If one bears in mind the amount of marijuana I had smoked

Let’s back up a little.

Sri Lanka in 2005 was a country devastated by the Tsunami of December 26th 2004, and laboring under the strain of a civil war, bombing and shooting its way into a third bloody decade. Government was corrupt at best and social services non-existent. Racism and misogyny were (and are) entrenched to the point of ubiquity. And in this climate of fear, starvation and hardship, I sat on the veranda of a beautifully-restored British colonial mansion smoking spliffs and discussing an upcoming break in the relief work schedule with my roommate, confidant, and partner in crime, Uncle Money.

I don’t recall exactly what was said, but I imagine it went something like this:

Uncle Money: So dude. We have some days off coming up.

Me (taking a hit): What?

Uncle Money (taking the spliff): Because of the election. They’re counting all the ballots in the fort so we have like four days off or something.

Me: Oh. Cool.

Uncle Money (exhaling): I was thinking we should do something, mate. Take a trip or some shit.

Me (taking the spliff): Yeah. Totally.

Uncle Money: I mean, fuck it dude. Let’s go to Trinco.

Me (Exhaling): What?

Uncle Money (taking the spliff): Let’s go to Trincomalee. We haven’t even seen much of the country. Let’s go.

Me: Isn’t that kind of the epicenter of the civil war?

Uncle Money (exhaling): Yeah. Should be a lot going on.

Me: Cooooool.

And so it was decided. We would go to Trincomalee. The front of the front lines of Sri Lanka’s civil war. And we’d be going during a hotly disputed, and incredibly divisive, presidential election. Brilliant.

But this story isn’t about war. This story is about elephants. And weed.

I think it was day three of our cross-country odyssey when we started hitching. I think. I know we had just left Sigiria, where we had spent an absolutely hair-raising night wandering by ourselves down dirt roads through thick jungle while stoned out of our minds. In my mind the evening is defined by the giant holes in the brush where the elephants had emerged, crossed the road and disappeared again on the other side. There were huge, arching portals scattered across the sides of the road as if the jungle were inhabited by large numbers of four ton rats. At one point a jeep pulled dustily up beside us and a woman shouted from beneath an olive-green safari hat “What the hell are you doing out here? Don’t you know there are elephants on this track? Wild Elephants?” To which Uncle Money replied “Really? Where?”

He seemed delighted by the prospect of pachyderms, but I was spooked. In general, I have no problem with elephants, having spent time with them in the past, but the prospect of encountering a wild bull, suddenly and at very close range in the dark unsettled me. I lost my shit, freaked out and dealt with it by bitching and moaning until my plea to return to the hotel was granted. Then we got high and went swimming. I thought that would be the end of it, but Uncle Money had gotten a whiff of elephant stink and was determined to encounter one at some point. When we got back to the room we checked the maps and found a game reserve within striking distance. Tomorrow’s destination.

We started out in a tuk tuk. And I think we might have arrived in a tuk tuk. I can’t be sure. I seem to remember stopping for a joint, some breakfast, and a beer. It couldn’t have been past ten in the morning. We walked into the visitor center at the game reserve and discovered, to our immediate displeasure, that while entry for locals was a mere 50 rupees, foreigners had to pay something on the order of 4000. About 40 US dollars, and well out of our price range if we expected to keep ourselves in drugs and alcohol for the duration of our trip, which we did. We decided to hit the road on foot, with the expressed intent of finding an entry point at some discreetly bushy section of the road. Here and there we ducked in, wandered up a creek bed, walked around a while smelling the sour sweet musk of elephant around every corner, but we never encountered one. They were around, to be sure, but they were surprisingly stealthy.

After much mucking about we headed back out to the road and hitched a ride in a van that had, in place of a back seat, the axle and wheels from some kind of small automobile. We sat, cramped and wary of the rolling chunk of metal with which we were housed, until I glanced through the window and caught a brief glimpse of sparkling blue between the green locks of the jungle. “Stop!” I shouted. “Stop. Stop. Stop!” Our driver pulled to the side of the road and Uncle Money looked at me quizzically. “What’s up?”

“I saw a lake!” I explained. “I think we can walk there.”

That was all he needed to hear.

This story is only very loosely connected to the holiday season.

