by Ben Feder
eleven |
Nava was excited. She crouched in front of the computer, her hair still wet from her nighttime shower. She clicked on the Skype icon to open it and found the username for her classroom back in New York. Her teacher picked up on the third ring. She reminded the class where Nava was living and showed them where Indonesia was on the map. “Tell us what it’s like, Nava.”
“Good,” Nava said, suddenly tongue-tied. She gave a few more monosyllabic answers, then her teacher turned to the class.
“Does anyone have any questions for Nava?” Silence. None of the kids knew how to communicate with Nava in this way. “I’m sure someone must have a question.”
One brave child broke through the awkwardness. “What’s the food like?”
Nava came to life. “Terrible! But there’s this one place, Taco Casa, that has the best burritos in the world, and they deliver. And don’t come here if you like pizza. It’s much better in New York.”
She took two more questions, and their short time was up. The whole episode lasted only fifteen minutes, but Nava lit up at the sight of familiar faces. By the time we got her to bed, I sensed her sadness return. “We can do that again if you like,” Victoria said. Then she kissed Nava good night, pulled the mosquito netting around her bed, and turned off the lights.
The next day, an email arrived from Pak Andy, one of Sam’s teachers. He called an urgent meeting of ninth- and tenth-grade parents to “address issues regarding weekend activities of some of our students.”
That Wednesday, the parents and Andy gathered in the fourth-grade classroom as the sun set. Andy was about my age or perhaps a bit younger, and his hair was beginning to gray. That evening he wore his trademark batik shirt that fitted loosely around his slight build. Andy was a serious and committed educator who cared deeply about kids. I paid attention when he spoke.
Andy opened the meeting. “Some of our students have been reported in town drinking with some of the local kids. We’ve had problems with alcohol, especially homemade arrak, which often is laced with non-food-grade alcohol. Worse than that, we’ve heard reports of marijuana use.”
He took on an ominous tone. “No kidding around, folks. You’re not back in Europe, Australia, or the States. In this country, there’s a death penalty for drug violations. The police don’t need a search warrant. They can simply knock on the door, enter, and arrest your child. They’ve busted parties where only a single kid was smoking marijuana, but they arrested everyone in the house.”
We’d thought there was no cause for concern for our own kids. We had good kids. Then again, how many parents were shocked when they found out their little angels were up to no good? Andy had planted the seed of doubt, and it scared me.
Our friend Luli offered a poignant perspective on the matter. She was a slight, energetic, thirtysomething British woman; a former editor of Tatler magazine in London; the wife of a local furniture entrepreneur; and the mother of three children, one of whom was attending Green School. In an alternate life, she could easily have been flashing credit cards in the shops on Kensington High Street. Instead, she followed her husband, Charles, to the far reaches of the developing world in search of exotic woods to convert into furniture and sell to major hotel chains. “Charles saved me from a boring London life.” Asked for her favorite place in the world to live, Luli said, “I try to be present wherever I am.”
Luli was also a deeply religious Christian. She and Victoria connected tightly. They both were committed to their respective religions, enjoyed the outdoors, and shared a passion for education. Driven at least partly by her religious beliefs, Luli often visited Bali’s prison to offer friendship, support, and food to the inmates, particularly to the members of the Bali Nine, a group of Australians arrested for planning to smuggle heroin from Indonesia to Australia. Luli believed that at the time of their arrest, they were young and stupid and had made a terrible mistake. Now they were paying for it, potentially with their lives. They were on death row, appealing their sentences.
The prison was located in Kerobokan, a dilapidated area in the south, where rice fields had long ago been paved over. Unadorned, ominous, and wrapped in barbed wire, its walls had blocked the natural flow of traffic and forced vehicles to navigate around its massive girth. The rectangular structure now stood at the center of a traffic circle, a formidable reminder of the authority and power of the institution behind the building.
When Luli visited, she brought food and her young children with her, offering sustenance, companionship, and a semblance of family to these tragically anxious young men and one woman. She inserted herself into and was involved in their lives almost from the day they were arrested. She visited them weekly, cared for them, and prayed for them.
In a matter-of-fact manner, Luli described to us their life in prison, the hours she would spend in the sweltering, still air, first in the waiting area outside and then in the tiny visitors’ courtyard, where only a small patch of blue sky was visible.
The combination of Luli’s stories of life inside Kerobokan Prison and Pak Andy’s meeting at Green School was enough to put the fear of God in me. We had heard that if a kid was busted for drugs by the police, there was an unspoken rule in Bali: the family had twenty-four hours to pay a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bribe, in cash, then pack their belongings and leave the country. With every passing day, the fee went up by another twenty-five thousand dollars. By the time a week had passed, the file would have moved into the Indonesian police system and out of the hands of the local cops.
I walked out of that meeting considering calling it quits. Sabbaticals were nice so far as they went, but I was unwilling to put my family at this kind of risk. Victoria talked me down from the ledge, assuring me that Sam, due to who he was and because he was rarely on his own or away from our family, was not in jeopardy.
