the jungle

Sean:

Sorry to belie the title of your blog but since I am taking you on this tour of southeast asia, it would be almost impossible not to talk about the power of the jungle in this place. It is everywhere here, doing what jungles do-taking over the roads and throbbing into the cities and being dense and green and powerful. They are unimaginable. When I have been hiking around (whether at work or play-tons of scenes of the movie have been shot in the coffee fields south of krabi and “coffee field” actually means jungle with coffee trees in it ((by the way, coffee trees are kind of cool and only grow about 9-10 feet. Quite pretty. And the coffee harvest here lasts only 3 weeks a year, so for the other 49 weeks, they just do their thing and the farmers grow palms (for oil) or rubber (for rubbers))), one has some of the same feelings when surfing, “I am in nature’s hands,” or “ I am soooo small.” Something like this. The sun is blocked out and the earth is always sweating and pulsing and air is suffocating. Another thought that comes to my head is what the hell this place would have been like if someone had been shooting at me. Maybe because we were boys who played war and are just old enough to have never really had to deal with one, it is easy to slip into that mindset. You feel the 60 pound pack. You hear dick ritter yelling at you (well, I guess not him since he was sipping mai tai’s in the city). You can’t help but raise your umbrella to the “ready” position. What our boys must have gone through. I am not getting political or patriotic, but man, we were fucked. Not in the wrong (read another blog for that shit), just fucked. You could train for a thousand years in the states but until that first wave of jungle grabs your ankles, you have no idea. These people have been here for thousands of years and it is deeply in their blood. They take the heat and the effort and the secrets of the place to heart. It is theirs. We had no business trying to take it (again, not in the political sense, just the actual sense) because we could not possibly get it away from them. If you could just hear the jungle hum and zip as you simply pound through it. The way the logs look sturdy and then explode under your foot-the termites the size of your big toe. The things that slither off as you round a corner. This place is remarkable on so many levels but you cannot help thinking of how foreign it is on so many levels. A million of our boys came over and felt that same thing just 40 years ago. Our mother’s friends. Just one generation off. I am sorry they died here. I am sorry they had to hate this place. i am sorry they never got the chance to just glide through the jungle and memorize the patterns of the falling leaves and the centipede trails. To the Vietnamese, it was just a part of their long history of war. No better or worse than any other. But to Americans, it looms large in our heads and hearts. I kind of think I know why now, even if most Americans don’t.