Tales of a Female Nomad (33 page)

“Wayan, hold my hand over this part,” I say every time we get to a difficult step, a muddy stretch, or a particularly narrow path. Fortunately this is a culture where young people are very solicitous of their elders. Wayan stays close.

Finally we get to the fields that are newly cultivated. We walk the paths, barefoot, holding the lantern down so we can spot the eels. Every few feet I slip. Every couple of minutes I call out, “Wayan, give me your hand.”

Besides holding my hand, Wayan’s job is to spot the curvy shape of an eel lying on top of the mud, slip down from the relatively solid path into the six-inch-deep mud, nab the eel with the pliers, and put it into the pail with our flip-flops.

“Where are the eels?”

“There’s one.” He points. I don’t see it. Leaning over for a better look, I slip, slide down the two-foot drop, and end up lying in six inches of mud on top of a bunch of unfortunate seedlings. The eel has slithered away.

“Show me another,” I say, laughing, as he puts down the lantern, lifts the pail out of the mud, and pulls me back up to the path.

Finally I see an eel. It’s a little darker than the mud. A shadowy dark “S” on top of the brown bottom. Wayan slips down and grasps the wiggly creature with the pliers and we have an eel in our pail, along with two pair of flip-flops and a muddy straw coinpurse that was in my pocket.

Wayan continues to help me along the paths. He keeps pointing to eels that I can’t see. Only once do I try to snag my own eel and I get squeamish at the last minute and slip again in the mud.

“So how many eels do you usually get?” I ask an hour later as we start back.

“Oh, a hundred, a hundred fifty. Depends on the night.” We have eleven.

Wayan walks me back to the
puri.
He has been quiet on the way home; it’s always hard for him when I leave. We are standing just off the little patio outside my room, the same room that Tu Aji showed me eight years ago, on my first day in Bali. Wayan cannot see the tears in my eyes.

The sky is black and filled with stars. There are squeaky bats eating the fruit of the
sabah
tree. The
sabah
fruit is brown and figlike, and every night when the fruit is ripe the bats squeak and streak around the garden. The buzzing of the cicadas is harsh and endless. The family is sleeping, each room dotted with a light that is keeping away the evil spirits.

Wayan and I are surrounded by the sweet perfume of night-blooming jasmine. He is quiet. Then, after I give him a hug and he turns to go home, he finally speaks.

“You’re not very well balanced are you?”

The next morning I leave for the airport. Tu Biang, Tu Man, Dayu Biang, Jero Made, Wayan, and an assortment of neighbors all accompany me to the car. As soon as the driver starts the engine, everyone begins to wave. As we drive down the street, I stick my head out the window and wave back until they are out of sight. There are tears in my eyes. It is the end of an extraordinary chapter in my life. But Bali will always be with me.

In Bali I have learned to listen to the spirits, the inner one that is a part of me and the ones from the other, invisible, world, who have been such an important part of everyday of my life on this magical island. In Bali I have experienced a serenity deeper than I have ever known.

Canada/United States

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

VANCOUVER AND SEATTLE

It is 1997 when I leave Bali. I first arrived in December of 1988. A lot has happened during those years. My mother, my father, and Tu Aji died. Mitch got married. Jan, Mitch, and Melissa all moved from New York to Seattle to work in Internet journalism. And I’ve gone through a significant spiritual development. Right now I feel that I’d like to be near the kids for a while.

I am still uncomfortable with the idea of moving in on top of them. Ideally I’d like to rent a place for a few months within two or three hours of Seattle, a place that they could come to whenever they wanted, for weekends or vacations. Years ago, when we were a young family living in Manhattan, we had a country house that was three hours away. We all enjoyed the drive and we did it every weekend and all the school holidays. I’d like to offer them a country house again, this time outside of Seattle.

A few days before I leave Bali, I am talking to a friend from Taiwan. Innovette mentions that she is planning to visit a friend of hers in Vancouver.

Vancouver. It’s perfect. Three hours from Seattle. A great place for a country retreat. I’ve never been there, so it’ll be an adventure for me. And I love the idea that there’s a huge ethnic Chinese and other Asian population there. And I even have two Canadian friends in Vancouver that I met in Bali.

When I mention that I might rent in Vancouver for a few months, Innovette says, “Call my friend Sue. I’m sure she’ll be able to help you.”

