When the sun sets in Beijing, it can turn the violent crimson of fresh-spilled blood. Light comes scattered through a haze of fine particles, or particulates, which can cause inexplicable and often beautiful chromatic distortions, but usually act as a translucent barrier between earth and sky. Beijingers call it “The Fog,” as though the city perpetually rests on the precipice of a shutter-thwacking storm.

The Chinese government’s official air quality index is notoriously lax, leading the U.S. Embassy in Beijing to publish an hourly reading on Twitter (@BeijingAir) with an emphasis on the tiny particulates — smaller than 2.5 micrometers — that are known to cause respiratory problems. While I am in the city, the PM2.5 measure rarely drops below “Very Unhealthy,” just one level below “Hazardous.”

Every large Chinese city has The Fog. One afternoon, in mid-July, a billowing black cloud eats up the Shanghai skyline, sits there for half an hour, then dissipates. To exercise outside at this time — to, say, go jogging — becomes a choking hazard. Photographs of Chongqing tend to have the look of bad impressionist works from a distance, the horizon flecked and smudged with the heavy breathing of industry.

I’m in China to attend Shanghai’s Expo 2010, likely to become — by a sizable margin — the largest World’s Fair ever held. Spread over five square kilometers of prime, smack-bang-middle-of-the-city waterfront property (18,000 families were relocated in preparation for the event), the Expo drew over 450,000 visitors the day I attended, most hailing from distant Chinese provinces. As I’m waiting in line, a local points to the huge number of “disabled” Chinese who are being sped through a special entrance and whispers that they’re mostly faking. If you arrive at the Expo in a wheelchair, you’re entitled to jump the queues.

Over six months, organizers tell me they expect 75 million tickets to be sold, maybe as many as a hundred million. As a point of comparison, Disneyland averages a tenth of those figures over the same timespan.

Expo 2010 promotional materials brand the event as a “grand gathering of the world cultures.” Of course, that’s sugar-coating it. It might be more accurate to understand the Expo as a kind of naff global nightclub, each country tarting up, peacocking, in a thoroughly transparent bid at seducing would-be tourists and foreign investors.

Lyndall, a 10% genial, 90% no-nonsense woman who speaks in a refined Strine, directs us through the Australia pavilion. “Pavilion,” here, is a misnomer: the imposing $83 million structure houses a 1,000-seat theater, banquet hall, food court, and a 160-meter-long walk-through diorama, in which the defining events of Australian history are depicted by way of cartoon figures in the style of Disneyland’s It’s a Small World. The entire experience is the epitome of camp — a deliberate reduction of Australian culture to a variety of colorful, hollow, and non-threatening images: nondescript didgeridoos protrude from the floor, a Bob Hawke doll rushes a grotesquely disfigured sheep, and, in a full-wall photomontage, surfer Layne Beachley is depicted larger-than-life as the country’s greatest contemporary cultural export. At the end of the walkway, visitors are herded into the theater for a final ten minute audio-visual extravaganza: six meter-high convex video screens rise from the floor and begin to whirl around the stage, with speakers blaring the chant “building better life, building better life” to fast-changing images of deserts and beaches, mountains and cities.

As the lights brighten, visitors rush along, jostling, pointing, and snapping photographs (I get asked for my picture twice in five minutes). Fundamentally, the idea is to race through each pavilion as quickly as possible in order to reach a desk by the exit, at which point a staff member will stamp your official Expo 2010 souvenir passport. With over a hundred national pavilions scattered around the grounds, and with hour-long queues for entry to some pavilions, a gray market passport completion “service” has emerged, with fully stamped passports selling for 420 Yuan ($70) on Chinese auction sites. In the provinces, I’m told, to possess a completed passport has become quite the talking point.

For lower-income Chinese, the Expo represents a good-enough substitute for international travel. For these attendees, visiting the Australia pavilion will come to be remembered fondly as their “Australian holiday.” The New Zealand pavilion goes a step further in offering the complete 2,000-square-meter travel experience: on the sloping roof of their pavilion, a South Island forest has been constructed, replete with hot springs and “flowering” New Zealand flora. (The flowers are plastic, but have been stuck to the branches of actual imported New Zealand natives).

The Expo is an imagined utopia in which every country can exist as it wishes to exist, unburdened by the imperfections of reality or the failures of history. Indonesia projects itself as an environmental Eden (the world’s “Cradle of Biodiversity”), with LCD screens planting visitors underwater, in the midst of an ocean teeming with sea life — while, several thousand kilometers away, rapid industrialization and population pressures push the country to the point of ecological collapse.

The walls of the South Africa pavilion are plastered with generic photographs of hard-working scientists and smiling multicultural faces, matched with the symbolically drained buzzwords “discover,” “experience,” and “explore” — no mention, of course, of the half-million rapes committed annually in the country, perennial xenophobia, income inequality, or mass unemployment.

San Marino, a landlocked European mountain nation with a population of only 30,000, can, within the confines of the bizarro world of the Expo, reconstruct itself, albeit sloppily, as a true world power. Third World nations, meanwhile, construct grand pavilions for the sake of proving a point: “We just spent a hundred million here, and you still think we’re poor?”

Cutting right on through these constructed paradises, though, is The Fog. From one end of the grounds, pavilions in the far distance retreat into a cloudy half-existence. By its very nature, The Fog comes to represent everything the Chinese government can’t cover up: a developing nation in denial, blundering and stretched to capacity. You can move the factories and power plants out of sight, erect security fences around the sweatshops, but The Fog will drift. In the lead-up to the Expo, the Chinese government attempted to “clean up” Shanghai, just as they scrambled to prettify Beijing in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympic Games. Running under the slogan “Be Civilized for the Expo,” Shanghainese were discouraged from wearing pajamas in the streets; street markets were shut down, or relocated; new subway lines were opened; and city night lights almost uniformly replaced for added bang. Police presence was boosted, with old cops returning from retirement to once again patrol the streets. The Expo is all about nation branding, and the Chinese realize that Shanghai is, in a sense, their pavilion — a marketing space in which to shape the outsider’s understanding of the possibilities “New China” might represent.

The presence of The Fog, however, hovering above Shanghai — and, by extension, above every pavilion, smothering attendees — pushes the entire Expo into farce: a billion dollar exercise in covering shit up. The fact is that every country has its own Fog: ‘Fog’, here, coming to stand for those particularly irrepressible, unpalatable truths that can be actively disregarded but will never simply blow away. We are defined as much by who we are as by what we don’t want to admit to ourselves or to the world. Are Expo visitors really so naïve as to believe that the fullness of any culture can be reduced to a marionette show, several choice catch-phrases, and some outrageous pyrotechnics? Or is there an understanding that Australia and New Zealand and Indonesia — in fact, every one of the hundred-plus countries involved in the Expo — are infinitely more complex that their pavilions might allow us to recognize?

