Jerry left me in Boulder with a tiny kitchen and dishes for one. He shopped at a local culinary fun house (which I’ve yet to explore) and found a pretty set of new chopsticks, Japanese style, with bright red tops and little yellow squiggle designs. But only one pair.
Only one set of chopsticks, on purpose. Though we’ll both be traveling to and fro in the next 8 months, I am, for all practical purposes, on this particular journey alone. I’m only one week into it, and I’m discovering my comforts and annoyances. Things I’m happy to have, others I miss. I’ve been taking mental notes from a largely ecological perspective. In no particular order, these are
THINGS I LOVE:
- This open-minded, educated, forward-thinking community. Its brain jibes with mine.
- Trails. Everywhere—for feet and wheels. All I do to find the view below is head half a block downhill, turn left past the nature center, and there it is: covered in myriad paths up and into and around the Flatirons. Heading there right now with my coffee….
- Drivers, who more or less are courteous to the cyclists and pedestrians who—almost—dominate Boulder’s roads.
- Fitness. I thought I was in reasonable shape (and I know I am). Yet I sputter in the wake of so many pro and nearly-so runners, bikers, hikers and all-around athletes who scale these mountains with barely a breath. But I’ll get closer—I’m walking or cycling everywhere these days.
- The Boulder Farmers’ Market, a beautiful sprawling tapestry of fresh foods and colors, accessible by bike (it’s right on the Boulder Creek Path, another new commuter’s love).
- The Chautauqua Dining Hall, a first-class restaurant one block out my door. Huge wrap-around porch, the perfect place for a glass of wine and sunset. (Plus, residents get 10 percent off!)
- So many restaurants and pubs with live music and general liveliness all around. Welcome back to college!
- And last but definitely not least, the Scripps program, one of the greatest contributions imaginable to journalism and the environment today.
The Flatirons, from Chautauqua
THINGS I MISS:
- My husband, of course. Family and friends. Remember the song, “Make new friends, but keep the old….”
- My big, open kitchen with room to maneuver and the appropriate dish or utensil for every idea in my cook’s mind.
- New Mexico food, wine and beer prices. Period.
- The ability to buy all of the above at one store.
- Perea Farms, El Mezquite, Valencia Fresh Fruteria, my neighborhood farmers’ market, fresh tortillas made daily, honey and eggs for sale around the corner, the scent of roasting chiles in the air everywhere this time of year. I know the local food scene has a lot to offer Boulder, and I have much to explore. But I do miss the down-to-earth nitty-gritty feel of food plucked straight from the dirt—a benefit of living so close to so many farms.
- My garden. Right now, right this very minute, I am missing loads of grapes, peaches, tomatoes, eggplants, chiles, chard, collards and arugula.
- My herbs. It’s a jungle out there among the dozen basil plants, oregano, onions, chives, parsley, sage, thyme, tarragon, marjoram, rosemary and mint. I’ve bought a few little plants for my Boulder porch (below), but I no longer have the option of chopping down a bundle of onions or a heap of basil and mint for a proper batch of laap.
- Dark and quiet. Previous residents have raved about Chautauqua’s peaceful nature. But I’m spoiled, already having the experience of living and staying in some of the world’s most serene locations. I’m liking my cozy cottage quite well, but this park is a tourist destination and a favorite of anyone in hiking boots. I get foot traffic through my little yard all the time. At home in New Mexico, I almost never need to close the drapes. Here, I feel just a bit as though I’m living in a glass house.
- Patio dining. Cooler nights spell perfect times for BBQs. Miss that.
Small herb garden in the making
AND A FEW RANDOM ECOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS:
- My graduate-level environmental studies class watched a video clip of Rachel Carson this week. The last time I’d seen similar footage was in Burma for an Earth Day celebration last year. Here, 20 percent of the class had never heard of Rachel Carson.
- Laundry. I’m actually less efficient living alone because I brought few clothes. I’m having to wash smaller loads more often. The machines here are not ENERGY STAR, and I can’t adjust for load size. Plus, I have no laundry line, which means I’m using the dryers.
- Garbage. I’m tossing more, more often because Chautauqua does not yet have composting facilities (we’re told they’re coming soon!). At home, we are able to compost or recycle almost all our waste. Some weeks, we have but one little bag in the trash can. Since I’m also tossing food scraps here, I’m having to take out the garbage more frequently because of the smell.
- Attitude. Despite the notes above, it’s a given in Boulder—people consider the environment in their daily actions. Bags aren’t immediately given in stores. Shops everywhere sell organic, biodegradable, compostable items. (Just bought a biodegradable plastic file folder.) Living green is the community norm.
- Cooking for one. Either I must change my habits, or I’ll have to start giving daily dinner parties. After so many years of cooking for at least myself and a hungry husband, it’s hard now to think and shop in terms of one. I can’t believe how long a single dish lasts—through the next breakfast, lunch, dinner and beyond. Must. Think. Small.
Just for the record, I do not feel as though I’ve had a summer. Is early August too late to start? For many reasons, big and small, this feels like the shortest, most harried summer on record. Now, suddenly, it’s August. And soon I will embark on this next important phase of my life. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining. It’s all good, what lies ahead. And I’m thrilled to be doing it. But right now, I just want a little rest and a little peace and a few free moments to watch the night hawks circling overhead (they’re very graceful).
So tomorrow morning, waaaaaaay too early, we’re catching a flight and we’re taking a short trip to see family for a few days. We’re going to a baseball game and a pool party, and we’re going to have ourselves a little bit of summer. (If you’re a friend back home, wondering why I haven’t told you—this is a spur-of-the-moment journey. We haven’t told anyone outside of family and friends who water our plants.)
