PLANTED

PLANTED

May 23, a Sunday, and as of tonight the fields are now planted!  Everyone was up before six, making food, gathering supplies. Pee's brother number three, Tee, came with a small Kubota tractor.  Two cousins came each with a two-wheeled Kubota, each pulling a wooden wagon.  We loaded the wagons with six hundred pounds of rice seed, and all our various supplies and we headed out. 

I didn't know exactly what to expect.  I felt a little bit silly having spent three years of my life working on a book about rice (Seductions of Rice), yet never having planted a single seed.  Last year at this time I helped with planting at the Yindichati farm, but only by preparing lunch each day and by transporting people from field to field.  

When we arrived at the fields everyone unceremoniously got started.  Everyone knew it was going to be a long day.  I watched what the others were doing and then copied them.  I picked up an empty five gallon plastic bucket, made a sling with my cotton sarong (which I felt proud of myself for bringing…), and then loaded the bucket with rice seed and lifted it so that the sling went over my shoulder and shared the weight of the seeds.  They were lighter than I'd anticipated, but still it was a bit tricky getting used to it.  I walked out on the field where everyone else was and then started to toss the seeds, looking at all the others to see exactly how to do it.  I would gather a large handful and then with a strong flick of the wrist I'd toss the seeds as I walked.  Several people came by to help me improve my method, but generally, we all just worked.  Pee and Ma, Doi, and three cousins:  we were seven people tossing the seeds. 

After the seeds were spread on one field, which didn't take long (the fields are small, about ¼ of an acre), Tee came with his tractor fitted with a disc hoe (I don't know if this is the correct term) and a rake behind.  The tractor took much longer to cover the field than it did for us to spread the seeds, but after the tractor had finished with a field, it looked beautiful.  It was all quietly remarkable.

We drank lao khao (rice whiskey) from  six in the morning onwards, as if it were coffee. 

Pee at one point left the fields with a bucket and a fish net.  A few months ago I would have wondered what she was doing, but now no longer.   I knew that she was going foraging, and probably for frogs.  I walked with her, a foraging slave.  Wherever there was water that I would never in my life set foot in (snakes!), she'd walk right in, her blue jeans immediately soaked, and then with the net she'd "fish" for whatever she could find.  She pulled out tiny frogs, about ½ inch in length and less.  She pulled out snails, huge snails, about 3 inches in length.  She pulled out crabs.  "Snake" she called out, as if she were simply saying "frog".  She pulled a small snake from the net and tossed it at my feet, knowing that it would cause a momentary distress (she likes that stuff…) .

Right before lunch Pee went foraging again, only this time for salad greens.  She walked right into the large field pond (where there are BIG snakes) and gathered an aquatic green, two large handfuls, and then brought them back to where we were making our picnic under a beautiful large tree (which sits right in the middle of Pee's four rai).   Pee started to strip off the outside skin of the green, and then Doi immediately began to help.  As always, she passed me one to taste, and sure enough, it was sweet and delicious.    

Food started to assemble.  Everyone had brought a lunch, but it was all put out to be eaten together.  It was a FEAST!  And it was WILD!  There were tiny crickets (jinglet) that Doi brought that were particularly delicious.  There was a soup-like dish made from red ant eggs which was also flat-out yummy.  There was a frog curry made by Pee that was, of course, super hot.  There were tree leaves, raw and steamed, maybe six different varieties altogether.  There were at least three different nam priks. 

If lunch can be a powerful experience, lunch was a powerful experience.  Here we were planting a family's fields of rice (Ma has eight kids and thirty –six rai, four rai per person including four for herself), six hundred plus pounds of seed, land and seed that can sustain life.  And to eat with the rice, crickets and frogs, tree leaves and fish, everything "free" and sustainable. 

The day became hot and hard, but everyone stayed happy.  I layed down on a pile of rice straw in the barn to take a thirty-minute sleep, but I got bitten badly on my neck and arms by who knows what, waking me up in a not so happy way.  Three days ago I was working at the farm to get ready for planting, and I put out my lower back.  Ugh, something I haven't done for a long time.  But three different people stopped by the house for nuet, massage (three people with very strong hands and a lot of experience….), so between my bites and a creaky back….anyway. 

By eight o'clock everyone was asleep.  The fields are planted!  

