Invisible Trail

The bow of our boat slid onto the muddy river bank under a shabby row of stilted bamboo structures. That was all of Pac Beng at the time, but for a few guest houses for overnight layovers. In the morning the boat would continue up the Mekong to Huay Xai on the Thai border. Unknown to me, I would not be on it.

I climbed up the rutted dirt slope to one of the eateries hanging over the river. At the entrance a big-shouldered, big-jawed man about my age with long greying hair sat at a small table. He glowered at me as I walked in. I had met others like him in my twenties on the road from Afghanistan to India in the late 60’s, the early travelers, often German or French. Many had that same fierce-eyed out-sidedness to them, like eagles who had shaken off their hoods. They had left everything behind, and swooped eastward into places like Benares, Katmandu, Goa, Laos, and Thailand. Many were into cheap drugs at the time. They huddled around their chillums of hash, bundled in sheep fur coats in mudbrick villages like Kandahar. It was an invisible trail we were all on. Not to a physical place really, but to a knowing that we had arrived. We travelled any distance and took any risk to get there. And here we were again, back on the road at this age. In his case he might have never have left it, still perched out in the middle of nowhere. I asked him if he lived there in Pac Beng. He flicked his head, blowing his breath out like smoke.

“You leave on the boat tomorrow?” he asked, ignoring my question.

I nodded.

He shook his head angrily. “Crazy! Stupid!” He twisted himself in his chair to glare at me. “The real Laos is right here. Fucking rich with culture. Right here in these mountains. No one fucking ever looks for it. Such bullshit.”

I nodded again, thinking just another crazy motherfucker on the road who never fit in anywhere. The real Laos, he said. But I knew what he meant. The place that is only real as you are with yourself. It wasn’t that we had to get off the boat, some of us had just never gotten on it.

I had salvaged enough money from the sale of our ocean front home after the divorce to come back to Asia. Yeah, I was shaken to the core. The life I had built and so believed I wanted was now out of reach. I had taken the slow boat up the Mekong. In the midst of taking photos of the boat’s rumbling old diesel engine with offerings of money and flowers tied around dripping pipe joints, and banana leaf bundles of sweet rice on the engine head, I heard what sounded like a chainsaw howling up the river. A spear-shaped speedboat suddenly raced past with a handful of tourists, their heads shaking crazily about in shiny crash helmets. Some had their arms outstretched making videos on their smart phones.

This was not how I understood travelling. Thrill seeking tourists oblivious to their wake almost capsizing a Sampan with a boy and his father fishing. No wonder the Frenchman was going grey. I went on YouTube and watched a video of one of those speedboats. It had slowed for tourists to video the corpse of a Laotian man floating on his back in the river. His penis was shockingly erect, and dark as a root pulled from the riverbank. No one onboard showed any consideration for this man’s dignity, or for how desperate his loved ones must have been searching for him. I felt deeply sad suddenly. That is the path that French guy and I are on, I thought. To tow the body ashore. To tow ourselves to ashore. The tourists posted a caption at the end of the video, Nobody Cares. Then their boat sped away just to prove it.

A young Laotian man came to my table to take my order. I asked him if there was any way I could get out into the mountains to visit a Khmu village. His face brightened. “Yes, I am Khmu. I can take you on my motorbike.”

That was it. All of 10 minutes had passed since the angry old traveler at the door had zapped me. The next morning an hour or so outside of Pac Ben, we pulled off the empty mountain road into a small cave where Sampone parked his motorbike. The walls were covered in rusty brown crystals. I scooped up a handful from the cave floor, and chuckled to think of my sons, someday finding these dusty gold shards in a scrap of cloth, and wondering whatever trail their Dad had been on.

Across the road and down an embankment several logs lay river-thrown over large boulders. The force of the current thundered under them. There was no sign of life anywhere, just a stream descending steeply from the jungle slope opposite. Sampone balanced his way across, looking back at me with a happy-home-coming smile. Not his village, he said, but his jungle. We climbed natural rock formations upstream. I soon realized we were on an invisible trail. Here and there conspicuous positionings of logs and rocks created stepping distances over fastmoving water. My foot found a blackened notch in a vertical log exactly where needed to ascend to the next level. Sampone plucked herbs for me to taste along the way. The jungle was not my home. I kept my attention on every root and branch for snakes.

The jungle gorge shallowed, and we climbed out onto a narrow valley floor of abandoned rice fields. The ancient Khmu practice of shifting agriculture had left the fields exhausted, cracking and crunching underfoot. Up ahead a mountain gorge descended from the morning mist. I could just make out the thatched shapes of houses that emerged like hidden images in a jungle picture. Then a human cry rose from the mountainside. A long wail of grief familiar to any human being on this earth, followed by a sky full of cries resounding over the valley.

Sampone turned to me.  “Someone has died,” he said. “Maybe a family member years ago; they are all remembering.”