And then next week, I hope, I will return refreshed, ready to face a few more deadlines before I pack and gather my conscience for the big shift.
It’s life—it’s always on the move. Just like culture, just like food. Everything always grows, changes, evolves. Nothing ever stays the same (first lesson in Buddhism, first lesson in anthropology—and first lesson in the kitchen, I think). If ever I need reminding of these facts, all I need do is look at my garden or the nearest farmers market. The world is constantly in flux.
Which, finally, leads me to the picture above. Not too long ago I bought a bunch of fresh, sweet garlic from our summer market. Along with the cloves came a bundle of scapes—those beautiful long flower stems that some people say resemble an octopus (true). They have many uses in the kitchen, and believe me—I had plans. But the scapes escaped me.
They sat on our counter, and they evolved. Life moved on, and so did they.
Their flower heads grew and burst, putting forth masses of little bulbils—this plant’s answer to seeds. At first I was slightly annoyed with myself for not having eaten the scapes sooner. But then I examined them closely and realized they had become works of art.
And now, as I think about those scapes in my frazzled state of mind, I realize they had something to say. They were trying to tell me: just sit back for a while, and let life take care of itself. It always does.
We pulled into the driveway for the first time in five months, and we found a yard dressed in full regalia—budding pomegranates, blooming sage, plump cacti with new paddles spreading in every direction. And most notably: dozens of fuzzy little peaches on a tree we had planted three summers ago. These are the tree’s very first fruits. I take them as signs of new beginnings.
Great news: I have accepted a Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellowship at the University of Colorado at Boulder. What does this mean? I will spend the upcoming academic year in Boulder (BOULDER! hee hee hee. Er, um, right—this is not a vacation, this is serious work) auditing graduate-level courses in food security and environmental issues. By year’s end, I aim to create a global forum linking food and environment journalists with scientists, farmers, fishers, environmentalists, cooks, gardeners and eaters around the world. The goal is to form a database of information and contacts—for anyone and everyone interested—on the health of our planet and the food we eat. I’m thrilled to be among the five journalists selected for this honor. Each of us will design an independent program related to the environment, based on our personal interests and experience.
We’ve all seen huge changes in journalism these past few years, and none of us can predict precisely where we’re headed. These shifts unfortunately coincide with some of the biggest environmental crises Mother Earth has ever seen. Ditto for food—from E. coli outbreaks to depleted rivers to contaminated farmlands to famines and predictions of warfare over access to land and water. The world faces unprecedented crises in food—just as the journalism world faces a crisis in reporting.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I will spend the upcoming year trying to find one—or two or three or four. I thank the Scripps Advisory Board for giving me the time and space and financial freedom to do so.
What does all this mean for Rambling Spoon? I’ll be here, perhaps more than ever. I’ll be adding new elements to this blog, and I’ll continue to write about Food Culture for The Faster Times. In the long term, I hope this fellowship will enhance my opportunities and abilities to report on serious food issues. I love fiddling in the kitchen, trying new spices and scouring foreign cities for favored soup stalls—but all of that takes a back burner to the critical issues I see threatening and affecting our food chain. Don’t worry, you’ll still find recipes and travelogues here. But today’s world also needs a type of journalism that puts food into a bigger context. Let’s just say I’ll be giving Rambling Spoon a sharper edge.
A few weeks ago, Jerry and I had the remarkable opportunity to witness an animist ceremony honoring the forest gods in a northern Lao village. Read the story in The Faster Times, and take a photographic scroll through that afternoon here. The villagers sacrificed a pig, offered bits of it to the spirits and divvied up the rest among dozens of families. This is the second in a three-part series on the lives and deaths of Asian pigs.
Happy Earth Day. In honor of the occasion, I’m taking you back to Cambodia, to a place I won’t see this trip, though I’ve thought of it often. It’s a place where salt and pepper meet on the edge of land and sea:
It’s just about this time of year. Jerry and I rent a moto in Kampot and drive eight sweltering, beautiful kilometers to the end of the road at Koh Trey, a spot whose name means Fish Island. We park beneath a giant strangler fig and hoof uphill to a lookout over the ocean. Two girls beat us to the spot. The four of us chat lightly. But mostly, we all sit in the shade, craving the little breeze that blows through in a tease—then leaves us sweating again for endless minutes.
Koh Trey is an idyllic little island of farmers and salt fields. Bony white cows speckle the land below towering sugar palms. The season’s first rains turn these acres to emerald green. And then, for miles, the landscape opens and saltwater shimmers beneath the oven of a sky. It spreads forever, it seems, in every direction: shallow, rectangular ponds glistening at the edges with fleur de sel. The air smells salty, the water feels greasy to the touch.
Salt of the sea, pepper of the Earth—the two converge along the Cambodian coast. Thanks to the local revival of a long-lost crop, Kampot’s markets now teem with these two tableside companions. Vendors sit beside sacks of pepper, both dried and fresh from the vine. Black and green. White, too. And satchels of salt that comes in varying grades of grinding—from rocks to grains to powder. I take bags of it home with me, doling out little gift packages to friends and family, and keeping enough to last me through a year beside my stove. They are Mother Nature’s gifts to the kitchen.
Last month, we spent nine days in the field with Jim Harris’s team in rural Phongsali province. We camped at the local dispensary and showered with cold river water, which was piped uphill to the village. The team hired two young women to cook, clean and launder. Our meals were served communally, outside, on an old red table. There weren’t enough benches and chairs, so we stood around baskets of sticky rice and the plat du jour. Each person paid 30,000 kip ($3.50) for three daily meals.
