It seems though that through the tenant of acceptance I have found my salvation, just as the Eastern mystics promised, in the form of The Sleeper Train. I speak of the sleeper train the way people speak of something secret, something dark or beautiful or forbidden, in a whisper lest the crashing volume of normal utterance send the magnificent card castle tumbling down upon us. So if you have never experienced the glory that is the sleeper train, let me get you on board, so to speak.
Out of the sweltering midnight haze and heat you emerge, the shiny carriages of promise glistening in the stolen light of the station. The attendant greets you at the door, and you are granted your entrance to the kingdom. Inside, there are beds. Clean crisp sheets on bunk beds just like when you were a wide-eyed child. The air conditioners hum in chorus with the chiming of the air horn, cheering the gentle march onward into the night. As you creep towards slumber, the train rocks you gently, reminiscent of the distant familiarity of the movement you experienced whilst your mother was pregnant with you, the gentle to and fro that rocking chairs and swaying hammocks seek to emulate. As a sales pitch it seems rock solid, but there is more.
Any man who has been in reasonably tight jeans down an uneven road surface knows the feeling. It’s the ultimate union of man and machine. Embraced by my mistress, the train of the evening, caressed so carefully and purposefully I’m left guilty and embarrassed like a schoolboy fantasy spoken aloud, screaming out “Oh Special Express, what ways to soothe my tattered soul will you imagine next?” And if all that is too esoteric to garner understanding as to what I’m talking about, then I apologize in advance, I was taught not to kiss and tell.
Now follow in my pied-piper attempts to make the rest of my life this blissful, starting with Chiang Mai. I really do like Chiang Mai. Around the Old City there is a large stone wall and moat which forms the traffic structure for the commerce that it throbs with. It has a temple count to rival that of Bangkok, and being significantly smaller and slower in pace it is a tourist hotspot. It also has a popular University, so the city is a mish mash of monks and hipster youth. Chiang Mai: a pleasant blend of old customs and new customers.
We hired a scooter and went to one of the more popular temples atop the mountains overlooking the city. I met a lovely young Thai man and we spoke at length of meditation and our disciplines to still our minds, and he invited me to stay with him in a few weeks time at his humble home. It left me with sorrow for the loss of this hospitality in amidst our Western ideas of stranger danger. And even though I like to think of myself as open to the flow of life and relatively fearless, I cannot say that I did not picture staying at his house and awakening in the morning to a naked ice bath with a banging headache and one missing kidney. When I asked for his name I had to clarify, for I was pretty sure he said “Nob”. Nop and I laughed about it together, and even through his broken English I’m pretty sure he knew what it meant.
As well as a temple visit, it’s also hard to spend any amount of time in Chiang Mai without being bombarded with the possibility of elephant trekking. I hadn’t claim to formal introduction with any elephants in my short time on this earth, so to consider the ethical grounds for this sort of odd-couple union was difficult. Elephants are known to be quite moody animals, and in perspective I can’t imagine that you or I would enjoy being saddled and ridden around in the privacy of our own lounge-room, let alone publicly in the Thai jungle. But then again, I probably don’t know you that intimately to make an informed judgement.
We ended up choosing Baanchang elephant park as they are saddle-free and expend a lot of energy rescuing elephants from lives of hard labor. In Thailand, it is not uncommon for logging operations to use elephants to lift felled trees onto trucks, effectively commandeering them as flesh forklifts. Baanchang uses its resources gained from being a commercial tourism operation to purchase elephants off of the logging operators. Whether this is a band-aid solution that simply empowers the loggers with finance and incentive to replace sold elephants or not I cannot be sure of, but the elephants in the park seemed content and catered for, bordering on spoilt. As I threw piles of bananas and sugarcane straight into their gaping mouths, they rewarded me occasionally with that wonderfully cliché trumpet sound you’ve heard them do whilst watching David Attenborough. As if it was part of a script. Elephants are almost too amazing.
An elephant can consume as much as 300 kilos of organic matter in a day. It has skin two inches thick and can live for 85 years. They are the ultimate mobile compost factories of the forest, constantly devouring vast amounts of leaf matter into a more readily digestible form for plants to consume. Confident in its monumental and integral role in the forest ecosystem, it is no surprise that when I kicked it and told it to turn left, it just flapped its ears and released gas out its arse.
I stopped cold and peered deeply into the fallibility of the human condition. I realized that we dominate and subdue our natural surroundings not because of our inherited intelligence or strength, but because in the scheme of things we are weak. Humans are the white frilly ballet dancer dress of the natural world, molly-coddled into existence in equatorial environments so amazingly gentle and abundant that the improbability of us even existing is impossible for our tiny minds to grasp. It is no surprise governments spend untold amounts of money on “offensive” weapons and label it “defense”. Misconceiving our own grandeur, we see ourselves as bullied by nature, bullied by circumstance and bullied by each other. We are the snotty nosed Columbine High nerd kids seeking retribution, scrambling to dominate not because we believe our own power, but because we know intimately our inherent weakness.
And as I lay on my semi submerged elephant friends stomach in a comical embrace of differing orders of size, I caught her gaze and understood that we were not so different. Especially when she sent an incomprehensibly large fart bubbling into the watering hole we both occupied and smiled sheepishly, the same way I used to as a child sharing the bath with my brothers and sisters. My name is Ben Connor, and I am at one with the elephants.
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