Reasons To Be Cheerful:

Revisiting “The Beach”, with friends

Well--what do you lot think you’re up to?

 Actually, about an hour from the moment this shot was taken, we were going to have a scare. Nothing too deadly. But nerve-wracking enough.  Call it a learning experience.

 The picture was taken mid-summer of 1986, on the island of Koh Samui  on the Gulf of Thailand.  Taken just before we tucked into the psychoactive mushroom omelets—hey, what could go wrong?– in our sandy Eden. 

 Let’s back up a second. 

Readers of this newsletter may possibly remark that this is the third post in a week to center on, or at least hover near, the work of Brit novelist and filmmaker Alex Garland. Earlier I covered his surprise hit with “Civil War” and its messages:   https://www.dogtown.press/cilivl-war/

...and subsequently the highlights of his entire body of work:    https://www.dogtown.press/alex-garlands-cinema-of-entrapment/

As readers of Garland's 1996 novel “The Beach,” and watchers  of 2000’s film adaptation would know, Koh Samui is a Thai  island a couple hours’  ferry ride from Surat Thani. 

These days there’s an airport on the island, and incredibly you can fly there  from Los Angeles with one stop in Singapore for around a thousand bucks roundtrip. How we would have laughed at that notion in the ancient times of 1986. 

 That said, despite the empty beach behind our gang, the island was starting to crowd up,  and we’d soon move along to Koh Pha Ngan, which itself went touristy circa 1989.  It’s a couple years after that abrupt overpopulating of once-remote islands that  Garland’s novel brings his anti-hero Richard to the story’s secretive fictional island, with Koh Samui as a way station. 

 In the epoch of our photo, the local infrastructure was a bit janky. The faint ominousness of the journey there helped insure that, for us and for Garland’s Richard, there was a sense of having left your sedate and comfy world behind: “I looked up at the clouds. A silver speck was leaving a vapor trail  across the sky, and I imagined people looking out the windows, watching the Gulf of Thailand unfold, wondering what could be happening on the islands beneath them. One or two of them, I was sure, must be looking at my island."

 Garland’s own discoverings can be glimpsed as echoed by Richard: “In 1984 I was sitting in my living room, playing on my Atari, and listened to my babysitter talking about Koh Samui, where she had stayed with her boyfriend for five months, hanging out on the beach. Doing strange things she was both reluctant and keen to talk about.”

  Garland would have been 10 years of age at that point, and perhaps 20 when he started traveling frequently, including repeated trips to Asia (and six months in the Philippines, which fed into his take on Thailand). 

Our group also island-hopped, much thanks to the initial inspiration of a lifelong friend, Steve McWilliams. Each of us probably considered him our best confidant and certainly best tour guide (and we collectively mourned him when cancer took him far too early, in 2012.)  He was our explorer-errant, first to find the Thai islands and so much more. He and I, in work windows of the 70s and 80s, sought out still-viable remnants of the international hippie highway. It was a calling, albeit drenched in privilege; we smoked up eagerly through a long bucket list of sites including Machu Pichu, Ouarzazate, and atop the arduously climbed Pyramid of Menakure at Giza. 

 Several minutes after the above snap was taken, we descended from the hillock where we'd stood, and repaired to our usual spot, a thatched-roof bar/restaurant called Rasta Baby II.  (It was Bob Marley music, all day, every day.) We drank icy shakes (we would soon be glad for that) and certain parties dined, as one does, on the potent shroom omelets.   We discussed bringing water—this is before the whole hydration thing got so big—but had planned an hour or so's round trip to, we imagined, the high point of the hill seen behind us—a hill 400’ high if it’s lucky. We started up.

Slam cut to forty minutes later.

Halfway up and stalled. 

Missing the water, oh yes.

Time to descend. But where? We had picked out way through indistinguishable arrays of brush, avoiding the wickedly thorny native shrubs, planting feet with care onto the slick mud beneath. We could see our Star Hut bungalows below. But saw no clue as to how to descend—any seeming pathway down might, and repeatedly did, turn into an impassable nest of boulders or a steep, rocky gully.

We were screwed, though no one wanted to say it.

 I had played high school football with Tom– that ‘s him on the left. He was stoic sort,  though visibly fuming a bit at our ineptitude. Marc, to his left, was another cipher, but as usual showed  a smidgen of ironic amusement. Right now he looked…resigned, as in “Life’s a bitch and then you die.” 

Of course we weren’t going to die. 

But there was every chance we would be stuck for some thirsty hours a half mile up that mazelike, overgrown scrub of pricker bushes rooted in a steep, oleaginous mudbank (it had rained the night before). Dark would come in a couple hours, and back at the huts our travel companions, probably drinking mango shakes at picnic tables, would in time mark us as absent from our usual sundowner ritual at Rasta Baby II. Feasibly they could alert—Lord knows who? The guy with the gold incisor and flip-flops who ran the mixer behind the bar? Would there be a file of black-smoking kerosene tiki torches, a... search party?

