Well, for the first time, I’m including audio with the post. The audio isn’t me reading out the post. Rather, it’s the other way around: the post is a transcription of the audio. I did it that way because I just couldn’t write it down.
This is really the post that I needed to write two or three weeks ago, and I spoke of other things instead. It seemed that needed to speak of those things: the Odyssey, Christianity, the feeling of uncertain ground, and the Passengers, before I could speak about this. That might be true - certainly those things are relevant - but it might be just that I didn’t want to write this. I really really did not want to write this but I wasn’t all alone in Italy any more, with energy to spend on angst.
So I didn’t write it, I told it instead. I told it to trees, and to my phone and I got an AI to transcribe it. Which it did pretty well actually; though I do say ‘you know?’ and ‘I mean’ an awful lot.
The audio contains a repeated prayer which I do not repeat in full in the text. I think it works in the audio because I say it different, but in the text it is just the same each time. Otherwise I have not done much to edit either the text or the audio. I don’t want to edit the audio. It has some long pauses, especially at the beginning and the end, but the pauses are part of it. If you like listen to audio, then this is rather raw. That sounds like there’s swearing; there isn’t. Or not in the modern sense anyway!
I’ve been wondering whether to make this an open post or not. It’s not going to offend anyone except me, but I think this is probably just too raw to go out on the internet.
…No, no. That would not be appropriate. OK Fine.
Hi.
I am sitting in a little wood. It's a little wood that is planted by a road. I've told this story to the trees already and now I'm telling it to my phone and I hope they don't mind. They've been very quiet. Earlier I told the story to a big oak on Pocket Park in the morning and wind rose in the trees at certain points in the story.
Here I can hear things occasionally crawling in the dry leaf litter. I don't want to tell the story. I couldn't write it. I couldn't write it in Italy. I couldn't write it this morning; on computer or in a notebook. I don't know why; I've told it before. So I've tried speaking it. This is the fourth time I've spoken it today. Once, twice, I thought the phone was recording but it wasn't. The third time I've just told it without the phone. This time, well, I think it's recording again. If it's not, then I guess that means I have to tell it more times, I. I'm stalling I'm stalling I'm stalling I'm stalling I'm stalling.
It was 2014. I can't believe it was nine years ago. It was the end of a trip to Vietnam that we have mostly spent doing interviews. We were doing interviews with a method that Sam and I had already worked on; and that I'd used for my PhD. We were collecting new data with a new grant from some other areas. A lot of the data that we'd had before had come from Pu Mat.
I'd spent a lot of time around Pu Mat National Park, in villages talking to people; but I'd never been in. If you want to go in, you have to take people and you have to spend money and you have to take food and you have to trek for days and days into the forest. It's like that because there isn't forest along roads, unless the roads have just been built.
Well, a road had just been built. A road had been opened, as they say, up into the forests of the northern half of Pu Mat, along Khe Choang. This road, Trung told me, was part of a scheme by the border army who'd been given, suddenly and unexpectedly, a silly amount of money by the central government. Their plan was to build roads all the way along the border and that, surely, was totally insane because the border is a high ridge. Trung assured me that, although they hadn't built a road yet, they'd built a wide path with big markers for the border army to march down all the way down all the way along the border with China. They like to keep things impressive as they can near the border with China.
But now they want to build that into an actual road for vehicles and do the same all the way along however many hundreds of kilometres it is, along the border with Lao. That's high mountain ridges, and the land falls down sharp on either side of the ridge. I got to calling them lizard-back ridges after the Acanthosaura... I've said this already, it's not important. The thing is, the road would roller-coaster, it would bounce like a mad heartbeat, like a seismograph.
But it wouldn't because it would all just fall away down the sides of the mountains, and clearly this was just a crazy boondoggle that some... well, maybe there was some general and no one dared tell him the truth, but more likely they were just going to get kickbacks from the construction company until all the money ran out, and it all fell through, and they could always use the roads to log. If there was any timber left worth logging1.
Anyway, it was a done deal. The road had been opened, and Trung and I went up it, and you know, I convinced myself it was all right to take the time to get into the forest, just to see what it's like in there, and get deep in. It would take just a couple of days, because there's a road. So we went.
We went past the villages of Na and Bu, where I was last year, and up. And there was a road, and it was ruinous, it was like the road that had been cut before - the Ho Chi Minh Highway - cut through the Saola Nature Reserves. There were great decoherences of the mountainside where it had all just come down around the road, below the road, in tongue-shaped laps of lost forest.
