Bangkok

Bangkok

Fire

Heat. The fan in my room is always spinning; on high speed during the day, low at night. It draws a bit of resource, adds a bit of noise, moves constantly. What does it mean to live in city of thirteen million? Every night I wake up numerous times. How can one expect to sleep through so much movement, among so many people? Motors, insects, gears and plumes of diesel smoke all add their noise. And the voices: Thai spoken in a song of pitched tones, the language of a rare bird. Bangkok is a vast, moving river of noise. Traffic, noise and heat. A cataclysm inside a mirage. But the noise varies, the traffic ebbs and in places there is none.

Bangkok
06-February:2005

Water

Today, I walked to the nearby ferry stop and waited for one that would take me four stops downstream. I studied the long boats, the opposite banks of the Chao Phraya River, the water and the fish jumping for insects. The ferry had still not arrived and in the spirit of adventure, I boarded one I’d never seen before. At first a disappointment: it merely went to the other side of the river. But instead of riding it back again, I decided to walk. Immediately, I entered a shanty town, erected on piers. It was dirt poor but immaculate as well. Houses were build of planks, corrugated steel, fiberglass, pieces of formica, fruit crates, old billboards and chicken wire. The public thoroughfares were small sidewalks of cement or wood that meandered in a helter-skelter order and only occasionally dead-ended. There were no cars and it was eerily quiet, even bucolic. It was as if something of the timeless life of the hamlet was reoccurring here (as if nature still existed). I felt strangely at home. People were frying pork in the usual dark oil, playing with their children, making bird cages, but the speed was slowed. They smiled easily, happily. It was poor but not squalid. The first street even had a Laundromat; a room with three sides, green walls and four washing machines, spotless as if it was a shrine.

An old woman sat in an even older wheel-chair on the porch of a tiny house that was dark inside. I said hello, sa-wat-dee kop. She smiled, thin as a bird. I was thirsty and came to a shop selling soft drinks. I removed a bottle of water and, upon impulse, a Coca-cola for the old grandmother. Behind the refrigerator, a woman was lying on the floor, glancing at a television. She was sensuously beautiful, not the least bit startled by my presence and began to rise so slowly it was fetching. Rather than letting her get up, I kneeled down to pay her. I brought the opened Cola-cola to the old women who looked a bit confused. She refused my gift with hand gestures but I set the bottle down beside her.

I continued to walk a zig-zag path through the shanty town, heading, I thought, for the Wang Lang ferry stop and my lunch restaurant. Unusually for me, I lost all sense of direction (they wanted me to) I remained spellbound by the worlds I was encountering. The small houses tended to, ingeniously furnished, most without doors, much less a padlock, each one unique. Dogs were on every block, often sleeping, looking malnourished but occasionally indifferent to scraps of food. Mongrelized into a soup without a trace of pedigree, no dog came as high as your knee. As the neighborhood declined, the mange and filth of its dogs increased. Raw sores, eyes crusted half-shut, teats and testicles drooping forlornly, hides like something found in a garbage dump. Dogs long estranged from affection. Some almost comical, others nearly hideous, but still maintaining a remnant of trust, a loyalty in their eyes.

Probably few of these houses had running water, but deeper into the shantytown the visual mood changed from poor to squalid, the access to water and other resources obviously becoming more difficult if not impossible. The ditches invested with more trash, the mud dank and smelling vaguely sinister with newly hatched chicks rooting in it. Geese inspecting garbage. Less order, less signs of life, the people living here off working somewhere. Fewer shrines with statues of the Buddha, fewer flower garlands adorning them. The place more of a way station than a place to live. More ghostlike.

The footpath, continuing in a chaos of intersections and makeshiftedness, was still going somewhere and I kept walking (what else could I do?). Suddenly a new world! A parcel of land uninhabited, a marsh with cattail and other water loving plants proliferate and gold-like in their greenness. Flowers I had no name for. Birdcalls. The sky appearing blue. An explosion of well being. A primeval garden. The path continued for a hundred yards, crossed an abandoned rail road track, avoided a pile of cinder blocks, skirted an old car chassis and came to an end. Disappeared. I took one more step and was standing on asphalt, four lanes of it, with buses and motorcycles hurtling by.

