Spooky Veil Night

Greetings, 

I am now in Saigon or HCMC which is short for Ho Chi Minh City. An old name and a new name. One door closes and one door opens. But, as they say, "the hallways can be a bitch."

The last time I was in Saigon I was on my way out, over the pond to what we called, "The World."

I've been on the ground for 24 hours. My initial feeling is that it's more relaxed, open and looser than the conservative north. A most pleasant exchange after 4.5 months. Attitudes, life styles and progressive vibrancy.

As usual, up and out early. I spent the morning sitting in the Cho Lon Chinese marketplace in throbbing mercantile zones near sewage, garbage, vegetable sellers, screaming motorcycles carrying precarious precious loads of everything from food to towering stacks of plastic sandals, wholesalers, hustlers, beggars, thieves and market women who, after the initial suspicious glance or stare thinking "what in the hell is that guy doing here?" they went on about their daily business of haggling, selling, gossiping, cooking, scheming, dealing, and living.

Then, I wandered down no-name streets and found large Chinese pagodas where I lit incense, made offerings, scribbled notes and focused on creating photo magic. Delightful.

Metta.

 

I need my cage cried Finch

Greetings,

I met with Tao at the Chocolate & Baguette early in the morning to discuss the possibility of my doing some volunteer English teaching and hospitality training. She sent my contact information to the director in Ha Noi.

Here’s an example of a story inside a story. Or it could stand alone. 

“Finch's Cage.”

After seeing Tao I wandered downhill and found a “new” side street. I needed some thick cold java and wanted to scribble notes about our conversation. I found a run-down internet cafe and sat outside. Here’s the true story.  It’s about a human-bird.

Finch had a yellow chest, red beak and brown feathers. It was outside the plate glass door. It had escaped from its small yet safe bamboo cage in the main room. Someone; perhaps the young mother worried about her wailing infant or her old mother worried about dying alone or her brother worried about dying of boredom had left the cage open.

Finch was outside. It sang, “Where’s my home? What is this beautiful world?”

I sat fifteen feet away watching it. Finch hugged the ground. It looked at green trees waving across the street. It saw the deep blue sky inhaling clear, clean mountain air. It heard birds singing in the trees but it didn’t understand them. Their songs were about nesting, exploring, flying, clouds, trees, sky, rain, warm sun, rivers, bark, worms, snails, and melodies of freedom.

I wondered if Finch would fly away. I hoped so, then again, I knew it was afraid to go. Perhaps it lacked real flying experience, the kind where you lift off quickly beating your wings furiously to get up and get going to escape the weight of gravity pulling you down and then you can turn and glide and relax and soar. However, Finch being conditioned to the caged world of bamboo with a perch, food and water merely looked and listened to the world.

Finch retreated from the possibility of free flight and pecked at loose seeds in a narrow crevice below the plate glass door. It smelled the dark stale room where the cage hung on a wire. It pecked under the frame. It wanted someone to rescue it.

It sang. “Help! Let me in. I want to come home. I’ve been outside and I’ve seen enough. It’s a big scary place. I promise I’ll never try to escape again. I was curious, that’s all. I’ve seen enough. Let me in!”” 

Finch was amazing in it’s beauty. Yellow, red, brown - bright eyed in it’s aloneness. 

Finally an old woman came out and opened the door allowing Finch back inside the room, trapped Finch in a purple cloth and returned Finch to it’s cage. She closed the bamboo door and snapped the latch shut.

“Did you learn your lesson little bird?” she whispered.

Finch sat on it’s perch, enjoyed a long cool drink of water and sang. “Thank you. Now I am truly happy.” 

The old woman didn’t understand this language, muttered under her breath about inconvenience and shuffled down a long dark hallway to a kitchen where she killed a chicken for lunch.

Metta.

Sapa Tale

Greetings,

Before shifting my fluid base to Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) this weekend I will post more Sapa material lest it become lost in the dusty archive of a Moleskine. Besides the words, here are three images to share with you. The Nikon and Leica galleries hold extensive Sapa visual stories if you have time.

Sapa is a remote mountain city in the Northwest and a favorite among tourists and travelers. I blogged and linked to Sapa earlier. Fresh air, amazing friendly local people, the H'mong, Red Dzao and Tay. 