Gray and red, and hammered in with the little staircases built into them for the water to run down so that they don't fall further. There was a bit where the contours were actually real, because they'd stepped the tops of the mountains, and still it was ridiculous, because you could see how much the mountains rose ahead, and they were never gonna get up there, surely. But then, I don't know about road engineering, I didn't think they would expand Hanoi by 13 times; I thought that was just talk. The government does talk; it's built on talk no one's expected to believe. But they're powerful... so... I don't know, maybe they were going to do it.
Anyway, we came at last to an empty yard with a long camp in it, a little longhouse I suppose, a thatched thing like a forest camp, where you might see meat hanging out to dry, but just ludicrously extended like some kind of insane cartoon dachshund of a camp. There was a roller, a yellow road roller - not a bird, a machine - and a JCB. And there were these two guys, and they were bored out of their brains; two Kinh guys in the middle of the forest, who had been set to watch the machines when everyone else went home. Everyone else - all the other workers - had gone home because there had been some kind of obstacle to the construction of the road. They were construction workers, but now they were guards; all on their own in the middle of the forest. They were really pleased to have someone to talk to, and I went for walks down the road with one of them and it was actually kind of nice, because I just got to chat "normal nature stuff." There was a wagtail on the road, so "yeah, we have those back home," that kind of thing. And he was talking to me about the hornbills that they saw, although I never saw them, and you know, I saw some stuff on the road; I saw a hawk cuckoo, but...
Well, it was nice in one way; you don't get to have that kind of conversation much in Vietnam. But on the other hand, though; in the forest, you want time to be alone. There's no time to be alone in Vietnam, and I would have to go always, as I said, with a big team of porters and guides and rangers and students, and then there would be all the stuff to plan, and the people to chivvy, and they'd be playing music in their hammocks, and they'd be cooking frogs over the fire, and they'd be camping in the old villages. It was enough physical work to get out of the camp and up onto the slopes to try and see anything, try and be alone, after a hard day's slogging through the rain or the heat. But it wasn't just that; there were also rules. They didn't want people going off on their own; they didn't want foreigners going off on their own. The country doesn't want it. They were supposedly all there for my safety in the forest. If I walked a little way up the waterfall, I might fall down, crack my head open, and then it would all be their fault and they'd be in trouble. It *might* just be an excuse. I thought originally that it was. The real aim was to keep foreigners under control, but I actually started to think that perhaps Vietnam really thinks that if a hiker fell off a cliff, the international community would take them to task for not keeping their mountains under better control, letting them run off and kill people. It seemed very strange, but this this was a road, and I was only with Trung, not a whole bunch of paranoid village or local officials, and he didn't mind. I just had to get away from this one construction worker, and after a while he was bored, and I went off. Off up the road, no social obligations, for a walk by myself2.
And then I got to the obstacle in the road.
In fact it was the obstacle to the road that the guys had been talking about, but it was an obstacle to me walking along the road as well; because there wasn't any road any more. A great chunk of the hillside had fallen away, like the side of a sand castle where the water invades it, and suddenly it belongs to a different kingdom, and it's gone. Down at the bottom, there was a stream...
I've said this three times today. When I got to this point in the story the first time, it was like the flesh of the story, such as it was, fell away, and I was left alone. Now it doesn't feel like that, and it's worth noting. It feels almost hackneyed now.
I set out across the landslide. I'd walked across landslides before; I'd tracked a serow across a landslide. This was a fresher one, though; and even that one had had its scary moments. But there was a path, maybe an animal trail, across the middle of it. I could walk, it was sloping ground, but it was ground. I was walking, not climbing, and I walked along this path to the middle of this scar of Mars in the middle of the rainforest, and I came to a gully. It was a little gully, no bigger than a storm drain, which came down from the cliff at the top of the landslide where the forest still grew out. I guess the rainwater had come down that, or fallen stones, or both, and I went up it, because the path went up a little, just a little, around the inner lip of that gully.
If you imagine, I'm walking on the slope, parallel to the stream, but I have to divert slightly to head a little up the slope, up this little gully, which is running down. I have to walk up a little bit, just a few meters, and then there is a place where the path crosses the gully. Except it doesn't, because there is no path. In the middle of the gully, it's rubbed out. There's nothing.
