JEAN, CRAIG AND RAY WHO?

Photo: Andrew Biggs

“In treeless lands, nomadic peoples often use dried dung from herbivorous livestock as their main source of fuel,” I remark to my friend Jean over soba noodles during our most recent Sunday brunch.
“Is that so,” she mumbles, struggling with her chopsticks.
“The best way to prevent the head of your axe from rusting is to rub it over with the end of a wax candle,” I continue.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” snaps Jean, but I’m on a roll now.
“To trap eels, you will need to line a cloth sack with bait, such as high-smelling intestine, and weigh it down with a lump of rock.”
Now she looks alarmed.
“Craig, what are you on?”
“Nothing, Jean, I swear I’ve been clean for weeks.”
“Should we try to make you go to rehab?” I say “no, no, no” and explain that these fascinating tips are from Ray Mears’ vanguard “Ray Mears Essential Bushcraft: A Handbook of Survival Skills from Around the World.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” says Jean dismissively, signaling the waiting to bring us more soy sauce and complaining that her noodles are wilting.
But Jean, who at 83 is my oldest friend, is still recovering from the physical and emotional trauma of being forced by a visiting relative to go elephant riding on a recent trip up north.
“It wasn’t exactly the highlight of the holiday. I don’t like riding elephants, I can’t see the point of it. I’ll never do it again, NEVER,” she remarks bitterly. “I’m a city person, no doubt about it. I don’t know why, but I just am.”
Me too. Why anyone would schlep around on a fucking elephant when there is any number of sleek, sports car convertibles on the market is beyond me.
Jean and I are not fans of the great outdoors. We are urbanites through and through, with a similar sense of adventure that ultimately brought us to Bangkok – in my case via Hong Kong, London and Sydney, in Jean’s case after stints in Mexico, San Francisco, Santa Something-or-other (I can’t read my notes), Cambodia, Bujumbura, Srebrenica and Kunming (I made two of those up). Trekking is anathema to us. The fact that anyone would choose to hike through malaria-infested jungles to stay in a bark hut with a hilltribe family flabbergasts us.
And when we say city, we mean smack bang in the middle of them, as we also share a fear of the suburbs.
“I loathed suburbia, just detested it,” recalls Jean.
“All people did was play bridge, go shopping and gossip at the hairdressers.”
Jean was born in conservative Ohio in America’s mid-west.
“I couldn’t wait to get out,” she says. And get out she did, upping stakes for Greenwich Village, Manhattan in 1947. I love hearing her stories about New York during that period and the way she tells them. They are far more entertaining and colorful than the drab Big Apple described in Julie Powell’s book Julie and Julia, which Jean describes as “ridiculous nonsense.” She’s not one to mince words.
But marriage meant Jean was trapped in the ‘burbs’ until her children grew up, whereupon she hotfooted it to Sun Valley, Idaho to visit Earnest Hemmingway’s grave and get a quick divorce, which laws back then prohibited in most states.
Flash forward a few decades and at an age when most folk are contemplating retirement homes, bingo halls and senior citizens cruises, Jean headed to Cambodia.
It was 1989 and the remnants of the genocidal Khmer Rouge were still active in large parts of the country. Not easily dissuaded, is our Jean.
“I came with a Cambodian-American who was trying to find his family and I wanted to help him,” she recalls. She returned two years later when the country was mired in civil war, under curfew and at a time when foreign tourists were being kidnapped and beheaded. A less intrepid person would most likely have fled for good, but not Jean. Off she went again on her third trip in 1995, where two years later she was caught up in a military coup – I’m starting to wonder whether she doesn’t bring on these disasters herself.
“I went back in ’95 because the people were so poor, they really needed everything. I stayed at a hotel that a friend was managing, and sent out a few CVs.”
She worked in the education field until the political situation made it unsafe to remain in the country, but she visits regularly and Cambodia has a place in her heart.
“Cambodian people are wonderful. If you are a friend of one person, you are a friend of their entire family. It’s a special place Cambodia, it really is.”
After a stint in China, Jean moved to Thailand, which she uses as a base for her extensive travels. And she still works.
As well as making the arduous journey to the U.S. a few times a year, she’s off to Cairo next week and ventured, alone, to India for the first time earlier this year.
Actually, this is still a source of much guilt on my part as I was the one who suggested the trip, was supposed to go with her, but pulled out at the last minute due to work commitments. Jean was totally cool about it. Others were not.
“Oh my god, you made her go to India by herself. INDIA! What sort of person
are you,” several friends remonstrated.
For two sleepless weeks I had nightmare visions of poor Jean floating face down in the Ganges, succumbing to Botulism or one of those other strange Indian cults, being run over by a cow or bursting into flames after mistaking a funeral pyre for the Varanasi cross-river ferry. And it would be all my fault! How could I live with myself?
I needn’t have worried. Jean took it in her stride. She, like me, is a savvy traveler.
We often trade little travel tips like how to push to the front of the immigration queue without anyone noticing, the best way to get past those imbeciles who stand still on moving walkways -- Jean favors a sharp blow to the back of the head but I swear by pepper spray – and techniques for avoiding small talk with irritating airline passengers in adjacent seats. Jean pretends she is deaf, I speak in tongues and feign epilepsy. We laugh our heads off these handy hints. Except she’s now outdone me.
“I demand a wheelchair from check-in. A porter then wheels you straight to the front of the counter then right through Immigration via the disabled section,” where upon she ditches the chair and strides briskly to her departure gate. Damn, why didn’t I think of that?
Jean loved India “except for the food” so much that she visited a second time and we’re tentatively planning another holiday there next year, although she’ll believe that when she sees it. And she has about half a dozen other sojourns planned before then, including another to the States to placate her family who say “at her age” she shouldn’t be living on the other side of the world.
“They want to put me in one of those ghastly seniors gated communities, you know the ones I mean, where the houses look like shipping containers,” she chuckles. “It’s not for me.”
No it isn’t. In fact I can’t picture it in a million years. Jean would be bored to sobs within a week. Her no nonsense, frank approach to life would probably piss her neighbors off in days.
She’s not one to suffer fools gladly, although she graciously makes an exception for me.
So what have we learned? Oh, shit, not much really. Jean and I got so caught up the latest Bangkok gossip and travel tales that we completely forgot to do a Ray Mears bush task.
“Ray who?” she asks. “Speak up dear, and don’t forget to bring me back some coffee when you go to Laos next week. Beans, not ground coffee, can you remember that? "
As I have forgotten to get it the last four times I’ve been to Vientiane, I forgive her rather terse tone. She’s still recovering from that hideous elephant excursion and probably needs time to heal. I know it would take me months to get over such an abomination.
Jean has been a friend for almost seven years. I’m sure she’ll be around for many more to come.
And I’m back in her good books after the Varanasi debacle, I hope, because this time I did manage to get her coffee. I have a sinking feeling, though, that it might be the wrong brand. BOY will I be in trouble! I jest.