In those nine days, I kept a diary of what we ate. With a few small exceptions (late meals, off trekking), I managed to record almost every meal. I present that diary here because I find it a fascinating telltale of village life, its limitations, its repetitions and routines. Villagers bestowed the team with little gifts of homegrown garlic and backyard tamarind. But after the novelty faded (Sophoon is unaccustomed to foreign guests), I don’t think our cooks quite knew what to do with us. I would have loved more of the roots and vegetables that villagers collect in the forest, as well as the greens they grow in their garden. I offered to pay extra for fresh lettuce, spinach, herbs and other greens–but the residents of Sophoon almost never sell their vegetables, so the concept somewhat confused them. When something new appeared on the table, it likely had come strapped to the back of a dusty moto, driven by itinerant peddlers who make the daily trek from Dien Bien Phu, not far across the border. These sorts of travels make me a more appreciative person. The surprise of a fresh mango or mustard leaves tickled my palate with delight.
I’m a lover of simple, spicy farm food; homegrown and homemade. But it didn’t take long for my tongue to tire. By Day 3, I was sick of fish (and egg, which neither Jerry nor I eat). Of course, repetition is a matter of life in Sophoon. Villagers eat what’s in season, what falls off the tree, what pops through the soil in the forest, or what comes through on the occasional truck to Vietnam.
On the other hand, Sophoon is an organic locavore heaven. When a cook walked into the kitchen hut with a chicken, we ate it for dinner that night. And Michael Pollan would approve: nothing on this menu contained more than five ingredients. With a couple of canned exceptions, absolutely everything originated in the hills between Sophoon and Dien Bien Phu.
Dinner ’round the red table
So goes our week of village sustenance (with comments in parentheses):
DAY 1
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow(or jeow—spicy paste made with toasted chiles. More on this to come.)
-Minced fish with chile
-Plain boiled cabbage
-Green & yellow beans with tomato, onion, chile, garlic
DAY 2
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Fried egg with green onion, garlic, tomato, chile
-Boiled cabbage with garlic and chile
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red Jaeow
-Boiled cabbage
-Fried small fish
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Fragrant fish soup with lemongrass (which team leader Vilaisack plucked from a field after a bomb demolition)
-Fish laap
Team leader Vilaisack with lemongrass cut from a field near a bomb demolition
DAY 3
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Very garlicky red jaeow
-Boiled cabbage and tomato with garlic
-Small fried fish
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow, super garlicky and juicy
-Omelet with tomato, chile, onion
-Spicy slightly bitter fish (from Dien Bien Phu) stuffed with lemongrass in a soup of tomato, garlic and local sour fruit
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Omelet
-Fish/tomato/lemongrass soup (This is getting old and the team is griping. Only fish and egg, egg and fish. We lobby for more vegetables.)
DAY 4
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Omelet (This is really old. And skimpy. We try to get the cooks to buy vegetables from the locals. It costs 3,000 kip, 35 cents, for a kilogram of any vegetables. We offer to pay extra if necessary.)
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Pork with boiled garlic, tomato, chile
-Mustard greens soup with chile and black pepper (Variety! A distinct improvement.)
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Steamed cassava leaves (which the team collected after a demolition)
-Dried salty crispy beef
-Pork with tomato, yellow beans, chile, garlic
DAY 5
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Dried toasted buffalo skin strips (hard as rock)
-Yesterday’s leftover pork cooked with garlic, chile, spinach
-Minced pork fat cooked in tomato garlic broth for a Lao khao soy-style sauce
-Bowl of fresh raw lettuce leaves (A pig was purchased before yesterday’s lunch, and we’re still eating it).
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Fresh green roasted chile jaeow, super hot
-Pork fat with shredded tomato and cabbage
-Mustard green soup with hunks of pork fat
Dinner (Jim succeeds in organizing “Mexico night.”)
-Raw cabbage leaves to use as tortillas
-Canned black refried beans cooked with fresh garlic
-“Salsa” of cooked tomatoes, onions, chile (Jim uses the cabbage to wrap the ingredients like a taco. It works. The guys each try one and declare it sep, meaning delicious. Then they eat their sticky rice, pork fat with greens and green chile jaeow and deer meat of mysterious origins.)
Jim explains “Mexico Night” tacos to the team…
…which everyone enjoys before reverting to the usual sticky rice.
DAY 6
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Green jaeow
-Mild bok choy soup with chile and garlic
-Dark dried beef (we’re told beef, but it looks distinctly like the previous night’s deer) fried with bok choy, garlic, onion, a bit of tomato and pork fat
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Dried beef pieces
-Beef, bok choy and garlic soup
-Fresh sweet mango
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Fish soup (only fish and gingery broth, no vegetables)
-Watermelon (which I bought off a truck that stopped in the village and dumped its stash)
DAY 7
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Green jaeow with added tamarind
-Cilantro and green chile soup
-Steamed cassava leaves
-Canned sardines and tomato
-Omelet
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Green jaeow
-Papaya salad with peanuts
-Mustard greens soup
-Green beans fried with chicken, chile, garlic
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Green beans with chicken
DAY 8
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Boiled mustard greens soup, just a little chile and salt
-Plain boiled green beans
-Fried meaty bacon with little fat
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Tamarind chicken soup
-Chopped “grenade” chicken with green beans (In addition, I cook canned tuna, tomato, onion, garlic and chile.)