In the space of a minute, I feel the heat of a thousand provincial Chinese as they jostle around me — into me — on their way to ‘The Hedgehog’, Britain’s spectacular spiked pavilion. The children point and grin, their adult hangers-on similarly entranced, and I suddenly get the feeling that I’ve understood this all wrong. For a vast number of Expo-goers, this experience will come to represent ‘The World As It Is’ — and who the hell am I to tell them what’s out there isn’t all wine and roses?

I feel like a cynic in Eden. Everything’s perfect, all glittering lights, plastic trees, and invisible birds singing sweetly from high fidelity speakers, and here I am, grumbling, preoccupied with the symbolic implications of Fog? Suddenly, I’m overcome with the urge to purchase a deluxe Expo passport and nab a spare wheelchair. If I’m trapped in a synthetic, hyperreal po-mo paradise for the day, I consider, I may as well traverse it in style.

The first leaf makes everything smooth

The flower of the likehdou blends from sunset purple at the edges to a deep bruised color in the middle. The thin, floppy green leaves surrounding the flower look like gecko feet. I don’t know and can never know exactly what the witch does with the eight carefully-plucked leaves of the likehdou plant. They end up mashed inside a small sack made from another leaf and tied together with a thin strip from a coconut frond. She whispers to the leaves. She lays her hands upon my wife’s pregnant belly. This will make everything smooth, she says. My wife swallows the medicine.

We drove to the Pohnpei State hospital, walked across the parking lot, and squeezed through a break in the chain link fence to get to the witch’s feast house, a tilting, dirt-floored, bamboo and plywood structure. My wife, Popo, would never put herself in the hands of a Filipino doctor without first getting local medicine.

Ten minutes after receiving the medicine, Popo is in the birthing room of the hospital. I have been barred from entry but can hear… nothing except a nurse laughing. Pohnpeian women don’t make noise when giving birth. Never contradict this statement near a Pohnpeian woman unless you want to be punched in the arm. The door opens and the nurse hands me a plastic bag of bloody gunk. This is the placenta, I guess. I leave the hospital and drive, the placenta in the passenger’s seat, back to Popo’s family. I bury the placenta behind the family’s house. This is where Popo’s ancestors are buried, presumably along with their placentas. And so before I ever meet my newborn daughter, I have already dug the first dirt of her grave.

The second leaf will make you healthy

For such a short, lumpy woman, Popo’s mother is formidable. Her glance is piercing and her smile is disarming. She has had seventeen children. Every morning before sunrise, for eight days, she prepares a cold bath for our newborn daughter. The cold water is mixed with the ground bark of a fig tree and other leaves and flowers. I awake in the gray early mornings and watch her bathe the screaming child in a red plastic basin. Popo’s mother sings. Then she brings the whole basin to her lips, 10 pound baby and all, swallows some bathwater, and spits it back upon the child. This child, my little Peanut, never gets sick.

The third leaf will make you forget

Popo’s mother has strong medicine. Her specialty is forgetting.

Illustario is a pudgy man whose daily costume is nearly always a dingy red track suit and several gold chains. He comes to Popo’s mother with a problem: he walked in on his wife having sex with her boss. It sounds cliched, I know. But the Pohnpei State government offices, even with their weak air conditioning and thin walls, are more active than most college dorms with all manner of fornication. The offices provide neutral space, like the coral-dredging sites, where anything can happen without upsetting a landowner. So this deputy minister of finance or whatever was screwing a secretary, Illustario’s wife. Not a notable event except that Illustario saw it. Illustario found it difficult to be around his family with the image of another plump middle-aged man screwing his large, diabetic wife. He found it hard to function at all, in fact, with this bothersome mental image popping up in his mind while he was at work as a high school counselor. (Never mind the stories about him and the students.) For four days Illustario came to our house, drank half a gallon of brown potion and got a therapeutic massage. Then he forgot. His family life went back to normal. In payment Popo’s mother received, on the fourth day, a fifty-pound bag of rice, sugar, coffee, and five bags of plain donuts.

The fourth leaf only works if it is the kind of leaf that works

There is a bright red growth underneath the nail of my pinky finger. A boil? I’ve had those by the dozens and it doesn’t feel like a boil. It’s angrier, redder, sharper… the pain is unbearable. I lie in bed with this pinky injury, feeling ridiculous. Popo and her mother say that this is bad magic. Somebody doesn’t like me and they’re playing magic. There is little other explanation for my recent unrelenting bout with staph infection and now this… whatever it is growing underneath my fingernail. Popo’s mother applies a poultice of pounded limenkasar leaves to my boils. The poultice draws the greenish white pus to the surface of the skin and forms the eye of the boil. But she pronounces my finger beyond her capabilities.

So we drive up a mountain until the road becomes two deep, muddy ruts. We get out and walk, following a haphazardly thrown up electric wire into the jungle. Up here is where the old man lives. This old man is going to cure my pinky finger.

The old man lives in a small shack with his wife. His wife has lost both of her legs to diabetes. She is lying on a wooden platform, a place she has not moved from in months. She props herself up with her hands to greet us. Behind her a television is blaring a DVD of a Benny Hinn revival meeting in Fiji.

The old man takes my hand, puts his ancient lips near my diseased pinky and whispers. I want to giggle. An old man has never spoken to my pinky before. The pain is great enough, however, that I’m willing to go with it. He blows on my finger then lets go of my hand and looks at me. Is it over? Was that it?

“You have ingin,” the old man declares.

“What’s ingin?” I ask.

“It’s what you have.”

He fixes me in his gaze. I guess the treatment is over.

“But what if my finger doesn’t get better?” I ask.

“Then it’s not ingin,” he says.

My finger got better, proving that it was ingin.

The fifth leaf will calm your heart

When Popo came to live with me she brought with her a small green basin with two changes of clothes, some cheap perfume, and a four-year old daughter. This daughter, Polynn, hated me with impressive passion and vigor. No amount of candy, toys, DVDs, or bribes of any kind would keep her from scratching me if I got near her. Popo’s mother volunteered to take her off of our hands, but I was as obstinate as the child. I dragged her, kicking, screaming, clutching the seat of the car into our house. I made her a room with blinking red lights, a Little Mermaid bed, and more toys than she could have ever dreamed of. She wanted to sleep on the cement floor with her grandmother and play with a stick and a flip-flop.