The friend I was traveling with, Patricia, was a beautiful girl from Adelaide who I’d met a few weeks before in Anchorage. The first day at the hostel I saw her across the day room and overheard her chatting with someone about how much she wanted to go kayaking – which led me to grab Lonely Planet and a telephone, and to proceed to have a series of unnecessarily loud conversations with various guides in the area about the virtues of fiberglass boats over plastic. Obvious or not, the play worked and that evening we were sharing a halibut dinner and planning our hitchhike down to Resurrection Bay the following morning for a week at a remote hostel and kayak camp.

That summer Patricia and I would log thousands of miles on the side of the road, about one hundred hiking in the mountains, and dozens and dozens in our kayaks. There a particular sense of one’s humanity in the Alaskan bush and also on the side of an Alaskan road. Being out in the big mountains, looking over ice fields with black basalt peaks shooting skyward through glaciers thousands of years old brings up feelings of both humble insignificance and universal connectedness. Seeing an 80,000 pound humpback breech to your right and watching his bubble trail pass beneath your 12 foot boat only to surface on your left does much the same. And somehow, hitchhiking in the north does so, too. In each scenario, at every moment, you’re number could be up. And yet – just as you trust that the next grizzly won’t eat you, and you won’t be flipped from your kayak by an aggressive orca, you trust that on the highway north of Seward, your next ride won’t kill you either. You have faith that that next ride won’t be  any more than half-drunk and he’ll still be taking his anti-psychotics – or at least you hope that his gun will jam at  the last minute if everything goes horribly wrong.

Patricia and I, touched by that good fortune and sense of humble connectedness, had had the best possible run of hitchhiking luck that summer. We never had to wait for more than an hour for a ride. We’d been invited to camp on people’s property, we’d been offered a free gun (which we declined), we’d been picked up by an elderly couple named Earl and Mavis in an RV because we looked like “a couple of nice kids,” which I decidedly did not. And once we’d even made it from Homer to Denali National Park in a single day – a hitch of almost 700 miles for which we’d figured two days minimum, with one likely spent on the side of the road.

As a last hurrah for the season, Patricia and I decided to do one more trek outside of Seward before we had to catch separate flights back to our own corners of the world. The trail we chose was only about 20 miles long, the first leg following the Lost Lake Trail and the second on the Primrose.  The Lost Lake trailhead was about 10 miles north of town. It’s a pretty steady climb the first few hours, up through the devastated spruce forest, but once you clear the timberline the vistas became overwhelmingly beautiful with high alpine lakes set like cold sapphires in seas of lupine and fireweed. Ringing the horizon in every direction were the snow-covered and glaciated Kenai Mountains.

The skies were clear and the days so long that had we wanted to speed the journey we could have finished it in two days, but that’s just not the point. Rather than racing, we would lounge on our Therm-a-Rests after coffee and oatmeal in the morning or freeze-dried lasagna at the end of the day. In the low-angled light of an Alaskan midnight we’d sip hot chocolate spiked with bourbon and listen to the wind, or to the wolves howling in the distance, before making a small fire and bedding down for the night.

I graduated from Syracuse University

There were seven of us – somehow led by a guy named Eric Wollschlager, who I didn’t know terribly well. Eric, close friends with a bunch of the other guys, had been kicked out of school a few years before for beating up a fraternity. Seems he was at a Fiji party and someone sucker punched one of his drinking buddies. Eric, for the record, was a Golden Gloves boxer and managed to break 4 noses on his way out the door with his friend under his protection. It further turns out that the Fiji boys had influential parents who were big donors to the school and in a kangaroo court of the disciplinary board, Eric was relieved of the burden to ever study at Syracuse University again.

But he’d come to town for the convivial in 1989, and was, on that Sunday afternoon, organizing us to rally against our hangovers and search out a bar that had The Girl From Ipanema on the juke box. That, as it turns out, was an unsuccessful quest, but it did bring us to joints we’d never visited in our many years on campus.

The last place we tried was called The Catch. Somewhere back in the early part of that century, The Catch had been a favored bar of the SU Crew team, and though the intervening years had changed the socioeconomic realities of the neighborhood for the dramatically poorer and darker, the oars still hung on the walls, and faded photographs of the winners of the 1954 Regatta on Onondaga were still in their frames.

I’d imagine we were the first white boys from the university to cross their threshold in decades.

