knew none of this when I left Jimmy contentedly smoking Iin the nude on his tree trunk with his dripping clothes hanging on a tree branch.
I headed upwards following the stream and a track that I imagined Cass might have followed with Ajahn Lee. The forest was thick but as I climbed the trees gradually thinned and blue sky began to appear.
I stopped for a while to sit on a large moss-covered boulder and to drink some water. Then I lay back, looked up, and listened. I listened but could hear nothing except for the twittering of invisible birds in the trees high above. That was when I heard a faint crackling sound from the undergrowth.
Thoughts of a Burmese python crossed my mind, but when I raised my head, I saw a small brown deer with its head down, feeding and moving slowly through the undergrowth. Then I saw another. I didn’t move. I didn’t even take out my phone. I
just watched them. I watched them for fifteen minutes or so. I was scared to move or sit up in case I frightened them. Slowly undisturbed, they moved away, and when I could no longer see them, I sat up. I had no idea what they were at that time, but I will never forget that sight. I was the only one in the world who’d seen them.
You see what can happen when you leave all that uncivilised urbanity behind? It was why I’d flown six thousand miles. It was a bit late, I know, as I was due to fly back in a couple of days. I had absolutely no desire to send a message to Coolie or Friggin or Lennie or Bungee, but my search for peace and tranquillity had just paid off.
I climbed further, made it to the top and it was just as Cass had so briefly described it - a bare rocky summit with a straggle of low trees and shrubs and a cooling breeze that seemed to come up from the other side of the hill. The view was magnificent. I could see the sea - a shimmering flat blue and a distant horizon that seemed to go on forever.
I must have sat there for an hour, until I heard a branch crack somewhere and Jimmy appeared. He strolled closer but didn’t speak, and I didn’t say anything either when he climbed onto my rock and sat down a few yards away. I expected him to light up, but he didn’t. He just sat with his legs crossed, staring out towards the sea with his freshly shampooed hair flowing in the breeze. Then he lay back with his hands behind his head, looking skywards.
It began to cool down as the sun sank lower. By then I, too, had lain backwards and must have fallen asleep when I felt a hand on my shoulder. When I opened my eyes, I wondered where I was until I saw Jimmy looking down at me from a height of about six feet. “You gonna stay there all night?” he asked.
I raised my head. “I must have dozed off,” I replied.
Surprisingly, he didn’t kick me to make me stand up but sat down beside me. “Did you see a hornbill?”
“No, but I saw a couple of deer.”
“You were lucky.”
“I was quiet and watched them for a while.”
He said nothing for a moment. Then, “When are you heading home?”
“In two days. I need to get the bus to Phuket tomorrow.”
He still hadn’t lit or even rolled a fresh one, and I wondered if he’d run out of Rizlas or something.
“How long are you planning to collect other people’s trash?”
he asked, looking far out to the sea.
It was a question that I constantly pondered on. What were my chances of becoming a facilities operator, a senior cleansing operative, or a recycling adviser? And did I care anyway?
“Not too long,” I said. “I think I’d prefer to be a forest ranger or an expert on hornbills.”
“You’re young enough to choose, Kurt. You’ve got options.
Remember what I told you? The first battles you wage on the way to becoming what you want are those with yourself.”
“But if you don’t know what you want, where do you start?”
“Start by eliminating what you don’t want?”
“That cuts out becoming a senior cleansing operative then.”
He gave a short sort of laugh. “Join the army, Kurt. Best decision I ever made.”
“Despite having to pick up body parts and then the rest of your life?”
“Sure. Despite all that. Life’s too short, Kurt. It throws shit at you, but you just got to brush yourself down and carry on. I reckon Cass learned a few things about himself when he came up here and talked to that old monk.”
I didn’t reply to that because I’d concluded the same and decided I wanted a long chat with Cass sometime when things were back to normal. And then I thought about the word normal.
I didn’t want normal. I’d always planned to avoid normal at all costs. Normal meant not changing. It meant keeping to a routine - the status quo. What I wanted was variety plus a bit of spice.
Jimmy was still staring out to sea, and for some reason, I remembered a painting called the Boyhood of Raleigh that I’d once seen in an art book in a library. It depicted the famous old Elizabethan explorer, Sir Walter Raleigh, as a boy being inspired by an old sailor to go to sea, to head into the unknown, and to face the unpredictable with all its dangers and its rewards.
As a boy of twelve, I’d often wondered where I might find an old sailor like that who could point to the horizon, tell me a few stories, and inspire me to get off my ass and head somewhere that wasn’t normal. Jimmy wasn’t a sailor, but he was an old American soldier who’d been around a bit and probably had more stories to tell than he’d told me. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, it looked to me like he’d just given up smoking.