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(Dwyer )
CONTRAST
H
ow did I get here? I don’t really know. It sounds superficial and a poorly considered response, but it is probably true. I don’t know. Perhaps I ought to start out by dealing with where I am. I am sitting in the sand of southern Thailand staring out into the Andaman Sea. I do know I am here. The thing I am unsure of is how is it I came to be here? The clouds are billowing and cumulus. They reflect on the calm sea and make it look like it is boiling. Somewhere out there, in that distant Indian Ocean, it is boiling with a furor. It splashes squall after hot breathed squall. Pushing the sloppy jungle heat of the monsoon into the few dry moments when the tourists try to visit. Their pale skin is always glinting when they arrive. Some of the glint is the moisture of the tropics. Some of it is the glare from their skin, too light and too tight. Like their luggage, they are shiny and new to Asia. Neither their newness nor their luggage will last long here. The sea here is strongly quiet. Soft and smooth on the surface and like most of Asia, not showing what is underneath. The currents can suck your life out and they swirl unnoticed below the casual breakers caressing miles of white sand. Behind me in a little round shack, the bartender looks bored. The tape deck drones on. One half of the beach gets rain. The other has sun. How did I get here? Some would say the question is meaningless and unnecessary. I got her on a bus. The bus came from meeting a plane and before that, a taxi and before that, I was walking. Oh yes, I was walking. For a long way, I was walking. That is how I got here. Yet something still is left out. Sure, I got here by bus. That is not the question. I mean, how in the hell did my life take such turns to set me down half a world away from the places and the people I know? I don’t really know, but I am willing to hazard this guess: I am able at the coarse and attracted to the fine.
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The phrase sounds a little like the common description of an adolescent male. In many ways it may fit. The years of question and wonder. The reason it may have started in adolescence is because before the teen years I don’t have much of memory of me as a person. I remember people and places and times, but I don’t remember me. After that time, the ‘I’ came quickly. Not necessarily self-conscious ‘I’, which I was told was bad, rather any consciousness period. The idea of self was still quite vague and undefined. Out there somewhere, floating. Mostly myself floated when I was outside. Outside, anywhere. Just not in a building. I seemed to expand. I remember learning that outside was the place where there were no boundaries. The realm of the limitless spirit. I don’t even have any memories of boundaries. I do remember getting outside was not always easy. It is four a.m. and I am walking in the ice of a dirt alleyway to catch the earliest bus. My boots crunching through the crystal sheet ice on the puddles in the ruts, wondering what the bus driver will think of this lonely boy standing in the darkness carrying all sorts of strange gear. The bus snakes its way through the untracked snow of the city down to the train station. A hulking gray building of stone. The terminal is steaming in a half dawn. I never did like trains the way some do. I liked where the train was going. Going to the mountains. It almost didn’t make any difference it was the ski train. Most of all it went west. Into the open. Up into the high cold. People under twenty are immune to thermometer plunges. Crisp and fresh can mean twenty below and I was attracted to it. Some, friends even, would say my rationale is just so much nostalgia. I mean, after all, most of the time I live in a place where it almost never snows. What is all this about the lure of the cold? Didn’t this discussion start on a tropical beach? Doesn’t all my cold macho dissolve in the comfortable light of a nearly equatorial sun? Probably cold weather has to do with the idea of value being born of hardship. I don’t mean a puritan vision. An elemental one. Understanding is not derived hardship yet it seems a little like the stick used in the Zen meditation rooms to whack the sleepy on the shoulders. Crisp, direct and effective. Yes, I’m frail like most and I’d rather not subject myself to it continually. Although occasionally, I need a big whack.
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(Dwyer )
That might just be it. The answer to how I got here. The big whack. It had been some time since I had a whack at all. I must have gone looking for a big one. It could be dismissed as sheer recklessness or thrill seeking. Some might think of me as a danger junkie. Someone always out there looking for the next whack. I’m not. I have simply become an unwilling addict to the reality and necessity of change. Change might even be the wrong word. Discovery is better. OK. Enough already. What did I discover on this trip to a very frozen place on the other side of the planet? I found some quiet. Not just an absence of static in the lines. Instead, no lines at all. Once, in the Himalaya, I realized I had not heard the sound of a motor for two weeks. None. The middle ages may have had poverty as a pervasive condition, but they also had silence. The unobtainable luxury of the twentieth century was the unnoticed wealth of the fourteenth. I rediscovered this silence when I was outside in the mountains and I reveled in its value. It was a richness of quiet. Are there any lessons that come from an American in Nepal? Perhaps the lesson is in distances they are apart, physically and emotionally? The per capita income of the citizens? How much or how little it takes to be happy? My lessons came in different packages. They came in under my skin and arrived as new methods for seeing. Paying attention became a way to be alive. More than anything it was learning by comparison and finally discovering there is no value in comparing anything. The big Nepalese lesson is: things just are. Like falling in love. Like being outside, it is not a thing of limits or edges. It just is. Weeks earlier, with a little less Malaria and a lot less dysentery, I finally arrived at a place in the mountains I had been thinking about for a long time. Almost as soon as I arrived, I began saying to myself, “Don’t screw up.” “You got yourself in here and your are the only one who is going to get you out.” I was at risk in the most obvious way. The only road was eight days of run-walk away. Meaning help of any kind was sixteen days away, minimum. Probably more like twenty. The only emergency help here is three days down the mountain in a place called Thami and consists of a prayer chant in the
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monastery. I was very careful coming down. Even there, in the ice, it was not the cold there that sent me to my knees. It was the disease. The water carries everything. Even if you are careful, you get most of it. Too many people, too many cattle. Too much of everything, period. Eight days later, I was skinny and sick, but I was walking on the road and I was alive. - - Dhud chia is the name for mlk tea. A Nepalese concoction having nothing to do with a terrifying drink called Tibetan tea. Milk-tea is a tool for getting through most anything. It got me through all the nights except one. The one when snow and the vomit and the diarrhea took over. The night when my violent shakes woke me to see Pasang Sherpa sitting quietly, watching. It was so dark I could barely focus on him when I asked why he was watching me? He said, “For your life.” I paused respectfully and had no reply. Silence and sleep took me away. Pasang watched. Sitting in his freezing darkness. Smiling. We haven’t seen any birds for some time now. I think it is too high. Pasang says it is too cold. Just then, swooping noiselessly, he is there. In the canyon below us, a black arc across the void. The lamergeier. A rigid glider this bird. No wings moving. A three-meter scythe. Don’t move. He might see us. Silly. This bird is a hundred feet below me in one of the deepest river canyons in the world and yet, I am completely still. This is his place. And I have never felt more foreign. I am not out of place, merely an intruder. Honored by his grace. He glides. Flashing in and out of the shadows of the nearly vertical stone. My wanderlust confronts his sense of peace and while I am lost. He is home. I am richer for having seen the both of us there. That is how I got here and I am pleased to have come. Some things are worth dysentery. This is one of them. I will go home different. And it won’t be because of the tropical beach or even because of the mountain cold, but for the contrast between the two. The black bird curls across the sky and reminds me of Pasang’s smile. I wonder, do birds smile? Surely this one does.
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(Dwyer )