When we got there, around 2 in the afternoon, the place was empty except for the bartender and the bar-back cleaning up from the night before. On the far end of the dance floor a few guys milled about setting up a drum kit and hooking up some amps. We ordered beers. And, no, the bartender informed Eric, they didn’t have The Girl From Ipanema on the juke. But there was something about the cave like atmosphere of the bar that told us this was the place to spend the next few hours of our lives shooting the shit and retelling stories to one another that we all knew as if we’d been there ourselves, and recently. Which, of course, we had been.

Then, after about half an hour, the place started to fill up with very well dressed Black folk from the neighborhood. From the suits and the bonnets, it was pretty clear that mass at the local Baptist Ministry had just let out, and now, with souls both roused and cleansed, they were ready to party.

At three o’clock the band hit their first tune and the bar exploded into life. This may be going too far for some of more sensitive readers, but in that instant the place looked like a live action, full motion painting. Specifically the one used at the beginning of every episode of Good Times for four years, Sugar Shack by Ernie Barnes. The men who’d been gathering at the bar walked over to the ladies who sat, fanning themselves, against the wall on a row of benches and couples just started to move. Half a dozen beats later, but for a few wall flowers and us White boys, the whole place was dancing.

For a fresh-faced 21 year old who had never traveled beyond a weekend in Canada, it felt like I supposed it might have if we were in a distant land, watching, as observers, a culture that wasn’t one any of us knew. The dancing I’d known up on the hill seemed to have something of a studied indifference to it – as if you would have violated a code had you smiled or looked directly into the eyes of your partner. Dancing on campus, for everyone but the Dead Heads, didn’t look like it was supposed to be fun – and the Dead Heads looked like victims of some odd, aurally induced palsy. Dancing at The Generic Bar or at a Red House Party was meant to express how little you cared about life, and how cool that made you. Christ, I wouldn’t be 21 again for the world. What an idiot time. But in The Catch, on the dance floor, there was pure, laughing, sweating, just-came-from-church-and-hope-to-soon-be-fucking joy apparent on every face.

But, also, there was no sense of exclusivity from the patrons of The Catch. There were no back turned, thumb gesturing conversations about us. We were, as far as we could tell, being treated as welcomed, if unexpected, guests.

The band was amazing. They were a straight rhythm and blues set, with a soulful baritone singer leading the way over grinding guitar riffs and a heavy back beat. They played maybe three songs, and Eric, as he was like to do, jumped into the fray. He finished his beer, looked at my buddy Tony and me, and said, “I’m gonna go ask that chick to dance.”

Tony and I tried to warn him off the action. It could, we figured, upset the generally positive vibe of the afternoon. Hey, it’s one thing for the White boys to be there, but trying to reverse the Animal House “Do You Mind If We Dance Wif Yo’ Dates” scene could land us all in a world of shit. At least that’s what Tony and I thought.

We were wrong about that, of course.

In September of 1995

His chosen path made life far more difficult than necessary. He could have had a successful, lucrative career navigating divorce settlements or hooking corporate clients up with other corporate clients, but somewhere along the line, he’d made an internal decision to fight for justice and by doing so, became something more than he’d been before. The world has been a darker place without his lantern shining into the darker recesses of our human abyss, but the lessons he carried abide.

There was a brief flutter of media attention in the days after his death, and on an afternoon during that particularly difficult year, after coming home from a day of teaching high school social studies in Brooklyn, I caught an interview with him somewhere up on the high end of the dial.

Kunstler was seated at his mess of a desk, papers strewn as wildly as his grey hair – a mop that could have been born from an illicit union between Albert Einstein and Kurt Vonnegut. His jacket and his jowls appeared to be in the final round of a grudge match to determine which could appear more naturally rumpled. To say the least, he didn’t look much like a specimen of human perfection, a fact that was highlighted by the statue that sat on a windowsill behind him of Michelangelo’s David.

The interviewer asked him about the statue and Kunstler proceeded to explain just why that particular piece of art might be the most important expression of human potential ever created by the hand of man. The interviewer appeared puzzled, so Kunstler gave a Biblical brief, somewhat bastardized below:

Goliath, General of the Philistines, had been marauding through the Middle East for years. He and his army would set upon new lands and demand slavery from the nations they encountered – promising death as reward for defiance. Kingdom after kingdom fell to his sword, until he came to the Valley of Elah and found the army of King Saul.

