Losar -- Part II

Nicki Minaj blares through my door.

The music is full decibel. Unrestrained.

I open the door and a computer has been set up just there on the porch. Speakers are connected and facing directly into my Boy’s Sick Room. Nicki Minaj turned banshee. The DJ is pint-sized Yoezer, dressed as if he summoned a universal idea of an American pop deejay: he’s wearing neon green sunglasses, is holding a ten Ngultrum note in one hand (likely couldn’t get ahold of a Benjamin) and a toy gun in the other. I almost expect him to say, “‘What up homie?” to me, but instead he says something else in Kengpa. Still, I translate it in my head as, “What up homie?” and before he can threaten to cap my ass, I move to the front yard, where Gyeltshen and the others have piled a heap of dry wood nearly eight feet tall. 

“Fire,” he says.

“Big fire,” I say.

Mr. Dorji has a Coke bottle filled with kerosene. He sprays it all over the wood. “Really big fire!” he says.

It is the year of the fire monkey after all, so we should honor him appropriately. I gauge the distance from the pile of wood to the corner of my Boy’s Sick Room. Hopefully it’s not too big of a fire, I think. Before I or anyone else considers the risk of igniting my room, the stack is lit and it takes off. The flames build upon one another, engulfing the wood. Dusk has descended and the fire becomes brighter and brighter in the twilit sky. The stone wall dances in shadow and light. Heat reverberates, the leaves of the nearby trees shuttering in upward waves. Though we placed our plastic chairs close at first, we begin shuffling them back further, the heat too unbearable to stay close. We strip off layers. Gone are the jackets. Gone are the sweaters. We stand in t-shirts and polo-shirts and still the heat is uncomfortable. Again I gauge the distance from fire to the Boy’s Sick Room. It seems safe, for now.

Ikel comes out with Druk 11000s.

“Do you drink, sir?”

“A little bit, yes.”

“Okay, sir. Beer, sir?”

“Sure, beer’s great.”

Ikel places the bottles on the table, and K.D. grabs one, opening it with his teeth. He pours my share of the Druk 11000 into a glass, all the way to the rim, the liquid curving up like a lens. Then he pours himself one, filling it the same way. The others hold their drinks in the air and say, “Cheers!” and we take sips. Before I can even lean back to settle in, K.D. tops off my glass, again leaving an amber convexity at the rim. I look at his glass, grab a bottle and top him off. He says, “No, no, sir,” but holds the glass out willingly.

This give and take goes on throughout the night: “More beer, sir? No, no.” Fills it up. “Finished, sir? Have some more? No, K.D., I couldn’t.” Fills it up. “Seriously now, I can’t.” Fills it up. I recall what a veteran chillup teacher told me before I came out to the east: “You have to be rude. You have to demand that they don’t fill up your cup. Be mean even. It feels weird, but that’s the only way to stop getting served.” But I’ve fallen into a rhythm with K.D., and music has started to play and I will not be the one to hamper the merriment.

We stand up and make a circle around the fire. Dzongka songs are being played from the DJ stand—did Yoezer drop that beat?—and all begin to dance. Gyeltshen does not drink. He does not need to. When the music starts his smile reveals complete bliss. He bobs his head and shakes his arms, twisting his hands in the air, mudra style. I copy him, but somehow my hand gestures look more like a flightless bird attempting a takeoff.

Ikel looks over at me and chuckles. She is capable, her dancing as natural and vivacious as the fire itself.

“I’ve had wine,” she says.

The song changes to a Hindi pop song. Everyone sings along but me. The dance changes slightly, we begin to rotate around the fire. We do false-steps and shoulder-rocks and fist-pumps (well, I fist pump) to the beat, moving and laughing and celebrating.

You’re a good dancer,” I say to Ikel. “You can tell that you like to dance a lot.”

“Maybe,” she says, her head tilting sideways slightly, a gesture that instantly reveals Bhutan’s cultural ties to India. “It’s because it’s Losar, the New Year.”

“You only dance at celebrations?”

“This one especially is important. This could be our last New Year. We don’t know what the future will bring.”

I nod, take a drink, and think Ikel will start her final year, whenever that may be, dancing.

The nature of our circumambulation changes for me with her comment. Sends me reeling. Or maybe it’s the 11000 Druk’s—Thunder Dragons—invading my bloodstream, thumping monk drums just under my temples. The fire becomes a stupa, and my dancing a meditation. Impermanence on the mind.

This very well could be it for me. The summer is supposed to bring landslides and I have been warned, “Don’t travel in the summer. The roads are too dangerous.” There is malaria in the jungle. HIV in the cities. A foreign teacher has died here, four years ago. The autopsy revealed septicemia. It is not uncommon to be warned of evil spirits and creatures unknown. There are wild animals and drunk taxi drivers, bandits and psychopaths. What’s in the water? What lurks in the shadows? Could the Year of the Fire Monkey be my last?

I dance to cleanse myself of the fear. I am alive and well. A’int nothin’ gonna get me down.

Dakchak deng dir jawa tsom pala gek dang nyewar tsewa künshi né dödön pel pel samdön yishin drüb tashi delek phünsum tsokpar shok.

May the work that we are now about to begin be free from all obstacles and imminent dangers, and, meeting with ever-growing fulfillment and success, bring good fortune, prosperity, happiness and peace.

 “Beer, sir?”

“I’ve had a lot. I think I’m good.”

The comment doesn’t take. K.D. and I raise overflowing glasses and take sips. Conversation picks up. English is spoken freely now.

An American song comes on.

“You know this one, sir?”

“I’ve heard it. But I don’t know it.”

“Show us the American dance, sir.”

