by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)
It is hard to understand how university educated people could evolve into the senseless butchers that were the cadre of the Khmer Rouge, and yet their reign has become just one more footnote in a long litany of genocide that is the history of man. Whatever the base reasons for a government slaughtering a quarter of its own population for a political agenda, it was the Buddhist monks who bore the brunt of the assault here in Cambodia.
Their modest education made them a threat to the powers that wanted to return the nation to a Stone-Age agrarian commune of illiterate peasants, and since they do not work in the traditional sense of the word, they were easily made into the national whipping boy, publicly declared useless and a drain on society to be removed. Under the Khmer Rouge, the saffron robes were turned red.
Pan sits next to me on the stone railing of the Angkor moat bridge, lightly as a butterfly, radiating peace. From under his robes he produces an old oil cloth to reveal a small, shiny bowl; his rice bowl as he calls it.
In a matter-of-fact voice he tells me it is the top of his brother’s skull, killed by the Khmer Rouge, and in true Buddhist fashion, he has kept it as a daily reminder of his own frailty and impermanence. After my initial shock, I decide it is a fitting prop to begin telling his tale. He stares at his dangling, sandaled feet, too short to reach the ground, as he speaks.
His story begins with the first night, when he was still a novice and lighting candles around the monastery when the door burst in and everyone was herded outdoors at gunpoint. Outside, in a huddled mass, the Abbott and all elders were singled out and summarily shot with a single bullet to the back of the head. By now, the attendant nuns were being stripped by the soldiers, intent on a long night of debauchery.
Next he tells me several monks were hung in the trees by their thumbs with small fires built underneath them, not enough to kill but just large enough to singe the skin. One of the nuns, now hysterical, was stripped, held down, and a monk was made to kneel between her knees. A pistol was put to his head, and he was ordered to copulate with her in front of all present. When he refused, a single shot rang out to the applause and cheers of the “soldiers” and another monk was brought forward. According to Pan, this went on for quite a while, until several monks had done the deed while several more had died in refusal. The fate of the nun was left unspoken
I search his face at this point for some sign, some emotional reaction, but see only tranquility. He has removed himself from this physical world and now occupies a separate reality. His roadmap face is a spider web of creases but his eyes burn bright. I pray his religious advancement had brought him true peace and that he is not simply numb in relating such unspeakable events. He returns my stare with a slight smile and says, “Tell this story once so it might never be told a second time.”
There is no self-pity or regret in his voice. To him it is karma, and all that surrounds him now is Maya, an illusion to wander through until he reaches true enlightenment. The realization of his unshakable faith hits me like a fist, and at that moment I yearn to find that level of peace.
We begin to walk into the main courtyard of Angkor, and though surrounded by thousands of tourists, I hear only Pan as he continues in his soft voice.
He was sent to the countryside and made to rip up railroad tracks, brutally physical work under a blazing sun while enduring non-stop blows from the fists and whips of his overseers. Soon, slowly starving, and with only putrid river water to drink, he was near death, the final plan for him from the beginning. In the end, his will to live overcame his belief in karma as he crawled away one night, into the jungle, and there, lost all track of time.
He recalled his first morning of this illusionistic freedom, waking in the crook of a tree, sucking the dew from leaves to ease his parched tongue, covered with ant bites. Dropping to the ground, his weakened legs would barely support him as he made his way into the bush, surrendering to the most basic human instinct, survival.
He was not sure how long he stayed in the jungle, but once there he soon found others like himself, survivors, all with an unspeakable story, all wishing to live. Everyone had a talent, some could fish, others snared small animals; Pan knew a lot about medicinal plants and soon became a gypsy doctor, moving every few days, avoiding roads and villages, helping the more needy for a handful of rice, defying the odds at the bottom of the food chain.
One day, while foraging near a village he spotted a saffron robe and, not believing his eyes, knew he had to talk with this brother. The Khmer Rouge were gone, but the damage had been done. Pan listened to the monk’s litany of atrocities all day, but told me he fell asleep while doing so and the next morning, he woke up under a roof, on a cot, for the first time in months if not years.
