Well it’s back to the battle today

“It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.” —Dr. Maria Montessori

we try out some Montessori

I’ve been reading a lot about Dr. Maria Montessori (Italy, ca. 1900) and Montessori-based education. I’ve written about it here before. Although it can feel overwhelming, this sense that an entire child’s future rests on my ability to do parenting “right.” I read an article recently that questioned that thinking, that said that we should be thinking of educating children more as being a gardener, rather than being a carpenter. Basically: not worrying about it so much. Not thinking of parenting as a verb, as something that you do, but as a relationship. We shepherd our children, we cultivate the ground they grow in, but we’re not actually trying to shape them, as we would a board, into a specific design.

Yet: my struggle is that I feel like there are many things being done wrong by parents today. There’s this sense in the article that most parents do things more or less right, and that most children end up more or less okay. This assertion I question. I, myself, have struggled for a long time with something I hesitate to call mental illness, because it feels more common than that. It feels literally ubiquitous, in the sense that this cosmic unease—or angst, or a kind of low-level anxiety—is everywhere. Everyone has it. I’ve written about my struggles with depression, and I’ve written about my struggles with disordered eating.

It is, of course, that eternal question of nature versus nurture. When things go wrong with our children we want to blame nature, but when things go well, we think we’re doing a great job.

And I feel like many things are going wrong with children these days, and not just children, because children grow up to be adults, and adults and children together make society. There is much I see wrong with our society right now, much I believe needs to change. Maybe if we focused a little bit more on our children, on the ways in which their needs are and are not being met (or maybe I say so because I happen to have a preschooler) we might see some changes at a larger societal level.

I just hunted online for my possibly apocryphal article (which, I believe, really did make the case that the kids were going to turn out okay), and it turns out that the research is actually from a book by Alison Gopnik titled The Gardener and the Carpenter.  Maybe I heard about it on my new favorite (that’s a stretch—I have so many favorite podcasts right—but I wish to God they’d do an episode about Carl Jung) podcast, “Hidden Brain.”

It turns out that Alison Gopnik makes exactly the point I’m trying to make, much better than I could, about the problems with the carpentry method, and the gardening method that she supports is akin to Montessori.

Referring to the carpentry model, she says: “the main harm is that it makes the process -- the life of being a parent -- anxious and difficult and tense and unhappy in all sorts of ways that are unnecessary. And I think it makes it that way for parents, and it makes it that way for children… the carpentry story is one where you're so concerned that the child come out that you're not giving the child the freedom to take risks and explore and be autonomous.”

Even though children of carpenters can be considered more successful: “in some ways, they're doing much better. They're achieving more, they're less likely to take risks, they are less likely to get pregnant or to use drugs. But that goes with a kind of anxiety -- high levels of anxiety, high levels of fear …that is what you would predict from the carpentry story.”

So, Montessori. Although whenever I mention the word, especially to another mother, I find my listener’s eyes immediately shut down: already they’re hearing, “You’re doing it wrong. Do it this way instead.”

Which, in short, is what I am saying. But I’m not saying: worry more about how you’re parenting. I’m saying: trust your children to follow their own path. Prepare their environment, make it safe, and then get out of their way. Don’t worry about whether or not they’re doing the right thing, but trust that what they’re doing meets their current developmental need, whatever that is.

I find it so difficult to put this essential Montessori principle into words. It is, as Dr. Montessori wrote herself, the “secret of childhood,” but the more I learn about it the more I see these principles borne out by research again, again, and again, not just for children, and not in work that uses Montessori terminology. It seems to be not just the secret of childhood, but the secret to happiness, to contentment, to joy.

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Take, for instance, the idea of focus. That particular intense concentration that children use in order to grow, to explore, to learn to do the things that they need to do in order to be complete human beings. The focus that a baby has when she is learning to crawl, or walk. It is one of the things that initially drew me to the practice, all the blogs with moms showing pictures of their children with what I now call Montessori face: a look of intense focus. Of inner drive and determination.

independent baking

"We cannot know the consequences of suppressing a child’s spontaneity when he is just beginning to be active. We may even suffocate life itself. That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendor during the sweet and tender age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious veneration. It is like the sun which appears at dawn or a flower just beginning to bloom. Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.”  --Dr. Maria Montessori

I’ve begun to think of those moments when my daughter is in deep focus as sacred. To interrupt her, to ask her if she needs to drink some water, or to teach her how to construct a tower, or to say we’re leaving for the library— any of these things interrupt the neural pathways that she is building, the pathways that she will use for the rest of her life when she is deeply immersed in something invaluable to her.

In short, it is flow. I take for granted that you’ve read Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow? Or that, even if you haven’t, you know what I mean? Flow is that right-brained state an artist enters into when he is painting, or a writer when she is writing, or a violinist when he is practicing. Full immersion into a timeless eternal state, where one may as well not be in one’s body. Again and again, in study after study, in book after book, I read about flow as being the one essential element to happiness. People are happy in their jobs when they can find flow. In their lives, when they have a hobby that allows them to slip into that state. That old saw “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is about flow. I keep reading self-help books, and they constantly refer to the concept of flow, and how essential it is to recover true contentment. (Designing Your Life is the book I read most recently that mentioned the concept.)

We say what we most want for our children is happiness, but really we deprive our children of the concentration that brings it, every chance we get. When they’re born we immediately pack their playrooms with every possible brightly colored electronic gadget that sings and dances, with rotund jovial cartoon animals that never occur in life, with screens and noise and color and sensation—anything to distract them from the horror of life— that must be what we really believe, right?—and then we wonder why they’re unable to put their own toys away, why they can’t sleep, why they’re having tantrums, why they’re so upset. All they need is a calm, safe place to discover the world and all we offer them is distraction.

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Take, for another, the Montessori idea of self-reliance.

Or self-trust, self-motivation, self-esteem — whatever you call it. The idea that I can know myself, deeply, intimately, and believe, at an intuitive level, that I know what is right for myself. I have come back to this self-reliance in my own life as I’ve begun intuitive eating, learning that my own body’s fullness and hunger signals can be trusted. Again, it is something that reoccurs in my reading so often, especially on the self-help websites I frequent: the number one predictor of happiness is intrinsic motivation.  (Like here!  Link: "Self-Reliance Is the Secret Sauce to Consistent Happiness")

Anyone can be shamed into doing anything. It’s a method of force, like physical pain. As soon as no one’s looking, though, we’re going to go back to the thing that we really wanted. When we become ashamed of ourselves, we lose our ability to trust our inner intuition. For a child, self-trust depends on learning that the way I want to play the blocks is a manifestation of my own imagination, and of no one else’s. It means teaching children that their desires can be trusted, and followed, and that they lead where they should go.

It’s one of the things I’ve read about early-childhood education that has the most data to back it up: this understanding that saying “good job” actually subverts children’s sense of self, because it takes away their ability to rely on their own intuition and motivation.  Link:  "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," by Po Bronson

"In short, 'good job!' doesn’t reassure children; ultimately, it makes them feel less secure." --"Five Reasons To Stop Saying Good Job," by Alfie Kohn

"Excess praise can be damaging to our children's intrinsic motivation (working just for the pure pleasure of it -- not to please anyone else)." --"Break the Good Job Habit" by Aubrey Hargis

It’s so counter-intuitive, right? Because we’re saying that what the child is doing is good! We’re supporting him! We’re telling her she SHOULD trust herself! Aye, there’s the rub: US adults, from the outside, telling children what to do, what’s good, what’s bad, instead of allowing them to discover the world for themselves.

The reason we don’t say good job is not because we don’t think our children are doing a good job. It’s because we don’t want them to be reliant on other people to think that they’re doing a good job. We want that sense of satisfaction to come from inside, rather than from outside.

