Akha Days 5
Kings of Eden

I got up early enough, sleeping in the village, but it was already raining while I ate handfuls of heavy mountain rice and prowled the hut for remainder of scraps left behind by the family before they fled to the fields, as is the manner. The rain came down more and more heavily and all the village was turned to mud so that I waited longer. By noon, I became quite intent over the matter, looking at the sky, the heavy rain clouds on the mountains to the south, I knew there was little chance for a let up, so accepting the matter I slung a hoe and long knife over my shoulder, picked up a second thin knife for brush, and headed out the upper trail of the village that started so steep to discourage a mountain goat right off the start. The trail went so suddenly up that I had to weave back and forth between the huts just to get up the slime, the children in the dark caverns of the porches asking me where I could possibly be off to in the rain. Taking a visit, my reply and up into the jungle I went, soon eaten by the trail. The first few hundred meters were not so bad, I trimmed some of the brush for the next guy, chiseled some layers off the bad trail in places, and kept climbing what I now referred to as the hump back trail, it was soon so steep. And so steep that you did not walking panting, thinking that it was so steep, that you didn't like it, that you rebelled, but rather your foot kicked out automatically as if you were falling and did not want to bash your face on the upcoming ground.

Bamboo heavy with rain blocked the trail in places, so I would unload the long knife and lop these big limbs off to make the going easier for the next village person. The pace was slow in places due to all this work, but I was soon to the first hill top clearing where I had placed enormous elevation between myself and the village. I was now looking down on that layer of clouds and many hilltops only stuck up through this ocean of grey and white mist now. At the first clearing there was a cattle pen, making use of this area at the end of the road the forestry people had built three years before. The road was so big and nice it surprised me even though grown over with weeds in places. The clearing now used for cattle could still host a helicopter or two if it wanted. I headed west wondering what this direction was about assuming I knew the other direction. But soon the road turned up again and I continued on up towards the ridge to near where one can anticipate the Burmese gun emplacement. Water buffalo bells could now be heard, and I had heard these once before, but didn't know whose they were. Then I heard voices and soon spotted a huddle under some bamboo that sort of came to life as I trudged sopping wet like a downspout, into view. The rain did not let up. Three older village women, Akha, from the same village greated me with surprise and offered me water to drink. I sat down against the near tree on a banana leaf, wet but not yet covered in mud. The women immediately exclaimed not to do that as the bark of the tree began to move, covered in nasty black biting ants as if the wiskers on a mans face, wet with dew, began to crawl. I stiffly hopped up and they went to cleaning the ants off, which were already busy digging into my neck.

We sat and talked, about the road, the water buffalo, the cows, surrounded in this beautiful jungle and it just so much home to them. Yeah, don't go up there in the high grass, that is where the gunners and runners are, stay down here to the road. But I had been up to the gunners many times before, slipping by, and was not sure today yet what I would do. I was seeking a solution to nutrition and fields and the trails that tied it all together. Their village had been relocated and the distance was too far to be sustainable getting to and from the fields.

Finally I headed on up the road which soon turned down, headed for the old village site I decided. I spotted a hole in a pile of dung on the road, and always wondering what went down through a pile of dung, I availed myself of the hoe and chopped into the stiff red clay earth of the road. But the host was not home, so I could not be sure. However, the hole, was very decently carpeted in this broken down dung felt, and mixed in very often were broken pieces of cricket, which I figured must be food for larvae from eggs that would be laid, a pattern among some insects. But as I was observing all this, one of the Akha women came along and told me about the beetle and that she wasn't home but out about and busy, a nasty sort that smelt worse than the dung she bored the hole down through. Where had I heard that before? The Akha woman went back the way she came, and I continued on with the road that now tipped off steeply. She hollered a few times at the water buffalo but I could no longer see her so she must have dropped off on a trail there, the wooden bell clunking down in the jungle brush. I spotted a big red fig on the road, and looked up the bank for the tree and there it was, figs that grow right off the bark as many fruits in asia, not off branches, but rather off the trunk, just the stem and the fruit. I climbed up, stuck a stick together with my long knife and reached up some six feet to bump one of the figs off. It landed in the grass and I pealed its skin and the inside out which had a worm's untidy room, things scattered around that looked like old brown leather workboots but were not. Then I ate the fleshy pink outer layer, not much, but no waste of time for its kind flavor. My mind jumped to those little orange fruits under other trees that had layers you must peal off but have the sweetest nectar when you chew the juice from them, no bigger than a rather small grape, but so fine.

