Take Off Your Shoes

by Ben Feder

  Along the way, we passed young men, their cheeks a raging red, walking in single file down wet, slippery steps. Each carried two baskets connected by palm wood rods slung in balance over his shoulders. Each basket was filled with large yellow chunks of sulfur mined from vents in the surface of the mountain. The connecting rods strained and flexed as the men walked with a heavy, unstable gait. They looked tired, filthy, and hungry.

  “I heard about these guys,” Michelle said. “They get paid less than ten dollars a day to break their backs.” She was a nurse married to a teacher. Was this a pointed remark aimed at the businessman? More likely the vestigial guilt of the college socialist who, when he decided to go into business, wrote off such economic disparity as the way of the world.

  We walked on. The rain grew heavy. A steady patter of water bounced off the hood of my jacket. I clambered to the top, grabbing at rock outcroppings to lift and balance my body. It was cold, and my fingers stung from the freezing rain and abrasive rock. I couldn’t understand how the miners managed to carry their loads over this terrain. Some wore flip-flops or rubber boots, but no one had ankle support. The slope was steep and unrelenting. The path became rocky, and the forest gave way to rock-strewn terrain. I felt my breath quicken.

  “I’m only wearing flip-flops,” Michelle said. “How the hell am I going to get down?” We forged ahead.

  Finally, we reached the volcano’s edge. Puffs of white steam swirled with yellow sulfur to create a sepia haze that rose from the surface. Low clouds formed a lid over the terrain. Rain whipped across the jagged, fractured lava rock and pelted my face like birdshot. Steep slopes walled in the crater lake. The remains of a dead tree gripped the mountainside, a life cut short by the poisoned environment. Below, decades of rainwater had accumulated to create a placid body of water more than six hundred feet deep that reflected brilliant robin-egg blue. Its stillness stood opposed to the violence of the volcanic eruption that created it. The accumulated water in the caldera of Mount Ijen in Indonesia was the most acidic lake in the world, and the evaporating fumes were as toxic as the gas steaming through fissures in the rock beneath my feet.

  Soaking wet, I shifted my toes and felt the mud squelch in my mountain-bike shoes. My damp clothes clung to my shivering skin. An acrid stench arose from below, the musty rotten-egg stink of sulfur mixed with oxygen, like someone had just lit a match. My eyes burned, and my throat was scratchy. I could almost feel the noxious air polluting my lungs. How could the miners inhale this stuff without any protection? I coughed as I fished inside my knapsack for a bandana to cover my nose and mouth. I came up empty. There was no protection against the toxicity.

  It was as if I stood in a Hollywood set of a primordial offering ritual with fire, ash, and brimstone raining down. But there were no virgins to sacrifice at this volcano and no chanting. Instead of humans being tossed into the seething pit to appease imagined gods, a single line of miners filed in the opposite direction, out of the steaming crater, as if from the center of the earth.

  Ijen had last erupted a dozen years earlier, a long while ago on the human scale but a mere blink in geological time. If an eruption were to occur again, as it almost certainly would, the poisoned water of the crater lake would pollute the irrigation systems below. The lake was a persistent environmental threat.

  When meditators sit in mountain position or yogis stand in mountain pose, they evoke an image of dignity, strength, and immovability in the face of the elements. But that was not this mountain. Ijen was beautiful and powerful, yes, but it was also a hellscape made literally of fire and brimstone. The image of Ijen was the opposite of the Buddhist image of the ideal emotional mind: a storm raging on the ocean, where the tempest is at the surface, but below, in the ocean depths, calm reigns. At Ijen, the roar was hidden below.

  I looked down again and felt a shiver of unreality. How had I arrived here? I’d walked away from a lucrative and exciting job as CEO of a public video game publisher that had released billion-dollar franchises. I had traveled around the world, first restructuring and then building an exciting and successful company. But something had been missing. I was leading a life not my own. I had felt unbalanced, and the partnership I was in wasn’t feeding me. Success wasn’t enough.

  I turned to Michelle. “Ready?”