“We don’t have a lot of dances with specific moves. We just kinda make it up as we go along.”

“Show us, sir. Come on. Show us.”

There is a trite beat, an easy-to-dance-to beat. But now, as the de facto expert on American dance, the beat seems complex and cunning. I hope the sweat is from the fire. Making myself look stupid is easy, but making everybody look stupid is a whole other responsibility.

American dance. American dance.

My shoulders start to undulate. Side to side. My hands go forward, straight in front of me, like a mummy.

“Ya’ll ever seen the Cabbage Patch?” I ask.

My words are disregarded, the others paying close attention to my American moves. No one answers. They assume the mummy position with me.

“Stir the pot,” I say. “Stir the pot.” Everyone follows the move, twisting hips while their arms circle the air. The Cabbage Patch is a hit, I think. But one can only stir the proverbial pot for so long until the move gets boring.

“What about the Shopping Cart?”

For an agrarian people, this one might be as foreign as they come. The world is not blessed—or burdened—with the gross infinity of supermarket product choices like America. But, the moves are simple enough, and very quickly, my dance students catch on.

I test another one. “A’ight, a’ight. How about the Sprinkler?”

The song is interminable. I exhaust my repertoire over the course of the next minute and a half: we Whip, we Nene, we Superman, we Dougie. We C-Walk, or attempt to C-Walk. We go back to 1996 and do the Butterfly, and I remember my first middle school social, when Crystal Smith watched me first attempt the moves and then laughed, saying, “Look at this white boy try’n ‘a Butterfly.” My newfound Bhutanese friends now have an eclectic variety of American dances to share with their friends. I imagine years down the line, during some other cultural celebration where an aging Gyeltshen hears another American song come on. I imagine him standing before the crowd and instructing, “I will show you the dances of the Nene and the C-Walk. Long ago my American friend shared this traditional dance with me, and now I will pass the knowledge on to you. In this way, we will celebrate.”

Finally, I put my hands in the air and say, “That’s it. That’s all I got.”

The others look slightly disappointed; the song is only half way through. It lingers in the background, disconnected. I just stand there. Mercifully, someone runs over and switches to another song. It’s Hindi, I believe. Not American. I’d like to think though, that the ultimate goal was realized. Everyone learned the ‘American dance.’

The fire has collapsed onto itself, a monolith devoured. The flames are cooler now and we sit close. It appears that there is a method for stopping the flow of alcohol: drink all the bottles dry. We kill the final Druk 11000, take it down, and move to Gyeltshen’s living room for dinner. Again we eat with our hands and sit and converse. There are framed black and white pictures of Bhutan’s five illustrious kings high on one wall. On the adjacent wall, pictures of Gyeltshen and his wife under prayer flags, and on a snowy mountain side. The woodstove is stoked and warms the room. The TV behind us flips images of beautiful women in saris, and thick-haired men with buttoned down shirts open at the chest. Again the women in the room breastfeed their infants. We take tea and continue the conversation, though now Kengpa is taking precedent and English is used sparingly.

At its own pace, the night winds down. Without pretext or excuse, the others gather their belongings, dress the children in warm clothes, and begin to leave. There seems to be a natural rhythm that all are in tune to. Except me. The others arrive with the rhythm, eat with rhythm, serve tea with it, care for children with it, return home with it. I follow cues. He arrives, so I go too. She eats, so I do too. They stand up to go home, I do too.

“Good night,” I say. “Thank you for the great day.”

“I hope you are feeling comfortable, sir.”

“Yes, very comfortable. I have had a wonderful time. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, sir. Come over any time, sir. You are always welcome here.”

“Yes, thank you.”

Back in the Boy’s Sick Room, I lay down on the stiff mattress and pull the plastic feeling covers over myself. I turn off the lights, close my eyes, and wonder if the others have gone to sleep too. Does the rhythm say to fall asleep now? Have I found the rhythm too?

Losar

Dreaming takes me away again. Off to that world that isn’t here: the strangely familiar spaces, the impossible romances, the warmth of a summer morning. I melt into the landscape, settle and take root.

And then BAM. I wake up and it’s real again. Afterimages linger for a second and I realize, Holy shit, I’m in Bhutan. It takes a few moments but I understand how far away I am. This is no dream. I’m awake. Alive. And I better go along and do something with myself.

An obsession realized is hard to describe. For the past three years, more really, I was poring over images and videos of this far flung place. During those times, I cultivated an idea of what it must be like in Bhutan: smell of incense; feeling of cold, alpine air and mountain sunshine; chants of monks, deep and guttural; Himalayan peaks stretching as far as the eye can see; spiritual, abundant happiness.

In that waking moment though, when reality strikes, Bhutan is none of those things. My concrete barracks, the Boy’s Sick Room, is frigid in the morning. And in the afternoon. And in the evening. It’s most noticeable after waking though, when I have to confront a day in a foreign country. A step into the cold is a step into culture, one that I must engage in not solely because I exist here now, but because I promised myself to exist here well and to take full advantage of it.

Feral dogs bark in the distance. A merchandise transport truck from India growls along the roadway about a half mile up. There are bird noises I’ve never heard before. Lame Pup comes shivering to my front steps, limping, rank, and looking for food.

I awake and hear Yoezer and Celine playing next door. Yoezer is four, I think, and Celine three. They banter in Kengpa, one of many languages spoken in this country. I know none of the languages, and though I have semi-committed to learning Sharchop, the language of the east, whenever I ask what a word means, they tell me, “That was Dzongka actually,” or “We were speaking Nepali,” or “That was English. What, you can’t understand my accent?” The discussion between Yoezer and Celine, which sounds earnest, is nonetheless unintelligible. They shout and giggle and discuss, all in cuck-cucks and throaty jöms.

