11.29.11. I walked up the road all the way back and came out over Jim’s Ridge Trail. Finally found the yurt and disintegrating shack, and hiked for a good 4 hours. Intermittently I stared back and forth with deer, who immediately froze upon noticing me, disappearing into the deer brown of the hill grass. Today was frustrating writing. My notes from last night were so rapt with ideas, but the scenes I wrote read flaccid. I finally realized one can’t make up a cult in Texas in the early 1990s without referencing Waco, and wrote a few good scenes around that.

And generally I remembered how a few years after Waco and Ruby Ridge, I worked in the produce department at the grocery store with a kid called BJ who was country and struggled to explain to me why Ruby Ridge was an atrocity. What happened there was so outside my experience that I never fully comprehended what he was trying to tell me. We cut watermelons with machetes and wrapped the halves in plastic then displayed them for sale on a bed of soft ice. When my ex-boyfriend was stalking me, BJ walked me out to my car with the machete under his coat. We had to be in a commercial for some reason, which necessitated me going to his family’s trailer out in the country for some reason, and everything in there was brownish and laced with cigarette smoke. He and his family had Southern accents and some little girls were running around, and the adults were all sitting inside watching TV. Or they weren’t, I barely remember. I had closer friends who lived in trailers and I lived in one myself when I was a baby, but being there, I felt something heavy and peculiar in my stomach. Anyway, his kindness and that atmosphere are right. That’s what I should be writing about anyway.

I started the last chapter of the novella, which is a first-person monologue from Colt’s character, a teenage girl we see just briefly in the rest of the text. It’s unusual in that it’s written to be read aloud and also in that I think it’s very good.

11.30.11. Shane told me about how he bushwhacked up the hill by the yurt and had the most beautiful view of everything. Today I did the same, through the deep snow. I followed deer tracks most of the way up and I wondered whether all us mammals maybe look for similar paths to climb and traverse: if we’re not pursuing food, the path of least resistance. After a few inches of snow has accumulated, deer prints are stretched, probably the drag of those pretty legs, and look to my eye almost like those of a human. I put this away in my mind, as I’m writing about human-deer hybrids.

The sky was strips of soft grey, and an ethereal band of pale blue appeared to the west. This would transform into a peach color two hours before sunset. The plains spread out beneath me once I reached the top of the hill. The mountains were covered in snow and trees. There was a further spur to the east, and I followed the deer and coyote prints through the fragrant sage until I could see the hidden land behind it. It was all the magnificence S had described. I took some photos, but the utter vastness and silence and geological ancientness of those kinds of landscapes are impossible for me to preserve digitally: it ends up looking flat. I was reading PeterMatthiessen’s Zen journals in bed every night and morning and so love what he writes about snow mountains (this appears in more or less the same form in The Snow Leopard):

The emptiness and silence of snow mountains quickly bring about those states of consciousness that occur in the mind-emptying of meditation, and no doubt high altitude has an effect, for my eye perceives the world as fixed or fluid, as it wishes. The earth twitches and the mountains shimmer, as if all molecules had been set free: the blue sky rings. Perhaps what I hear is the ‘music of the spheres,’ what Hindus call the breathing of the Creator and astrophysicists call the ‘sighing’ of the sun.

I walked the fence line and saw moose poop that looked like it had fallen from a great height. I saw a tire painted with the words “You know you are trespassing” along its circumference. I came to a single-track road and followed its gentle slope downhill. The sun was starting its drowse when I arrived at the bison pasture, which we were told not to cross. B says the bison is statistically the most dangerous North American land mammal. I think getting lost happened quickly. That kind of panic and its physical and psychological effects are good things to know about as a writer. Also, it’s frightening. I thought I could get around the pasture, so followed another fenceline until I started bushwhacking downhill. I looked out over the plains, hills, and mountains, and there was nothing human except for the lights far below that I couldn’t reach. The hills were familiar, but I couldn’t place them or turn my map the right way. I realized I couldn’t navigate the hill I was descending in the dark, so I went back up, but was panicked and couldn’t remember where I’d come from. I went back to the place I recognized on my map and called the program director. Two hares who hadn’t yet grown their winter coats watched nearby, and when it grew fully dark, a distant ring of coyotes howled. I know my sense of direction is fallible, so I had plenty of layers, a flashlight, my phone, and a liter bottle for water, as well as the map (still, don’t hike unfamiliar/improvised trails alone, you guys!). I stood on the hill until Katie and Shane drove up to rescue me in his borrowed ranger’s truck. I tried to express my gratitude but it’s like photographing those landscapes—what I’m equipped with is never big enough to meet the magnitude of what I’m approaching. We went back to the lodge and played Big Buck Hunter.

I only wrote for 2 or 3 hours today, but figured out a huge amount about The Conversion while I was walking and wrote a lot of notes on it when I was done writing for the night. I finished the Colt chapter today and read it out loud. I’m not used to loving something right after drafting it, but I love this piece and think I can make it into a self-contained story of diminutive length, something I haven’t done in at least 5 years. The deer prints from today’s walk are like the science to this piece. I watch the deer, study them; we look at each other for as long as we can stand it. It’s a low year for regional mule deer populations, but there are still so many. 

12.1.11. I wake up later and later because I’m up later each night. When I first got here, I’d go to bed at 10 and rise with the sun and feel clear and focused, but more and more the night is where I find focus, clarity, the banishment of distraction. Decided to expand the POV in The Conversion, spread it between a few characters. I think I”ve been following the wrong main character.

