You do hear about people—sure—who visit someplace Asian and scenic at a certain altitude, Asian or Indian, and then decide to go native. In one fell swoop they copy the whole Buddhist or yoga idea, they give away their worldly goods, move to a mountain hut where baths are taken in the snow and then pretend they never heard of home equity lines of credit or eyelash extensions. Next comes the cross-legged chanting, the wearing of loose and flowing robes, the eating of plain brown rice; some of them eat the rice just one grain at a time, holding that single grain in long, delicate chopsticks.
You hear about it and, despite your incredulity that a person would ever give up the bounty of our modern life, a minuscule part of you can almost see the seduction. Just minuscule, but still. I didn’t want to run the risk. I’ll take a pass on that serenity, I said to Chip, I’m just not in the mood for it.
I think, to be honest, Chip really wasn’t in the mood either, once he did more research and got an inkling that the monks wouldn’t be like monks in videogames. I think he’d been half hoping for monks with supernatural powers—at least flying kung fu. He first expected temples you could run through, surmounting obstacles and solving puzzles as you went. Then it began to seem as though extremely wise monks might be the best he could hope for, and I think at that point his interest waned.
Next he got pretty enthusiastic on the topic of a shark-feeding situation, a shark- and stingray-feeding package, with round-trip fare included, optimistically. You put on rubber fins and swim around with hostile marine life. Next came a thrill-seekers’ week-long Air Safari, where you jumped from high places such as airplanes and treetops, wearing harnesses clipped to parachutes or bungee cords. Plummeting, plunging, then bouncing; screaming, then laughing in relief at not yet being dead. No, Chip, honey, I said. Some other time though, we’ll do that.
My point was, I don’t need to be reminded I’m alive, I’m well aware of it. Catch me later, when I’m fifty, by then I may be on the fence.
Volcano bicycle camping, snowshoeing on glaciers, ruined Cambodian temples. All had their downsides, believe me. The volcano bicycle camping was too sweaty, I thought, we’d be so grimy in our tent at night, not showered, not fragrant, no clean linens; that also was not a goal of honeymoons, was it? And the glaciers—don’t get me started there. The glaciers had crevasses that could crop up suddenly, icy-blue traps of freezing death. And lonely! After I fell down the crevasse, crumpling a leg, splinters of bone confronting me, I’d sit there all alone in the darkness of the deep, cold earth. I’d sit there wracked with pain while frigid glacial meltwater washed over me, until, blessed release, I died of hypothermia.
I could picture Chip attempting a rescue, but finally it wouldn’t work. Chip’s not a mountaineer.
The picturesque ruins in Cambodia were a better alternative, but I happened to read a blog by a Canadian who visited Angkor Wat, got dengue fever and bravely survived it. But then she slipped on a rotting mango and snapped her neck like a winter twig. It might have been a hoax, I wasn’t sure, you never know with blogs: in this case the blog started quite normally, one of those travel blogs you see so many of, and she talked about the dengue fever, she took pictures, even, of both the ancient impressive buildings and her dengue fever rash (labeling the contrast “Macro/Micro”), and put up blog posts every day. Then for a couple of days there wasn’t any new entry, and then someone purporting to be her sister typed in a sentence saying she was deceased.
Anyway, hoax or no hoax, it’s all the same to me, isn’t it, in one sense, since I was never going to meet the blogger in real life anyway. Still it soured me on the ancient temples of Cambodia, or Khmer, as they apparently call it, I knew I’d be there eyeing mangoes suspiciously. The memory of the travel blog woman, first stoical, then dead, would make me wonder about other maverick fruit, sudden misadventure generally.
Chip yearned for daring exploits; I didn’t so much yearn as just not want to have any. My vision of a honeymoon involved some relaxation, possibly spa treatments. I suggested he could do his adventure on a separate trip, a trip for bachelors—or men, at least, supporting his final bachelor days, wanting to flex their muscles, commit some acts of bravado. They didn’t have to be unmarried themselves, although, let’s face it, the trip would be more exciting if they were.
Chip’s very friendly, most everyone agrees on that, but still he doesn’t have what you might call a group of close friends—not exactly. He has pals he plays racquetball with, he has his coworkers, and he does some multiplayer online games with guys from college who live in other cities.
One of the racquetball players is an anger-management student, that is, he goes to seminars on anger management, to learn to manage his anger. Chip says the racquetball can get a little edgy because of this, when the managing isn’t going smoothly. I ask Chip why he even plays with him, he shrugs and grins. His name was in the racquetball pool at Chip’s gym, Chip picked him at random and got into the habit so now he doesn’t want to disappoint the man. You have to wear goggles in racquetball anyway, Chip said, or you could lose an eye. I said, But Chip, aren’t there some other places an angry racquetball could hit? Do you wear goggles on those too?
Just your typical Nutty Buddy, says Chip.
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