Quarter Year

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.

Ah, Johann.

So he set up a ladder that didn’t QUITE reach its intended destination, and he managed to reach to the low end of the beam and grab it, hands only, feet dangling. This was all part of the plan. He hung from the beam with the pulley system in one hand and a chronically bad shoulder attached to the other. He would walk, hand-over-hand, along the beam to the peak of the roof, hanging the whole time, then after the rope was attached he’d walk himself back down to the ladder. Right?

Wrong. It turns out he wasn’t as strong as he thought, in fact I don’t even think Siren from American Gladiators could have done it. His hands quickly gave out and he and the ropes crashed onto a lower beam and then crashed again to the ground, where he landed on his head and hip. There was blood everywhere. In shock, he got up and dragged his broken body to the house. Through the gate, past the table, he managed to open the door. He saw the family in the living room and explained, “!wosdln;lksir.”

Suzanne saw the blood and called the ambulance.

After a couple days of blissful country living, skirted children and dinner prayer songs, quiet family meals and hand-picked salads, quiet nights with talks about religion, a helicopter roared into the valley. A few sturdy-looking paramedics jumped to the ground with a stretcher in their hands and ran to the house, putting out their cigarettes on the way. In the meantime the well-endowed pilot hopped down from the cockpit wearing a single-pieced jumpsuit that unzipped from his neck to his thigh, and he lit up his own cigarette.

Fifteen minutes later they loaded Johann into the chopper. The neighbor took pictures. The family watched in unison as the helicopter rose into the air and took off for Montpelier. Didier prayed for his idiot son; in the helicopter’s downdraft the women’s skirts flapped at their ankles.

It was a culture shock. Azure was shaken out of the trance of this peaceful valley by one of the paramedics who looks like her cousin Todd. “These are our people,” she thought. What are we doing here pretending to be anything like the family when our lives are much more like those of the paramedics? And tonight they’ll go home and tell their wives or husbands, “You’ll never believe this weird place we went today…”

We decided to give the family some space, so we took off for the afternoon. It was a good excuse to check email in town.

The next day we had a little surprise: an ambulance pulled up to the chalet and unloaded a morphine-soaked Johann into our living room. It was unbelievable that he was out of the hospital so fast, let alone that he wasn’t still in ICU. And now here he was being wheeled into our little candle-lit bubble. Would he turn on the lights at night? OH NO! Would he bleed on our food? At first we thought he was going to take our room, and we balked, so instead he was carried into the neighboring room. He groaned as the paramedics – with help from the family – set him on the bed. The paramedics took off and we were left with a roommate who couldn’t move, who would need help going to the bathroom and whose head was partially shaved and sewn like the ass of a sick cat. But we all know what it’s like to fear we’re a burden, so I sucked it up and broke the ice with a smile, “If there’s anything you need…”

It turns out – miraculously, really – that he didn’t break any bones, not even his skull. They think he has a concussion, but if that’s the only chip in his enamel then he’s incredibly lucky.

We helped him walk that first afternoon. He couldn’t believe that this happened to him when he had so many horses to shoe the next day, not figuratively. He said he smokes 50 – FIFTY! – cigarettes a day, and now he’d gone two full days without.

“Every crisis is an opportunity,” I chirped.

He looked at me with knowing eyes. “It is, it really is.”

Johann cried in the hospital, apparently, he cried about his life and how nothing ever really seems to go right for him, how he screws up good things. His dad said, “Johann had everything here ten years ago – he had this farm, he had his horses, he had family and he had God, he had good food and a quiet life. But he wanted to ‘see the world’ so he threw it all away….”

(From their little paradise the outside world looks like a mess, it looks like an ocean of people who take comfort in other people’s weaknesses to justify their own addictions: identity, status and craving, not to mention the more obvious daily addictions of narcotics, processed foods and mindless spending.)

Anyway, Dad continued his thought: “In the ten years since he left the farm he’s gone from crisis to crisis, he’s crashed 22 cars. He’s no longer a practicing Christian, he’s lost.”

The night I said the crisis/opportunity thing, I popped into his room to ask him a question and then backed out quietly: his room was candle-lit and he was in the middle of the bed on his back, counting rosary beads on his chest with his eyes closed. His legs stretched thin and fragile under the sheet.

Later that night he sat with us at the table, slumped. “Do you know where my car is?” he asked.

“No, we haven’t seen it.”

“It was up on the road but when the paramedics came they parked it over by the horses, it’s a little white car,” he said. I could sense where this was going.

“Oh, really? No, I don’t think I’ve seen it.”