We took Polynn to the kitchen of the Pohnpei State hospital. The cook was making the meals for the patients: some kind of white corn-starch soup, rice, a banana, bread, and a juice box. The thick, squat little cook smoked while cooking. He turned off his stoves and approached Polynn, cigarette dangling from his mouth in Robert-Mitchum fashion. He picked her up in his wiry, strong arms and began to rock her back and forth. He shook Polynn a few times, dropped her back on her feet, told us to crush the roots of a rehdil plant and place it in her mouth before sunrise. For eight days we brought her back to the hospital kitchen. Each time the cook picked her up, swung her about, shook her, squeezed her legs then gave her back to us. We paid him in rice and donuts on the fourth day and eighth day.

Polynn still preferred the cement floor to the Little Mermaid bed, but she no longer hated me. I was her baba. She was my little girl.

The sixth leaf is a lie

I like to say that I have “man’s sickness.” It’s the kind of sickness you get from doing man’s work: catching fish, whacking at the jungle with a machete, and building your own house. I like the sound of man’s sickness to explain my every ache and pain. In reality, I’m sure it would be impossible for me to contract man’s sickness, given that I do so little man’s work.

The half-naked tough guy with wavy gray hair who is fondling my testicles doesn’t believe that I really have man’s sickness. OK. But at the same time my back is killing me and I can hardly walk.

“Where does it hurt?” he asks.

I begin to explain about how I was trying to push my Jeep out of a ditch (Popo really should not be allowed to drive) and I threw out my back. But each time I begin to explain, he just laughs at me and says, “Why are you lying?”

I explain that I’m not lying, my back really does hurt.

“Why do you lie to me?” he laughs. “Point to where it hurts.”

So I point to my back.

“You’re a liar. It doesn’t hurt there.”

“No really. It really hurts there.”

“No it doesn’t. It hurts here.”

He digs a knuckle into the bottom of my foot.

“Yow!” I scream. “You’re right! It hurts there!”

“See, now you’re telling me the truth,” he says. “Why do you lie to me?”

So this laughing guy massages my leg up to and including the testicles. (Popo says this last bit was not really necessary.)

“I can also treat impotency and depression,” he says.

He takes eight leaves of the weipwul and heats it in a fire underneath a coconut shell. While he does this he tells about his recent trip to Guam where he massaged a stroke victim back to the use of his legs. He’s very proud of this exploit. Then without warning he slaps the hot leaves on the bottoms of my feet.

“Where does it hurt now?”

“My feet!”

“See, you tell the truth now. No more lies,” he says.

The next day I can walk again. The pain in my back is gone.

The seventh leaf will help you see clearly

The Pohnpeian secretaries at the college where I work are hatching a plan to slip some magic in our coffee pot. They cast a little spell into eight mashed leaves. The spell causes divorce. But, they think, what if other people drink the magic coffee? There would be a divorce epidemic among coffee drinkers in Faculty Building B. They can’t think of a way to make me think clearly.

The cleaning crew, librarians, secretaries and even various vice presidents are all united in hoping that I can break the spell that Popo’s mother has cast upon me. This spell causes me not to understand what is going on. Popo runs around every night and yet I don’t seem to register this fact. I’m in a daze where what is normal keeps shifting around. It just seems natural that my fate is to be sucked dry of money, thoughts, dreams, while Popo spends her nights partying at the Skylight Hotel, crashing our car. More than once she has ended up in jail, where she likes to yell at the guards about the affairs she knows they’re having. They’re glad to be rid of her in the morning.

There was no magic, no remedy, no special herbal concoction that caused my mind to realize what I surely already knew. No, it was an American who has that direct quality of Americans that is the opposite of magic. He said that he was my friend and therefore could no longer listen to people laughing at me because my wife is running around with some guy and spending all of my money. He said it in simple sentences that I could understand. I had to leave. Take my daughter, Peanut. Say goodbye to Polynn. Run away.

The coffee was suspiciously bitter that morning.

The eighth leaf will make it all work out fine

After I ran away with Peanut I couldn’t sleep. I was scared that a truckload of Popo’s relatives would come to my new house in the night, machetes at the ready, and steal Peanut away from me. So I slept curled around her like a dog with its pup. I had an escape plan: slice through the window screen with my machete and make a run into the jungle. I slept in ten minute bursts; always at the ready to protect her. I could not send Peanut back to the muddy swamp, drunken uncles, and absent mother we had just run away from.

At the college most people thought I did the best I could, considering that I’m a foreigner at the whim of local magic and unable to beat my wife. One of the librarians told me, while I attempted to check out a book, that a real Pohnpeian man would have beaten on the problem until it got better. If I really took my marriage vow seriously, I would correct my wife when she strayed. That is what she would expect her husband to do. The secretaries, my true friends, understood that my dazed look, lack of sleep, and constant fear of losing my daughter had to be dealt with. So they made an appointment with a witch who lived behind a small store that sold canned meat and Safeway grape soda.

Three secretaries, my father, who had flown in from America, and I went into a cement feast house on a humid afternoon. There lived a happy old woman, her three obese daughters and various grandchildren. The secretaries explained everything to her — every little detail about my marriage, the adultery, the wrecked cars, the magic that had been played upon me. And I sat in the center of the feast house, mute. I was desperate to keep my daughter yet felt helpless. I was numb. I felt constantly stuck between a sob and a scream, ready to lash out at the air or fall to the ground in helpless despair; I wanted only one thing — to be free and to have my daughter. Could this woman help me?

She ordered her daughters to fetch various plants, seir, probably pwetepwet, and others that are secret. What happened next is a blur. I remember the quiet face of my father. It seemed surreal that my father should be here, of all places, on this dot in the ocean, at the exact moment that I needed him. My friends are serious but confident. They sing, I think, a hymn of some kind. It’s sung in a high caterwaul that makes my skin prickle. The witch puts her magic concoction, a little wad of leaves about the size of a quarter, in my mouth. She mentions Jesus and I think that’s a little odd. It’s like my father, the pastor, giving me communion as a child. I feel as helpless as I did as a child who knelt before his own father to be fed the body of Christ. I remember the communion wine, how it warmed me and protected me. I didn’t know then that was just what alcohol does. Funny. The mystery was fermentation. Communion had long since become an awkward family occasion, not spiritual. I was a non-believing American who had placed his trust in a Pohnpeian witch with a sack of leaves.

“Everything will work out fine,” she told me.