Last year also saw the release of lots of books by friends and friends of friends, which was exciting! I feel lucky to know such talented and innovative writers. Here’s a list of the books I finished in 2011:

1. My Horse and Other Stories, Stacey Levine

2. Beauport, Kate Colby

3. At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Peter Matthiessen

4. Goldengrove, Francine Prose

5. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (on CD)

6. Tough Skin, Sarah Eaton

7. The Return of the Native, Kate Colby

8. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote (on CD)

9. Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, Jon Krakauer (on CD)

10. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen

11. Awe, Dorthea Lasky

12. Georgic, Mariko Nagai

13. Sparrow & Other Eulogies, Megan Martin

14. America Pacifica, Anna North

15. Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, Simon Winchester

16. The Adderall Diaries, Stephen Elliott

17. Down From Cascom Mountain, Ann Joslin Williams

18. Fun Home,  Alison Bechdel

19. The Tiger’s Wife, Téa Obreht

20. Black Life, Dorthea Lasky

21. Red April, Santiago Roncagliolo (trans. Edith Grossman)

22. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

23. How To Shit Around the World: The Art of Staying Clean and Healthy While Traveling, Dr. Jane Wilson-Howarth

24. Map of the Invisible World, Tash Aw

25. What is the What, Dave Eggers (on CD)

26. Possession, A. S. Byatt (reread)

27. Room, Emma Donoghue

28. Love in Infant Monkeys, Lydia Millet

29. Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky (trans. Sandra Smith)

30. Song for Night, Chris Abani

31. Waveform, Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto

32. State of Wonder, Ann Patchett

33. Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982, Peter Matthiessen

34. Tin House vol. 13, no. 1: The Ecstatic

It’s taken me a while to write about this. I write enough fiction featuring people coming to terms with their own lapses in sanity to recognize that it’s a process of interest to me. I also spent enough time on independent travel forums, and especially with threads around traveling to Sumatra’s Aceh Province, to recognize that women who work toward expressing the complexity of their feelings about their experiences there are most often gaslighted and told to grow up. And the thing is, I really liked Ketambe. It was utterly beautiful and startling and intense, and the people were warm, and the food and coffee were seriously the best. I felt truly foreign there, almost otherworldly. If you can get to Sumatra and to Ketambe, go.

The heat is so much wetter than that of Central Texas; insect bites raise the skin all over. Leeches waver up hungrily from the dirt. I came from drought and could smell the coming rain. Rain pounds for hours, muffling all the senses. Across the road, the brown river pulls branches in its wake. I hung my towel on an empty electrical socket and the circuit coursed through me and I screamed. I had vowed to forsake toilet paper in Sumatra because the locals don’t use it, and slowly I realized that despite my attempts to master local methods I smelled mildly of pee. I wanted to walk in the jungle alone but couldn’t even find the waterfall up the hill on my own, though I acquired several leeches along the way, so I walked up and down the road and was greeted by everyone I passed and also honked at by every passing vehicle, and I felt of interest, and answered jalan jalan each time someone inquired what I was doing or where I was going. At night I’d lie awake in my beautiful room under the pink mosquito net and metal roof and rain and feel that the end of all things was encroaching. I think it would’ve helped if I’d gone to Sumatra later in my trip, though that wouldn’t have made sense logistically. Travel is a loop or a wavery continuum, and you settle into it and you open and open, and so you should not do the hard part first. More than anything I wanted to be open to Ketambe.

I went on a jungle trek with Mus, who has been guiding forever and whose father was a guide, and Joanne and Eugene, an awesome Irish couple. Part of the reason I came to Ketambe was because I wanted to see orangutans in the wild—in all the world, they only live here and in Kalimentan (Indonesian Borneo). An hour or so into the first day of our trek, we walked out onto a thick fallen log and observed a group of them. To use some Texas points of reference, they look somewhat like Willie Nelson, but with fur of a more vivid red, and they move like rock climbers. They’re completely magnificent. They’re just mammals going about their day. Babies cling to their mothers until they’re big enough to go out on their own. A mother had deposited her baby in a tree crotch and we watched and heard it cry out for its mom, who returned to it and picked it up in her long, loping arms. Hornbills took flight, most often in pairs. Their wing feathers cut the air in a rhythmic whoosh.

We camped at a hot spring section of the Alas River. The Irish couple and I walked down among the rocks and crossed the river to its center, where we sat with our bodies braced against rocks as the hot, sulfurous river plummeted past us into a small waterfall. I leaned back and looked up into the long sickled palms through my foggy glasses. It was incredibly relaxing and I could feel my mind just going. The rocks at the campsite were warm from the geothermal excitement, and the river and rocks steamed. Late at night, it rained. The next day, we saw another orangutan, who was resting in the trees. They enjoyed nailing us with fruit pits. We also saw macaques, the butt of a Thomas Leaf monkey, butterflies in many sizes and colors, tiny birds, a little squirrel, and a dead Rafflesia. Back at the guesthouse, the power went out and we watched the geckos stalk insects across the ceiling, the good television of the tropics.

Joanne and Eugene left the next day and I decided to spend another two days at the guesthouse, just reading and writing and sitting on my little porch. On this huge green island, at the edge of a national park that’s one of the last bastions of the orangutan, where electricity is intermittent and the water has little black things in it, it isn’t quiet at all. There’s truck and motorbike traffic on the road all day. The sons drive their motorbikes across the grass with pretty girls riding sidesaddle on the back. They go into the empty bungalows and run the water. The daughters float about in loungey white outfits. The little kids yell and macaques fight or play and the tiny bright birds sing and cicadas hum. Laundry flaps on the line. It gets rained on and dries again. Mus calls me outside and we look at an enormous orangutan eating in the tree up the hill. Everything is thick with life.

