I’ve spent the winter inside. I sleep late, waiting for the sun to rise, and then I work late, and by the time the cycle’s done, it’s dark again, and there’s nothing to do but stare into one screen or another. Sometimes I leave something in my truck; I go out late to get it, and I accidentally look up, and then remember the stars are there. But it’s cold at night here, so I don’t look long.

I’ve forgotten what it feels like to walk outside, alone. The world looms over you, passing slow; no world this way looks normal or expected, and there is joy in that. The cypress trees, tall and leafless in the bayou, the slowly slumping shacks on Main Street: this is and is not home. A hundred black birds rose up then over the street. They signaled their arrival with an enormous collective cry, and then disappeared east over the curve of the earth. Off behind the graveyard a boy practiced batting; I could hear the irregular clang of metal and leather. It was warm, finally, and the sky was yellow and the winds gathered patiently.

Almost home, I watched a girl on her scooter make elliptical loops. She was tiny against the giant sky, nothing compared to a hundred black birds. But this world was hers, maybe the only world she’s known, and the one she’ll always remember when she thinks back to innocence and scooters.

Hours later, after dark, the storm finally came. The winds tore at the house and hail battered the windows. It felt like a big one, like a tornado might come and lift us all away. Jess got up and looked at the window, and I guess she didn’t see houses and cows being sucked off into the heavens, because she came back to bed.

I know nothing of Thai geography, so I had no idea what to watch for out the bus window—when the city might ascend to suburbs, then country. But the city just sprawled on and on, another big and bright car dealer every few kilometers, rising over the rice fields. Farms and malls piled on top of one another, neverending. It’s all frontier here, to my eye, everything at the sloped edge of wildness, a step or two away from a street-corner hustle and a campfire.

I passed a thousand homes, more. Laundry flapped from high rise balconies and teak shacks shuddered on stilts over still water. It’s self-absorbed, but the word I thought of was anonymous. These lives would always be nameless and blank to me. The night before I’d dreamed of home, of all of my homes: South Dakota, college, Connecticut. Those homes are probably anonymous, too, to these millions. Who will take the same bus ride, past my house in Mississippi?

Back inBangkokwe visited the Jim Thompson House. The man was an architect and intelligence officer; he built a home a beautiful home in the city from traditional Thai teak houses. Then he disappeared in Malaysia.

Sometimes I imagined the bus stopping. I’d hop off in a town I’d never heard of, where I could stop being a tourist. Just eat the food and sit in a shack over a river. Grow old there, anonymous.

We visited a wat today, and there was Buddhist wisdom nailed there to the trees. Old age is no cause for regret, one said. Regret that one is old, having lived in vain.

Seaweed is the clear victor. Not that hot chili squid is gross; it’s actually must better than it sounds, but it could really be anything.  Seaweed tastes like seaweed.

Watch out, though. “Bacon cheese with seaweed” may run away with this thing.

I loved it, and I loved it more when I inadvertently heard it earlier today.

By the time I listened, I wasn’t getting ready for Christmas anymore. Christmas had passed–it was December 26–but it was still Christmas for me, as Christmas as I’m going to get this year. I hadn’t slept yet, at least, since waking up so early Christmas morning.

Also cool is the sermon which Simon samples in the background:

I was lucky to get an aisle seat to Tokyo; the guy two seats down sat stuffed next to his window for nearly the whole thing.  It was around 4:30 pm when we landed in Tokyo, and I saw a Japanese sunset from the plane windows.  I have no idea what time it was then, at home or in Bangkok.  I think the flight was thirteen hours; by the time I left Tokyo I had been traveling for twenty-four hours straight.

I had slept for an hour or two, maybe, but I’m stubborn with my body. After the blur of time zones, I could probably convince my body of anything.  It was another seven across Asia, then an hour and a half through immigration, baggage, customs, and the traffic-jammed midnight highway in Bangkok.  It was December 27 by the time I settled into bed, two days washed away.

Not long ago, this trip would have taken listless months on the ocean—back when travel was rare.  When there were undiscovered places still, back when that old aphorism—it’s the journey, not the destination—was true, when there was a record to keep of the slow dramas of your voyage.  Now I just note the awkwardness of my seatmates and the hours-long absence of time.  Now everywhere inBangkok is jammed with tourists from Europe and Japan and America, standing in your way to get the perfect photo op.  I don’t really understand tourism photography: you could buy the same picture—or probably one better—and not stand in my way, waving around your cell phone camera.  Of course, I took the same photos.

Let me take the contrarian vision of travel for a moment: here I am, halfway across the world, affirming your otherness, consuming your culture as a bit of intellectual capital, proving I’m not just one of those Americans who sits in the comfort of home.²  Burning obscene amounts of carbon to cart my body across an ocean.  Gawking at palaces and temples whose history I won’t be bothered to learn.

Ahh, but the food.  You can only taste it for a moment before it’s gone.

