Ocean

The U.S. Coast Guard would be appalled, but drinking while adrift is a daily scene off the coast of Nha Trang, Vietnam. The "floating bar" is part of a popular all-day boat trip to outlying islands and it works like this: Shortly after lunch, a crewmember swims maybe 100 feet away from the boat with several bottles of (very cheap) Vietnamese wine. He is followed by a small horde of travelers, all of whom are hungry for this novel mix of alcohol and the sea. Within a matter of minutes the bottles run dry, plastic cups are gathered, and everyone hauls themselves back onto the boat so that we might chug toward the next destination (I think it was snorkeling).  While the floating bar says little about Vietnamese culture, it says a lot about Vietnamese entrepreneurial skills.

There are at least as many reasons that people drink as there are nationalities in this picture.  In “Pray Without Ceasing,” one of Wendell Berry’s characters is said to have “stood, letting the whisky seek its level in him, and felt himself slowly come into purpose; now he had his anger full and clear.”  Another character, this one in C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, explains:

But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine.  I understood why men become drunkards.  For the way it worked on me was – not at all that it blotted out these sorrows – but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and reverend for feeling them.

As the people in this photo leapt from the ship to the sea to swim to the Vietnamese sailor with spirits, I don’t think anyone was doing so with the intent of being great and reverend, or to feel their anger full and clear.  Maybe the Vietnamese guy in the very top of the photo said it best.  Swimming back to the core of the group for a refill, he saw me still on the boat and yelled, “Joel jump, its so fun!”

And so, tucking my camera away, I jumped.

I saw this horse on two different visits to Isla Bastimentos, in Panama’s Bocas del Toro archipelago.  Drawn to the salty taste of the surf, it would wade into the water and then mostly stand still, letting the occasional wave slap its face.  After maybe half an hour it would then return to the beach and slip silently back into the jungle.

It was a captivating scene: the clear and vibrantly colored water, the jungle-green backdrop, the horse maintaining such solid focus on its salty bath.  Its life didn’t seem that bad.  Certainly it was less stressful than many of its ancestors would have known, given that for much of human history horses have been instruments of war.  Since before 3000 BC they've been ridden in battle, and a training manual for chariot horses was in existence as early as 1350 BC.  It wasn’t until after the time of Christ, however, that the paired stirrup came onto the scene, revolutionizing yet again the tactics of war.  The English travel writer Colin Thubron, in his book Shadow of the Silk Road, explains its spread and significance:

The heavy stirrup was a Chinese brainchild as early as the fourth century AD, it seems, and as it travelled westward, stabilising its rider in battle, it made possible the heavily armoured and expensively mounted knight.  To this simple invention some have attributed the onset of the whole feudal age in Europe; and seven centuries later the same era came to an end as its castles were pounded into submission by the Chinese invention of gunpowder.  The birth and death of Europe’s Middle Ages, you might fancy, came along the Silk Road from the east.

Yes, this beach-loving Panamanian horse had it pretty good, as did the rest of us on the island.  We had put our shirts and stirrups aside, and the history of war felt rather remote.

There are at least a couple things about this photograph that would suggest it is not taken in, say, Miami.  First, the woman is wearing her clothes into the sea.  Second, she is playing with water in much the same way a three-year-old would.

I mean neither of these observations in a negative way.  Like many other Vietnamese women, she wants to protect her skin from the sun.   As for the playful splashing, I silently cheered her ability to delight in such a simple thing.  What beauty!

The woman and her husband, both from the port city of Haiphong, were on a daytrip to Cat Ba Island to celebrate their one-year wedding anniversary.  Her love, I couldn’t help but notice, was directed not only toward her husband but also toward life itself—part of what her husband found attractive about her, I suspect.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, there is a dialogue between two characters about the “meaning of life.”  In it, the one character offers this astute observation:

“I’ve always thought that, before anything else, people should learn to love life in this world.”

”To love life more than the meaning of life?”

”Yes, that’s right. That’s the way it should be—love should come before logic, just as you said.  Only then will man be able to understand the meaning of life.”

In the Panamanian island chain of Bocas del Toro, theft is a problem on some beaches.  During the week of my visit, one couple described being approached by two young men who “asked” for their wallet.  They carried no weapon, but their demeanor was intimidating enough—and the travelers sufficiently isolated on their secluded stretch of sand—that they handed it over.  The couple did, however, ask if they could keep the non-cash items in the wallet, which the thieves amiably agreed to.

The theft happened on Wizard Beach, which is sometimes patrolled by police.   In this photo a policeman on the beach talks with an Israeli traveler, likely wishing to assure her that he’d keep a good eye on her belongings.  Later the officer would tell me that she was “very beautiful,” an observation with which I could not disagree.  He also answered my question about the ship that had been anchored offshore for two days: it was waiting to pick up a load of bananas.  (The province is home not only to pretty beaches but also the Chiriqui Land Company, which brings you Chiquita bananas.)

Bananas and beauty aside, one of the most provocative descriptions of theft I’ve ever read is in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.  Here an argument is made that thieves include more than the two opportunistic men on Wizard Beach:

“Good,” Baba said, but his eyes wondered.  “Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one.  And that is theft.  Every other sin is a variation of theft.  Do you understand that?”

“No, Baba jan,” I said, desperately wishing I did.  I didn’t want to disappoint him again.

…

“When you kill a man, you steal a life,” Baba said.  “You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father.  When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth.  When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.  Do you see?”

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.