In one swift motion I slip out of my sleeping bag and I step into the cold air. Long-underwear and t-shirt and sweatshirt and light down jacket. Scarf and hat. Wool socks. I make way to the squat toilet, always pungent, and I relieve myself.

The day has begun.

I cross to my battered wooden door, which still clearly shows the orange and green and blue hand painted symbols which I believe bring good luck to a house. They could just be pretty though. I open the door and step outside and am greeted with a view that no online video or picture album could prepare me for. I am just under the clouds. The sun is beginning to pour in, an effusion of light emanating, it seems, from the misty clouds themselves rather than from a single source. The world beyond is all mountains, steep and, in many sections, uninhabited. The south faces are dry and the villages clearly stand out for lack of trees. The north faces, where I live, are much greener, much more vegetated. Houses poke out of the greenery and punctuate the hillside erratically. On the occasion of a flat bit of land, rice paddies sprout horizontal like gills on the side of an emerald fish.

Today is an important day. It’s the Lunar New Year, Losar, as the Bhutanese call it. Gyeltshen, my neighbor, and his family and friends have invited me to celebrate with them. They lay out a large, thin foam pad on the grass in front of our kind of duplex and we sit in a circle in our pajamas and eat a salty vegetable porridge, tokpa, and drink butter tea, sooja. The sun pours over us and we squint as we talk. They speak Kengpa and I can’t make heads or tails of it. My brain produces a dumb, silent Error message over and over: Not Japanese. Not Spanish.

There are, however, bursts of English. Numbers are said in English, as are certain phrases like, “best way,” and “very interesting.” I’m also referred to as “sir,” both as a sign of respect and because many of them do not know my name yet.

“Does sir like hot food? Are chilies okay for sir? How long will sir be staying? Does sir have family down there?”

“Down where?”

“Sir’s country?”

“Yes, I have family.”

“So sir is married?”

“Oh, no. I have my parents and sister in America, but I am not married.”

“Bachelor, sir?”

“Yes. Bachelor.”

An unmarried, thirty two year-old white guy is about as aberrant as it gets out here. The notion of not having a wife and a few kids by my age is almost sinful I feel. As we sit on the pad, three out of the five women are breastfeeding healthy, rotund babies. Celine and Yoezer run around and play, occasionally coming in for a bite of tokpa or a tubular rice cake. The men tell me about how they have no free time anymore and the women glare at them and return to the work of caring for the children.

Gyeltshen, the boy’s dorm room warden and my neighbor, sits stoically among the others. I’d think he was unfriendly if it wasn’t for the occasional glance my way and smile, and the way he takes his three-month old son into his arms and playfully jostles him, making baby-sounds that are universal. Phuntsho, who lives a little ways away but who came to join the Losar festivities, is very talkative. She makes jokes and asks questions and tells me how much I will like it here. Here, is still an intangible concept; I still wonder, Where am I?

In the afternoon we play games. Gyeltshen challenges me to a game of chess. As we play, some of the others, Mr. Dorji and K.D., gather around and sit close. They watch our calculated moves as if they were watching a thriller on the T.V. In the end, I win, but I think Gyeltshen gave away a few pieces—part of that Bhutanese hospitality. 

Then we gamble. I put in twenty Ngultrum to the game of cards and am given three. I have a pair of nines, but Sangay has a run. She collects an eighth of the pot and we go again. I’m out again with a poor hand and Mr. Dorji collects his winnings. Finally, after a few rounds I have a high pair of queens, and another eighth of the pot goes to me. By the end of the round I’m up forty Ngultrum, nearly a whole U.S. dollar.

When the gambling stops the women head to the kitchen. For hours they are singing and dancing. There is a crashing of pans, hissing of pressure cookers. The real celebration is effusing from that kitchen and we, the men, are not invited. We sit outside and shoot the shit. Succulence and spice escape the walls and tempt our appetites. The women bring out a welter of curried chicken and fish. They bring pork with chili peppers, the pork ninety-five percent fat and five percent meat. They bring the infamous ema datsi, spicy green chilies in cheese sauce. Red rice and white rice are jettisoned from inside of rice cookers in their inner-pots. There is dal and saag and dried beef. The hosts insist I eat first and I know that this is a gesture of respect. But I do not want to stand out as a guest, but rather, as a new friend, so I insist that someone else go before me.

“No sir, you go, you go.”

“No, no, no. Please someone else first.”

“No it must be you, sir.”

“Someone show me how,” I offer as an excuse, just to get someone in line before me. But then I regret the statement. Show me how? Now they’re going to think that I don’t know how to serve myself food. Fantastic.

Mr. Dorji offers to show me how, and he kindly demonstrates the scooping of the rice into the bowl and the placing of the curries onto the rice. I copy him with aplomb, hoping to prove that I am not an idiot.

When we sit back down on the mat, I realize that I don’t have a spoon. But then I see that no one has a spoon. Sensing my dilemma, a woman offers, “Spoon, sir?” I can’t falter again, lest they think: What, he doesn’t know how to eat with his hands, either?

“No, I’ll eat with my hands, just like you guys.”

“It’s okay, sir, we’ll give you a spoon.”

“No, no, no. I can do it. No spoon,” I demand.

“Okay, sir. You’ll get used to our custom then.”

“That’s right,” I say.

“Do you know how to wash your hand with the rice?”

I debate saying, “I totally know how to do that,” and instead revert back to the simple ape I am. “No. Show me, please.”

