Sliding (or bumping) down the shallow Ping River, the long tributary that joins the Chao Phya and flows through Bangkok, Steve Van Beek pondered his odyssey. Having begun in the river's headwaters near the Burmese border, he had paddled from the still-natural north into the polluted south, rested on his oars midstream and realized that "I was more interested in the journey than in the destination."
During his nearly two-month, 1,120-km journey from the Golden Triangle to the Gulf of Thailand, a distance a plane could have covered in an hour, the intrepid foreign boatman had ample time to consider the implications of his voyage.
He wanted, he knew, to travel like the early Thai river men, "slipping into the jungles or villages and eating local food," and he wanted to find out what happened to the river, for it is quite dead by the time it reaches Bangkok. But perhaps an even greater charm was the quixotic nature of the venture, its luxurious uselessness, and the tests that came with it.
True, he wanted to find out more about rivers in general. He was, after all, the published authority on this one ("The Chao Phya, River in Transition," Oxford, 1995), but there was more to it than that. Though rivers are often used as metaphors for life, flowing from birth to death, it is also true that a river's course, like that of even the best-planned life, is decreed by random events. Rivers follow where the land leads, "snakes slithering across the landscape without any purpose or destination."
Indeed, "within the confines of its banks, a river is a metaphor for a personality disorder. It wanders in a dozen directions at once, its uncertainty displayed in surface currents that run at angles to each other." It was to this that Van Beek wanted to entrust himself. Having lived so long in cities, having so intimately witnessed "Thailand's pell-mell, environment-be-damned race toward economic development," perhaps the personality disorder was the author's own. He wanted to rediscover the people he had known when he first went to live in Thailand in 1969.
This was no romantic urge, or at any rate not only that. It was also a need to test himself, to confront again the organic naturalness he had once known. He found it, to be sure, right where it ought to be -- in the Thai people themselves, and one of the many delights of this delightful book is in the encounters with all sorts of river folk.
In the north, people understood why Van Beek did not want to put a motor on his heavy and unwieldy rowboat, why he wanted to row. He met with common courtesy and was always put up and fed at the headman's house or the local temple. One of the reasons, perhaps, was the novelty of a Thai-speaking foreigner paddling alone on the river, but there was also the traditional ethic of hospitality.
These meetings with locals are invariably beautifully described, along with the musings they occasioned. "I often wondered whether, in lieu of air conditioning, rural Thais use fluorescent light to impart a frigid coolness to a home." And, alone in the dark on a hard floor, he sees that "this is what life was like before electricity."
As he proceeded south, not all of the encounters were so pleasant. Nearing Bangkok, rowing on the now polluted waters, he was menaced by those ubiquitous long-tail boats that not only emit terrible sounds but also cast high wakes. Almost scuppered, Van Beek loses his cool and picks up a rock, then stops.
"What was happening to me? Where was the culturally sensitive man who had started this journey? What was he doing threatening boatmen with rocks? A welter of emotions washed over me: anger with them for their selfishness, shame that as a rational man I had let them get to me."
So, noting that others in the river were paddling on, unperturbed by the waves, seeing that he was the only one objecting, he dropped the stone. "Better put the energy to something useful." And he began bailing.
This matter-of-fact but accurate tone distinguishes the writing, and the freshness of the observation often reaches a lyrical intensity: "I lay back to watch the thousands of stars orphaned by the sun's departure." And, "in the kite season -- still a month away -- a burning zephyr would puff paper wedges aloft to quilt the sky with color." Or, "further inland, a train lowed, another lonely traveler."
As with all successful voyages, the voyage itself was the point, and Van Beek knew that "what had begun as a journey about a river, became a journey about people," and that he was one of the people. "I was exhausted, and as battered and gouged as my boat."
He had become the river. "I had flowed along its life span, attending its birth at a rock face," then had seen it being despoiled "by people who no longer regarded it as vital to their lives but as an exploitable resource and a repository for their garbage. . . . Innocence, hope, maturity, depravity, decay and death. I didn't have to be Siddhartha to recognize that the same currents flowed through my own life."
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