Turning Point

Today's blog entry--while extremely long--covers the remainder of the third day at Maesa Elephant Camp (you can read about the first day here, the second day here, and half of the third day here). It is also--drumroll please--the beginning of the memoir that I am writing about my two years in Asia. Or at least as much of the beginning as I feel like sharing at this point.

Now, mind you, I will most likely never do anything with this memoir. I am writing it for my own purposes at the moment. This blog contains some facets of the story, my pen and paper journal contains some, and my photo album/scrapbooks contain others. The memoir is a way to draw everything together so that, forgetful as I am, I do not forget the lessons and experiences of my life here. And it's a way to insert these two years into the greater context of my life, instead of simply chronicling individual moments, memories, and experiences. It is my hope to weave a greater tapestry of it all.

So here is the beginning. It is EXTREMELY rough and unedited, as the revising and editing will come much later in the writing process.



I’m sitting on an elephant’s head, and the hairs on the back of my neck begin to rise, accompanied by a sparking shower of tingles up and down my spine, like a snake awakening and preparing to strike. The jungle is suddenly and inexplicably quiet, save for the squishing of multiple sets of footprints negotiating the impossibly deep mud. One set belongs to Wanpen, the elephant (whom I have come to know as “my elephant”); one set belongs to Chi, my guide at the elephant camp outside of Chaing Mai, Thailand, where I have come for a three-day mahout (or "elephant keeper") training course; and one set belongs to Vichien, Wanpen’s actual mahout. Wanpen is harrumphing along methodically under me, shaking her head with each step in protest. She hates the mud, and I don’t blame her. The mud in this section of jungle is an organic entity, swallowing and spitting up the feet of brave pedestrians with gurgling, slurping sounds. Its top layer is slick with what I imagine from my vantage point to be digestive juices. I peer down at my bare feet, which are dangling right below Wanpen’s ears and getting tickled by her breath as her trunk swings back and forth, and I feel fortunate for their distance from the mud. I had, in fact, badly injured my right foot the day before, and I could feel it filling with blood and fluids, and throbbing in dull exclamations. In a daredevil moment—which had recently become a new and strange norm for me—I decided to attempt the advanced dismount: Sliding back onto Wanpen’s hind end and swinging one leg over so that I was sitting sideways on her spine, her vertebrae holding my tailbone in place like a tinker toy. Wanpen then raised her hind leg, I stepped onto the remarkably stable ledge that she had created out of a bent knee, and then stepped down to the ground. Except I grossly misjudged the distance between leg and ground, and wound up flailing through the air before falling painfully (and sans grace) onto the ball of my foot, which responded with a loud POP. It still hurt unbearably the next day, but nothing was going to keep me from giving Wanpen one last bath and taking her for one last trek.
My heart starts fluttering in my chest. Not pounding, as pounding would have been a comfort in that moment. It would have been a feeling of substance, of something REAL and tangible to feel the weight of my heart against the butterfly spread of my ribcage. The fluttering, however, irritated my stomach, and heralded a nervousness of a more primal nature.
I found myself melting into Wanpen, dissolving into soft folds of her skin that had not yet been hardened by age or turned pink by the sun. All of her was a perfect, perfect gray, and with each step I found myself merging with it, my joints and bones stretching to accommodate the massive elastic strides of her movement. The more I felt myself merging with her, the more urgent the fluttering in my chest became. Wanpen kept turning her huge head from side to side, being sure to secure my leg against her neck with a giant, leathery flap of her ear as she did so. Her trunk arched in the air in front of us like an awkward periscope, exhaling brief snorts of air.