DAY 9
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red juicy jaeow
-Fresh lettuce leaves
-Canned sardines in tomato sauce
-Sweet potato ginger soup (This is good. Mild, young, fragrant ginger slightly sweetened from the potatoes. I think of making it at home: start with chicken stock, some small fresh garlic and garlic greens and/or chives, ginger, potato chunks, dried red chile, salt. If not using regular potatoes, add a pinch of palm sugar.)
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Melon soup with green onion and grenade chicken
-Papaya salad
-Fried forest ferns with chile, garlic, fish (Borneo-style but these ferns have a leafier consistency… now why couldn’t we have had these sooner?
Seaside view from the Galle Face Hotel, Colombo, before the tsunami
Exactly five years ago, on the morning after Christmas, an earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra. With a magnitude surpassing 9.1, it was one of the mightiest quakes on record. It spurred a series of tsunamis that devastated parts of Asia and Africa, and it killed at least 230,000 people. Jerry and I had just spent a month in Sri Lanka, one of the hardest-hit countries. When we heard the news, we shifted our holiday plans and traveled to Phuket, in southern Thailand, to cover the aftermath. What follows is an essay based on my journal notes from our month of travels along Sri Lanka’s edges, before Mother Nature altered the coastline forever. It’s the second in a two-part series. The first, a personal essay about reporting on the tsunami from Thailand, ran yesterday.
The Sea Before
Note: We visited Sri Lanka during a ceasefire in a 30-year civil war between the majority Buddhist Sinhalese government and the minority Hindu Tamil Tigers. That war ended in May 2009, but thousands of Tamil civilians remain in camps, and country is scarred by war. Jerry and I visited both south (predominantly Sinhalese) and north (predominantly Tamil) during our travels. In every corner of the country, Tamils and Sinhalese agreed: war would come again—and it did. Below are scenes from Sri Lanka’s waterfront, as it was in late November and early December 2004, just before nature pitched Sri Lankans a curveball in already catastrophic times.
Nov. 24
A storm comes. Black towers of clouds fade into a sheet of gray as lightning prickles distant rooftops. It comes, like most Asian storms, hard and fast. We dine tonight on the ocean, in Mount Lavinia, just south of Colombo. We order devilled fish, chicken curry and spicy rice. Two cats mingle with our feet and whine for scraps — feisty.
For a long while, we are the only people at this restaurant, so barren is this beach. A tropical beach with little hint of tourism. A couple of quiet men stroll through the darkened sand, talking and smoking, their silhouettes like mist. They have no light but that faint blip of a cigarette. A southbound train rumbles past, people cramped inside and spilling out the doors. The tracks follow the shoreline, closer to the water than any road. This place has the feel of a town abandoned after battle; roughened, empty, a little spooky.
Nov. 25
This morning I talk with Marcus, the desk man at our guesthouse. He spent 17 years in the Navy, in the north and east, and he describes his combat days with the hallmark precision of a tragic remembrance. “Our camp was attacked by LTTE in 1985. Third through fourth of May 1985. I was engaged in that face-to-face attack. We retaliated after 48 hours of attack.” He remembers three soldiers died and eight were badly injured: an amputated hand, an amputated leg, shrapnel wounds. After all these years, he still remembers the names of the dead and the cities they came from.
Marcus tells me he was excited to fight, not scared. He felt a duty to defend the lives of innocent people from “terrorist insurgents.” He thought he would die in that attack. “I thought there was no way — I must sacrifice my life.”
He admits the Tamils have not been treated kindly in the past 50 years; they suffered under the Sinhala-only law, which made Sinhalese the official language. “We must look at both sides.” But warfare aimed at civilians — bombs and raids in public places, a mark of the Tigers — is unconscionable, he says. “We must stop this nonsense.”
This afternoon, Jerry and I catch a train to Colombo. It takes 30 minutes in a shabby car with hard seats, hordes of people. The tracks skirt little shanties by the sea — nothing else on this coastline. Nothing but the poorest of homes, shacks huddled against each other. Women bathe at communal spigots, dogs laze in the shade. I watch their eyes as we slowly bounce by. (I remember their eyes later when I see pictures of these tracks, ripped from the earth and all these homes, gone.)
We arrive at Colombo’s main station amid hustle-and-bustle and a riotous noise. A moaning, more like it. Buddhist monks occupy the sidewalk, chanting in unison, protesting the LTTE. They do not want a separate country, a monk tells Jerry. They want a unified Sri Lanka, Tamils and Sinhalese. So they sit and chant their story amid the frenzied rush of humanity getting on and off the trains.
The sea, Colombo
Strolling around Colombo’s seaside fort: it feels as though the war is not over. Snipers skitter atop skyscrapers; two wiggle and wave when we spot them from the street. All government buildings hide behind thick barriers of sandbags and concertina wire. A lone soldier peeks from an empty seaside lookout on a playground of rainbow-colored swing sets.
We pass bombed-out buildings, just the shells still standing; we pass others reduced to heaps of broken bricks. Again and again, police officers stop us and ask where we go — no problem to look around, but no photos allowed. Colombo is a place at odds, with the tarnished remnants of colonialism and the feel of a city quietly under siege. There’s a police post, sponsored by Coca-Cola, beside the Galle Face Green, the city’s great promenade. There are checkpoints on the roads. There is tension and worry.