“I have two cigarettes in my backpack in the car. I just know that if I can get them I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

I changed the subject.

I was astonished to watch him find a pair of jeans and start to put them on. Then he scared up a pair of shoes and painfully fit his feet inside. He winced as he put on a jacket. This guy could hardly walk, he’d just been airlifted out of the valley, and here he was getting ready to drag his broken body into the unlit night just for two cigarettes. He limped across the room and opened the door.

“Wait!” I said.

He paused and looked over his shoulder as cold air tumbled in. I walked to within arm’s-length and handed him our flashlight.

Sam believes that genetics, essentially, make black people less intelligent. He called it “instincts,” but he implied that these “instincts” couldn’t be overcome, so I thought of it as genetics. He said instincts, like how Jews are two-faced and women are untrustworthy, are “hidden” in people and there’s just not much anyone can do about it.

In America it’s an unwritten rule that people have the same capacity for intelligence (happiness, pain, love, compassion, etc) regardless of their race (sex, sexual orientation, religion, etc). Another unwritten American rule is that you don’t openly question the first rule. Don’t worry, this post isn’t going there.

This story is beside the point, but it will illustrate Sam’s dedication to Buddhist practice. Sam lived with a nagging, painful neck injury caused by a car accident. Finally, eleven years to the day after the accident he decided to get rid of it for good, so he sat down and meditated for three consecutive days. He didn’t eat, didn’t drink, didn’t move from the spot upon which he sat. He focused all his attention on his neck, visualizing it healed. When, 72 hours later, he finished the meditation, he could move his neck freely – he twisted in either direction to prove it. Healed. Hearing this story before the questionable comments, I thought, “Wow, to meditate that much means this guy must be a river of compassion!”

Sam’s phobias seem inconsistent: Buddhism teaches you to love others unconditionally, I thought, so how does he reconcile the practice with the lack of respect? (Well, there are plenty of people who manage to hate despite their loving leaders, so perhaps Sam is to Buddha as America’s anti-gay Christians are to Jesus and the Taliban is to Muhammad).

Sam asked Ali what he believes happens after we die. Ali responded that he feels this is it – there’s no afterlife. Sam said, “So you don’t even believe in re-incarnation?” (which, I suppose, is an afterlife scenario halfway between “this is it” and “there is a heaven”). Sam does believe in reincarnation, obviously, in which one’s karma determines their station in the next life.

So I wonder, Does Sam believe a person’s race is determined by karma from their previous life? In his beliefs, would a good dog be reborn as a Jew? Would a bad Eskimo be reborn as a Latino? It all seems ludicrous to me, but who am I to judge? I have no evidence either way.

I never asked about racial hierarchy as dictated by karmic law because I wanted to be polite: I was in his house, after all. The more relevant topic to come out of this exchange is how a guest should relate to their host. I was brought up to be polite (which in our culture means not talking about touchy subjects) in someone else’s home, but that could be just as much a culture-based practice as the one about not questioning racial equality.

About being a challenging guest, one view is that we travelers can claim “ignorant’s license,” which allows us to say or do things that might be rude in the town we’re visiting but can be written off as cultural differences. For example, Ali suggested that Sam’s hellion of a son (my words) needs more attention from his father, especially considering that Sam splits time between his two families in different cities. It would be inappropriate to say such a thing in England or America, but Sam doesn’t know that, so it might as well be said and written off as a cultural difference. And to be fair, we don’t even know if such a statement is inappropriate here in Thailand. So Ali chose to say what he was thinking and put the onus on Sam to blame the cultural difference if the statement does prove to be insensitive.

(I have a British client who says, “I don’t know why American parents are always gushing about how much they love their kids… I mean, my kids are alright. They’re just kids.” Who knew parental gushing/pride was cultural?)

Anyway, back to the story at hand: So, can a guest challenge their host’s opinions? Mathew says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks (Sam’s in his late 50s), so you might as well just listen politely and even goad them, then later blog about how fucking crazy that guy was. To all the old dogs reading this – can you teach an old dog new tricks? Have you been open to major philosophical changes as you’ve aged?

I’m coming to the conclusion that if you can manage to cleanse your argument of judgment, then these topics are fair game. The key – as is the case with any communication – is to avoid taking anything personally and think about whether you’re making unfair assumptions when you’re speaking. For example: ‘having unconditional love for all people’ and ‘thinking that Jews are two-faced’ aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

Here’s the argument that won me over: I’ve spent 30 years wandering among millions of people on this planet, starting on North America. Sam has spent almost 60 years wandering among millions of people on the opposite side of the world. Finally, after all this time and all these people, he and I have come together for one night to talk face-to-face on his porch, and it will never happen again. The odds are astronomical that we should be here! With that in mind, it seems like a waste of an opportunity that politeness prevent us from discussing important topics. To me, the devil is in the intent.

