Transportation

The urban landscape, particularly early in the morning when you’re still wiping sleep from your eyes, can feel heavy.  It is a world of moving metal, belching exhaust, impersonal towers of concrete and steel—a world which five days a week slurps half-dead people toward its crowded center.  Whether on the Metro in Washington DC or on a bus in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (above), I sometimes imagine what a perfectly awful world it would be if everyone maintained their sluggish, standoffish, rush hour demeanor beyond the morning.   I’d rather have anthrax sprinkled on my cereal.

The photo above shows a young woman who would rather be in bed, but it also reminds me of how "waiting" is an integral part of life.  I come from a country where waiting is neither particularly valued nor well practiced.  In some cultures, however, people are adept at it.  In Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin’s Three Cups of Tea—a book offering more insight into Pakistan than most newscasts ever will—there is a good example from the Balti, a people group who live in the rugged Karakoram Mountains.  Mortenson is trying to build a school for the village of Korphe and has invested considerable time in raising the necessary funds, only to discover he won’t be able to build the school until he can first build a bridge.  The village has never had a school and their desire for one is real, so when Mortenson breaks the news that he'll have to return to the States to raise more money for the bridge, he expects the people of Korphe to feel as awful as he does.  But they don't: 

[W]aiting was as much a part of their makeup as breathing the thin air at ten thousand feet.  They waited half of each year, in rooms choked with smoke from yak dung fires, for the weather to become hospitable enough for them to return outdoors.  A Balti hunter would stalk a single ibex for days, maneuvering hour by hour to get close enough to risk a shot with a single expensive bullet he could afford to spend.  A Balti groom might wait years for his marriage, until the twelve-year-old girl his parents had selected for him grew old enough to leave her family.  The people of the Braldu had been promised schools by the distant Pakistani government for decades, and they were waiting still.  Patience was their greatest skill.

It will be rare that I post a completely bland snapshot to this photoblog, as I am now.  Had I known that I might one day display this picture so publicly, I’d have taken a moment to compose the thing.  But I took it in a rush, thinking that later in the day I would simply download it to my computer (for enlarged viewing), type up the text (which I'd then store in a Word document in case I might one day find a use for it in a story), and then I’d either delete the photo or file it into some dark recess.  I'm sorry the picture's ugly.

But in recently coming across the photo again I decided to post it here--largely because it says something commendable about the people in charge of the Bangkok Mass Transit System.  I love how they very clearly explain what the problem was, acknowledge the domino effect the mishap on train #24 had on others down the line, and then apologize for the inconvenience some may have experienced.  That’s classy.  And to add to the class, they posted the sign in both Thai and English (for all of us foreigners who can’t read a lick of Thai).

The BTSC folks, of course, did something not only classy but also civil and healthy.  It's good to say "sorry" when something you do, even if unintentional, affects other folks.  I suspect that had the narrator in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men been moseying through this Bangkok skytrain station and laid eyes on the posted apology, he would’ve nodded his approval.  Here’s what he says in the book:

My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth.  He said there was nothing to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.  And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it.  Dont haul stuff around with you.  I guess all that sounds pretty simple today.  Even to me.  All the more reason to think about it.

There are no icebergs in the Gulf of Thailand, but at any given moment there is, in this and many other seas, someone thinking about the Titanic—or at least about Leonardo Dicaprio.  

I almost didn’t take this photograph.  For most of three hours I had been lying on a bench on deck, seeking out that elusive position where a severely herniated disc wouldn’t make me wish there were icebergs in the Gulf of Thailand.  On top of my physical pain, there was the psychological terror of knowing I still had 20 hours before I reached Bangkok – 20 hours of ship, bus, and train, some of that with 75 pounds of cargo hanging from my shoulders.  Only the day before did I come out of a 17-hour gala of agony in which it felt like a herd of elephants had collapsed on my lower back. The possibility of returning to that state somewhere between here and Bangkok was all too real.

I was alone on this portion of deck except for two German university students on a three-week holiday to Thailand.  Feeling eight times their age (and almost eight times my own) as I navigated my bad back on the bench, we didn’t engage each other that much.  But when the girls turned giddy as they conspired in German to reenact the Titanic bow scene, I eased myself into an upright position and grabbed my camera.  The bow was off limits to passengers—I don’t think the girls knew this—and I thought the expression on their faces would be priceless when the captain roared out the window from the bridge above us.

But the better picture, I think, is the one I’m posting here.  Taken three seconds before the captain got the bridge window open to commence his roar, I love how it seems to capture the feeling of youth, freedom, and lightheartedness.  It was a fleeting moment in time that will never be repeated.

By the end of the week they would be back in university, and the week after that I would be on an operating table in Bangkok.  A year has passed since then, and I imagine their Thailand experience, like my pain, now feels pretty distant.  As the wise narrator in Wendell Berry’s book Hannah Coulter says as she looks back on her life:

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was.  But you can’t remember it the way it was.  To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening.  It can return only by surprise.  Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind.

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.