The hill top experience

This photo is from a few years ago. I had spent the previous night in the jungle below with a group of men from the nearby Lahu village in the northern tip of Thailand. It was a rough night physically and mentally. We had spent the late evening walking up stream through the shallow river, trying to catch small fish with nets and handmade slingshot harpoons. I only had one pair of shoes for the trip, and I didn't want them wet for the remainder, so I had borrowed a pair of size 9 cleats (3 sizes too small for me) from one of the villagers who insisted.

At midnight, with our headlamps fading and a few handfuls of fish and other small creatures which would only be used as bait in the developed world, we left the river and went to higher ground to follow the moonlight back to the smoldering fire and campsite. After ten years of intense language and cultural studies, regular trips to these mountain villages, countless hours of drinking tea and listening to stories, eating everything put in front of me, hunting together, playing their games, singing their songs and building true friendships, I felt barely any closer to understanding, knowing, or being known. Even the language that I had learned (Thai) was not preferred by the men in this group. So, as we sat around the fire the other men went to work on the food, cutting bamboo sections and filling them with water from a runoff. They knew which leaves to pour the rice onto that would fold perfectly into pouches to be stuffed into the bamboo. They knew which part of the blade on their machetes to use to mash up the smallest shellfish or to cut open the fish.? They knew the roots to dig up and grind into the fish and chili paste they made on the leaf plate in the dark.

The making of the food gradually overlapped with the eating of the food, served on new leaves and charred bits of bamboo that the rice had been cooked in.? The other men could squat for hours so they just spread the food on a few long banana leaves on the ground and didn’t let their feet touch the eating area. After a little while I had to stretch out my farang legs away from the food without turning my back to everyone. The cleanup happened much like the cooking, gradually while people ate with their hands, and without ceremony but with an understood order.

I laid out two banana leaves side by side to sleep between the rib of each and my jacket balled up for a pillow. It was getting colder but the fire was being built up now that the cooking was done. It was late into the night when I laid down and pulled my still damp quick-dry towel over me to try to sleep. My friend and coworker YawSaPa had an audience a few meters away at the fire but was speaking Lahu and all I knew was that he was teaching and they were all listening.

It was a long night. Hard ground, cold air, the vague threat of unknown creatures above in the trees, below in the dirt and rotting foliage, and constant movement of bugs from all directions. When asked, the Lahu people always said that scorpions, spiders and centipedes are not dangerous, only painful if stung. "What about the Cobras, Vipers, Banded Krates, and Pythons?" "They stay away from fire." I wouldn't say that I had a lot of fear of these things, just didn’t sleep quite as soundly as I would in the woods of Maine or Ohio.

Okay, back to the photo posted here. That morning I got up cold and stiff and climbed out of the jungle. The 600 feet of elevation gain warmed me up and loosened my muscles enough so that when I reached my dirt bike I was ready for the two hour drive out of the hills and back to the town. The high point of the road shown above was a high point of the experience as well. The moment where I was ready to be grateful for everything. But without the low points, the high point doesn’t bring the same kind of joy.

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