The People of the Rattan Vine Mountain, II.
An immersive ethnography (Cli-Fi) - Chapter Two: A Rude Awakening --- [Estimated reading time: 1h]
A quick note to subscribers: I finally decided - surprise, surprise! - to make the second chapter available for free as well, to show my commitment to this project and give you an opportunity to read deeper into the story (to see if it’s any good). The next two chapters will have to wait a while, though, as I have plenty of drafts of regular essays waiting for the finishing touches. I will likely publish the remaining chapters of the story in pairs every few months.
Thanks for reading!
CHAPTER TWO: A rude awakening
Yaem arrived at their home a good while after Hector, because she and some of the other elders had quietly talked among themselves after the delegates had retired to the longhouse, to try to figure out what to do next.
Hector was sitting in his hammock under the house when she arrived, puffing on a palm leaf muan in the feeble light of a resin lamp on the table. He offered her the joint with an outstretched arm, but she ignored it.
“Hector.” she said, her forehead wrinkled with seriousness.
He hated it when she used his full name, just as he had hated being named after an ancient king in the past, before the Fall. It got better after he had moved abroad, because in Southeast Asia at least nobody knew who Hector, the historical figure, was. It was just a name, as alien to the people here as the complex Thai names sound to Westerners – there was a reason everyone had a short nickname. His nickname was Hek, not pronounced ‘Hack’ like some of his old friends had called him, but with a long ‘e’ – Hehk. It still sounded a bit strange, even after all those years, but he had accepted it as his new name, with only a slight resemblance of his old persona.
Yaem only used his full name when she was serious about something, and he could sense that she was very serious right now.
“What?” he asked impatiently when she didn’t continue.
“The delegates, there is something they don’t tell us. There are a few locked boxes in the storage compartment of their helicopter, Jaak told me, and they are very heavy, the kids say.”
“So what? It’s probably their fuel reserves, or their personal belongings,” Hector guessed.
“Some of them rattle and tinkle, Jaak says, like crates of ammo.”
“But where would they get bullets from?”
“I don’t know, make them?”
Yaem sounded slightly annoyed, because Hector obviously didn’t believe her.
“As far as we know, all ammunition was used up in the months after the fall, and several cycles have passed since,” he said reassuringly, “we have no way of knowing what’s in those boxes.” After a moment he added, as if to underscore his point, “We haven’t heard a gunshot in ages.”
“But what else would make such sounds, Hector?” Yaem doubled down, “what small metal objects would you store in locked boxes to take with you when flying a fucking helicopter to search for other settlements?!”
She had a point. And her concern was genuine. Guns had changed anything. They had made wild animals terrified of humans, they had allowed humans to decimate wild animal populations until mere shadows were left of them, hastily scurrying into the scrub at the slightest hint that there was a human around, they had inflicted wounds so gruesome that nobody except a fully equipped and staffed high-tech hospital could treat the victims, and they had made taking a life as easy as flicking away an insect. They were glad that there were no more guns around, and both thought of the world as a better place for it.
“Has anybody actually asked them what’s in those boxes?” Hector inquired.
“Jaak said that some of the older kids asked the pilot, and he simply told them it’s ‘a treasure.’ Think about that, a treasure! They are definitely hiding something.”
“Could be,” he admitted sheepishly, “it’s definitely not a treasure.”
“They have a radio as well, and it works!” she exclaimed. “They could have already sent word to their base!”
“What would they possibly want from us,” Hector said appeasingly.
“I don’t know, knowledge? Food? Seeds? Us, as an addition to their workforce? Do you want to dig ditches to farm catfish, Hek?”
“For what it’s worth, I think they are exaggerating quite a bit. How much oil could you possibly get out of a depleted field? And how big could this city they built actually be? A few hundred people? At most?”
“Of course they exaggerate,” she replied. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take their story at face value. They have a helicopter, and that alone is almost unbelievable. They might be boasting, but they are a threat, and we should not trust them! What if they are planning an ambush, to carry us off as slaves, and the delegates are like scouts? Wouldn’t be the first time in history that happens.”
Hector scratched his beard and nodded in approval.
“What did you talk about over dinner?”
“They were mostly busy talking about how much their settlement resembles former times, and how glorious their undertaking is. It seemed a lot like plain propaganda, if you ask me. They seem pretty convinced of the virtue of their little project, especially Peet.”
“What about the other two?”
“Dam, I can’t quite get a read on him,” she said, “and the pilot seems like a nice person, actually. Polite and reserved, and with lots of technical knowledge. Probably an ex-engineer…”
“…with an inbuilt tendency towards ‘order,’ mechanistic thinking and authoritarianism,” Hector interjected, “Great.”
Yaem ignored his comment.
“So what about their city?” he asked after stubbing out his muan.
“It seems pretty scary, if you ask me,” Yaem said. “Like they haven’t learned anything from the past few centuries. They are intent on ‘rebuilding civilization,’ and I didn’t feel like I want to be the one telling them that that’s impossible. They probably wouldn’t have listened to a ‘mere woman’ anyway.”
‘Traditional’ Thai society, if you could ever call it that, was decidedly patriarchal, a fact Yaem had lamented for the better part of her life, and all the more reason for her to cherish the current arrangement they had created. As it turned out, plenty of other women also didn’t like having their opinions dismissed simply because they lacked a penis.
“They said the guy who runs it is called Phibun,” she added, “as if that’s a coincidence.”
“Typical,” Hector scoffed, spitting out the word in disgust.
Phibun had been the nickname of Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram, an ultranationalist military dictator who had ruled Thailand with an iron fist around the middle of the last century, and admired (among others) Italian fascism and Benito Mussolini for his ability to whip up crowds and create an extreme sense of unity – he had even called Hitler and his Nazi party “intellectual allies”. Moreover, he had changed the name of the country from Siam to Thailand (to better reflect the Thai race), stomped out cultural differences in the various regions (such as local dialects and customs), forced people to salute flags, dress according to a Western dress code (before, even women commonly went bare-chested) and eat with spoon and fork (and not, as was custom, with their hands), and he had even tried to adopt the fascist salute – luckily without success.
“They seem to be convinced they are doing the only right thing there is to do.”
“I suspected nothing less,” he shrugged, “civilizations, empires and city states have always bragged and portrayed themselves as vastly superior to what they actually were. And, from what I’ve gathered, those guys are pretty much proto-colonizers.”
“See, they are up to no good!” Yaem nodded in agreement, “But now that they know we are here, they are going to tell their people about us! The worst thing would be to have more of those damn helicopters show up here.”
“Or more of those people,” Hector added.
They continued to quietly discuss the implications of the day’s fateful event, and mapped potential scenarios – some of which were, admittedly, quite dire – until the breaks in their dialogue got longer and longer and they finally decided to call it a day.
Hector lay awake for quite some time after they had gone to bed. It didn’t make any sense. Why would they carry around boxes of bullets, and what did they intend to do with them? Where were the guns those bullets were destined to feed? They couldn’t all be for the single pistol Peet had carried when they first arrived. No, something was off, and the more he thought about it, the more it puzzled him.
After what seemed like an eternity of pondering the previous day’s many mysteries, he finally managed to doze off, and, after a moment, fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
The next morning, Hector and Tak went down to the longhouse right before the sun rose, just as she started illuminating the horizon, in hopes of asking the delegates a few more questions before they took off. Tak and Bay had joined Hector early in the morning, before the first crow of the roosters, when they usually stretched together – a Treeclimber custom – to warm up their bodies for the day. A bit of Yoga, a bit of Tai Chi, and a few movements they had invented to help stretch the few muscles that only climbing strained. The delegates had signaled that they would leave at first light, in order not to worry their people with their delay. They had to return directly, without layovers, Tak reasoned, since the leftover fuel in their helicopter’s tank would probably not allow any more detours.