When he revealed his identity, he was called to the capitol of Phnom Penh, where he was received as a revered elder and met a delegation of Theravada monks from Vietnam who had come to help re-establish the religion. Only then did he realize the extent of the genocide, the monasteries destroyed, the sacred texts burned, countless brother monks slaughtered, and for the only time in our conversations, I saw a single tear roll down his cheek.
Two subsequent visits with Pan were deliberately kept light-hearted and fun, and I learned that he loved shave ice and to laugh, but it is more of a sustained giggle than a laugh that spares no part of his face. His joy in all that surrounds him reminds me of a small child, and though I could not see it, I often felt his aura.
When I left, Pan was in great demand, traveling around to various monasteries, imparting the old ways, “The Teaching of the Elders,” to a new generation of monks who now use the internet, have cell phones and iPods, and ride motorbikes, but this does not seem to bother him in the least; how could it? Karma.
His goal has always been to spend his life in meditation, and I am sure that since our time together he has merged with the cosmos. I allow myself the fantasy to think he has been looking over my shoulder as I write this and knows that his story has been told, one more time, for the last time.
Today there are close to 60,000 Theravada monks throughout the country and almost 5,000 monasteries, all because men like Pan refused to give up their faith, and though he would laugh and shake his head at the thought, he is one who made a difference.
James Michael Dorsey is an explorer, award-winning author, artist, and photographer who has traveled extensively in forty-five countries. His principal interest is documenting remote cultures in Africa and Asia. He is a seven-time SOLAS category award winner for best travel writing from Travelers’ Tales and has written for Colliers, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, Natural History, Sea Kayaker, Perceptive Travel, Seattle Times, Orlando Sentinel, and the Chicago Tribune. His latest book is entitled Vanishing Tales from Ancient Trails. His photography is represented by the National Wildlife Federation, Shutterstock, and Camerapix International. He is a Fellow of the Explorers Club and a former director of the Los Angeles Adventurer’s Club. www.Jamesdorsey.com
V. HANSMANN
Ohio House Tour
The simplest journeys are often the best.
Some people say the most splendid thing about a road trip to Ohio is the road trip from Ohio. I might have agreed; benighted Rust Belt, flyover, swing state that it is. But follow this simple itinerary and you may come away with affection for Ohio. Spring is a good time to travel.
I had signed up for a nonfiction conference at a small university in a small university town in the middle of Ohio. The keynote speaker, Scott Russell Sanders, was someone whose work I respected, who had written a wrenching essay I could not get out of my head. Once I decided to drive, I started examining the road atlas for possible routes. There is no getting around Pennsylvania if you want to drive to Ohio from New York City. Two basic corridors exist—Interstate 80 to the north and the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the south. Driving the full distance would be more than a day’s work: so, to break up the trip, where to stop? What’s beyond Harrisburg?
Fallingwater.
I could visit Fallingwater—Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece that sits astride a stream in a tiny western Pennsylvania town. I have been an architecture nerd since a college survey course, and I believe no structure, big or small, exerts such exquisite tension on its setting as Fallingwater. So I went.
I dropped my things at a B&B nearby, then found some startlingly good sushi, and ultimately wound up at the multiplex in time to be disappointed by Star Trek Into Darkness. Early the next morning I wound through hollows pillowed with ground fog to the invisible town of Mill Run, Pennsylvania.
Wright built Fallingwater as a weekend home for department store magnates from Pittsburgh. They gave him free rein, and what they got was a glory, a stack of cantilevered terraces that stunningly recapitulates the waterfall below. The rugged watercourse adds music to the breathtaking geometries, while the yellow-green leaves of spring cast a dazzling play of light. It feels like there is a breeze. The terraces levitate, suspended from a supple column of stone and glass by good fortune alone. The boundaries of inside and outside dissolve. Somehow, gravity doesn’t operate. Within, the sensation is almost Cubist in that sights and sounds and smells and textures shift and overlap in a wondrous, kaleidoscopic way. Instantly, I knew I could live here, not intellectually or from vanity, but the house could effortlessly fit into my life and my life into it. Setting foot in Fallingwater fulfilled an ageless daydream. I will forever know it in all four dimensions.
