I hadn’t intended to write this up. I did not think it was appropriate to publicly share. I changed my mind, though I’m still not sure. This is an account of a trip I made alone (and, as it turned out, illegally) to the Thác Kem area in Pú Màt National Park. I had planned to do something like this for some time. In fact I had intended it to be a rather bigger thing, but I could not defend my time or energy against the other claims on them and two nights, one day was what I had.
Many thanks to Caroline Ross of Uncivil Savant for help talking through this.
I think this ought to be the last unfiltered rambling ‘diary’ post.
01/04/23
I'm the last person off the minibus, having refused to give any location except the name of the town. I don’t want help from the bus people. It's midday when I get there and I'm watched only by a couple of kids and the ladies on chairs outside the market. Hanging from the cliffs above the houses I notice five or six huge hanging tongues of honey, reminding me immediately of that scene from The Second Jungle Book where the old snake tells Mowgli whose help he has to seek against the armies of marauding dhole.
“This is the Place of Death,” said the boy. “Why do we come here?”
“They sleep,” said Kaa. “Hathi will not turn aside for the Striped One. Yet Hathi and the Striped One together turn aside for the dhole, and the dhole they say turn aside for nothing. And yet for whom do the Little People of the Rocks turn aside? Tell me, Master of the Jungle, who is the Master of the Jungle?”
“These,” Mowgli whispered. “It is the Place of Death. Let us go.”
“Nay, look well, for they are asleep.”
I long to be asleep myself. I’m just sick with the thought of interacting with any more human beings before I can string up my hammock in the woods. I shouldn’t have brought the hammock, maybe, but my capacity to make decisions was shot. I had spend a week in office and coffee shop and hotel room, bashing away at the report from our whistle-stop tour of villages, talking about animals dead, imaginary and painfully possibly real.
Still, I wonder at these good combs hanging unharvested, just a good tree’s height above the attic rooms of an ordinary street. The ‘striped one’ and the dhole were once numerous in the hills behind, though I doubt the former ever really turned aside for the latter very often. ‘Hathi,’ incredibly, is still in there. Well, there’s one female elephant, apparently; I have seen her dung on the trail.
I first heard those lines of Kipling from out of the cassette player in my parents’ car. It’s wonderful and horrible that they can still set my hairs on end, given all I’ve learned since I first heard them. Actually, I suppose it’s just as wonderful and horrible that my hairs can still go up at all. It doesn’t make me look any bigger.
Where am I and what am I doing?
I am in Con Cuông town, on my way into Pù Mát National Park. I am alone. On my back, I have a Vietnamese army rucksack, swollen so big that I must look like the guy from the Routard travel guides; the guy with the buckled-up Earth on his back. I am, in fact, looking for a café. After that a taxi. Then, if all goes well, a spot in the jungle between two well-spaced trees.
I made myself a promise and have broken it three times already: when I came out last year, when I went back, and when I came out again. This is my last chance. The promise was that, although the fieldwork for this last trip would be spent in houses talking, I would take the chance to go into the forest alone and to sleep there alone with no next-day schedule. This is something I have never actually done in Vietnam.
In fact, it was supposed to be more than that. It was supposed to be for four days and I have just two nights; there was no way I could have left Vinh on the Friday evening. Long battered bus ride up on a Saturday morning: that’s realistic. Two days at a weekend out of the laptop-bashing, proposal-spinning, coffee-chugging work-life: that’s realistic and I had to fight for that1. It’s questionable whether what I am doing is legal. Trung reassures me that it will be fine in a tourist area and has made a call to someone in the park office and to a man who owns a restaurant in the place where I will get off the taxi. He says it’s fine but he does seem worried. He’s grateful, though, that I’m not heading all the way back south to Bạch Mã. So am I. I didn’t fancy the logistics and I didn’t fancy a place so spectacularly haunted and cold as Bạch Mã mountain. Two nights somewhere just off the track near the tourist waterfall will suit me just fine.
My model was the four days that I spent in a Dartmoor wood three years earlier, on a Wilderness Vigil with Martin Shaw’s West Country School of Myth. In those woods, I could hear chainsaws as well as ravens and festival music that bounced off the hills as another music seemed to come up from inside them. I wasn’t after wildlife; I didn’t have to hike far.