Mr. Dorji takes a small pinch of rice and rolls it into a ball between the palms of his hands. He rolls the ball around, up his fingers, across the meat of his thumbs, down toward his wrist. When he is finished, the little ball is a dark grey, having collected all dirt that was stuck to his hand. I copy him, and my ball crumbles half way through. I pretend I was finished ‘washing’ my hands anyway, and I put the crumbled bit of rice onto the mat and watch the others to learn the technique for grabbing at my food.

I have been missing this experience as a traveler. I have eaten with a knife and fork, I have eaten with chopsticks, but I have yet to eat with my hands; there was a great part of the world that I was missing. Bhutan offered the bridge.

My friends’ hands are calloused and brown. One hand holds the plate. The other is the grasping crane. The claw of the crane drops to the edge of the plate, scoops more rice than curry, massages the mixture, balls it and then the crane lifts and turns palm up and inserts the mix into mouth. I think to myself, There has to be a right way and a wrong way to do this. But as I watch, techniques vary. Some look to create a ball of food, others pick at the large solid pieces—the beef and pork chunks, the steamed radishes and cheese soaked chilies—eat those first and then grab a pile of rice and drop it down the hatch. There is no way to keep the hands clean—what would be the point of that—the cheesy sauces and spicy curries, the oils and fats and little flecks of cilantro and survivor rice grains cling to their hands, and before the bowl is finished, someone beckons them for seconds and first they refuse vehemently, and then are up and heaping more rice, more curry, more fatty pork and dal into their bowls. They come back to their seats and ask me to take seconds too.

I do my best, relieved that there appear to be no rules. I relish the tactile stimulation that arises with my fingers deep in a warm bed of rice. There is something tawdry about how the oils lubricate each digit, a violation of rules ingrained when I was very young and my mother would scold, “Don’t eat with your hands!” Here in the hinterlands, the rules have changed. I go in for more, and take handful after handful of delicious mix. I caress the spongy fat of the pork. I scoop up the ema datsi and heave it into my face. I pinch the dried beef and delicately slip it onto my tongue. And then I line up for seconds and do it all over again. I scrape my second serving clean with all four fingers together, as if holding an invisible cloth. And then I sit back in sweet satiety.

“Are you adjusting to the fooding sir?"

“Yes, I can handle it.”

“You liked the meal then, sir?”

“That was delicious,” I say. The women look pleased. The men have the same lugubrious smile that I do, their one soiled hand perched dangling off a knee, drying and resting, waiting to be washed.

We wash our hands and I retire for a nap. That great fatigue that comes with adjusting to a new life abroad has not gotten any easier despite my now accumulating experience. It’s a feeling I crave, that barrage of culture—new language, heat and humidity, the smells of wood smoke and new plants and feces; the eating of strange meals in strange ways; the T.V. constantly on, news in Dzongka and Hindi soap operas; the kids roaming wildly; the vast views with stupas and temples and prayer flags scattered across the hills; it’s my constant state of worry: am I accepting enough food, refusing enough, sitting properly, addressing people properly, acting friendly enough but not superficial; Will I be okay here? Will I make it? And it’s all exhausting.

The input is so alive. It is easy to fall asleep now. Just so easy.

Wild West. Wild East.

Take me to Thimphu.

It’s Wild West here. But Billy the Kid would be a bodhisattva. Wyatt Earp a monk garbed in deep maroon. Buffalo Bill would have to trade his moniker to Takin Bill, the mountain beast—part cow, part goat, part water-buffalo—that I’d have thought was a myth had I not seen it with my own eyes. Trade six-shooters for prayer beads and mani. Trade dusters for the traditional dress of ghos and kiras. Trade bandoleers for kabnay, honorary sashes. Trade spittin’ tobaccy for betel nut and lime. But keep that undercurrent of wildness: the feral dogs, the hard looks to strangers; keep the spittin’ on the streets, and that sour market smell; keep the gathering of men with an air of trouble about ‘em; keep the drunken and querulous; keep the coquettish glances; keep that dust blowin’ through town, keep that middle-of-nowhere adventure feeling, that indigenous feeling; keep the cacophony, the immensity, the isolation. And picture it all happening in a mountain town gone loco.

Yeah, you’re gettin’ it, partner.

But there is so much more.

Half the roads are paved in this capital city. They’ve got fresh paint down and road signs written in Dzongkha. There is not a traffic light to be seen (in the whole country I’m told), rather an officer in something like a gazebo, directing traffic with wild gestures. The other half of the roads are packed dirt, erratically cobbled with stones once buried deep beneath these towering Himalayas. There is refuse congesting the walkways, heaps of it piled together and set alight. The conflagrations are toys for smiling, ash varnished kids, meeting grounds for groups of men, a romantic stop for couples headed up Lover’s Lane.

The Bhutanese are a beautiful people, swarthy and rosy-cheeked. What is that face? Some deeply hidden beauty, some mountain hermit beauty. Can’t get a handle on it; I have not seen a people like this before. Smiles are abundant, stained red with doma, many a missing tooth. Often the elderly gaze up at me with vitreous cataracts, unblinking. There are deep crevasses that carve their faces. That great sculptor known as Time has added lines to the crow’s feet around their eyes, built up scar tissue, folded in wrinkles to make fine layers of parchment skin. These faces are not like Time’s other works of art—those pretty, young faces with nary a crease in them, which are also abundant here. No, the faces that are cracked, withering and delicate, painstakingly detailed, those are the masterpieces, Time’s lifework reaching the height perfection. Beautiful.

Where the takin run wild.