They walked quietly, widely circling around the helicopter parked in their village square, and descended the slope that separated the clearing from the lower-lying plateau above the creek on which they had built the longhouse after the first raincycle was over, in a bid to create a temporary space to house the refugees that had started arriving in droves from the capital and other cities along the way soon after the Fall. The air was still cool and humid, and as they walked down the narrow path, lined by dense vegetation and the massive, heavily buttressed trunks of several species of ironwoods on both sides, the first birds started their daily morning concert, and soon the cicadas and crickets joined in. Below them, the distant rumbling of the creek trickled through the trees.
Upon arriving at the longhouse they almost immediately ran into Peet, who seemed visibly agitated, pacing quickly around the corner of the longhouse. Peet, his eyes fixed on the footpaths leading away from the longhouse, startled when he nearly walked into them.
“Dam wasn’t at your house?” he inquired without even greeting them first, nervously massaging his broad chin as he scanned their faces. Hector shook his head.
“DAM!” he suddenly called out, “AI DAAAAM!”
The pilot seemed to have spent the night in the helicopter, ever careful, but he came running as soon as he heard Peet call out. He had pulled the top half of his jumpsuit down, sleeves knotted around his waist, to reveal his lean but muscular torso that was – as Hector and Tak realized with astonishment – covered in large scars, stretching diagonally over his chest, abdomen and sides. Hector didn’t take him for the fighting kind – he seemed like more of a nerd, to be honest – but the time after the Fall had transformed all of them.
“What’s up,” the pilot inquired, visibly concerned, “why the fuss?”
“Dam wasn’t around when I woke up,” Peet told him breathlessly before calling out once more at the top of his lungs, “DAAM!”
No answer. The only sound they heard was the symphony of birdsong, which was now in full swing. The sun had started climbing over the horizon, and although it was still behind the mountain to their east it was getting light fast.
“Maybe he went down to the creek to take a proper bath?” Hector suggested.
“He wasn’t there when I woke up,” Peet snapped, “and he never gets up early. Never!”
“So, let’s have breakfast together and wait until he shows up,” Tak suggested, “maybe he just took a walk?”
Peet and the pilot nodded hesitantly, and together they made their way back to Hector’s house, where Yaem and Bay were already busily preparing breakfast – a mushy paste of boiled, unripe cluster jackfruits with various herbs, fruit vinegar and the ashes of burnt papaya trunk as seasoning.
Cluster jackfruit was the result of a hybridization (or a mutation) of a jackfruit tree that had occurred spontaneously, likely because of the semi-intentional cross-pollination with a wild Artocarpus species – Hector had planted the two initial trees next to each other to see what would happen – that he would have never expected to succeed in a million years. He had planted the seeds in the bamboo thicket adjacent to their forest garden, and down by the creek in the valley below, where nobody else thought to fight back the vegetation anymore ever since herbicides had first become too expensive to afford, and then disappeared from the store shelves entirely. ‘Protectionism,’ the newspapers had called it, leading to worldwide chaos in the agricultural sectors. The nations that produced agrochemicals had stopped all exports to boost their own country’s struggling agricultural production, or at least that was the official line. How you could ‘boost’ dead soil with even more toxins was beyond Hector’s imagination.
The cluster jackfruits produced flowers that initially looked like regular jackfruit flowers, but some trees simply didn’t stop producing a string of female flowers that grew up to a meter long, and developed into a currant-like cluster of – admittedly relatively small – jackfruits. They didn’t have much sweet flesh, even when ripe, but were packed with marble-sized seeds that could be boiled and eaten as a staple food. The entire fruit, when unripe, could serve as a meal. One fruit was enough to feed one person for half a day, and the trees were immensely productive since they didn’t have to waste much energy to develop the sweet, bright yellow arils that characterized regular jackfruits. As soon as Hector and Yaem realized this, they had started frantically planting them all over the area, often leaving for the entire day with a large bad of seeds, and returning just before dusk.
Peet and the pilot ate with renewed fervor, despite their worries. This definitely isn’t part of the plan, Hector thought, because their concern is genuine. They had no idea where Dam was, and they seemed to have a strict schedule they had to adhere to. But right now, there was no reason to hurry. Dam could be everywhere.
A few of the recent refugees joined them soon after, thankful for the meals people in the village provided for them from the harvest of the communal gardens during the time they were still busy clearing their own swiddens and planting their own orchards.
Many of them had gradually migrated further away from the cities, from settlement to settlement, each more wretched than the previous, until they had finally made their way up into the mountains, which was often the last desperate choice they were left with, along the narrow pass that formerly connected their coastal province to the vast plains further inland. Nobody expected to find a village like theirs, and people were thankful enough for the opportunity to stay there that they worked hard in order to show their appreciation.
Hector remembered vividly when the hordes of refugees arrived that had fled the former capital. They had initially started showing up in pairs or alone shortly before the Fall, then in small groups, pitiful figures, hungry and exhausted, faces stained with mud and covered in small cuts from hacking through the dense thicket of rattan and bamboo that soon covered long stretches of the highways and all but the most crucial rural roads. The former grew long spines lined with rows of sharp, inwards-turned hooks – Hector called it ‘Nature’s barbed wire’ – that sunk themselves deep into your skin if you were not careful. The clothes on their back, dirty and torn, were often the only belongings they had. Occasionally, there were children without parents, their blank stare a vivid reminder of the trauma they must have gone through. Who in their right mind would have stayed in those death traps so long anyway?
Most urbanites still had relatives and friends in the countryside, and an exodus had slowly started towards the middle of the 20s when it became painfully clear that promises of better times ahead were empty.
The rolling blackouts that began soon after killed tens of thousands, as it became impossible to cool down ones body without air-conditioning or electrical fans, and the sweltering heat in the cities was boiling people’s bodies alive, with wet-bulb temperatures close to the dangerous 35 degree mark, hot enough to cause permanent organ damage in at-risk groups such as children or the elderly.
Nonetheless, some chose to remain – at least until the Fall finally delivered the death blow for urban life.
They had taken in whomever they could, and had redirected the others to the remaining few settlements, scattered over their valley, that they were on friendly terms with. Hector had actually expected that there were more of them, but – frighteningly – it looked like the majority of people simply hadn’t survived the chaos of the first few months. Luckily, the military, private security firms and other armed groups had been severely restricted in their operations due to the general lack of fuel, which would have otherwise only added to the already astronomic number of casualties.
According to the stories of the refugees, most people had simply starved. There were swarms of starving people lining every major road, abandoned by their relatives or friends, too weak to continue walking, their sunken faces silently mouthing requests for a handful of rice, some lead tree seeds, anything to quell the gnawing hunger. Their bodies were sallow and emaciated, and sometimes it was hard to tell whether they were still alive. Some of them grabbed the clothes of passers-by in desperation, clinging to them as if their life depended on it, and the refugees had to pry off their gnarled fingers one by one and leave them to their grim fate. It was either them or you, they had asserted apologetically.