When I went into the woods on Dartmoor, I was overwhelmed with dread and fear. Really every kind of fear that has ever plagued me clambering over me and hammering in me. And it was ridiculous because people did this who’d never even slept outdoors before; I regularly slept out in jungles. What would it be like, I wondered, if I did that in the Annamites? What if I slept on banana leaves in the lee of a cliff as I’d seen Katu men do (though not without fire)? What if I went in there without dismissing the idea of the spirits beforehand? Lowered myself into those wet leaves among the leeches? Let it be possible for a centipede wide as my tongue to find my naked body in the darkness? Sat among the stones where the creatures I feared most - the striped ones - came out after dark? What if I took seriously the intimation that I had an appointment to keep with them? I would have to bring offering and sacrifices. I would have to be as bold as those old monks in the charnel grounds - but I am not a monk, I have a family - bold is selfish unless I’m sure I die more without this death. Am I sure? Can I be sure?
Those are the kind of thoughts that prompted me to plan the sit-out in the first place. What’s driving me onward now, along the pavement in Con Cuông is 95% the fact that I’ve shared such thoughts with some people and will feel incredibly lame if I just go home. The remaining 5% is just that I want a green light in my eyes. One of the people I spoke to was Caroline Ross of Uncivil Savant who, extremely kindly, offered to have a conversation with me over the phone after I got out. That was a necessary part of the process, I believed, and I felt honoured and rather guilty that I’d impressed on her to do this. I couldn’t back out.
I could delay, though, and find a cafe where I could send that last important email about the report and have a lemon tea and enquire about taxis. There had been a taxi parked by the bus station but no, that one wouldn’t do. I drag my feet like this when leaving the country and, in the old days, when leaving Hanoi for the forest. It feels like the plane, the train, the taxi, will tug all the little undone tasks out of my flesh by their roots; I have to complete them first. And then I think of the idea that people will be suddenly motivated to get their affairs in order before their death, even if the death is unexpected. So then I want to leave even less. Since the early days and a couple of close encounters, I had a clear idea of what would kill me in the forest. Although falling off a waterfall was obviously the greater risk, I was convinced I was going to be bitten by a krait.
I don’t find the old cafe with the blotchy wooden tables and the orchids and the shade. I settle for a little empty streetside one whose walls bear inspirational quotes rather than saola horns. There are quotes from both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The elderly middle-aged couple who own the place are some more of those people who know I’m not really speaking Vietnamese and have to point at pictures of the drinks instead, which infuriates me. Everything infuriates me, but I make myself understood and I keep my cool. The fact is that I’m actually not speaking even my limited Vietnamese very well at all; I’m tired and cross and I don’t want to be speaking at all. Turns out the man has a taxi service himself. He’ll take me.
Along the road, slowly, more and more species are shuffled into the deck the ecosystem’s dealt from. The trees are all slender and young. Some burdened with orange flowers.
There’s a restaurant and an FPD checkpoint. I’ve been told to ask for Mr Th- and perhaps the old man squatting chatting by the table of boards is he. I ask out the car window but am waved on. There’s another restaurant by the waterfall car-park. They might mean I should ask there and they might mean “you have a face that English comes out of and so I cannot understand you.” I don’t really care. I’m trying to do my duty for Trung who wanted me to check in with this man but I am not feeling very dutiful.
The taxi driver asks when he can pick me up; I say I don’t want him to. I realise I had not negotiated the fare and the cab has no meter. I am going to a tourist spot and am behaving like a tourist which infuriates me also. I ask the fare and he says 400 - a lot more than I’d been expecting. He also says it after an obvious pause for calculation which I interpret as ‘how much might I get away with here?’ I get angry like a tourist and refuse to pay that much. I will walk from here, I tell him and he says it’s much too far, he can’t let me. In the end, I let him take me, for no additional cost and start to worry that he’s actually entirely honest and I’m being a brat. Mostly I am miserable that I’m still in a place where such concerns apply. Of course, the whole problem with this indigenous-inspired, ‘relational’ attitude to the forest is that these sorts of concerns apply everywhere. I think this glumly; untrammelled wilderness would be nice now. I feel very trammelled. But then…
Hey. Best not to think about it. We ford the stream.