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All night a heavy rain decorated the lake. Ripples from the center. Water echoes.

 My room is on the 4th floor of a cheap local hotel overlooking the lake, away from the typical tourist backpacker joints.

Above the lake are heavily forested eastern mountains with high granite ridges running north. Fog and water and low clouds rumble over the peaks, down the valleys bringing rain, fog and mist. It’s a perfect environment. 

The moving, falling water creates whirlpools on the lake with a steady falling mist.

The air is clean and pure. It feels marvelous. 

At 7:30 a.m. I jump in a van for a three hour trip to the Sunday Bac Ha market south of Sapa. It is “famous” for the Flower H’mong women’s elaborate colorful clothing. In the van are four Australian girls completing their nutritional studies program in Ha Noi.

It’s a splendid wild nature ride up, down and through narrow mountain passes, often with zero visibility as we are surrounded by thick cold fog. It is pouring in Bac Ha and the market is flooded with locals huddled under blue tarps buying and selling. There are lots of foreign tourists. It’s the Sunday “happening.”

We drop the girls off in Lao Cai so they can catch the night train to their dietary studies I and return to Sapa through the clouds as twilight sweeps over peaks into deep valleys where roaring rivers sing.

One Morning.

I rescued a brown moth from room #402 so it could fly into the sky.

At dawn I saw a bright white, yellow sunrise over the eastern mountains. Behind me was a brilliant rainbow arching over the high green western hills. Perfect natural equilibrium. 

I met Sa, a H’mong woman and we walked around the cloth market discussing the finer points of fabric quality. She told me a story about a H’mong woman in the far north mountains who was kidnapped by Chinese men from Yunnan, taken over the border and forced into prostitution. When she became pregnant she was taken to a remote cabin in the Yunnan mountains and kept there as a prisoner. One day she escaped and returned to Vietnam. Human trafficking is a growing problem in the world.

Sa also talked about how there is a lack of minority owned shops in Sapa.

By now most, if not all the H’mong women and kids know me. I’ve been here longer than the average tourist who does 2-3 days; takes a trek, explores the area, maybe really gets to know the local people and then they vanish, back on the train southbound.

I smile and speak with everyone along the path. In-out, up-down the steep sunrise street, past tourist shops and restaurants. “Same-same, but different,” goes the t-shirt proverb.

I am just sitting with the mountains, sky, clouds, kids and dancing stories.

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How to travel inside the market. How to carry fresh meat in a box on your motorcycle so you can stop, chop, weigh and sell to the people on the street. 

The village of Sa. Small steps going down, Steep trails, dirt, plants. She identifies wild plants on the hillside used to create the indigo colors in their clothing.

The wild terrain. Rising rice terraces where people harvest. People cut, thresh, stack of stalks and burn them. Isolated puffs of smoke dot the valley below rising green forests and mountains.

It’s a long simple home with a dirt floor and bamboo walls. There are also some wooden walls but wood is expensive. The home is divided into a kitchen on the left, main room and bedroom. The main room has a TV and DVD machine. Under the roof is a storage area.

Outside is a faucet for water, water buffalo pen, pig pen and writing pen. Actually there’s no writing pen. 

Indigo cloth that has been repeatedly dyed in a large vat hangs to dry along a wooden wall. Stacks of straw for winter feeding are stacked. Twenty-five kilogram bags of rice in blue, white and orange plastic bags made in Indonesia are piled in a corner.

Sa's husband returns with the water buffalo and we share a simple lunch prepared by one of Sa’s three daughters. She is 19, a mother, a trek leader and speaks excellent English. Many girls marry at 16. They begin families. We share rice, tofu, and greens.

Metta.

Sa's husband. One harvest per year.

Nuclear Waste

The New York Times ran a piece on the toxic cleanup at Los Alamos, New Mexico garbage site. It's costing a cool $212 million. Los Alamos was part of the Manhattan-Project in 1945 where they tested the Trinity atomic bomb.  Read more...

The article is linked to the Hanford, Washington nuclear site where the Department of Energy is working on a glassification project to store radioactive waste. It will cost $1.9 billion. It will take forever. Environmentalists say that Hanford may be the most polluted nuclear site in the country. 

