Connection and a Death

Yes, I do get lonely sometimes.

It makes sense. In Vietnam I am often the only foreigner in the hotels I stay at, and I spend many hours on my motorcycle moving between them. Conversations are mostly with Vietnamese with the same level of English as my Vietnamese, or with much younger travelers breathlessly telling me all about themselves.

When I’m on top of my meditation (which is less and less the further I get from my extended retreats in Myanmar), I automatically look at emotions like loneliness as mere mind states. If you’re around me and hear me say the word “Blip,” that’s because I’ve noticed a mind state, and I’m noting it.

In Myanmar I was always eating breakfast and lunch with dharma friends and engaging in intense discussions about things like blips. In my Bangkok guest house it was a crap shoot, sometimes I’d luck out and meet someone who had something to teach me if I listened closely, other times I could only think of the Grateful Dead lyric, “Please don’t dominate the rap, Jack, if you got nothing new to say.”

About three weeks into my Vietnam journey I headed toward Ba Be National Park, in the north-central part. I found www.babenationalpark.com.vn, which connected me with Mr. Linh, who runs a homestay inside the park. He’s a hustler in the positive sense of the word, making the effort to learn English and paying for a nice-looking website. He runs group tours, and when he invited me for a two-night, one-day tour of the park with eight others who were driving up from Hanoi, I figured it was a chance to take a little edge off of my isolation.

Here’s three pics. Although it's a national park, they've decided to let the villagers who have lived there for many centuries keep their homesteads and fields. They're also allowed to catch lake fish for sale.

  

You can go here to see more professional images. Prepare to be gobsmacked.

I was first to arrive, in the early afternoon, and I spent about an hour chatting with Mr. Linh, his wife, and his four-year-old son. A wonderful hour spent with a happy family. The homestay was pretty rudimentary, but it’s all about location, location, location, right? I was in a park that is on par with Yosemite and the North Cascades.

My tour-mates showed up while I was exploring a nearby cave. Three French, one Dutch and his Romanian girlfriend, a Sicilian living in the U.K., and two Vietnamese. I hit it off with Yves, a 70-year-old Frenchman who could, and did, talk about any and all subjects that came up. By the end of the following day, the rest of us were taking turns giving each other breaks from his cheerful, informative, and sometimes overbearing monologues.

The next day we spent seven hours getting in and out of a boat to do brief walks through villages or caves, and ended the day with a short but very steep hike to what the U.S. Forest Service used to call a “scenic climax.” We went back to the homestay, showered and ate, and segregated ourselves into three groups: the foreign tourists drinking beer and tea around one table, a group of Vietnamese men feasting and getting loaded on rice wine at another, and the Vietnamese women gossiping, taking care of the kids, and generally doing whatever needed to be done.

It was a peaceful tableau destroyed in the time it takes for two small motorcycles to slam head-on into each other.

All I saw out of the corner of my eye was a young man zipping by, emerging from the darkness on one side of the homestay and disappearing into the darkness on the other. He was going too fast, but that’s just part of the Vietnam scenery, so it didn’t seem exceptional to anyone. A second later there was that repulsive sound of two objects crashing head-on. Not the heavy-metal crunching sound of two cars, but the crackling sound of cheap plastic parts disintegrating from the impact.

Everyone ran toward the accident, we foreigners keeping our distance, not being in a position to do anything but add to the confusion. In the slivers of illumination from flashlights I could see the motionless form of the young man who had sped by, and my only thought was, “He’s gone.”

Along the side of the road there was a frantic search for the other motorcyclist, who had flown off into the trees along the side of the road. The wails of the searchers told me that they knew the victim. It was Mr. Linh’s wife, dying no more than 50 yards from her home, where her son was playing with a friend. If she was in her 30s, it was just barely.

Inconsolable, Mr. Linh picked her up and carried her toward the road, screaming for someone to get the van that the foreign tourists had ridden from Hanoi. Blood was streaming from her external injuries and mouth. From the brief glimpses I got, she likely died immediately from massive head trauma, hitting a tree or one of the two-foot concrete pylons that you see next to most highways in Vietnam. She was not wearing a helmet.

Perhaps acknowledging that she was already dead, the van driver was slow in arriving, first recruiting other men to move the half-dozen motorcycles blocking his parking spot, and letting the engine run for a minute before putting it into gear. A screaming Mr. Linh placed the body in the van and they drove off. Several older women from the neighborhood wailed and collapsed in grief. When I gazed back at the male motorcyclist, he was standing under his own power.

People wandered back to the homestay, where they rehashed the facts as they perceived them, with Yves dominating bilingually. After a while I went to my room and did what I currently believe is the best thing to do in these situations: a Buddhist practice called powha, which ends with the line, “And through the power of her death, may she benefit all sentient beings, living or dead.”

If there was any grief in the minds of the Vietnamese in the neighborhood the next day, they sure hid it well. I heard a surprising amount of laughter. The foreigners, though sober about the previous night’s event, were also in a good mood while saying our goodbyes.

  

They left in their van, which made me the only Westerner still in the homestay. Mr. Linh’s father, a bit older than I, took me by the arm and invited me for some tea. We tried to converse. I watched as he took one hand and ran it up and down along his arm, and then touched his head, and then touched his heart while he talked. It’s hard enough to say something meaningful in your own language in such situations. I said something about rebirth and the feeling I got from spending an hour with his daughter-in-law, while touching my own heart. Then we sat quietly.

Leaving Ba Be, I remembered what an old Tibetan Lama once advised a group of Western students to do every evening before sleep: if you have a water cup, turn it upside down by your bedside. And put out the fire, there’s no need to waste the wood in case you don’t wake up. You just don’t know.