Abuzz with satisfaction, I pushed on to Ashland, Ohio, site of the conference. Tedious interstate unspooled before me as I scanned my efficient directions. Ashland lay between Columbus and Akron, and I imagined it as the Ohio equivalent of those moribund New England mill towns, a hodgepodge of seen-better-days, a hollowed-out downtown and weary streets of unhappy houses.
I picked up my room number and key and my sheets and towels. My dorm was a three-story, motel-style slab at a right angle to a busy intersection. The rest of the university sprawled across the street, in a mid-twentieth-century industrial park sort of way. Lavish flowerbeds, generous swaths of color, softened the utilitarianism. Remarkably for a 125-year-old institution, no building predates World War II. What might the campus look like filled with undergrads? Corporate on a very casual Friday.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Ashland University was its rococo fetishizing of memorabilia. Every possible vertical surface was covered with framed and captioned photos, documents, posters, and tchotchkes, as well as trophies, beanies, balls, and plaques. Every corridor was a walk down somebody’s memory lane or a stumble down a gauntlet of arcana to an end so trivial that all you noticed were the bouffants and bell bottoms. One could not help but observe a dismaying partiality for magicians and Republicans. Astonishingly, Ash U has nurtured a fine nonfiction literary magazine called River Teeth.
Back in the wintertime, I had submitted my “manuscript,” a swiped-together selection of discontinuous personal essays, for an “assessment.” No one had seen the thing since its days as a master’s thesis. I discarded about 40 percent of it in favor of current writing. In addition to the many other stimulating aspects of a gathering of like-minded writers, the opportunity for someone of reputation to read my writing and proffer their opinion had me vibrating with apprehension. While I’m not shy about letting other people see my work, I sometimes play a very self-manipulative game with fantasy outcomes.
We sit at a picnic table in the quad in the afternoon sun. Kate, my reader, says I have a book here. She points out areas that need expansion and whole pieces that should be set aside. But I have a book, if I want. How about that.
The conference did not provide breakfast on departure day, so I tracked down some to-go coffee, gassed up the vehicle, consulted the next page of the directions, and pointed the car’s nose toward Kidron, Ohio. My friend Becca and her husband Michael had offered to show me around the Amish counties of eastern Ohio. She had grown up there on the family farm. Ohio is home to more Amish and Mennonite families than Pennsylvania. The highlight of the tour would be lunch with her grandma, Ruth Amstutz, who lives in the farmhouse built after the family emigrated from Switzerland in 1840.
I pulled into the yard on the dot of ten A.M. It was a damp, soft-focus morning, somewhere between overcast and foggy. From the looks of it, there didn’t seem to be anyone home. I double-checked the address. Despite a smidgen of doubt, I maintain a steadfast, manly faith in printed directions. I rang the bell. Becca answered. She stood in the doorway, always taller than I remember, her strawberry blond hair pulled back, and a big, sweet smile on her face.
She tilted her head just a bit to the left and said, “V.”
“Becca.”
We embraced.
Michael stood behind her and Grandma behind him. With a flurry of pleasantries, I was ushered into the fine old house, spotless and modest. Did I want lemonade or iced tea? Grandma Amstutz carried a pitcher of lemonade and four glasses onto the back porch, and we fumbled joyfully through small talk. The voluble dachshund seemed to like me.
After draining our glasses, we departed for a prelunch exploration of the rectilinear byways of the Ohio countryside. The infinite farmland was either still bare or covered with new green. Proud barns with acolyte silos lorded over congregations of dusty outbuildings and cast nets of white fence everywhere. In the fields, mighty horses pulled plows, and in the yards, wash hung limply on lines. The farm folk always waved as we passed by. Kids were dressed exactly as their parents. A man in overalls, navy blue long-sleeved shirt, and straight-brimmed straw hat walked beside the road holding the hand of a tiny, perfect version of himself.
They brought me to a rambling emporium called Lehman’s, which strived to meet all the simple requirements of the farm communities, while anticipating summer tourists’ insatiable need for stuff. The hokey practicality and impracticality of the abundance extended to fifty different types of hatchet, psychedelic displays of seed packets, stiff, tubular denim trousers in every imaginable size except for “fat,” and Amish romance novels.