It’s Thanksgiving Day, we’ve almost forgotten. We drink beer at the Galle Face Hotel as the sun sets over roiling seas. Construction workers pound behind us; the ocean pounds before us. A chipmunk visits, taking my offerings of fried spicy cashew, propped on the leg of my chair. Crows cackle in the palms above us. The Indian Embassy stands within view; it is well-guarded, like all others. Soldiers prepare for another storm, erecting a tarp over their rooftop perch beside a mounted heavy machine gun. The sky blackens, the sea turns slate, the air cool and good. The rain chases us inside as it pummels the banquet tables on the lawn, white cloths and glasses drenched. Men in white shirts and black pants leap the wall and sprint to retrieve the dishes.
We return to Mt. Lavinia that night by taxi. As we pass through the Tamil area of Bambalapitiya, our driver tells us Tigers are bad for business. “Tiger people are dangerous,” he says. “They are suicide people.”
I tell our driver we are from the United States.
“Ahh… Bush,” he says.
I ask what he thinks.
If Bush had not been re-elected, he says, America would face more problems with Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda is a problem he understands — terrorists, he says, like the LTTE. How many times have the Tigers blown up hotels? Terrorists are bad for business, he says.
Nov. 26
It’s a Poya day, a Buddhist holiday, and the streets are bare. We head to a cramped little office in Bambalapitiya to buy LionAir tickets to Jaffna in the Tamil north. These days, the agent tells us, Jaffna is “more normal than Colombo,” where every day brings a new murder or three.
LionAir resumed flights to Jaffna with the ceasefire in 2002, after a four-year hiatus. The company opened in 1994 but, “Unfortunately,” the agent says with a downward glance, “one of our planes was shot down.” All 48 passengers and crew disappeared off the coast of Mannar Island.
Egret, Jaffna
Nov. 27, Jaffna
We drop closer and closer to Jaffna, passing over sparkling estuaries. Emerald forests, egrets in rice paddies, red dirt roads, crisp air: It’s beautiful, stunningly so. But the airport is a bunkered high-security zone. More soldiers, more encampments, more looks of war. There is nothing to indicate it has stopped. This is Tamil Eelam, at the northern tip of the island.
The 17-kilometer road into town passes shot-up schools and bombed-out homes, businesses with nothing left, buildings with trees and bushes growing inside; mile after mile destroyed. Most every corner in most every neighborhood is guarded by a Sri Lankan Army bunker with soldiers watching.
Nov. 29
We hire a van for a day trip, driving north and east, then back to Jaffna and west. It’s potholes all the way, nothing maintained. And everywhere, we see the Sri Lankan Army, the Sinhalese. Soldiers occupy the best beaches, Tamils tell us, and they’ve mined them all.
The young soldiers we talk to admit they don’t like it here. Tamils and Sinhalese living together, in fear.
These torn causeways wind through groves of palms, flush with birds and cows and goats, and more birds and butterflies, and more birds, all day long. Brahminy kites and cormorants, spot-billed pelicans and black-crowned night herons, little egrets, great egrets, grey herons, painted storks, red-wattled lapwings. I’ve never seen such birdlife in such abundance. The birds, so light on their legs; they walk through minefields with peaceful feet.
The homes we pass were lovely and elegant in a previous time, perched on the property of retirement dreams. Before: there were colonial art-deco villas set deep within coconut groves. Now: there is nothing but shattered walls and rooftops gone. So many families vanished, and all the contents of those homes with them.
Dec. 2
I’m on our balcony in Jaffna. A cow swishes its tail across the street. People pass on bicycles and a small fire burns against a wall. The sun strikes upon the bombed buildings around me.
We spent the day in a three-wheeled taxi driven by Mr. K, a newfound friend. He has a difficult past, having traded the life of a Tiger for that of a family man. He knows men have been killed for the political thoughts he now harbors – all he wants is peace and normalcy, a future for his children.
Mr. K drives us to Kurikadduwan, where we board a ferry to Nainativu, a small island where Hindus and Buddhists meet. Amid 5,000 Tamil villagers sits a Buddhist temple where the Buddha himself walked 2,500 years ago. He came to Sri Lanka, ironically, to stop a war. Legend says he left his footprint here, which is why thousands of Sinhalese Sri Lankans make pilgrimages to this island. Hence, the government stationed a Navy garrison here.
Just outside the temple, along the road from Buddhists to Hindus, is a Navy bunker. A 21-year-old soldier asks Jerry if he’d like to photograph his gun, a T-56 LMG. The soldier comes from the inland city of Kandy and has been stationed here six years. I do the math and realize he was 15 when he came to this island of peace.
Back on our balcony in Jaffna, the rain comes lightly from a heavy cloud over wavering sun. A clunky armored personnel carrier shuttles a load of soldiers up the road. A bus follows with more officers, then a truck. There has been rioting in Jaffna for the past two days. The circumstances remain cloudy, but it seems to be a squabble over fishing and money. At night, we’ve heard the jolting booms of grenades.
Mr. K has told us two boys died in last night’s fighting. A curfew was set from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., though we don’t know if it still stands. There is no news here beyond word of mouth. This afternoon, we had hoped to see an old ice factory, a five-story building on the coast, so Mr. K began driving in that direction. The narrow road met a cramped intersection crowded with people. We inadvertently found ourselves in the center of rioting, where yesterday’s deaths occurred. The locals politely advised us to leave immediately.
Jaffna has grown on us, but its troubles run deeper than we can go.
Fishing, Trincomalee
Dec. 7
Trincomalee, the eastern edge of Tamil Eelam. It could be Seattle, but it’s decidedly not. A city on a bay, islands and harbors, hills and fishing boats, birds and blue sky. Trinco sits on gorgeous land buffered from the sea. But it shelters the worst of ethnic hatreds and war-formed mentalities. Buildings are barricaded and marked with skulls and crossbones. As Jerry says, it’s as though no one here gives a shit, and shit is literally everywhere. So is garbage, so are guns.