Mus’s 15-year-old son fell off his motorbike and I was asked to administer first aid. They sat him in a chair and two of his siblings held his arms as he thrashed through my attempts to clean his bloody knee with alcohol pads. I had Mus rub antibacterial cream into the wound because I didn’t have any gloves and it seemed instructive. Everyone seemed baffled by the creaminess and he tried to retain a slab of goop atop the wound. I began to fear that my instinctive use of my stash of medical supplies had triggered some awful chain of events. With the help of my phrasebook, I wrote Mus a brief letter in Indonesian detailing how the dressings need to be changed twice a day to prevent infeksi, etc., and I noticed that they did change the dressings and appeared to be dousing the cut in iodine, which is better than the cream I used since cream won’t dry in the tropics. The next day, the son sat with me on my porch and we talked for a few hours in our equally bad English and Indonesian, and looked through my Lonely Planet Indonesia book (which I called my buku turis, which made him laugh [I’m a cutup in bahasa]) at places neither of us would ever see. He said I was brave for traveling on my own. I was surprised and delighted to hear this. I had surmised that the family thought I was a depressive weirdo, which they handled deftly: Mus or Tuma (his wife) plus one or two of the kids would come out and eat with me every night so that I wouldn’t be alone. Most guests perhaps eat with the family in the little room I only caught the edges of.

My little bungalow!

One day at dusk it poured and poured and Tuma loped across the grass to fetch me and we huddled underneath her huge rainbow-striped umbrella and walked to the common area as she held my arm. She is squat and strong and the mother to these 13 children and if I spoke better bahasa I’d beg her to take me to the market with her to buy food and then show me how she cooks. Mus sits at a table with his littlest daughter each night as she does her homework or writes or draws in her notebook. He built everything here by hand and with love: the star and triangle shapes cut out of the wood, the patterns along the roof edges. His mother and siblings live up and down the street. They all stayed. He owns the land by the river, grows corn and palms and fruit trees, and has some tiny farm animals: goats and their kids, sheep with long and matted wool, a chicken leading baby ducks. When it rains very hard, the guesthouse chicken paces startledly along the rail, hesitant to ascend into her semicircle of vines. I discover why the narrow grey cat is always slinking purposefully across the common area floor: four kittens beneath the porch, grey with black stripes. She lies under there with her pretty eyes calm; one kitten plays with her tail, one hides, two pop from the box where they were probably born and play.

It’s like a dream now, all image and no feeling. There was so much beauty and sweetness. But at night I lay or snapped awake and grew terrified. It was like a tropical sickness without the fever. I can’t fully recall the source of my paranoia and dread. There was a sort of malaise, too—the unstoppable inner chatter that I should have been better, eaten with the family, sat at the table smoking and staring silently into the trees with whichever family member was currently relieving my female solitude for longer instead of going to my room to read (I could not convincingly explain why reading in bed was lovely). I felt sticky and intransigent and like I’d failed to connect with the family in any of the ways I normally connect with people when I travel. Physically I felt vulnerable in ways I can’t fully recall. I felt like a bad traveler.

I have gratitude for their hospitality and respect for the land they are keeping close. I was ready to move on and I did feel brave. On my last day in Sumatra, I woke at 5am after barely sleeping. The rain coursed outside and I was petrified. Tuma gave me a plastic bag full of glorious coffee. Mus took the bemo with me. It filled with and emptied of schoolgirls in white jilbab, which they decorated at the throat or back of the head with cartoon character buttons or little chains of beads or filigree. The airport was populated with guys in their 20s in work uniforms. I was irritable and bedraggled and full of horror; all my accumulated bahasa (which was never much to begin with) fled and I knew they were talking about me in a macho manner but couldn’t understand a word or sass back. They took pictures with me and I made an angry sad face in each photo. I was visibly not into having a conversation, and their disrespectful persistence appalled me and made me hate them. I felt bad about hating them because again I wanted to be better, a good traveler and grown-ass woman, and really they’re just backwoods hicks and probably virgins who work in an airport smaller than the ones in Wyoming that they will never in their lives afford to fly from. My plane landed, spun its propellers. I crossed the tarmac.

The only other person on the flight was an educated gentleman from Banda Aceh, who is affiliated with the university and is running for office. He lived in New York for two years and taught at Colombia and NYU and was the best possible person to be on that plane. We talked about classy, worldly things. The pilots were white. I felt utterly disoriented. I felt incredibly wealthy. We flew low over mountains and fields.

I thought I could buy a ticket straight to Padang from Medan, but at the domestic ticket counters I learned that the flights were full or had already left for the day. I was sweaty. I had PMS and felt deeply vulnerable and unhinged, but tough too. Medan seemed horrible and I couldn’t stand to spend the night there. Part of me wanted to not fail, to be strong and good and spend that week in West Sumatra; I still desperately want to visit Padangpajang and the Harau Valley. Most of me recognized that I just needed to relax. Travel isn’t like everyday life when you hang onto all your old baggage when you move to a new place hoping to reimagine your life. Travel is transformative in the day-to-day. You can slough off your crazy old shit over the span of a flight. I asked if I could get a flight to Bali instead.

I had to make two ATM withdrawals to pay for the ticket. Suddenly, I felt light. I was elated. In the snarl of Lion Air’s bag check, I waited forever, watched everyone, let them go in front of me. Soon it was mid-afternoon and all I’d eaten all day was four jam-filled biscuits on my Air Susi flight. On the jungle trek and on the green side of the volcano, I had fantasized about walking through level fields for hours and hours. Among Sumatra’s raucous and reeking motorbikes and shitty trucks, I was embarrassed to find myself fantasizing about being sealed inside a decent car, being moved hermetically from one place to another, closed off from the sounds of the roads, just for half an hour or so. I thought about the goodness of what I was leaving and it was eclipsed by the goodness of what might come and I was thrilled.

Travel Tips

My bungalow at Pak Mus Guesthouse cost IDR 50,000 a night. Dinners cost something like 20k and they’re great at accommodating vegetarians (as is everyone else I met in Indonesia, incidentally)—highly recommended. The 2-day trek was 700k per person with everything included. I went a little crazy, but you don’t have to! I really recommend this guesthouse and Mus as a guide.