A new destination is created and a friend is born. When I call Sue from Seattle, she invites me to stay with her while I look.

I ring the doorbell of a suburban Vancouver house and a beautiful Chinese woman welcomes me. Sue is tiny with long shiny black hair and a warm matter-of-fact smile. She makes me feel as though there is nothing special about the fact that she is welcoming a perfect stranger into her home and giving me bed and board. Sue, her partner, Stephen, a Canadian, and her teenage daughters, Vicky and Waylin, take me into their family. For nearly a week I eat Sue’s great Chinese cooking, meet her friends, and tour around Vancouver with her, looking at different neighborhoods and houses. I also take everybody out for dinner several times. Sue picks the restaurants—all of them Chinese—and orders the meals. We eat magnificently.

Each morning I pour through the
Vancouver Sun.
I want something wonderful, with land and a view, something the kids will love, something big enough for everyone—them, their friends, my friends. It’s a good time for this. My investments are doing well and I’m ready to break my rule: I’m going to sell some stock and splurge.

I call on an ad for a house outside of Vancouver in a community called Belcarra. According to the ad, the house is modern and it has a view, a brook, trees, and wooded land. And dogs, says the ad, are welcome. Mitch and Melissa have two of them; sounds like a place Riley and Abby and all the rest of us will like.

I find Belcarra on a map. It sits at the end of a peninsula, forty minutes from downtown Vancouver. To get to it, you have to drive through a national park. Sounds intriguing.

The house is spectacular. I step inside and feel as though I am still outside. Only glass walls separate me from the trees and the sky. The house, natural wood inside and out, sits on a hill with a view of water and islands and pine trees and sky. From the kitchen and the patio, you can hear the brook that runs through the property. The massive bathroom Jacuzzi looks out at water and tall pines, through a tub-to-ceiling window. The view from nearly every window is breathtaking. And the house is elegantly but simply furnished.

There are four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a deck. The owners tell me that the house has been empty for several months. I offer sixteen hundred U.S. dollars, which is about a third less than they are asking. It’s a deal! For three months. As an added perk, the owner is paying for a cleaning crew every other week.

Now I need a car. Jan is driving a battered old Honda that used to belong to Mitch, and she’s been mumbling about wanting a new car. A three-month car rental would cost me fifteen hundred dollars.

“How would you like fifteen hundred dollars toward a new car?” I propose. “I’ll take the Honda.” Done. I have a car and a spectacular house. Now for the guests.

Sue and family are the first to see my new home. I invite them to spend the day at my little resort; the invitation includes a hike, dinner, and a Jacuzzi. Together we go through the kitchen cabinets. I told the owner that it was fine with me if she left baking ingredients and spices in the cabinets.

Waylin, who is fourteen, decides to bake cookies. She is nearly finished with the dough when she discovers that we have no baking soda. “Let’s see if your neighbors have any,” says Waylin, and off we go. I haven’t even met them yet.

Maria answers the doorbell. Waylin and I introduce ourselves and explain our mission. We meet Maria’s daughters, Atlanta and Natasha, and their father, Walter. And we leave with a tiny plastic cup of baking soda. Later that afternoon, we bring over a plate of cookies.

There is also a neighbor on the other side, though we cannot see each other through the thick lot of trees. The owner of my house has said that if I am ever in trouble, I should call John, and she gave me his number. He’s a policeman.

Two nights later I am leaving to meet Mitch and Melissa in a supermarket parking lot about twenty minutes away (there is not even a mom-and-pop grocery in Belcarra). They are arriving from Seattle between eleven-thirty and midnight, and I told them I would lead them to the house rather than have them try to read signs in the dark.

At eleven-fifteen, as I am backing out of the hill, which is my driveway, my rear wheel goes over a curb and into the pansy patch. I can’t move forward and I can’t move back. I spend ten minutes trying to get out, but I just dig deeper in. The car won’t move.

I decide to call John the policeman. It is late, but I’m in trouble. Mitch and Melissa will arrive to an empty parking lot and no directions. John’s wife answers the phone. I explain who I am and tell her my problem.

“I’m so sorry,” she tells me, “John isn’t home. But you could borrow my car if you like. Then John could come by in the morning and help you with your car.”

How kind. I have never even met this woman. I thank her and say that I will first try Walter on the other side; there are lights on in his house.