"Lest there be any misunderstanding, the point here is not to call into question the importance of supporting and encouraging children, the need to love them and hug them and help them feel good about themselves. Praise, however, is a different story entirely."  --Alfie Kohn

I continue to struggle with praise as an adult, as a writer. All I want as a writer is external validation. In the form of publication, or an agent or an editor telling me that my words are worthy of reproduction. In the form of money. In the form of an audience, of you, reading these words. It’s not enough for me simply to write them, to produce them for the joy they give me, the sense I have of order coalescing as I organize my sentences. I want you, reader, to tell me “good job.” Preferably in the comments.

So. Is it any surprise that I want something different for my daughter? Something different than what was given to us by our parents, and what I’ve consistently watched other people give their children: shame, and guilt, and constant reliance on external validation.

A brief story: we toured a Montessori school (Bridgeview Montessori) and the director said that she’d sent her daughter to Montessori preschool, but then to kindergarten at a traditional school. When she and her husband figured out that it wasn’t working for their daughter, they brought her back into Montessori school.  Even in that one brief year, she had unlearned this ability to trust her own intuition, her reliance on intrinsic motivation, her own inner sense of self. The girl would bring her drawings up to the teacher and say: isn’t this good? Is this what you wanted? Is this how it should be colored?

The Montessori-trained teacher would have to answer: what do YOU think? Is it good for you? Is that how you wanted your drawing to come out? Can you talk to me about it?

That’s after one year. Only one year of traditional school.

“...it's particularly ironic because school was actually designed as part of trying to get people trained for an industrial world. In a sense, school was designed to make robots, in that it gave people skills that now robots are capable of doing. And in a post-industrial world, exactly the skills that we need -- innovation, creativity, risk-taking -- are exactly the ones that we're not encouraging.”  --Alison Gopnik

When I say I want this self-trust for myself, I mean that I’m thinking of starting remedial Montessori workshops for adults. Because I have 41 years of that kind of programming to counteract. It’s why yoga has been my heart-song for the last however many years. In yoga, the teacher says: allow your body to be what it is today. Listen to your body, the same way in Montessori we say: follow the child. In yoga, the lights are off and I’m on my mat myself, no one to impress, no teacher to show off for. Even though 99 percent of the time, I’m thinking: did that impress her? Or: oh no, I’m not doing it right.

The other crazy thing about Montessori is how it actually works. Every principle that I’ve taken seriously and implemented consistently has had unforeseen benefits and astonishing success. It works.

The irony is that articles about teenagers all essentially say the same things. Have good boundaries and agreed-upon limits with your children. (Montessori: freedom within limits.) Teach them how to do things themselves rather than doing them for them. Give them autonomy and responsibility rather than helicoptering all over the place. It seems like so much of what we’ve done with the millennial generation, all the evils that are blamed on them, is exactly the opposite: our fault. The boomers, the Karens. We’ve given them no freedom--not to go outdoors, or to get jobs, or to hang out with their friends--and instead have given them limitless addictive technology that may literally be killing their brains.  ("God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” says Sean Parker, Facebook's first president.)

"...that parent can take on the most important role of parenting, that of teaching the child to take care of himself by demonstrating how it is done."  --"When It's Time for Them To Get a Life," by Jim Fay

"An emerging adult who takes the time to deeply reflect and raise their own self-awareness about their innermost desires can be guided by them if they have at least some clues from listening to who they are and what they value.”  --"How To Help My Young Adult Find Their Purpose," by Jennifer Miller

"While some parents may think that they are helping their children to make better decisions and to fix the consequences of their actions, research has shown that parental codependency may alienate children from their own feelings and distance them from self-determination. Ultimately, parents may want to consider setting up boundaries for their children, and also for themselves."  --"Failure to Launch," by Mark Banschick

I become more and more frustrated because not everyone shares this view. The first two essential parts of Montessori education are prepared caregivers and a prepared environment, and I fear I am giving my daughter neither. I do my best, but I’ve been taught to be a voiceless people-pleaser my whole life, and despite my attempts to the contrary, I am not always finding the courage to speak up in favor of autonomy, and joy, and creative freedom, for her or for myself. Plus, these things are effing expensive. I applied for financial aid at a local Montessori school and was told that their financial aid maxes out at 30 percent, meaning if we were to qualify for the maximum, and send Sagan to school part-time for three days a week, school would still cost $5000 a year. This, despite Dr. Maria Montessori explicitly designing the method for poor children.

Then I read the data about how important Montessori is, and how it’s even more effective when children come from disadvantaged or impoverished backgrounds.  It can erase differences between income levels.  “The difference in academic achievement between lower income Montessori and higher income conventionally schooled children was smaller at each time point, and was not (statistically speaking) significantly different at the end of the study," says the National Institutes of Health.  "The Montessori Method is not only superior to all alternatives, but categorically so," says America Magazine, in this article.  "The scientific link between executive function and school success couldn’t be clearer, but the real opportunity lies in taking that science out of the lab and putting it into practice inside the homes and classrooms of our youngest learners," says Mind in the Making, a nonprofit founded by Jeff Bezos (himself a Montessori alum).  

Still, despite the evidence of these and many other studies, education in this country is not based on science. Nothing in our country is based on actual scientific data, least of all the precious minds of our most vulnerable. As a country, we continue to use outmoded, outdated, hundreds-of-years-old traditional pedagogy.

Meanwhile, I’m watching the elementary school in our community be torn down and rebuilt with a $90 million state grant. Money that would pay for 1400 teachers, or to retrofit our public school into a Montessori one, as this low-income school in rural South Carolina did.  (Link:  "Public School Makes the Case for Montessori for All.) It feels like a purposeful attempt to ignore the reality of what is involved in good education for all children. Because a well-educated populace would mean that people have the courage to become active. They wouldn’t be consumed by anxiety and diseases of despair, cocooned inside their houses and their devices. Freedom means the courage to take action: against climate change, against racism, against children’s concentration camps.

“How can we speak of Democracy or Freedom when from the very beginning of life we mould the child to undergo tyranny, to obey a dictator? How can we expect democracy when we have reared slaves? Real freedom begins at the beginning of life, not at the adult stage. These people who have been diminished in their powers, made short-sighted, devitalized by mental fatigue, whose bodies have become distorted, whose wills have been broken by elders who say: 'your will must disappear and mine prevail!'—how can we expect them, when school-life is finished, to accept and use the rights of freedom?”  --Dr. Maria Montessori, Education for a New World

And the gun that’s hanging on the kitchen wall, dear

New England Christmas -- fourteen pounds!

On the beach, during my childhood in Thailand, we celebrated Christmas.  We went and ate shish kabobs and sunned ourselves.  We played ping-pong with other missionary kids from other Christian schools scattered around southeast Asia.  I read Agatha Christie novels and built sand castles.

We did not feel guilty.  Yet it was other people’s sacrifice funding our tropical vacation.  At some point during my childhood, maybe when someone else pointed it out, I realized that all of our income came at the mercy of strangers.  We went “home” to the States, on furlough, to raise money from churches.  These churches, and their elderly members, or families much like ours, working-class families, or wealthy families, or friends—all of them “supported” us.  They gave us money because they believed in what we were doing, evangelizing Buddhist Thailand, and their hard-earned savings funded our barbecue crab dinners and beachfront bungalow.

It sounds sordid, maybe—but only if you don’t believe in what we were doing.  And we did believe.  We believed with all our hearts.  My parents continue the same work, now living in Islamic Indonesia, where people keep framed photographs of Osama bin Laden enshrined on their walls.  There they run a Bible school, in a country which has a regular history of mass slaughter of its Christian minority.