The bemo ride from the Ketambe guesthouses to the Kutacane airport cost 60 or 100k—I don’t remember—you’ll have to negotiate with the driver once all the kids are dropped off. The airport is seriously podunk and the ticketing seems informal, so don’t worry about getting there too early. Mus called Air Susi to reserve my ticket a day or two ahead. NBA is half the price, but its planes are decades old and I read about a crash on the Kutacane-Medan route a few weeks later where everyone onboard was killed. Air Susi seemed competent, straightforward, and safe, but grow a thicker skin if you’re a young-looking, light-skinned woman waiting at the airport alone.

Book at least a day ahead if you want to fly from Medan to Padang. It’s more expensive to buy plane tickets for the same day—even flying the day after ticket purchase is about half the price. Ticket prices are fixed. Tickets at the counter are cash only. Like everywhere else I went in Sumatra, kind people materialize in front of the domestic ticket counters and will help you figure out which airlines fly to your destination. My impromptu Medan-Denpasar ticket cost 2.2 million rupiah, but it’ll cost less if you do some minimal planning or are flexible.

Our afternoon will begin at 4pm with readings by local authors Annie La Ganga, Melanie Westerberg, Jack Kaulfus, Debra Winegarten, Shubh Schiesser, Rose Pulliam and Tiff Holland. 

Our musical segment begins at 6:30pm and ends at 8:30pm. Nancy Scott is hosting! Our song-circle guests are a new duo comprised from the former trio, Tres Lunas. Debbie Schmidt & Billie Woods are now Suite Journey. Check them out. And also we have fantastic Austin musician/songwriter veteran, Karen Abrahams. It’ll be a real cool nite!

 

A bonus Wyoming photo. Because it is solstice-y.

BookWoman

5501 North Lamar Blvd #A-105

Austin, Texas 78751

11.23.11. Wrote for a few hours today, just finishing revisions on The Emily Ice. Sort of can’t believe I’m still working on it after almost two years, but it keeps getting better. Last year at Jentel, a buck was poached overnight on nearby land and after we were all asked to remember if we’d seen or heard anything suspicious the night before, they drove us out to look at the corpse because they knew it would be covered in astonishing birds. We watched eagles gnaw the dead deer through binoculars, then I went back to my studio and wrote a scene of grotesque tension that we so needed in that story. I think of all those things as connected. I’ll do another read-through in a week or so.

11.24.11. Pretty sure By Anonymous should be a long short story, not a novella or novel. Spent about 4 hours embarking on an extrication of all the extraneous material I’d added to this piece over the past year. It feels good to pare it down, and since I spent so much time moving around inside the story, I have a better sense of what really needs to be there.

Notebook. The chair that is a repurposed deer. Leather floor. Leather wallpaper. Leather picture frames. And its craftsmanship. Flies.

11.25.11. A sort of day off, during which I watched it snow and wrote about yoga.

11.26.11. Continuing to undo a year’s work. I finished rewriting The Game (part 1 of By Anon) today (minus 2 scenes) and it has turned into a phantasmagorical Alice Munro-type story -meets- sex farce. I don’t know where this tone came from, but it probably rebelling against so much time in the heaviness and black humor of The Emily Ice. I worked for about 5 hours today and interesting things kept coming up. Having these long stretches of open time is the best way I have to develop my material. Walked through the new snow for almost 3 hours, to the top of the hill where all is panorama and light. A group of deer on the side of a hill. They stop what they’re doing and we watch each other. Then I went through the blue-shaded valley, which is full of robins. The creek moves under the ice.

Notebook. Psychological horror. The flies, the animals as furniture, the blank black windows sealed off from the land. The awful history of the place.

11.27.11. Wrote 3,000 words today. The Conversion (2nd half of By Anon) started to cohere in my mind. When something coheres that way, I always wonder what had driven me before. Sometimes that revelation happens over and over in a story. At night we built a fire (we did this on Thanksgiving too). All the stars were out. Talked about living well, without a lot of things, and farming, and the economy of the handmade. At the edge of the yard, some creature had burrowed into the snow and wriggled enigmatic free-form patterns of loops and lines.

11.28.11. Realized I’d need to reorganize all The Conversion scenes and think more about structure. Something happened to my brain–probably the hitting of a stride–where I can write more with less effort and it comes out better, more oriented toward the larger story. The last time this happened was in Bali when I forgot every song I know but felt permeable and could pick up Indonesian words after hearing them just once or twice. Sekolah, suka. Now I surprise myself every day with what I now know about this piece. This is where not-writing begins to more clearly show its value.  So much that I read, hear, and witness on my walks ends up twined inside the story. Sometimes it’s a shining through-line.

Notebook. Scenes will need to be reordered for max building of tension. E should not know what’s going on bc it’s insane. Then there’s a brief Colt section at the end. 1st person. It will be wonderful. 

My bus driver was so fond of that “Yeah” song by Usher and Ludacris that he played it approximately twelve times, sometimes twice in a row. Forever and ever, “Yeah” will remind me of North Sumatra. That is a gift. He also played “O Holy Night,” a Bon Jovi song I’d hear several more times in Indonesia, a very catchy song about partying, additional Usher hits, sappy Indonesian pop songs, some really fantastic Indian- or Middle Eastern-sounding songs that I fantasize are some kind of Indonesian Islamic standards and need to find out more about, and some of the nastiest American rap songs I’ve ever heard. He played these songs very loudly. It’s less than a hundred kilometers between Berastagi and Kutacane, but the trip took seven hours. And by “bus” I mean a decrepit yet plucky minibus with seats accommodating about a dozen people and lap and aisle room for many more, though this one was usually less than half full.  