Without fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers, harvests had dropped by over half in a single season – in some cases even considerably more. Already trapped in an escalating downwards spiral of taking on ever more debt to finance the growing number of new ‘vital subsidies,’ the government had frantically tried to keep fertilizer prices ‘as stable as possible,’ which in reality meant that their prices were climbing a little less steeply than those of other commodities. Extreme weather had battered fields, plantations and orchards for years already, but in most places, plants were still able to produce a meager surplus, provided you piled up heaps of ammonium sulphate around their bases – enough to offset the massive losses of bright-blue granules that were simply washed away during the torrential rains. But even that stopped once chemical fertilizers became unavailable. Most soils were long dead by then, and animal manure was either too scarce or too concentrated (and thus toxic, as in the areas around the factory farms) to revive the earth.
What ensured was a catastrophe of biblical proportions. There had been sporadic food riots almost every year already, but once even rice, the millennia-old staple food of all civilized Asians, became too expensive to afford it in any meaningful quantity, all hell broke loose. In a desperate bid to stem the ever-growing tide of protesters flooding the smoggy squares of the major cities, the government had started to ration rice, which only intensified the chaos because the officials tasked with the allocation of those rations happily descended into crony capitalism and corruption on truly epic scales. As a result, any remotely edible plant was swiftly stripped, first of its fruit or seeds, then of its leaves, and then of its bark. In their desperation, people first ate whatever ‘wildlife’ was still left in the cities and towns – rats, pigeons, snakes, lizards, stray dogs, even cockroaches – and finally their pets. They had spanned nets over the entire breadth of the rivers running through the cities, in an attempt to catch whatever fish could still survive in the foaming, toxic brew rushing towards the sea.
And, according to some, there were instances of cannibalism.
What was probably the worst was that none of this came as a surprise to anyone with even the most basic understanding of regenerative farming, soil biology, ecology, geology, or even history. This was what had always happened, to varying degrees of severity, when ancient civilizations collapsed and the steady influx of food and other resources that supplied the cities ceased. Anyone who knew the basics of soil science knew that it eventually had to come to this, and Hector and Yaem had stood by helplessly as the ecosystem around them collapsed – and nobody else seemed to take notice.
Industrial monocropping, barely sustainable in the most forgiving temperate environments, had proven utterly disastrous on fragile tropical soils from the beginning on, and insect populations (closely followed by birds, bats and amphibians) had visibly declined throughout the 20s.
The only insects that actually seemed to thrive were, apart from a few species of scavenging ants, the ubiquitous mosquitoes, who – now without predators to keep their numbers in check – descended in massive clouds onto humans and their livestock, and mosquito-borne diseases had ravaged all mammal populations, humans included.
If there was one good thing about the Sixth Mass Extinction Event, Hector thought wryly, it was surely the virtual extinction of land leeches during the first suncycle. Previously, thousands of the much-loathed little beasts had survived the dry season by hiding in deep holes or burrows in the earth, or in cracked or punctured bamboo segments that contained a bit of water, but the relentless drought that had shriveled up the landscape killed the vast majority of them, and the remaining population never managed to reproduce enough to reach even a tiny fraction of their former numbers. Maybe some predator somewhere goes hungry now, but when it comes to those fucking leeches I couldn’t care less, Hector chuckled to himself. Agriculture was an all-out war against Nature from the beginning on, but ultimately Nature has won, despite heavy losses… Some of which will be dearly missed – and some not.
All this was already bad enough in the countryside, but in the cities it was cataclysmic. People couldn’t just disperse, and there were no forests in which to forage for wild foods – and even if there were, people simply lacked the knowledge and skills. Cities had always been the glistening centers of civilization, their inhabitants deeply – fanatically – convinced of the superiority of urban life, but eventually all good things must come to an end, and thus the exponential upwards curve of urbanism had been followed by its diametrical reversal. The millennia-long Age of Cities was over, and the ‘primitivist prophecy’ had been fulfilled.
Although Hector openly admitted that he had looked down on city folk for most of his life, he was actually glad when the refugees arrived. Some of them spoke English, a few very well, and both he and Yaem were happy to have more opportunities to use this quaint alien language – except among themselves (when they didn’t want anyone else to eavesdrop) and with the few kids and teenagers whom they taught it. Some of them even wanted to read the books they had safeguarded over the cycles, and they were almost exclusively in English. Their library included books on a wide range of topics, from history, politics, agriculture and permaculture, over ecology, sociology, geology, and biology (with a focus on the latest developments in plant neurology and animal behavior), to ethnographies about various hunter-gatherer societies and essays written by indigenous scholars, although they had lost a few of their most valued tomes to mold and termites over the years.
“There is great knowledge stored within them,” Hector once told a group of youngsters with a conspiratorial grin when they were huddled up around a smoky campfire under his house, the wind thrashing through the trees, spewing wave after wave of fine mist into their faces, “knowledge that only few people alive still have. The knowledge of how to build a better world…”
The kids were instantly fond of the idea of finally becoming a member of the Wisdomseeker guild, despite the requirement to master a foreign language, but perhaps that was also due to the fact that this was easily the guild with the lowest work requirements, and hence often the guild of choice for adolescents who still had plenty of other things on their mind. Hector was the most senior member of both the Treeclimber and the Wisdomseeker guilds, and he often feared that interest in history (and its many important lessons) would slowly fade away as the ruins of civilization crumbled and the forest gradually retook the cities and buried them under a thick layer of green – exactly what happened to Angkor Wat as well, he always told people.
How foolish were we to think that our iteration of the city-builder’s frenzy of extraction and destruction would be any different, that the gods and spirits would have a different fate in store for us, Hector thought. Cities are an insult to our Great Mother, a blasphemous attempt at defying Her rules, a blatant disregard for how the world actually works, and a monument to our own arrogance. How could we ever think we could control Nature, keep Her in check and outside the city walls, and create the human world as a separate realm from Her?
Luckily for the former urbanites, there was no shortage of land here, and since people used to own dozens or even hundreds of acres, areas that they could only ever manage with the help of chemical poisons and fertilizers (and legions of socially disadvantaged people they could pay to do the dirty work), they were often relieved to have someone move in and look after the fruit trees that their own parents and grandparents had planted – especially since all surplus was shared.
After Peet and the pilot had finally finished their meals, they talked quietly among themselves for a few more minutes, then got up from the mats under the lychee tree and made their way towards the house. In the meantime, Hector had used the opportunity to ask for Yaem’s consent to show them around and look for a sign of Dam. Yaem had agreed reluctantly, under the condition that they wouldn’t reveal to them how far the lands they tended stretched, and didn’t mention the handful of other communities that laid scattered over their valley. The guests placed their calabash bowls in the basin for dirty dishes and joined Hector and Tak, who were waiting for them, lounging in the hammocks strung between the stilts of Hector’s house and passing a muan back and forth.
“So, what are you going to do?” Tak asked them, raising a questioning eyebrow, his arms crossed behind his head.
“You tell me!” Peet retorted with a hard expression on his face.
“Look, let’s have a quick look around,” Hector suggested, flicking the muan into the bushes next to them, “we’ll show you the way we farm, so you have stories to tell when you get back. Maybe we meet someone who has seen him. He can’t have vanished.”
“It won’t matter if you’re an hour late,” Tak added casually, lifting himself up out of his hammock.
Their guests exchanged a quick look and agreed to a small tour. Fon had already suggested this to the other elders the previous day, but was held back by Yaem, who advised caution.
“Let’s go!” Hector clapped, and they started walking up the path behind their house, towards the top of the first hill where they would have a better overview.