On down the road I soon came to the second cattle pen, made right in the road this time, the muddy track going around it next to the brush of the downside. Then the road jacked to the right and down some more, but now I was on the edge of a great jungle canyon and needed to take a careful look at all this. I still wasn't sure what the day was about, how this fit into my plan, or what I could make of it all. I could see the road way down below and knew I didn't want to go down yet. But I walked a few paces and my mind was taken off questions when I spotted a very large bush, covered in wild eggplant. So I took a cloth from my pocket, and picked many and tied them in a bundle and fastened this to my belt for the moment. Then I walked a little ways back to the corner of the road and gave great thought to the matter. In this great canyon there were a couple islands of jungle if one looked carefully so crossing it directly was no small matter, and I knew the steam would soon on knock the energy out of me and I had tools to carry. On the downside of the far canyon wall I could see a mud trail, very steep but much eroded or used.

Near to me was an old abandoned terrace for rice. Now many years gone unkept. But up to my left, sureal, like some magic landing place, was a velvet of the most wonderful green cleared in the middle of a jungle so grand that my eyes could not believe that people, that humans like myself, had once been living in such a fantastic place. The view, almost like a shock, because it just did not fit, grasped my mind and eye with intensity. I pulled the small knife and began clearing vines in the trail that the water buffalo had gone up. Feet wet from the mud, back wet from above and now vines in the face, I cleared them best I could and pushed it all away with my arms and made it to the other side, now off the road and on to a very old jungle trail, packed hard except where the hollow left the water for the animals to churn it up. The old village site lay nestled up on the other side of the top end of the canyon and I could hear the water pouring down the creek from all the springs in all the hidings of the trees. But I had not gotten very far when I spotted the big pods on top of a tree, that we often used for chopping into meat to make a meat cake. So I dropped all my tools again, took my small knife and headed down into the bamboo to find one piece that was long and skinny and a hook on one end. Soon found I then hefted this very long pole up into the top of the tree and pulled down a couple of pods. I tied them together with a small vine on the trail, one of those super strong ones which always caught my feet, and hung the arm long flat pods over my shoulder, hefted my tools and was soon climbing higher into the canyon.

The trail wove through fantastic forest of bamboo and large trees, never cut by any Akha. Matter of fact I could see no fields any where which I looked, only large trees. I came into a dark turn in the trail and there was a creek full of stones that I made it across, not so big, wet, fed by a spring. A very neat trench, very new, a hand width wide, was cut from the spring and went down the trail. It was leaking, so not even seeing yet where it went, I had compassion on what I figured was someone moving water for a small planting of some sort, so I patched the little water sluice and then headed down the trail further. Then I saw that the water sluice dumped the water into a carefully split bamboo that was now a pipe for this water and walking further I saw signs of much activity right there were I was, surprisingly lacking a human sitting stone still there watching me through all this. And then I came to see that there was a big hole dug under the trail, someone persuing an animal, and that the water was dropped onto another split piece of bamboo and directed into the hole to chase the animal out. I could hear it falling like in a cave as it ran into the hole deeper but no trace of animal come or gone. A hoe handle stood against the bamboo, freshly made, but no hoe blade. A huge tailing of dirt, spread out below the venture. Then I spotted on the side of the trail an old bamboo hand made box what the Akha use in their huts. Not left by this worker, but just sticking out from under some leaves. I carried it some ways.