Goodbye, Berastagi . . .

The Karo Batak woman in front of me was sort of dancing in her seat whenever “Yeah” came on, and I danced in my seat too, and we smiled at each other and laughed. She asked to look at my books and gave me a fruit with a brown snakeskin peel and large seeds inside, and I gave her a small orange from the plantation at the base of the Gunung Sibayak jungle. Eventually she compelled me into the seat between her and a woman in a turquoise beaded jilbab. The two of us sat very close and sort of cuddled, dropping our heads onto one another’s shoulders and eating snakefruit and reading from my Indonesian phrasebook for hours. She had about as much English as I had Indonesian, so the phrasebook was a good way to communicate, to teach one another, and to joke about Lonely Planet’s selection of Indonesian phrases. We put our feet up on the raised area in front of us. Little roaches scurried across the floor and sometimes inspected our feet. In the thrall of Usher and Luda and bonding with this lovely stranger, this did not gross me out at all. The bus stopped like five times for us to buy food and use various dark and fetid squat toilets, and stopped twice more to jack up the front and repair something or change a tire, and it all seemed okay.

A bunch of ladies with babies got on, so the driver turned off the filthy rap and put on a sitcom involving a handsome man in a dress, two schoolgirls who are perpetually sexually harassed and then buy shoes, animals who speak textually in thought bubbles, and morning radio-like sound effects. Then we watched an interminable sing-off or duet between a man and woman in red, who were performing a lengthy Karo Batak love song. My cuddle buddy showed me how to imitate the singers’ hand movements, which entailed pulsing our arms in rhythm with the song and floating our hands in a fluttering circle. “Horas!” (“Hello” in Batak) we cried at the end of the song.

It was mid-afternoon by the time my friend disembarked at her village, and I knew it would be a couple more hours to Kutacane. We passed villages and their markets, and entered the valley with its heat and sun. The woman on my other side got out shortly after we entered Aceh Province, then it was just me and a small Muslim granny in purple who’d been riding in the front seat the whole time with an elaborate paper or palm sculpture in green and lilac balanced on her lap. I started to become unhinged. The music was unbearably loud. I listened to Usher and Luda and we drove past cornfields owned by Pioneer, the company I detassled for in Iowa for three days when I was a teenager, and this barely surprised me. It started to rain.  

Late that afternoon, they deposited me at the Kutacane bus station, which is outside the city center. Again it was a place with no street signs or visible names or numbers. Soon I would learn that standing anywhere transit-related with a stumped expression on my face summons at least five men to help me, but I was still doing it instinctively then, frowning theatrically and turning in little circles. The bus driver talked to some dudes hanging out there, and they nominated their chubby friend to drive me on his motorbike to the main road. They all hooted when I clung to his belly. He tracked down a bemo for me and wouldn’t take any money.

It was raining harder and harder. The bemos connecting Kutacane to the Ketambe guesthouses are like pickup trucks with a metal roof, open window rectangles, and a bench running along each side perpendicular to the cab. A huge speaker from which loud music may issue rests against the cab. Most everyone has a motorbike, so the majority of people riding the bemo were children and teenagers going back and forth from school, mostly girls. The boys hang off the sides and open back and sit on the roof. Each bench is crammed with schoolgirls, and more girls fill the center aisle in a knot of lap-sitting. We looked at each other curiously. The bemo trundled down dirt roads in varying states of washed out. It shuddered across rockslides and streams. It seemed incredibly touching or maybe just administratively sound that in pursuing their education, little girls pass across all that mud and raging water, those jagged rocks and broken roads, for up to an hour each way every day in the only province in Indonesia where sharia is practiced.

. . . Hello Ketambe and Gunung Leseur National Park

All the girls were eventually dropped off, so it was just me and the teenage boy whose job seemed to be hanging off the back of the bus shrieking and collecting fares. He persistently attempted to persuade me to make out with him verbally and through pantomime. SAYA TIGA TIGA (“I’m 33”), I cried, hoping that he’d realize that wanting to make out with someone the same age as his mother was undesirable after all. I regretted having unthinkingly worn what I fondly call my legislative shorts, which end an inch below my knees. I began to completely despise this child, and to think about how easy it is to degrade those who don’t speak our own language, how quick we are to ascribe linguistic mistakes or lack to personal or intellectual deficiencies. Some combination of my whiteness, my foreignness, my slatternly legwear, and my inability to talk back made this kid think it was appropriate to address an adult woman in a way he likely wouldn’t dream of talking to anyone else in his life, and I would encounter this again and again, in Indonesia and back at home, from Sumatrans, Balinese, expats, Americans: mirror sides of that perceived permission to dehumanize. And, too, I would encounter and had encountered kindness beyond my expectations across those same boundaries.

An hour and a half after leaving Kutacane, we rumbled up a dirt road and the driver asked for five times the price he’d originally quoted. Quickly learning he was not up for bargaining, I grudgingly gave this to him and fled down the road in the misty rain, and a lanky middle-aged guy with a mustache emerged from a shop and showed me to Pak Mus Guesthouse, where Tuma made me a coffee and the most amazing nasi goreng, which was perfectly spicy and featured potato strings instead of egg. Mus gave me a kretek and slowly I drifted back from the edge of reason. Behind me, a chicken breathed contentedly inside a semicircle of vines.     

Travel Tips

Public buses to Kutacane depart fromMedanand typically don’t leave until they’re full, so I lucked out in catching a bus only half-full. I waited about 45 min. across from Wisma Sibayak and I think I got the first Kutacane-bound bus that passed. The guy at the station (which is a bench in front of a hair salon) flagged it for me. There are ATMs in Kutacane, but I’m really glad I used the one in Berastagi before leaving because Kutacane was a rainy blur. The ride took 7 hours but is supposed to take 5, and it costs IDR 40k. Mus says this road is better than it was last year; only one part seemed seriously damaged.