I thought about opening my mouth to say something. To suggest that we turn back, that the sun was starting to droop in the sky, that I had to catch my ride back to Chiang Mai soon and wanted to be sure to shower first. But I had become so merged with my elephant that I had no ability to speak--only to soak in my surroundings. I saw the strange geometry of leaves making flirtatious etchings in the air. I saw the uprooted trees resting comfortably against their still growing counterparts, whose very roots and trunks arched under the weight of their fallen comrades. The jungle was emotional and energetic and all connected. I breathed it in deeply, even as a malignant sense of dread coiled and uncoiled itself at the base of my spine.
And then, from around the corner came two bright, white slices of tusk. A gigantic male elephant was taking a pleasantly plump older couple for a relaxing jungle trek. I had never seen tusks that size. They practically devoured the earth as the elephant walked.
Something strange was happening, but it wasn’t quite registering. I could hear Vichien yelling “How! How!” in an urgent voice. How. I mentally leafed through my mahout command book. “How” meant stop. Stop? I saw Vichien lunge for Wanpen’s ear, but the mud had closed its muscular throat around his ankles. I saw him topple near Wanpen’s front leg about a second before she took off running.
The former equestrian in me, the one that had endured many episodes of spooked horses running away with me, automatically sat straight up as my hands instinctively reached for reins and my feet reached for stirrups. Instead, all I had to hold onto were two ears that were waving fearfully, like flags in a storm, and Wanpen’s awkward and surprisingly slow gallop was threatening to unseat me with each step.
She slowed to a trot and I heard a deep and frightening growl. It was so strangely aggressive and gravelly that I thought there must have been a tiger chasing us. Somehow a story that my friend Nadia had told me about a family that was killed on an elephant trek in Nepal when a tiger chased and attacked the little group had time to unfold in my head. I had no idea whether or not to tell Wanpen to stop or go, so I chose to curl up into a ball instead. In another second it registered that the growling noise was coming from deep inside the baby chasm of a frightened Wanpen’s stomach.
She stopped trotting, and I knew what was coming next. She had communicated it to me in a millisecond—the deep guts of her instincts connecting with mine—and I braced myself. With an earth-shattering shake of her head, we parted ways. I fell for what seemed like many minutes as the former equestrian within me shouted directions in her freshly pressed hunt coat: Turn your body so that you land on your side! Keep your right foot elevated so that it doesn’t hit the ground! And, for the love of god, don’t forget to roll!!
As I fell I heard a piercing and unpleasant sound, and I realized that it was my voice, locked in a deep and trembling scream. I hit the mud with a comical squish and rolled. I did a mental scan from my head to my toes and back again. I was completely fine. Chi threw his body on top of mine, as I had not landed far from Wanpen’s frantically stomping front feet. Wanpen and I locked eyes for a moment, I gave her a nod of my head, and with that, she was off, trotting for home, her lower jaw swinging in nervous circles, her ears wringing like fretting hands.
I brought my attention to the frightened and bewildered eyes around me—in particular the poor couple who had witnessed my fall and heard my screaming, and judging by their pale and breathless appearance, the experience had been far more traumatic for them than for me. I tried to imagine what I had looked like to them—like a Barbie doll being shot out of a lawnmower—and I scanned the faces of Chi and Vichien, who were afraid to say anything or even touch me, lest I fall apart right there.
In the great scheme of what my life had been over the last year and eight months, it made perfect sense that I should fall off of an elephant. It made perfect sense that I should be the first visitor EVER in the history of the camp to not only sustain an injury, but to also fall off of an elephant. It made perfect sense that this experience that I had been waiting for my entire life should take these rather adventurous, if scary and painful, detours.

And it was the most hilarious moment of my life.