And with those words: relief. Genuine relief. To be surrounded by friends and family. To be touched, massaged with oil, fed a magic potion and told simply, that it will all be fine. This was exactly what I needed. And that night I sang the song that I sing to my daughter every night. She was two years old then. I held her in my arms and we walked in the moonlight through the high grass in front of our new house to where we could see the ocean. She asked me to sing “Peanut Went Swimming.”

The truth is that I only know one tune, a tune I picked up as a child in church: “God Has Smiled on Me.” I just change the words to whatever Peanut did that day. And so the atheist and his daughter sing a church tune each night. And the two of them are free. See them, there on the hill overlooking the mangrove swamp and the ocean. The ocean calm out to the reef and beyond that chaotic until the horizon where the moon bursts from behind the clouds and throws a purple light like the flower of the likehdou onto the high grass and wild orchids of the hillside.

Everything worked out fine.

“Peanut went swimming,” I sing. “Then she saw an eel. Peanut went swimming. Swimming with an eel.”

“Again,” she says.

“Peanut went swimming. Then she saw an eel….”

Her eyes half closed now. Her head resting on the man’s shoulder. She’s almost asleep.

“Again,” she whispers.

Earlier this year, I traveled to the small Caribbean island nation of Dominica, and in between witnessing the elegance of the rain forests and the beauty of the black sand beaches, I was treated to a piece of Dominican history. There was a public protest in the village where I was staying, the first protest that any of the locals could remember. For years they had been waiting for the government to fix the local road as promised, to no avail. One hot day in April, they were fed up.

“We need this road fixed, and we need it now,” said Nap, my trusted guide and friend, who knew everyone and everything about the island. “So, we protest today, and we will keep doing it until the roadwork starts.”

Fixing the road was a campaign promise from the previous election. In Calibishie, votes don’t come easy, and this repair was badly needed — not so people could drive faster or because their low-riding sports cars were in danger, but because without it they simply couldn’t lead their lives.

“My grandma can’t leave the house,” said a young woman. “Driving is too bumpy for her, and she couldn’t walk that far or that steep. Spending a day on this is what I can do.”

Several others told me about cars destroyed by potholes that remained unpatched. Farmers had a hard time bringing their wares to the market.

Calibishie is situated on the northwest coast of Dominica, in a T-shape that stretches along the shore, then up a steep hill to Calibishie Ridge. The road up the hill was the one in question. I walked down the hill to the shore regularly, but this morning, at the intersection with the main road, I saw at least a hundred people gathered at the intersection. They were the people I usually saw working in the supermarket, the school, the restaurants and snackettes. It seemed that everyone in town — except the police officers — was spending one day of their lives to protest. A group of dedicated men had blocked the main road with trees and cars during the night and set some produce aflame. It was now up to the rest of the village to make sure no cars could pass.

Police were dressed in camouflage for the occasion, armed with American-made M16s, and they drove pickup trucks paid for by Hugo Chávez. Countries like Dominica take money from whoever offers it to them — you’ll find drug police with sidearms and body armor paid for with American money, shining new Venezuelan schools, EU-funded farm access roads, and Chinese building projects, amongst others. Officially, this is foreign aid; unofficially it’s quid pro quo to advance any political goal. The U.S. wants to limit drug transits in and out of the country, and Venezuela successfully convinced Dominica to join the ALBA. International politics are very visible in Dominica, even in the equipment of paramilitary-esque police officers.

Guns loaded, the police looked like they were coming to break up the party, and the village crazy had told a group of tourists that it might get dangerous. I told the group to ignore him, but I couldn’t stop the fear forming in the back of my mind. If I had been back home, it would have been justified. I was in the midst of a protest that severely limited transport for the entire country, amongst a population tired of their government, and a government with guns. Your favorite analogy about pressure cookers or lit fuses fits snugly into this scenario.

But nothing bad happened that day.

Even after police cleared up one of the roadblocks and some locals cut down yet another tree to replace it, everyone went about their business and kept calm. The locals introduced me to non-violent yet physical protest, and while anger and resentment loomed, it didn’t change the fact that nobody here would think of harming anyone else. The stereotypically relaxed Caribbean lifestyle that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere did exist that day in Dominica. 

Any statistic tells the tale; despite high poverty, crime is low and mostly limited to the drug trade, murder rates are half the US rate and one tenth of the rate in Puerto Rico. On the flip side, the economy isn’t so great. A Canadian bar owner had to make sure meticulous work was done before lunch, before Mary Jane came around. A retired British botanist told me that banana farmers refused to work more than twice a week after the Crown stopped subsidizing production in the early ‘90s. From macroeconomics to mortal citizens, the Caribbean lives on in Calibishie. Everyone was completely laid back, even the guys with the loaded guns. After a while, I had no problem understanding that the village crazy deserved his label as a badge of merit.

The day went by, police came and went, roadblocks were removed and reapplied, angry drivers complained, and finally, local news covered the event and got everyone cheering. After almost ten hours in the sun they were all still there, about half of the famed 300, when nightfall came at about 6 p.m. 

The roadblocks were still intact when Hon. Rayburn Blackmoore, Minister of Public Works, arrived. After a prolonged speech in the dark, drowned out by megaphone noise and hollering from the crowd, everyone went home and the road was cleared of all debris within hours. I couldn’t hear it, but I was later told that the village was promised about $100,000 to get the work started, and it was to start in three days. The people of Calibishie got what they came for. This road was needed to improve their lives, for some even faced the brink of poverty or the inability to live as masters of their own lives. Such a simple and often overlooked piece of infrastructure that creates so much opportunity makes for a protest well worth having.


Lastly, don’t forget: If you ever need a new road, just block a bigger one. You’ll have your money by the end of the day.

Despite my isolation, people here have ways of pulling me in. An overnight train ride to Chennai produces an unexpectedly heartfelt conversation with a young woman working at an IT company, heading back to work after visiting her family. A quick stop for an ice cream cone in Madurai attracts the attention of a young man who worked in California for several years, and who becomes a good friend and local accomplice. A stay at a bare-bones YMCA hostel in Bangalore introduces me to a group of young female architecture students from Gujarat, who proceed to adopt me for the rest of their stay and take me on a thorough tour around the city.

But perhaps my most amusing experience was when a brief visit to an engineering college in rural Tamil Nadu turned into an all-campus affair, with me up on a stage giving a speech about America in English and broken Tamil in front of hundreds of students.