Almost everyone in their village went barefoot, even during the raincycles, and Hector had noticed that their guests seemed slightly irritated by that. The delegates and their pilot were wearing worn-out boots that looked like they had once been military grade, and Hector didn’t even want to imagine how their feet smelled after a day in the hot, humid weather. Moreover, even the best hiking boots’ soles can’t grip the slippery mud of a rain-drenched footpath as well as your own bare toes can.
They slowly made their way up the increasingly steep hill, through Yaem’s and Hector’s own mixed, multi-storied orchard, with milk trees, wild mangos and a few Dipterocarps as the dominant canopy species, and cluster jackfruits, cacao, mangosteen and bananas in the understory. As they walked, they pointed to clumps of cardamom and achira, vines growing from purple yams that climbed up into the canopy, and a smattering of wild herbs and edible plants, all happily growing in the in the shadow of the trees.
The pilot seemed genuinely impressed.
“And you don’t till the soil?” he asked incredulously.
“Never,” Tak smiled, “that would be way too much work!”
Peet raised his brows, as if suspicious about something, but remained quiet.
“So you don’t eat any rice?!”
The pilot seemed incredulous.
“We do, but not often,” Hector said, “it doesn’t really grow well in most places here, especially during the rains, and the work requirement is enormous compared to some of our tree crops. Once you plant those, basically all you ever have to do is harvest, and prune some branches here and there.”
He made chopping motions with his hands in the direction of the next tree.
“One of our main jobs,” Tak added with a wide grin.
It became painfully clear to them that most of their food must come from trees when the first rice harvests failed in the mid-20s. Annual grains were the original fuel of civilization, long before anyone thought about adding fossil fuels into the mix – the result of which they now lived under. Now, the annual plants always died first after the rains abated. It was the forests that always stayed green, or at least green-ish: many formerly evergreen trees had become deciduous and shed their leaves in order to be able to cope with the drought stress towards the end of a suncycle.
But even most of their tree crops were less reliable now – due to the chaotic weather patterns, many of the cultivated trees that had formally fruited each year had now adopted the habit of mast fruiting, at intervals greater than one year, like formerly only wild trees did. The resulting ‘mast years’ (or, in their case, the ‘masting around the change of the cycles’) were a bonanza of food for all animals, humans included. But in the meantime, they had to utilize a whole array of other staple crops – the more diverse, the better – which occasionally also included rice.
“Rice requires wide, open spaces, and if you create those, you’ll always have to battle soil erosion, especially during heavy rains,” Hector went on to explain. “We try to work hand in hand with our Great Mother, not against her.”
“So this ‘Great Mother’ you always talk about is, like, your land?” Peet inquired with a hint of amusement in his voice.
“Yes, in a way. The land, the forest, the rivers, the mountains… Everything around us,” Tak started explaining. “The whole world, if you will. She nourishes us and gives us life, each and every day.”
“And this is, what, your religion?”
“In a way, yes,” Tak replied.
“Like Mother Earth?” the pilot asked, using the Thai term, Phra Mae Thoranee, the goddess of the Earth in Buddhist mythology.
Tak nodded, and opened his mouth to continue, when suddenly – “HOOOH!” – they heard someone call out from behind them. They often imitated bird calls when communicating over longer distances, which seemed less intrusive and occasionally led to funny mix-ups when people wandered into the forest, dead-sure someone had called for them, only to discover a bird perched in one of the trees, eyeing them suspiciously. The call of the wood owl was often used to get peoples attention over longer distances, or to alert someone to your presence.
It was Lui, one of the Wildtenders, sprinting up the path in long strides.
“Yaem told me… you went… this way,” he panted once he had caught up with them, “I wanted… to check… the fields!”
Hector patted him on the back and laughed, “Oh, if only I was young like you again… You can breathe first, you know?”
“Yaem told me to check on the cucamelons she transplanted a few days ago,” Lui added once he caught his breath, tapping against the backpack woven from pandanus leaves he was carrying, that – from the sound of it – contained a few plastic bottles with water. It hadn’t rained for two days, and Yaem was worried about the seedlings.
Yaem was the most senior Seedkeeper of their community, and she led a small group, made up mostly of women, whose responsibility it was to save enough seeds for the next time planting became possible, and to protect them from the elements in the meantime. Seeds kept well during the suncycles, where the only concern was the heat, and seeds could be stored in small plastic barrels underground. But during raincycles, seedkeeping was basically a full-time job that could, at times, be akin to a war. They had to strategically choose the sites where they stored the seeds, and fortify them against the relentless waves of ant and termite armies looking for food and a dry place. There were species of ants that could make their way into almost every container, chewing up plastic and rubber seals into tiny pellets as they worked their way into the treasure vaults of the Seedkeeper guild. Storage jars and boxes had to be moved around, because once the ants and termites knew that there was food, their numbers started swelling in the wink of an eye.
Last year they had lost almost all of their cucamelon seeds, after the ants had found a detour over a sagging branch that touched the roof of the storage unit. The Seedkeepers had erected what looked like a beehive or a large spirit house, a compartment with a square piece of metal sheet as a roof on a single metal pole, around which a cloth soaked on old motor oil was wrapped. Usually that was sufficient to keep the ants away, at least for a while, so nobody paid much attention to it – until one day they had heard a shriek when Saai, one of the younger Seedkeepers, discovered an ant invasion during a routine patrol of the seed stores.
Usually, they divided all seeds equally into at least four compartments, which the Seedkeepers moved around regularly. But the cucamelon crop had almost failed last suncycle due to a highly abnormal infestation of crickets, so they weren't able to save a whole lot, and they only narrowly escaped the extinction of this crop from their community (and thus probably the entire continent). Due to this shortage, the remaining seeds were stored in a single plastic ziplock bag in one of the compartments, and it was this bag, in this box, that the ants raided first.
Cucamelons grew like weeds, thin thread-like vines spreading over the ground and climbing everything in their vicinity, and they produced tasty, slightly sour berries that looked and tasted like tiny cucumbers with a hint of lemon juice. They fruited prolifically, even during the height of the suncycle, if you just gave them a single long squeeze of one of the two-liter Pepsi bottles the Wildtenders used for watering. Whereas the Wildtenders were busy carefully nudging the the land towards more productivity pretty much constantly, in the short periods where both rain and sunlight was abundant both Wildtenders and Seedkeepers worked together in their communal gardens and some of the outlying swiddens. Since land was not scarce anymore, they had almost completely abandoned private landownership as soon as the refugees arrived, and each household laid exclusive claim to only a small patch of land, usually adjacent to their dwelling, on which they could plant things for personal consumption or for ornamental value.
If everyone tried to grow everything they needed to survive on single pieces of land, reasoned Hector, the workload potentiates and the unpredictable extreme weather would hit certain people harder than others; and even if everyone had their plot, planted whatever grew best and traded afterwards, disputes over allocation of basic foods would ensue. No, the best way was to assess what needed to be done, together, focusing first and foremost on staple foods and the requirements of the entire village population, and then to allocate work towards the prevalent tasks at any given time. The various ethnic hill cultures of Zomia had managed their lands collectively in this fashion for millennia, and it was precisely that system they tried to reinstitute now – and all that without formal leadership, but with a system of diverse guilds, whose membership was fluent and non-coercive. Hector had devised the guild system during the first, seemingly endless raincycle, and although Yaem always quipped that it sounded cartoonish or even childish, the people loved it and took great pride in their guild membership. There was no formal governing body supervising the guilds, and there was no hierarchy among them. Whatever differences in opinions there were had to be talked out, even if it took hours to reach consensus. The eldest members of each guild convened regularly, informal meetings in the longhouse to which everyone was invited, and decided what the priorities for the next few days or weeks were. So far, everyone was very satisfied with the system, much to Hector’s pride.