This part of Bangkok wasn’t even on my map, but I could tell from certain tall building I’d become familiar with that I was far from the river, that I had indeed lost all sense of direction (I thanked them for this). The road went one way, the river was another, so I started again down lesser streets, alleys, abandoned lots. I came to a railroad station with a surrealistic air: two set of tracks, people resting against the shady side of old windowless passenger coaches, everything else baking in the sun. I couldn’t tell if trains still came through of had long ceased to.

Beyond the train station I came across the most haunting spectacle of all. A covered food market, about the size of a basketball court, but nearly empty, open on the sides and without a trace of water or hygiene, as if it served denizens of another realm, a purgatory between homelessness and something worse. I could smell it a block away, that sinister smell, but multiplied, evoking the colors of choking fumes. There were three of four people inside, almost listless but engaged in a task: a woman sorting through a case of mostly broken eggs, a man peeling strange vegetable beside an ancient TV, a man asleep near a sleeping dog. Unlit light bulbs hung with their filaments, like exposed cavities. Fruit crates recycled a thousand times, rags, and dogs flattened by ill-nourishment and sleep. The place seemed to operate in slow motion, as if the smell effected the thyroid gland, sapped energy, spiraled one into despondency. Above all, the place lacked water: water to clean the concrete slabs where food was served, water to wash up fish entrails and splattered hogs blood.

Then I was back at the river. Barges pulled by tugboats. Shade from leafy trees and ferry boat docks, breezes and the air fresher, the view wide again. I wondered about the Chao Phraya River. What condition was it in? What would some of it look like under that microscope? It appeared far less clear than the waters of the Bospherus, but not even a fraction as filthy as the Tiber or River Arno. Then I noticed two men under the shade of a bridge. One was old, just resting against a concrete slab with the water’s edge at his feet. The other man was young and bathing in the river, its water up to his waist. Naked except for a pair of black briefs, the young man’s body was sleek and perfect. He had washed and now he was standing there brushing his teeth with river water and a red toothbrush. He brushed vigorously. It seemed like he’d never stop. Five, eight, ten minutes, he fulfilled the instructions of the most vigilant dentist. Then he rinsed his mouth and submerged himself in the river again.

Bangkok
05-February:2005

Air

Defeated by the Metro and Skytrain in my attempt to find where Bangkok ends, I decided to try the ferry boat. North. Where I’d never been. The river widened, displayed just how much water it had, as if it could flood the city if it wanted to. Boys fished from the concrete piers, dove into it. Modern Bangkok had not yet invaded. Stretches of houses built in an old way, some in a colonial way. Behind and around them palm and leaf trees, here and there a wat. From the boat, the houses were almost unbearable to look at, as if they were gorgeous beings waiting on shore to satisfy your every desire. Porches, windows, balconies, roof angles all as if saying, Look this is a perfect way to live, it is warm, wet, abundant in fish and delicious fruit, here you can laugh and let the world take care of you. We will even help you become enlightened .

I had intended to ride the boat to its northern terminal, Stop #30 at Nonthaburi, but each stop looked more and more inviting, I couldn’t imagine paradise could improve so I bolted four stops shy of the end, a place called Wat Khema. It was if I was on a planet with a different atmosphere. Suddenly there little noise and few people. A courtyard with a car here and there, but mostly room for breezes to wind through it, to talk. A huge tree wrapped with old brocades and fabric, like so many belts tied at it waist. Flower garlands old and new strewn within it. Naturally a shine. It had several levels, like an elaborate tree house and was filled with stones carvings of ancestors, depictions of the king, toy soldiers, photographs, opened bottles of soda with straws in place, coins, amulets, and back in the corner a golden Buddha. It not only invited you to stop and pray, it invited you to add to it. The emptiness of the wind and open courtyard was enhanced by the shine, and they conversed.