Now I’m doing the same thing.  Asking for “support” from people who believe in what I’m doing, merely to fund my life, merely to fund what I believe in.  And I’m getting it.  I am absolutely blown away that today, with 6 days left of my Kickstarter campaign, I am at 68 percent support.  It feels great, and it also feels terrifying.  Because if people believe in me, then that means I actually have to do the work.  Do my work.

Books about creativity frequently talk about fear, not just fear of failure, but fear of success.  Because being successful means inviting people in, to see the work.  Being successful means that the bar is raised.  Being successful invites rejection and critique.  It means accountability.

Accountability, or the lack of it, is the hardest part of being an artist alone in the world.  I’ve never missed a day of scheduled work—and by that I mean any one of many menial office jobs, or bar-tending, or waitressing, or my numerous other minimum-wage jobs—any job where I had to clock in and report to a boss and had FICA taken out of a paycheck.  Maybe I occasionally showed up late, I took personal days—but I met my obligations.  I called in.  I knew I had to be there so I was there.  But working for myself is a different story entirely.  Why is it so much harder to meet an obligation to myself?

Also, I feel guilt.  If other people are funding my life by their sacrifice, what right do I have to sit in front of the television?  To take days off?  To eat shish kabobs or play ping-pong?  I do not share my parents’ certainty of belief.

Instead, I find myself returning an old prayer, again and again:  Lord, I believe.  Help Thou my unbelief.

After having prayed I believe for a little while longer.  This whole experiment, discovering a community of friends, friends of friends, family, blessed strangers—maybe can make me believe in myself.  One friend, an old friend, my first donor, wrote a beautiful email that said:  the patrons of your art demand such boldness.  And they do.  You do.

[Give here:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/casting-off/artist-residency-at-the-vermont-studio-center-1]

Don’t be afraid

Were Keats’ final words.  More light, more light—the dying words of Goethe.  Fear not, was what the angel Gabriel said when he appeared to Mary, and the command most often repeated in the Bible.  How many times do I have to hear it?

And still I am afraid.  Occasionally I have moments of boldness.  As today, posting a Kickstarter campaign, supporting the fiction residency to which I was accepted this month.  I’ve been at this business, trying to build a career, trying to publish, for ten years now, but this is the first time I’ve actually come out and ask anyone for money—what if all of you say no?

The Vermont Studio Center has granted me $2100 to attend their residency program for a full month:  including room, board, and most precious of all, my own personal writing studio, with desk, chair, privacy, quiet, silence, and space.  But an equivalent amount is mine to match, mine to find somewhere in the dwindling free digital economy.

In my video (watch, to hear me read you a story), I say:  "I know, from personal experience, the ways in which writers are finding it harder than ever to make a living.  Traditional publishing has been upended, and publishing companies are finding their budgets and staff cut yearly.  Yet the demand for content—satisfying, beautiful, well-made content—is at an all-time high."

I can say that I am alive, working as a writer, but am I making a living?  I am alive by the grace of God, by the grace of my dead grandmother, by the kindness of family members and strangers.  Making a living means people actually buying my work.  Choosing to spend their money on it rather than on a coffee or a donut or a mortgage payment.

Writing as a career is a diaphanous veil over an abyss.  Since I was a child, I’ve been told to give up, that I’ll never be successful financially as a writer.  My grandfather started his own publishing company to put his exegetical theology in print, a publishing company that’s slowly going out of business even now.

The things I create do not exist in any space except in your own mind.  Jonathan Safran Foer said, in an interview I attended, that writers are artists that paint on the canvas of other people’s subconscious minds.  The terror of the internet age, as Gillian Welch tells us, is that everything is free.  If everything is free, then how shall any of us eat?  But the terror of the internet comes with corresponding beauty: it puts the power into the hands of the masses.  Into your hands.  What we want is ours to ask for, ours to ask the whole universe for.

J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter while on welfare.  She trusted in her work enough to demand that the British taxpayer to pay for it.  I’m just asking you.

So go check it out.  The worst that can happen?  Utter humiliation and a big fat goose egg.  Nothing to be afraid of.

[Edit to add a link to the campaign--realizing I forgot to include it last night.  Clearly I'm a beginner at this:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/casting-off/artist-residency-at-the-vermont-studio-center-1]

Mawlamyine, Burma (Myanmar)

Decaying colonial mansion

Today I'm looking out over the delta and islands along which George Orwell once walked, the river heading into the Andaman Sea.  I chose to stay in Mawlamyine for three days partly as a kind of pilgrimage (see the masthead), to breathe the same air that George Orwell breathed, walk the same streets that he did.  On the day I arrived, the Breeze Guesthouse owner informed me that the building where I slept, and the surrounding buildings, are a hundred years old.  Well within the time that Orwell-then Eric Blair—lived here.  Did he drink afternoon tea in my bedroom?  (Not likely.  It was more probably servants' quarters.)  Did he make social calls on the balcony where I eat breakfast?  Did he stroll along the oceanfront boulevard, arm-in-arm with a lady and her parasol?

I wandered among the streets on a self-made tour.  His grandmother lived in this city all her life. Her house allegedly exists still, but no one knows where.  Every grand old example of colonial architecture I passed I imagined was it.  And say what you will about colonial fascism (and Blair said a lot), its architecture is grand.  This city may be my favorite example yet, better than boutiquified Georgetown and Luang Prabang.  Mawlamyine's grand old buildings are decayed, decrepit, rotting, their elegance and glamour somehow only enhanced.  Georgetown and Luang Prabang have already been recolonized by the nouveaux riches, but this town is real, authentic, hungry.

Never mind that the riverfront, below the gracious tree-lined colonnade, is covered in heaps of garbage, a festering noxious street-side landfill.

“Shooting an Elephant,” an essay I've never managed to read all the way through (do it yourself, if you dare—it's out of copyright, free for the reading, but I quail about the eleventh paragraph—see if you can make it farther) is set here.

It begins:  “In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people.” 

Critics believe his five years in Burma shaped the rest of his life, shaped his constant and unflinching opposition to totalitarianism, in all forms.  His first three years he spent farther to the north, in perhaps less polarized conditions, the setting of Burmese Days, his first novel.  There he learned Burmese, with friends saying he was able to converse fluently in “high-flown Burmese” with priests.  During his early rural posting he imprinted himself with blue circular knuckle tattoos, a common preventative against bullets and snake bites.

He continues in his essay:  “The sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.”

I feel echoes of the same visibility now, in the attention paid me.  The comments hooted after me are “helloes” and “I love yous” but it still gets badly on my nerves, on occasion.  Annoying occasionally, but not really so much, not in this town isolated from tourism for so long.  Mainly what I feel is gratitude for my presence, for the coming presence of tourism.

Attraction and hatred, two sides of the same coin—the same inability to see each other merely as people.

Blair was a cop, an ambassador of the system he despised:

At that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.  The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been bogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.

For one thing this paragraph is perfectly written.  Each sentence follows the next as inevitable as a windstorm.  The entire essay is perfectly written, fierce profluence, one thought following the next inevitably.  That's why I can't finish reading it.  Especially the distance in his tone, a distance that allows the unsayable able to be said.

But he is graphic about how the unsayable affected him, and despite any internal conviction to the contrary he was hated and hated back.  Maybe the Stanford prison experiment has become a cliché, but in case you haven't heard it:  in the seventies a psychologist staged an experiment that set two groups of college students against each other—some were assigned as guards, others as prisoners.  In less than a week, the guards began inflicting psychological torture on the prisoners.  They took away their clothes, attacked them with fire extinguishers, prevented them from emptying buckets filled with human waste, confined them to dark closets, and refused to allow them to use their own names.  After only six days the psychologist discontinued the experiment intended for two weeks, as a third of the guards began exhibiting truly sadistic qualities.  The conclusion being that setting one group in power against another alone instills violence and hatred between the two groups.