It ain’t all National Geographic though, partner. There are punks with stringently coiffed hairdos, wearing studded leather jackets and skinny jeans. There are girls checking themselves out on their smartphones, primping and preening, pushing up cleavage and verifying the effect. There are gangs of boys smoking like chimneys, blatantly defying the nationwide anti-tobacco laws. There are businessmen in suits, and immigrants from India and Nepal loitering in front of construction sites, and children with their mothers out shopping for the day. Kiosk attendants look bored. Police officers intimidate. Homeless beg on the street.

It’s all going on here in Thimphu.

Not a tourist to be seen though. Just as you didn’t get camera toting, pasty white lookyloos in the dank saloons of the West, it’s hard to find a foreigner here. I walked the length of the city and didn’t see a single chillup until getting back to my hotel and rejoining the group. Capital cities like these are hard to find.

The nearby peaks are fresh with light snow. The behemoths to the north cannot be seen from my spot in the city, but the feeling of immensity persists. Forest is abundant.

Thimphu would be a beautiful city to stay in, but I am headed to The East, where, if the tales are true, it just gets wilder.

My group received a medical briefing from a resident doctor and the director of the program that brought me here. One story they recounted about The East went like this:

“A boy from one of the villages was on his way home for vacation from boarding school. He was on a path he always walked and knew well. Close to his home, a group of wild boar ran across the trail, very near to the boy. He stopped, scared by the boars. But then he saw that behind the boars a leopard was in pursuit. The leopard stopped on the path, distracted now by the boy, a much easier meal. It pursued the boy. It swiped at him and the claws caught the boy’s face and tore out an eye. The boy played dead and soon the leopard left him. The boy arose, took up his eye from the ground and ran home. His mother fainted when she saw the disfigured boy, so the boy had to run to his neighbor’s house. The neighbor eventually took him to the hospital, though they couldn’t save the boy’s eye.”

Such is a story from The East.

If that isn’t enough, they say leeches jump from the trees. They say that there are cases of malaria, and that dysentery is common. The wet season brings a persistent mold. There is precipitous terrain (teacher falls 20 feet and breaks hip), bad roads (cars plummet), false trails that will lead a wanderer astray (a group of boys lost for fourteen days; two dead). The doctor told us of ghost villages where the bears have taken over, eating the crops that the people no longer harvest.

What a great time to be alive and in Bhutan, for The East still exists and there are tales that strike fear. At home in Denver I was afraid; Bhutan was too foreign, too remote. I was growing content, complacent perhaps. Now I am even more terrified, that wonderful terror that I made a commitment to long ago: “Do what terrifies you.” My fear has stoked a fire and the tales of The East are a bellows, feeding that fear and turning it red hot. And here I am, a three days journey away.

To The East. To The East. To The East. 

Amateur Traveleur

Behold the ugly tourist.

I wanna pet the tigers! I wanna ride the elephants! I wanna go to the ladyboy show, the ping-pong show, the show-it-all show. I wanna get fucked up, bro. I wanna fuck, bro. This is Thailand, homeboy; we can do whatever the fuck we want! And it’s cheap.

Frenetic streets. The ladyboys make puckering noises at me as I pass by. Look he laugh, she says and her friends start the cat calls. I step over a beggar woman, child at her side. I side glance, side pity, but don’t slide a hand in my pocket for at least 5 baht. Just keep moving.

On the other side of the street is the prostitute beat. More calls, winks, beckons, toothy grins. As I am alone, they think I am like the other white men walking the red light: the middle-aged, paunchy, crooked smiling men; men out shopping; without-shame men; tank-topped, lascivious. Relentless. A woman grabs me by the arm—Come on sweetheart, we’ll have fun—and I push away, push on toward the Saturday Night Market because You just have to see the Saturday Night Market if you’re in Chiang Mai.

Hey man, you wanna tailored suit? You wanna Nikes? You wanna handmade scarf—fine Thai silk, man, fine Thai silk. Honey, I want some of those Thai pants. I want a Chang tank-top, man. Yo quiero. Je veux. Ich will. Wŏ yào. There is nothing for me at the market, but since I just had to see it, I go and walk the stalls, snapping pictures, clutching my camera, white knuckled.

Back in the Old City, I sit down in the atrium of a high class hotel. The swarming buzz of motorbikes outside is constant, as is the smog, as is the heat. The concierge smiles. She is beautiful. There is no point in talking to her, as she is the kind of beautiful where all the men talk to her; what’s the point?

I talk to her.

I wanna know how to say Yes and No in Thai. I wanna know how to say How do you get to _________. I wanna know how to say I’m sorry.

She obliges a lesson, looking at me directly in the eyes, as if searching for wicked deeds I’ve done. I try not to look away.

“You know you could take classes at the University here,” she says. “Thai is a beautiful language.”

It is, I agree. She teaches me phrases and the tones are light and airy, like the tickling fizz from a glass of cold Coke. Her English is excellent, better than my Thai will ever be. I ask how she learned it so flawlessly.

“I studied it on my own. I watched YouTube videos and TV. I love America and I wanted to move there, so I studied until I could speak fluently.”

Wanted to move there, I ask? Not anymore?

“I married a French guy. I tried to live in France, but I hated it. So now we live here again. It is nice living here. Thai people are so friendly and warm. The French were too cold. My husband is that way too. But I will change him. Maybe Americans are that way too: Cold. Maybe we will just stay in Thailand.”

I see. I put my hands together as if in prayer, say Kop khun krap, and head back into the streets. A suffocating, sweaty man is on a second floor balcony taking a Muay Thai lesson. He huffs and puffs and sweats more and tries to kick a punching bag but only succeeds in a light hit, the bag moving as much as it would from a breeze. Then two punches and a kick that misses and he sits down in a chair. The young man training him chuckles and the guy comments to his buddy, This is bloody ‘ard!