During the summer of 2009, I was living in a small village outside of Madurai, doing some observational research on an NGO. Nearby, there was a small college established by a man from the area who had lived in the U.S. for several years working as a nuclear scientist. One day, the chancellor, this Indian American, invited me to meet him in his office. After introducing myself I was asked many now-familiar questions: Why are you here? Do you like India? How do you find Indian food? Do you like America or India better? Do you like Bush or Obama? How about Clinton?

When I thought our conversation was nearing its end, the chancellor asked me if I wouldn’t mind talking to a few of his students, “just fifteen or twenty, no problem?” I agreed — how could I refuse a request like that, especially as someone who was in India as a student? He sent one of his assistants off to gather the group.
I entered the room, and immediately felt two-hundred-plus pairs of eyes on me. The chancellor hadn’t gathered a handful of students; he had gathered the whole school — students, teachers, administrators and all — into the auditorium. I was quickly led up onto a podium on a stage where the chancellor proceeded to introduce me to the audience.

“We have today a very distinguished guest. She is a student from America!”

“She has come here to learn about the Tamil language and culture!”

“She has traveled very far from her country to come here and talk to you!”

He then turned to me. “Please, will you tell the students how America and India are different? Then they can ask you questions.”

I approached the podium, and launched into the most fluent Tamil I could muster for an introduction: “My name Kassia. I from America come. I in Tamil Nadu studied. I little little Tamil can speak.” Then I switched to English, simplifying my sentences in hopes that all of the students, with varying levels of English proficiency, could understand me: “America and India are both great countries, but India is very old and America very young. So, India has many customs and a culture which is much older and very different from American culture.”

It was here that the chancellor interrupted me to translate in Tamil. I could follow along at first but grew steadily dismayed as a few minutes passed, and I realized that his Tamil translation was taking much longer and sounded much more detailed than the few short sentences I had just offered.

The chancellor paused his translating and turned to me. “Now, I’d like the students to ask you questions!” He looked to the audience, full of young and timid faces. “Raise your hands if you would like to ask Miss Karr a question!” No one raised their hands. The chancellor began to chastise the students.

“This young lady has come here all the way from America. Why won’t anyone raise their hands? You are losing an opportunity!”

Finally, a young man in the audience stood up.

“Why do you think the American way of eating food is better than the Indian way?” he asked.

For a half-second I was baffled — when had I said that? I quickly realized that the chancellor had been putting opinions in my mouth when he was translating for me. I went to the mic to try to clear up the confusion. “I do not think America’s customs are better than Indian customs! I like them both the same,” I said, almost pleadingly, trying to indicate the mix-up with an exaggerated expression of worry. But then the chancellor started translating for me again, and I did not return to the podium again as he regaled the students with his opinion on why eating with a fork and spoon, American style, was more proper and more hygienic than the Indian way of eating with hands.

Despite the offense I had supposedly incited by claiming that American culture was better than Indian culture, the audience still clapped when the chancellor finished his fork vs. hand rant and thanked me for visiting. I walked out of the auditorium somewhat sheepishly, knowing that, despite my best intentions, I had no way of redeeming myself in the eyes of these few hundred engineering students. To them, I assumed, I had acted like a “bad foreigner” — an identity I have always tried to avoid, wherever I am.

After declining the chancellor’s invitation to join him at his house for hamburgers and hastily leaving to make my way back to the village, I realized that the whole situation was not so embarrassing, but rather funny. It was a classic traveler’s gaffe. Drifting through the country like a one-woman cultural observatory, I still managed to find myself giving an extemporaneous speech to hundreds of strangers, and not just any speech, but one which apparently came off as rudely disparaging toward Indians and their hand-eating ways. How could that cultural comedy of errors have played out any better?

The most famous of the area’s towns, Stellenbosch, is the cultural heart of Afrikaner culture in the Cape — and the nucleus of the Winelands. Its streets are very old and very charming. Its sidewalks are lined with cheerful cafes, where patrons sip from generous wine glasses and graze on their national snack, biltong (meat strips cured with cider vinegar, pepper and coriander). Stellenbosch seems frozen in some indeterminate time, and happy that way.

Another highlight is Franschhoek (literally, “French corner,” for the influx of Huguenots fleeing the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the late seventeenth century). There, vintage Jaguars glide along mountain roads shuttling drivers in cashmere and pearls. The downtown exudes a leisurely East Egg nonchalance, with jewelry shops that steadfastly keep the north’s diamond mines in business, and Africa’s fanciest restaurant, The Tasting Room, a gastronomic homage to its hometown’s Gallic heritage.

Once sequestered under draconian trade sanctions, South African wines emerged on the international scene after the end of apartheid in 1994. Pinotage, the Cape’s pièce de résistance, is a rising star on lofty wine lists around the world.

Still, the country’s wine industry is only beginning to unravel itself from the vestiges of apartheid and colonialism, and to face the human costs of wine production head-on.

The story of South Africa’s Winelands stretches back more than three centuries — a legacy as long and fraught as the country’s complicated relationship with Europe and its descendants. In 1652, a mustachioed young Dutchman named Jan van Riebeeck became the first European to put down roots in the southernmost tip of Africa. As soon as his fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope, the exhausted party of Calvinists — 130 fewer than when they’d set out nearly a year earlier — made camp in the shadow of Table Mountain, in present-day Cape Town.

They were there on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, whose accomplishments included banishing an entire Indonesian island chain’s native population to make way for Dutch spice plantations. This time, the Company had sent the fleet on a mission to set up a rest stop for other Dutch ships as they traced their way along the spice route. The local people of the Cape, the Khoikhoi, met with familiar misfortune and were promptly put to work in the nascent settlement.

After weathering the Cape’s damp, chilly winter, the Dutch newcomers set out across the Western Cape, creating a constellation of towns along the way and laying the groundwork for the Cape Colony. Remaining at the helm, Van Riebeeck earned himself a hero’s status among his descendants, the Afrikaners, whose political parties centuries later attracted international attention for their belief that their country would be better off if the best parts were reserved only for white people.

In the process of settling the Cape’s towns, Van Riebeeck took stock of its unique climate: Mediterranean, with exceptionally fertile soil, similar to the wine-growing regions of Europe. So he also started the Cape’s first wine farms and promptly imported slaves from his parent company’s holdings in Malaysia, India, Madagascar, and North Africa to tend them.

Meanwhile, within days of the first slaves’ arrival, the new farm owners began to give them small portions of cast-off wine, which they called “dop.” The idea quickly caught on, and soon distributing wine to workers was standard practice throughout the region.