On along the trail I went, more forest, great emerald leaves on huge stems sprouted all along the trail, towering over me and showering me with water when I bumped them. I crawled on through this like a field of corn, and slowly ended up in the bottom of the canyon. The land was full of drug runners and the trail was covered with fresh boot marks, the hairs on my neck not raised yet, my mind on other things. The villagers told me they would cut my throat, said it with their hands first, drawing them across their throats as they stuck out their tongues, and true, many corpses were seen up here by the Akha women. What amazed me is that they came up here, but that was another tale. Anyway, I was on the other side of the event from terror, so kept on, expecting at any moment for the leaves to give way to guns and small dark skinned faces with quick eyes from the Burma side. There were many groups running drugs from Burma to the Thai side here, all under the big guns. Sometimes you could hear other people here too. Some people were here only to kill them. No one was sure who was who. I wondered how many were squatted close to the trail watching me walk by meters away, the tracks still fresh, not washed by rain. I almost expected to get slapped by a bullet as well, figuring that there were worse and more noisy places to watch your blood run in the spring than here, cold but warm, in the hands of the jungle.

Occasionally I could hear the tink, tink, tink of a single gunner, then suddenly came in a heavy dmm thack, dmm thack, dmm thack of a heavy gun homing in on a target higher above me on the grass covered ridge. But today was silent. Never the less, I felt not reassured just because my neck hairs were not bristling, but it was only myself and the trail, steep down to the right, steep up to the left, and not much anywhere or energy to dodge.

Finally I made it into the very bottom creek of the canyon, but now was so high up that the water was small. I looked for the trail to come clearly out of the creek, but it did not. It dissolved, as though blurred by vision. So I went left after leaving the creek and was soon in lush bananas and huge flower bushes, so massive and their many soft branches nearly impenetrable. I was on the left side of the village clearing suddenly not on the right side where I wanted to be, and I did not realize I was already this high up, but thought I was still far below the village. One look at the thousands of flower branches towering above me was enough to dishearted me, waterlogged clothes, and a bit hungry by now. No trail. I tried not to think about what I saw, and began working my way through all these black arms beneath the great leaves, felty leaves, that wanted to cling to me when I touched them. Some branches I had to only cut or I could not go on, as they were so long as impossible to move aside. Despite all the branches, it was as if the space was clear down there below the leaves, and then I saw them. Standing on these flat earthen benches, like prisoners of time on a vigil, silent, not speaking, watching me before I had spotted them, towering above me, were the posts of Akha houses. Their tops each carved with a notch or a peg, in distance from each other, but still in line, their arms out to each other with the branches of the flowers, silent, but all in hand, bodies charred, termite tunnels built up their legs, and then the sound of wheeping came to me.

I suddenly pictured the old man telling how when the army had moved them from this place they had wept so sore, moving his hands across his old and wrinkled face as he sat in what was now the village, a lowland hole, more like a prison without walls. The cavern of the flower arms from post to post, showed the red earth of each clearing for each hut, the soil not collapsed or eroded, more than a hundred years of carefully notched mountain and not so much as one collapse that could be seen so often on the hastily built motor roads of the asian wishful empire. The flower velvet leaves and branches were too thick to spot any trail so underneath them I found my way to the back of the bench, stuck my knife deep in the earth and pulled myself and all I had up to the next bench, noting the incredible size of this village.

The Akha told me that always someone had lived here, someone came, someone left, but this village never sat empty and I could see why. Poking my head above the clinging velvet leaves I could see for quite forever below, but know also that I was very deeply in the forest. I was surrounded by forest, the bananas were the only buffers, and anyone would have a hard time getting here silently or quickly. The trees so tall one could feel like the whole village was in a well of sorts. Bench after bench of crawling, I could still spot no trail, no memory of how the huts had talked with one another. I knew it would not be my last trip to this mountain kingdom. Save for the charred skin, the posts had not shrunken in size, not round, but flat, as the Akha split the wood. I could look at all the notches for the cross members and spot the whole Akha house, knowing where what and all had been, and that the total use of wood was small, the bamboo above the ground not rotting, only the grass on the roofs being changed every couple of years. Huts inside laquered from fires, I imagined that I was crouched below the floors, the thunder of children's feet above, holding my finger to my lips, hoping the pigs and horses would keep quiet, the dog still asleep on the porch, the mother calling one of her sons to come and help with the rice barn.

