…taking a turn
off the 10 is taking a turn back many centuries. The black turns red and the
red sometimes becomes gravel. Many of the houses are old.
From every
corner a “sabeidee” rings out and not a peri-urban in-your-face greeting, not
‘we say sabeidee because that’s what they expect’. It is a greeting and a
benediction of good health and cheer.
Children call
out ‘falang!!!’
when I ride by and the light red mechanism of the Specialized turned almost effortlessly.
The greens of
the field, the rice paddies in various stages of growth, were so convincing
that I took off my sunglasses to let the full force of it in and everywhere, to
my left, the Nam Ngum River rang its sweet peasant song. Coconut trees, teaks
the size of planets, people stopping me to offer sticks of barbequed pork with
pieces of hardened cartilage hidden in the meat so you chew and force down on
this, the marrow of the countryside, until it yields to your persistence and
surrenders its juice and softness to your teeth.
The morning is
cool and has a Canadian summer cottage smell, the water smell, the Nam Ngum
smell and now I sit on the dining terrace of the Vansanah Resort (in Ban Keun)
and look down on the river running into the pale sunrise; it runs flat and
rippled between banks of garden, the greens a pin-point of precision
hand-farming, the browns showing where the earth has been turned. On occasional
horizons a line of palm trees will rush and hide itself within a larger expanse
of trees.
Boats cross the
river and leave in the air the winsome and nostalgic smell of the out-board
motor. The boats carry trucks and cars from bank to bank.
The amazing thing
is that just one hour by car out of an increasingly busy capital city, straight
dusty roads lead through temple-less villages of simplicity and charm.
* * *
…and they have
lived their lives thus, in redolent non-movement, for generations above the
slow flowing river, their crops fed gently by the deluvian soil.
old women walk
to the temple, offerings in arm; bent like broken match sticks.
and so it goes
on: bamboo scaffolding to lime the walls white, the row of coconut palms in the
courtyards holding their fruit.
* * *
If I had wanted
to breathe in le terroir of the land
then I am doing it literally by breathing in all the dust thrown up by the
trucks and cars.
With apologies
to David Farnell, great Torontonian oenologist devant l’Eternel, I am breathing in the Somewhereness of the land.