After slavery ended in 1834, little changed. White men continued to own the farms on which slave descendants — now part of a racial group known in South Africa as “coloureds” — worked and lived. Wine distribution persisted as well, steadily increasing its role in farm worker culture through the 19th and 20th centuries. Faced with the challenge of retaining their newly freed workforce, farmers added hefty amounts of wine to their workers’ wages, which already included meager housing and food rations — but strikingly little cash.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the routine had become institutionalized. Enterprising farmers even gave it a name: “the dop system” — along with its own code of conduct and regulation. Under the dop system, workers received five-ounce portions of wine five times per day, plus a whole bottle each night and on weekends. Employer-perpetuated alcohol abuse became a hallmark of the South African wine industry, with a litany of associated pitfalls: violence, poverty, low school attendance. South Africa’s Western Cape remains home to one of the highest rates of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in the world.

Though Nelson Mandela’s government banned the dop system in 1994, many of the 150,000 agricultural workers in South Africa’s Winelands were already dependent on alcohol. As some farm owners shifted over to cash wages, alcohol abuse on some farms actually shot up, as some addicted workers spent their wages on drink to the exclusion of other necessities.

But in the fifteen years since South Africa’s legendary political transformation, change has finally begun to trickle into the Winelands. On farms where families were once bound to the farms on which they worked, whether by servitude or alcoholism, paternalism or poverty, “empowerment” has become the new philosophy.

Many farmers have created programs to educate workers and their families, and to make sure they have a stake in their farms’ profits. Farm owners are increasingly seen as employers, instead of omnipotent masters. And winery owners are no longer exclusively white: wineries such as New Beginnings and Thandi are managed by people with diverse backgrounds, including blacks — and have improved their marketability in the process.

The improvement in worker conditions has been buoyed by the surge in global interest in the Winelands. After apartheid, as the world embraced South African wines, farm owners realized that their wines would struggle to be profitable if they could be linked to apartheid-style worker exploitation. As wine estates opened their doors to foreigners, the increased revenue enabled them to invest in their workers, and tourists in turn patronized establishments that demonstrated such commitment. While at times these changes could be superficial — farmers had been documented renovating housing visible from the main road, leaving less-visible housing unrestored — investment in workers on some farms triggered broader social transformation in the Winelands.

South Africa remains one of the world’s most unequal societies, a fact that has long played out in the Winelands. It has a turbulent history to overcome, but through a combination of new policies and new sensibilities on the part of farm owners and workers, it’s ready to put its best foot forward for the rest of the world.

Long after the World Cup has come and gone, this is a change we can all celebrate.

Photo by jomilo75.

The way that Senseleen’s dark hair waterfalls down her neck awakens an entire adolescence of adolescent longing. In that long, black swirl I see the paradise of sweltering weather, loose morals, and primordial mystery that Gauguin, Rousseau, countless sailors, wanderers, and convicts sought in the Pacific. Each wave of her raven tresses holds the allure of escape. Escape from civilization, from boredom, from phony, pointless suburbia, from empty, masturbatory America… here is the real, the pure, the original primitive soul in tune with nature’s rhythm, that soul that craves only the ecstasy of the flesh, the soul that spurns the thinky death of the intellect… all that is best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes. One flash of those eyes and I’m ready for my own post-impressionistic escapade, where I will contract syphilis and drunkenly paint away my remaining days.

Senseleen is sitting in the front seat of my Japanese sports car and we are parked near the ocean. The Mazda might be impractical — its undercarriage scraped the stones as we meandered down a thin road to this former coral-dredging site, now abandoned and empty — but at least it has a sun roof that allows the ocean breeze and the moonlight to play in her hair. The silver light bounces off of Senseleen’s several golden teeth. Her gold caps have hearts and crosses etched in to them. She is wearing a gold velour top, copious amounts of gold-plated jewelry and high heels that make her walk bow-legged. Juice Newton’s 1981 hit, “Queen of Hearts,” plays on the radio.

Won’t you keep my heart from breakin’ / if it’s only for a very short time?

At the dredging site, thin roads of coral jut out into the ocean. These roads were once wandered by giant metal claws that reached into the ocean and scooped up coral for Pohnpei’s roads. The maze of roads is surrounded by nothing but ocean and mangrove trees. I’ve been to this place before. It took me a year to find it. When I found it I finally understood where everyone was going on the weekends and during lunch breaks. Senators with tinted Toyota trucks hold intimate meetings with their constituents here. The police investigate and commit crimes here. Boozy teenagers occasionally dump their parents’ cars in the ocean.

Things both sinister and beautiful happen here on the complex pathways of the coral-dredging site. It’s an important place. The site provides a neutral space for us to do stuff on. Nobody owns these newly dredged spits of land. Nobody can be angry with you for being “on their land” and no embarrassment for anything that happens here can shine upon anyone’s family. Every inch of Pohnpei is owned by someone, but these few thin roads are free.

I might as well try to kiss Senseleen.

Lovers, I know you’ve had a few / but hide your heart beneath the covers / and tell ‘em you’re the only one.

On my last trip to the coral-dredging site I parked the Mazda in the dark, stopping only when I heard bits of the road falling into the ocean. How I made it to wherever I was, I don’t know. I was a bottle of tequila short of common sense, but I learned a valuable lesson. Sometimes what happens in the front seat of your Mazda in the moonlight when you’re not thinking straight is, in fact, pretty wonderful. I wouldn’t trade the bits of that event that I can recall for anything.

Honey you know it makes you mad / why is everybody tellin’ everybody / what you have done?

Kissing Senseleen is like kissing two cold eels. Canned eel? Is there such a thing? You know that gelatinous goop that rises to the top of a can of Ox and Palm corned beef? That’s the image that comes to my mind when kissing Senseleen. Still, one mediocre kiss shared over the gear shift of my Mazda won’t stop me from being completely smitten.

Getting Senseleen to the coral-dredging site was more convoluted that most drug deals. Here’s how it went down: I must have sounded depressed to her uncle one night when we drank sakau together. Her uncle informed her auntie that my problem was that I was single and needed a wife (everyone thinks I need a wife). So her auntie talked to Senseleen’s mother and asked if I could call Senseleen. Both mother and auntie agreed it was a good idea. I called Senseleen at work. I couldn’t call her at home because of the slight possibility that her father would answer the phone. If her father answered the phone and knew it was me, he would be required to be very angry at both of us even though I had not yet laid eyes on Senseleen. I called up the local school where Senseleen was a teacher and got the principal to pull her out of class so I could ask her out. Senseleen, whose mother had tipped her off, agreed to meet me. Her auntie told me to be ready for “the call” on Sunday. I waited by the phone until the call came. I was told to drive past the auntie’s house. The auntie would follow with Senseleen in her car. We would meet up at the parking lot of the College of Micronesia and there we would exchange “the package.”