Well then I have to go back, but to go back... Well, if I go back walking, I have to turn round, and if I turn round, well my heels are on the slope, but my toes are in emptiness; or they are pointed down at such an angle that it tempts me forward at that angle, and I'd want to lean back, I'd want to, I wouldn't, but I do, I would want to look down; I look down. Down below there's the stream, and I'm not walking on the ground any more, I'm suddenly halfway up a wall, and the wall is - in my memory,
and, I think, in reality - skyscraper-high. I can see, right down at the bottom, Khe Choang; the stream; very straight in my memory, strangely so. It's black and white. This is a mountain stream; hard chunks of boulders blacked by the water, and the water white between them. And if I go - if I go down - I will tumble. And if I tumble and if I hit that stream, the power line of a stream...
OK if I'm on a wall I should go down backwards, like on a ladder; I should look for handholds. But handholds don't seem to be at all the same thing as footholds. Footholds rely on, on a slope being beneath them, rely on gravity; and for a handhold I have to grab onto something. Nothing to press up to me. It's not about not slipping, it's about the thing I'm holding onto coming away in my hands. And I'm on a scree. It's not pebbles, it's like crumbs of rock; just, this is red-grey shaley stuff; anything could come away in my hand. There's nothing solid to hold and if I go down that slope, I'm... My flight home is in a couple of days, but if I go down that slope, I will be going home in a bag; I'll be going home in a pulp in a bag, and I won't see my family again.
That's more important - that's what I think then; not that I will die but that I won't get home to my family; and not that I won't see them again, but that they won't see me. Last time I came home I was away for a long time and Bernard made this bunting, his grandparents him make this bunting that I still have, and that has - in felt letters - "Welcome Home Daddy," and all these shiny green stickers of insects on it, and he laid it out across the wall at the front garden at my parents' house. And this time he'll have to lay it on a, on a bag of bloody pulp. Or nothing; and he'll never hear me tell him stories again at night. That's what I was thinking, and there was something strong there; because I knew now that I wanted to get home to my family more than I wanted to live. Obviously I couldn't do one without the other, but it was real.
It reminded me of the time when this tumbled-up krait nearly fell on me, and I leapt into the river, and I was in the river before I knew what I was doing, and I realized: "Wow, I do have a reflex, I do have a reaction to danger." Here on that slope I thought: "Wow, I do love my family; I wasn't making it up."
But I have nothing.
I have the pull; but I don't have the... technology, the skill. A mountaineer would probably have found it laughably easy, but I was very much outside my element; nothing to hold on to. I could see the trees at the top of the slope. I considered going up all the way to the top, but I think I decided I had to go right; that was the best option to get to the closest trees. Not down the way I had come, though: straight right. There was a fallen log in another little gully, and then there was a patch of trees. They were just meters away, but I couldn't get there.
So I was ransacking the pockets of my soul; it was as if my soul was one of those fisherman's jackets with loads of little pockets, and I was just patting them down, looking for something. What could I do with thoughts of the saola; with all this story-making about quests and goddesses, or about the importance of a world rich with living creatures and charismatic megafauna? I didn't want to see a saola, or save a saola, in that moment; I wanted to get home to my family.
I thought of my Buddhist practice, which I had let slide, and it seemed to me that offered me the chance to know that I was dying as I died. Or rather, it offered me the potential to have that if I had kept up the practice, which I hadn't been able to do.
Things that you put in a tin and you haven't used them in a long time; but you know how to use them: I began to chant. But it wasn't chanting for temple mornings or green tea; it was chanting for nights awake in my bunk bed as a child, seeking respite from nightmares:
"Our Father,
who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us,
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil,
For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory,
Now and forever, Amen.
Our father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name...
I was holding; I was clambering up the probabilities and the dust; hand-holds; real but dubious hand-holds; no different ones, no revelations, no miracle. But I was talking to someone that I hadn't been talking to; the God that I learned about in assembly, whoever He was. There wasn't any need, or there wasn't any time, to ask. I needed to know only one thing and that was whether He could get me off that landslide, and well, I wasn't going to know, But I didn't have anything better. I was saying to myself "shouldn't you be chanting something that you believe? Chant the Heart Sutra, which is not cosmologically difficult."
But the Heart Sutra is about telling me I don't have a nose3; that there is no object of mind; and it's purpose is liberation. And I didn't want liberation, I wanted to get home.
Our Father,
who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven...
I wasn't naive enough to think that He lets every dad get home if they ask nicely. And that, again, wasn't important right now. I prayed.
I knew I couldn't just ask; as if I was asking for a payout on my insurance or something. I made a deal; like a sailor lost at sea. I knew that making a deal wasn't very spiritually advanced, and that didn't matter either:
"If You let me get home somehow - off this cliff, and then somehow across a continent in an aeroplane- then... I will go to Your church, and that is not enough, I know. Okay, okay, I will go to Your church and I will open... my heart to You."