In addition to the communal gardens surrounding the village, each household could clear swiddens for personal use from the bamboo thicket to their east, and could expect the other villagers to help with both the controlled burning and the planting of those fields. Throughout the entire process, they received instructions from the Wildtenders, who showed them the practices that worked best with the unique characteristics of the land around the Rattan Vine Mountain. Both Yaem and Hector had been pivotal in the establishment of the Wildtenders due to their prior experience with regenerative farming and indigenous horticulture, but Hector had soon devoted himself to leading the newly-established Treeclimbers. Nonetheless, the Wildtenders were one of the largest – and most important – guilds.
When their small group reached the top of the hill, they stopped to take a look around. They stood at the edge of the forest garden, and in front of them stretched a grassy expanse of bright green blades. The southern slope of the hill had been cleared to make a new swidden, and the hill rice they had planted last month was sprouting vigorously.
In the distance, they could make out a few more clearings, but their guests didn’t even seem to take notice. Dispersal was one of their main focuses when it came to food cultivation, because you never knew what the next cycle brought, and because it was much safer in case they ever had to relocate – which had almost happened on several occasions.
“So you do plant rice,” Peet said with a satisfied smile.
“Hill rice,” Hector added, “sowed directly into the soil after clearing and burning the area. It’s the first crop, and always a real treat. But afterwards there won’t be any rice growing here for decades.”
In the middle of the swidden, two of the refugee families had built a small hut with help from the Homebuilding guild, which helped with construction and made sure roofing materials were not overharvested. Wood and bamboo was both abundant now, and the refugees who had cleared the swidden had cut some of the younger hardwood trees, those with trunks as thick as an arm, to be used for the hut, whereas the roof structure was made of slats of giant bamboo, tied together with rattan twine.
Two dark-skinned men with short, bristly hair, were sitting in the front opening of their palm-thatched field hut, busily sawing and carving dry bamboo segments to build tilong rat traps. Rodents were a real threat to some of their crops, especially cassava, which had been planted together with the rice in some of the flatter areas immediately after the burn.
One of the men, the younger one, had reflexively started to bring his palms together in front of his chest for the waai, the traditional Thai greeting, when he saw Hector approach, then thought otherwise and lowered his hands shyly. Before the Fall, Westerners had often been greeted in this overly respectful fashion, which had always made Hector feel like a 19th-century colonizer – a painful reminder of the burden his ancestry had meant for him for the better part of his life. He had told the refugees from the beginning on that nobody was considered of ‘lower rank’ than anyone else in their community, and thus the overly submissive gestures that had characterized conversations and interactions so much in the past had been abolished completely in their community. Furthermore, Hector never failed to point out, everyone of ‘higher rank’ had either been killed in the bloody vendettas that erupted soon after the police had lost whatever power they still held and decade-old feuds had finally been settled – or died of their chronic diseases soon after the Fall.
Rich people in the countryside had wronged and exploited so many people over the decades that most of them were dead within days after the fuel supply had collapsed and it became obvious that the police couldn’t protect them anymore. Even the henchmen some of them kept around quickly turned against them, and after years of low pay, terrible hours and unfair treatment it was like a dam broke when all the bottled-up frustration, envy and hatred suddenly burst forth.
In a way, this almost seems like karmic retribution – how soothing to know that, ultimately, you reap what you sow. Countless generations of rich folks died way too peacefully over the millennia, considering what they did to the planet, to our communities, to us, and to our descendants. If, against all expectations, there is in fact a ‘hell,’ it is surely reserved for the rich, the parasitic elites feeding off the suffering of the living world and all its inhabitants. Nobody has strayed further from the right path, nobody committed more atrocities, nobody was more alienated than the arrogant, snobby World Eaters in their fancy oversized houses, unable to live without countless slaves catering to their every need. Pathetic creatures who finally got what they deserved.
When the store shelves were still stocked to the brim, the wealthier classes in Southeast Asia had been at least as unhealthy as the lower classes, since there was very little health awareness (or incentive to restrict consumption of foods considered ‘delicious’) in Thai society up until the Fall. The richer you were, the more factory-farmed pork you ate, the more sodas, iced coffees and expensive liquor you drank, and the more you feasted at the lavish moo gra-tha barbecues1 that were so popular during the economic upturn of the early 21st century. Healthcare had begun draining the government’s coffers soon after, and, starting in the early 20s, rates of diabetics, dialysis patients, liver- and heart disease and cancer had skyrocketed. In the already tense economic environment of the post-Covid recession, public healthcare was prioritized as good as anyhow possible, to avoid unrest and revolts, but the expenses for the health sector grew exponentially, and yet public health was still in free fall, for virtually all social classes.
Ever since the immediate fallout from the Fall had settled, general health actually improved, since many ‘everyday poisons’ were simply not available anymore. Gone were the days of fried pork belly (moo saam chan), of forty Baht two-liter Pepsi bottles, fried chicken on every street corner and iced milk tea so sweet it hurt your teeth. People were suddenly forced to eat wild foods, and those happened to provide exactly the nutrients their pre-Fall diet was lacking so dearly.
“I see the first crops are almost ready,” Tak said after a casual greeting, pointing to the vigorously growing loofah vine covering the roof of the hut. Small, finger-shaped fruits had started to develop along the nodes, and the wide yellow flowers swarmed with pollinators, mostly stingless bees – but even a few honeybees, Hector noted with delight. Another sure sign the suncycle had really started this time.
“Coming along well,” the younger man grinned, exposing a wide gap where his lower front teeth should have been.
“Yes, I’m surprised how fast everything is growing,” the older refugee added, “and all without fertilizer!” He grabbed one of the loofahs that was dangling from the roof above them and gave it an inquiring squeeze.
“Fine, fine,” Lui nodded, visibly satisfied, “how are the cucamelons coming along?”
The men gave him a puzzled look.
“The Mexican cucumbers,” Lui added with a smile, using the ‘common name’ the Wildtenders had invented to make the plant names easier to remember for the new arrivals. Many of the refugees had never heard of the exotic crops Yaem and Hector had started collecting when international shipping and travel were still possible.
“In the lower part, really good,” the younger man let is arm sweep across the field below them, “but up here, some of them are struggling. Two got dug up by bamboo rats the other night, hence…” he lifted the half-finished Tilong trap, “but I think the others are gonna pull through. No idea what they want with the roots, though.”
“They grow a small, starchy bulb pretty early on,” Hector explained, “from which they resprout even if the aboveground part of the plant has dried up. The cassava roots are probably still too young, but the damn rats are as hungry as ever.”
The two refugees recounted how they had seen a swarm of giant honey bees pass right overhead the previous day, which was a special occasion these days. Wild honey was still taboo (a word Yaem and Hector had added to the local vocabulary), because giant bee populations already struggled enough with the unpredictable weather, and probably needed a few more decades to adjust to whatever the ‘new normal’ would turn out to be.
After excusing themselves from the conversation by saying that they were in a hurry, Hector, Tak and their guests left Lui behind with the refugees, and they continued to wade in single file through the knee-high rice, careful to step into the footprints of the person in front of them to minimize damage, and down the western slope of the hill, towards the denser part of the forest where they grew two of their main nut crops:
“Wild almonds and stone oak, both used seasonally as additional staple foods,” Tak explained as they made their way downhill.