I guess we had been working up an appetite. By the time we got back to the farm, Grandma Amstutz had laid out an epic lunch—a plump breast of chicken accompanied by egg noodles, mashed potatoes, stuffing, crescent rolls, and asparagus. And a mountainous apple pie and coffee. If I were heading back to the fields, I’d have energy to burn, but after such a painfully hearty lunch, I was predisposed to snooze. Michael and Becca had other plans for me, but first she beckoned, “Come to the springhouse, V.”
Behind and below the farmhouse sat the whitewashed springhouse, two stories, two rooms. Two, small, square windows in its wattle-and-daub walls flanked the thick door, which opened noiselessly. In the half light hung a rich, chill dampness. A long stone trough stretched against the back wall, filled with cold water of unearthly transparency. Opposite was a great fireplace with a heavy kettle suspended above the swept hearth. “Everything happened in the springhouse,” said Becca. “It was the center of existence.”
“I see,” I said, really seeing.
We stepped out into the now bright May air.
More hill-and-dale driving, in search of authentic Amish baskets. Becca knew of a gentleman who set out his excellent wares in the parking lot of Shisler’s Cheese House on weekends. We stopped by, got his address, and then lit out on a GPS adventure. A half hour later, we beheld a hand-painted sign, red baskets on a white section of corrugated metal nailed to a fence post. Abruptly, we turned left. I was in the back seat, my view compromised, as we bucked down a dirt road. A pair of curious sheep paced us from behind a fence. We stopped short of the house, and chickens ran across our bow. Again, no sign of human life.
I strode onto the porch and announced, with some self-conscious bravado, “Hello?” through the screen door. The interior of the farmhouse lay deep in shadow. No response. I turned to my friends with a shrug. Then, behind me, the screen door creaked.
“You woke me from my nap.”
“Oh, hello there. Your nap?”
“A
fter the noon meal. My nap.”
“We got your name from Shisler’s,” Becca said. “We’d like to see your baskets.”
“Baskets, yes. In the shed.”
He stepped off the porch, and we followed him quietly across the hardpack yard and through the Dutch door of a red, weathered building. In a corner, spilling off a workbench and piled underneath, every conceivable form of woven container—breadbaskets, wastepaper baskets, pie carriers with leather handles (one-, two-, and three-pie), baskets that fit baking dishes of all sizes, and hampers with and without lids. The sharp smell of linseed oil cut through the dusty gloom. The basket man grew increasingly animated as he displayed his handiwork, which was very handsome and not without some quirky flaws. Before we knew it, he had disassembled the great pile basket by basket, and I had selected four different ones for Christmas purposes. Well, three. The two-pie basket was for me.
The joy of beautiful, simple things, of found art, and of a peculiar, almost mystic, encounter way outside the bounds of my customary experience, made for a chesty exhilaration, a core happiness shared with friends. Back at the farmhouse, I stowed my finds in the trunk of the car and bid Becca and Michael good-bye. The music of Cleveland beckoned.
From the south, I arrived at Cleveland via a boxed-in interstate that gave way to a tumble of squat, banged-up industrial buildings. All of a sudden, a Mylar-shiny baseball stadium ballooned into view on the left. An afternoon game would be getting underway. A beefy crowd clotted at the crosswalk, then streamed across, more likely to aggravate a melanoma than see the Indians win. After driving just fifteen more blocks, I could see the lake and, Jesus, another stupendous stadium. Cleveland—city of light, city of magic. Thank God its streets were numbered.
The Hyatt Regency hotel had been retrofitted into and out of a grand nineteenth-century structure called The Arcade. In its original configuration, the five-story atrium was surrounded by lower floors of retail and, on the upper ones, offices. Now it was all hotel. The atrium ran the length of a city block beneath a glass canopy, so that the space flooded with soft, saturated light. Cast-metal gargoyles circled the fourth floor, leaning balefully into the vast space every twenty or thirty feet, each with a small incandescent bulb in its mouth. It’s a breathtaking interior. I was to meet my friend, Chet, there. He had driven up from Dayton to join me at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
