Always so much to say when I’m traveling. From my journeys to Sulawesi and Bali emerged an ecstasy of expository epigrams, emitted from the environmental epicenters of some small but significant islands. (You can now find those dispatches in hoary archives of the Seacology Foundation; how quickly news fades into memory.)
It was a long, productive, but exhausting trip: six weeks in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and India, enjoying the
separation from church and state but also aware, every day, of how much the world has changed—and how much I have changed—since my first Asian odyssey, many long years ago. On my final day in Nepal in 1984, I remember walking around a sacred ficus tree holding the hand of a little blind boy, offering prayers to Saraswati and fighting back tears; during my last day in Thailand, just a few weeks ago, I went to see King Kong (the new one, of course) at the Siam Center multiplex, where I had to wrap myself in broadsheets from the Bangkok Post to fight off the cryogenic blast of the air conditioning.
The ape is loose, all right. Learn to love it.
Or give it as wide a berth as possible. I have some terrific friends in Bangkok, and they arranged a special trip to the Kha Khaeng Nature Preserve, an area so sensitive that only naturalists and rangers are usually granted access. It took five hours to drive there from the city, but once we arrived we were immersed in a jungle so wild and vast that no one even knows for sure how many tigers live within its boundaries; a place so raw that, retracing our steps after a short hike, we’d find our boot prints covered with elephant, deer and leopard tracks.
In India, my hosts Sally and Sudama (see my previous blog) took me to the Wildernest,
a 450-acre wildlife preserve in the Sayadhri Corridor: the unspoiled hills where the states of Goa, Keralla and Karnataka meet. Purchased by a dedicated band of local professionals (an Indian Navy captain, his father, a newspaper publisher and a naturalist), the preserve is the home of sloth bears, sambar deer, hornbills, wild bison, leopards, and at least four migratory tigers. Sayadhri one of those magical places that seem suspended in time; a place where even the morning sunlight has an urgent, adolescent quality. I was guided by a young naturalist, Nirmal Kulkarni, who wrote his thesis on the ornate flying snake. Nirmal had a gift for finding things that my own eyes missed, and as we wandered across a mesa he discovered the molted skin of a saw-scaled viper: a gossamer flag that I took as a portent.
Since returning to the States in late December, my work has orbited two poles: preparations for the opening of Strange Travel Suggestions at The Marsh Berkeley, and the revision of my perennial memoir: Snake Lake. Begun in 1990, during the days and weeks following my brother suicide, the story is set in Nepal, New York, and California. It weaves together three very distinct paths to liberation: each a personal, spiritual, or political skin-shedding. With any luck—a lot of luck—I will finish it this year.
Well, it seems I’ve had enough to say here, after all. Maybe it’s not necessary to travel in order to put words to paper. As Robert Benchley once remarked: “I do most of my writing sitting down. That’s where I shine.”