Munching Bugs with the Waltons

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

I've been working weekends a lot recently, but I was rewarded with three days off and I took the opportunity to do a little farming. Actually since my job involves going to exotic places and staying in nice hotels, all my working weekends are a little bit like vacations. So last weekend's actual vacation was a little bit more like working.

I visited a farm in lovely rural Isaan, the Thai equivalent of Kansas, where a lot of food is grown and nothing much else goes on.

After six hours in a taxi, a bus and the back of a pickup truck, I made it down a long dirt road to the homestead where I'd be staying the weekend. The roads were not so much dirt as fine, powdery dust which was packed a little harder around the house to make a yard. The house was set in amongst a cluster of similar places to make a little village of maybe 300 farmers. All around trees full of crazy fruit fought each other for sunlight, though they really didn't need to as the sun found enough time to burn the back of my neck even though I tried to avoid it. Beyond the trees fields of rice and vegetables grew here and there, with pockets of tobacco and other things that the farmers grew for personal use. Around all this grew huge hills teeming with wild boar and other delicious things. It was hot as hell, but just about as close to the traditional image of paradise as I've yet seen.

The house where I stayed lacked a lot of the amenities of your modern five-star hotel, such as plumbing and walls, but it would probably seem ridiculous to these people who fight floods every year to actually pipe water in through the ground. And wall are for places where you actually want to keep the breeze out. The toilet was an outhouse and flushing was done by pouring a bucket of water down on whatever you'd accomplished there. For my shower, I wrapped a long strip of traditional Isaan cloth around my waist, disrobed modestly under it and stood in the corner of the yard, dipping rainwater out of a great cistern and pouring it over my head. A fairly pleasant experience at the end of a hot day under the blistering Isaan sun, which they keep turned up to eleven.

The night of my arrival I was given a big room to myself. It was one of two in the house that actually had walls but they only went up to about a foot from the ceiling to let out the hot air. I guess they were mostly just for privacy. Mosquito netting hung where I slept, on long, flat, beautifully embroidered cushions made from cotton on the farm, but there really weren't that many mosquitoes about. Probably due to the giant preying mantids that hung around the single fluorescent tube that lit the open main room and their insect-eating pals, the geckos. Geckos barked all night and were accompanied by squealing dogs, clucking chickens and a host of the kind of noises one hears on Tarzan movies. I woke in the middle of the night to the dogs barking like crazy. Someone stepped stealthily up under the house (which is raised a full floor off the ground on stilts), and did something mean to a dog which sent it off squealing pitifully. He then said something to the other dogs which kept them quiet. I listened with all eight of my ears but didn't hear a sound after that, which was fairly spooky.

Despite that I slept quite well and the next sound I heard was a really hoarse rooster coughing out a lungful of dust and trying to impress all the other roosters in the area. Our rooster was pretty lazy and wouldn't start crowing until all the other ones had been at it for a quarter of an hour or so.

There are no special breakfast foods in Thailand and the morning meal was suspiciously similar to the previous night's dinner: sticky rice from a basket, pinched between thumb and forefinger, eaten with another pinch of spicy papaya salad with live baby crabs mashed into it. Super yummy. I had brought loads of groceries and a big stew of cauliflower and pork had been made of that. There was also the ever-popular bowl of fried grasshoppers and I was privy to the spectacle of a couple quite beautiful girls gleefully munching bug after bug. When they realized that it was grossing me out, they proceeded to pop more of them in and chew more dramatically so I could see all the lovely details of bug mastication. Since everything was pretty much outside, flies would occasionally land on the food and it was kind of funny to watch people waving the flies away from their bowl of bugs.

After breakfast, which was at around 6am, we headed to the fields in this cart attached to a mini tractor. Not too long ago they had musk-oxen pulling these things and instead of making a whole new wagon, they adapted the tractor to act just like an ox. The front wheel was discarded and long three-metre handlebars were attached which stretched back to the wagon where the driver sat. Despite a diesel engine the thing chugged along at about the same speed as an musk ox would have.

The cutting had all been done and the rice was laying in small piles of bundles all around the field. We drove around in the wagon, loading the bundles and taking them to make a bigger pile near the dirt road. This took all morning and when we were done, we retired on a raised platform (raised above the cobras and floods and other terrestrial hazards) under a big shady tree full of papayas and ate and relaxed. Then it was back to the house for nap time during the hot midday.

After naptime, I was let off work and went with the youngsters to a nearby stream for a swim and a wash. Back at the field they flailed the rice to get the grains separated from the stalks. When they were done with that at around 2am, they woke me up and I helped them load the rice from a truck up into the house. Every time I climbed the ladder with a huge sack perched on my shoulder the Thais would all tense up and stare, expecting me to pitch onto the dirt at any moment. I wonder if they were concerned about me or about the rice.

The family was wonderful and everyone had great fun over my peculiarities as a foreigner, a really tall one at that. I was told later that apparently I had scored big points with everyone by politely refusing to drink the Thai whisky with one of their cousins. An Australian man lived up the road about 15km and he was known for the fact that he never drank anything that didn't contain alcohol. He was married to one of their cousins and she'd become quite a drinker as well. I love to drink but I just didn't feel like it and after a day in the sun all I wanted was water. I drank lots of the rainwater which was collected in big cisterns from the roof of the house and I didn't suffer any ill effects. The food didn't bother me either and I ate everything that didn't have more than four legs.

The final day of my stay was Sunday (which is the reason my weekly column is late, since there was barely even electricity there, let alone an internet connection) and just like in "Little House on the Prairie", everyone hied off to church. The little country Buddhist shrine was just a roof and a floor and a line of gold-painted Buddhas. A single priest in a yellow robe chanted while we all kneeled on the mats in front of him with hands pressed together in prayer. It was very casual and some of the older women sat in back and chatted away about things while the priest chanted sutras and blessings. We approached the altar on our knees and made offerings of rice and vegetables. Some people offered 20 baht notes and, being a 'rich American' I offered 100 baht (if I'd offered less it would have cost the family I stayed with some face). The villagers all asked me a bunch of questions which I less than half-understood, but most of them had to do with America, my height, whether I liked Thailand or could eat Thai food.

Before I left the village by pickup truck, the family each tied a cotton string around my wrist for good luck and blessings. It got a good bit emotional at that point and I had to promise to be back to help with planting.

Thanks and love to the Ingkokphung family.

Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career.