FIRST BIG RAIN

FIRST BIG RAIN

The first big rain came on May 17, but then the next morning it felt as if it never happened.  Sunny skies, excruciating heat.  Forty-two degrees C, and one hundred percent humidity.   The red laterite soil baked hard as clay once again.  But then on the next day, May 19, a sudden storm hit late in the afternoon, and that I think marks the beginning of rainy season.  My view across the street of the tall palms bent at wild angles with wind and rain reminded me of watching hurricanes on the television.  The rain just poured and poured, for hours, eight, maybe more.  Everything was mud, streams of mud.  The eves on Pee's mother's house totally overflowed, and we were all soaked to the bone trying to damage control.  I think in everyone's mind, same as in my mind, was the realization that this was the first day of the next six months.  It's amazing how an environment changes so quickly so dramatically.  

 

Waiting for the Rain

Today is May 14, and here in Kravan it's extremely hot.  I believe that everyone in the village feels the heat, because today's extreme.  I'm sitting in front of a fan, but the fan is blowing hot air.  Every once in a while I will turn the fan off, wait a few minutes, and then turn it back on.  For a time the fan will blow somewhat cool air, but then it will be hot again.  Today's hot!  Most days right now are hot, and then every third or fourth day there is a day like today.  It reminds me a little of being a kid in Wyoming in the winter when severely cold patches would come through, and all that anyone could do is to stop and wait.  Here in the village the odd person will drive slowlyt by on a motorbike, covered to protect from the sun and the heat.

I'm back in Kravan after travelling to Canada, to Wyoming, back to Canada, and then finally to Bangkok.  Pee came to Bangkok to meet up again, and for a few days we simply lounged in an air-conditioned hotel room and watched TV.  It was great therapy.  Then finally we bussed the 6 ½ hours to Kravan.  We knew that it would be hot here, and the earth parched, the soil caked hard, almost impenetrable, with the heat.  But any time now the rains will start to come, and then we'll work fast to get the fields planted.  Pee has four rai (about 1.6 acres), and we'll help Mae with her four rai, and sister number one, Kaesorn, who's leg is so bad that she can barely walk.  We plan about 600 pounds of seed rice for four rai.  Brother number three, Tee, has a small Kubota tractor, which will really help.

Kravan is in so many ways similar to the Yindichati farm, but also completely different.  There are eight children in Pee's family, just like the Yindichati farm.  But unlike the Yindichatis (with eight girls, all but one living in Bangkok), here numbers one, two, three, four, and five live in the village, and half the children are boys, half girls.  It's different.

Brother number two, Tat, is the one who everyone seems to respect the most (as it seems so often happens in a large family).  Pee's father died when she was just a kid, getting hit by a car when he was coming home on his motorcycle.  My sense is that Tat took over his father's place.  He works the farm but he also works in Bangkok, working way too hard.  But he "looks after" in that Thai sense of the expression.  He has three great kids, and his spouse, Doi, seems to be just like him:  steady and reliable.

 The other night we were at a wedding in the village and there was Kantrum music, the Khmer version of Morlam (and it's great by the way).  But I ended up dancing with Bpoo, number one son of Tat.  We got to dancing more and more, just the two of us, and while he was in a whole different league than me, it was really fun.   Boy, could he dance.  I don't know exactly how old Bpoo is, maybe 15 or 16.  At some point I had to bow out, totally spent, and for sure he could've gone hours more.  And just a great dancer, long limbs dancing in four different directions, body always in control but so loose. 

A few days later we were all together one evening and after dinner someone put a video on TV of Bpoo in a dance competition sometime last year.  Bpoo was the only young dancer, and it was all traditional Khmer dancing, and no question, he was again by far the best, and this among really good dancers.  Pee made a comment about Bpoo being the only "katuey" (transvestite) in the competition, and people just smiled, acknowledging that she was right.

Later that evening when I brought it back up with Pee, she told me that his father, brother number two, had also been a great dancer, but that Bpoo has taken it to a higher level.  "You know," she said, "it's very good for body and he can make a lot of money with it sometime if he wants."

I finally, at this stage of being in Thailand, resisted the idiotic North American question (for which I am so adept) about how his parents feel about him being katuey, and living at a young age in a small village as a katuey.    They are immensely proud of their son, and so is everyone else here.