Dispatches from the Peninsula

by Chris Tharp

  Next to Grandpa C. lie my great grandparents, Matt and Marie Reisenhauer, whom I had the pleasure of being very close to until I was 12 and 13. They left this world exactly one year apart. These graves are nearly 30 years old now, and the surrounding grass encroaches well onto the faded stone. I rip at it with my fingers and sweep the excess away with my hands. I give them both a belt of booze and again I bow.

  CHAPTER 19: GOING UP THE COUNTRY

  It was the end of the hottest summer I’d endured in six years. The heat was persistent and draining, an unwelcome guest who refuses to leave the party. The slightest exertion caused my clothes to stick to my skin like wet toilet paper. The new semester was grinding away and Chuseok–Korea’s Thanksgiving, harvest festival, and biggest holiday–was right around the corner.

  With the coming three-day holiday falling squarely midweek, most schools in the country chose to take all five days off. This doesn’t happen too much in work-obsessed Korea, so our little expat motorcycle gang–the Rain Dogs–planned an epic journey around much of the southern part of the peninsula. So, after meeting Sunday night in central Busan, we were off, crossing the Nakdong River and shooting down the small highway toward the neighboring burg of Changwon. Our bikes were running smoothly and the night’s heat made it possible to ride in our t-shirts. With light traffic, we made good time on the open road. We had a full roster this time around, the whole gang on board:

  Essex, England’s David Scraggs, also known as Her Majesty’s Man in Korea;

  B.C. Jay, who hails from Vancouver, British Columbia–though the B.C. in his name actually stands for Boring Canadian;

  Idaho’s Sam Hazelton, my officemate and partner in crime, whose neck and head are shockingly similar in width;

  Big Welsh Will, a mild-mannered Welshman with feet as big as Frankenstein’s monster’s;

  And this here author.

  * * * *

  After a night in a Changwon love motel, we woke up headed through the port city of Masan, down the coast road that would take us to Namhae–an island that sticks out from the peninsula like a stumpy toe–separated from the mainland by the narrowest strip of water. The road passed through the town of Tongmyeong and followed the coast east, winding up into the hills, through villages surrounded by terraced rice paddies, golden with ripened grain ready for harvest.

  As the road twisted down out of the hills to a settlement near the water, we noticed a sign: Dinosaur Footprints. The southern coast of the Korean Peninsula is famous for its fossilized dinosaur remains, along with actual footprints, which can be found along at spots along the shoreline, etched into the rock. The signs directed us through a near-empty parking lot next to a pier. Old buoys and fishing nets lay in piles, and seagulls sailed in the breeze. The place smelled of old fish, rubber, and salt, and the blue-green water gently licked the rocks of the shore. We dismounted our bikes and hiked out to the black volcanic rock that held the evidence of these great beasts’ wanderings, our eyes fixed for any sign of a claw or paw prints.

  “Over ‘ere,” David said, pointing down to some splotchy spots on the rocks. “You see ‘em?”

  I did not. Certainly there were some kind of imprints, but millions of years of waves and wind had cratered the rocks. With no smooth surface in sight, we couldn’t tell whether these imprints were dinosaur footprints or just holes. We gave a collective sigh, jumped on the bikes, and headed out toward the main road.

  At the intersection, we saw three grandfathers sitting on a raised platform–a common sight in Korea–especially during the warmer months. They drank from paper cups filled with soju and snacked on kimchee and fried fish. Upon seeing a group of five foreign riders, they waved us over and filled a cup for each of us, poured from a disturbingly large several-liter plastic bottle.

  “Where are you coming from?” Their accents were thick and countrified and different from the saturi that I usually heard in Busan.

  “Busan.”

  “Oh. Busan! You have traveled far! Did you see the dinosaur prints?”

  “Oh, yes,” David replied in very competent Korean, though with a cumbersome Southern English accent draped over it like a woolen blanket. “They were very interesting!” I think he was lying for the sake of diplomacy.

  “Oh… very good… very good.” The old boys nodded in agreement.

  “What country do you come from?”