At the village entrance we passed under an arch made from tree limbs that led through a broken-down fence surrounding a small village of thatched homes. Sampone said that the fence was protection from evil spirits. There had been plenty of those around there, I thought. American cluster bombs that rained down for nine years during the American war on Vietnam. More bombs had been dropped upon tigers, langurs, sambar deer and the Laotian people, including the Khmu than any country in world history. An estimated eighty million undetonated bombs laid about Laos, still blowing up 1000’s of people every year, mostly children. Memories of another time can also be like bombs that go off when step on them.

We passed under the entry arch and came upon some women laying on a roofed platform. They lay together like seals beside several small children, as if waiting for a wave to take them back to sea. By all appearances the children were dying, pale and listless, crusty eyes with flies crawling on their parched lips. Their limbs and chests were wrapped in banana leaves bulging with tribal remedies of herbs, roots, and flowers.

We proceeded into the village past bamboo homes on stilts. Kids gathered around us, thick mucus running from their noses, and snot dripping off their chins. Almost all had distended bellies. Little kids had insect scarred legs, and thick broken toenails as if they had already worked a lifetime barefoot. The adults showed no response to my presence, not raising their heads from their task at hand, averting their eyes when they passed me. Only the fixed eyes of an elderly blind woman walked up and stared right through me, as if I were vapor. And I felt the chill of her to the bone.

In the village center I stopped at a large cooking pot over an open fire. An animal’s head, that looked like a deer skull lolled to the surface with a jawbone full of teeth. Some women sitting there were the first to acknowledge my presence, politely offering me a cup of soup.
Already feeling sick at heart, I politely turned my interest to an old shriveled woman seated in a pile of tobacco leaves. She made me a cigarette rolled in a leaf as precisely as a bird making a nest, and struck a match. I had only inhaled two puffs when a wave of nausea so overwhelmed me that my fingers seized the post next to me. I clung to it over the animal head soup, breathing the bone marrow steam, and the whole village broke into uproarious laughter.

Sampone appeared relieved, and walked up to tell me the villagers wanted to know if I was married. Holding my cigarette at arm’s length, I told them in all honesty that I needed a wife, that mine had just left me. They understood right away that my joke was the truth. A number of people quickly pointed at an old lady approaching. She had a small cooking pot in one hand, and a large comb chopped down into her top knot like a hatchet. They said her husband had recently died, and she could be my bride. The woman stopped, apparently stunned by what they were proposing.

I am not sure what possessed me, but I stepped forward and spontaneously threw my arm around her shoulders, as if we were a couple. Certainly we both understood the heartbreak that was not a joke. Her flesh quivered in my grip, wild as an animal’s caught off balance, before she could lunge sideways. The crowd erupted again in laughter. Sampone got a photo of me squeezing my unsuspecting bride. A photo that caught the irrepressibly sweet smile on her face.

Feeling more comfortable, but unaware of Khmu superstitions and codes of behavior, I took some photos of emaciated children gathered in the doorways of their homes, mindful of the pigs eyeing me like airport security guards. Sampone caught my attention, giving me a similar look as the pigs. He waved for us to leave.

Something happened as I walked back past the cluster of dying children in their pagoda at the village gate. I turned back, and leaned over each one of the children, and tucked 10,000 Laotian Kip under each of their arms, about 1 US dollar each. I actually glanced at the mothers as if I had done a good thing, but no one looked back. I still was not visible to them. I did not look back either as I walked away. I had probably insulted them. Even if I had given each a thousand dollars, they would not have moved off their platform of spirits and herbs. Theirs was another world. Nothing I could do would help them.

I plodded along behind Sampone, my stomach nauseous. I felt numb, floating over my feet crunching the desiccated earth. I had no sense of the trail I had come on. It was if I were climbing back into clouds over those mothers bent over the bloodless faces of their children. And up ahead in the horrible silence, no screaming or pulling out their hair, or cursing the moon and every star above was the inescapable glare of their acquiescence. The courage of heartbreak I had never known. Yes, what bullshit. What monsters we have become. I stumbled. There had never been any path through indifference and the horrid justifications. The weight of the earth slammed up under my feet. That crazy Frenchman spoke the truth. The trail is right under your feet.

When we got back to Pac Beng, I asked Sampone to show me to the small medical clinic in town. I explained the situation to the Laotian doctor in charge. His reply, as Sampone translated, was that no, I could not bring the children there. He could not begin treating Khmu patients. I had to be there to see it through, and pay for it.

The doctor sat with one hip on the edge of a hospital bed and looked back at me, just staring, waiting for me to get it. To get the life and death realities in Laos. In their world of taboos and magic, watchful animal spirits, and gods of harvest and transcendence, I was the one in need of help.