In the parking lot, Senseleen scooted into my car and ducked below my un-tinted windows. I asked her where we should go and she looked at me like I was a lunatic. I was expected to act, not ask. In considering where to go there was one rule I had to keep in mind: we can’t be seen in public. Being seen in public, even as a passenger in a car, is all that it takes to be married to someone. This cuts down on wedding expenses, but it can also lead to being “married” to people who I just happen to be walking near, or who I offer a ride home to, or who I sit too close to at a sakau bar. The honest answer to the question “How many times were you married on Pohnpei?” is “I don’t know, but at least once.”

I offer to take Senseleen to my house, which is reasonably private. She again looks at me like I’m a lunatic. She knows my neighbor all too well. My neighbor takes a census of my car every time I drive by. She notes the times she hears my rumbling sports-car muffler leave or arrive at night. In fact my muffler has become known as the “Ghost of Jonathan’s Hill” because its evening moan and wail can be heard throughout the neighborhood, announcing my comings-and-goings. We can’t go to my house. Thank goodness for that tequila-fueled night of good judgment or I would never have known the secret location of the romantic coral-dredging site.

Playing with the queen of hearts / Knowing it ain’t really smart / The joker ain’t the only fool / Who will do anything for you.

I can see Senseleen two times during the day: when she is feeding the pigs and when she is taking a bath. Without her gold trimmings, Senseleen is basically a farm girl. She has muscular, wiry arms and rough pig-slopping hands. She spends her days grating coconut for pig feed, washing pans and clothes in a stream, scrubbing floors, and carrying fifty pound bags of rice up a hill. Her roughness doesn’t make me like her any less. In the evenings I sit with my daughter near the ornery, enormous pigs and watch Senseleen hose them off. My daughter is fascinated by the pig poop that sluices towards the ocean.

Senseleen and her equally if not more gorgeous sister like to bathe beneath the bridge over the Lehnmesi river. They perform this complex feat with colorful skirts hiked up over their breasts. I blame the leering men of the Peace Corps for this habit; formerly, Pohnpeian girls simply went topless. Sometimes I just happen to be taking my daughter to swim in this river when Senseleen, her sister, and assorted younger cousins are bathing there. What does one say to a pretty young woman washing her four-foot-long jet black hair in a cool jungle river? I don’t know either.

After a week or two, my hanging around Senseleen is verging on being disrespectful to her father, who can no longer plausibly deny my existence. It’s not my land. I don’t have the right to be there, even to watch the pigs. I am told I need to get clearance from Senseleen’s father before any further loitering.

Her family’s house is perched atop the twisting, entangled roots of giant mango trees. One Friday night I sit alone in the kitchen of this tree-house, eating cucumbers mixed with kimchi and pretending to enjoy them. I wait one long hour before Senseleen’s father comes home from drinking sakau, the calming and mildly hallucinogenic pepper root that I could really use a coconut-shell full of at this point.

I amuse Senseleen’s father. Out of the blue there’s a thirty-something foreigner sitting in his kitchen, stammering in Pohnpeian and eating spicy cucumber. In the other room his two daughters have plugged in the family’s Casio keyboard and are singing church hymns like two sirens — the mythological creatures, not the thing the on top of an ambulance.

“They’re doing that for you,” says the father.

It’s a-hard to be a lover when you say you’re only in it just for fun

If you notice a pasty guy, half-naked and bobbing alone in the middle of the Lehnmesi river, that’s me. Young boys returning from school call from the bridge, “She won’t be here tonight!” I pretend not to understand what they are talking about. I coolly float in the river like it’s simply the place I want to be. Alone.

Or maybe you notice me patiently waiting near a long cement pen of screaming pigs. I like pigs. Maybe I just want to contemplate these particular pigs. They are fascinating creatures. The passing schoolboys note that she won’t be here either. I have been cut-off, erased. I no longer exist in Senseleen’s world. I’m not sure why except that once it happens her uncle, the secretaries at work, my neighbor, and the lady at the grocery store check-out agree that this is the way that Senseleen always acts. They name at least five other guys who have gone through the same process of pig-slop watching, river-swimming, and hot-cucumber eating. Everyone knows. Didn’t I know?

For all of my effort, I was alone with Senseleen a total of three times. Two times we went to the no man’s land of the coral-dredging site, the another time we wasted watching a bootlegged DVD of Music and Lyrics. All the romantic fantasy I indulged in just made it more fun for her to make me another notch in the thin elastic band that keeps her bright yellow skirt perched above her breasts as she bathes in the river.

Baby, I know it makes you sad / But when they’re handin’ out the heartaches / You know you got to have you some

If there’s one thing that is constant on Pohnpei, one thing that I could count on for the eleven years that I lived there, one thing that is woven into every aspect of the culture, it is Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts” off of the album Juice. I have seen young boys in baggy pants line-dance to it at talent shows; I have seen diabetic elderly ladies wearing muumuus shuffle to it at parties; I have heard multiple versions of it in probably all seventeen of the Federated States of Micronesia’s official languages; for eleven years I heard “Queen of Hearts” playing, somewhere, every day. It’s a fact so random that it’s maddening. Why Juice Newton? Why that song and not “Love’s Been a Little Bit Hard on Me”? Why Pohnpei?

I loved “Queen of Hearts” when I was in elementary school. I loved Juice Newton because she looked like Bailey Quarters on WKRP in Cincinnati, who I also loved. When I hear “Queen of Hearts” I am eleven years old. I’m back at Babyos record store playing Donkey Kong, attempting to rescue a girl from a monkey. Juice Newton is on heavy rotation. I am too busy jumping barrels to learn the lesson of the song: you got to have you some heartaches.

Whatever mysterious allure islands hold, whatever romantic notions I might get about the people who live there, are instantly shattered with the first strummings of the intro to “Queen of Hearts.” That song is from my past. I listened to it in a little record store on the west side of Chicago. The song represents everything I am supposedly getting away from. I wonder if Gauguin had a similar experience — perhaps he plugged his ears during nightly turn-of-the-century Tahitian sing-alongs of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Hello! Ma Baby.”

Real island girls don’t live in paradise. They just happen to live somewhere warm that doesn’t require much clothing. Idealize them at your own peril.