I have a nascent political theory about post-traumatic stress and culture, that entire groups and subsets of oppressed and oppressors experience post-traumatic stress as collective entities.  We have a sense, in the west, that these ex-colonial countries just need to get their acts together, find democracy, the same way believers would tell people they need to find religion.  But the way most ex-colonial countries govern themselves—specifically, Burma—was modeled to them by us, by the colonial powers, with our white man's burden and noblesse oblige.

In Dawei, a Burmese friend Caroline (not her real name) showed me a pdf presentation for a business she’s enlisted in. 

“Taiwan,” she said, as if that proved its legitimacy.

I hope it’s not a pyramid scheme she’s bought into, but I have no way to know.  It involves door-to-door sales, a la Girl Scout cookies or Amway, of things like healthy herbal teas and skin creams made from odd plants.  One slide showed the arches of McDonald’s as a golden symbol of franchised success the world over, and she displayed it proudly to me on the same day I read of a riot in front of the Oak Brook corporate headquarters of McDonald’s, right down the street from where I used to work at a development organization.  I’m fairly sure I ate lunch at the same plaza where the riot happened.

I showed her images of the riot, trying to explain.  She looked bewildered.  McDonald’s is the Holy Grail here, as all American companies are, beacons of the kind of success Burma is reaching after.  I was able to explain with judicious use of my Myanmar phrasebook.

“McDonald’s president rich,” I said.  “Workers poor.”

“Same in Myanmar!” she exclaimed.  “Government rich.  People poor.”

I could have adapted Orwell’s line:  “All people are equal.  But some are more equal than others.”

Maybe we don’t torture anymore, unless it’s of accused terrorists in Guantanamo, or girls enslaved for our sexual pleasure, or Bangladeshi sweatshop workers locked in firetraps for our cheap clothing.  We have our own cowed, grey-faced prisoners—they’re just all black drug dealers.  We hold ourselves at a distance from our crimes so we can justify them.  Ignore the coming Holocaust brought about by our carbon dioxide waste.

Oppressive oligarchies are the same everywhere.

Our new capitalist colonialism, our consumer empire--the future tourist onslaught--is a welcome distraction for people here from the “younger empire” that supplanted the British.  But when every restaurant begins selling banana pancakes and every shop elephant pants—when Burmese people realize that, despite our dollars, their culture is dying, I wonder what their response will be.  I am still a colonialist, colonizing with my culture and money.  I float in the ether of my class, a class that allows me to travel for pleasure even with an income below poverty in the west.  I bring change.

The metal road was building and where it was impassable the Ford car took the bullock track;  here and there we splashed through shallow streams.  I was bumped and shaken and tossed from side to side;  still it was a road, a motor road, and I sped along vertiginously at the rate of eight miles an hour.  It was the first car in the history of man that had ever passed that way and the peasants in their fields looked at us in amaze.  I wondered whether it occurred to any of them that in it they saw the symbol of a new life.  It marked the end of an existence they had led since time immemorial.  It heralded a revolution in their habits and their customs.  It was change that came down upon them panting and puffing, with a slightly flattened tyre but blowing a defiant horn.  Change.      —Somerset Maugham, Gentleman in the Parlor

 I feel I have more to say about this--a lot more.  But no matter how much I write, I can't find a way to express just how Orwellian both modern-day Burma, and its counterpoint, the industrialized west, have become.  It's one of these things that takes time to tease apart in words.  It took Orwell ten years for his essay.

En route from Kanchanaburi, Thailand, to Dawei, Burma (Myanmar)

Myanmar-Thai border crossing at Phu Nam Ron

People say it’s possible.  Even the sohngtaeou driver trying to convince me to go with by sohngtaeou taxi rather than by bus.  I have a single bent $100 bill and I’m convinced that’ll get me at least to Dawei, where they have ATMs.  Allegedly.  If they don’t, I’ll be stranded in Dawei, penniless and alone.

But the taxi driver keeps trying to convince me to go with him instead.  It’s more expensive, I say.  He gives me a Thai proverb I don’t know:  if you think expensive, then it’s expensive.  If you think cheap, it’s cheap.

It sounds like Thai taxi driver logic, to help me break out my pocketbook, but I bet he’d stop at the bank for me so I could exchange more baht into American money.  But then I’d lose the exchange rate twice, so I’m betting on the ATMs in Dawei.  I’ve been back and forth on this decision since Bangkok.  I have no idea what the exchange rate from the ATM will be.

This feels foolhardy to me but also Christlike, going in with nothing, never mind that I have my budget for the month safely resting in a bank account.  I always find some way to agonize, some way to be paranoid and anxiety-ridden.  Confident travel writers would constantly explain their decision in advisory bulleted points:

1.  Bring some Thai baht, but not too many!  You’ll get a horrible exchange rate of baht to kyat.
2.  Bring a percentage of your budget as untouched dollar bills from the US.
3.  Trust local ATMs, now confirmed on the VISA website and reported reliable, for the rest!

Sounds good, right?  If only I believed it.

So now I embark on the bus, driving up the mountains and over, towards the border, into the unknown.

Luang Prabang, Laos

Main street in Luang Prabang

So there’s this other thing that I’ve been thinking about, traveling in a foreign country, and that is money.  Maybe it makes sense that it’s what I’d start to think about, traveling through one of the world’s twentieth poorest countries.  A country that is the most bombed per capita in the world.  By the United States of America, my own government, in a “secret war” against communists.  The one on which Apocalypse Now was really based.

Or maybe I’m thinking about money because at our guesthouse room in Nan the other day, on satellite television, played a very faithful movie adaptation of the Ayn Rand classic, Atlas Shrugged.  A book that I last read when I was in these latitudes.  A book that kept me from believing in the concept of love until I was 22.

If you don’t know Atlas Shrugged, consider that Ron Paul named his son Rand after its author.  It’s a paean to capitalism, an exaltation of self-involved greed as the highest good for society.  Here’s the speech that I flipped to the movie, on my all-English-movie satellite station:

‘Oh, so you think money is the root of all evil?  Have you ever asked yourself what’s the root of money?  Money’s a tool that allows us to trade with one another.  Your goods for mine.  Your efforts for mine.  The keystone of civilization.  Having money is not the measure of a man.  What matters is how he got it.  If he produced it by creating value, then his money is a token of honor.  But if he’s taken it from those who produce, then there is no honor, and you’re simply a looter…’
    ‘Señor D’Anconia, we all know that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak.’
    ‘What kind of strength are you talking about?  The power to create value, or the ability to manipulate?  To extort money in backroom deals, to exercise pull?  When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men.  Blood, whips, chains, or dollars, take your choice.  There is no other.’

This speech entranced me, before I realized what movie it came from, exactly the way Atlas Shrugged entranced me 28 years ago.  It’s a beautiful idea, and true, I think.  If money is produced by creating value, then it is honorable, with no moral pollution.  In the speech, he’s speaking to crony capitalists and government flunkies—comparing them unfavorably to himself (the scion of a copper mining family) and another dude that mines coal.  They’re both good guys, escaping an evil communist empire.

The problem comes, of course, when one realizes that creating value does not equal looting land.  Why do all of these brilliant creators have so much land anyway?  How is it valuable to take stuff out from beneath the ground?  How did they get this land?  Who does land belong to?  Who does its resources belong to?

