Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Instead, I sit down and unzip my backpack, unsealing the ziplock bag that holds my
peanut-butter-and-crackers, the one food I don't want to share. I'll need all the energy I can
muster to cross the mountain tomorrow.
As I quietly chew my snack, I listen to the people in the next room talking and laughing.
I'm reminded of lying in bed at my grandparents' farmhouse in West Virginia, listening to
the voices of grownups telling stories around the woodstove. My sisters and I didn't know
our grandparents, our aunts and uncles and cousins. We'd been raised in Japan. Although we
understood English, the Appalachian cadences rising and falling in the next room sounded to
uslikethelanguageofaforeigntribe.Yetitsomehowcomfortedusthatthereweregrownups
talking around the fire. We didn't hear the words, just the reassuring rhythm of their voices.
When I sweep the crumbs of my subversive peanut butter snack into a gap between the
floorplanks,apigbelowthehousesquealswithdelight,butthevoicesnextdoordon'tpause.
Thank goodness, no one suspects.
Curling up into a fetal position, I fall asleep to the voices of my hosts, mingled with the
soft sound of rain on thatch, until I'm back in the toy jeep with my sisters. We descend into a
woodedvalleywherepythonsandtigersflyatus,butweknowtheywon'treallybitebecause
it's a magic forest. Then we're no longer in the jeep but climbing a stone staircase up into
the sky. Somewhere in the ascent, my sisters vanish, and I turn into an adult. At the top, I see
the white columns of an American courthouse, but before going inside, I pause on the steps
to look down at the way I've come. A woman lawyer in a white powdered wig comes and
stands beside me.
More to myself than to her, I say, “I've come very far. All the way from the Kingdom of
the Elephants through the Valley of the Enchanted Forest.”
“What are you talking about?” she demands, raising an eyebrow in disbelief as a cloud
bank moves in to obscure the view.
I point indignantly to the ground below, outlining my very path with my finger, but she
doesn't think there's anything there but clouds. The more she doubts my story, the more I
believe it, until I'm shouting in her face, “I know the way I've come!”
The next morning, on taking my leave of Memnahop, I offer money to my host father, who
refuses adamantly, then I press a can of sardines on the mother. Both she and her husband
smile goodbye, still furrowing their brows.
As a cuckoo-dove coos overhead, the girls and I thread through dripping shrubs and dis-
appear into a dark, muddy montane forest behind the village. The rain has just stopped, and
cool morning mists are rising. Nigel warned me not to attempt the mountain if the ground is
wet. What could he have meant? Even in the dry season, it rains at least once a day. I doubt
that there ever comes a day when the ground isn't wet.