In Elah, Goliath didn’t threaten to have his minions fall upon the encampment. Rather, for 40 days, the giant himself walked to the middle of the battlefield and taunted the Jews to send him just one hero. His offer was to dispense with all the unnecessary bloodbath of a battle royale if a champion would fight him man to man. Now, of course, Goliath had little fear in making the offer, as he was a giant, standing six cubits and a span.

Saul addressed each of his best warriors, amongst them David’s older brothers, but none of them would take the challenge. Then, on the morning of the forty-first day, young David sauntered down the hill from where he’d been tending his father’s sheep and learned of the martial offer . . .

As he got to this point in the tale, Kunstler leaned closer to the interviewer, and noted that David was the smallest man of his village, a child. No one expected him to fight and he could have easily just turned around and headed back up the hill. Life for him wouldn’t have been much different regardless of the tyrant in charge. But, instead, David grabbed a couple of rocks from the stream, put one of them in his sling – and the rest, as they say, is mytho-history.

Dropping a hint about the importance of the sculpture to his interviewer and his television audience, Kunstler gestured back to The David:

“The important thing is that Michelangelo sculpts David before the battle.”

The following summer I found my way to the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, to visit the David myself. It had been one hell of a trip getting there. That school year began with the suicide of a good friend and former student, and nearly another one by a 16-year-old still in my class. Bashir, the boy who killed himself, tied a make-shift noose around his neck in his bedroom closet and kicked the chair from below his feet after he’d been dumped by his girlfriend. He was 19 years old.

Pothole?  No, this is an understatement. These aren’t potholes, these are a geological phenomenon. They are craters. They are canyons. And Guatemalans, badasses that they are, just drive right over them. I find that lying down on my side doesn’t work but standing on my head does.

Oliver sleeps.

Window 3, US Embassy:  “Ma’am, you need the father’s information on this application. Where is the father?”

I take a slow, weary look behind me to see the whole waiting room staring at me.

Sigh.

“I don’t know what to tell you. It was my college graduation party. The last thing I remember was dancing on the bar with two fat blond girls from Texas. Neither of them looks like my little boy…”

If they want me to scream the dirty details of my life through a 3 inch piece of glass in front of an entire waiting room full of people that have nothing to do but eavesdrop, that’s fine. Truth is, I do know who the father is. I’d just rather not say. He’s a professional golfer, a gambler and a fine whiskey drinker. The whiskey being the only thing we had in common. After nine months of explaining this and countless other more interesting (but less true versions), I’m over it. I have found that if I want the conversation to end quickly, the mention of the fat blondes does the trick. The attendant’s eyes dropped quickly, she was more embarrassed than I was when I told my mother. Ha!

The woman behind the counter explains that without a father present she cannot take this conversation any further. I will have to reschedule an official appointment. Which means that I’ll have to relive this nightmare some other day.

“The next availability is the 10th of next month.”

My son starts crying on my behalf.

I have two milk-soaked breasts getting bigger with every wail from Oliver and they are asking me for more proof that this is my son?  There’s something about windows that turn normal people into complete assholes. Specifically, power-mongering assholes, because Oliver and I so desperately need our passports and they hold all the cards. We need our passports like the crack-head who needs his stinking $20 but the bank is closed, so he walks to the drive through window and the bitch won’t give him his cash because he doesn’t have a car. We need our passports like the sad and lonely man who works at the insurance company needs his 20 piece chicken McNuggets but is 5 goddamned cents short on the bill when he goes to pay at Window Number 2. You have a need. They have the power AND the security to deny you. The equation equals assholery.

I shrink back, admitting defeat to the window-devil and get set to sate little Oliver.

Shit! I only know how to breast-feed lying down…

I retire to the women’s room and lay down on the disgusting, but refreshingly cool, tiled floor, making a bed out of several layers of toilet paper for my tiny little unvaccinated bundle of joy, tears and poop. In my head, I quickly run through my explanation in Spanish should anyone interrupt my awkward moment.

“I am in the bed since this baby being born in the week before and I no know how to breast-feed while I sit… or on feet and during walking, like you all can do. That is very good… and for that is why I on floor now. For to breast-feed.”