  As David told them each of our nationalities, the grandfathers emitted sounds of great approval. They were very much impressed at our international membership and likely had never seen so many foreigners in their village since the war. They were so impressed, in fact, that they unscrewed the top of the bottle and offered us more soju. This act of hospitality was short-lived, however, interrupted by a woman’s shrill voice. An old grandmother, probably one of their wives, strutted across the empty road and waved her hand in annoyance.

  “No, you old fools! Can’t you see they are riding motorcycles? No alcohol!”

  The men quickly recapped the bottle, sheepishly obeying her command. We gave bows and smiles and headed out down the road, slightly warmed from the alcohol in our guts–and a little thankful for her intervention.

  “Hast du Kimchee?”

  The last thing you expect when motor biking through rural South Korea is a village made up entirely of wooden homes, complete with 45-degree red-tiled roofs. Garden gnomes pop up throughout the impeccably-landscaped yards, many of which contain real grass. Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and BMW automobiles are parked in the driveways, and elderly white men can be seen pruning the flowers and heard talking to one another in guttural Teutonic tones. It’s as if you have just driven through the Black Forest, exited the Autobahn, and rolled straight into a real German village. In fact, it is a German village. That’s its official name: the German Village. This German village contains many of the trappings and details you’d expect from such a place, and like any real idyllic European spot, it too is filled with mobs of gawking, photo-snapping Koreans.

  In the 1960s and ‘70s, thousands of Koreans emigrated to West Germany for work. Some toiled in the mines, but most of these transplants were women who went to work as nurses in German hospitals. Many married German men and made lives for themselves there. Fast forward to modern Namhae, with an aging population of just 51,000–less than half of what it was in the Sixties. Namhae, despite being one of the most beautiful spots in the country, is losing people, so the Korean government has undertaken different strategies to get them to resettle. One such scheme is the German Village, built with the intention of drawing back some of these emigrants by offering the actual Germans a taste of home, while giving the Koreans a chance to return to their real home. Ja vol.

  Of course we, the Rain Dogs, could not resist the pull of the German Village. We twisted the throttle and pushed our weak bikes up the precipitous hill, rolling into a hamlet that was painfully quaint, Disney-like in its accuracy and artifice. Upon seeing such detailed design, such Northern European purity, I felt the urge to sing and speak in German–to be German. I had learned a bit of German from an exchange-student friend in high school. So, from the safety of my slow-moving bike, I belted out the lines of the German national anthem, which he had taught me so many years ago:

  Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit

  Für das deutsche Vaterland!

  Danach lasst uns alle streben

  Brüderlich mit Herz und Hand!

  This clamor at once attracted the attention of the Korean tourists, who turned their many cameras away from the pretty houses and lawns and onto me, figuring they had at last found a real German in the not-so-real German Village. As they smiled and pointed, I greeted them with a hearty wave and in my best Bavarian lilt, repeated: “Hallo Deutsche freunden! Hallo! Wie geht’s dir? Gut? Ich bin sehr gut!” I did this throughout the village, bellowing my hackneyed greeting for all to hear. At one point we reached a dead end in the road, which was punctuated by a small guardhouse. A diminutive old Korean man stood sentry. He wore a sagging, overs
ized uniform that emphasized his emaciated frame, giving him the look of a grumpy and malnourished child. His hat appeared to eat his head. Alarmed by the sight of our gang, he got up and stepped out of the house, taking us in with sharp suspicion. He had heard me singing and did not like it one bit. Real Germans do not sing alone, especially when atop a motorcycle. He had been a guard at the German Village long enough to know this basic fact. I was far too festive a German, and therefore probably not a real German at all. This could not end well. He muttered into his radio–perhaps calling for backup? We took this as our cue to leave. After all, we still had soju on our breath from the pit stop near the dinosaur footprints. It was best to take no chances.

