the rational liberal who doesn’t necessarily believe in something he can’t see, like God or dream-hunters. To each his own, of course, but if I can’t see it, I don’t believe in it.

Then, in mountains that had been presented as ogre- and Mazzeri-filled, where dreams had been dangerous, we saw kids in Yankee baseball caps and Nike tennis shoes listening to 50 Cent.

We have lost something, I could see.

The world is poorer for the loss. Much poorer. What richness is steam-rolled by skeptical media, employment-focused education, the medical establishment and our science-centered faith? What creative force was extinguished by the Church or ignored by tv-addicted posterity? And how did MY money encourage it?

I wondered, “Really, what does it hurt to open myself to believing in dreams and magic? Am I skeptical only because I have so much pride that I think it matters that I be right or wrong?”

I chose to open myself to the possibility probability that there’s much more going on than what I can see. At the very least, it will make my world richer.

But science and money, the twin pillars of Modern religion, crush cultural niches, the pockets in which creative wealth can accumulate. The Corsican mountains are flat. The Snoqualmie run casinos. Modernism has its cellular talons in Africa.

Then we rolled into the valley of the Christian Back-to-the-Landers, and everything lit up. Nowhere else had I seen a cultural cauldron like this: the kids were singing songs to entertain themselves, they talked about natural phenomena, they believed in the supernatural, the Christian God, they believed that Mary was there and helping them. They had stories. They had a world that was immediate and rich, and legends of their own creation were growing in its garden.

I could see how this might be the kernel for a culture. It wouldn’t take many more generations, or like-minded families, for this to develop into a web of myths and practices that the world has never before seen.

So, what does this have to do with food?

Rugged independence persists in modern Corsica.

There are groups of people among us that are making an effort to live in this fashion. They don’t have TVs and don’t read the newspaper. They’re trying to live in a way that allows them and their kids to sharpen the impression of their characters^{2}, that the force of their creativity be unrestrained and untarnished by mass-commercialism, that they can channel their unblemished centers and create with its texture. And for their efforts our world will be richer.

These are the people we need to support with our money. Whether they’re making clothes or constructing homes with local materials or growing food, our money needs to go to those who are creating culture, not steamrolling it.

If we’re going to buy food, let’s buy it from these people, the farmers, the independents who are making this place richer. Let’s buy from the small stands at the farmers’ markets, to help the fragile ones nurse quiet lives.

And we need to stop supporting the steamrollers, the brand names – Coke, Safeway, Costco, Monsanto, Dole, and all the others. There is no spirit in money-centrism, and I’m tired of hearing their voices in humans’ mouths.

Money is the agent of the modern world’s evolution. Spend wisely.

—
^{1} Dorothy Carrington in Granite Island, describing the Corsican fishing community:

“A week he was missing with his boat and crew…. I heard only a single comment on the situation: ‘His wife came down to ask for news. You should have seen that woman! Her face was black; she has drunk the blood of his heart.’ Blessed are the illiterate, who can spontaneously express themselves in such apt and opulent imagery! But perhaps this was general in the days before universal education began mass-producing minds. I have often wondered how far the Elizabethan writers were indebted to the virile, vivid speech of an illiterate majority.”

She wrote about the Mazzeri and other Corsican folklore in The Dream Hunters of Corsica, in which she reinforces her point:
All this, one might say, belongs to the past. Rational French state education and materialistic values have discredited the evil spirits and reduced the legends to curiosities of folklore. The ogres have vanished; the Devil no longer roams among the rocks. Nor, indeed, does Saint Martin…

^{2} “The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character… Under all these screens {brands to which a person subscribes} I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”

– Ralph Waldo Emmerson

Reading Emerson makes me want to overturn cars.

U-District Farmers Market
Year-round. 9am-2pm
Corner of University Way & NE 50th

Magnolia Farmers Market
June 5 – Sept 25, 10am-2pm
Next to the Magnolia Community Center at 2550 34th Avenue West.

Bellevue Farmers Market
June 5 – Nov 20, 10 – 2pm
Washington Square
10610 NE 8th St

Kent Farmers Market
June 5th – Sept 25th
2nd Ave & Smith St in downtown Kent

Edmonds Farmers Market
July 3rd to Oct 2nd, 9:00 am – 3:00 pm
(Closed Aug. 14th due to the Taste of Edmonds)
Downtown Edmonds on 5th Street from Main at the fountain to Bell and east up Bell Street around Centennial Plaza.

Georgetown Farmers Market
June 5 to Sept 25, 10:00am – 3:00 pm
Located on the grounds of the original Rainier Brewery, 6000 Airport Way S in the Georgetown District, between the General Offices building and the old Malt House.

Redmond Saturday Market
May 1 – Oct 30, 9am-3pm
7730 Leary Way NE

West Seattle Farmers Market
Year-round, 10am – 2pm
The ‘Junction’ at California Ave SW and SW Alaska.

Ballard Market
Year-round, 11am – 3pm
5330 Ballard Ave NW.

Broadway Farmers Market
May 19 – Dec 19, 11am – 3pm;

Lake Forest Park Farmers Market
May 9 – Oct 10
Intersection of SR 522 and Hwy 104.

Meadowbrook Farmers Market
June 6 to October 31, 11am to 3pm
2728 NE 100th Street 98125

Mercer Island Farmers Market
June 20th – Oct 17th, 11am – 3pm
SE 32nd Street at Mercerdale Park

Renton Farmers Market
June 1 – Sept 28, 3 – 7pm
At the Piazza
3rd and Burnett
Downtown Renton

Columbia City Farmers Markets
Apr 28 – Oct 20, 3-7pm,
Rainier Ave South and South Edmonds.

Kirkland Market
May 5 – Oct 13, 2-7pm
Marina Park, Kirkland

Wallingford Farmers Market
May 19 – Sept 29, 3-7pm
Parking lot of Wallingford Center.

Sammamish Farmers Market
May 19 – Sept 29, 4-8pm
801 228th Ave. SE

Lake City Farmers Market
June 3 – October 7, 3 to 7 pm,
Next to the Library at NE 125th and 28th Ave NE.

Olympic Sculpture Park Farmers Market
July 15 to September 9, 3:30-7:30 p.m
Corner of Western Avenue and Broad Street, at the northern edge of the Belltown District.
(206) 654-3100

Queen Anne Market
May 20 – October 7, 3-7 pm
W. Crockett St. at Queen Anne Ave. N

Bellevue Farmers Market
May 13 – Oct 14, 3 – 7pm
First Presbyterian Church of Bellevue
1717 Bellevue Way NE
(425) 454-3082

Madison Madrona Farmers Market
May 14 to September 24, 3-7 p.m.
The corner of Martin Luther King, Jr. Way and E. Union Street.

Phinney Farmers Market
May 28 through October 1, 3-7pm,
Phinney Neighborhood Center, at 67th and Phinney Ave N.

Bothell Farmers Market
June 4 – Sept 24, Noon-6pm
Country Village
23718 Bothell Everett Hwy