Who knows, in the fictional universe of Ayn Rand.  But here, on this earth, I know.  The land belonged to Indians, who didn’t believe that land could be owned.  The idea when the invaders managed to make it understood, was obscene to them.  They believed it belonged to everyone, that is was sacred.

“The Inuit language has no difference between he or she, or between mankind and animal,” she adds. “They’re all equal.” —American Nations, Colin Woodard

But the Indians were killed at rates of ninety percent, a mass extinction event.  A genocide.  Then us, their successors, systematically stripped the land, above and below, of all its “value.”  We turned the value into money.  We created nothing except waste.

Even today, the reason certain people own vast stretches of land is that their fathers were wealthy, and their great-grandfather before them.  That their families have been wealthy for so long that they had original land grants.  My family and my family's family are the inheritors of all of the wealth of the New World--all that fur and wood and coal.  It’s the reason that I can still afford to pay someone to clean my bathroom here, as I stay in guesthouse after guesthouse.  I watch the housemothers sweep the floor, and I think about somehow our histories being different, that this is the exchange of resources between us.

Laotians, according to sources in Luang Prabang, also have no word for mine and yours.  The words are the same.  They believe, shockingly, that everything in their land belongs to everyone.  It’s a communist country, still.  Ha!  The Randians say.  And see how little value they create!  See how poor they are!

And then we realize that no.  They’re poor because of ten years of illegal, illicit, secret, and relentless bombing by the United States of America.  They’re poor because of the following twenty years of futile embargoes.  They’re poor because of the refuse of colonialism. And still their land is being used by those with money—Chinese building massive smog-shrouded power plants that we drove by. 

Which brings me, of course, to climate change.  The last two brilliant Atlas Shrugged capitalists are a train builder and a metal smelter, who builds the high-tech rails for the train tracks.  The original screeners of the movie, for the American Heritage foundation, had as their major criticism that trains as an effective method of transportation are unrealistic.  Never mind that Hank Rearden (one of characters who could be designated an actual value creator) has invented an ultralight ultra-strong super-metal.  Never mind that gas costs $42 a gallon (as it should).  Never mind that we already have the technology for mag-lev TGV (ultra-high-speed) trains that go 400 mph with virtually no friction, no drag on the rails, and a fraction of the energy that it takes us to drive anywhere.

So the movie treats a coal-miner as a hero and gas at $42 as an outrage.  But then also treats scientists and inventors as saviors.  Never mind the irony of the brilliant scientist working in his public university lab, the sole genius creator, funded by government grants. But those who hold to Ayn Rand’s doctrine (Rand Paul, for one) refuse to believe what scientists are clearly saying, and refuse to listen to the inventions that could save us.  They refuse to use the free market and entrepreneurial spirit, the best tools at our disposal, to solve the problem they don’t even admit exists.

I don’t know to explain it clearly, without using incendiary propaganda myself.  I want it laid out stark.  Carbon dioxide is a waste product from burning things that contain carbon.  It is causing climate to change, in ways that could murder billions of people, in ways that could cause a mass-extinction event, in ways that endanger civilization.  A free market only works if people are asked to pay the true price for things.  It is crony capitalism if a certain producer, a certain company, or a class of companies, do not have to pay for the disposal of their own waste.  For the results of their waste.  If we do not have to pay the true cost for what it costs for us to burn carbon.

If one is able to dump lead in a river, or avoid the expense of a septic system by shitting on a neighbor’s front lawn, that is not a free market.  That is a system where manipulation, chiefly of people’s minds through doubt and misdirection, is in power.  Not liberty.  Not creators of value.  Not even the all-powerful market.

The book itself is seductive propaganda.  It’s so beautiful to believe in a world where all anyone has to do is make money, and the poor magically disappear, taking care of themselves.  It’s like believing in Santa Claus. 

I read Ayn Rand’s books, and I read my grandfather’s book, The Labor of Love, back to back.  His, by a Greek self-published exegete, analyzing the epistles of Paul.  Hers with their seductive vision of pure humanism, desire for money.

But the truth is that humans are much more complex.  Desire for money is simply a twentieth century concept.

I met a bitcoin capitalist in Chiang Mai, a libertarian, a defender of “liberty.”  A denier of climate change, who believes the whole thing exists to siphon money from poor to rich.  And it will do that.  Everything does that.  But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen anyway, unless someone, poor or rich, decides to do something, from the best power within them.  He doesn’t down the evil of Monsanto, though—not the GMO crops themselves, which are fine—but the things they can now spray them with.  But what should we do about it, if Monsanto has the liberty to spray what it will?  If doing otherwise would inhibit its brilliant capitalist entrepreneurialism?

Liberty has many definitions.  American Nations, a book I read last year, continues to haunt me, in its argument that

"from the very start the country was divided by the northern states’ Germanic idea of “Freiheit” and the southern states’ Latin idea of “libertas.”  "Essentially, Freiheit (“freedom”) holds that all people are born free and equal before the law, that they all possess at least certain minimal rights that have to be mutually respected, and that they are capable of self-governance.  Conversely, libertas (“liberty”) holds that people are born into bondage, that liberties are granted as a privilege, that most people are not capable of self-governance, and that only a very few, governing elite can or should enjoy the full blessings of liberty."  --Daily Kos

Another Colin Woodard find is this quote, from Virginian John Randolph decades after the American Revolution. “I am an aristocrat.  I love liberty; I hate equality.”

I keep thinking that what I am is a communitarian like the Yankees in American Nations, whose governments built schools, churches, community centers, courthouses, grange halls. As if living in a Massachusetts town, a Commonwealth, was a place where the wealth was common—where if something would benefit everyone, it’s cost should be shared.  They believed in collective good.  They wrote laws to protect us from other people, from them murdering or raping or torturing us.  Those laws stand today.

Simply put, one does not have “liberty” to dump someone’s garbage in a place where it does other people harm.  As Benjamin Franklin said, my freedom stops at the end of somebody else’s nose.  And murder can be more subtle, if it comes as an invisible gas.  The example I use is piles of shit on a sidewalk.  In an ideal Massachusetts town they’d build a sewage treatment plant, pool their resources to clean it up.  But what if the shit weren’t brown but invisible?  What if it were floating all around us in the air?

Andrew Guzman says:  

If you push on someone who doesn't want to take action on climate change, the place they end up, if they're reasonable people, is exactly the question: why should we spend money now to solve this problem, instead of either spending money later when we're going to be richer, assuming economic growth continues, or just living with it later? So there are a lot of answers to that. The answer the human being makes is that the economic gains from this pollution—which is what it is, the greenhouse gas that we're putting in the atmosphere—are falling to us. We're getting the benefits.

The economically well-understood principle is that the cost of the thing should be tied to its use. That is, we will get better allocation of resources if the person who uses a resource has to pay for it, for its full cost. In this case, including this pollution. That suggests that we should have to pay for it when we use it.

But even money isn’t the root of all evil, according to the Bible.  The love of money is.  That’s what gospel said.  That’s what Christ said.

Ayn Rand addresses this too, in her own work, not in the shortened screenplay speech:

Did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money–and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

But I disagree.  I can love the best power within me without loving money.  My work comes from that best power inside of me no matter what our culture chooses to financially reward.  Never mind that even loving the best power within me, even love maybe, is a kind of desire.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.  —John Rogers, Kung Fu Monkey

Or science tells us, in a recent Ted talk, that money as a motivational tool is a myth.  For factory work—repetitive, endless labor—money can work.  But for any kind of creativity monetary rewards actually depress performance.  And what are 21st-century problems if not problems that demand creativity?  Do these brilliant capitalists wanting us all to work from the “best power” within us want us to have factory jobs?  Or sweep floors?