Every sound was eaten by the forest, the banana leaves rolling back and forth slowly, like great flat and green eyes. The soil was asleep, not now polished by feet, but I could see that the Akha lived with here, not in here, this place in the forest. The forest was full of fruits and nuts, was so cool for the animals and in many places not overgrown like the abandoned village was now. The burned skin on the posts made me wonder if the village wasn't burnt, what was left behind, or how many years it stood, huts, roofs, before it was burned. Who burned it? I had seen other abandoned villages due to forced army moves, they never called it that, but the huts stood for many years. Vines and all the fruit and flowers the Akha had planted growing without one kind hand or voice to tend to them and the laughter and gleeful shouts of all the children gone so far away.

The wind blew, but not like it does when there are people, more in a slow sad chant from this mighty place, an Eden of Akha Kings, a proud people, not needing or asking anything from anyone but to be left alone. No phones, planes, motorcycles, roads, only trails, the clean clear water of the creek strong as the light in a diamond of liquid. I drank deeply, afraid of nothing, the cold water running down my chest, shirt and into me. As I plunged my hand into the creek the stones were cold, reminding me that the water was cold, clear and real, so far it seemed from the steam of the jungle trail. But my thoughts pulled back to the village clearing and I asked myself how anyone could want to leave from this place, and what anyone at the prison village now had possibly gained in all the promises that the army had made them? Nothing I could see, only being turned into consumers for some, and paupers for others. The chickens, pigs, and water buffalo died. So did the people. The mountain cool, had no fever for them before, no fever for the animals either. Least they talked that they had it much more often now.

Everywhere I looked the water dripped off the leaves of every variety around me, I shoved my hand to move the next batch of flowers away and make it past a post and up the next embankment and filled my hands with thorns, pushing one under my finger nail. I looked, was only a stub now, would have to wait till later to take it out, feeling the poison aready biting my flesh. I cut my way on, hoisted my tools up, and suddenly was on a well worn tiny narrow trail full of fresh boot marks of tiny feet, there above the village. I looked back, one of my pods was gone. I now had four. I contemplated going back for it but refused to enter that mass of towering flowers again, even though now it all looked distant and knee deep and easy. Ah, how different life looks when you are top.

But now I had the most fantastic of views and wondered if this was not the throne site, vast greens and towering trees to all sides and down below the tops of trees that made you feel that sure you could take flight down over all of them and stir the foggy mist that sat upon their tops.

No, I could not imagine that to move from here was anything but an act of violence of rogue people upon the articulate. I felt like one thread must feel when it stands next to its fellows in a piece of cloth, knowing that all works together and all belong here. In my minds eye I could see well worn bamboo items, boards, woven walls, thatch and angles in what was a village borrowed from the earth around it, all careful sounds, ones that only these items make, as they gently rot away into the soil and must be put aside for another piece on occasion. The posts stood firm however after more than thirty years, standing in the wet soil, laughing at people who believed in machines that flew and iron, compared to their own beautiful feet there upon the mountain. Times and times again. Like some long poem that I settled under the light next to a fire to read, this clearing, the Akha wrenched from it like a sheer wind, spoke to me all in one piece, all in one moment, as a place that all fitted tightly together, growing children, no piece of steel gear, but no piece out of place in a careful pattern of work, sound, water, leaves, air, birds swiming on wind, and always those brown colors of it all, some borrowed place agreed upon with the forest, to use, in as kind a human way as possible. These people did not dominate the forest, they quietly lived in it, like the poetry upon the pages, like the children of the very forest, so big, yet feeding them of its hand, not asking much, and all ears to all they had to say to it and each other. The ox bell, or the clink of two silver coins, a dash of salt, the only intruders.

It was sad when I thought that now so many people said the Akha had the poem all wrong and ripped their pages out of the book.

The earth had places in it. Places for water to fall very great, places for wind to blow the grass, places for the sea, and places for villages, Akha villages, and though torn away, this was still a place for an Akha village and neither I nor the forest had overlooked the matter. I knowing not nearly as well, as the forest knew it. And all about me there was great forest, still not cut down. All around the village. After all, what could they possibly need trees for? To fill the lumberyards down below? not hardly.

So I walked on out the upper trail in the evening breeze knowing that darkness was soon to be at me and I was not out of the woods yet, but I let the forest hand close back in around the village as I pulled away from it, the thinking and job not finished. The trail I was on now was a very old one that came from Burma on one side, through the village and back into Burma again up ahead. I was still down below the gunner on the top. The Akha told me that sometimes the Burmese army would run the trail, and then they might take my slingshot. But I did not have one, and a hoe was boring. They jabber at you a long time in Burmese with questions they said. One time the women told me they saw these two men coming, so then they hid along the trail, and while they were hiding, there on the other side of the trail, like leaf people, was a whole army of men, all crouched perfectly still, looking at them, the two walking men going by. They had not soon gone, and the women jumped up too and got off down the trail and into the bamboo before that mystery motionless army of men stirred.

Along the trail to the right, were more posts, to guide it, and now I was in beautiful golden green tall elephant grass, blowing in a song to the wind, like slow dancers. But the normal trail stopped, couldn't see it any more and seemed now to be muddy going off to the right instead so I followed away from what should have been the curve and went to the right and soon was in a see of grass with occasional trees and a huge number of trails going everywhere with new boot marks, all fresh, enough to have moved a thousand men through here. Still I was in the land of all these couriers moving so many items which I did not want to encounter. I made it across the top of these gently sloping flatlands of the mountain tops to the far ridge of grass that I would walk back down. For these were the fields of the Akha village, beautifully level, farmed for at least a hundred years, taking no new forest, and such a sight for eyes. For everywhere you looked, there were clouds and sky and mist and fog and rain and mountains, and all below you, your eyes feasting, I dropped my tools with a clank, mindful everyone knew I was here anyway, my boot print twice the size of theirs, and took off my hat. The wind blew my hair as with a shout, and cooled me. Yes, kings, they were kings these people, and this was their throne room, and the other people could not stop them being kings so they put out their eyes.

But I was still not at the top, however now a good ways from the gunner. I headed for the last leg of trail going to the ridge, switching from this horde of trails through the grass turning everywhere, like so many secretly dodging each other, and soon cut across to the top of the long ridge that I would run down, for it was way at the bottom of this ridge, with a small patch of forest in the middle, that the Akha farmed now. They had been content to be where they were, asked for nothing, but they were moved, made again to clear land, and thus trees were lost. Now even that land was being taken, but one could see that the land that they had needed all along had never grown. They had used it carefully, so many families need only so much food, only want to walk so far, which in the past had been only a few minutes from the village and clean drinking water, now it was hours.

Some sticks and leaves made a shelter nearly torn apart by the wind and there lay a piece of salt that I quickly grabbed up and ate and a chili pepper. I popped that in my mouth and then ate some of the tiny wild egg plants I still had with me. The fire still smoldered. There was wind and sky in every direction. I could see a big village further below and one village just a tadd to my left into Burma, the grass thatch of one hut peaking out from behind the hill which hid the village from view.