The bemo from Kutacane to the Ketambe guesthouses costs 10k, but expect to pay more if you get to Kutacane after 4 or 5, are a lone female with poor Indo language skills, etc. I paid 50k, which only offended me because he’d quoted so much less originally. The driver sat down at Friendship Guesthouse before asking for this sum, which makes me think they are sketchy and further dissuaded me from staying there.

I fled Sumatra a week after I arrived there. By then, I felt like I’d been traveling that island for most of my life. I was elated to get to Bali early, but even as my plane traversed dark Java with its occasional chips of light, part of me knew what I was giving up. Landscapes under such tension that they bubble and steam, soil with a loft to it. Some of the most magnificent food I’ve ever eaten, fresh and spicy and wildly flavorful. An easy closeness with some local women I’ve never before found while traveling, and a quick bond with other travelers. Feeling watched over and protected, at the warm center of so many gazes, which is the same as being under perpetual scrutiny. And that was what drove me out, the mirror sides of everything intensely good.

Medan was loud and dirty chaos. I rode through quickly on a becak (a sort of open-air taxi attached to the side of a motorbike, like a tuk-tuk sidecar) in that snarl of traffic and cigarettes and everyone and everything very present physically–most people are either on foot or riding motorbikes or in becaks, so very few vehicles have windows to seal drivers or passengers off from the street. On the public bus to Berastagi, which does have windows, everyone sits very close, and you can smoke on the bus, and the driver honks his horn when he’s passing another vehicle or else the kid hanging off the side of the bus or halfway out the window yells something, a verbal turn signal. The man next to me was very kind and explained how he’d come into Islam, how he used to work as a guide on Samosir Island and is now a baker. We passed a dance party where everyone wore some kind of sparkling traditional-looking outfit, and it was the middle of the afternoon. He pointed out the brothels on top of the mountain and both of us felt bad. I told him I was a Catholic–I’d decided I’d tell everyone this, and possibly also that I was married, because it’s easier for Indonesians to understand culturally and I wanted them to be comfortable so I could get them talking (this is a dirty writer trick I employ in most situations anyway). I told him I worked for the government and half an hour later he very quietly asked if I worked for the CIA. I would have to amend that part of my story. Outside, the leaves were thick green on the trees and sometimes the space between them was open enough for me to see down the mountain.

I found the guesthouse I’d chosen, Wisma Sibayak, just past the main road’s roundabout, which is crowned with an enormous concrete sculpture of a cabbage on a pedestal. The cabbage sculpture, that the soil in the fields around the city is so rich and fertile it looks fluffy, the fumaroles steaming on the side of the volcano I climbed, the coffee I drank from a hot, narrow glass with Alene at that warung on the main road that was some of the best coffee I’d ever had, the produce market overflowing from its wooden building that was the best food market I’d ever been to, the sambal and peanut noodles and nasi goring my friend at Sibayak made for me, the farmers washing their carrots in huge plastic tubs–everything in Berastagi seemed thrillingly alive. You just sink into the intensity of that landscape and the food it nurtures.Berastagi seemed nasty when I first arrived. Places like that, noisy, with a single broad, dirty road running through, with men who will yell at you before they break into a smile, with no street names or address numbers, are still hard for me to access. How I came to love Berastagi is that I went to the main road to buy a SIM card and a plug adapter and was trailed for a long time by a pack of children, who exploded into excited giggles each time I said or did anything. On my way back to the guesthouse, I explored the streets west of the main road. The sun was in its quick descent and the green-roofed mosque was blaring the most amazing call to prayer, which sounded like a muffled drone metal song. I looked at the fields and the crumbly houses with satellite dishes, and I went inside the vast produce market. Later there was a thunderstorm. After a year of drought in Texas, I couldn’t get enough of this rain, and could smell it from far away. And my Indonesian soul mate works at Wisma Sibayak. She’s a vegetarian because she objects to chickens and cows being injected with hormones, a process she says the Bible forbids. She is very short and wears leggings with big hearts on them and is an amazing cook and loves to read. She wants to translate into English an Indonesian book about a man overcoming the black magic he was born into. We talked about food and animals for hours. We sat close and laughed.   

From the top of Gunung Sibayak, the writing in its crater

I climbed Gunung Sibayak, the easier of the two volcanoes near Berastagi; there are three ways to climb it and I did the most difficult one, ascending through the hot, steep jungle, its floor covered in ferns and occasional red mushrooms. A sonorous circle of monkey whoops surrounded my guide and I at one point. The crater was still alive with frightful earth power, water boiling and steaming from holes in the rock piles surrounded by bright yellow sulfur. Men carry large sacks of this sulfur down the mountain and sell it at the market because it’s excellent for the soil. People had written messages in rock pieces in the bed of the round crater lake. Though there was some fog, we could see the dense green mountains and valleys humped out below us, and a gleaming gold Buddhist temple.

One of the women who works at my guesthouse teaches English classes to about eight students, and I agreed to practice with them. Alene, a German I’d met in Lingga village who was also traveling by herself, and I climbed Gundaling Hill with them. They took us alongside fields of green onions where women with their hair up worked. Carrots and cabbages covered the hillside plots in rows. Practicing English with teenagers (and one guy who was forty and getting ready to move to Java and work on a ship) is one of my favorite things to do when traveling because they’re so fun to talk to and can show you secret things about where they live. Ultimately this involves taking endless photos of each other and me trying to sing Lady Gaga but forgetting all the words. On our way back down the hill, a minivan stopped and a pack of beautiful women in jilbab (headscarf in Indonesian) emerged. They asked if they could have their picture taken with Alene and I in all our foreign glory. All of us giggled and posed, and their husbands snapped photos on their phones. Soon the farmland receded into the town, and we passed a resort with a manicured lawn, and mosques and churches, and an open, roofed structure where men and women in plastic bag ponchos cleaned the huge piles of carrots they’d pulled up from the ground that day. Alene and I took photos of them. We all just want to photograph each other and talk about the animals we’ve seen. We all just want to eat the best things from the ground.