Watch it if you don’t believe me.  Human beings aren’t driven by money after all.  We’re driven by autonomy, mastery, and purpose.  We do worse with a profit motive.

Dan Pink:  Puzzle of Motivation

“Blood, whips, chains, or dollars, take your choice.” said D’Anconia.  “There is no other.”  But of course there’s another choice.  There's love, as an operating principle.  Autonomy, mastery, and purpose—all kinds of love:  of self, craft, calling.

We stood at the mouth of a Buddha cave in Luang Prabang today.  I crept inside, alone.  I didn’t want to bring my (10,000 kip) coffee inside, in its plastic bag, so I waited till I could leave it outside with K. and headed in alone.  Ever the revenant I am but still there’s this feeling of terror in heading inwards alone, this sense of going into a sacred space, into the holy of holies.  It’s terrifying.

I wrote this in my journal when I passed my first temple on this trip, on Kho Phayam: I had that same feeling of power from the statues, or silence, or quietness, or peace, or brooding strength--the feeling that made me panic as a teenager.  It's odd and unexpected.

But I can write about it now on a computer worth a piece of land in Laos.  This is one of the twentieth poorest countries in the world.  And still to hike to the top of the mountain cost us 20,000 kip.  And then there’s the amount of how much food costs, and how much my daily income corresponds to a person here and a person can go crazy.  Our water budget here is insane.  How much to just keep myself in water.

Still I feel poor here.  I am poor here.  Laos is bleeding us dry.

Buddha teaches us about money in that he teaches about suffering.  Do not desire money, is what he would say, as you should grasp after nothing.

The gatekeepers at the temple give us evil eyes to make sure we pay our $3.  At the top of the mountain is a simple stupa.  We go down into white-hot heat and dust.

What Buddha said doesn’t seem enough to me.  It’s not enough to desire nothing. I also need the Holy Ghost inside me.  Meditation and mindfulness are good for focusing on where the Holy Ghost needs me to be.  Yoga helps too.   My father preached a sermon in Maecherim about Jacob meeting the angel and wrestling him, about wrestling with that Spirit for your own name, for your own answers.  Money does not help me in that fight.  Nor does desire. 

I love money.  Help thou my love of money.  I try not to love money, but I do.  And I try not to desire, as Gautama taught, anything other than what is.  Lord I believe.  Help thou my unbelief.

I remember the prayer given to me every time I take the rail at St. Anne’s in Mars Hill:  This is my body, given for you.  I begin to take that literally.  This body, that I’m living in, is His body.  It’s given for me, my self.  A gift.

As is grace, as is forgiveness, as impossible as I find it to live inside of that place.  I love him, I love my partner, I love my self, and I love this broken world, and I try to make my way around it in love.  I love the life I’m living through.  Can’t I love it more than money?

Even today, though, the guy glares at us as he sweeps our room.  He’s the teenaged son, sent upstairs by his mother, in a spotless starched shirt and carefully ripped jeans.  He has to sweep our room of my hair, the room we stayed in for a week.  Somehow I have exchanged my money for this service, the ability to have him clean up for me.  I exchange the result of my best labor for his, and I hope he can work from the best power within him, too.

Nam Sohm, Thailand

12 March – 18 March

K. and new friends

We're in the heart of Eesan, or so I hope. A place where only farang fans come. The husbands of the ex-bar girls. Maybe that is too false-hearted of me. Too ugly.

Although also true. We told a tuk-tuk driver in Bangkok that we were headed to Eesan to get away from farangs, and he said: but they're still there. “Fans” are there. “Fan” is the Thai word for intimate partner or spouse, a borrowed word from English. It's a fun word to use. Whenever I say that K. is my “fan” I feel like a celebrity.

So the town is chock-full of ancient decrepit boyfriends with cute perky Thai girls in braces. But I'm the only female traveler in town, and people seem shocked to see us—what brought you here? They ask. We don't get many tourists here. It only makes sense when I explain that my brother has a friend from here, and she told us to come visit her family. The only people that come here have a connection.

Which is exactly what we're looking for. Despite the fans, there is cultural wellbeing here, a sense of true authenticity. In short, it's the best week we've spent in all of Thailand (and that includes the week at the beach villa).

For one thing, the food. As always, the food. Prices are more or less standardized across Thailand, so a bowl of noodles or a simple dish over rice is always basically B30-40 ($1-1.2o), with the notable exception of tourist resorts and restaurants. But what is not standardized is quantity and quality. What B35 buys you at a city bus station, a half-full bowl of broth-heavy soup (albeit still delicious, arguably better than the best Thai food in the States), a bowl that leaves you needing to find a chicken skewer to fill up, is probably half of what B35 buys you here. Here, we go out for noodles and receive giant tureen-sized bowls chock-full of noodles and meat and bean sprouts and greens, more stew than soup. We almost can't finish them. Almost.

I'm actually able to have Thai conversations here, able to hang out with Thai people and cook and eat with them and do: what? Live a normal life, but in Thailand. People here are happy to see two goofy Americans drive by on a miniature bike (miniature only in comparison to our size), happy to smile and laugh and not try to overcharge us, thrilled at my attempts to speak Thai. They are thrilled just that we are here visiting—like the old Thailand, the Thailand from fifteen years ago, the Thailand I remember.

It's also a vague relief to have a break from these places where there are a ton of sights to see and attractions to visit (not that there aren't plenty of temples and waterfalls to visit here, too, that we're not getting to), because all the sightseeing begins to feel oppressive. Like a duty necessarily carried out, not something pleasurable. Nam Sohm just feels like normal Thai life in a normal Thai town, about the size of Mars Hill, the town where we go grocery shopping in Aroostook, and in the same pastoral landscape. The town is surrounded on all sides by rice farmers, the same way we're surrounded on all sides by potato farmers in Aroostook.

Somtahm with sehn, noodles, added

People here make sense to me. They live the same kind of life I do at “home.” I compare prices with them, finally able to communicate in something approaching comfort. Meat, dairy, and potatoes are unsurprisingly cheaper in the States. Things like shallots and limes—exotic ingredients in the States but necessities for Thai cooking—are cheaper here. We eat food that we've never eaten before, like green papaya salad (somtahm) with noodles mixed in, an all-in-one Lao dish that they only make in this province. It's delicious and spicy, a refreshing change from noodle soup and sticky rice.

One of the lizards we ate for dinner.  A bearded dragon, I think, like the ones they sell in American pet stores.  The boys in the neighborhood go fish for them, with bamboo poles and noosed ropes.

We eat lizards: skinned and dried in the sun and fried and then pounded in the mortar and pestle with herbs and spices into a kind of meat salad, like lahp. They tell us they eat snakes and scorpions and rats (not city rats, they explain with a shudder—ground rats from the forest—which is better if only mildly so). They'd eat them more, I guess, but they say they're harder to come by now, harder to find, that it's hard work to get them. Unlike the tourist areas of Thailand, where I feel wrung dry by touts, here I feel dazed by my own wealth. We go the market and buy 100 baht ($3) worth of chicken and pork and innard skewers to share, and the lady shoves in a whole handful extra. People behind us comment that we've already spent 100 baht, as if it's an unearthly extravagance. I feel guilty for my mild indulgences, my B10 yogurt drinks that are still half of what a big bag of market soup costs, enough to feed a whole family.

Lizards, cooked, as lahp

Here, on a budget, we live like kings. We found a teak house, three-bedroom, for B1500 a month. It doesn't seem possible, and yet it is. I dread going back to the reality of the tourist track with its crepe and falafel stands, all-you-can-drink specials, reggae bars, and dance clubs. I'm just happy. I'm trying to just let myself be happy, not obsess about how little we're doing or how little time we have left or much there is we could see.