Walter and Maria both come over to have a look. Walter tries to drive out, but he can’t do it either; so he goes home for their car and a rope, and he pulls me out.

I like my new neighborhood.

Belcarra turns out to be great for hiking, crab fishing, lying in my hammock by the brook, and having lots of guests. Jan, Mitch, Melissa, and Jan’s friends Craig, his dog Jasper, and Robin. Sue, Stephen, Waylin and Vicky, and even Innovette, my Taiwanese friend from Bali, who visits Sue while I’m in Vancouver. And Don, a university professor, and Dan, both of whom I also met in Bali. And many more.

A couple of weeks after I arrive, Don takes me to a children’s festival where there are people painting people, others playing guitars and drums, others singing and dancing. There are balloons, plays, food stands, and even literary characters running around. We have been there for ten minutes when the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland rushes toward me shouting, “Rita, what are you doing here?” It’s Dan Vie. I met him when he was studying masked dancing and comedy in Bali. I love it.

My favorite Vancouver activity is going to T & T supermarkets. I can’t stay away from them. They’re a chain of mammoth Asian supermarkets where you can get stuff for any Asian recipe anywhere. Sometimes I drive forty minutes into downtown Vancouver just to spend a couple of hours in this Asian foodie paradise. The exploding Hong Kong/Taiwanese population of Vancouver has brought not only brilliant and talented students, a wonderful mix of people, bilingual street signs, and fabulous restaurants but also this chain of spectacular supermarkets. You can buy duck’s tongues and shark’s fins, and Indonesian bird’s nests (at $250 an ounce). There are sixty different brands of soy sauce and forty varieties of frozen fish, including whole eels and cuttlefish and dace and sandgoby and keo fish. And there’s a wall full of thousands of frozen dim sum, and fresh mangosteens (the fruit the dying Tu Nini requested) in the produce department.

And another wall of fish tanks with carp and tilapia and rockfish, crabs and shrimp and lobsters and clams and mussels and cockles, swimming and crawling and hanging out. My favorite live animals in the tank section are the geoducks, pronounced “gooeyducks” after the Nisqually Indian word
gweduc,
which means “dig deep.” They live around a meter down in the sand on the ocean bottom, sometimes fairly close to shore. They are the giant clams of sushi, chewy and sweet, and they can weigh up to seven pounds. The ones in the markets are usually between four and five pounds. The round, clammy part is as big as a man’s hand, but it’s the neck, or siphon, that makes these guys memorable. It looks like a huge brown phallus, it can be as wide as five inches and as long as three or four feet, and it expands and contracts.

“I want one,” I tell Sue. “Do you know what to do with it?”

“Yes, of course,” she tells me. And then she shows me how to squoosh the siphon before I weigh it so the water will squirt out. The siphon is the part that is sliced up raw for sushi. The part inside the shell can be fried or boiled.

Sue does the cooking and I eat the neck part raw, like sashimi, and I am buried in fifteen by four inches of thinly sliced heaven.

I spend a lot of time in my hammock by the brook, the water trickling down the hill toward the salty bay, the leaves rustling in the wind. I sit for hours in my Jacuzzi, reading, thinking, dreaming.

Jan, Mitch, Melissa, Riley, and Abby come up often.

My college friend Debby from Maryland arrives with her friend Pat. The three of us talk nonstop for three days, close, intimate, personal woman-stuff.

June, our childhood friendship having been renewed at a high school reunion a few years ago, comes up from L.A. to work with me on a collaborative writing project.

Marianne from the Sunshine Coast arrives to work on a joint book-project on nudibranchs, those gorgeous little sea slugs that I met when I was diving in Lombok.

Kathy, an artist and friend from L.A. who now spends half the year in a wonderful old farmhouse on the Sunshine Coast (it’s through Kathy that I met Marianne), comes with her dog en route to L.A. I like being in the hosting mode.

And Don, the university professor; Dan, the Mad Hatter; my neighbors Walter and Maria, who pulled me out of a ditch; and Bonnie and Brian, who live a couple of houses away, all become better friends as we exchange invitations.

While I’m in Vancouver, the kids suggest that when my three months are up, I should rent for a while in Seattle. They want me closer. I’m flattered.

Jan and Melissa and Mitch live within walking distance of each other, and they want me to try to find something nearby. After a couple of weeks of searching, we’re all getting impatient. Everything I see is a box. The only place that intrigues me is down the street from Jan.