The Indonesian word for carrot is "wortel."

Travel tips

Public buses to Berastagi leave often from Padang Bulan station in Medan. Ask around for which bus to take, but Berastagi is on one of North Sumatra’s few sealed roads, so most buses leaving from that station go there. I paid about IDR10k, and it’s a 2-hour ride. There are multiple ATMs along the main road. Most people go on to Lake Toba after Berastagi, but it’s also a nice break if you’re traveling to overland to Ketambe, as I did.

My room (#7) at Wisma Sibayak cost 60k a night. There are smaller rooms for 50k, and larger ones for more. It’s a lovely oasis at the edge of the loud part of town, and the food is great. They called a guide for me. The Gunung Sibayak trek cost 300k (this would be considerably cheaper if you don’t take the jungle route, and that’s the price per group, not per person), plus 4,000 for the bus to the jungle ascent base/park office and 2,000 for a permit. The trip was about 7 hours return–we came back on the road and caught a truck part of the way.  

Lingga village has a few traditional Karo Batak houses. Kids were begging when I was there, the only place I saw that on my whole trip, so I don’t think tourism has been good for this place. There was a huge tour group on a private bus, but it’s easy to get to on your own using public transportation. Change buses in Kabanjahe or Lingga town. Each leg of the trip costs 2,000-3,000, just ask around for which bus to take (usually the orange ones).

I. The portal

Indian food opened the portal to my love of Melaka. Selvam is in the touristy central part of the city and in the Lonely Planet (which mysteriously describes such places as “banana leaf restaurants”), but it seemed full of local people, or at least people who knew what they were doing. Raymond and Mani, the owners of River View Guesthouse, where I was staying, were eating at a table when I arrived, and ordered vegetable biryani for me when I sat at the table adjacent to theirs. Selvam makes biryani only on the weekends, and it’s delivered by a series of guys; I didn’t know what I was doing, so each thing that happened was a new petal of ecstatic delight.

A guy spread a banana leaf before me. A guy dropped two idli upon it. A guy blobbed three amazing vegetable concoctions onto my banana leaf: something with cucumbers; something with pumpkin; something with green pulses. A guy placed a bowl of biryani beside my banana leaf. I wadded the rice into careful spheres with my right hand and dipped it into the vegetable concoctions. A guy spread my rice onto my banana leaf and ladled a sauce containing boiled potatoes over it. Soon my hand was more like a sauce- and rice-encrusted shovel. A guy brought the lemon tea I’d ordered, which came with a green citrus sphere suspended in the golden liquid. I sort of wanted to cry because the food was so good. A guy set a whole cylinder of silverware before me but I continued eating with my right hand because everyone else was. Mani gave me props for this and ordered me more vegetables since Sunday vegetable biryani is fixed-price. When I went up to pay, I thought the girl asked for 17 ringgit (U.S.$5.50), which I found completely reasonable, but it was actually only RM6.70. The portal had opened. I stepped through.

Later I remembered that I’d been down this road before:

. . . The Indian ladies looked at me sorrowfully as I was a white lady eating alone, but really I was so happy I almost started crying several times. . . .

l like i have heard these exact words from you–almost started crying from happiness while eating alone in a far off country. . . .

II. The river

The story of Melaka’s founding goes like this: in the late 1300s, Parameswara, a Hindu Sumatran prince, was resting beneath a melaka tree while on an expedition when his hunting dogs were kicked into the river beside him by a mouse deer. He founded the city on this site because of the courage of the little deer.

I got up before dawn and went up to the empty balcony, where I drank coffee and listened to the river. There were pigeons and a throaty whoop and a high call repeated over and over and the crowing of roosters. Across the river, people live in houses with corrugated roofs and walls made of wood planks, a few painted but most just tinted by the wet rot of living beside an old river. A wire grid separates these houses from the promenade that lines both banks of the river, and at night the grid glows with tiny white-blue lights. This is just Melaka’s historical center. The city sprawls out around it, far beyond the map in my guidebook—I went through on the city bus, saw the wide roads, universities, shopping malls.

III. The armature

Melaka’s history as a place of a confluence drew me there. Its strait is halfway between China and India and is relatively near Indonesia’s spice islands, and thus in the fifteenth century attracted a wide geographical array of merchants. Malay, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, Indonesian, British, Indian and other regional influences can be found in the food, the architecture, the population. I was curious about the houses and started opening doors. First I went to Melaqa House, an antique store in a restored house. It was airy, with high ceilings, sleek rats, a courtyard at the center. I bought a thick necklace made of weightless green spheres connected by a cord; this ended up being a good conversation starter with Malaysians and Indonesians throughout my trip–What was it made of? Where was it from?–and I didn’t find a definitive answer to the first question until the last day of my trip, when a woman working at my hostel in Kuala Lumpur told me that a plant with the seeds that comprised my necklace grew in her yard when she was a child.