Koh Jum, Thailand

Landing at Moo Too Pier, Kho Jum

4 February – 12 February 

Making it to Kho Jum, I find it is just as crowded as the rest of Thailand. This island K. found online before we left Maine, an island not in Lonely Planet, with 150B bungalows, allegedly off of the beaten track. And then in Bangkok, during our first week, we met a Finn engaged to a Thai who lived on Kho Jum. We made plans to meet. We got our hopes up—authentic Thailand. Markets and street food and long stretches of empty beach.

Our Finnish friend told us that locals don't take the ferry, they take the taxi boat, so we knew that one existed and managed to get from Phun Phin all the way to Kho Jum in less than twelve hours—and all the way from Georgetown to Kho Jum in less than 24—a traveler's feat I remain proud of. We checked out of our hotel at eleven, had a leisurely breakfast of curry and fish, caught the local bus, and pulled into the bus station the minute before the government bus to Krabi was pulling out, just by luck, and took its last two places. Standing room only, at the front. The bus left within seconds, and we looked back to see the whole back half stuffed full of farangs, heading to Kho Phi Phi or Lanta or another island for their vacation. As, incidentally, are we.

What did one tourist say to the other tourist?

“Man, there are so many tourists here.”

Sometimes I feel like I am just a hypocrite, complaining about all of the travelers while being one myself. The fact remained that we were the last two farangs on a bus full of them, one of whom was hogging an entire seat with his baby backpack, the daypack that he wears on front like a Baby Bjorn while walking around town. I shot daggers and bad karma at him with my eyes. For a while I sat on the floor among the giant backpacks below knee level of standing and swaying Thai girls, the ones just going halfway, fanning their sweating foreheads as I tried to catch the breeze.

But unlike many travelers, we try to be respectful. We attempt to speak Thai and act and dress respectfully, failing often. Unlike the Italians at the back of the bus who started taking off their shirts (most were wearing bikinis beneath) and yelling at each other about how much Thailand sucked in Italian. A German in Kho Phayam told me, authoritatively, that Italian was the most beautiful language, and when I suggested Thai, he dismissed it as guttural and awful. I hear it as music. Anyone who thinks Italian is the most beautiful language should hear hungover college-age Italians yelling about how horrible Thailand is while standing in a 100-degree (38-degree Celsius) bus.

We took a sohngtaeuo to the taxi boat, effortlessly but expensively, catching what I thought was the last boat at 5:30pm. The guy at the bus station had told us 5. It's the boat our Finn friend told us the locals took, a boat with no farangs on it. The island appeared, dusty and numinous at sunset. We're the only travelers on the pier, and on the dusty taxi drive to our friend's restaurant we imagine we've finally found paradise. The restaurant I picture as a small local one, with a glass case and plastic chairs and cousins and nephews hanging around. I imagine I can learn Thai here, study.

Then we arrive and already elderly British and German couples are filling the place with $7-schnitzel orders. The island is full, we are informed. No bungalows anywhere. Even the mythical 150B and 200B ones, which exist on this island, are full. We taxi to one bungalow where she offers to let us sleep on the floor in her restaurant. We go to another and wake up the owner. He shows us a beautiful villa, made of bamboo and teak, up on the hill—but on the other side of the road from the beach. We take it, for 500B.

We ended up staying a week. I loved it—the teak bench on the bamboo porch, surrounded by rubber trees and garden and hibiscus. Although we are twelve minutes from the beach, and don't even get there every day, don't even swim every day. When we first arrived at Kho Phayam, our last island, we scoffed at Lonely Planet, which said the days of 200B beachfront bungalows are over. Already we'd found a 600B one, only three rows back, and 300B cheapies behind us. But the cheapies are always booked, and when they're not, they're concrete bunkers by the generator, facing away from the ocean. It's possible to stay for 200B on a Thai island, but you may be on the other side of the road.

I'm still complaining about expense. The fact is that many things here are more expensive now that in the States. Coffee, for one. Drinks. $1 in the US gets you a 20-ounce soda and free ice, or a bottomless soda at McDonald's. Here you pay $1 for a bottle and extra for ice. Water. For a while we were spending 160B a day on bottled water, because we can't drink tap water.

Maybe we could just be cutting back in Thailand on things like coffee and three meals a day, but instead it's increasingly clear that Thailand is no longer on the hippie trail. Seven-dollar meals are cheap for Danish pensioners or French retirees or Dutch families on a package tour. But for us, with no car, no fridge, no access to a market, and no cooking facilities—we find ourselves stranded. And also, while complaining about costs, I realize how cheap so many things still are. Why can't I just allow myself to enjoy the time?

We do, as much as possible. Long mornings laying in the hammock on the porch. Long walks on the beach after dark—better than taking the road. Finding a restaurant (even if farangified) that makes us khao dtom goong (rice soup with shrimp) and puts an egg in it, poached in broth. I'm trying to let costs go, as much as possible, not let it gnaw at me. Maybe it's the primary response of people returning to their homeland, shock at how much prices have gone up.

If it wasn't so malicious. I was proud of our 24-hour travel day until I realized we were over charged every step of it—5B on the local bus, 30B on the government bus, 40B by the sohngtaeuo, 20B by the boat, 20B by the taxi. Maybe not much, but it adds up--$4 a day. The farang tax, we call it. The consistent over-charging by Thais for travelers. We see things printed on menus in English, other listings in Thai. We watch the price paid by a Thai and then paid by a westerner. Often, as my Thai improves, I hear that the prices given in Thai are less.

I made friends with one restaurant owner here who is scrupulous in her prices to us, and we keep coming back to her, although her prices are also high. I ask her why so many people do it. Our Finnish friend sometimes thinks it's gouging, charging 65B for a coffee because one can. And then there's the contrast with the poverty. Why should I begrudge a coffee that costs $2.50 if the person making it is only making 500B a day? But it doesn't seem fair. I feel angry when I go to Starbucks at a service plaza in the States and buy an overpriced coffee, because it's overpriced. But it's fair. The price listed is charged to everyone, regardless of race. Taxes are the same.

It just doesn't feel like the Thailand of my youth. People have hardened, grown calloused against farangs. Have grown calloused to our money. It's not a surprise, considering how little respect we have, in general, towards Thai culture. It's like I want to convince Thai people I can be a human being.

I said, on our first night in Kho Jum: “I don't know if it's because my parents spoke better Thai, or because there were fewer farangs, or because it was fifteen years ago, but I don't remember being overcharged like this.”

K. said: “Probably all of those.”

It just leaves a sour taste in your mouth, like you're made constantly to feel stupid. This country is beautiful, its language, culture, food, and people exquisite—and instead of the “radiant hospitality” promised by guidebooks, the hospitality I remember—I feel this simmering racism.

It's hard to explain, because then it can seem like the entire experience has been negative. This exists, but these other layers exist, too, of beauty and kindness and generosity. I am as in love with the Thai language as ever, maybe more so. I learn something new from every Thai conversation. The landscape here is the one I belong in. The culture is alien and confusing, but almost all Thais are gracious, wonderful people.

The hardest ones are those we have to deal with most often, the ones directly on the tourist trail, bus drivers and boat drivers and guesthouse owners and travel agents. And understandably so, based on the farang behavior we've seen. In Bangkok a French couple yelled at the guesthouse owner for two hours because they'd taken a 200B taxi to his place for a reservation that didn't exist. He paid for their cab. The cleaning lady, gentle and kind, who did our laundry for almost nothing—stood by the desk, horrified. In Surat Thai, in the middle of the night, a British girl yelled at the entire railway station staff for a full hour, in English and incomprehensible Thai. “I want my f***ing bonnets!” she said. Evidently someone at the station had taken her motorcycle helmets, or she'd left them—it wasn't clear. He came back with them, eventually. On Kho Phayam, a French woman left a restaurant—little more than a streetside stand—when her green papaya salad didn't come soon enough. “I wait, and wait, and wait...” This at a stand where they had the cheapest food on the island, the entire place packed, and one person cooking.