I pay the man what we agreed and he leaves, to my relief. There’s big empty car park and a great shack of a restaurant. I’ve been here a few times but it’s never a place that’s meant much to me. I remember seeing chickens there being fed polystyrene to bulk them out. I remember seeing great flocks of brown hornbills through a fug of FPD-enforced alcohol. Now there’s just a strange concrete statue of elephants and one young ranger who I collar in a last dutiful bid to let Mr Th-, whoever he is, know I’m here. I head off on foot up the tourist road in the once-again living light.
Rustle in the leaves. As ever I have since my childhood summers, I think ‘it’s a snake’ and then ‘it’ll just be a lizard.’ Turns out it’s both: a fat sun skink pushes under the big dead leaf with a small snake pooled in the palm of it. I think at first that the snake’s a young cobra because the charcoal eclipse-mark on its moon-grey back looks like a cobra’s monocle mark but in fact I don’t know what it is; not the one I’m scared of anyway. It does look young.
What does that mean? Who knows? I can’t really believe in such meanings yet, there are banners on the lampposts advertising fast data with pictures of a sexy urban night. Teenagers dragged out here by their parents are the targets, I guess.
Who cares?
Mountain-way is to my left, past the river where it flows down from the falls. I wouldn’t drink that water, it’s tasted more feet than DeviantArt. In the end I push down the slope and across it. I think I can see an outlet and am pleased to find I’m right, there’s a little runnel meeting it, a way to follow.
And then I’m happy! Pushing alone up a little Annamite stream. Worried, still, about things of all sizes but the little purple damselflies leave me, the long green damselflies leave me and loop back and the stream plants pour up round me. I find I know their faces, and a couple of their names. Happy water steps. Like all streams, it’s a trail - though not a well-used one. I worry about frog-catchers stumbling on me - I would have to explain myself to frog catchers and that would be so tiresome - but it isn’t very likely. I worry about boar stumbling on me and I hope they will. Worries are foaming off me, filling volumes. I feel confident, though, that they will run out in time. I need to find a place to sling my hammock. Yes, I brought a hammock. I’m pathetic. I worry that I won’t be able to let a spot in the forest call me because I’ll be too busy assessing anchor points.
The path diverges from the stream to dodge the cliff of a man-high fall. I find myself standing in a stream so small it’s barely there, a tributary of the tributary, under tall banana plants. I look upwards and I can see where it seeps from the rock. It’s a curved dark scarp of stone, a miniature ‘natural amphitheatre’ which is smaller, not larger, than a real one. The stream here is too small for laughter and the place is silent. Everywhere I can see the pulpy banana stems going over. In front of me at eye-height, a corpse white millipede, wide-scuted, thumb-long, is gnawing at the caved-in place where the trunk went down. I experience this as an invitation, though I’m not sure it’s one I want to accept. This would be a great place for a krait to come after frogs.
Caroline Ross asked me why - it was much later - and I was sitting in my dark and unassembled study in the old bakery on the Linton clunch. Caro had returned from a similar appointment herself but I didn’t ask about that. I’d said ‘corpse-white’ to her; I’d written it in my notebook. “Why was I drawn to that?” she asked. I said something about the question: “what has come here to die” being something I was asked on Dartmoor, about the forest monks over in Thailand choosing the scary places for their meditations. I was defending myself against a perceived charge of being morbid. What I didn’t say is that it was a stream source. The sources, I’d been told in the south, were where the spirits had been driven back to.
The bananas are a disturbance-tolerant species; slower than nettles, faster than pines, they grow where landslides or loggers have cleared the real trees. These ones were not small, though, they’d be house-high in England. Huge black leaves of Arenga, the wine-palm, arced down from the slopes to touch the ground by the stream. Leaves here, are long enough to be paced out.
Đoặc - that’s the wine palm in Vietnamese. The Katu language calls it Ta Vạc but they don’t speak Katu in these hills.