Once they reached the forest edge, the air temperature dropped immediately. A cool breeze wound through the trunks of the nut trees and the native forest giants they had allowed to grow alongside their main crops, as a windbreak, to hold the soil in place, and use the lower branches as continuous source of mulch for the nut trees, as Hector pointed out to their guests.
The soil on the footpath had eroded considerably over the last cycles, and now the bare roots of the trees along the path were lined up like a staircase, which made travelling during the raincycles a lot easier. Some roots had come lose and were hanging like a rope railing along the path, so that walking was much less hazardous than on the muddy smaller trails that crisscrossed the less-traveled areas.
After a short walk down the steep slope, they reached Uncle Mun’s shabby little hut, situated well outside the circle of the main village, at the dark and moist mouth of a steep ravine where he tended a few dozen large kratom trees that overshadowed a small clearing, in the middle of which he had single-handedly built his primitive abode. As usual, the hut was in utter disarray, with clothes strewn all over the single open room, blackened pans and pots standing around awaiting a shower and a scrubbing, a ragged mosquito net hanging under the roof, and plastic bags with unidentifiable contents piled in every corner. Although the guests knew nothing of his relation to the owner of this run-down shack, Tak lowered his head in embarrassment.
After the untimely death of his beloved wife, Auntie Doy, two cycles ago, Uncle Mun had changed considerably. Gone was the happy old man, smiling his warm, toothless smile at even the slightest hint of a joke, gone the good-hearted taunting he and his wife had engaged in so often, and gone was his cheerful disposition. What was left was a shadow of his former self, grumpy, alone, and utterly unwilling to accept any help from anyone in the community. Tak and a few other men had tried to persuade him to move closer to the village again, away from the snake- and mosquito-infested valley, but to no avail. “If a snake gets me, all the better,” Uncle Mun used to grumble, “at least I won’t be anyone’s burden.”
Despite his grief, he was never really an outsider, and was well-integrated into the community, although he wasn’t that active in any guild anymore. People liked him, valued his opinion, and everyone had mourned with him after Doy passed away. He had been a Treeclimber until Doy’s death, and he still accompanied them sometimes, but his focus had shifted – and, as he always asserted, his bad ankle didn’t allow for the same primate flexibility anymore. These days, he was one of the main suppliers of kratom leaves in the village, another reason why people always appreciated his presence. Kratom use was rampant in the entire valley (and probably beyond), especially during the raincycle when they had to ration the compressed cannabis buds they grew, cured and used over the suncycle. Pretty much everybody was traumatized, some pretty severely so, and in the absence of professional therapy, plant-based tinctures to help handle the pain of it all were seen as a ‘gift from the gods’ – and this was pretty much literally how people saw the kratom tree. Belief in spirits inhabiting certain sacred trees was widespread even before the Fall, and this ancient folk belief surely helped pave the way towards the animistic reverence of other living beings and natural entities that Yaem, Bay, Tak and Hector had developed, promoted, and consequently woven into the fabric of everyday life over the years. In their village, everyone agreed that kratom trees took pity on humans, and mercifully provided relief from insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, pain and depression. The effects that the dark, bitter tea brewed from their leaves had on the mind and body was said to be a direct transfer of the plant’s spirit into the human consciousness.
Right after the Fall, one of the objects most desired (after food, obviously) was alcohol. Alcoholism had been rampant – especially in the countryside – long before the Fall, and rice vodka was dead cheap and subsidized (or, more precisely, tax-exempted) by the government, for ‘preemptive crowd control,’ as Hector used to joke. But the sudden rupture of supply chains had led to an equally sudden disappearance of all but the most dangerous alcohol on the shelves of the tiny mom-and-pop stores that dotted roads in the countryside. If Hector remembered it right, this had happened even before gasoline prices had soared to unimaginable extremes, making fuel a luxury good and something ordinary people – not only nation states – were soon waging war over.
People weren’t necessarily killing each other over liquor, although fights broke out regularly over the last few stocks of Lao Khao, Hong Thong and Sang Som, carefully guarded over by the owners of larger stores, who had often kept their entire stores under armed guard.
In some areas, local militias who euphemistically called themselves “Security Services” or “Rural Police”2 emerged, and usually disbanded as fast as they were formed. Most members were alcoholics as well, there was precariously little discipline, and many used their position of authority to extract bribes from store owners and terrorize people whom they suspected of hiding precious goods, such as the highly prized brown bottles of rice vodka. Desperate villagers set up primitive distilleries, which produced alcohol so laced with methanol that people simply dropped dead in droves, and even more went blind – a horrible fate, considering the general state of things, and the fact that the worst was still lying ahead of them.
Hector had anticipated this. Most of his pre-Fall neighbors were – if not actual alcoholics – at the very least seriously at risk of becoming one. As life got harder, prices for the basic necessities of life went through the roof, debt amassed, and more and more luxuries and consumer goods disappeared out of reach, many had turned to drinking as a form of self-medication. Alcoholism had long been the commoner’s refuge, providing relief from the dull work routine as (fruit) farmers and farm workers, and the existential worries of everyday life in a collapsing civilization.
Alcohol withdrawal can be brutal, and any relief was much welcomed by addicts going cold turkey from one day to the next. Kratom produced mild opioid-like effects, a warm and light feeling throughout the body, and a rapid decomplexification of conscious thought, while at the same time counteracting any withdrawal symptoms. It had been used for that purpose for centuries, starting with the treatment of opium addicts, and later being prescribed as a traditional remedy for people trying to quit the ubiquitous and dead cheap yaa baa pills, which contained a mixture of caffeine, methamphetamine, and a few other unidentified substances, and were the drug of choice – especially for young people – right up to the Fall.
Whereas some villagers had looked down on Hector and (especially) Yaem for their affinity for strongly brewed kratom tea – it was much more uncommon for women to get high than for men – after the Fall, suddenly half the village asked for cuttings. Luckily, Hector had begun distributing cuttings long before the Fall to friends and allies all over the valley, and several people in the village already grew large trees in their orchards, so the sudden increase in demand could be met without too much delay.
Kratom tea slowly became the new drug of choice for the suffering, miserable masses, which, in Yaem’s and Hector’s view, was a lot better than alcohol. Nobody became overly violent after drinking Kratom tea, since one of the effects was to make you too lazy to even think about starting a fight.
Another advantage was that all one had to do to make kratom tea (or, how it was colloquially known as, naam tom), was to rub a handful of leaves between your hands, and boil the resulting pulp in some water (usually together with a few twigs of stevia, to make the taste a bit more bearable). Fermenting alcoholic beverages mostly required adding sugar, which became more and more expensive – making fruit wine (such as the villagers’ local specialty, ‘Nana Ale) a rare treat.
The sun had risen over the mountaintops, and the humidity slowly intensified. The air was still comfortably cool under the shade of the kratom trees surrounding Uncle Mun’s hut, but wherever the rays of the sun fell on their skin, the group got a taste of what the weather had in store for them today. There was no sign of Uncle Mun, and the only sound was the constant trickle of the small stream behind the hut that wound its way along the bottom of the ravine.
“Uncle!” Hector called out and clapped his hands.
No answer. There was still no answer after Tak repeatedly imitated the call of the Asian koel – the bird call used to ask if anyone was around – so they decided to venture a bit deeper into the narrow valley. Tak, slightly worried, continued to whistle the call of the koel, until they thought they heard a faint answer. Or maybe that was actually a bird?