It's incomprehensible to me. I feel a constant consciousness of being in a foreign culture, and attempt to act respectfully, knowing that all the while I'm trampling restrictions I know nothing about. So the least I can do is be polite.

Maybe the best part of Kho Jum was its limited internet access. Finally, a place free of wifi. Not exactly free, because the nicer resorts did have it, at glacial speeds, and there was one internet cafe in town. But I spent a week not worrying about it, lounging in the hammock, taking a break from the road. We thought about finding another bungalow, closer to the beach—one of the mythical 200B ones is opening up. But I think we'll leave. Maybe we're done with the islands. As much as I love the beach, I'm ready to go to the farthest corner of Thailand to see if there's any place left away from the crowd.

From Aroostook County, Maine, to Newburyport, Massachusetts, and back again

I have awaited long the day when I could announce with a drumroll that I am again Casting Off, not merely metaphorically, but actually. I thought I'd be able to say that last month, when K. signed on the dotted line for our new boat, a 36' Mao Ta cutter, Spirit, Secret's successor. She's a blue-water cruiser, a double-ender, an ocean crosser. We are, or will be soon, at last Casting Off. Here she is:

Three feet longer than Secret, but wider, beamier, bigger in every dimension. Already I am in love. So this post was intended as triumphant, as with Caesar's armies returning from Sparta, or wherever—but instead I have chaos and disaster and loss to report—although also their underbelly, their paired twin: hope and light and freedom. Here's how it went.

It's our second day on the boat, August 1, and there's a grand festival going on in swanky Newburyport, our current hailing port. The Yankee Homecoming, of all things, featuring live music all week, dinghies piled up on dock, fireworks, fried dough and clam chowder in the streets. The whole nine yards. We come to town to buy a guidebook and charts and an Eldridge for tides plus to stock up on groceries and water. We drop $350 among West Marine and Home Depot and Market Basket. I send out my money-earning email at the library. Then we wait at a bench beside the dinghy dock as the RIBs motor drunkenly away, and the band cleans up, and the teenagers engage in elaborate mating rituals.

We await the turning tide so we can cruise gleefully back to the boat with nary an oar stroke. Two days before we'd been unable to row against the outgoing current on the Merrimac River. This time there's almost a full moon, and we use the oars more to steer than to row. We get back to Spirit briskly and tie up. K. hefts a few bags on deck but leaves more bags below to steady the dinghy while I clamber aboard.

Then the fatal flaw of hubris. We don't drop the teak ladder. I don't ask for it, and it isn't offered. Both of us think I can make it over the freeboard (far higher from the water than was Secret's) without assistance. After all, I did it more or less effortlessly two days before.

I don't. You can see what's coming, but I couldn't. It's just like when people talk about car accidents. All I remember are brief snapshots, everything happening at once. I remember having one foot on deck and the other back in the dinghy, and feeling spreadeagled, like I wasn't going to make it. I remember looking back at the dinghy and seeing water coming over the side. I remember floating away, with the blue-colored paper bag from West Marine floating away in front of me, and thinking: that's $100!

K. yelled after me to grab the next mooring ball. (Moorings, for the uninitiated, are like anchors permanently affixed to the bottom of the harbor, to protect the ecosystem and to aid the mariner.) I tried, but was unable to. It was then I realized what a fix I was in. The current was sweeping by at a rate of at least six knots. I realized I had to swim, and swim hard. The next mooring was the last before the open Atlantic. The water was cold. The tide had already swept off one of my shoes, and was threatening to carry away my flannel.

I swam hard. I caught the mooring ball. And then I realized I was in a deeper fix. Could he see me? Would he know I was safe and not swept out to sea? How long would it take for someone to find me? How long could I hold on? How long before hypothermia set in?

I didn't know then what I know now: that the dinghy had completely overturned. That everything in it was lost. That my partner in crime managed to hold on, barely, and pull himself on deck to immediately radio the Coast Guard. When I thought of my backpack, containing my computer and my camera and my purse—everything of value I'd brought with me onto the boat—I assumed K. would have rescued it first thing. I just worried about my computer getting wet.

I used my yoga breath. I took turns with my arms, holding on with one side, then the other. Even then, I realized how quickly I'd become tired. I thought about letting myself drift back, thinking that maybe I could hoist myself onto the stranger's boat and find a way to get warm and to radio my location. But then I stopped that line of thought: if I let go, there was almost no way I'd be able to grab onto anything again. My body was carried back in a straight line by the current, parallel to the boat's waterline.

Then I saw the Coast Guard light up its boat. I started to yell for help, worried that they'd go out to sea rather than see me at the mooring two boats down. They heard me, and minutes later I was wrapped in a blanket and safe. I can testify that the major emotion one feels on being rescued by the Coast Guard is embarrassment. I couldn't believe that I'd made such a fool of myself. If only I'd been skinnier, stronger, more limber, I could have made it over the freeboard. If only I'd been humble enough to ask for the ladder. If only I could be a responsible human being, for once in my life.

As I expressed my humiliation, my apology, they were resolutely affirmative: “It happens all the time. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's our job.”

Thank God for the US Coast Guard and George Washington who established them, lo those many years ago, at this very port, Newburyport on the Merrimac River, for exactly this reason—wicked tidal currents and related carnage.

After I was warm and safe and drinking hot tea, I began to worry about my computer. Had K. put it on deck? Of course he had. It would have been his first priority. It had to be safe.

But of course it wasn't. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde by way of Dave Eggers: to lose two computers is a tragedy. To lose three seems careless.

These are the things I've had to think about over the last three weeks, as I've begun to process not just the loss of $2500 worth of gear, but also a five-year-old Moleskin, almost full of story ideas, my dream journal, my everyday journal, my legal pad with assorted yoga notes and boat lists. I am attempting faux Buddhism about it: they are just things, after all. It's just money. The important ideas I'll remember.

And in another universe, if the abstract mathematicians are to be believed, I am dead. In another universe, the computer is salvaged and we are just pissed at each other. In yet another, we're still looking for the perfect boat. In another, we have never met.

In the last universe: I didn't lose my data when I bought a computer two years ago. I didn't institute a rigorous weekly backup process. I didn't recover everything despite myself, as a result of my own insane persistence. I'm not typing right now into a file recovered from my Aroostook backup, on a program recovered from the backup, listening to music recovered from the backup, using settings recovered from the backup.

All this to say: nothing was lost except some money, ephemeral ideas, and my pride. God has his reasons when we don't understand his reasons. If you'd told me that when I was beating my breast over my computer data loss two years ago, I'd probably have hit you. But you would have been right.

So maybe now, in my 35^th year, halfway to 70, I'm starting to learn some things. I'm learning that the life I've chosen is one of risk. I haven't lost three computers because I'm careless, but because I've chosen to risk valuable things in order to achieve a higher goal. To some sheer adventure as a cause celebre is insufficient—especially maybe to our families, our parents. But we've chosen this life because it's the one we want, even if it means losing things. Losing money. Losing health, whether by hypothermia or by shoulder bursitis from too much backpack-carrying. Losing dreams, and ideas, and the stories that may have been borne from them.

That's our tax on the life we've chosen. The life we continue to choose. So all hail Spirit, our new vehicle of destruction and rebirth. We live in Spirit while Spirit lives in us.