The owner of our guesthouse is a man named Tilko, a Tamil who came of age in London. There, he drove a taxi, washed dishes and put himself through engineering school. He says his people are deeply united in their fight for freedom. “We are terrorists in the world’s eyes. But the people have suffered.”
Tilko returned during the ceasefire to help rebuild. He has opened several hotels, north and south, but he waits for lasting peace to pursue his grandest visions – he wants to build a resort on a small seaside plot outside Jaffna, and another one here, facing a coral island that’s good for snorkeling.
But it is not yet time.
Now, it is time to live with war in mind. Tilko plants rice and bananas on his vacant lands. That way, if the bombs fall one year, the fields can be replanted the next, he says. When he works on his hotels in town, he buys only cheap (though tasteful) materials because he knows the building may not last. “If there is war, we have to rebuild.”
Jerry and I take a tuk-tuk to the nearby tourist beach of Nilaveli. Our driver turns down a dirt trail and there it is, big wide sand, a few men casting lines, and nothing. No hotels, no restaurants, no tailor shops or tattoo stalls. It’s what happens in paradise when paradise goes to war.
A few scattered hotels lie farther up the road. We stop at a place where, for $17, you can rent a basic room with a porch overlooking the ocean. The pool-in-progress remains as it has for years. A military bunker sits next door. There are no guests when we visit, but the manager assures us things pick up in spring.
Dec. 26, Thailand
A tsunami strikes Asia, killing 230,000 people or more. Hardest hit are Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka.
Early January
The little hotel we visited in Nilaveli is gone; we read about it in updated online guidebooks. “Flattened,” “totalement detruit,” “completamente distrutto.” Much like the streets we strolled in Trinco, where the waves scattered landmines far from their designated fields. Much like the tracks south of Colombo, where the tsunamis killed at least 800 on a southbound train. That train was called the “Queen of the Sea.”
A week or so after the tsunamis, an envelope arrives from Mr. K. “I pen this letter to remember you. I and my family are in good health,” he writes. But northern Sri Lanka is not. Mr. K sets off around the Jaffna Peninsula, to help where he can.
Mr. K sets off to do what millions of Sri Lankans have hoped to do for decades: rebuild and renew. And restore life to a devastated land.
Exactly five years ago, on the morning after Christmas, an earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra. With a magnitude surpassing 9.1, it was one of the mightiest quakes on record. It spurred a series of tsunamis that devastated parts of Asia and Africa, and it killed at least 230,000 people. Jerry and I had just spent a month in Sri Lanka, one of the hardest-hit countries. When we heard the news, we shifted our holiday plans and traveled to Phuket, in southern Thailand, to cover the aftermath. What follows is a personal essay I wrote about this reporting job. It’s the first in a two-part series. Tomorrow, I will post an essay based on my journal notes from a month of travels along Sri Lanka’s edges, before Mother Nature altered the coastline forever.
After the Waves
I can’t kill the stench, can’t stand the reek of my clothes. I smell like rotting bodies, like the bloated corpses that lie in heaps here at Wat Bang Muang. Death smothers the temple and eats through its shine.
Some of the victims are covered, hundreds are not. They don’t look real, faces so puffed, tongues extended, bellies distended, breasts and penises erect. I see a child with maggots in the gut, a woman with a gash in the breast. Dry ice swirls in eerie loops.
Worker, bodies and dry ice at Wat Bang Muang
Workers tiptoe through these morbid avenues yelling “falang” when they identify a foreign corpse. Shell-shocked survivors scrutinize the piles. The bodies are no longer people. They are not humans, no life, nothing — absolutely nothing — of a loved one’s being. They are bloat and rot and food for scavengers. I understand the longing, the wanting to know what happened, the desire to bring a body home across miles of ocean to a family in waiting. But nothing remains of these people. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, they are returning to the same Mother Nature that killed them.
This is Khao Lak, January 2005. Jerry and I are here to write this story, photograph this news. On Christmas Day, thousands made merry on the beachfronts of southern Thailand, sunning and sailing and smiling for cameras, with the backdrop of bliss all around. The next day, everything changed. Death gushed through the door and broke it down. We’re supposed to look at the remains and somehow assemble them, sanitize them, for family readers back home. Editors don’t want feelings and opinions in the face of gore. They want truth without the tears.
Yet reporters do cry. I’ve seen it many times.
“If you do not see the reality, you will never understand what happened here,” an Austrian volunteer named Walter Dreier tells me. His vacation has turned into a search-and-rescue mission. For days, he picks through rubble, looking for Austrians buried in sand. He finds identification papers for two people, no more.
It’s a reporter’s bitter struggle — my struggle — to convey the visceral feelings aroused by a wave that killed a quarter million people. It was nature, unbiased, invoking random selection. Pictures and words alone don’t always work. They don’t translate smells or sounds or the overwhelming clench of desperation.
The sewers in town stink of death. I step over a manhole and I smell the temple; I smell my clothes, my hair, my bag, all over again.
I smell sad irony, too: The airport is warm and flowery, like paradise, like it should be. But the tarmac is stacked with coffins.
Remnants of a Khao Lak resort
I hear it: Calm waters lap against placid shores. A red sun slips over a docile ocean, as stunning a view as ever. But strips of metal dangle from a ceiling, creaking in an creepy wind, as bulldozers crush their way through mountains of rubble. In some spared spots, little lizards rustle through lush vegetation. In others, nothing green remains. We wake one morning to helicopters thundering round and round. It’s the drone of disaster.