That night I went to speak to Sam. “I know this isn’t about you,” I said. “I know you don’t do drugs, and I trust you. But I need to remind you of what the pilot said on our flight from Singapore. The penalty in this country for drug violations is death. So if you find yourself in a room with somebody doing any drugs at all, you pick up and leave. Call me anytime, I’ll come get you.”
He looked at me blankly. “Just so you know, Daddy, I know that marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs are illegal here, but it just so happens that magic mushrooms are not. They blend them into milkshakes, and I know exactly where they’re sold, at a place right in the center of town.” I was shocked in the way parents are shocked when they should not be, when teenagers behave like teenagers. Sam’s words reminded me that he was aging past his innocent childhood. “But I don’t do any of these things, and I don’t plan to. Don’t worry about it.”
I knew enough about teenagers to do the opposite when they say, “Don’t worry.”
twelve |
I thought about what to pack for the bike trip to Java. The wet season in Bali had ended. The change was not abrupt, but I noticed fewer tropical downpours. Now quiet overcast skies gave way only to mild showers that lasted about an hour. I included some light raingear in my bag, just in case.
Before I set out, I sat next to Nava, who was reading on the couch, as she did most mornings before breakfast. “What was it I heard you saying to Oliver the other day about Green School?” I asked. I knew Oliver had asked her to tell him something she liked about Bali.
“No walls and no doors,” she said. “Everything is open. Like being in the wilderness. I take a deep breath so I can have fresh air even inside the classroom.”
I knew what she meant. Green School’s buildings were veritable cathedrals made of bamboo, soaring from the jungle floor. Even the nails that held the wood together were bamboo. Three large, connected spiral structures, with round roofs thatched in local alang-alang grass, formed the center of the campus. The natural world that was core to the school’s educational mission was literally all around and could be felt, seen, and heard.
I gave Nava a kiss on her forehead.
“You know I’m going to Java for a few days, right?” She nodded, eager to get back to her book. “I’ll see you when I get back, okay?” She pecked me on the cheek and returned to her reading.
In the morning, I pedaled up to Green School, where John Hardy and the rest of the group waited in the parking lot. There were a dozen of us in all, mostly but not entirely Green School parents. Jon Ross made sure we didn’t mill about for too long. We left on time at eight thirty to meet our guides in Bedugul, a mountain lake area in the center of the island about an hour away. John had arranged for our bikes to be transported ahead of us. Van support in Java would take our gear from one location to the next so that we wouldn’t have to carry the extra weight on our bikes.
When we arrived in Bedugul, we quickly unloaded the bikes, filled our CamelBaks with water and our tires with air, and applied sunscreen. I knew it was time to go when Pak Andy’s wife, Michelle, plugged in her earbuds and cranked up the music. Once jacked in, she would want to move her legs. Peter clipped a GoPro camera onto his helmet. “Movin’ out!”
Jon took the lead. The route was a mountain road that started out easy. The main challenge was dodging opposing traffic that pulled into our lane to pass. About five kilometers in, we turned off the road onto a dirt track. The trail was so thick with underbrush that I often lost sight of the ochre earthen path. My tires crushed a thick carpet of dense flora as they rolled over.
A slight rain developed, and the single track became slippery with mud just as we hit a challenging segment. Off to one side, a deep ravine with no protective barrier opened to a valley floor below; on the other side was a mountain wall, thick with mud and brush roots. The soil in the mountain that day was so heavy with rainwater that it spouted spontaneously from the walled earth as if from a leaky bladder.
The path developed dips, some of them abrupt and deep. The only way to navigate the hollows was either to stop and walk the bike across or to use forward momentum and a little hop to jump over. Jon, one of the most experienced and skilled riders in our group, taught me that little maneuver. But as he turned a corner, he lost his balance. He instinctively unclipped his right foot from the pedal to touch the ground and set himself upright. But there was no footing. Instead of earth, there was only air. In a blink, he separated from his bike and sailed into the ravine below. He just disappeared.
Peter saw it happen and was stunned in disbelief. He dismounted and ran over to where Jon’s bike lay. He called down below, “You all right? You okay, bud?” He picked up Jon’s bike. There was no response to Peter’s call.
Then a rustling crackled about fifty meters below. “I’m okay!” Jon clambered up the side of the ravine to the trail. Fortunately for him, a small tree had broken his fall. He suffered only minor scrapes. He maintained his British decorum. “I guess I caught a little bit of air there. Luckily, not too much.” And then, “My heart is going kaboom.” Following the advice given to anyone thrown from a horse, he got back in the saddle and carried on.
As we pressed forward, the path got even narrower. Up ahead, a river raged with fresh rainwater. The group stopped at its edge. The only way across was a makeshift bridge slapped together with bamboo slats that had rotted and become uneven with time. Michelle was nervous about going across, but there was no other way. She gritted her teeth and began to cycle, careful to look neither right nor left. The slats clattered as she rode over them. The loose frame of the bridge swayed. It took less than a minute to get across, but once there, she said, “I don’t really want to do that again.”
For me, these episodes were a reminder that there were so few protections and so many careless ways to fall ill or get injured in this part of the world—rabies from the dogs, dengue fever from mosquitos, car accidents from poorly designed roads. The list went on and on.