  On our way down, we stopped off at a few houses, if just to take in the lovely design. They were quite nice, absolutely correct in their German assembly and craftsmanship–wood worked with expert care. You just don’t see such houses in Korea, where view-blocking gates, blood-red brick, and metal-barred windows are the mainstay of any abode that isn’t an apartment block. It was good to breathe in a scent of something different, a reminder of how nice houses can be. (Houses! Yes. People actually live in houses! Years on the peninsula can cause one to forget such a fact.) For a moment, I envied those lucky enough to live in the German Village, despite the fact that they would never know real privacy. What if I could live the reverse? What if I could marry a Korean woman and eventually move back to America, only to settle down in a government-built Korean Villagenestled in a valley in rural Oregon? We could live in crowded brick houses or one-room apartments. We could make kimchee and bean paste in pots that we stored on the roof. Overweight American tourists could waddle down the narrow streets, marveling at the grandmothers crouching on the pavement, selling seaweed and octopus. “Look at that! Isn’t it neat? Is that squid moving?” Real ajosshis could eat dog soup, gulp from bowls of rice wine, and piss on the sidewalk in broad daylight, while I’d sit on the heated floor of my home with my aging, permed, and visor-wearing wife, popping rice cakes and watching trot concerts on TV. Yes, the Korean Village.

  I could think of worse fates.

  Naked In Sangju

  Right before dark we managed to get to our destination: Sangju Beach, puttering into town on our not-so-intimidating 125cc bikes, failing to frighten either small children or the very old. Before long, we located a minbak near the beach, where we chatted with a beaming ajumma who wasmore than happy to have some guests so close to the Chuseokholiday. She was especially thrilled to learn that it was David Scraggs’ 40th birthday, a fact that was lost on most of us as well. He had kept it a secret, but now we were settled in, on one of the nicest beaches in the whole country, with practically no other tourists about. The weather was gorgeous, we were on vacation, and now we had David’s 40th to celebrate.

  After three-hour raw fish dinner we ended up on the beach, which was wonderfully empty. Sangju is a long sandy beach, popular with visitors in the summer. A bright moon peeked up over the mountainous ridge of the island, but the ocean itself was dark and loud with surf, the result of a typhoon surging in the Pacific some hundreds of miles south. David took one look at the black water and said, “All right lads. I’m going in.” And with that, he stripped off his clothes and sprinted into the waves, au naturale.

  “How’s the water?” B.C. Jay shouted toward David’s pale form bobbing in the foam.

  “It’s fucking great! Get in ya wanker!”

  B.C. gingerly removed his shirt and jeans and drawers as well. Sam followed suit, and soon they were both in the sea.

  “Dude! The water’s perfect,” Sam yelled our way.

  Will lit a cigarette and considered the scene. Something caught his eye. “What’s that up there?” He pointed to a thin object, jutting out of the sand.

  “I dunno. Let’s go see.”

  We walked up the beach and checked it out. It was a long wind-surfing board, stuck vertically into the sand.

  “Don’t suppose anyone would mind if we took it out for a spin…”

  “I don’t believe they, would, Will.”

  With that we grabbed the board and hauled it toward the water. I stripped and ran into the surf, followed by an also-nude Big Welsh Will, board at his side.

  The water was purifying and cathartic, still quite warm from months of summer heat, which lingered well into September. The waves were some of the largest I’d ever seen in Korea. We took turns paddling on the massive board, trying to ride the good swells, but the board was too large: it invariably kicked out from whoever was trying to command it, causing a wipe-out that was surely more fun than any real ride. I was drunk and giddy, like a sugar-whapped kid let loose at Chuck E. Cheese’s. It was cosmic revelry: raw nature and friendship, with enough booze to quash any fear.

  None of us should have been swimming. It was definitely a bad idea, a roadmap to catastrophe–something that would horrify any mothers, wives, or girlfriends–but there are times when reckless fun trumps good judgment. I was alive and electric; all my hairs were copper wires, receiving signals from the fat, waxing moon. I was there, in the womb of the ocean, with my friends, with my new family, in my new home. Everything was warm and good and just felt right: bodies and water and the camaraderie that is brotherhood.

  Our return-to-the-wild moment was eventually interrupted by the arrival of a small group of young Koreans, who, unlike us, came into the water fully clothed. David and I stood chest-deep as they came to greet us–two guys and two girls. They spoke some English and asked us the usual questions as they splashed each other and laughed with each deluge of a wave. They had no idea that we lacked clothes, our nudity masked by the fact that only our torsos were visible. This illusion was soon shattered by Big Welsh Will, however, who paddled by on the surfboard, his yogurt-white buttocks lit up by the angry moon.

