Beginning to See the Light

I once wrote a novel, which thankfully only one person has ever read in its entirety (thank you for suffering through it Rhiannon), and hopefully only one person will ever read. It’s a terrible novel (though I like to think well written at least). It is the novel of a very young and very stupid man. While I will not profess to be any smarter I am at least older and I have come to absolutely hate the central premise of the novel. The central premise is so sophomorically postmodern as to be laughable, but here it is— nothing ever happens.

The central character spends most of the novel waiting for something to happen. Yes just like the Radiohead song. When a band can summarize your novel in a three-minute pop song it’s not a good sign.

I have now after seven months of traveling come to have a journal full of notes, verbal sketches, transcribed conversations, anecdotal stories, and writings of that nature, which are chiefly concerned with the fact that something is always happening. In fact so many things are happening that I am sometimes paralyzed by the thought of having to choose what to record and what to ignore.

I could for instance describe the early morning market in Phnom Penh that surrounds the bus station. I could tell about the bananas and dragon fruit, the fish arriving in trucks, the women walking among the stalls, the way they paused sometimes to feel the firmness of the piece of fruit or try a taste of some dried meat, the throngs of flies on the pig guts, the blood on the chopping block, the unidentifiable meat hanging in the dark rafters, the blue plastic tarps, the sound of the motorbikes coming and going, the dizzying rush of cars, the lottery ticket sellers, the taxi drivers waiting, the bamboo baskets full of freshwater clams, baskets full of dried shrimp, baskets full of chilies, baskets full of lotus heads, baskets full of dried fish, the baskets full of cucumbers, full of seaweed, full of tomatoes, full of beetles, full of fish, full of things I’ve never seen before, and the smell of fish and meat and cigarette smoke and rotting garbage and stale water and grilled meat and sautéed onions and noodle soup in bowls climbing up into the already steaming morning heat.

But none of that is actually in the journal, that’s just memory. And that skips all the fun of the dialogue, breakfast at a food stand, Matt and Debi and I bartering for tuk-tuks, waiting in the bus station….

I could write about the bus, the bags of mysterious liquid stuff hanging from the backs of the local’s seats, the sticky rice with Soya beans cased in bamboo, the book I was reading, the sound of the woman’s voice behind me, the creak of the rusty seats, the grinding roar of the engine, the smell of petrol, the inevitable stopping, the chickens clucking in their baskets, the pig squealing in his, or us falling asleep all askew with our mouths open, or the endless bartering to obtain motorbikes for the afternoon. We were headed you see to the floating village of Kampong Luong, just offshore from Krakor on the edge of Tonle Sap. And yes, you might think motorbikes are a poor mode of transport for a lake, but there was the ride to the lake to consider (and of course I have said before that the Honda Dream is capable of all, I have no doubt that somewhere someone has converted one into a boat). But see even with that I’ve missed a million little details. I remember for instance that on the way back the key bounced right out of my bike. Disappeared into the ether of Cambodian roads, never to be seen again. I remember the trucks and their deafening horn blasts that nearly unseat you when they sneak up behind you and let loose, I remember the laughter on the drivers face as he passed knowing he just nearly made you piss yourself. I remember stopping for petrol and losing something.

A village that floats on the water is not so ordinary as to be forgotten. And yet surprisingly a floating village is not that different than a village on the land. There are the same stores, the computer repair shop, the grocers, the petrol station, the temple, the dance hall and all the other things that makeup a town. I could even say with some authority that the town is laid out in streets, watery pathways that form nearly perfect lines. When viewed from above, I imagine the floating village would be scarcely any different than a normal village. But what made it special was that it was not a normal village and while a computer repair store may not be all that special in the average town, float one out in the middle of lake and it becomes fascinating. That such a thing might exist in floating village is remarkable, I for one was not expecting that people living on water would have computers, let alone have enough that there is exists a market for repair. After all it’s only a ten-minute boat ride to shore.

But the one place the notes and photographs fail me are when it comes to describing what it feels like to be there. The further and longer I travel the more I realize that I cannot begin to convey what these places feel like, the smells and sounds can be described, the sights may be captured in words or pictures, but then they are no longer sights, nor sounds, nor smells, they are simply words here on the page, on the screen, repeated in our heads.

I do not know why the village was built on the water, perhaps it’s closer to the fish, perhaps all the land was taken, perhaps it just seemed like more fun to them, but I can tell you there is something wonderfully appealing, magical even, amazing, bewitching and any number of other adjectives I can dig out of the Oxford English Dictionary about the place. But I can’t tell you how it felt. Maybe ask Debi, she wanted to move in.

But we wouldn’t let her. So the next day we headed on around the lake to Battambang. Just outside Battambang is what’s known as the Bamboo Railway. After the Khmer Rouge destroyed most of it, the local rail line was abandoned. But the people of Southeast Asia (and I imagine anywhere in the developing world where governments do not do the sorts of things we expect governments to do like build highways) are far too ingenious to let some abandoned track go to waste. They found a bunch of old wheel housings and built bamboo flatbeds for them. Throw in the ubiquitous four-stroke engine and you’re away.

It’s a bit kitschy I suppose, even by local standards and it probably only persists because tourists like it, and it is fun. We hired motorbikes and rode out to the railroad, this time with guides. We were waiting for the locals to put together a bamboo car to take us back into town via the tracks when we noticed one of our guides was buying a grilled rat. We have seen rat for sale various places in the last two months, typically small villages in Laos, but we had never quite worked up the courage to try any. For me it wasn’t so much that it was rat, it was more that it’s typically been flattened to the point that it’s lost a dimension and hardly seems worth it. Plus, well, it’s a rat. We all sort of stood around watching as he ate it. He laughed at what must have been semi-horrified looks on our faces and offered us some. Now purchasing a whole rat always seemed to me a bit of a commitment, but trying a piece was not so daunting. Still I hesitated. Matt went for it, tore off a bit of stringy meat and started chewing it. Not to be out done I grabbed a piece and popped it in my mouth. Somewhere between chicken and beef, not what I would call good, but not that bad either. Eventually after exerting an undue amount of both Cambodian and English and American peer pressure we convinced Debi to have a bite. Some people claim there was physical cohesion, but that simply isn’t true. Matt even had seconds.

When I was laid up ill in Sen Monoron I watched a bit of the Discovery channel (and no one was eating rats). I saw one program in particular which fascinated me. Biologists in Africa who study elephant behaviors have come to the conclusion that when elephants lay their trunks flat on the ground they are actually listening (so to speak), to distant vibrations. Not listening to sounds that we could hear, or even sounds they could hear, but rather to the very deep long wavelengths of sound that we might, when they’re big enough, feel as an earthquake. And what do the elephants learn from such listening? There were if I remember correctly several theories, but none of them are worth recounting, what interested me was that there are hundreds of vibrations that pass under our feet that we are simply not equipped to sense. In fact when you come down to it our sense have a very narrow biological slant—they keep us alive.

But in narrowing down the world to what was necessary to survive we may have missed out on a whole lot of stuff that was well, fun. Eating rat was not biologically necessary, I wasn’t even hungry, but it was fun. Maybe elephants lay their trunks on the ground and “listen” to distant vibrations because they enjoy it the same way your grandmother likes it when you call long distance or your sister likes a postcard from Africa to hang on her fridge or you like to stare at the sunset. Even animals stare at the sunset and you’ll never convince me it isn’t because they have fun watching it. It’s been fun to realize how wrong I was. It’s fun to know that something is always happening; you just have to know where to look.

My only regret is I cannot capture details as a whole. I have to pick and chose and focus on individual bits to try and build a whole. But words are reductive, they take wholes and deconstruct them into parts and attempt to put them back together, but they never can. All the Kings men can’t put the rat in your mouth, but I’m glad we have this at least, some little bit to give and take. Though it may not convey the spatial and temporal and it may not get you here or me there, it does serve as some bridge, however rickety, between worlds. And believe me you’d be surprised the rickety bridges that will actually hold your weight. Oh yeah and I regret that I have a really bad novel taking up space on my hard drive.