I stood up, waved to the couple, shouted “I’m fine,” (to which they responded with an audible exhalation), and the hysterical, overpowering laughter came rushing out of me. It was more than my muscles could handle and I found myself doubled over, heaving, completely unable to catch my breath. And the laughter spread to Vichien as he took off after Wanpen. Chi looked at me quizzically, as he was fairly certain I had sustained a head injury, and repeatedly asked me if I was okay. The laughter just kept coming in strong, swift waves, and the tears blurred the whole world around me. Only when my abdominal muscles could no longer sustain the laughter was I able to find my voice again and tell Chi that I was, in fact, just fine.
We were stuck on a very high, very muddy hill, and my foot was still too injured from the day before for me to walk down it, so Chi had to lift me onto his back, just as he had the day before when I had first injured myself. Correction—THIS was the most hilarious moment of my life. Here I was, riding down the hill on the back of my guide because I had been unceremoniously jettisoned from the head of my elephant, and I was too gimpy from falling off of my elephant’s hind leg the day before to walk on my own. Chi could hardly keep his balance with the combined forces of the mud and my still bubbling laughter, and we fell several times, which made me almost panicked because the laughter became utterly breathless in those moments.
We looked like earthy Pollock paintings when we reached the bottom of the hill. Chi deposited me on the porch of a mahout hut and informed me that he would send for a motorbike, as we were still quite a ways from the central area of camp where my (rather upscale) mahout hut was located.
“No!” I said, wiping my eyes with my dirty sleeve and smearing mud all over my face, “No! I want to ride Wanpen back to camp!” At this point, a small crowd had gathered, as the tale of my fall had spread through the camp, which was a déjà vu moment from the day before, as the entire camp had held a vigil at the foot of my bed, icing and massaging my injured foot and helping me to the bathroom. Everyone looked at each other, certain that they had not heard me correctly.
“No, no,” said Chi, “we get you a motorbike. Is better.”
“No! No, I want to ride Wanpen back to camp. I don’t want my last memory of this experience to be falling off of an elephant. I want to get back on.”
Chi finally agreed to send for another elephant (he thought that Wanpen and I seemed to be a bad luck pairing), and I just sat there, laughing while everyone stared. I kept laughing while I rode the new elephant back to camp, and was laughing still when a parade of mahouts escorted me out of the camp and into a car bound for the hospital. The mahouts brought me sweets—delicious rice candies and pyramids of a gelatinous, banana flavored delicacy wrapped in banana leaves—and joked that they should stamp the certificate that I had received for completing the camp with a “real mahout” seal. I felt like a wounded war hero--I don’t think I had ever been glazed with so many respectful glances at one time. I had earned some wicked street cred among the mahouts. They all wai-ed deeply to me as I drove away, steepling their fingers together and bowing their heads.
My foot was fine—just badly sprained—and Chi pushed me all through the hospital on a wheelchair as I went for X-Rays and examinations, bringing me water and ice for my foot, and apologizing constantly.
“I knew this would happen,” he said, “I had a dream last night that a guest fell into the river and I couldn’t help because my legs were stuck. I was very scared all day. And then this.”
There is no underestimating the importance of dreams here. Dreams are prophetic, dreams have messages. While I had always paid attention to my dreams, they took on a new level of significance since living in Thailand. I looked at Chi, saw the worry in his eyes, and I knew that he felt responsible for either ignoring the message in his dream, or for somehow dreaming it into existence. I put my hand over his.
“Mai pen rai,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. To be honest, this was the best experience of my entire life.”
And it was. That night, after Chi had dropped me off at my hotel in Chiang Mai and I was alone with my enormous foot and my buzzing thoughts, I realized that I had turned a corner. That every step I had taken had been precisely planned, had been expertly guided, had been following Technicolor signposts of situations and interactions and decisions that had brought me to this exact point: The day where I would become The Girl Who Fell Off of an Elephant, and it would be a defining beacon in my story. It would carve a dividing line in the topsy-turvy timeline of my life. There would be everything the happened BE—Before Elephant, and everything that happened AE—After Elephant. The Universe, or the Powers That Be, or whatever lexical packaging one prefers to use, will never give us more than we can handle. And, well, if I could handle falling off of an elephant, I could surely handle anything.

And while Falling Off of an Elephant was a turning point, it is neither the beginning nor ending of this story. The beginning of this story—the true beginning, the absolute fertile ground of this story’s germination—begins....[to be continued]