
This past weekend, I visited the Pucheefa Forest Park with some friends of mine. I wanted to briefly note the experience, trying to remember the details before they're lost in the wash of time and forgotten like so many wild thoughts and secret moments crowded out of the memory by the dull hammering drone of the everyday and the ordinary.
My friend Ali, a friend from yoga, part of my Monday night yoga sangha (of which I will surely write more on), who works at Chiang Mai University, invited me to accompany some students of hers to camp on the top of a mountain near the border of Thailand and Laos. I agreed, after being assured that we would not be riding in a
songthaew but in a lush air-conditioned private bus.
I awoke before dawn on Saturday morning, gathered all the warm clothes (it's really cold up here now!) that I had brought to this "tropical" country, and set out against the pale darkness that still ruled the earth at that hour. I picked up my friend April, a yoga teacher at
Wild Rose at the Three Kings Monument, in the center of the old city. In front of the monument, scores of Thai people were doing morning aerobics. I commented to April about the sweet secrecy of the time just before dawn, how an anxious kind of hush descends upon the world about to wake up. As if you accidentally stumbled upon the day as she was getting dressed, and divined some secret of her anatomy that would have otherwise been forever locked away in the realm of the secretive. We drove up Huay Gaew Road, toward the mountain, feeling the chill that clings to the skirts of the mountain pierce our thin jackets. Turning into the university around half-past six, we met Ali and her friend Jordan in the parking lot of the humanities building.
We waited, as is the fashion in this country, about twenty minutes past the arranged meeting time for the driver to arrive. He did arrive. In a dingy light-brown sonthaew, which would comfortably fit about ten people. We were sixteen.

One of the students, whose friend he had counted on to drive another songthaew, reluctantly relayed to the group that he was unreachable. We discussed our options, deciding that if we rented a car and followed them, all would be comfortable.
A Thai liaison relayed this to the driver, who was also a professor at the university, whose incredibly Thai response I will try and recreate verbatim:
"Oh, do not worry, everything is fine and relaxed. There is no need to rent a car, it will be expensive and since we are all each other's older and younger brothers and sisters, we will go together in a relaxed way and have good fortune. Never mind do not worry."
So that was our answer.
We resigned to clamber into the back of the truck, thinking foolishly that the closer we sat to the cab of the truck, the lesser the amount of wind that would be able to whip in and chill our already cold bones. April had the foresight to cite her residual trouble with motion-sickness, and was granted a coveted seat in the front. Ali, Jordan, and I, along with eleven other Thai students, who clearly had never experienced cold before, crammed ourselves into the truck, sitting opposite each other on the eponymous songthaew's two rows. Two students were given pre-school sized plastic chairs, which later caused a Thai girl to comment that it in fact was a "song thaew krung," and two-and-a-half row, which I realize as I type it lacks the certain punch it did then, but it was damn funny crammed in there like sardines. I asked this same girl about now how many hours it would take. Her response (deadpan): "long time."
We rode for an hour, my foolish lack of knowledge of the aerodynamics of songthaews put on full display as the 50 degree wind whipped in around the cab, funneled in through the curved roof through small gaps in the welding that held the covered portion of the songthaew to the truck it once was. This created a forceful and concentrated sustained blast of cold air that my body was fortunate enough to block from the rest of the passengers. Nothing could assuage this barrage of frigid air. If I shoved my pillow into the gap between the carriage and the truck, the wind redirected upon my legs or face. If I simply thrust my back against the corner of the cabin, the wind found ways to draw all warmth out of my face and nose. I was inconsolable. But like a good Thai, I bore my pain in a contemptuous silence, until I saw my chance for escape.

We stopped at mid-morning for breakfast, hot noodles and pork. April and I conspired to oust her Thai partner in the front, claiming that I was her boyfriend and was also prone to carsickness, a malady that affects many, if not all
farang. I was granted the honor. The rest of the ride up the dizzy hills of the northland was undertaken in the cramped warmth of the shared front seat, April in the middle dodging the gearshift with her knees, me pressed up against the window as the clear winter sun flooded in over the hills into the cab of the truck. My water bottle sweated in the sun, the thick beads of perspiration catching the light and refracting with a golden hue the radiance the sun layed out across the land. The fields had been cut, and stood solitary, mute, chopped haphazardly but with an innate sense of order. The long stalks of wheat or corn were cropped to only a foot in length, and with a resigned but bold rusty color, bore the days of winter in the mountain sun. Beyond the fields stretched the green mountains up into the clear azure sky. The mountains straddled that fine line between jagged and rolling, as if unsure of their identity as mountains, or perhaps too new to have acquired the thick flesh required to be called rolling. In the indecision lay a certain beauty, a tense kind of sparkling radiance, at once calm, at once fierce, but at all times more than pleasant to look at. The day warmed as we moved north toward Laos and the mighty Mekong.