I fix up my bug-nest to a miniature cliff at the side of the valley. Thin trees but well-rooted. I set the tarp as a roof. There’s an animal trail breaking the lip of the valley here. Would be the place for a trap if that were my game. Pigs come this way and, decades ago, saola too, I expect. Someone once told me the saola liked to rest up and chew cud on the slopes where bananas grew. He meant sunnier places than this but there’s browse here; the slopes across the way are thick with môn thực. Also, I think, snakes - and specifically krait - might find good ways to glide between the stones at the side here, on their way down to the stream bed for frogs. I can see it exactly, as if on a camera trap photo. I will stay in my hammock. I’m sorry. I will.
And that is what I do. I brush a tiny hairy caterpillar off my trousers, - those things can be dangerous - swing my legs into the hammock and lie there worrying. I worry a whole lot about ChatGPT because I’d clicked on a Facebook post the day before while trying to distract myself from worries about work. I worry - for some reason - about Martin Shaw’s new book ‘Bardskull’. I mean, I record this fact in my notebook but I cannot remember how or why I was worrying about Bardskull, which I still haven’t read (I will). Probably it was the Christianity of it. I notice the difference between worry which keeps me in my hammock and fear which drove me out of my shelter on Dartmoor - drove my out of the town in the first place. “You only start swimming when the water reaches your arse” as it says in this book.
And there’s a treeshrew! Coming over the stones in that scurrying hug that they have, as if the Earth itself were a trunk they were liable to fall off. Surprisingly squirrel-like without being rodents and nothing like shrews, treeshrews were once celebrated as the distant ancestors of humanity. Now they aren’t celebrated at all, the internet doesn’t love them and they can almost be just themselves; as meerkats or pangolins can’t. If you go to a southeast Asian forest, they’re likely to be the first mammal you see that really proves that you are where you are. This one swarms up towards me over the stones and, to my surprise, just keeps coming; it’s almost scary. It pushes under my hammock and off up that path I had clocked as if I weren’t there at all or didn’t matter. Well! I feel oddly unmanned. It is a national park, I suppose, near a tourist spot. Small-ranging animal like this, maybe it really does live in a spot on the map that is shadowed from the fear of us.
A hanging tattered banana leaf, dead and beige, looks like a man hanging there. Hanged man, OK noted. I can do mammalian orders, I can do major arcana. Doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing. I am lying in my hammock. I stick my head out until it falls back in again. I’m tired and I’m worrying still.
And then, standing in the streambed below me, bowing first one way and then the other, is a blue whistling thrush. Again this is a common animal of these forests, like the treeshrew, but a rather more impressive one. If you know British birds, I think I can describe it precisely. Imagine a blackbird the size of a jackdaw, spangled like a starling on the shoulders and you’re mostly there. Imagine, though, that it holds itself with a raven’s confidence; a dinosaur chieftain, alert and shining on the brow. While the colour in deep shade is very like a blackbird’s, even the slightest bosc-light would show it is not black but midnight blue and the shoulder-spangles and the brow-shine are blue also, darker than kingfisher or jay-wing but at least as refractive. In the understorey, light seems to condense in the brow of the thrush as it condenses in white things under a stormfront or darklight. There’s a charge showing up in the bird and the word for the charge might be ‘agency’. It swipes me with a gaze from either side of its brain, just as a song thrush might swipe a snail’s body over a stone. And yet I feel welcomed. And yet I feel undeserving of the welcome.
Line about birds from a poem that’s stuck in my head a long time:
“They do not know compassion and, if they did, we would not be worthy of it.2”
It’s actually more frightening to think of the welcome as genuine. What a bird! God made this one first, this is Bird; that’s what I’m trying to say, to the utter confounding of everything I know.
Anyway. Blue Whistling Thrush. In the streambed. He’s clocked me. That’s cool. To be expected in this habitat. I hope I’m not in his way actually; I’ve hung my nest in a spot that ought to appeal to him too. He swoops off and, in the hammock, I doze.
I dream about Rowan being very sick. Anxiety dream.