Finally, I looked at Steve II, a college pal and co-marathoner whom—with help from the explorer Steve--I had lured into this cabal of hiker bro's. (All of us had for years done many trail kilometers, together and separately, through the well-mapped Grande Randonnée trails of France. )

How exactly did we end up here?  his fatigued smirk seemed to say. 

This was hardly what we’d foreseen when our significant others turned we two loose for this  buddy expedition, barely a week before. I asked Steve just yesterday to summarize our trip, and he wrote back, also attaching, with his lawyerly precision, a map: “So, we flew to Bangkok, took lots of pix there, then bussed up to Chiang Mai—to the East of Chiang Mai you can see the small, white print that says  "Kok River."

 The Kok is a tributary of the mightly Mekong, known to we Vietnam-dodging boomers as a fated name. I remembered climbing into a wobbly long-tailed boat piloted by a spivvy-looking dude with aviator shades and a cowboy hat. His wooden craft’s grunting motor, a converted car engine, impelled us north past mud banks, until we disembarked after an hour or so at a humble village where a branch of the Karen tribe lived simply, not far from borders shared with Cambodia, Laos, and what was then called Burma.  We’d hiked up a dusty trail to the noted word-of-mouth destination known as the Karen Coffee Shop. 

 “We arrived at dusk,” Steve wrote, “and found Marc and Dominique celebrating a birthday or anniversary with some black gooey stuff and a pipe. I took a pic of them in the candle-lit gloom of the hut—later saw Marc had it framed and in a foyer of their house in Besançon.”  

We threw our rucksacks down in another hut, whereupon Marc sent over the man he called “the dope preparator”.  We’d just taken our first--curiously taste-free-- inhalations when the chain-sawing roar of two dirt bikes filled the clearing. 

 We had been told earlier that the local authorities, funded and equipped by the American Far East Region DEA, pulled occasional raids. 

The preparator coolly pulled up a loosened floor plank, tossed his pipe and kit into the dirt below, and scrambled  out a side door into the bamboo forest.

 Things suddenly weren’t so dreamy. Through a crack in the hut's wall we saw the two red-bandana ’ed Thai narco cops, automatic rifles slung over their backs, saunter into the quarters of a quite innocent IDF trooper on vacay as he sat journaling by candlelight.

 In a moment we too had slipped out the side door, just a pair of Yanks having a ciggie by the shop's banked cook fire. It may have been hearsay that a $5K stack of U.S. dollars could spring you from the shabby Chiang Mai jail, but we were glad not to have to find out as the cops buzzed off with a last sardonic glance. 

 Back to what someone later called Greasy Mountain.

 A bit dizzy with thirst, I made a hopeful recon down a rocky ravine and saw a likely, descending deer path. Soon enough we had slipped and slid and grappled, single file—with many a sharp jab from the infernal pricker bushes--to the two-lane road below. 

 Somewhere there’s a picture from the next morning, the same shirtless four in the same spot, but all now sporting shallow scrawls of dried blood from cuts etched by the plants. Our hands that took the—ultimately minor--worst of it are spread palms-out in view of the lens, as if signaling to posterity our contrite future gospel: bring water, lots, and pay heed to the route you’re taking.

In another land, September, 2022

So, this yuppie “Deliverance” saga has an epilogue of sorts, stretching four decades to the above, as a group sits telling the stories that refuse to be retired.  My son Ridley, 20, is seen at his indoctrination.  We got the band together for a typical semi-annual meet-up,  this time at the Southern France vineyard-side retreat of pal John (standing as wine preparator), with his wife Chiyoko to the right of Marc. Tom, in the foreground, is the one who conspired with Marc (and our pal Rohan) to come up with Ridley’s plane ticket and more, setting up a sybaritic pilgrimage from London to Paris to the sunny French provinces. 

If there’s a takeaway here, amidst what at some level smacks of simple, lucky overprivilege, it’s about durable friendship. Which, per what Tom Petty told me in an interview while speaking about “It’s Good To Be King," goes like this: “Maybe a man’s a king when he’s fallen in love and raised a family. Maybe that’s the greatest reward there is in life…and funnily enough, available to everyone.” 

So why not find reasons to be cheerful?  If you feel lucky in family and friends despite living in a world gone mad (has it not?), say so. Let yourself feel the gratitude. Abiding in our fellowship– I know, "Preach, brother"– and through the years and lessons to come, and keeping close to our hearts all that we are “reluctant and keen to talk about,” we’ll always have Greasy Mountain.