death

If at dawn you walk the streets of Nha Trang, Vietnam, you may see blocks of ice being hauled by modified bicycles, bound for paying customers. In looking at this you may remember your grandfather, who mangled his legs as a kid in the 1920s when he got drug behind an ice truck (if I remember the story correctly, he was trying to nab some free ice). His injuries were severe enough that when later he tried to join the military during World War II, he was refused.

Also, you may recall a footnote in David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas, in which he details how ice made its way to Panama in the mid-1800s. It’s fascinating:

The ice was supplied by the Boston and Panama Ice Company and it sold for as much as fifty cents a pound when first introduced on the Isthmus. One ship from Boston carried seven hundred tons of ice packed in sawdust all the way around the Horn to Panama City, with a loss from melting of only one hundred tons. But in the process of getting the ice from ship to land to the Panama icehouse, a distance of two miles, another four hundred tons melted. Yet such was the demand that the sale of the remaining two hundred tons paid for the voyage. Within a few years, ice on the Pacific side was being supplied by ships from Sitka, from what was then knows as Russian America.

Finally, in looking at this scene—particularly if you notice the dripping—you may consider ice as symbolic of the human condition. The ice does in a matter of hours what your body will do in a matter of decades. What begins as defined blocks commences a change of state from the moment it is released into the world. The race is on.

The scene conveys a sense of urgency, speaks to the value of time, mirrors things about yourself. You stand and watch the ice drip till the driver returns. Then you walk on toward the beach, stretching your own block of flesh and spirit further into space and time, feeling it drip. And as you settle into the sand to watch a blazing sunrise, this is what you hope: that you will have more value than even the best cargo from Boston or Sitka, and that one day when you finally die all the way, you’ll be nothing like the wasted puddle on asphalt.

The Colombian city of Medellín is still shaking off its bad reputation.  In the 1980s, while serving as global capital to the cocaine trade, it had one of the highest homicide rates in the world and was also home to one of the most notorious (and richest) men, Pablo Escobar.  The ubiquitous nature of brutality helped give it the nickname “City of Eternal Violence”.   But a series of positive turns—including the death of Escobar in 1993 and the demobilization of urban militias between 2003 and 2006—has helped return Medellín to stability and even vibrance.  Today Medellín is better known by another (and older) nickname, "City of Eternal Spring," which reflects its mild climate and beautiful natural setting.

Few visitors to Medellín these days will witness violence during their stay.  Some, however, may wish to see the Cementerio de San Pedro, where this photo was taken.  Established in 1842, it’s statuary and tombstones are elaborate and often provocative.  High walls muffle the noise of city traffic and foster a sense of serenity.  Death itself even seems far away, at least its violent forms.

In the quote I used last week from A Tale of Two Cities, the following, more somber lines came immediately afterwards:

Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this.  No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all.  No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged.  It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page.  It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on its shore.  My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end.  In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

In my book Thirty Reasons to Travel, one of the reasons I offer is "graveyards."  Here you meet people, some of them absolutely fascinating, you’ll never get to know in hotels and cafes because they are dead.  In addition to introducing us to individuals from the past, cemeteries also assist us in putting our own present lives—their brevity, fragility, and perhaps meaning—into perspective.

Not all my visits to cemeteries have been easy experiences.  Hearing strangers weep beside a headstone is troubling, as is carrying the coffin of a cherished college friend who, only weeks before a car accident and on the afternoon you went together to hear James Baker speak, taught you how to tie a tie.  Nor is it serene when, swept up in a funeral procession on the streets of the Palestinian town of Jenin (this was in 2003), you peer into the ashen face of a 14-year-old boy killed by an Israeli tank.  Five minutes later, as you stand beside a hole in the earth and watch men lower him into the ground, the man beside you thrusts his M-16 into the heavens and blasts several rounds into an innocent blue sky.  The sound of each shot punches you—angers you.   Something is boiling in your veins at this moment; it is the hatred of violent death, whether from smashed cars, gargantuan tanks, or tiny bullets.  It is that thousands of mangled people fill the earth each day, including this boy.

The above photograph was taken last week in Mompós, Colombia.  Though it shows a grave being readied for a person who I suspect died a natural death, it was still unsettling to peer into the hole (but also comforting to see two good-spirited, sweaty men chatting inside).  Later that evening I was reading Stephen Crane’s classic The Red Badge of Courage and came upon the following passage, appreciating how it captured both the horror of violence and the emotions elicited by it.  In the scene a mortally wounded soldier has been walking for several minutes to the rear of the battlefield and now enters the final throes of death:

His tall figure stretched itself to its full height.  There was a slight rending sound.  Then it began to swing forward, slow and straight, in the manner of a falling tree.  A swift muscular contortion made the left shoulder strike the ground first.

The body seemed to bounce a little way from the earth.  “God!” said the tattered soldier.

The youth had watched, spellbound, this ceremony at the place of meeting.  His face had been twisted into an expression of every agony he had imagined for his friend.

He now sprang to his feet and, going closer, gazed upon the pastelike face.  The mouth was open and the teeth showed in a laugh.

As the flap of the blue jacket fell away from the body, he could see that the side looked as if it had been chewed by wolves.

The youth turned, with sudden livid rage, toward the battlefield.  He shook his fist.  He seemed about to deliver a philippic.

“Hell—“

The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.