Oliver is done eating but my breasts aren’t done leaking. So I fill my shirt with all the extra clothing I brought for the trip, leave the embassy with my head high and my cute little tank top with the removable top part convenient for new moms shoved full of scarves, socks, and half a (clean) diaper covering each breast. As I walk down the street in this condition, I still get hit on. Major shortage of calcium in these parts, I guess.

Back to the shuttle van, aka torture mobile. We begin our drive home, without the baby’s passport or my Report of American Birth Abroad, our only two reasons for this horrendous trip to the city. I forget all the things I had wanted to pick up in the city that aren’t available in the village and resume my headstand position in the backseat. Oliver is sleeping. I stare at him and realize that even upside down he is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve never liked babies or children. “A contributing factor to the drain of natural resources on our Earth,” I’ve been known to say matter-of-factly.

I eat my words as I change his diaper.

As for child birthing and rearing, I understand women must suffer for making man eat the apple and all…  but we get to experience a kind of love, energy and adoration for life that no man will ever experience. Okay, maybe by the time Oliver is my age, they will. Did you guys read about that post-op transsexual dude who kept her ovaries and is now a preggers daddy? Wild! But for now, I feel special. I will happily suffer through anything to see this undamaged little angel smile. Even if it’s just gas.

I’m pleased to hear the driver has a major case of food poisoning and needs to drive very slowly over bumps to avoid barfing on the steering wheel. I move a little closer to give him my sympathies. And then proceed to tell him of my ten vaginal stitches and urinary tract infection and the bag of milk-rocks I used to call my breasts. And how two doctors had to put all their weight on my stomach to help my son be born, it being quite possible that I have no organs in my stomach anymore. That might be what is hanging outside of me, making my hoo-ha look like a baboon’s ass. But again, my sympathies with regards to your diarrhea, Mr. Driver Man.

We reach the village of San Pedro la Laguna, where I call home. We pass my small school garden project, my favorite cantina and the ancient Tzutujil men that frequent it, finally arriving at my beautiful but simple home and we are greeted by a group of multilingual friends waiting for multilingual answers of the day’s disaster. It occurs to me that this is the universe helping me along. I don’t really want my son to be an American. I don’t really want him to know what PVC is, or be comfortable on a riding lawn mower or have a girlfriend who gets manicures regularly. I know these things aren’t specific to the USA but I’ve encountered them a lot more often in the States than in Atitlán.

The universe continues to scream its thoughts on the matter into my ears when I take my next two trips to the Embassy in the following weeks. I decided to take the chicken bus for shits and giggles; at least it gets there faster. I prefer the sound of the indigenous languages over Dutch or Hebrew or Californian valley-girl English, which has been my experience in the shuttles. I realize the only thing those giant mirrors above the driver’s head are used for is to watch gringos fall all over themselves while they try to find a seat. God bless them for having fun in life.

The same bitch is running the show behind Window 3 when I arrive. She and her associate she-devil don’t make a single move to address me. They just sit and smirk. They didn’t even pretend to look busy, maybe because I was the only person in the waiting room. Eventually, the younger, prettier one comes over and I count my blessings because the older one is obviously pissed to be the older, uglier one. She chides me for not waiting until my appointment date and then tells me that my US birth certificate, US social security card, US driver’s license and US passport are not sufficient evidence that I have lived in the US for over a year. Strangely, I am not surprised to hear the Embassy’s stance that it is, in fact, quite possible that I flew into the United States to get these documents, but never once actually spent one full year there, which is a requirement to get Oliver’s American citizenship. I’m blond, I have a terrible American accent and I’m carrying a backpack… where does she think I’ve been spending my time when not using the US for its driver’s license vending facilities and wonderful waiting lines?  Does she think I bolted as soon as the doctor wrote out my birth certificate?  The mental images and ridiculousness of what she’s saying cause me to laugh in her face. Not the way to go. I leave the Embassy, dejected and rejected once again.

The next week, I bring everything one could possess to prove themselves and their offspring, including the high-definition photo my sister took of Oliver exiting the womb and asked the older, uglier one if she’d like to see more – I’d brought a whole album!  I think that’s what did the trick.

Little Oliver Sol’s US passport was approved less than 20 minutes later. Suddenly all the nervous fretting and terrible frustration of the past several weeks was gone. Rather more tragically, what appeared in that place was sadness and fear at the thought of our impending trip and life back in the good-ole U.S.A. But, for better or worse, little Ollie, now you are part of the people.