By afternoon, we rolled up sopping wet at the port of Gilimanuk, just in time to catch the ferry to Java, where support vans were waiting to take us to our hotel at the bottom of the Ijen volcano. By the time we arrived at the hotel, it was already getting dark. We grabbed our bags and a quick shower before settling in for dinner and a beer.
I sat next to Peter. We rehashed the day’s adventures. Then he confided that he was up against a deadline. His sabbatical leave from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was coming to an end, and he had to decide whether to return to his job or call it quits and start something new. It was not an easy decision, but the conversation was common among expats living in Bali. Many thought about using a break as an off-ramp from one career path to the next. Peter and I batted around pros and cons. It was clear to me by the way he spoke that he wasn’t going back to Canadian winters anytime soon.
I hadn’t yet arrived at the crossroads of a decision like Peter’s, but I knew it was coming.
Jon interrupted the dinner conversation. “Tomorrow’s a big day, guys. We’re going up Ijen. It’s a tough ride, so get some sleep. We’ll meet at the front of the hotel, bags packed, ready to hit the road at eight thirty.”
I woke early the next morning and walked out my door onto the hotel’s lawn. First light fell softly. Off in the distance, emerald-green rice terraces stepped slowly upward. Palm trees punctuated the wide landscape, and brief glints of sunlight flashed from the water in the distant irrigation canals. Beyond the rice fields, Mount Ijen rose majestically to tower over the entire scene. It sloped so evenly and beautifully into a symmetrical cone that it reminded me of the parabolic curve that Sam studied in high school math. The sense of beauty and wonder ceded to trepidation; I would be ascending to the top of the volcano that day.
I sat in a lawn chair for about twenty minutes and watched the light brighten, losing its early golden hue. Then I walked to the dining room and piled eggs and rice onto my plate. I ate hungrily in anticipation of the day’s ride and then returned to my room to pack my bags.
Michelle was the first to be ready to leave. The others primped and milled about in the hotel’s parking lot. Michelle filled her CamelBak with fresh water for the day and slung it over her back, then rode in tight circles waiting for everyone else to gather. It took a good twenty minutes to get our group together before John led us out in the direction of the massive volcano.
Michelle plugged in her earbuds. Music helped her get more power out of her legs. We passed through some villages and made our way up a slow incline. The initial riding was easy, but as the grade steepened, my breath shortened.
As we progressed up the slope of the dormant volcano, it dawned on me what a classically cone-shaped volcano would mean to a mountain biker. The slope would pitch ever steeper as it approached verticality. An hour into the ride, as we started to climb sharply, I downshifted to keep my cadence but quickly fell behind as Michelle pulled away. The ascent got even steeper, and I downshifted again. Soon, I lost sight of Michelle and was separated from everyone in my pack of riders. I pushed on, but it was slow going. As I continued to climb, the weather deteriorated. Fog settled in and blocked sunlight. I felt the mist on my face. The temperature dropped with the increased altitude. I could see my breath, something I hadn’t experienced since the wintry day we left New York.
The road became even steeper and more broken. Asphalt gave way to a rough dirt road, which quickly dwindled to a bumpy path riddled with stones the size of footballs. The mist turned to steady rain. I pulled out the rain jacket I’d shoved into my CamelBak.
I continued to grind my way up the hill, painfully and slowly. I searched for another gear but there were none lower than the one I was in. I cursed my bike. I wanted the chain to move more smoothly through the gears, the wheels to grip the terrain, and the crank set to better translate the energy from my muscles to the drivetrain. The more I suffered, the more I wanted. But the bike wasn’t responding to me. I cursed it again for not having more gears just as I cursed the trail for its relentlessly increasing pitch and for getting between the summit and me.
The road was now a broken path of boulders shouldered against one another. It was not really a r
oad at all. I couldn’t crank out another rotation, and my bike came to a stop. I tried to hop off quickly to catch my balance but couldn’t unclip my shoes from my pedals fast enough and fell right over. Pain shot through my right shoulder as it hit a boulder. I picked up that damn bike and walked alongside it for a bit. Then to adjust for the slope, I pushed it from behind. I walked for about half a kilometer that way before I lifted the bike and balanced the frame on one shoulder. When I tired of that method, I hinged forward and lugged it on my back as if I were carrying a sack of stones.
One hour later, I reached a clearing. I had finally arrived at Paltuding Valley, an open area that served as the base station of a mining operation and featured a small warung offering coffee, snacks, and a little fire for warmth. All in all, the ride had taken five hours to climb just fourteen miles and a vertical ascent of eighteen hundred meters. John, nearly fifteen years my senior, had arrived a full thirty minutes ahead of me. He sat with the others, drinking coffee and waiting for the group to gather. I was utterly spent, exhausted by the punishing climb.
John pointed. “Look up. Behind you.” Through breaks in the cloud cover, I could see that the valley was not the summit. The volcano’s caldera was straight up, kilometers ahead. And there was no way to get there by bike. The only way was on foot, and the terrain was rocky and slippery.
Most of the group were there for the cycling and had little interest in hiking to the top, but Michelle and I did. Exhausted, hungry, and wet, we began to make the climb, leaving the rest of the group below.
