knew that but I did not say this to him. And another reason I had to take everything he said with a large grain of salt: Whenever people we met seemed to be talking about us, though me in particular (sometimes it was the color of my skin, sometimes it was my hairstyle), if we asked Sunam what they were saying, he would say he didnât understand their language. He would say that they were speaking in a local language that he didnât understand. The mystery of what Sunam did and did not understand became a source of much amusement. What are they saying? we would ask. I donât understand, Sunam would reply. A joke between Dan and me was: âWhat are they saying?â[a short pause]âI donât understand,â and this would make us laugh until we ached in the last places left in our bodies that were not in pain from our exertions.
At half past one and at an altitude of 3,030 feet and temperature ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit, we stopped and had lunch in a place that was not even on the map. It was on the tiny plateau of a steep climb we had just made. It took us an hour to get there from the crossing of the Arun River and it was less than half a mile. Of course Cook and his assistants were there already when we arrived and they had our hot beverage waiting for us. We had a lunch of potato salad, mushrooms, and boiled melon. A young woman sat on the porch of her house, lovingly combing her own very beautiful, long black hair, trying to make it free of lice. From her exquisite strokes, I could see that she had much practice, which meant that it would never be so. She looked very sad and lost in that way people do when they are doing a good thing but only for their own benefit.
We walked through a neatly arranged village with houses made of wood and painted white but it was too early to stop and, in any case, the village seemed to take up all the flat spaces where we could camp. It was hot, tropical, and I recognized plants from Mexico: bougainvillea, Dahlia, marigold, and poinsettia especially. Every house was surrounded by a food garden, and though I know that is unusual, a food garden, the way they grew food, squash vines, for instance, carefully trellised and then allowed to run onto the roof of a nearby building, was so beautiful, it became a garden. And in making this observation, I was reminded again that the Garden of Eden is our ideal and even our idyll, the place where food and flowers are one. After that, food is agriculture and flowers are horticulture all by themselves. We try to make food beautiful and we try to make flowers useful, but it seems to me that this can never be completely so. In this village almost every building had something written on it in red paint and the drawing of the sun in much the same way I had seen on the bridge earlier. I did not ask Sunam where we were, for I suspected it fell into the category of a place with no name, a place where he did not understand the language. We walked on and spent the night on the school grounds of the next village, a village called Hedangna. That village had a center concentrated around a little fountain of water, built not for beauty but for necessity. From the school yard where we camped, we were surrounded by the most stunning view of a massive side of a cliff from which poured white, stiff bands of water. They were waterfalls, but they didnât seem to fall in the way I was used to. It looked as if they had been set down there on purpose, so constant was the flow. It was so stunningly beautiful in its cruelty. For the people who looked at it, myself included at that moment, could die from want of it. It is very hard to get water for use in this place where there was so much of it. Water could be seen everywhere, but difficult to harness for human uses. After a few days, we looked more like the people who lived in this place than as if we did not. We looked as if we longed to bathe and I smelled that way too. As if to remind us of
At half past one and at an altitude of 3,030 feet and temperature ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit, we stopped and had lunch in a place that was not even on the map. It was on the tiny plateau of a steep climb we had just made. It took us an hour to get there from the crossing of the Arun River and it was less than half a mile. Of course Cook and his assistants were there already when we arrived and they had our hot beverage waiting for us. We had a lunch of potato salad, mushrooms, and boiled melon. A young woman sat on the porch of her house, lovingly combing her own very beautiful, long black hair, trying to make it free of lice. From her exquisite strokes, I could see that she had much practice, which meant that it would never be so. She looked very sad and lost in that way people do when they are doing a good thing but only for their own benefit.
We walked through a neatly arranged village with houses made of wood and painted white but it was too early to stop and, in any case, the village seemed to take up all the flat spaces where we could camp. It was hot, tropical, and I recognized plants from Mexico: bougainvillea, Dahlia, marigold, and poinsettia especially. Every house was surrounded by a food garden, and though I know that is unusual, a food garden, the way they grew food, squash vines, for instance, carefully trellised and then allowed to run onto the roof of a nearby building, was so beautiful, it became a garden. And in making this observation, I was reminded again that the Garden of Eden is our ideal and even our idyll, the place where food and flowers are one. After that, food is agriculture and flowers are horticulture all by themselves. We try to make food beautiful and we try to make flowers useful, but it seems to me that this can never be completely so. In this village almost every building had something written on it in red paint and the drawing of the sun in much the same way I had seen on the bridge earlier. I did not ask Sunam where we were, for I suspected it fell into the category of a place with no name, a place where he did not understand the language. We walked on and spent the night on the school grounds of the next village, a village called Hedangna. That village had a center concentrated around a little fountain of water, built not for beauty but for necessity. From the school yard where we camped, we were surrounded by the most stunning view of a massive side of a cliff from which poured white, stiff bands of water. They were waterfalls, but they didnât seem to fall in the way I was used to. It looked as if they had been set down there on purpose, so constant was the flow. It was so stunningly beautiful in its cruelty. For the people who looked at it, myself included at that moment, could die from want of it. It is very hard to get water for use in this place where there was so much of it. Water could be seen everywhere, but difficult to harness for human uses. After a few days, we looked more like the people who lived in this place than as if we did not. We looked as if we longed to bathe and I smelled that way too. As if to remind us of
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