Emily Zielke is a freelance writer and new mommy. She is currently homeless in Normal, Illinois with her beautiful baby, Oliver Sol. We love her and wish them both well.

When I was a kid my family

In general, I suppose, it was money. But it was also about being busy with other things – boy scout camp,  our cabin with the porta-potty on Beaver Lake, manhunt with the Colemans from next door. Raiding the collection of Playboys stashed under the porch of the apartment building down the street. Stealing beer after my dad’s campaign fund-raisers.

With Disneyland, I’d like to think that our disinclination to go was evidence of an early onset political realization on my part that Mickey Maus was a false prophet of joy whose only kindness was providing the smiling face for a soulless corporation that has been driving poor folk, the Third-World over, into poverty and desperation with their cartoon factories for several decades. But that’s likely bullshit. More to the point was that my Mom knew it was faster, easier and cheaper to sate my annual 10-year-old rollercoaster jones with a trip to the decidedly downscale “Ghost Town in the Glen,” located a few hours from our home in upstate New York, than it was to drive the three crazy-making days to Florida.

The vacation we did take, several times, was to Washington, DC. And those trips were cool. There aren’t many kids who would get excited at the thought of visiting the National Archives to see The Constitution, but I guess I’ve always been a bit off.

But the memory that stands out most from those trips was going to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. From very early on I was completely taken with all things astronomical and have remained so my entire life. In my early 20s that predilection sent me into a five-year-long dysfunctional relationship with a deeply insane planetarium director. But that’s a different story and it ends with me setting fire to her cat. Let it be.

According to my mom something happened to me on that first Smithsonian trip when we walked into the main hall and I saw the Apollo 11 Lunar Command Module hanging from the ceiling. According to her I just stared up, slap-faced speechless, eyes agog and mouth agape. It was the kind of look that some kids get when they see dinosaur skeletons, or some middle-aged men get when they see firm, young pop-star breasts bouncing in rhythm at an MTV awards show. It was a stare that said something about God and witness and creation.

I stood there, neck craned and mouth wide, staring at the spaceship’s intrinsic coolness until my older brother, JP, shook me from the reverie and towards a model of the Lunar Lander in which we could crawl around. Even then I knew that flopping about in a Lunar Lander was a damn sight better than an entire chain of Space Mountains.

But it was when we were leaving the museum, and passing through the museum shop, that I saw a couple of photos which, I can honestly say, changed my life. One was of the Earth itself, floating blue in a sea of darkness. The other was taken from the Command Module of Apollo 11 and it showed the Lunar Lander ascending from the grey moonscape with the Earth appearing to rise above the moon’s horizon. Even to an 11-year-old brain these photos seemed to hold some promise for a better world.

My folks bought me a poster of the first photo and it hung over my bed for the better part of the next few decades. I can’t say that I looked at it everyday and wondered, like a Dr. Seuss character, about “All The Places I’d Go,” but it did beckon with a teasing thought that all this is yours, go grab it.

Some 25 years later I was living in New York City, working as a high school teacher in Brooklyn. My circadian rhythm has always been set for late night, so I’d generally grab a couple of pints at Flannery’s from 10 until 1 in the morning, then get up at 6 for work. When I’d come home in the afternoons I’d flop down in the Lazy Boy and idly flip channels until I fell asleep for a several hour siesta before getting up, doing my lesson plans and starting the routine over again.

I am reaching into my pocket

That’s peculiar.

I look at Logan but he is at a loss to explain the events as usual.  “It is ze full moon, ze tides are strong,” some French woman is saying.  Silly bitch.  But I can’t muster a better explanation.

We go to the little travel kiosk in the Ashram to check the train schedules then sit around a while softly talking shit about whomever happens by.  Eventually we go up to our room on the 15th floor of the big pink cereal-box dormitory to read for a bit.  I am sitting on my sleeping pad flipping through a pamphlet of Ashram propaganda when I hear splashing and yelling out of the corner of my ear.  A consternation is wafting up from the palm forests below, terrified screams riding up the 15 stories on the crest of a dull white roar.  What the hell is that?  I walk over to the window and look out.

The sea is coming….