  The muddy terrain was slippery and the decline steep. Michelle’s wet feet slid forward and slammed into the thongs of her flip-flops with each step. Soon the thongs were cutting into the skin between her toes, and her pain worsened with every step.

  I stepped in front of her. “Put your hands on my shoulders and lean on me.” It helped break her forward momentum, which eased the pressure on the thongs. The clouds and the rain began to clear, and in the distance, we could see the summit of Mount Merapi, Indonesia’s most active volcano, steaming like a simmering kettle.

  When we arrived at the warung, the others were geared up and ready to go. We still had a lot of riding ahead of us, and it was getting late. We had to arrive at the hostel before dark. We mounted our bikes and set out.

  As difficult as the broken road was to navigate on the way up, it was even more treacherous on the way down. My forearms and fingers were cramping from the grip. My knuckles were white. Peter stopped to take some video footage and called out to give me some downhill riding tips: lighten up on the grip, and trust the bike and its shock absorbers to do the work. I didn’t quite close my eyes, like Luke Skywalker placing absolute trust in the Force, but I did ease my grip on the handlebars, bend my knees slightly to settle into a crouch position, unclench my teeth, and relax my shoulders.

  All of a sudden, the topography loosened up for me. Instead of fighting it, I let it carry me. I didn’t navigate around rocks or slam into them; I bounced over them. I didn’t squeeze my brakes on steep declines; I let the bike rip. It seemed as if there was nothing between me and the ground below. The bike was a mere extension of my body. Once or twice, on a rough incline, I stopped in my tracks; this time I stayed upright with my shoes clipped into the pedals, pulled on the handlebars, and hopped from one rock to the next. The ride became fluid and graceful. As in any relationship, once I learned to trust, my bike delivered, and I became stronger. I felt I’d broken through some barrier and left something behind. It was a soaring emotion.

  I dismounted my bike to take in the moment and mopped my face with a sleeve. I smelled the fragrant soil. I wondered at the moss-covered stones, the giant roots of hardwood trees, and the luscious leaves of primary rainforest around me. In the distance, a powerful waterfall crashed.

  The remainder of the descent from the volcano was a dirty, wet mess but a lot of fun. Muck from my bike spattered across my clothes and caked my face. I hollered joyfully as my bike screamed through murky puddles. By the time we arrived at the hostel Catimor Homestay, the sun was setting and my face was a fractal of mud.

  Catimor wasn’t much to speak of. The rooms were musty but dry, the showers had hot water, and the evening meal made up in warmth what it lacked in taste. Some of the others in our group stayed up after dinner to reminisce about the day’s ride in the hostel’s aging Jacuzzi. I went to my room and, fully clothed, collapsed on my bed and closed my eyes. I slept deeper than I had in years.

  The next morning, we had a relatively short, easy rolling ride to Bondowoso at the other end of Ijen National Park. The ride was about fifty kilometers, mainly downhill, with about twenty kilometers of moderately broken road that was easy to navigate. We passed cocoa bean plantations and again saw workers breaking their backs, this time to pick beans. We passed Blawan, one of four government-owned coffee plantations that took advantage of the volcanic soil, elevation, and rain to produce some of Java’s best coffee. The women who picked the berries in the field were covered from head to toe to protect themselves from the sun, which, when it beat down, was brutal.

  We stopped to taste some of the local coffee. The warung served up a batch from beans that had been freshly roasted, but the coffee tasted bitter to me and le
ft a coarse feeling in my mouth as it went down. A black sludge of coffee grounds lingered at the bottom of the cup. I wondered what Asher would have thought.

  I had a growing awareness of how our group must have looked to the locals: a bunch of Westerners in colorful outdoor gear, fancy bikes, and helmet cams. I thought about the juxtaposition of our presence against the miners who toiled in a toxic environment or the farm workers who slaved in the searing heat. Here, on this trip through southeastern Java, I saw true suffering wrought of the need for the basic necessities of life.