  “Hallo boys! Lovely night indeed, I’d say.”

  A look of horror shot into the eyes of the young Koreans, who immediately turned around and headed to shore, creeping away into the safety of the night, where they’d hopefully see no more stark-naked, raving Welshmen. It is fortunate that Will was lying on the surfboard, belly-down, for he is a massive man, both in frame and endowment. The guy has size-14 feet and a dick of similar proportions. I’m sure it’s unlike anything those hapless kids had ever seen before. They could have been scarred for life, so let us count our blessings as they come.

  One by one we came out of the water and put our clothes back on. At one point, David returned from the town’s little store, where he had restocked on beer. We sat in the sand and drank some more. Despite my damp hair and tingling skin, I felt relaxed and content, if not just a little sleepy. It was then that I noticed a sound coming from the far end of the beach.

  “Do you guys hear that?”

  “Sounds like drumming,” Sam replied.

  “Look, down there, there’s a group of ‘em.” David pointed to a dark mass of what appeared to be people, crouching over drums.

  Why was there a drum circle on Sangju Beach in Korea? At one a.m.? Had the place suddenly been invaded by hippies? I didn’t smell any patchouli, but you never can be too sure.

  We grabbed our beers and made our way down the beach until we came to the group in question. They definitely weren’t hippies, despite the drums and somewhat colorful garb. These guys–and they were all men–were dark-skinned Asians and made a mean percussion section.

  “Hello my friends!” One of their ranks stood and welcomed us into the group. He wore a red-and-white shirt with a black cap.

  “Hello!”

  “Welcome.”

  “This is awesome. What’s the occasion?”

  “We are playing music from our country.”

  “And which country is that?”

  “Sri Lanka!”

  “Ahhh…”

  It turns out that, like us, they were also foreign workers. Unlike us, they worked in the factories, which is the toughest work in Korea, especially for immigrant laborers.

  These Sri La
nkans were not bemoaning their situation on Sangju Beach that night. Like us, they were relaxing, and like us, they were celebrating. They were enjoying one of their precious days off by sitting on the sand and drumming into the night, by conjuring a bit of a home that must have felt far, far away. In a sense, we were doing the same. Upon hearing that it was David’s birthday, they broke into a loud cheer.

  “Actually,” Dave looked at his watch, “my birthday’s ended now. But thanks anyways, chaps.”

  With that, they hit the skins again: a spirited, up tempo rhythm. This went on for another hour. We stayed through the end, soaking up the drumming and warmth of the group, until the Sri Lankans stood up together, whisked the sand from their colorful clothes, and walked away into the dark.

  The five of us were left sitting alone on the beach, with a half of a pack of smokes and nearly empty bottles.

  “Happy Birthday, Scraggsy.”

  “Cheers.”

  We made our way back, forming a chain, weaving over the sand and through the streets of Sangju, up the treacherous stairs of our minbak and back into our tiny, shared rooms, where we could sleep away the approaching morning on warm, hard floors.

  Return To Jirisan

  The next day we rode north through a disconcertingly pissy rain, away from the coast and into the knotted, mountainous interior. Summer’s final blast had exhausted itself, and the relentless drizzle which now fell was positively chilly. Actual Chuseok was just one day away, and the slick road was relatively empty of traffic. We took it slowly. We only had a two- or three-hour journey ahead of us, so there was no need to risk a spill. We were in no hurry.

  We arrived at our destination thoroughly soaked and chilled, but with bikes and limbs intact. We were meeting another group of Busanites near Sangyesa Temple on the edge of Jirisan National Park, the site of my adventure with Josh “Donk” Graham some years earlier. I had since been returning over every Chuseokholiday, each time with a larger number of friends. Our compatriots–mainly folks from Busan’s expat music scene–were holed up in a large minbakjust uphill from the small river that runs down the valley. When we arrived, they were all on the premises, sipping beers and jamming acoustically under the building’s flat roof.