Amritapuri Ashram is located on a narrow peninsula of sandy land in southern Kerala, a state in the southwest of India.  It consists of three immense dormitory structures, a hospital building, and a central temple.  Everything is painted bubblegum pink.  The 15-story dorms, built on land reclaimed from the swamps by filling in the saturated parts with sand, are said to be the tallest structures in the state.  They are bordered on the west by the Indian Ocean and on the east by one of an immense network of backwater canals.  It is a slow moving frog-colored estuary lined with huge cantilevered, Chinese fishing nets.  The surrounding land is billiard table flat palm tree forest all the way to the horizon.

Amma, the hugging saint, one of two living deities in India, has her headquarters here.  Over the course of the last three decades she has created myriad social programs to aid India’s poor, provide education, construct housing, and improve medical care for hundreds of thousands of Indians.  She has also given over 25 million hugs.  People queue for hours in the sweaty confines of the crowded temple to receive Darshan: a quick embrace from a living god.  I spend the majority of my time just outside the Ashram at the chai shop, smoking and discussing the implications of Amma’s deification with the other cynics or listening to the western hippie imports talk about ‘Amma’s energy’.

It is a strange place.  Amma’s message is supposed to be something like ‘love your fellow human beings’ but the intricacies of her teachings are sometimes lost beneath the flood of her followers.  Every Amma-zealot I meet has a different idea of who or what she is, and what is important about her.  Because she subscribes to no specific dogma, she can be all things to all people, and she is.

Most of her followers are extremely kind people, but many are a bit more anal than one might expect.  Ashram rules are followed with almost fascistic control and efficiency; from an 11 o’clock curfew, to set meal times, to an Ashram wide smoking ban.  The place runs like clockwork.  The rabid enforcement of rules seems somehow contrary to the principles upon which the Ashram was founded, and I am never able to reconcile these two seemingly antithetical elements in my mind.  It annoys me.  Especially when people tell me not to talk on the stairs simply because there is no talking on the stairs.  Which is why I spend so much time at the tea stall, or on the balcony outside my room where I now stand, looking down and wondering why the sea is coming…

The entire narrow peninsula between the ocean and the lethargic green slick of the backwater is disappearing beneath a rushing chocolate river. It looks as if the land has suddenly and inexplicably become lower than the water, and the entire ocean is simply flowing downhill, engulfing the Iowa-flat expanse of palm tree forest.  I hear women screaming and see white clad pilgrims wading chest deep through the sludge clogged Ashram courtyard.  The smell of backed up sewage gurgles through the kitchens and bedrooms of the buildings ground floors.  I see one of the women from the chai shop, up to her neck in water, fighting the current that is funneling between the Ashram’s concrete walls to ferry her meager possessions to some non-existent dry patch.

There are boats attempting to cross the now oil-black moat of unforgiving back water.  They miss the docks and are swept down stream.  People clog the communal balconies of D building, leaning over watching the carnage, the palm trees like the legs of wading birds, the elephants tied by one foot in their enclosure trumpeting and struggling as they are battered by debris borne on by the relentless flow.

By the time Logan and I reach the ground floor, the Ashram’s steps are a jumble of Indian and Western refugees.  They stand about, slack jawed and stranded on the partially exposed concrete blocks, helplessly watching as Indian men who can’t swim struggle to string a line across the new-born river and begin helping the weak, the injured, the elderly and the fearful across the current toward the main dorms and the ferry docks.  I mount the steps and tread on a fish.  What do we do?  What can any of us do?  Everyone is talking.  “I heard it was an earthquake in Indonesia this morning.”  “8.5″  “I heard 9.0.”  Jesus.  Logan disappears.

I make my way to the Kitchen, struggling barefoot over invisible ground against swirling currents.  All the food must be moved up stairs.  Bags of rice that when dry weigh 50 kilos, now saturated and polluted, weigh considerably more. Two men heave one onto my shoulder and I make the trip across the concrete floor – now littered with lentils and smeared with uncooked rice – then up a flight of stairs to dump it, and run back down to get in line for another.  My body hurts, I gasp for breath, choking on the thick shit-smelling air that comes wafting up out of the receding brine.  Filthy people pant and sweat around me, exchange purse-lipped half-grimaced smiles as they pass one another.  I find Logan and we spend a while moving wet linens out of the laundry rooms and up four flights to an unused bedroom.  My body is screaming for rest.  People keep screaming for help.