Down the River

Morning in Chiang Khong Thailand revealed itself as a foggy, and not a little mysterious, affair with the far shore of the Mekong, the Laos shore, almost completely hidden in a veil of mist. The first ferry crossed at eight and not wanting to get caught in the mess of tourists crossing that day, I made sure to be on the first ferry.

After crossing through the respective borders and getting my passport stamped, I made my way up the road to the docks where I was to catch a slow boat to Luang Prabang. My head was full of statistics as I walked through the bustling border town of Huey Xui, Laos. I half expected to see a sign that said welcome to the Mekong Valley where the U.S. led troops of Laos and Thailand never fought a secret war, where there were not one and a half more bombing sorties flown than in all of Vietnam, where the total metric tonnage of bombs dropped was not 450,000 which of course, was not a whooping half ton per man, woman and child in Laos, because if it is not written down, it did not happen. But there was no commemoration of the terrible legacy that still haunts Laos.

You would never even realize a war had been fought here from aboard the slow boat where I and roughly sixty other passengers sat in cramped quarters watching the green jungle covered hills slide past. Indeed it was hard to imagine that anyone would want to invest the staggering $2 million dollars a day every day for nine years that the U.S. invested into the war in Laos. And yet the fact remains, Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the history of warfare.

The slow boat, which is not necessary slow, it just isn’t a speedboat several of which passed us in the course of our two day journey and without exception the passengers looked, cold, windblown, probably near deaf and generally miserable; the slow boat was meant for perhaps forty passengers, could actually seat about thirty and yet as with any transportation in the east, was packed to the gills. But the tight quarters often turn out to be fun in perverse ways; there is a certain bond that forms among those that suffer together. One of the best things about traveling is the people you meet, whether they are fellow travelers or indigenous locals. I had met up with a Swedish man named Robin and an Israeli lad, Ofir on the bus ride from Chiang Mai to Chiang Khong and since we were all headed into Laos and down the Mekong to Luang Prabang, we just sort of fell in together. On the boat I found myself seated next to an Irish girl, Siobhan, who later tagged along with our multi-national travel party for a few days.

Edward Abbey, the source of today’s title, once wrote, “everyone must at some point go down the river.” No stranger to rivers, Abbey went down a few, both the metaphorical and literal sort and my journey down the Mekong was similarly filled with both the metaphorical and literal journeys. It took two eight hour days in cramped conditions to get from Huey Xui where we crossed into Laos, to Luang Prabang, which was to be my first stop. I was glad for the company of Robin, Ofir and Siobhan, but still there were long periods of near silence in which everyone’s face seemed to me lost in some private mental journey, as if it were not possible to simply go down a river, but that the action necessary required an equal action on the part of the mind.

I do not know what absorbed my fellow passengers between reading and talking, those relatively quite moments (save for the continuous roaring white noise of the smoking diesel engine) where we simply stared at the limestone cliffs or the sandbars along the shore, but for me the mental journey became a process of abandonment. To say that traveling changes you would be a gross misstatement, but it does bring into focus any number of things that may have previously only lingered on the peripherals of your mind. My journey has been a slow process of letting go; I would not say I am different than when I left, but nevertheless I suppose I somehow am. At the end of the day, when the sun sets over whatever river you happen to be headed down, there is inevitably some change from that foggy morning that saw you off. You must let go of things to travel down a river.

And while a voice in the back of my head said just before I stepped off the boat in Luang Prabang, you cannot let go completely of anything, you will always have this thin strand of cotton wrapped about your smallest finger if for no other reason than to let it fall aside is to abandon hope entirely, I did, somewhere in the muddy waters of the Mekong, cast off huge chunks of myself, chunks that had been falling away for some time, but now perhaps because of the river, perhaps only the free and empty time, those chunks seemed to slough off at last. Most of these things that fell off me were too nebulous or vague to understand, I could not for instance say what I was letting go of or whether or not I would miss it, rather that the process of letting go was what was difficult. The thing or idea or dream was inevitably a product of my imagination, it had never been real to begin with, so letting go of it was natural, even if the process perhaps was not.

On the second day, after talking for a while with Siobhan about how dreams and traveling intermingle, I was in the ensuing silence suddenly struck by the thought that perhaps our dreams are ultimately acts of arrogance, or at least become so when we cling to them too tightly, cling to them until they do not guide us, but imprison us. Dreams must be cast off before reality is allowed to happen.

Which is not to say my friends that a dream can not merge with reality, that they can not be one and same, but merely that they must be let go of in the mind before they will take shape in the world. It is perhaps the act of letting go that eliminates the certainties of cannot or will not, and replaces them with might, could and have; or, to put it in the vernacular of James Bond film titles, never say never.

This feeling grew stronger and more disorienting when I fell ill with a bout of food poisoning. I lay on the floor of the guest house bathroom for the better part of two days vomiting horrible liquids out both ends of my digestive system, not a pleasant experience I can assure you, but somewhere in those tortured early morning hours, as I hugged the porcelain toilet that had become to sum total of my universe, it occurred to me how quickly our worlds can be reduced. Not just dreams we may try to let go of, but also our physical worlds and not only are we incapable of ever saying anything with certainty, we are incapable of even saying that. In other words, to say there is no certainty is itself a statement of certainty and therefore we find ourselves right where Joseph Heller so aptly described in Catch-22.

Did I travel for two days down the Mekong River here to Luang Prabang? Is there a place where you still are, that I am not? Is there a place here that I am and you are not? Uncertainties I cannot wrap my still fevered brain around except to say that however the words might twist and turn like the Mekong, in the end they are the only things that make it real to me.