  I thought of metta meditation, which cultivates compassion by imagining sending kindness to others with each exhale and receiving their suffering with each inhale. Compassion was a core Buddhist ethic that began with compassion for the self and ended with compassion for all sentient beings. I closed my eyes, took in a deep breath as I thought about those workers, and exhaled slowly. It was a strange response for me, someone who would ordinarily think about concrete ways to help or otherwise take action. There was little I really could do. Yet I recognized the benefit of cultivating compassion in my own mind in the face of their suffering and the harm to me if I were to be as indifferent as a mountain to their suffering. I also tried to instill compassion in my children, some of whose friends—and ours—seemed to take for granted their windfall into privilege.

  I took in another deep breath. Then another. And another.

  At Bondowoso the vans picked us up to take us to the city of Malang, a five-hour drive made even longer by Javanese traffic. The group had arranged to stay at a city hotel, but I had other plans. A local internet entrepreneur, Steve Christian, had invited me to stay with him in his guesthouse.

  Steve was ethnically Chinese, a group considered outsiders in Indonesia and, because of their economic success, discriminated against. It was a narrative familiar to someone like me, whose Jewish grandparents lived in Eastern Europe before and after the Second World War. Steve, having sold more than one business to US internet companies, was successful, especially by Indonesian standards. Yet he shared the insecurity of many ethnic Chinese Indonesians. He lived in a large home behind an alarmed, wrought-iron gate. Like early American immigrants who changed their names in order to better fit in, Steve’s name connoted nothing at all Chinese.

  With Indonesia’s economy growing at a rate twice that of the United States, and with smartphones only beginning to penetrate, I was keenly interested in what Steve was up to. I yearned for a business discussion. I couldn’t help but sniff the scent of new opportunities. But it seemed more like a pleasurable game than a serious endeavor or compulsion.

  Steve and I ate Chinese takeout and talked about business and the ventures he was nurturing. I felt an easy affinity toward him, and our business conversation was neither fraught nor complicated.

  In the morning, Steve drove me to the hotel where my group was staying. I joined them for a ride up another volcano, Mount Bromo, on the outskirts of the city. Its caldera had erupted only six months earlier and was still active with tremors and periodic ash eruptions. Once a year, the people of East Java traveled up Mount Bromo to make offerings of fruit and vegetables and, to appease ancient deities, to sacrifice livestock by throwing them into the caldera. Believing it would bring them good luck, some locals tempted fate and made the dangerous trek into the caldera to retrieve the sacrifices.

  Having had my fill of toxic calderas as well as personal sacrifices, I had no intention of making it to the top. We stayed at lower elevations, but the riding was still steep and difficult. At times, I needed to lift my bike onto my shoulders to get past difficult terrain. My body was spattered with dirt and blood from the various scrapes I took. Steep ravines were always present, always a danger, but I was more confident in the saddle. I let instinct and muscle take over. I tried not to think of the volcanic rumble that growled only a few kilometers away.

  By the time we returned to Malang, my legs hurt badly. I darted through traffic to the drop-off point from which John had arranged for our bikes to be transported back to Bali. From there, we piled into cars destined for the Surabaya airport and a flight home.

  On the small Air Asia plane, I thought about our ride. I was beaten to the top of the mountain by a man nearly fifteen years older than me and had to carry my bike to make it at all. At another time in my life, that would have bruised my ego, even if I knew it was silly. This time, I felt no shame. Getting to the top was the main thing, as was experiencing the grinding effort it required.

  I pictured Ijen, its power and beauty but also its toxicity. I remembered what it had been like for me in New York, when I tried to find another gear but could not, when I reached the top of an organization only to discover the view was not what I’d imagined. I would need to find another way to exist, to be in this world, not with the explosive energy of an Ijen, but with the power, dignity, and sanctity of a different kind of mountain.