I lived in Richland, Washington for a year paying the bills as a tennis professional at a club and writing. An engineer friend worked at Hanford. In June 2001, when the reactor was down for maintenance we went there on a tour. Surreal, educational and scary.

I wore a dose-o-meter badge to register the levels of radiation as we moved through various levels at the site. As I remember there were at least six deep levels underground; labs, control rooms, offices, machines, lower halls with 55-gallon drums destined to be placed in huge earth excavation pits, the core reactor area and a room with giant turbines. I stepped outside to see the giant electricity grid feeding the Seattle area.

Here is a brief excerpt from my novel, A Century is Nothing and images I took on the tour. 

...My team dived into, under and through massive Columbia waterfalls near tributaries where the confluence of Northwest rivers gnashed their teeth, snaked, roaring past abandoned Hanford nuclear plants where 55 million gallons of radioactive waste in decaying drums left over from W.W.II slowly seeped 130 feet down into the ground toward water tables. 

Tribal survivors ate roots and plants garnished with entropy. 

Fascinating. 

He turned another fragile yellow page marked Top Secret Evidence.

“It’s called Technicium, TC-99,” said an Indian scientist on a shuttle between reactors. “This is the new death and we know it’s there and there is nothing we can do to prevent it spreading.” 

“The waste approached 250 feet as multinational laboratories, corporations and D.O.E. think tanks vying for projects and energy contract extensions discussed glassification options and emergency evacuation procedures according to regulations. Scientists read Robert’s Rules Of Order inside the organized chaos of their well order communities. 

“Hanford scientists, wives and their children suffering terminal thyroid disease ate roots and plants sprinkled with entropy.    

“The postal worker and the nomad talked over a counter while a frantic mother yelled at her daughter, “DON’T touch the stamps,” because at her precocious age curiosity about colors blended itself toward planetary exploration developing her active imagination. 

“Holding a nebula in his hand he told the woman how, up in the invisible sky, are all these really cool galaxies which means we are a third the life of a 3.5 billion year old universe and she said, ‘That’s interesting. I never looked at the stamps before,’ handing him change.” 

He returned Omar’s papers to the folder and traveled beyond the forest on comet star tails.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, after seeing the atomic test said, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

I suggest you see Hanford Watch for additional information and images.

Metta.

Fast Flux Reactor, Hanford, Washington.

The control room at Hanford.

Cooling rods being removed from reactor.

Ghost Stories

Greetings,

In today's New York Times I found my comments included in a section called "Ghost Stories." I would like to thank the editors for selecting my piece.

On October 22, I posted an entry called BEDLAM AND HEALING. It was about the NYT and their "Home Fires," opinion section where Brian Turner, a Vietnam veteran posted his essay and poem. I'd read this and entered a comment and later read all of the postings, numbering 163 at that point.

Here is the entire piece and a link to the site. Read more...

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Hello Brian and Travelers,

I am a Vietnam veteran, author, English teacher and photographer living in Ha Noi after completing a teaching job in Indonesia. I felt it was time to “return” to a place where, as a green 19 year old, I was really on the ground.

I served with the 101st at Camp Eagle near Hue. I needed to get a sense of place and perspective. Nature has reclaimed all the land. Only the spirits and ghosts and memories remain.

I went to the Phu Bai airport. The yellow and green small simple cement building sits next to an “International” box. On the ground I found a discarded paper baggage handling tag. On one side in all caps it said, "EMPTY." I put it in my pocket.

‘Yes, ‘ I realized, ‘this completes the picture of my returning.’

As I wrote in my novel, “A Century Is Nothing” when I returned to San Francisco from Saigon heading to Denver they gave us a new green uniform.

It was a strange flight to Colorado. I grasped the significance of being a ghost. No one spoke to me. They averted their eyes. Maybe I smelled like death, evil incarnate, a green silent demon. Maybe all the passengers were afraid because I represented their worst nightmare. I was invisible, just like now.

Fortunately my “homecoming” was brief, then I continued to Germany where I finished my military time. Two years later while attending the University of Northern Colorado insensitive students, knowing my history, called me a “baby killer.” They had no idea. I didn’t absorb their sense of anger, frustration and illusionary ignorance.

Brian’s poem is a truthful insight how it feels to be invisible after a war. How leaves and rain and medicine birds are all. A cleansing and healing ceremony indeed.