With George Bush now back in Texas, bathroom stalls in backpacker hangouts in cities such as Bangkok and San Jose will never be the same.  The political graffiti his eight years in office produced was immense.  Scribbled across many a door and wall, the one-liners and paragraphs were seldom insightful.  But never did I tire of reading what anonymous folks, while using the toilet, had to say about my President.

Other times—though almost never in a bathroom stall—I would stumble across more provocative messages such as the one seen here.  Written on the seawall in Singapore's Esplanade Park, in the shadow of the city's financial district, I wondered who wrote it and why. Unlike political graffiti, its motive and meaning were a mystery.

Odds are, I suppose, that someone young did the writing.  But it reminded me of something old, namely the idea of commitment, of the knowledge that there would be an end, of the work involved in shaping one's life with that fact in mind.  I'd later remember this splotch of graffiti while reading Wendell Berry's book Hannah Coulter.  In it Hannah, narrating from the twilight of her life, says, "Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door.  It changes things and makes them clear.  Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life."  Reflecting on her husband's passing, she later goes on to say:

I was changed by Nathan’s death, because I had to be.  Our life together here was over.  It was my life alone that had to go on.  The strand had slackened.  I had begun the half-a-life you have when you have a whole life that you can only remember.  I began this practice of sitting sometimes long hours into the nights, telling over his story, this life, that even when it was only mine was wholly Nathan’s and mine because for the term of this world we were wholly each other’s.  We were each other’s chance to live in the room of love where we could be known well enough to be spared.  We were each other’s gift.

I received an email this morning from a Venezuelan friend who had been celebrating New Year’s Eve at a nice hotel in Panama City, Panama.  She wrote, “The dinner was great, a lot lot lot lot of food it was, but at the moment I ate my food I just can´t stop thinking about the 400 people killed in Palestina, and how it was the new year for that families. The party was awful…I just can´t imagine that the rest of the world were celebrating yesterday while a lot of moms, dads, and sons were crying about their lost in Palestina.”

She writes about a tension with which many of us are familiar.  How does one celebrate while knowing that at the same moment someone else is mourning, or living in absolute fear?

There is no space here to delve into that question.  But like her, the events in Gaza and Israel have been on my mind in recent days.  Of all the places I’ve traveled, none were as difficult as Gaza.  I thought it an often claustrophobic strip of land (at least in the cities and refugee camps) that had taken not only the lives of Gazans but also amazing (and controversial) people like Rachel Corrie—and where one afternoon, in my desire for a photograph, I had feared it might take mine as well.  I had never been to a place where even for a mere 72 hours it was so hard to stay sane.  Unless you’ve been there, you simply have no idea what it means to live in Gaza, to live in a cage.

The photograph above was taken in the West Bank town of Ramallah in late 2006.  The Palestinian boy was part of a protest against Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence, which the day before had left three Palestinian children dead in Gaza City.  Some eyes on this Earth take in an incredible amount of suffering.  They take it in, even while many of us celebrate.

In a story by Wendell Berry entitled “Making it Home,” there is the following line: “And now, though he walked strongly enough along the road, he was still newborn from his death, and inside himself he was tender and a little afraid.”  Berry was writing about a man returning home from the carnage of World War I, but the words well describe any experience in which a person has peered closely into his or her own fragility.

This photo was taken on one of many steep grades on Ko Phangan, a Thai island home to the famous (at least in the backpacker world) Full Moon Party.  It is also home to hundreds of motorbike accidents each year.

The day after taking this picture on a good portion of road, I went against the advice of my guesthouse manager, the lady at the massage shop, and the local hair stylist, venturing down the infamous road to Thong Nai Pan.  For the full story click HERE, but suffice it to say that half an hour into my journey I flew headfirst into the jungle.

In the end, scratched and with a sprained ankle, I made it to the beautiful bay at the end of the road to Thong Nai Pan.  The water was so quiet, the beach nearly empty. As I walked along the water’s edge I felt the beauty but also the fragility of life.  I thought of how there are experiences in addition to motorbike accidents – a shocking turn in a relationship, the loss of a home, the news of one’s failing health – that can leave us tender and a little afraid.  Like the road to Thong Nai Pan, life can feel steep and rutted.

Ba Chuc, a Vietnamese community in the Mekong Delta, sits just across the border from Cambodia.  In April 1978, Khmer Rouge soldiers entered the village and massacred 3,157 men, women, and children—almost the entire population.  Today the skulls of the victims are on display in this outdoor memorial.

Statistics, when referring to numbers of dead, fall flat in their attempts to convey the humanity of what has been lost.  This is because emotions are connected to people, not numbers.  Try, for example, to process this excerpt from Chris Hedges’ book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (2002):

Look just at the 1990s: 2 million dead in Afghanistan; 1.5 million dead in the Sudan; some 800,000 butchered in ninety days in Rwanda; a half-million dead in Angola; a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia; 200,000 dead in Guatemala; 150,000 dead in Liberia; a quarter of a million dead in Burundi; 75,000 dead in Algeria; and untold tens of thousands lost in the border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea,....

In Ba Chuc, I spent a good amount of time before these skulls, imagining the life that had once animated the now hollow bones.  I heard the laughter, the conversations, the sneezes, the crying...and then the sudden ending of it all.  The victims in this photo were almost all females in their late teens—girls in the process of becoming women—and more than a few of them died only after being horrifically raped (an adjacent room offered the most nauseating pictures of sexual violence I had ever seen).  And in looking into these skulls, I felt neither the sterility of statistics nor a mere twinge of sadness; I felt a palpable, riveting absence.