I walk past three monks, robed in the bright orange of embers alive. They smile and nod and turn into the Wat to continue their devotions. I pause from afar and take a picture. I want that quintessential monk picture.

The food market is pullulating. The aromas are humid, a billowing putrefaction. Flies burrow in the nooks between fruits, rats scamper out of the trash, there is always something wet across the asphalt floor. The market clings onto the street by its tendrils. Traffic passes just a meter away.

A woman with buzzed hair sits seemingly pugnacious at her stall. I’m afraid to point at the lukewarm soup, a purulent yellow with islands of fish carcass, and to say One please, as I gesture. I haven’t even tried to learn to say One or Please. The concierge never taught me. I never asked. So in English I point and say One please. The buzzed hair woman scoffs, fills a plastic bag, maintains her icy mien, and says in clear English, Sixty baht. I pay and run away, off to a table amid the throngs of carts and vendors. I open the bag and the soup suppurates into my bowl and I plunge my spoon in like I’m doing amateur surgery. The soup is wildly robust, a jungle deliciousness. The fish is soaked through with yellow spices, and the broth is thick. I am satiated, not left wanting.

I consider going back to the concierge, but remember that my life has been filled with such heartbreaks, that fleeting love, and the last thing I need in Chiang Mai is another. I find solace, albeit loneliness, in my guesthouse room. The mountain hamlet I had hoped for while planning this stopover does not exist, not in the Old City of Chang Mai at least. But Bhutan awaits and in Bhutan I will be a teacher, I will live with the people, I will be in the mountains, and I will be far away from any tourist. The sick leviathan that has consumed places like the Old City of Chiang Mai and is gnashing at it whilst its good citizens and bad tourists and good tourists and bad citizens collapse onto one another, will not consume me.

The air-conditioner hums, waves of hospital-like air fall onto me, diaphanous sheets from an arctic sky. I’ll hole up here a bit longer. Until it’s time to move on again.

An Update of Sorts

“Sorry. My Japanese no good. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it, Joshua. We are happy that you are back in Japan. It has been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, Horie-Sensei. Long time. Yes, Japan in I am. I am happy.”

“And you are off to Bhutan after this, eh Joshua? That’s incredible. Your wish has finally come true. You worked hard for it, didn’t you? It pays off, hard work. It always does. Finally, Bhutan! I hope to go and visit you.”

“Yes, Horie-Sensei. To Bhutan. Please coming and visit me. Yes. Lots of fun.”

The sun has set on the Jogasaki coast and the twilight has just begun. Horie-Sensei, Suyama-san, Ōhashi-san, Iga-chan, Kawamura-kun, and Rina-chan have all turned on their headlamps. The effect on the trail as we return to the fisherman’s inn is less than desirable for easy walking. We march in a line and the penumbra jumps and darts with our movement. It is hard to find good footing with such capricious light.

My headlamp is off because I think it is still not dark enough to merit using it. I am therefore an aberrant point in what would otherwise be an even, organized line of lights. It is one of many characteristics that marks me as different from my friends. I am alien from them in so many ways and now, with my headlamp off, it is just one more sign that there is a gaijin—a foreigner—among them once again.

My steps through the forest are less deliberate than they ought to be, a sign of growing fatigue. I have been in Japan only four days, but the omnipresent symphony of language, etiquette, and customs, along with full days of climbing, has exhausted me. I want to return to the inn, slip into my yukata, and sit on the tatami mats and drink tea. There will be an expectation to talk to my friends, as well there should be, and so I am attempting a walking rest in order to be ready for the Japanese that is sure to come.

“Hisashiburi, ne?”

Yes, it has been a long time. As I walk along the path, I think about what that time consisted of. The memories feel like hot sediment, mixed and dirty, still sifting themselves into organization, into something I can understand.

At one point there in the land of stars and stripes I was a defiant rebel against a racist regime called a “No Excuses” high school. Despite good intentions, the school covertly told these amazing students that they deserved less than their affluent, white-counterparts, that they needed to be obedient and strictly ruled over. I took arms with students who were angry at something none of us could quite define, something that we all knew threatened our happiness and well-being, like an invisible, suffocating smog. We fought in our way, creating a classroom that worked,  that was humane, challenging, fun. It was a safe haven among the school’s totalitarianism and rampant disorganization. But, as happens with injustice, I lost the fight. My students lost an ally. I was forced to leave them to fend for themselves.

But that time is over now.

I studied at a university. Perhaps I even learned something. I have a new, crisp diploma that says “Master” on it, but that, I’m afraid, conveys nothing about the knowledge I have nor about that which I still seek. But that piece of paper did prove to be my ticket to Bhutan, a ticket to that day at Jogasaki, a ticket to a three week visit in Japan and Thailand. That’s all diplomas are really, if used appropriately: tickets to something else, somewhere else.

I also fell in love—a visceral aching, a drunken stupor, nervous instability, terrible fear of loss—and I yearned for her. I spent winter snowstorms seeking her warmth. I spent spring days hoping for a chat at that café, a sharing of her brilliant ideas, an attempt at recognition that we were great for each other. But, once again I confronted the fact that, as it has been forever now, I am still a disciple of Not Yet, who sets forth the pillars by which the wanderer strictly adheres: Fall in love but do not stay in love, Do not call one place home, Do not create a life that you cannot escape. These are not tenets by which to build a relationship, and so I set off again, knowing that Not Yet took something from me as a sacrifice, as penance that, in exchange, will reward me with auspicious travels to come.