We stopped to admire a lakeside village called Phayao, taking in the pink water-lilies resting on the surface of the water, our Thai friends posing in all necessary poses (peace-sign fingers, hand to chin splaying thumb and index finger like a check mark, sundry poses of infinite creativity and utter cheesiness, the ubiquitous hear no evil...)
We stopped for lunch in a nondescript town whose name demands to be forgotten. We were advised to buy food for dinner (despite the existence of food stalls where ever there are people).
We climbed back into the truck, our legs stretched to endure a few more hours of cramped jostling driving.
The songthaew winded up and around mountain roads, climbing slowly and steadily a valley of rolling hills, patchworked by agriculture and glinting in the early afternoon sun. The higher we climbed, the more spectacular and sweeping the vistas became, the thinner and clearer the air. As the road became less civilized, marked with potholes and patches of sandy dirt, April and I talked at length about India and the nature of being out on one's own. She is twenty-two, fresh out of college, pursuing, as I am, a clearer picture of herself and the world around her. Talented at many forms of expression, not the least being song and dance, she told me her story of growing up in Colorado, of visiting Israel, and her tangible and intangible goals for coming to Asia. The time passed beautifully as we climbed the hills, the sun softly falling in the sky.

After eight grueling hours in a rusty songthaew, whose windows were old and warped and would not shut, we arrived at our campsite, a mantel in a steep hillside that overlooked a valley sprawling with green and rolling into the foggy distance. We quickly set up our tent and set off to hike up the knobby hillock, scarred by a single trail, that sat atop top of the ridge above us.
Climbing past a gold meditating buddha, and two children with weather-beaten faces selling incense and candles, we reached the summit and beheld the other side. Over a large pile of pockmarked boulders stretched a valley cut horizontally by a straight and coursing river. The Mekong, which flows from the hidden hills of the eastern Himalayas down through Cambodia and Vietnam to empty in the South China Sea. Beyond the physical line cut by the river was Laos. The cold mountain wind swept up the mountainside and blew straight into us. It was achingly beautiful. There was a strange fog on the horizon that visually divided the earth from the sky. Above the foggy earth flew the clear and pure sky, blue as my mother's eyes, crisp as a glacier melt. My eyes watered from the wind and enormity of it all.
We climbed down and watched the sun sink behind the murky haze floating on the horizon line. Two lights shone bright and metallic in the early night sky, one bigger and brighter than the other. We wondered what stars would have the audacity to shine through the twilight. I later found out they were Venus and Jupiter, out for a short time to align beneath the waxing moon to create a smiley face in the early night sky.
That night the temperature dropped below six degrees Celsuis. The wind ravaged the feeble ledge as my tent clung to its stakes in the cold earth. We attempted a fire of bamboo wood, but the wind, changing directions and force every few seconds, drove us into our tents and sleeping bags. The Thai children that built our fire for us were long gone, off in the cold empty night to shriek their waning adolescence into the wind.

The next morning, we awoke at around seven, collectively but without speaking deciding not to go to the top of the wind-swept hill to watch the sun rise over the Mekong. Though the promise of beauty called strongly (almost as strongly as my bladder called me out of my warm cocoon to walk the five minutes to the bathroom), I could not muster the courage to leave my refuge of warmth.
We finally did awake, eating a quick hot noodle and hot chocolate breakfast, before disassembling the tent, bounding across the campsite to rescue a tent tumbling towards a precarious ledge followed by three screaming Thai girls, and packing everything back on to the roof of the songthaew, our noble chariot.
We lumbered back down the mountain, straddling potholes, crossing wooden bridges rusted with age spanning rocky streams, down through the saddle between the mountain we camped on, Doi Ba-dtang, and Pucheefa, which in Thai literally translates to, "point at sky." We wound around turns up into the Pucheefa forest park, past some beautiful gardens and landscaping that looked cold and huddled.

Climbing the steep hill from the parking lot, past children peddling fat infant buddhas, "authentic" hill-tribe wares, smiling beneath cheeks ruddy and worn from the mountain wind, we reached the top of Pucheefa, and beheld the great stretching mountain ranges, jagged and torn, sitting like open jaws waiting for the sun.
The sight filled me. With what, I think I have not the capacity to say. Or perhaps (shifting the blame here) that words have not the capacity to express.
Rilke says it better:
"Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life."
This landscape was a work of staggering art. By whose hand, no man could say. I will say that it filled me with a sense that life is designed for these moments. Designed to put you in a muddled place, to make you forget the real and clear things by weighing you down with the everyday. Then, if you're lucky, and you have the sense to pursue it, you get moments where the world lays itself out before you, where the expansiveness of beauty and the fortuitousness we possess to be able to behold it, weave and fly together in a single silent song.

I sat long and drank from the well of life.

That of course made me have to pee.
The drive down was a prolonged, rocky exercise in quiet contemplation. A bemused sort of quietude. A gracious quiescence.
We arrived home at the faded edges of twilight, tired, full, alive. I returned home to read and go to sleep.
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I would love to offer a word on the current political situation in Thailand. I imagine you have been following it. The truth is, it has no real effect on me. I am in no way invested in it. Neither side is acting for the good of the nation. Neither side has a solution to what ails the country. I fear for the economy, for the tourist industry, and for the future of the monarchy. Now it seems, the PAD will leave the airport. This is not the end. The solution reached is a disguised apparition of the same thing. Know that I am safe and will not be affected by the turmoil that plagues this country. Do tell your friends to come here, not to deter any plans should they have them. I think once the economic effects of this disaster are fully felt, a lot more people will be a lot more indignant.
But for now, as the late afternoon coolness creeps in from the windows behind me, I must depart. Thank you so much for reading.
d.