I could feel myself thinking - or it was like I could feel Him looking at me. You know, that's not a SMART goal; it's not... oh whatever it is, "sensible, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound," is that right?4 I'm sure the first one is not "sensible." It *was* time-bound - I had a flight in a couple of days, and I would go to the first church that I could, which would be the chapel at Heathrow - but it wasn't measurable; "opening your heart" is not measurable. I knew that; He obviously knew that, but -well- I did say before that He had to accept that or not; that's not true, He could have asked for much more. He...
Well, I got off the landslide, and I remember the feel of the first tree in my hands, and I remember a little later running through the trees: the Tarzan slalom through the forest. Running through that forest where I'd told all these stories about how terrifying and alien it was, and just feeling suddenly so happy to be at home now, under the trees. Still, I thought "what happens if I grab hold of a snake? What if I grab pit-viper instead of a tree?" But I knew that wasn't going to happen. I know where I am now. I am home in the forest.
So that was something I learned. Two solid things, it seemed: I love my family, and I'm at home in the forest. No "oh, there is a God," solid thing; I didn't have a religious experience, I made a deal. What I knew about God was: "I will turn to Him when I'm in danger of my life." Whether that is what I should do, or not, I don't know. I didn't say that quite rightly; it's mad to say, oh maybe I shouldn't have, it got me off the landslide, and...
And I'm grateful. I went to the chapel in Heathrow. I was happy to go. I was happy to be doing something I'd promised.
I knelt on the little sweaty red leather chunk things. I prayed. I think there was a priest there, I didn't talk to the priest.
I didn't talk to any priests; I went to the church in the village regularly. I said I was being humble and not imagining that I needed a special church; the one in the village was fine for me. I have a suspicion of myself that I was really just being lazy. I don't know why I stopped; it just seemed empty. I wasn't in terror of my life.
And I don't know - and this is important - I don't know if you can trust someone better when he's in terror of his life, or not. Well, it's obvious that, in some ways you can and in some ways you can't; but that doesn't really say anything.
Do I care, really, about the saola? Or do I care only about myself, about having a quest, about being interesting?
I say that, acting the disgust that I think should be in my voice. I was acting.
On the landslide, I was just a dad; I was just a lost dad on a scree, praying for his ordinary love.
And then I'm off home in the plane.
With this love, you know? Sanctioned love to multiply; planet-boiling love.
Our Father,
who art in heaven...
You know, He seemed kind of like a dad too.
Like I said, it wasn't a religious experience, I have to remember that. I would be terrified to have one!
What if - here's something I haven't communicated properly - and this is the end now - something I haven't communicated properly so far in these posts is what the connection was between the saola and my feeling of total instability and uncertainty. It's such that, with everybody I meet, or rather everyone who expresses an opinion, I think: "how do you get to be so sure?" And the answer there may well be that everyone's acting, but I think - I believe - that it was to do with this concept of probability; of stopping seeing things in terms of proven or unproven, because that didn't work for saola interview reports, and seeing them instead in terms of levels of probability, and suddenly that's just an acid that eats everything; nothing is certain, everything is just more or less probable. It's not advanced philosophy, it's just, it got into my life through the saola.
And I was trying to make decisions based on science, so it was my life but it was also "science;" there wasn't some sort of separate world of scientific fact and...
... I mean, it's not like I could imagine creationism being correct, but what if the doubt itself is just my deliberate blurring of the boundaries, in order to not see Him as the only truth?
And I've been... I don't want there to be an only truth, I don't...
I, uh, I'd better stop this recording. This is a whole different thing.
And that is what I recorded. That’s most of the story - I did leave some bits out.
Maybe next week I will have that mythical Time to Reconsider and Regroup, which I’ve been imagining that I will have every week since late June. Maybe I will be able to write a post tying these threads together before I come back to the Dream in Kati, and the Odyssey again.
It’s really strange how much better I feel having done this; even though nothing at all has been resolved.
There definitely was, as I found out later. Though I don’t think they actually would have been able to log in the National Park. They might well have crossed into Lao to log, though.
Doesn't sound like much, I know.
OK, not really. But sort of.
No. It’s Strategic, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound. ‘Measurable’ and ‘Time-Bound’ were the ones I was obsessed with. In my work, they were spoken of a lot in the context of anti-poaching enforcement and, in fact, the new data management system for patrol data was called ‘SMART’.