After a few minutes the ravine started to widen again, and they came to a bend, from behind which the answer had seemed to originate. They walked around the rugged edge of the ravine and into the broad, densely vegetated valley that opened up beyond it.
Uncle Mun was perched on a termite hill right in front of them, scarf wrapped around his head, absent-mindedly sucking on a muan. He must have heard them, Hector reasoned, because he sat facing them when they came around the curve in the path leading from his hut through the valley, and out into the forest on the other side. Usually, the villagers didn’t travel this area much, because the thicket of the emerging secondary forest was bristling with spiky rattan vines creeping every which way – which made walking, especially barefoot, a precarious endeavor – and all sorts of other thorny plants abounded as well. Wild salak palms grew every few meters, and their long, spiny fronds extended like star-shaped barriers in all directions, so you had to walk in wide circles around them, always one eye on the ground, since their spines could easily pierce even the soles of the rubber tire slippers people usually wore in this part of the forest.
He greeted them briefly, and, upon inquiry, revealed that he was collecting rattan shoots for lunch.
“Have you seen Dam?” Peet asked impatiently.
“Your friend? Hell no.”
“So nobody came this way?” Tak doubled down. “When did you wake up?”
“Well before sunrise, and I didn’t hear a damn thing,” Uncle Mun responded, slightly angered by the fact that Tak didn’t seem to believe him.
“He went missing this morning, and we thought he might have taken a look around,” Hector tried to appease.
“In this thorny hellscape?!” Uncle Mun laughed, “there’s surely better places to take a stroll!”
He had a point. Apart from people harvesting rattan vines for weaving (or young rattan shoots for cooking), ga-por palm leaves for rolling their cigarettes, or the ripe fruit of the salak palm, nobody in their right mind would have ventured any further.
“Okay, well, then let’s circle back to the longhouse and see if he showed up in the meantime,” Hector suggested, “You coming with us?”
Uncle Mun nodded once, flicked away his muan, slid off the termite hill, and the entourage made their way back up the ravine.
“Why do you live so far off the settlement?” the pilot wanted to know as they were walking along the clear stream dabbling over the stones on the ground.
“I just value my privacy,” Mun answered, “good to have a place where you can be alone sometimes.”
“But doesn’t the constant dampness bother you? It must be pretty horrible during the rains!”
“Sure doesn’t bother me – the floodwater drains well enough into the canyon, and at least here I’m protected from the damn wind,” Uncle Mun countered, “if you live all exposed, like this fella here” – he pointed his thumb at Tak – “it won’t matter if you have a roof at all!”
Tak laughed out loud.
“That’s not true! You never even tried spending the night, no matter how many times we asked you!”
“’Cause I’m not a damn bird, that’s why!”
Now Uncle Mun was laughing as well, a deep guttural roar that reverberated from the walls of the ravine. Tak slapped him on the back, happy to have elicited a rare laughter from him, and the two continued chuckling until they passed Uncle Mun’s hut, and ascended the path leading to the clearing.
Before reaching the plateau, they passed several huts and houses of various sizes, some housing an entire family, others only a single couple, each one unique – a hallmark of the Homebuilders’ creativity – and radiating the distinctive post-apocalyptic charm that Hector admired so much – like a creative blend of squalid slum dwellings and the elegant, all-natural temporary abodes of tropical hunter-gatherers. Most of those huts belonged to refugees, as the old guard of the village – for the most part – still inhabited their former houses.
Because of the never-ending torrential downpours during the raincycles, everyone – apart from Uncle Mun (lower) and his son (higher) – lived on hillsides now, and only during the suncycles did some of them build temporary camps down in the valley, along the rapidly shrinking river.
Members of the newly established Homebuilder guild had gone on salvaging trips with the newcomers soon after they had decided where they would settle – a process that had escalated into brawls on several occasions, due to the presence of mature groves of various fruit trees in some sites, but not others – and had helped them finish their makeshift shelters: primitive structures made from bamboo and wood, tied together with vines, wire and old cables, floored with bamboo slats and thatched with the leaves of wild palm trees, rusty metal sheets, and the occasional plastic tarp with the long-faded advertising for condensed milk or iced tea.
When the guilds were being established, Yaem and Hector – together with Bay and Tak – had initially been active in almost all of them, working tirelessly under the scorching sun or in the relentless rain, eager to exploit the opportunity to build a society from scratch. This was the moment they had waited for so long, and now the vista of a new beginning gave them a newfound sense of purpose, and hence the motivation and ability to tap into hitherto unknown reserves of strength and endurance. Everyone had to contribute to the best of their abilities, they asserted the group repeatedly – and not without a hint of irony – during their meetings, so that everyone’s needs were being met. Stone Age Communism 101, Hector called it. The real objective was to create a group identity, a strong sense of unity, and a shared purpose, so that they might – in time – be able to recreate the intimate network of mutual support that had shaped the genus Homo over millions of years of evolution.
Formerly, we had to pay strangers money to do everything for us: grow and cook our food, supervise, educate and teach our children, even take care of us when we were older. The reason our ancestors survived the Ice Ages, a landscape riddled with giant predators, and life in the forest, the savanna, the desert and the ice was because they did all those things for each other – one hand washes the other. Only if we help each other out do we have the chance to live a decent life from now on. Times have changed, we all know that. Nothing is as easy as it used to be. But this is why we need to help each other, even if we don’t get an immediate reward for it. Who goes alone eventually goes hungry, and when you are sick, nobody will take care of you. We work, move, and live as a group. All we have is each other now, and only if we all cooperate do we stand a chance. The weather is not what it is, and what we spent our past lives doing is now irrelevant. We are in unchartered territory, and we need to be wise in our decisions, or else our group will fall apart and we will suffer the same fate of all those we were forced to leave behind.
The salvaging trips to get material for the new huts had each taken up an entire day (since they had to carry everything by foot), and until a new locale was gutted up to a week passed. What they were looking for was mainly intact metal sheets to be used for roofing, since they were relatively easy to dismantle, transport and reuse, and since the ubiquitous wild betel palms in the area were soon stripped of leaves to make thatch – after which strict ‘honorable harvest’ ethics were implemented by all guilds to avoid bottlenecks in the future. They had desperately needed reliable roofing materials when the bulk of the refugees arrived – the next raincycle was approaching rapidly, with massive black cumulus cloud formations gathering in the southwest each day, coming closer and closer as they worked tirelessly to patch together hut after hut, neatly arranged in small clusters of two or three buildings, three sides closed and one side open. Most huts were on stilts, which made them less susceptible to runoff rainwater and provided refuge from at least some of the insects and snakes.
Metal sheets were abundant, since formerly every store, restaurant and house had a tin-roofed porch, and large warehouses, factories and parking lots were completely covered with them. The higher structures had suffered considerable storm damage, often ripping entire sheets in half along uneven and extremely sharp lines, which made dismantling the roofs even more difficult. They were the most-sought-after construction material, since you could use them both as roofing and as walling, and they were lightweight, and thus easy to move – a steady caravan of people carried stacks of them on their heads, through the jungle, and back to their settlement once they had disassembled a new building and hacked straight footpaths through the emerging patches of open secondary forest and dense bamboo thicket.
In the evenings, everyone was tired but highly satisfied, and they often spent time together around the longhouse, laughing, gossiping, telling stories, singing old songs, and passing around cups of bitter-sweet naam tom.
When they reached the clearing again, Bay had just emerged from the path leading to the longhouse. She waved excitedly once she spotted them, and jogged over to greet them.
“Someone found a pair of black pants and a shirt by the side of the river,” she told their guests, “The kids brought them to the longhouse. Are you guys missing some?”
