Author: <span>Patrick Cumby</span>
Patrick Cumby is a science fiction writer who also blogs about exploring the real world. He's sharing his thoughts at PatrickCumby.com.
This post is part of a series of micro-travelogues called Seven Weeks in India. To see all the posts in this series, click here.
My driver’s name is Kal, and he will be taking me everywhere I want to go over the next eight days while I tour the southern Indian state of Kerala. Sounds cool, right, to have a private driver to chauffer you around, leaving you stress-free to enjoy the trip? A driver that is also a local guide who can point out interesting sights and activities along the route and explain the background to what you are seeing? A driver who is at your total disposal 24 hours a day?
Yes, but… this is India, where nothing is ever as simple or as easy as it first seems.
I’m in a taxi in the western Indian state of Goa, a sun-drenched surfer’s paradise known for good seafood, wild parties and easy access to illicit drugs. Like most of India, to my western eyes it’s a hard-to-grasp mishmash of poverty and prosperity, of vitality and dreariness, of incredible beauty and unbelievable filth. It’s also the only place I’ve ever visited where all of the world’s major religions seem to coexist in at least some level of harmony. There are lots of huge Christian churches (courtesy of the Portuguese colonial rulers), but there are also impressive collections of Islamic mosques, Hindu temples, and other religious structures I can’t even identify. Given this obvious attitude of religious tolerance, I guess the shrine on my taxi driver’s dashboard shouldn’t surprise me.
The moving map with the little airplane icon doesn’t show political borders, just a low-resolution image of satellite terrain. Where am I? I check the route map in the back of the airline magazine. Are we flying over Armenia or Turkey? I’m beginning to realize that my high-school geography is totally inadequate when confronted by the real world. Maybe that’s the Republic of Georgia in the distance to the north? Could it be Russia?
The ride is smooth; the roars, rumbles and hisses of an airliner in flight have merged into an acoustic lullaby. Everyone else is asleep, but I find myself glued to the window, trying not to smudge the cold plastic with my noseprint. It’s after midnight and the full moon is behind us, revealing a soft, snow-covered landscape of wrinkles and folds. Above, the stars are harsh blue perforations in a cold steel sky, arranged in strange patterns like an indecipherable blueprint of creation.
We’re flying over some of the most beautiful and exotic lands on Earth. How can it be that nobody else is enthralled by the view? Why isn’t every nose stuck to the glass, watching the wonders of the planet scroll slowly below us in the ethereal moonlight? How is it that nobody cares?
This post is part of a series of micro-travelogues called Seven Weeks in India. To see all the posts in this series, click here.
I first noticed it on my wall-map of the world, a small, oddly-shaped blob of Indian territory disconnected from the rest of country linked by a long, thin tether of land I could cover with my pinkie finger. This strange little geographic extrusion was unlabeled; it looked oddly vulnerable stuck between Nepal and Bhutan and Burma and Tibet and Bangladesh and China.
You can read history from a simple map. The fact that this region was a part of India even though it was so remote and disconnected suggested a geopolitical struggle at some point in the past. Its location at the base of the Himalayas and at the center of a cluster of other nations suggested strategic importance. Curious, I looked at the area in Google Maps. Odd and compelling place names filled the screen: Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh. When I switched to satellite view in Google Maps I was confronted by a bizarre landscape of a truly gigantic river basin draining the world’s highest mountains. It was obvious from the map image that this was a land of tremendous geological scale. The biggest rivers, the biggest mountains. I was instantly hooked. I’d stumbled across a strange and exotic land, the most undeveloped region of India, a sheltered cocoon filled with tiny remote villages and traditional tribal cultures and a vast alien landscape unlike anyplace else in the world. We would definitely be visiting this place on our trip to India.
But how?
Admittedly, this is a bit heavy-handed and iconoclastic, but I offer no apologies; it’s the way I felt after reading the news today.
She was born in the heart of the first man, and she has stalked us since. It was she who elevated the kings to their thrones and the gods to their high realms, and through the millennia her tyranny has grown boundless.
To some she seems a noble warrior: tall and terrible; to others she is a virtuous goddess: beautiful and compelling. Yet all men know the crushing power of her weapons: in her right hand is Patriotism, in her left Religion, and spanning her brow is the crown of Righteousness. She is glory and misery, passion and cruelty. She is the sword and the flag, the hymn and the verse. She is the army marching to defend the homeland from the enemy, the preacher condemning the unbelievers. She knows that the hollow cavity of our soul can be filled by love or fear, but not both, and that fear is the more energizing passion.
Here’s a flash-fiction story inspired by an evening I spent at Canyon de Chelley, surely one of the most magical places on the North American continent.
The old man stood at the rim of a canyon in Navajo country, his toes just three inches from the raw edge. Sunset had come and gone, and now the thousand-foot-drop at his feet could only be perceived as a black emptiness as huge and compelling as eternity itself. It was visceral, existential; instead of a canyon, he felt as if he was leaning over the farthest end of the earth, staring down into cosmic infinity. Death was three inches away, but he’d never felt more alive.
A 90-minute drive south from Portland brings you to one of the most unique hiking trails in America. The Trail of Ten Falls is an easy, 8.7-mile loop hike in the Silver Falls State Park. The name of the trail doesn’t do it justice. Yes, there are ten waterfalls along the trail. The thing is, though, several of them are terrifically magnificent, dropping vertically 200 feet or more. The trail even passes behind a few of the largest falls, giving you the unique perspective of standing inside one of nature’s most awe-inspiring engines.
My wife and I hiked the trail and captured our experience on a short video. Check it out for the highlights of the trail, and if you are ever in Oregon, make the time to visit this state park. You won’t be disappointed.
I hear the same mantras over and over from my most successful and happy friends, as well as the famous artists and business people I admire most: Live in the moment. Be mindful. Live like there’s no tomorrow. It leaves me wondering… do they know something I don’t? What the heck do those words even mean, really?
So, as a project for the new year, I’m going to do a little philosophical experiment. And because I’m a writer, I’m going to write about it. If you don’t like philosophy, or you don’t care for experiments, stop reading now and go check out the latest cool article over at wired.com.
Okay, you’re still reading so let’s just dive in. I’m neither a philosopher nor a scientist, but in an effort to make my philosophical experiment be all scientific-like, I’ve developed a hypothesis. Here it is:
Screw the future. It’s irrelevant to happiness and it hinders success.
Designers say the eye is guided by the simplest elements of an image. Maybe that’s why we humans find whitespace so compelling; it provides context for the pattern-recognition tendencies of our brains. But truly, it is the unexpected disruption of simplicity that elevates a beautiful scene into one that is sublime.
Writing is influenced by so many things, from your mood to the meal you just ate to the temperature of the room and the comfort of your chair. Writers all dream of finding the perfect spot to do our work, quiet and undisturbed but surrounded by beauty and inspiration. We all have to settle for what we have, an old armchair in the bedroom or the kitchen table or the hotel bed at a Hampton Inn.
Some writing spots, however, are better than others, and some, occasionally, are spot-on perfect. Once I found a place so perfect, so sublime, that I had to bottle it up and save it for a rainy day. Even now I regularly retrieve the bottle and pour it out whenever, like today, my chair is uncomfortable and the room is cold and the sky outside is grim. Today’s bottle contains a stone patio on the city walls of Montepulciano, Italy, high on a hill in Tuscany.