I dream, then, about being in Cúc Phương instead of Pú Màt - that’s another national park to the north, outside. When I was there - for real some years back - I remember the management board had put up a bunch of laughable warning signs to suggest that animals long since exterminated from the park might be spotted crossing the road and cars ought to be careful not to hit them. In my dream these animals are still there; we can still see them. Saola aren’t included; Cúc Phương’s outside the known historical range, and I can’t remember, on waking, what beasts there were. What I do remember is some kind of festivity going on; a very un-Vietnamese affair in some ways, with no banners, no speeches, no soft-covered seats. Instead a group of youths are clambering atop a pile of truly gigantic logs. There is a famous ‘1000-year old tree’ in Cúc Phương (or perhaps it’s supposed to be ‘3000’, I can’t remember) and it seems that it, or someone similarly enormous, has been felled or has fallen and some wild and populous shenanigans are taking place atop its hacked-up body. It is Vietnamese enough in that it involves large numbers of people making a lot of noise. Also inasmuch as it has a little cluster of westerners, myself included, standing at the side and making disapproving noises, which in this case are about health and safety. That pile is definitely not stable, and those logs are truly huge. If they rolled away, well… we’ll keep our distance, thank you. I think people were also handing out flyers, and we were avoiding them. Then the logpile’s internal frictions did indeed yield and it burst outward but the disaster didn’t happen. Instead, I saw what seemed like a tremendous tree fly up through the air to fall beside us but, when it landed, it was a chunk of wood no bigger than a coke can.
“Perhaps that’s just as obvious as it seems” Caro said later, and I agreed. Then, reading over my pencil-scribbles again, I saw a phrase I’d missed: “Protests (in paper).” Within the dream, I’d read a newspaper, probably the same tedious, English-language paper that used to headline with stories of leaders affirming the importance of ‘ties’ and made me homesick for free speech; in the dream, the paper explained that I’d not been witnessing a protest, rather than a state-sanctioned celebration. I now don’t know what it means at all but I do think it was about something larger, at least, than I am. It wasn’t about saola, though. It seems the action was shifted to another park just to underline the lack of saola in the dream.
I wake in the night to more worries about artificial intelligence3. The tarp falls down, dumps rainwater on me. I'm fine, though, I have my bivvy bag. I head up the cliff to tie it more securely. Again, I am fine.
02/04/23
In the dawn light, a small bird - I think a jungle flycatcher - fans its tail on a branch above my hammock and zips off, as if to tell someone.
I do not want to get out of my hammock.
I do not want to get out of my hammock.
With my eyes closed, I see screens.
And then I see cards - like tarot cards. Woodcut pictures, black and white. One bears another ‘hanged man’ image - but of a woman. She has a belly like a crab’s. The title of the card is ‘GRAVELO.’ Apparently this is a kind of mountain-biking.
That is pretty much all that happens for a huge chunk of the day. I don’t have the energy to be bored. I don’t have a watch on. My phone is switched off in my bag and I feel no temptation whatever to turn it on. Just picking up the bag would be too much. I’m content to lie there. I am not feeling desperate, only exhausted, and so nothing is happening. That’s what I think.
I watch a small lizard exploring the slope. A crab exploring the pebbles of the dry stream bed.
It seems like it’s darkening.
I have to do something. This was supposed to be a big deal.
What did I do on Dartmoor when I felt that nothing was happening, that I hadn’t really stepped up to the task? I took my clothes off and lay in the leaf mould, feeling the cold and worrying that Lithobius centipedes would run over my balls. I remember thinking then how laughable it was that I was scared. In the Annamites, I thought, there would be leeches and there would perhaps be Scolopendra which are like Lithobius but super-sized and venomous. I felt it was ridiculous but it was enough. I was exposed enough for something to start, to shake me out of what I was trying to be. So that is what I have to do here too, then. I shrug my clothes into the hammock and walk naked to the stream source. The temperature is balmy, the sky overcast. I haven’t seen a single leech. I curl up with my forehead on the stone, like a big stone myself. With something, imagination or sense - you know what I mean - I reach out into the mountain behind. The mountains, in fact, but they are not divided. They go up to the border ridge, where our cameras found bears in the fog. They include the pool whose water I drank to taste for minerals and where a free saola was first caught on camera in 1998. I’m thinking of these places only lightly, to mark out the size of the darkness that’s inside the mountain and from which the water is emerging. I reach out to this dutifully, with the little ardour I have.