  Landing at the local terminal in Bali, with no customs or immigration to clear, I felt for the first time like a native and that I belonged. I had returned home, and it felt good.

  thirteen |

  I returned to our villa from the airport that Friday afternoon. Shoes of all sizes lined the entrance to the front door, a sure sign that the family was in. Putu’s mother was cooking a vegetarian Indonesian meal, and the smell of frying shallots, like teenage body odor, wafted from the kitchen. Even though Nava had once proclaimed, “I’d rather starve!” eventually she tried new Indonesian flavors and discovered her capacity to adapt to and even be curious about new foods. Her favorite: tempeh manis, freshly made tempeh cut into small pieces, fried until crispy, tossed in a sweet sauce, and sautéed again with chili peppers and garlic. On the menu this time was cap cay, a Chinese-style vegetable stir-fry with plenty of cabbage.

  Friday nights were special in our family. We regularly celebrated the Jewish Shabbat with a large meal. Well before an internet Sabbath became fashionable in some technology circles, our family unplugged all our electronics for twenty-four hours each week. There were no computers, no phones, and no television. Instead of the pseudohuman contact of electronic media, we made eye contact with each other. We played board games, lingered over meals, and lazed around. But as the day drew to a close, the kids typically got fidgety, and the moment it was over, the screens flashed open faster than an Intel processor.

  Early in my career and marriage, I’d made a commitment never to miss Friday-night dinner at home. Even when work required that I travel regularly from New York to Asia, my commitment to my family to be home Friday night was firm. One Friday, I traveled back from Tokyo to New York, survived on catnaps for forty-eight hours, then turned right around and headed back to Japan. It hadn’t always been easy for me, but after many years of struggle, I learned to appreciate more fully the magic of the day and what it meant for our family to be still.

  Now in Ubud, we adopted a new custom to our Friday-night ritual. We all wore semiformal dress, Bali-style: sarongs and sashes. The boys, including me, were at first uncomfortable wearing what Oliver called skirts. But it was completely normal in Bali, and over time it became normal in our family.

  When I returned from Java that Friday, we waited until dark to eat. Putu and her mother had left the food on the outdoor table, the plates covered in mesh domes to protect the food from bugs. Just as we prepared to begin our meal, Nava did or said something that set Rita off. Rita and Nava regularly argued about the real estate of the bed they shared, each accusing the other of violating her sovereign territory. This was different. Something had happened. I did not see or hear what it was, but before I knew it, they flew at each other, each screaming at the other that she was “the worst sister ever.”

  With the ear-splitting conflict, Sam grew silent. His face took on a my-family-is-completely-nuts expression.

  Oliver got into the mix. “Rita, calm down!”

  I shot back, “Oliver, you’re not the parent around here.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” Oliver and Sam beat a retre
at to their room and now were separated from the family.

  I looked wide eyed at Victoria. She threw down her napkin. “You take care of it. I’ve been dealing with it all week.” And I’d been away, just as I often had been in New York.

  I talked to Rita when she settled down about an hour later. I realized that Oliver was involved too, which didn’t surprise me. Theirs had always been a charged relationship. While Rita had made good friends at Green School and generally was in good spirits, her relationship with Oliver still had moments of desperate conflict. Oliver had hurled an insult at her that hit home. Now Rita slid backward. Although angry with Oliver, she lashed out all around.

  Or maybe it had something to do with my being gone for the week.

  Victoria and I finally herded everyone to the table. The food was cold, and we mostly ate in silence.

  The next morning, bright light pierced the curtains and spilled a golden puddle on our stone floor. A slice of moon lingered beyond the rice fields, and an errant cloud wisped in the air currents. At breakfast, the conversation was jovial. Something about family life had become more resilient; tensions eased quicker, and that morning felt like a new beginning. The kids asked about my trip to Java, and I heard about what was happening in school. We worked on the jigsaw puzzle and played Boggle.

  While the kids settled into a game of Settlers of Catan, Victoria and I talked about Pak Chris’s Sea to Summit field trip. In what once might have been a tense conversation in which each of us wanted to make sure the other had heard our concerns, we instead quickly found common ground and decided to let Oliver go. He would need a little encouragement, but courage was something that seemed to come easily to Oliver. In the afternoon, friends dropped by to splash around in the pool and graze on the apple pie and brownies that we picked up on Fridays at Bali Buda, just off Ubud’s main road.