In a previous post, I quoted a line from one of the Lord of the Rings movies.  At the risk of sounding shallow or hopelessly geeky, another line (a scene really) from one of those movies struck me this morning as I sit sipping coffee in a tented camp in the middle of the Cambodian jungle.  Samwise Gamgee trailing behind Frodo on a small track through a field suddenly stops.  “This is it, Mr. Frodo,” he says.  “If I take one more step, it will be the farthest I’ve ever been from the Shire.” Geographically, I have probably been farther from Seattle than Cambodia, but mentally, this is it.  We’ve been gone since January 12.  I don’t think I have ever travelled for this long.  I feel the need to stop and observe the moment.

Melissa and I left Phnom Penh two days ago and drove four hours towards the Thai border and the ocean.  The weight of what we saw at the Killing Fields still pressed upon us.  We stopped at the base of a river near where it empties into the gulf.  Though it is called a river, it is more of an inlet.  The water is brackish in the dry season and fresh in the rainy season. 

As we sat with Sing, our guide, waiting on a boat to take us to the tented camp, once again, I found new shoots of hope and love and healing springing from that barren place laid waste by the previous day’s activities.  Sing drove us to a small, quiet spot along the river.  We walked out on a wooden dock over the emerald green waters with nothing but jungle on either bank and sat on the bare floor letting the breeze cool us in the ninety-degree heat.  Something was different about this particular rest stop.  It was not on the itinerary.  We thought it was simply a place to hang out until our boat arrived to take us up river.  Then Sing let us know that this was his place.  He had recently purchased it.  His face filled with a mixture of pride, love and joy at being able to share it with us. I would like to tell you that in that moment the heaviness of the Killing Fields lifted.  It did not.  But I felt lighter.  I sensed the beginning of recovery.

If I learn nothing else from our ramblings, I am content to know with greater conviction than ever that if there is something that created this universe, that something is most tangible and real in the connection between two people.  And if, as atheists maintain, there is no creator, then I am content to know that this connection between people, a connection that only blooms into existence if we reach for it, does not defy scientific explanation so much as resist it.  I am a believer in education, in science, in objective, empirical data and analysis. I reject the irrationality that warps and bends our public discourse today.  At the same time, I believe there are ways of knowing that exist beyond the domain of science.  One is not better than the other.  They are different ways of learning and must be harmonized.  

After a forty-five minute ride on a large wooden canoe-like boat fitted with a very loud outboard motor, we glided to a stop at a floating dock, the first human-made structure along the banks of the river we had seen since setting out.  During the ride, we chatted (yelled, actually, to be heard over the engine) with a British couple slightly older than us.  By the time they left the next day, we had exchanged emails and made promises to get together if they ever found themselves in Seattle or if we ever travelled to London.  In the span of less than twenty-four hours, we mutually discerned in each other a kindred spirit, a willingness to laugh and share and enjoy each other’s presence. Perhaps more than any other experience on this trip saturated with new experiences, this recurring ease at making connections reveals (in all its naked ugliness) the toxic, vapid, relentlessness of Donald Trump’s rhetoric and the media’s incurable addiction to reporting it.

We noted in a previous post how nice it felt to catch a breather in Hoi An after starting our sabbatical with a full, nonstop schedule.  If Hoi An was a breather with its lights, energy and restaurants, the tented camp is a silent retreat.  The facility consists of 12 canvas tents, each fully plumbed and approximately 12 feet by 15 feet.  Think glamping.  The main building is an open-air pavilion with a wooden floor and a thatch roof.  Down a series of sand and wooden steps you reach the silent, virtually still river and a floating wooden dock. Our only planned activity for the three days was an early morning kayak/hike, which, true to form, we completed with our guide a good ninety minutes faster than he had ever done it.  Side note: we may experience many transformations on this trip.  Being able to amble leisurely through the jungle will not be one of them.  We are both starved for exercise and use every opportunity to pump our hearts.  Melissa did, however, learn how to identify the diarrhea tree, the bark of which makes a tea to calm the stomach.  Good to know.

A swim in the river is simply delightful, the only way to cool off during the day.  The first day, I kayaked up stream and then reclined fully on the kayak and let it drift slowly back to the dock.  The British couple we met saw my supine body sprawled on the brightly colored kayak floating aimlessly downstream and debated whether to call for help or laugh hysterically.  Between the heat of the day and the quiet of the jungle, this place lends itself to blessed inactivity.  The second day, after our record-setting kayak/hike, we read, dozed, laughed and eventually rallied to get some exercise.  Melissa kayaked while I swam upriver for 15 minutes.  Then we switched.  I kayaked while Melissa swam downstream back to the dock.  What took me 15 minutes took Melissa 8.  I tell myself she had the advantage of swimming with the current, and I would appreciate it if all of you would go with that theory as well.