And I get back a shaking, a hint of a rhythm, that’s all. I’d say I ‘hear’ it in the same way I ‘heard’ the music on Dartmoor. I could tell, just about, that it wasn’t with my ears - but I did have to check. It wasn’t like an earworm; I had those too. Writing it now I feel I need to talk about the quality of it and turn myself to the question of whether it was ‘real’, how it was ‘received;’ even if I then dismiss that question. What seemed important then was that it was a different kind of music. It was like drumming or like cicadas, insistent and majestic, shaking off the dark hills like rain from black fur: shaka shaka shaka.
Well what do you expect?
I sit up after a while. All this time, I’m scared of kraits. Sure a krait is going to come up the dry streambed and find out what I am late enough to be angry. One bite. It’s stupid obsessive paranoid stuff.
I do this a few more times. Then back to the hammock. Then back to the rock face.
Two Inornate Squirrels, muscle through on the same path as the treeshrew earlier and it’s odd how similar they look to that animal, given the orders between them. The squirrels run up and down cliffs and trunks all around my hammock. How are creatures here less wary than those in England, after all they’ve been through?
At the rock, I sob a little. I realise a krait is not coming to get me. I find I am just sitting there. I could be in so much trouble when I get home, I think, but I'm not feeling desperation. I'm just not. An antler-eyed fly moves through the hairs on my arm.
When I’m back at the hammock, the Whistling Thrush comes back and sits on a knuckle in the vine there beside. So big, so close, so soft in the darkness. I was right, I suppose; I am in his theatre. Again, he looks at me all ways, then swoops across the glade to snatch up a worm. Earthworms here are also more dynamic than at home, they thrash and wriggle like Erasmus Darwin put 1000 volts through them, but that big yellow beak snaps this one up regardless and the thrush wings straight back to his stool.
This close, I find my eyes drawn to that huge yellow beak. It’s yellow like a blackbird’s but there’s more than the colour to it. It’s massive. Not outsize like a toucan’s, but huge like a sea eagle’s, though it’s not at all the same shape as that. It does the same job as a blackbird’s beak - I’ve just seen it do so - just as the sea eagle’s beak tears and gulps like the beaks of other eagles, but a weapon like that makes a statement, it glows in its class. There’s not a kink in its lines to mark it as deluxe but you can’t help but see it. This bird just goes around carrying that thing the whole time.
And the legs of the bird - they’re so long. Long, yet they move so swiftly over the stones that the bird’s body is mouse-sleek above them, unpausing. Compare my gangling calculated progress. I get myself up the stream as elegantly as I assemble an IKEA cabinet. Competent is the best praise I can hope for; I’m worse than the crab.
On his stool on the vine, right by my hammock, the thrush tucks one of those long legs up. I don’t think I have ever so much simple unfearful attention from a wild animal in my life. His throat bubbles a little, he’s singing softly to himself. I feel, again, most undeserving; any ordinary person from Vietnam would have brought incense. I dreamed of extravagant libations and ended up here with nothing at all. I should at least apologise. So I start talking quietly to the thrush. He instantly flies away.
I see him again, though. He’s about the grove. Once, he sees off another like himself - so fast I see only a flurry. The squirrels are back and forth too and I’m back and forth to my stream source cliff, even in the night [03/04/23] where the fungi glow around my face in the darkness. I take a torch down there, I do, but I turn it off when I arrive. “Krait, krait, krait.” my mind says but it’s only anxiety.
I have an anxiety dream too. We’re lost on safari in the African savannah. We’re on motorbikes; myself and my wife. There are lions, cheetahs and buffalo and the buffalo chase us, a mother and calf. The calf follows longest and is grey fuzzed and big-eyed, with the faintest hint of white markings, a water buffalo calf, not an African buffalo. Just an anxiety dream it seems like: we’re lost and we can’t get back. It seems that to me then. It seems like that to Caro when I recount it and then, writing it up, I think: a wild calf? You really didn’t see any significance in that?4
Well then it’s the morning and I’m still myself. The birds are singing. My mind is still racing and anxious but then that’s what I thought before. I write that ‘I guess the lesson is it's not easily healed' which seems like a very ordinary thing to say.
I write a haiku on a piece of paper and leave it as my offering to the grove. Of course that means I have to not use any of the images from it in this text or ever. I’m quite pleased with one of them so that counts as a sacrifice, I think. I leave some pebbles from Cromer beach which I found in my raincoat pocket also, weirdly smooth among the shaken black lines of the cliff.