I taste grief in sweet tangerines and greasy fried chicken, offered freely by hundreds of men and women toiling over bubbling woks. They’ve volunteered to feed the workers and journalists who have flooded this island. The cooks are happy to give but heartbroken for the reasons why.
I come to understand this catastrophe through the absence of sensation, too. I walk one night, alone, along the beach in Patong. It’s a black cavity of nothing — nothing of what was here before. Think of Waikiki, snuffed of life. Bricks are stacked to be made into sidewalks again. The road is open, the debris mostly cleared. But no lights, no people, not even dogs. Step two blocks inland and the beer flows, the music thumps, in near-empty bars. All the customers are scared away — or gone to another life.
On Khao Lak beach, the waves pulverized everything in their paths, turning high-end resorts into piles of refuse. Everything is where it shouldn’t be. Doors and windows litter the ground. An overturned truck rests in a hotel lobby. Electric wires lay in ditches. Concrete posts are snapped in half. A tree sprouts from the broken windshield of a vehicle stuck in mud.
Rescue worker searching through the rubble of a Khao Lak resort
Rescue workers pick through the detritus. It’s meticulous work by hand, down in the sand. A man from Singapore digs through broken wood and concrete, pawing carefully, sniffing for the telltale smell of human remains. He is momentarily drawn to a curious spot, but his boss tells him never mind — it’s only the odor of rotten fish.
Up the beach a bit, Jerry and I watch a Korean team going through similar motions. They find a backpack and spill its contents: a wallet, a cell phone, medications, lipstick. It belonged to a woman, that’s all they can discern. The team has found 11 bodies and one leg in five days. The workers doubt they’ll find more. They’re moving north, where the tsunami wiped out an entire fishing village.
Evidence of the missing surfaces in tattered bits — a photocopy of Toth Ildiko’s Hungarian passport, a March 1 Turkish Airlines boarding pass from Bangkok to Istanbul in Oliver Gutzke’s name.
Miles inland, there is life—lights, voices, movement, progress. The living keep going. But on Khao Lak beach, there is only the sea against the sounds of searching. It is overwhelming, and it shows on every face here. The tragedy lives behind every little white mask.
Most unnerving are the third-floor rooms of a Khao Lak resort, left as they were that morning. Jerry and I climb the dirty stairs. We see what life was like just moments before, as though we’re traipsing through time. We find an open tin of mackerel, a glass of grape juice, John Grisham at the bedside. The next room over has crayons and dolls spread across a table. On the floor sits a survey measuring “the opinions of international tourists toward Khao Lak.”
In another room, we try to guess the course of events: The female occupant went swimming, met the first wave and lived. She ran to the room, kicked in the door, grabbed a few items and fled. She left little spots of blood on the bed.
We come to know the missing: One family had kids, one guest had a cold. Someone loved tea, another liked silk, someone else took expensive care of her hair and skin. These rooms harbor little freeze-frames of life before it vanished.
When people need more answers, they visit “the wall,” an hour away in Phuket town. It’s a sobering corridor of photos and fliers and phone numbers, lists of dead and injured, places last seen and pleas for help. It’s the only information available. Everything else is sealed in coffins or scattered through unknown graves of sand.
Workers here answer the phones 24 hours a day. It is chokingly sad to talk with the volunteers, the people who field these calls from hither and yon. A young woman named So Pida fetches a list of names and the resorts where they stayed. Most all the way down the page it reads: Khao Lak, Khao Lak, Khao Lak. “We work all day, all night. We cannot sleep,” she tells me. Only ten times have people called her back to say they found their loved ones alive.
I write about So Pida, the wall, the bodies at Bang Muang. I write many paragraphs, yet the words don’t suffice. I can’t find adequate imagery for the things that haunt my head, for the details unbefitting a family newspaper back home.
Instead, I drink a beer and my thoughts turn to puddles. It’s the same for Walter, the Austrian volunteer. After five days, he removes his mask and takes a break. He can’t go back to those dreadful beaches, he says. “Last night I thought, ‘I have to go out, I have to drink some beers.’” But he couldn’t even drown in an alcoholic elixir.
“It didn’t work.”
Walter can’t shake the images, so he changes his mind and vows to search through sand again. “I have to,” he tells me, with tiny tears misting his eyes.
And I have to look away. My eyes are equally blurred.
Ever hear a sandhill crane directly overhead? The voice is a warble with a prehistoric ring, the wings a primordial whooosh. These are sounds in evidence of lifecycles that have endured far longer than we.
The birds visit New Mexico each year in an ancient ritual that maps their lives from the far northern reaches of the Rocky Mountains down to the deserts of the Southwest.
Just an hour south of our house, thousands of cranes (plus ducks and geese) gather in the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, where the Rio Grande welcomes the world’s largest gathering of sandhill cranes. The refuge is strictly managed to provide ample water and food. In earlier times, habitat loss along the Rio Grande posed severe threats to the birds; 70 years ago, only 17 cranes visited the region. Although this river still has its problems, officials today count more than 17,000 cranes in Bosque del Apache.
But I don’t have to drive anywhere to meet these birds. Several times a week, I ride my bike through the long stretch of forest bordering the river about a mile from our house. When I don’t cycle, I run, often along the acequias connecting farm to farm, neighbor to neighbor. Today, like many other days this fall, I encountered a congregation of cranes feeding in the fields along these waterways. They bob their heads and go about their business, almost oblivious to my presence. Of course, they know I’m there. But they seem to have learned through the years that sometimes humans mean no harm.