The sun was biting into clouds and it would soon be below me if I didn't get going. I still had to drop down very far and go through one big forest to reach the new fields and from the new fields I must still walk more than two hours. It was already past six in the evening I figured. Too tired to make my body or feet scurry, I began walking down the rolling ridge expecting to take off into the great forest when the trail hit the bird rock. I called it the bird rock and all the Akha knew what I was talking because sometimes game birds were cleaned here, you could see the feathers, or someone hung their legs off it and had a smoke, looking far away at the sky and villages below and other mountains in the distance to the east and north. I jumped out on this huge rock for a moment and then headed down the trail into the darkening forest. The bird rock was called after an Akha man shot by a Lahu there many years ago, they didn't call it the bird rock to themselves. I turned onto the trail and headed immediately into a very big very dark forest, closing over me like black lava, while I hoped for a spot of light to peer at me from the other end, but it did not, and just got darker and darker as I made my self do the best I could to dart throught these stands of trees. The going was rough, the trail getting slippery with time and dispappearing completely. I guided myself by spotting tiny light to right and left off the ridge through the great trees to know that I was still on the center of the ridge and not headed down into some haunting hollow that would plunge off into steep gorges from which you could not get out of quickly.

Twice I had to find my way back to the center of the ridge. Snaking through the trees, as if a ghost, no one else there, least not talking to me, which was just as well. Compared to the jungle, this was the woods, and not so friendly, not to me, not to the Akha it would seem, who now had to live below it. I went on endlessly, the sun long gone, the darkness soon to be black and only sparked a little hope when I caught the last light dimming as it fled the stands of rice fields on the sides of the lower mountains as I came out into them from such a dark wood. The green quickly turned dark like deep water and I found a trail now west and still down. But each time the trail had to cross some spring, it went back into the woods, because there was always woods around the routes of the springs and then I could see nothing, only listen to the water, guage the curve of what must be the trail, as trails tend to be like that, and grope on with my feet, then coming back out into a little lightness and rushing along fast as I could stir myself, knowing that I must save energy for two hours still. Mountain working huts stood in the deep green rice now, forest above, looking quite disaproving, the bottom of the valley below, not the same valley, not the same forest, no kindness here. I hurried on, the bamboo chafing a noise to send me on my way, but no sun to heat the sound of the ants so that it would come up to me off the trail. Sometimes in the day I saw those ants, great troops of them, far as you could see, in great ranks, or the termites, that all snapped back and forth to each other as they marched and finaly disappeared down a hole, but this night was not friendly and this trail felt less friendly than the ones above near to the gunners.

I got on along, but soon it was hopelessly dark, only one star, clouds, all dark. The trail sometimes made a dim light spot in a long line before me, but I had to think more what the trail might be up to than able to see it. I could only feel it. I dropped the long knife down off my shoulder, it no longer clanking to the hoe, and taking the handle in my right hand began feeling out the trail for every step. Sometimes the star shone light into the holes of the water buffalo tracks which had filled with rain, so it appeared that there were white circles on the ground in front of me. As long as I walked in this splashing sucking mud, I could know that no soft voiced water buffalo would put me wrong and went on.

But soon as the trail went hard I had to find it again with the knife, when all around me it was mostly wind swept hillside, so dark was it. I got off the trail a time or two, soon got back on, like walking off a cliff or into a wall, but my mind dull with how far this was and how long it was going to take, crossing creeks still in the jungle, not being able to hear a thing or even see the white of the water as it crashed over the rocks. I couldn't see the rocks either, cause it was so black, like a black hollow sucking light from fields, dropping it into the water and washing it down the mountain. So unable to see even stepping stones or bamboo walks I had to each time cross through the water, because I could feel the water on my legs and know I was at least not stumbling into the jungle again.

The trail was hopelessly chewed up by water buffalo, horses, and rain. Very steep in places, I falling down more than once, feeling the blade of the long knife slide into the flesh of my one hand, then planting the knife deep in the dirt to hold myself, getting back up and going along side ways one step at a time through narrow places the trail went in the dark, brush to each side, nothing but mud, no steps, and nothing to see. I trudged on, down as it were into a swamp, no place for kings and found the village before anything else found me, covered in mud, soaking wet for some ten hours now, and knowing a little bit more about how a proud people had come to poverty. Oppression.