There are other moments, odd moments.  A stray dog lying in a foreign street.  A old Thai man, pulling his boat into the river’s current.  There are still undiscovered moments.

It’s time now to get out of Bangkok.

1 Turns out Christmas in the airport is about the same as any other day, except the piped-in music while you’re sitting on the tarmac is holiday-themed, and about half the employees you interact with wish you a Merry Christmas.

2 A few days before I left, I ran into a very Southern acquaintance at Wal-Mart.  When I explained my Christmas plans—two days on an airplane to meet my family in Bangkok—she was appalled.

Since I’m in Thailand, I should probably be sharing pictures of Thailand.  But we’re almost out of ten baht coins, needed to access the internet here.

So for now, here are the photos from this fall that I cleared off my camera before I skipped town.

Edit: Pictures from the first day are now up.

He’s one of those writers who I read and I wonder, how did he become him?  And how do I become him? And is it too late? Is there hope?

This essay, about his experience with his literary mentor, answered some of those questions.

Here’s one of them. Make of it what you will.

I asked him if he thought there was any hope. Like that: “Is there any hope?”

He answered me quite solemnly. He told me that in the hallways at Versailles, there hung a faint, ever-so-faint smell of human excrement, “because as the chambermaids hurried along a tiny bit would always splash from the pots.” . . . [T]hat night I had no idea what he meant, and still don’t entirely.

All people are temporary—only I remain
eternal, and even I am shedding atoms
constantly.

Soon I’ll be replaced again, new bits and
pieces collected from strangers and loved ones,
stones and trees, the bones of things, and
all those morphed too.

Like all stances, this one is temporary, and has
happened—the obituary truth that shares all lives.
Our grand plans, too,
just made of many particles
coming together for a long and over moment.

And then I handed the keys to my girlfriend. I can’t drive stick.

*

I grew up in Connecticut, in a suburban town where pick-up trucks seemed like mythology. We saw them on TV, or in the glossy pages of a magazine, but never alive in the world. Once my friends and I spotted one parked in the gravel outside a track meet. We staged a photo shoot: Brian took off his shirt and rolled up his jeans and put a strand of straw in his teeth, leaning over the truck.

I met a guy in college who told a terrible story. The gist was that he bedded a woman by claiming to drive a sports car; at the end of his encounter, he tore off the condom and threw it down on her chest. “I drive a truck,” he told her, though he appended it with one more word I won’t repeat here. I think of him whenever I hear that phrase.

These were our truck drivers: condom throwers and straw-chomping rubes.

Now, I drive a truck.

*

Here in the South, the trucks are new; big, shiny, four doors. You climb in and put your beer in the console, or a full tumbler of whiskey, and look down from tinted windows.

In the wide Midwest, the trucks hover like ghosts. They’re all beat and rusted, old two-tone Fords and Chevys. When you drive your car off a Nebraska road in a freak April snowstorm, time it: a truck will arrive in five minutes. A man, broke down too, and hidden under a wide-brim cowboy hat, will wordlessly pull you from the ditch.

These places were mythical, too. We knew of the country as scenes from a magazine road trip, or the set piece of a great American novel, or the dark, hard words in a history book.

In high school I drove a Volvo sedan; sometimes I joked about painting flames on its side. In college I didn’t own a car, and when I came back to Connecticut I borrowed my parents’ Ford Festiva, a tiny and florescent blue box. It was manual, with hand-cranked windows, and I stalled out on every hill. My parents drive a Prius.

Our story was already told: we’d drive these cars until we could afford to buy our own. Something fun but not too impractical, a Subaru maybe; and then later, when the kids came, we’d get an SUV. We’d read our books and watch the movies, and wonder at the improbable countryside, this vast empty land panning across our television set.

I took a detour, and drove my Subaru west.

I’d stay for a year or two, I thought; teach in a rural school, then decide what degree I wanted next.

This was unlikely, too, the Connecticut boy dropped onto those fantastic plains. I was amazed to find the cowboys and Indians were real.

*

Maybe you become an adult when going home means leaving your parents’ house, not arriving. I’m home for Christmas this year, here in my house at the edge of a picked-down cotton field, teaching in rural schools still.

Where I grew up, country music was embarrassing. It was old and stagnant, drenched in sentiment. No one listened to it.

When I came west, and the south, I learned that some things are worth embarrassment. Because on a wide-open highway, nothing sounds quite like a slide guitar.

Sometimes I think about friends up north, friends I’ve kept in bad touch with. They’re finishing med school or running companies; they’re moving, it seems, one by one to California. They’re driving Volvos and hybrids, to their settled down apartments in nice parts of town, finishing the stories we began.

I wonder what I’m doing here, and what else I could have done instead.

Then the sun dips over the cotton field. The horizon shines pink behind the water tower and the clouds stretch long in the winter sky. There’s a dirt road behind my house, leading back through the fields. It’s clear and flat, a good place to learn to drive.