And they seem to have learned, through ages of practice, that humans rely on the same waters as they; that farmers plant fields each year resulting in the diets cranes love: grains, tubers, mice, snakes, insects and worms.
These relationships linking the water to the farmers to the birds have lasted centuries. I ride my bike along the Otero Lateral, an acequia dating to the 1600s (and marked accordingly with a sign). The early Spanish settlers followed the Puebloans before them, using a gridwork of irrigation canals to supply water throughout the desert region. Those same canals continue to feed people and birds today.
I’m reminded of a spot, halfway around the world, in Cambodia. Something similar happens in the little village of Tmatboey, where endangered giant and white-shouldered ibises gather in ancient watering holes known as trapeangs, which date to the Angkor empire. Long ago, the ibises likely followed buffalo and elephant herds as these animals churned up the ground and created pockets where water could collect. Today, the wild ungulates are mostly gone, but farmers and their domestic livestock create favorable conditions for the birds. With their thin, elegantly curved bills, the ibises nose around the fields for insects, worms, eels and small crustaceans.
Something happens when a bird this big flies away and I can feel the flap of its wings in my heartbeat. It’s as though my body shrinks in the shadow of an age-old system that has nourished more cycles of life than a single human can ever know.
A cool afternoon tea in a remodeled stone home at Castleton, Derbyshire.
When Condé Nast shuttered Gourmet last month, the move actually opened a drawerful of opportunity for me—entire files and folders of material left undone, unpublished, unseen by readers. As with any magazine, articles and ideas get stashed in mysterious corners, some never to surface again. It’s just the way this business goes. Ever since Gourmet.com appeared online, it was part of my job to feed the site. Sometimes I’d send my editor a list of ideas; other times, when I felt a deep-down urge, I’d scribble something from the moment and send it off, straight away. And sometimes, I’d hold an idea for a time more appropriate. Some such pieces would never run, for reasons of timing or space or mood (all magazines are moody: sometimes something works, sometimes something doesn’t, and sometimes something doesn’t today—though it might tomorrow). None of this necessarily detracts from a narrative’s merit.
What I’m saying is this: I have on my desktop a big, fat package of ideas that were, at one time, intended for other places. But now, periodically, I’ll be posting those narratives right here. Let us begin in Derbyshire:
How to handle a whistle-stop tour of England’s Peak District
First, get yourself an A and G, distant cousins who double as the dandiest of tour guides. They greet you at the Derby Railway Station, stuff you into their little black car, and whisk you to a countryside literary barn. It’s known as Brierlow Bar, advertised as England’s biggest bargain bookstore—and its highest, at 1,075 feet in elevation.
Get your books, then head to nearby Buxton, on old spa town built by the Romans just after Jesus’s time. Healing waters spurt from St. Anne’s Well, where believers gather with plastic bottles.
Moving along, through a misty mountainous drive, Castleton beckons just as hunger riles your stomach and goosebumps prickle your skin. Skip the hilltop castle and choose instead a warm seat inside The George, a homey little inn offering watercress soup, steamy and predictably green. Still chilled? Try a half pint of John Smith’s Extra Smooth. It will put you in the perfect mood for a walk along a babbling brook, past stone-walled cottages toward the mouth of the Devil’s Arse (it’s a cave).
Taking an afternoon stroll past the old stone homes of Castleton, leading toward the Devil’s Arse.
Not much time to linger, though. You’re off to the “Plague Village” of Eyam, to which the dreaded disease arrived in a bundle of cloth in 1665. Pay your respects at the church, then wander the town, where buildings bear signs with the names of the dead and the dates they succumbed: “John Torre died here 29th July 1666. Godfrey, his son, aged 8 months died 3rd Aug 1666. His wife, Joan, survived.”
Eyam, infamous for its plague history and stories from the 17th century, today is a quiet village, perfect for wandering.
Choose dinner in Derby to escape the gloom. La Tasca’s wine and lively décor soon remove all memory of the grim reaper (just don’t tell A and G the paella could do better). Afterward, stroll the ancient sidewalks and acquaint yourself with the local ghosts. Catch last call at The Brunswick, and be sure to try the porter. Then head to bed, for morning shall arrive early.
British breakfast served overlooking a typically British garden on a typically misty Derby morning.
If you’re lucky, the sun shines and it’s a pleasant drive to Calke Abbey, through a pretty oak-lined passage, past a rare breed of longhorn cattle grazing in the dewy grass. Eventually you hit Ashby de la Zouch, where the remnants of a massive medieval kitchen occupy your imagination for an hour, as does a climb to the old castle lookout. (Hint: rent the audio guide. It’s entertaining and informative.)
You’re hungry again, and your guides insist on dinner, a Sunday afternoon tradition. Your destination: The Rose & Crown in Brailsford, a cheery affair serving hearty classics such as beef roast, Yorkshire pudding and steak-and-mushroom pie. Ask the server a question, any question, (“Where’s the bathroom?” or “What, exactly, is Yorkshire pudding?”) and he’ll quip, “Ah, right, so you’re a foreigner.”
You are currently browsing the archives for the Nature category.
Welcome to my ramblings on food, drink, travel, politics, history and all the other avenues that converge in life. I’m a journalist, author and media trainer; and for five years I was Gourmet's Asia correspondent until the magazine's recent closure. I’m a bit obsessive in the kitchen. Much like my mother, I start thinking about dinner well before breakfast….
My books:
