in freefall, from the sky.
[W]hat if the islands are lost? what if the waters
cover the Hesperides? they would rather remember—
remember the golden apple-trees;
O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop one by one,
for they fall exhausted, numb, blind
but in certain ecstasy,
for theirs is the hunger
for Paradise.
(2007)
::
Being Big
Late September 2001
Chiang Mai to Louang Phabang
The plane is small, and operated by less-than-reliable Lao Aviation, but convincingly shiny, and I climb the aluminum stairs off the tarmac confident, grateful as the next guy to be avoiding a bus. But I am one of the stragglers, and I’m hardly in my seat before the stewardesses are calling for seatbelts. The plane begins to taxi, taking aim out of the flat, Chiang Mai valley at the green mountains of Laos to the east. In a flying-trance, it takes me a long moment to realize that the stewardess standing in the aisle is speaking not to the passengers at large but to me in particular. Please, she’s saying, this way. And as the airplane picks up speed she leads me from the rear of the plane, up the aisle, to the front, the very front, To balance the airplane, she explains.
Oh.
The nose of the plane tips up, but not too far up, and we’re airborne. I feel like I’ve made an important contribution to air safety. Over my shoulder, I see a planeload of Thais, small, neat people, and I have to acknowledge the simple efficiency of moving me rather than three or four of them. But that’s an exaggeration, surely, two slim Thai to one of me? Not that I’m that large. At home, in West Virginia, my six feet, two hundred, hardly stands out, but since I’ve been in Southeast Asia—less than two weeks—I have begun to feel large, swollen, shapeless and shambling. Lumpy. The word galoot rollicks into consciousness and sits down. I feel like I’ve taken some drug and woken up in the mind of anorexia. Food looks less good. I pass on the in-flight snack.
Out the window, the jagged hills of Laos glow an emerald green through the patchy clouds. Soon, the Mekong River snakes into view, brown and rolling here at the end of the rainy season. We begin our descent, Louang Phabang only minutes away.
I think of Delta B. Horne, back in Morgantown, who after September 11 no doubt entertained grave doubts about the wisdom of my traveling this fall. She emailed me she had dreamed we were on an airplane, and everything was okay, except we were all ghosts. Only that.
I look up. The seams of the cabin have started to smoke, but it’s not smoke, more like the fog that rises off a cooler of dry ice when the lid’s opened. The molding around the oblong windows pours with it, wreathing the view. But we are seasoned travelers, no one panics, even when the seams overhead start to rain down water on us. The mood is festive. One intrepid traveler has his camera out and is considering a picture. Probably he’d like to stand in the aisle, a man in a cloud on a plane, while someone else took his picture, but the seatbelt light is on. So he snaps and grins.
The red tile roofs of Louang Phabang are clearly visible now, the town situated like a miniature Pittsburgh on a narrow peninsula between the Nam Khan on one side and the swirling eddies of the Mekong on the other.
::
Waiting for the Bombs
Late September/early October 2001
Louang Phabang
The first gong resonates like it’s in my room, and I’m awake, the silence of 4:00 a.m. still thick behind the single ringing, the air black and liquid. I can almost see the sound vibrating out, waves on a disturbed night lake. It’s the monks. Their day has begun. Begins with percussion. There are monasteries (wats) all over town, three within a hundred yards of my room in Villa Xiang Moane, itself named after the sweet sound of the big drum in the monastery compound just across the street. Monasteries dot the landscape across the Mekong, across the Nam Khan; one sits on top of Phou Si, the holy hill. There are at least twenty, maybe thirty monasteries within earshot of my bed in the Xiang Moane. Every monastery has a big drum housed in its own building, and soon a monk is standing before it, a soft hammer in hand, pounding morning from the drum’s taut hide. And gongs, and cymbals, and old car wheels hung and struck with two feet of rebar, and teak logs, hollowed out, made sonorous, hung and struck.
I feel like my bed is sitting on the strings of a gigantic, prepared piano. Every monastery its own ensemble, playing together, but each on its own, playing alone. The whole is not a concert, but not a cacophony either. Every monastery plays and pauses, and plays again. The rhythm, the spatial effects, are like peepers in spring or crickets in fall. Mysterious, organic polyphonies.
I get out of bed to stand at the windows, throw back the shutters. The golden stupa atop Phou Si is lit, casts a yellow radiance up into the still starry sky.
For as long as they play I forget and am happy. Fifteen minutes not bereaved, fifteen minutes without anxiety. Fifteen minutes just a man, all ears, in a town awake, listening.
Breakfast at the Scandinavian Bakery. CNN on a TV mounted high on the wall: Larry King Live. The Lao girls bring me a mango shake, a croissant, a cup of thick, Lao coffee. I listen. I can’t help it. The question: when the bombs will fall, not if. The news scrolls across the bottom of the screen, all bad. Worse than the news though is the rhetoric. Patriotic frenzy. Whatever will be done, must ideological corruption precede it? Can men who hijack airliners and fly them into buildings honestly be characterized as “cowards”? This from the man who, when he got the news, flew in Air Force One to Offutt AFB, in Nebraska? And wasn’t it ideology that made those other guys hijackers? The same kind of lies? I finish my coffee and leave Larry King to the generals.
An American traveling so soon after September 11, I am traveling in the wake. Since I’ve been in Southeast Asia I’ve been asked to accept condolences, again and again, for the nation, which feels strange. I am, of course, sorry, too.
One of the good things about being American is that at home I don’t have to feel American very often. That layer of identity drops out; for weeks at a time it never occurs to me to think of myself as an American. Traveling abroad, of course, the world insists, asks, Where are you from? In Southeast Asia, this question is asked all day, every day. And now, I’m sorry, and that thin shell of my identity that is national, accepts the condolences, Thank you.
In old Louang Phabang, the main streets are lined with shop houses. There are a few colonial mansions now put to new uses, and beyond that, in the alleys or away from the center, the distinctive stilt houses of the people. And monasteries, of course. I take an interest in them all, walking. But I like best to walk in the evening, when the architecture begins to soften in the darkness, when the monks are in their sims, chanting. I might walk the whole town, listening to the chanting swell up as I get close and fade after I walk by. Or perhaps sit on a curbstone or a stone stair, listening, or stand at a gate, looking at the rows of kneeling figures, shaved heads, orange robes. Here there is no before or after, just again, the chants taken up, devotion again. But it’s not all seriousness. Some of the monks are only boys, and a serious demeanor at times fails them. One boy will lean and whisper and another’s face will light in a wicked grin. Being a monk in Laos isn’t only the decision of a lifetime, but a rite of passage that almost all boys undergo, to “ripen” into men.
Another day I climb Phou Si at day’s end, leaving my black, rental bike at the bottom of the serpent (naga) stairs. Up, through trees, to the golden stupa, That Chomsi, where the sun catches last in Louang Phabang. Like much of the religious architecture in Laos, it looks better at a distance, but the voice of a monk chanting