“We’re not only missing clothes, we’re missing a person,” the pilot explained sincerely, “Dam wasn’t here this morning.”
“When did you find it?” Peet asked eagerly, “and what else did you find? Was he still there?”
Bay shook her head.
“Maybe he really took a bath then,” Tak said thoughtfully.
Suddenly, his face darkened.
“The river still has a really strong current at some spots,” he said. “I went in yesterday, and was surprised by the pull.”
“And there’s still some logs in the water sometimes, even though we didn’t have a proper downpour for a few days,” Hector added.
“You think… He might have…” Peet’s mind seemed to have slowed down from the awful implications the scenario posed.
“Drowned?” the pilot asked incredulously, “That guy grew up on the Islands – he can’t drown.”
“Well… I mean, we are already well behind schedule, so what the hell do we do now? They’re expecting us by noon, and the sun is almost above us already!”
Peet seemed more agitated than ever, and Bay, Tak, Hector and Uncle Mun grew increasingly worried as well, as they slowly realized what this meant for them. Another visit by their new acquaintances, definitely, a few days of scouring the riverside downstream, and the prospect of having to expand resources towards that rather pointless end at this crucial time during the change of the cycles.
“I just hope you know we had nothing to do with that!” Bay assured their guests, “We would never dare harming or endangering our guests, and we are very sorry for the complications. This was surely not what you expected.”
“No, no, don’t worry,” the pilot brushed aside her concerns, “I believe you. I have seen how you and your people live, and I can see quite clearly that you are not the kind of folks who’d look for trouble. But I also know Dam, and he’s usually one to take care of himself. I’m a little concerned…”
“But what now?” Peet asked.
“I guess there’s little else we can do right now,” the pilot said pensively, “we will have to leave. You got your stuff?”
“All still in the machine,” Peet answered.
“So I guess we will leave it at that. We will return in a week and see what happened in the meantime. I find the whole thing a bit hard to fathom, to be honest. But I have no idea what else we can do.”
They said their goodbyes, thanked everyone present for the delicious food and the hospitality, and the pilot even brought his palms together and bowed his head for the waai, to respectfully bid farewell to Uncle Mun, who looked away in embarrassment. He was older, yes, but they had seen his hut – and the pilot flew a helicopter. But status hierarchies hadn’t always been straightforward.
In the meantime, word of their guests’ imminent departure had gone around, and a crowd had assembled at the edge of the clearing, waiting to watch the takeoff. Yaem had brought a burlap sack full of durian from their house – apparently a few more fruit had ripened overnight - and handed it over with a warm smile. The pilot expressed his gratitude and carried the bag over to Peet, who stored it under their seats.
Uncle Tip, as always more adventurous than worried, had decided to travel as their ‘leader’ with the delegates, since chances were now higher that they would actually return to look for Dam – or at least to figure out what had happened to him. He had spent the morning with Yaem, Fon and a handful of others in front of the longhouse, planning his mission and discussing what he should say and what was better left unmentioned. He bowed down to hug his niece, Sung, and then briefly embraced his wife. She gently squeezed his bulky forearm, gave him a smile, and he walked over to the helicopter, where Peet was waiting for him. Peet showed him where to store his duffel bag, and they climbed into the cabin.
Hector walked the pilot to the helicopter, and Fon ran over to join them.
“There is one more thing we would like to ask of you,” Fon said, addressing the pilot, who had already put on his helmet, “please be discreet about the fact we harbor a farang.”
He smiled, gave her a nod, and turned towards the machine.
“One more question,” Hector interjected, just as he was about to turn around to climb into helicopter, “What is in the crates you carry in the helicopter?”
“Potential trade goods,” the pilot replied casually, “you never know what opportunities you might encounter! You guys seem to have everything you need already, though, so maybe next time we’ll have something more appropriate for you.”
He climbed into the cabin, skillfully swung himself into the cockpit with his functional arm, flipped a few switches, and the rotor slowly started spinning.
“Oh, and what’s your name?” Hector called out over the sound of the engine. The pilot turned towards him, shoved up the visor of his helmet, and gave him a wide grin.
“It’s Plaek!” he yelled, before slamming his visor shut again and turning towards the blinking instruments.
Hector and Fon tugged their heads between their shoulders and ran back to the side of the clearing, where some of the other elders waited, just as when the helicopter had first landed. In no time, the rotor was spinning furiously again, kicking up dust and shooing away the children back behind the treeline, before lifting the helicopter off the ground. The passengers waved goodbye and the village waved back, covering their faces with their scarfs, as the machine rose slowly, hovered for a moment, and then gently set out westwards.
After a minute, the pulsing roar got quieter, before fading away completely once the machine disappeared behind the mountains. For another moment, everyone was standing there, rooted to the spot and eyes fixed on the horizon, mesmerized by the extraordinary spectacle and the surreality of the last two days. Hector’s mind was racing.
Plaek, he thought, grinning unwittingly at the unintended pun. The word plaek literally meant ‘strange’ or ‘weird’, and was thus a very uncommon name, except for…
“Shit,” Hector hissed as the neuron swarms in his brain connected the dots.
To be continued…
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All names, characters, places and incidents mentioned in this story are purely fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), events, places, institutions, and products is intended or should be inferred, and resemblance is entirely coincidental. Images used are either from the author’s personal collection or random pictures found online and distorted beyond recognition, and are thus beyond the scope of any reasonable claim of copyright infringement. No type of AI has been used in the writing, processing and editing of this text, or to create or edit any of the images contained herein.
“Moo Gra-tha” (หมูกระทะ; pronounced mŏo grà-thá) A widely popular fusion of Korean style barbecue and Chinese hotpot, consisting of a round table grill with a raised dome in the middle (for grilling meat) and a ring filled with soup around it (for vegetables, noodles and mushrooms), placed on a charcoal stove. There were restaurants offering all-you-can-eat buffets for 199 THB/person in the 10s and early 20s, and those restaurants (and similar establishments) brought out the darkest aspects of human Nature.
The “Rural Police” (ตำรวจชาวบ้าน; pronounced dtam-rùuat chaao bâan) was a shady organization of vigilante groups loosely affiliated with one another, similar to the infamous Red Gaurs (กระทิงแดง; grà-ting daeng) or the Village Scouts (ลูกเสือชาวบ้าน; lôok sĕuua chaao bâan – literally “villager tiger cubs”) in the latter half of the 20th century – both of which were extreme-right-wing, ultra-royalist paramilitary organizations founded in the early 1970s to quell (and sometimes bomb) socialist protests and demonstrations against US military bases in Thailand, assassinate progressive politicians and activists, and, in the case of the latter organization, to spy on the general population. Both organizations played a key role in the Thammasat University massacre on 6 October 1976 (and the resulting “War on Communism”), which virtually eradicated any form of leftism from the country for almost half a century. While the Red Gaurs had been sponsored directly by the US government (which provided at least 250 million Baht – an unfathomable amount of money at the time – to help organize and equip the organization), the Village Scouts were funded by the royal family itself. Nobody was sure who exactly was funding the Rural Police, but a few conspiracies tying them to wealthy landowners and their vain attempts to restore “law and order” circulated in the years preceding the Fall.
Loved this!
I think you might have invented a new genre writing a future autobiography of yourself and place? Really curious what is real and fictional too, like cluster jackfruit and milk tree. Lots of educational ethnobotany info relevant to where I live in (Malaysia) too. Thanks for the enjoyable read!