I wasn’t sure that I was walking the right direction, but I went the opposite direction of that last car. It was a guess. I figured I might come across a town or a house or a farm, but after about a mile there was no sign I would.

A car was coming down the road. I stuck out my thumb and they stopped.

“Vado a Tudia.” They had never heard of Tudia and kept driving.

I walked on and looked at the hills on either side of the road. Fennel grows like a weed here, and there are cacti with those spiny red fruits. It really is a beautiful place. I was in a good mood anyway.

Another car stopped for me, and the old man had heard of Tudia but was reluctant to give me a ride.

“It’s far,” he might have said.

But then he started clearing the front seat and I crammed in with my bags on my lap and against the windshield. I had been walking the right direction.

He took me as far as his own farm, about five kilometers down the road, and he claimed to not have a telephone or maybe I still didn’t know the right word. As he let me out, he said Tudia was another five or six kilometers from his house, but I suspect he said that to make me think that he’d taken me farther than he had.

I walked another two and stopped at a collection of shuttered buildings. I was hot, so I put my bags at my feet and took off my jacket. I listened to the birds and watched a flock swoop and dive as a group. I heard maybe six different calls from the hills. There was a little wind, and on that wind I thought I might have heard a human voice. I strained to listen… was it just a piece of tin roof in the wind? I cupped my ear… Or… a cow? No… it was definitely the cadence of speech, and it might have been coming from one of the buildings.

I walked up and found a radio blasting from a warehouse and a man sitting in his car outside.

“Hello?” I called out in English, not thinking about it.

He stepped out of the car, a young man with a beard, and smiled

“Dov’e Tudia?”

“Oh, very far,” I think he said in Italian. He described the route, then offered to draw me a map. On the paper he drew a line the length of the page, then it turned left toward the edge, where he put an X.

“Quanti kilometers?” Seven or eight, I think he said.

“Io ho numero telephono, pero non ho telephono. Hai telephono?” I have a phone number, but I don’t have a phone. Do you have a phone? He seemed to follow what I was saying, but just kinda smiled. “Telephono? Telephone? Telephonado?” GODDAMNIT WHAT IS THE WORD?

He wished me luck and I walked back to the road. I did notice that he had been sitting in a car and knew where Tudia was, but wasn’t going to drive me. Not that I expect the generosity, but it told me how far away the town might be.

More walking. I was still in a good mood, though tired. But the situation was all positive: My stomach was full, I had a bag with food and water, I had a sleeping bag and a phone number. Worst case scenario I go back to the dude’s farm and ask to sleep in the barn, and he lets me sleep in the house out of guilt or hospitality. And besides – this island is stunning. I realized that impatience disappears if you’re ok with where you are.

Another car came but passed at a high speed. A guy with a suit and tie. Prick.

But then he turned around.

“Sorry, I wasn’t expecting to see a hitch hiker,” I think he said. I was glad I hadn’t flicked him off or given some other vulgar gesture, like pelvic thrusts or a fake machine gun.

“No problemo, no problemo,” I told him. That may or may not be an expression in Italian.

He knew where Tudia was, and we went to the wrong farm at first, maybe three km past the town. They said there was another farm back in town, so we went there. He totally went out of his way to help me.

As we pulled in another car arrived behind us.

“Are you Mike?”

“Yes! Hello!”

“We were waiting for you at the station in Caltanissetta, where were you?”

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…

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.

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?

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.

The most unexpected part of holding the fowl was that it was warm. I guess I don’t know what I expected, but the feet felt like human fingers. It’s kinda like when you imagine kissing a person, but you forget to imagine saliva, and it totally changes everything.

City boys have written about killing their first chickens before, so I won’t go into it. It wasn’t an emotional experience for me. But as we were plucking the feathers I told Didier how amazing it was that I’d only killed my first fowl after 30 years.

“I got a good education in high school and college, I’m happy about what I learned and it was relevant for what it was… but it wasn’t…”

“…essential.” He offered.

“Yes.”

“The root of the word ‘essential’ is ‘essence’ or ‘truth.’ You weren’t educated about the truth…”

“… of how our bodies mix with the earth.” I said.

“Exactly.”

Didier and I were on the same page a lot, some of his rants could have come from my mouth. The ones about how companies have a stake in keeping their employees powerless, how it’s good for capitalism that people be vaguely afraid about the future, and so on.

When he taught us about the medicinal herbs in the garden I took tons of notes, but I had a hard time accessing what I’d been taught. I’d look at a plant and look closer at its leaves and compare it to my notes and would be too unsure to declare it Citronelle! or Lemon Pepper! or whatever. I said this time and again, and I’ll repeat it here:

“Learning to identify plants is like learning to read for the first time.”

People ask us often, “So, the kids could leave school at 15? How did he educate them?”

I was curious about this too. One day we went for a ride with Didier and his oldest son. They sat in the front seat, we sat in the back. As they drove, Didier pointed to the sky and talked about the movement of the clouds. He pointed to the hills and talked about the rock formations and the fossils. He talked about the fields that the neighbors were sowing. His son pointed to a sea gull that was out of place here. His son talked about the history of some old structures on their land. His son talked about planting by the moon and how it was a good guide but not the last word. His son talked about finding fennel by looking for a larger reed, because fennel grows at its feet.

Azure with her wild salad.

In other words, Didier taught his children about the land and the plants and the weather and the animals and natural systems and Catholicism. He taught them the things that he considered essential.

They might not know a lot of the academic stuff we consider foundations of knowledge, but they’ve learned how to have a relationship with the earth, and I think that’s fundamentally healthy.