On display was a book called Voices from the Street, which I looked at for a long time. There are photographs of old buildings and chronicles of who lives at various addresses and what they do in their community. There are interviews with people, many of them Straits Chinese, whose families have lived and worked in central Melaka for generations, and a lot of them are being displaced by the city’s converting of their quarters into tourist shops. I’m writing it like the city has some agency of its own—surely it’s local government or developers or some configuration of that—but I often think of old, storied cities like Melaka in those terms. The book comments on the grossness of the Jonker’s Walk Night Market, which I’d been so excited to see before I realized it’s just a lot of garbage for tourists (as well as undeniably amazing fried food), and the disruption it beings to those old neighborhoods night after night. Some of what I wanted to see in Melaka is just as much of a fantasy as souvenir stalls and expensive bars—most urban people don’t want to live the way their grandparents did. It’s the sense of greed and unchecked development chronicled in the book that really bothers me, and I paged through and looked at the faces of old people and read what they did all their lives and thought at least we have this: their stories and the shells of where they had lived, those old armatures inside the new.

Near the antique store, another old house had its door ajar, so I went inside. It had also been restored and was beautiful in the same way as the one I’d just left. The house was hosting exhibits by architecture students from Singapore, which focused on land use and the reclamation of public space in cities like Melaka and Fez. Sometimes in museums or places like this one I just stop. If it’s somewhere I live, I return over and over. If it’s somewhere far away, I think or write about it for years.

Notes on the exhibition:

–Hidden rivers. Rivers in ancient cities, a thread that goes through them. In Fez, the river was polluted by craftspeople, sludge from practices like tanning and dyeing, but both the river and craft traditions are vital to society so there should be a way to retain both. Repurpose and clean the water, then sell it for tourist consumption (which may be a joke).

–Living museum, so craftspeople can continue to practice and their historic quarters can be preserved, while also opening those places for (hopefully less invasive) tourist consumption. Should not be like a zoo. Lyon’s Croix Rousse neighborhood seems to do this well/inoffensively. It’s a hybrid of old weaving studios, some weavers still working, and lots and lots of ordinary residential space.

–All concerned parties involved in process of negotiating tourism.

–Mapping, architectural modeling, old and new in concentric layers.

I will appear in the following events alongside many fascinating writers. If you happen to be lucky enough to be in Bali, please stop by!

Thursday, 6 October. Long Table Lunch. John Hardy Estate, 12:00 – 16:00.

Enjoy a leisurely long table lunch in the spectacular Tiga-Gunung bamboo pavilion of the John Hardy jewellery estate with twenty of our hottest authors. Feast on a Balinese banquet of home-cooked organic produce created by the John Hardy chefs and savour the glory of the Spice Islands while our authors reveal their hidden selves. Here’s your chance to get up close and personal with our acclaimed stars in a gathering your friends will envy!

Friday, 7 October. Love Bites (Special event). Bar Luna, 18:00 – 19:00.

Bar Luna celebrates literature with a twilight gathering of the Festival’s hottest authors telling tales of love, longing, and the spaces in between. Sip on Bar Luna’s legendary cocktails, graze on tapas, and enjoy our love bites at Ubud’s literary ‘salon terrible.’With Brenda Walker, Gregory Day, Jaya Savige, John O’Sullivan, Melanie Westerberg.

Saturday, 8 October. Simple Pleasures (Arts program). Warung Pulau Kelapa, 16:00 – 17:00.

Refresh with a fragrant tea or fresh roasted coffee in the intimate surrounds of WarungPulauKelapa. What better way to sample the simple pleasures of the short story than with afternoon readings from Festival authors KunalBasu, Melanie Westerberg, Simone Lazaroo, O Thiam Chin and UthayaSankar SB. Sit, snack, sip, and savour: superb!

Sunday, 9 October. Dream Weaving: Casting the Narrative Spell (Main program). Indus Restaurant, 09:30 – 10:45.

How do writers create the worlds in which we become immersed? Love, landscape, and longing form the language of their narrative. Learn how credible fictions come to life. Gregory Day, Alex Miller, KunalBasu, Melanie Westerberg. Chair: Simone Lazaroo.

Sunday, 9 October. Ubud Writers Great Debate: Poetry is the Agent of Love (Main program). Left Bank Lounge, 16:00 – 17:30.

Who does it better, in terms of writing about love? Poets or fiction writers? A cutthroat slam that takes no prisoners!

Fiction faction: Melanie Westerberg, DaniyalMueenuddin, KunalBasu

Poetic protagonists: Alicia Sometimes, Geoff Lemon, Oleg Borushko

Lion tamer: Corinne Grant

I don’t have a specific itinerary–I want to be as flexible as possible and to be surprised–but here is what I’m leaning toward:

Fly into Kuala Lumpur. Take the Transnasional bus from the airport to Melaka, a Unesco World Heritage Site. I’ve already booked two nights at River View Guesthouse and should arrive well in time for the Jonkers Walk Night Market! 3 days.  

Sumatra. Fly to Medan, and hopefully get a bus directly to Berastagi, where I want to climb Gunung Sibayak and possibly Gunung Sinabung (climbing Indonesian volcanoes was another of my fitness goals upon turning 33, after climbing Snake Dike at Yosemite) and hike around and look at Karo Batak architecture. 2-4 days.

Bus to Ketambe, a main access point to Gunung Leuser National Park, one of the two places on earth where orangutans live in the wild. 3-6 days.

Fly back to Medan on NBA Air. From here, I’m considering a few different things:

Bus to Tangkahan. I watched that beautiful video at Arthouse with the blind people touching the elephant, and Tangkahan is home to an elephant camp where one can bathe them.  Tangkahan’s elephants patrol the protected land around them to make sure people aren’t mismanaging it. 2-4 days 

Or, if I have at least a week before I think I’ll want to fly to Bali, I’ll go to West Sumatra.

Fly into Padang. Expore the city and go to a nearby beach area because I want to snorkel in the Indian Ocean. 1-2 days.

Bus to Bukittinggi, maybe immediately upon reaching Padang. Go to the Rafflesia sanctuary! If you’re not up on your tropical botany, Rafflesia is the world’s largest flower; it gives off a smell like rotten meat to attract the insects it consumes.