I strolled around. Dogs so asleep and still they seemed to be lying there without gravity, as if they could just as well be floating. To the north a wat and inside its gates monks in their saffron robes wandered idly down a corridor. A section of house started at the edge of the courtyard, with the crisscross footpaths and people who were happy to smile. I had dressed better this morning, wore the black trousers I’d bought yesterday and tucked my new shirt in. There was zero probability of running into another tourist here, nor did I look quite like one. I felt like a schoolteacher or anthropologist, as if I would stay and make it my life’s work. As is was, I seemed destined for the other side of the river. I had come to the water again. Along with an old woman and a bunch of schoolgirls, I stepped back onto a ferry boat. Like an ice-cream truck, the boat made three stops, all in the neighborhood, then crossed to the other side. The pilot was a boy, silent, darkened by the sun. He greeted me without taking his eyes off the water.

Bangkok
08-February:2005

Wind

The Chiangmai to Bangkok fourteen-hour overnight train is now four hours from Bangkok and the window by my seat is a magnificent movie screen, open, wide (two people could jump through it). Wind blows across my face. Occasional plumes of diesel exhaust appear from the engine two cars forward. Brick kilns and cremation fires. Dogs congregate at the train stations, sometimes try to follow a passenger home, sleep in the shade, go homeless. Rice fields are either flooded and a luminous, electric green or else fallow and fire-blackened. Other colors appear: white herons, chartreuse boganvia, a red field hat. Sometimes the landscape is a primeval harmony of muddy fields, songbirds in flight and temple roof spires piercing the sky. Herons perch akimbo one another. High-voltage towers loom. The train slows to a stop at the edge of the greenest imaginable rice field and the herons land, white as golf balls. There are so many species of birds you’d believe we were in a wildlife sanctuary. The perfection of traveling at slow speed with car full of open windows is almost unbearable. The wheels clatter incessantly. The engine roars. Piles of garbage appears in a bramble patch. Each passenger has a seat which at night became a bed, enclosed with curtains. It was possible to lay in bed, tilt your head slightly and stare up at the moon. People chatted in their seats but the ambient mechanics muffled their content, only adding to the solitary pleasure. A gushing hose begins to flood a new rice filed. We are now only three hours from Bangkok, when the temporary realm of our train car – number two – will disintegrate. Children in front of my seat have their head out the window. Two young men are reading video game magazines. The German girl has fallen asleep. The car rocks about like a boat on water. A herd of oxen. Cattails. Ash. If I lean toward the aisle, the wind blows across the side of my head but not into my eyes. The train car is askew with feet and elbows: a glance down the aisle reveals a half dozen bulging backpacks, a thirty-kilometer highway sign and an old woman with a walking stick. Hank Aaron was the greatest ballplayer when I was twelve. A gust of diesel smoke in a thicket of banana leaves. A farmer plants rice with an underhand toss. I sleep for a while, gaze out the window each time I wake. Ayuthaya train station and it is eleven a.m., ninety minutes from Bangkok. Heat, stronger. Humidly, greater. Sky, less blue, more cement like. Food continues to be offered from the aisle, various barbequed things, sticky rice, sliced pineapple, mangoes, incessant soft-drink offerings. The land encounters freeways then returns to greenness and trees; like a zoo of shorebirds, a hundred varieties of houses on stilts. A cow skull nailed to a fence post is what you’d expect from Nebraska. We pass Chian Rak but don’t stop there. Dogs without a dog-dish. The wind has been at my face for five hours and my hair is matted. Eyes begin to sting. The weariness of early afternoon detectable in the smoke. Thoughts of a wash cloth or ice cube. Massive concrete pillars wait for a freeway to be installed like catcher’s mitts waiting for a high pop foul. Thirty-five minutes to Bangkok. Slum transmigrations along the railroad track and one house is decorated with old CDs, playing side out, while another shack defies falling over and the great tree beside it, strewn with fresh flower offerings, brings a Chiangmai recollection: a bodhi tree planted from seeds of the one Buddha become enlightened under. Who is in a hurry to complete this marvelous trip? The overhead fans have been spinning for thirteen hours. We are at Bang Su Station. I once saw Willie Mays hit a home run. There is a wakefulness in Bangkok, as if refinement occurs in spite of the traffic and smog. I feel it every time I’ve arrived here. There is something clarifying, as if the city was on the ocean, or some other great body of water. Of course, all Bangkok has is the Chao Praya River, which couldn’t possibly create a sea breeze or effect the entire city. It is only a single river in the immensity of Bangkok. But it does do something, I’m sure of it.