Still, it’s light enough to walk without my headlamp on. But whether it is an insult or not, I recognize my failure to embrace the Japanese way and I silently reprimand myself. I turn my headlamp on and the line is complete, all of us join together as dusk descends. We retire to the inn, one at a time taking our shoes off at the entrance, stepping into guest slippers and making our way to the tatami matted room. I slide the door to the room open and join my friends, sitting on the floor around the low table. Each of us reclines, stretches tight, aching fingers and shoulders and arms. We are lightly dusted in climbing chalk, slightly burned and sun fatigued.

“Why did you choose Bhutan, Joshua?”

“Mountains. Culture with no tourists. Teaching for the Bhutan happiness goal.”

“Subarashi, ne?”

“No, no, no. I need it. In America, many bad feeling. Many bored feeling. I need to live in other country. I really do. Life is turning happy again now.”

“Oh, I understand.”

Horie-Sensei has organized the perfect return to a country that I love more than as nostalgia. I offer to pay for the littlest of things and Horie-Sensei calmly explains, “Joshua, I am Japanese. It is very important for me to be hospitable. Your happiness on this trip is my happiness.” He refuses. I look up an expression that I’d like to say to him, but I cannot remember if it is exactly what I want to say: Osewa ni natte imasu. You are treating me with kindness and care.

We leave Jogasaki and we return to Fukushima, the place I called home three years ago. It feels like a waking dream, and I wonder if I ever left. Could it be that all of that time in America never happened? 

Not much has changed in Fukushima, nor in the sleepy hamlet of Ishikawa-town. The ramen shop still serves the chashumen that I have been craving for years, the elementary students still race off to school in their uniforms, raising their hands high in the air before crossing the streets. There is still a nightly call from the town’s intercom, wishing everyone a good night’s sleep.

I could just as easily settle back into that Japanese life I once had, spending time with good friends, teaching simple English lessons to four and five year olds, studying Japanese daily. But there is still a tapping at my shoulder, Not Yet reminding me that there is a world to see. Before I know it, I say goodbye to my friends, and we say, "Mata aimashou!" Until the next time. 

I am at Narita once again, boarding the plane. A quiet snow descends on the airport, and I am lifted to the next destination.

Two Weeks

Two weeks left. Two weeks left of understanding language as a vague impression. Two weeks of cultural fumbles and mistakes. Two weeks of receiving stares and whispers.

There are other things that I am counting too:

Three more days of working at the chuugakko, where I am called assistant teacher and I am treated as such. M. Sensei has me sit at a desk in the classroom while she gives a lesson—something like a rote memorization worksheet verbalized. In my head, memories play of my Peruvian students who I cooked meals with and built low ropes courses with and who improved their English considerably by the year’s end. M. Sensei’s teaching is terrible. It’s arrogant of me to believe that I could teach the students better, so I tried to quell those thoughts when I first arrived, in respect of this foreign culture.

While M. Sensei drills vocabulary and makes the students fill out the same worksheet four times in a row, she talks to the students about me. My Japanese has improved. Now I understand.

“Joshua-Sensei isn’t a real teacher. He’s an assistant teacher.”

“Joshua-Sensei can’t explain this grammar to you.”

“Joshua-Sensei can’t teach these lessons; He doesn’t understand Japanese.”

Such comments are accompanied by laughs and giggles. Had the students been mine, their English would be much better by now. Three more days of being M. Sensei’s assistant.

Eleven days left of being an employee for a corporation. There are emails regarding moving out and final salaries. Your last paycheck will be subject to decreases in order to pay expenses after you leave. Return all supplies to the company. You cannot leave before submitting all the necessary paperwork.

Six days of school lunches—bland salads, miso soup so sour that it’ll put hair on your chest, milk as thick as direct from the cow’s tit.

I have two weeks left in Japan. I can’t help but count down.

 

On my drive to work, there is an old, fading poster that hangs on the side of a crumbling barn. It’s from the inauguration of the prefectural airport, which must have happened before I was born. The poster shows the airport in the background, as an after-thought, faded down from weathering. The woman in the foreground is the focus—a slender Japanese woman, traditionally dressed in a kimono that has had its color bleached from the sunlight. Her gaze is steady, her smile coquettish. She has a proud, long neck, and docile, balanced shoulders. She looks out at me as I’m lifted through the rice paddy laden countryside, to another day in classrooms filled with Japanese children. “Here you are,” she whispers. “You made it.”

Two more weeks of that drive.

In the climbing gym, Tomi-san, the owner, sits next to me on a giant crashpad. In Japanese, he asks, “You didn’t go to Dainichi Iwa on Saturday? I went there in the afternoon and you weren’t there.”

“No,” I say. “I was busy on Saturday. A friend came from Tokyo. We ate dinner. We went to Inawashiro lake.”

“Oh really? I went to Dainichi all by myself and no one was there. The weather was great, but no one was out climbing. Funny, huh? Today the weather was terrible, but still Kawamura-kun and his friends went out there.”

“It is cold,” I say. “Kawamura-kun tries his best. He is training for Half Dome. Half Dome is hard. Training is good. He should try his best.”

Tomi-san’s Japanese is still hard for me to understand, but he does not slow down for me or talk to me like I am a child. When I arrived in Japan almost two years ago and went to the climbing gym, all I could do was gesture that I wanted to climb, and he showed me the routes with the colored tape. “Yellow,” he said in English. “Very easy. Black: Very Hard.”

Despite the wall of language, he invited me to go climbing with him for two days, just a month after I had first met him. Now, able to convey most of my thoughts, I wonder how to culturally approach saying, “Thank you for that climbing trip Tomi-San. I needed friends then, and you were the first. That made Japan good and now it makes Japan hard to leave. Thank you.”