And I am down the stream, up the slope, walking down the road past the banner adverts. I meet people at the upper restaurant and am delighted with the difference in my own manner. I’m polite and calm with everyone. A lady, who is clearly in charge, helps me get a lift and confirms that the price I was given for the taxi was the correct one. I resolve to leave the remainder at the cafe on the way out.
My ride takes me to the other restaurant and it turns out that the old man crouched on the table before really was Mr Th-. I’m offered noodles. I’m offered an egg in the noodles. I enjoy the noodles. Then, unfortunately, I get taken to the ranger station where I get my wrist slapped. The senior ranger on duty calls up our contact in the science division and confirms that no, I did not have permission to stay overnight in the forest. Foreigners can’t just stay overnight in the forest in Vietnam, even in a tourist zone. He will let me off this time but next time I could be fined. This is how it is. My last visit to this ranger station was more embarrassing, but that’s another story. The tree in the yard is a peach tree. The old ranger once worked in Bulgaria. I have caused trouble and been unprofessional. I’m not really sure if I’m more or less effective if I keep or break the rules. I’m not sure I care about that question any more.
We’re away by motorbike and we wait in the petrol station for the bus. I do leave the extra change at the cafe. I’m glad I’ve redeemed myself from being that kind of foreigner. I arrive in Vinh too late for lunch and at midday with no-one to meet me except two drunk South African students who fall off their motorbike in the university entranceway.
I wait a long time for a shower.
I say goodbye to the team in the office. We go to the airport. The lady at the check-in scolds me for being late. I hadn’t noticed I was late. I go out to the aeroplane. That’s it.
04/04/23
On the aeroplane, I sit serene. I have no real desire to watch the TV and, when I think about it after some hours, I scroll through various foreign films and then decide against it. What I want to do is look out of the windows.
I look out of the windows over China and see the ground burnt, the hills scribbled over, the river bloated. Nothing at all but devouring. I jab my thumb into my ankle. Have to hurt more somehow. Pleased after to still feel a little pain. Then they darken the windows. Just assuming that no-one actually wants to see out. They can check the flight map on screen if they want to know where they are. This is a daytime flight!
Somewhere over western Russia I realise the window darkening has manual controls
Weeks later, back in England, I go to sit out under an oak tree in the Pocket Park at the bottom of the lane. Again, nothing much is happening. The oak tree is just coming into its fire. A muntjac fawn wanders out into the long grass in the evening and I cry. In the morning I go to church and take communion, breaking my fast and my intention. Bounds had not been set. I set my same big bulging army rucksack under the pew. I arrive late, partway through the sermon. The sermon is how Jesus is not just a wise man who did kind things. That old chestnut. The priest walks out before the congregation, out through the vaulted porch and looks up to the morning as if to ask it how he did.
Not sure if that’s relevant.
With myself, mostly.
Of course this has to be a thing I worry about. I am constantly reminded what it means for our cousin species to share a world with us. Climate change raises the prospect that privileged humans may be the marginalized humans of the future. AI raises the prospect that humans, as a whole, may be the powerless animals of the future. I don’t think anything eliminates this possibility bar wishful thinking and a misplaced sense of the absurd.
…after all, when I was a teenager, it was believable to have humans on Star Trek beating AI at chess in the 23rd century. Now that’s absurd. Really, there is nothing more absurd than literal monkeys sitting in literal boxes deciding what’s absurd. I mean, we belong to a species that has selectively bred thousands of lineages of plants to have hugely inflated colourful genitals so that we can cut the genitals off and use them in our courtship and bonding rituals. We see the presence of large clusters of inflated colourful severed plant genitals as a marker of a gentle and harmonious domestic life.
To think there’s anything special about humans in the cosmic sense… well, for all that Christianity scares me sometimes, the idea of an Eden which necessarily includes our eternal sacred forms is enough to reassure me that I needn’t worry to much about the full orthodox package. That Eden seems so tawdry and so obviously self-serving.
…unless, of course, you don’t really believe in time. But then why talk about the future at all?
Hey welcome to the footnotes. This is where we forget all the spiritual introspective stuff and crack open those cans of sweet worms.
I think you should seriously consider writing a book about the whole saola experience.