Bangkok
10-March:2005

Along the Chao Praya

The Nathanburi Ferry works the Chao Praya River and will take to you to thirty different piers, each one floats on pontoons and leads to a neighborhood, a time a day and the illiterate life of taste buds or the inner ear canal. At Wat Tien dogs so mange-eaten are virtually hairless and lie like discarded sofas indifferent to foot traffic, dreaming and then waking again to smoke particles of fried squid. Most piers have tables and propane tanks nearby, firing woks of scalding oil with a fresh catch of chilies, bean sprouts and the unlimited supplies of pork tendons and underbellies as if just scooped out of the mud ready to fry at 420 degrees. The relative humidly is ninety proof and if you take a soda from a sidewalk refrigerator and set in on a table, the bottle breaks into a furious sweat. Two men stripped of their shirts rest in shade by a barber chair, a gleaming mechanism like a 1945 hat in red leather chrome. One of them would cut your hair in it. At Bang Po, stop #22, the dogs are better fed and more populous, there eyes are wide, saucer-like, rolling about, even hallucinogenic as if lost in visions of a benevolent canine underworld just as people are getting off work. The houses built on piers and bordering the river – shacks by any other standard – are a glimpse into another way of life as you walk past them, proof that the Neolithic era produced a languid but sublime humanity. Towels and shirts dry in the sun and emit colors, mixed as they are with sunlight and this way of life, that can probably cure cancer just looking at them. Belongings lie in shadowy rooms as if on the verge of ceremonial sacrifice. The sight of a fifty-cent pair of sandals, a quart of shampoo or the page of old newspaper glued to the wall makes your head turn so fast it hurts.

Bangkok
11-March:2005

Passenger

I was back on the Chao Praya River, taking the ferry boat to whatever stop seemed appealing (being led), though I’d paid fare all the way to Wat Tuek, twelve stops north. Without anticipating it, much less planning to, I saw sunlight on the water and it corresponded immediately to the River Arno, a spectacular glimpse of the elements and my (everyone’s) affinity with them. I’d drank a large bottle of Singha with my lunch of steamed perch wrapped in a curried banana leaf and it was now 4:30, the sun low in the sky, broken into a million reflection particles in dance on the water’s surface. Other passengers took the wind or looked about as I was. The planks of the boat supported my weight, a simulacrum of earth. Fire was abundant in the sun and however many knots the Nathanburi to Wat Rajsingkorn Ferry was moving promoted the experience of air. I imagined a realm of gills below the water’s surface, immediate death and a bardo ticket. I gripped the handrail and felt my palms sweat in the heat. I stared at the river like a spear-fisherman at an ice-hole. The dancing sunlight spoke but I could put no words to it. Politics, history, real estate schemes and who won the 1987 World Cup bilged past like expelled crankcase oil. I surrendered to the Chao Praya planetarium as if I was staring at the sky. The sunlight moved with the boat as barges, fishing shanties and gated condominiums passed like whiffs of smoke forming names in the dictionary. I felt my eyes breathing as if they were lungs; immense in-and-outflows of retinal images, sans names and labels, thousands of boats clamoring through the pupil of my Suez Canal.

Bangkok
12-March:2005

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