As for Sam, his views are consistent with Buddhism in this way: he says that they all come from careful observation. I imagine (assume) he’s dealt with a few Black people he found to be dumb and a few Jews he found to be two-faced. We asked him whether he would ever visit America and he said that even if he was given a free ticket he wouldn’t go. “Too dangerous.” He’s afraid of the guns (of course) and thinks Americans hate people from other cultures (he mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan). In response, Azure showed him pictures of our house, our chickens, the Demeules’ lake house, our friends cooking and smiling, and Sam said, “You must live in a really nice part of America.” Well, yeah, I guess we do.

Either way, it’s hard to trust the opinion of someone who learns about the world through observation but would refuse a free ticket to a place they’ve never been. Not that we’re even close to understanding how his version of the world operates, but is his observation of race so different that he had to ask if Obama was as smart as Bush?

Years ago, Ari’s uncle converted from Hinduism to Christianity in an effort to become a better person. I don’t necessarily think Christianity’s values are any better than those of Hinduism, but Hinduism is the religious norm of Bali. Religious conversion would be a monumental, conspicuous declaration, a tangible reminder to himself that being good is a decision. I’m familiar with the strategy of rejecting cultural norms to feel I’m living intentionally, I noted, as Christmas approached in the US. I even got a tattoo to remind me.

Maybe I’m projecting. Ari’s uncle converted, then he was miraculously cured of some sickness in his leg, then he really let the faith rush in. He never brought up relgion, though, except when I asked.

Uncle swims farther against the tide in practicing organic farming on his clove farm. His pesticide consists of tobacco leaves burned under the tree to smoke out the insects. He uses natural sulfur to fight fungus on the roots. He sources his organic compost from the town’s restaurants & food stalls. Before the shift to organics, the chemical fertilizer stripped the soil of important components, and his clove trees hung sick until he tried the compost. He’s the only organic farmer locally. I asked if his religion and farming practices were related, but Ari said they weren’t. I think it’s too much a coincidence that the only Christian and the only organic farmer we’ve met happen to be the same person. My own conclusion is that this man thinks critically, holds himself to high standards and makes an effort to move in the direction of his principles – that’s how he’s different. I found him to be extremely thoughtful and polite.

Bapak

Bapak, a 71-year-old who looks 85, said his family split from a larger kingdom near Ubud (on Bali, crossed the mountains and established their new home in 1883. His is the seventh generation since the split, Ari’s is the eighth, the kids running around the living area comprise the ninth generation in Munduk. He emphasized that the pioneers’ names – and even those of the second and third generations – were never recorded and are forgotten.

The family has lived on this land – where we ate and talked – since the 1883 exodus. In 1965 Munduk got a road and was officially established. Ari can remember the road being bumpy and unpaved even in his lifetime. The lakeside fisherman’s village we visited, Limpah, still lacks a road. I asked if people live differently in Limpah than do people here in town. Ari didn’t understand the question at first, then he said, “no.” I suppose I asked a strange question in the first place, I’m not sure what answer I expected.

The Dutch ruled Indonesia for 300 years. During WWII a base building (like a communication hub) operated in Munduk, and Bapak remembers a Dutch soldier giving him a piece of bread when he was seven-years-old. Then the Japanese forced the Dutch out, ending the 300-year rule. The Japanese didn’t give Munduk trouble since it was so small and poor, they simply claimed all of Bali and that was it. Apparently they had a presence in Denpasar. Indonesia gained its independence when we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I asked if Bapak had been frightened after the ruling powers left (would there be civil war?) but he said, “no.” Apparently Bali was pretty well-united.

We asked Bapak if he’s friends with Bapak Dewa from across the street – the coffee farmers’ grandfather. Satisfyingly, he is. They’re about the same age and I imagine they grew up together and share memories of different times. At a little temple in Ubud I met another old Bapak dressed in a nice sarong and headscarf; he asked me for money after I took his picture. Today we ate lunch with a family following a private tour of their farm, and they let us hang out and ask prying questions the entire day. They even bought us snacks. Then this evening another family cooked us dinner, and Ari translated all night while we asked prying questions of Bapak and the uncle. At no point throughout the day would anyone accept money from us, and though we spent almost nothing, it was by far the most valuable day we’ve had.