The climbers threw a going away party for me. I man who I have talked with infrequently and whose name I do not know, approached me and handed me a brand new piece of climbing equipment. “Here,” he said. “I hope you can use this in America. Are there good places for you to climb outside in Colorado?”

I bowed and said, “Hai. Arimasu. Zettai tskaimasu yo. Honto ni arigatou gozaimashita.”

He looked at me, smiled and said, “You will be missed.”

My friend Kondou-San handed me the copy of the Ishikawa Bouldering guide book that I had made for him and the others, and asked me to write him a message on the back.

“Kondou-San, I can’t write in kanji,” I explained. “And you can’t read English.”

“That’s okay,” he responded. “I just want a message from you.”

My first month at the climbing gym, there was a barbecue and a climbing competition. As we ate together people asked me questions that I didn’t understand. I sat quietly and tried to learn the language quickly. Now with two weeks left, at the going away party I could speak with my friends and make jokes and understand. Strangely, there is little sense of accomplishment. Rather, I feel tired and still very far away from a goal that I have not defined. And when I count the two weeks that are left, I know that I will not reach that goal.

There are only two weeks left with Eriko. I could write a novel on the goodness of Eriko. On conversations in the loft above my kitchen, or during long drives on our dates together. I could write about the softness of her hands, the sweet kisses she gives me on the cheek for no reason, that long embrace before leaving one another for how long. I could write of sitting in hot springs together, and eating nabe in her apartment, and of massages in the evenings. She sometimes feigns anger and raises her voice at me, and I start to laugh and she giggles as I wrestle her down to the futon. I could write about the slight feeling of helplessness when we don’t quite understand each other, about the patience she has with my Japanese, about the language spoken with each other that has no words in English or otherwise. There is too much good to that woman and writing it all would cripple me. It’s easier to not write it, to leave it to memory and to question. That way I do not have to believe it—that such a good person can exist, and that we once shared time together in that life I had in Japan. Two weeks is not enough time left with Eriko. But I bought that ticket home.

In two weeks I will say goodbye. I will board a plane. I will sleep poorly and watch movies on a screen in front of me. I will see the Pacific. I will land in L.A. and then take off again. And very soon I will see those Rocky Mountains, and my mother and father, and I will sit down with friends over dinner. And they will ask me about the good things in Japan, and I will have many stories to tell. For there were many more good things than bad, and in the end, those good memories will be the ones that stay with me.

 

In Anticipation of a Climbing Trip

There are plane tickets to buy, and a pickup truck with a topper, and new climbing equipment. How much will you have saved by the time you get back to Colorado? What about insurance, and taxes, and nights out? Get a job and it’ll be okay. Then you can afford car payments and rent, and student loans and micro-brews and fine salamis and cheeses. A job will sort you out. Then how fat you can grow. How comfortable you can get. If you’re lucky enough, you’ll pay all your worries away and you can be bored. Just work and never stop working and you’ll be just fine stupid.

That would be a good way to go back to America. Good American culture, right? Debt and food and a shiny four wheel drive pickup. Yeehaw Amurica! Here I come!

Or I could not work. Technically I have a job. It just doesn’t start until July. That gives me three months to do what I need to do. And there’s really only one thing that I’ll need to do—figure out why I left Japan.

That still won’t be enough time though. Who am I kidding. There’s too much. There’s tatami mats and shouji screen walls. There’s the countryside life of salutations from smiling children and scowls and stares from old men. There’s the kerosene heater in my living room in the winter, the sweltering loft in the summer, and the open windows and cool breezes in the seasons in between. There’s the feeling of leaving my friends who I speak Japanese with and who I understand like reading in the dark with a strobe light on. There are ramen shops, and sushi, and grilled clams on the half shell in Matsushima. There are long drives with climbing partners through country I’ve never seen. There are kindergarten and elementary school kids that think whatever I do is superhuman. Sugoiiiiiiii! they yell. Joshua-sensei jozu da ne…

There’s also Eriko—a woman who I love, and that knows me and loves me enough to say, “Go ahead. Go where you need to. It’s okay.” That's the kind of woman that is impossible to leave. With a broken heart and the guilt of breaking another I will be sitting in a big apartment with a shiny pickup outside and I’ll be drinking a six dollar bottle of microbrew. Yeehaw.

 

There’s therapy for that kind of thing, son. Get into God’s country and you’ll be sorted out.

The American desert cleanses. Look at the white bone of a cow carcass if you need an example. That’s what it’ll do. You’ll spend weeks there and the earth will drink in your tears and pour unforgiving sun on your depression. On soaring desert towers and thousand foot sandstone walls you’ll remember that you are he who climbs, who struggles and bleeds and sweats. Your struggle will become something physical, and therefore manageable. Get stronger and smarter and you’ll be able to climb what you thought was impossible. You’ll either end up better for it, or you’ll be beat by it. Both are good for you. And you will have dirtied and banged up the truck, and the beers will have run out and all you’ll have is a tent to go back to at night. And you’ll sit by the campfire with good friends, under an open sky with living and dying stars. And that’ll get you through.

 

My whole life has been spent trying to know what I ought to do-- what's the right choice for good living. I, like everyone else, have been the winner and the loser to such decisions. But there is a resoundingly clear lesson that has come from those experiences that guides me in when I don't know either way—spending more time in the wilderness is always good. I don’t know whether I should go back to America, but I do know that once there, the best thing to do is to get out into that big, healing American West. Once there, I’ll know if I made the right decision. Nature will simplify and clarify doubt, and it’ll make me confront myself, and it will give it to me straight. Either I messed up big time, or America is where I need to be. Either way, the message will come from the wilderness and I need to get there in order to hear it.