Sampone and the doctor spoke for a moment before Sampone turned and told me that the doctor had advised us to go see the French Doctors. They had just come to town from Doctors without Borders, and had set up a temporary clinic right there in Pac Beng. They were staying for a week or so. I could not believe our luck. We hurried out and found a French medical team in a small whitewashed community building on the only crumbling asphalt road through town.  A long line of locals waited on the veranda to see the two men and a woman doctor, working with a Laotian nurse. The room was jam packed. I approached a bearded doctor in his 40’s bent over a patient. He looked up with soft tired eyes. In very limited English he explained they did not have the resources to travel to tribes in the mountains, but he said I could bring the children there for treatment.

I could scarcely keep up with Sampone as he ran to some roadside food stalls in the market. He reappeared pulling out a young woman to meet me. She had a taxi pickup truck with wooden bench seats in the back. Her face brimmed with warmth to hear my plan. The next morning, she sped us back up the highway in her truck, and we hiked up the stream to the village. The three of us walked up to thatched roofed platform where the mothers lay beside their children, unchanged from the day before. Sampone told them to get ready to bring their children to a doctor in town. There was no reaction; not one person moved.

We walked to the center of the village where Sampone told me stand aside while he spoke to the villagers. I sat on the wrung of a ladder with my chin on the backs of my hands. There was still no reaction from anyone to my plan. Villagers moved slowly about their business, unshouldering wood for cook fires, and stirring food in pots. The elderly and children carried babies around. Most of the adults were at work in the mountains.

Activity in a bamboo hut behind me turned my head. I glanced inside over the top of the ladder. Light sliced between bamboo wall slats over grass mats covering the floor.  A woman was stuffing a sack with personal things. A naked and swollen bellied toddler came to stand beside me, with his nose dripping on the mat. More bundles began to appear at the bottom of ladders outside homes around me. My God, I thought, the whole village is coming, bursting like a meteor shower from their isolation. A huddle of villagers approached Sampone and I, kneading the shoulders of a small sad-eyed man. He stood pale as a clay statue with his head hanging down in front of us. The villagers wanted us to take him with us.

The crowd merged at the front gate of the village and several women peeled off carrying children with bundles balanced on their heads. The sick man started out carrying two children in his arms. On our way across the fallow rice paddies, I turned and counted our troupe: four very rugged women, one sick man, and five limp children, ten in all. We turned down the mountain stream with its slippery stones and waterfalls, all its steep and precarious negotiations. Much as I tried to keep up, the cracked heels of the Khmu people in their worn-out flip flops outdistanced me in a weightless surefooted pace downstream. I leaned over ledges to take photos of them, all in line over the log bridges like leaf cutter ants, weaving back and forth with their bundles from bank to bank among the boulders and under foliage. By the time Sampone, the taxi girl, and I had reached the big river, crossed the log bridge, and climbed back up to the highway, the Khmu were assembled at the truck, quietly as stones rolled down stream in a long-ago flood. We loaded into the deep shade under the roof in back. I sat opposite the sick man at the end of the bench, holding on as we lurched forward. The jungle blurred white with sun behind the brown shoulders of the mothers, steadying the milky-eyed heads of their children against their breasts. No one made eye contact with me or said a word.

At the clinic they crouched in line, still as moths on tree bark. The French doctors spent quite a while treating each one of the children, fulfilling prescriptions, packing up hydration packs for diarrhea, antibiotics, antibacterial skin creams, and administering injections. Something was wrong with the scrotum of one of babies. I didn’t know what. After a few hours, they were all done. Each mother was instructed by a Khmu translator before they walked out how to use their sacks of medical supplies. The pale Khmu man emerged looking quite relieved. I asked the bearded doctor about their illnesses. From what I could understand, all of them had diarrhea, but probably not Dengue, the hemorrhagic fever common in Asia. The older man may have had malaria.

The French doctor, I first spoke to, ignored my thanks.  He just politely nodded and turned back to his work. Right then and there, I understood. Gratitude would suggest an alternative for what a person knows he must do. There was none for them. Not for me either I had just discovered. Doing what we were all doing had nothing to do with heroism, or ego, or anyone’s appreciation or response.

I followed behind the last mother and child as they walked out, and stopped in the road a few meters behind the truck. My job was done. The villagers sat in the back of the truck facing each other on the bench seats. No one turned to look at me waiting for them to leave. They tended their children in their laps with their belongings, and bags of new supplies stuffed in around them. They were right. I could not be a physical reality in their world. I had swooped in by plane and would soon be off again. Khmu believe they are under the protection of totem spirits, including an eagle that watches over them. The invisible trail I had followed to their village had no more hidden steps. It all ended as this truck dug its back wheels into a cloud of exhaust. That was until one of the mothers turned and looked directly back at me for the very first time. She held my eyes, and slowly raised up the flat of her hand. And the way came clearly to me. Clearly as the river tossed log, the flat-topped stone bubbling under the surface of brown stream water, or the slippery foothold in the waterfalls. Yes, I will keep following this trail. Yes, I will get off the boat. Thank you, crazy Frenchman. Thank you, Khmu.