Last night after dinner, we played two hands of gin, both of which Melissa won.  We returned to our tent around 7:15 with Melissa joking about what mini-series we should watch on Netflix.  I started a new novel on my kindle, but found my eyes drooping.  I think I fell asleep around 8 pm and did not wake up until 6:15 am.  I can’t remember the last time I slept that long or that soundly other than when I was down with the flu.  

This morning at breakfast I looked at Melissa whose face I could describe in detail and said, not at all trying to be romantic, just factual, “you get prettier everyday on this trip.”  I hope throughout this blog I can capture a sense of how restorative this trip has been.  That observation, however, probably comes as close to what I sense is happening as anything I could write.  Her face has not changed.  I see in it today all the beauty, laughter, worry, tenderness, and love I have seen over the course of our relationship.  What I saw this morning reflected back at me was that essential goodness, the part of both of us that came into this world trailing clouds of glory.  It sounds sentimental when I write it, but I refuse not to.  If we cannot find beauty in ourselves, we will never find it in the world.

In the fifth basketball game of my senior year, I dislocated my right ankle badly enough that it required surgery.  I remember people bent over me.  I remember pain reaching the point that I wondered what would happen if it continued. I remember telling myself to close my eyes and breathe.  To this day, I shut my eyes in movies if someone is about to break a bone.  Just writing that sentence creates a feeling like fingernails on a chalkboard.  Mentally, I close my eyes.

Yesterday, Melissa and I visited the infamous Cambodian Killing Fields and the prison, S-21, at which the victims were mercilessly tortured before being driven in covered trucks in the middle of the night, blindfolded, shackled, and starved to be executed and dumped in mass graves.  I thought about what I saw all yesterday and last night.  I woke up thinking about it.  I tried to read, to distract myself, to mentally close my eyes.    

I’ve composed the beginning of this entry a dozen times in my head.  Nothing seems fitting.  I can no more capture the lingering, sickening horror of what I witnessed than I can figure out a respectful, dignified way to write about it.  

The first people Pol Pot systematically murdered were teachers.  His regime converted one of the schools, emptied of teachers, into S-21. The wooden desks were used to divide the classrooms into three by six foot cells.  The playground equipment was sadistically transformed into tools for torture.  Melissa and I walked through these former classrooms, stepped lightly into the prison cells, and read with disgust and horror the frank, unembellished, process used to exterminate human beings — men, women and children. 

On the ground floor of the two-story school, the classrooms were not divided into cells.  They were divided by rows of display panels each one exactly like the other, each one containing photographs, headshots, exactly the same size lined up in neat columns and rows.  Each photograph was a face, like looking at pictures in a yearbook, except no one was smiling, and draped around the neck of every face was a number.

Before they tortured the prisoners, the guards measured and recorded their height.  Then the guards forced each prisoner, even the children, to sit in a chair with a device that held their head upright for the photograph. It was these photographs that were arranged on the display panels, rows and rows of them, room after room.   

Ellie Weisel was asked what punishment he would impose on the prison guards who tortured him and others at Auschwitz and Dachau.  He said he would force the guards to sit in a room for eight hours and watch an endless stream of the faces of the people they murdered.  I understand, now.  The pain reaches a point that you wonder what happens next.

But unlike the pain I felt in high school, this pain comes from an unseen source.  It is the pain of despair, the loss of hope and meaning, the pain of touching evil itself and knowing deeply how real and present it is. Our tour guide, Sing, a gentle, funny soul who has guided countless tourist through this hell, a man, who like most Cambodians, lost five members of his family to the Pol Pot regime, told us, courageously, that his leaders are like the tigers and crocodiles that once lived in the jungles of Cambodia.  You can feed them.  They may even seem gentle, apologetic.  But at any moment they will eat you. 

Earlier that same morning, before visiting S-21, we went to the killing fields, the place where the prisoners were executed and buried in mass graves.  I cannot write in complete sentences when I think about that experience, what I saw.

I saw a tree in a field. Large, strong, old.  Hanging from the tree like braids or dreadlocks were multi-colored bracelets, the kind middle school children make and give to one another as a sign of friendship.  I saw this tree standing silently in this field, a field marked by depressions in the earth, sinkholes, but too perfectly geometric in shape to be natural.  I walked along ridges in the earth between these depressions in this quiet field.  I saw in these depressions, bits of clothing, the tattered remnants of some one’s pants, or skirt.  I saw white specks of bleached bones, and I felt tears press against the inside of my eyes.

I saw a tree in a field with braids hanging from the lowest branches, standing still beside a small depression. 

The guards took the babies from their mothers because they would cry.  Silence was needed to cloak their crimes in secrecy.  

I was told many things about the trees.  From one the guards hung a large speaker to play music to cover the sounds of murder, the moans and screams, the scrapping of shovels on dirt to cover the bodies.  

I was told many things about the trees, but I will never forget the tree with the pretty braids, the trunk of which was used by the guards to smash the heads of babies.  

I saw a tree in a lonely field.  I will never forget it.

Oh loving God, teach us peace.