Communism had lingered in eastern Europe, but by 1991 the Socialist Yugoslavian Republican had begun to fall apart. The resulting conflict was extremely bloody, and became infamous for the ethnic cleansing and genocide that ensued.

I spent the summer of 2009 traveling overland through Europe and had taken the bus down the Croatian coast to Dubrovnik, once a powerful Byzantine city-state, and now one of the newly popular Adriatic tourist destinations. In 1991, the city was besieged by Serbian forces. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, most of the army defected to Serbia, since around eighty percent of the officers in the force were Serbian. Serbia then began to conquer anywhere that had an ethnic Serbian majority.

Dubrovnik shows little sign of the damage it took during the siege — a small billboard showing the locations of shelling, and a memorial in the side room of a museum were all the evidence I could find of the conflict. Of course it was not Croatia that took the brunt of the war — to see the real impact I would have to travel inland to Bosnia.

I took a bus northeast to Mostar. As the bus entered Bosnia, it passed bullet-scarred apartment blocks and scrub covered alleyways. Mostar takes its name from the Slavic word mostari, which means “Bridge Keepers.” The city’s eponymous bridge spanned the river Nerevata and joined its Serbian and Croat banks. It was destroyed during the war and was rebuilt afterward. It is perhaps the most enduring symbol of the conflict.

I spent my first night in Mostar in a soulless pension — one of the cheap hostels that are hawked by persistent old ladies at the bus station. That night, I heard about Hostel Majda from some fellow backpackers, whom I’d met drinking cheap beer on the rocks below the bridge. The next morning I set off in search, armed with little more than the name. As I walked between tall concrete apartments, pockmarked by bullets, I began to doubt whether this place existed at all.

But after an hour or so of searching I found it, nestled inside a first-floor flat. I had scarcely walked through the door before a great bear of a man, named Bata, thrust a coffee into my hand — Bosnian hospitality is legendary — and booked me on the tour of the area that was about to leave.

Bata led me down to the minibus, speaking a hundred words a minute, a smile fixed permanently on his face. I squeezed onto the bus — the eighteenth passenger in a bus registered for eight.

“Put on your seat belts,” Bata told us. He saw our confused looks, and beamed, “spiritually, I mean.”

We drove erratically through the back streets of Mostar, with Bata talking at mind-boggling speed. We passed a popular local club that shook with fast beats and Slavic singing: “Turbo-folk — it is taking over the Balkans, something the army could never do.”

Soon we were among the skeletons of buildings in the old financial district, Bata pointed out a sniper’s nest above us. Bata is a Bosniak, and was living in the city as the chaos descended. He tells us about the saboteurs who started the conflict by blowing up a truck; about being hunted by the Croats; about having his life saved by an ex-classmate; about hiding behind chimneys and escaping the concentration camps.

It’s an incredible story. We sit, sweating, cramped, but paying rapt attention, in the back of the minibus.

Before the war, the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milošević, met with the Croat leader, Franjo Tuđman, to draft the Karađorđevo agreement, which discussed the division of Bosnia between Serbia and Croatia. Bosnia is inhabited by Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks, who are predominantly Roman Catholics, Serbian Orthodox Christians, and Muslims, respectively. The nationalism that provoked the conflict exploited these differences by promoting the partitioning of Bosnia under the guise of national unity. Croatians and Serbians alike were motivated by the chance to consolidate the territory of their religious compatriots. The Muslim Bosniaks were caught between the two factions.

Bata summarizes the situation: “The Croats wanted the North bank, the Serbs wanted the South, and the Bosniaks were meant to leave down the river.”

The Dayton Agreement, signed in December of 1995, finally ended the fighting, but Bata explains that the tensions are still there, bubbling under the surface.

The majority of Mostar is now owned by ethnic Croats, and so many Croatian tourists visit the city that apparently it is forbidden for tour guides to mention that Croatian forces were the ones who destroyed the old bridge. The skyline of Mostar is dominated by a pair of huge Latin crosses: one that stares down at the city from what used to be a Croat fortification, where Croatian soldiers rolled truck tires filled with dynamite down onto civilian houses, the other atop the most imposing church steeple I have ever seen.

Even the beer tells the story of this silent rift. Sarajevsko beer, the biggest Bosnian beer, is unavailable anywhere on the Croatian side of Mostar, whereas Ožujsko, a Croatian beer, flows freely. Apparently bars serving Sarajevsko are forced out of business.

One might expect that the Bosniaks may bear hatred toward the ethnic groups that still discriminate toward them. But Bata explains that the opposite is true: “They say I hate you, I say I love you back, they don’t sell our beer, I drink theirs.”

Bata spends the rest of the tour showing us more of the Bosnian spirit. He talks about the medieval Bogomils from who he draws the inspiration for his philosophy of forgiveness, and shows us the incredible natural beauty of Bosnia by taking us to stunning waterfalls.

By the end of the tour I have a massive respect for the Bosniaks who returned to their homes after the war, determined to build a future in spite of downright intimidation.

The next day I walk to a bombed out bank that I saw during the tour. I climb carefully up the concrete staircase, which is littered with shattered glass and shell casings. On the second floor filing cabinets full of paper have been tipped across the floor. I look through the documents and find birth certificates, letters — the records of people’s whole lives are here, forgotten amongst the dripping concrete ruins.

I’m sitting on the terrace at Hari’s Hostel in Sarajevo, looking down through the humid haze at the city, and sipping on thick Bosnian coffee. The midday call to prayer echoes from the city’s minarets.

It is a good place to reflect upon what I have seen of the region. A fellow traveler told me not to take sides in anything I see, but it is hard for me not to get emotionally involved in a conflict where I have seen the evidence of the slaughter of innocents, a conflict where rape was used as a weapon, where eight thousand men were murdered trying to escape from a UN safe area at Srebenica. Every time I see the haunted look on a face I realise that if I had been here, I would have been amongst the fighting. This isn’t just history — this happened during my lifetime.

But Bata’s attitude brings me a little solace — the prejudices may still be there, but at least people are beginning to rebuild their lives.

A thunderstorm rolls overhead and in minutes a heavy downpour cuts through the humid air. Selena, one of the charming ladies who work at the hostel, brings me another pot of the potent coffee.

“Forgive, but never forget,” Bata said. “We forgot about the Second World War, and it all happened again.”

I think that is the message that I will take from the region. Humans are capable of great inhumanity. The atrocities of the conflict echo the countless conflicts that have happened before, and which continue to happen. Unless we remember them and remain vigilant, they will happen again.

Before I came to the region, Bosnia was a name synonymous with conflict. As I leave, I understand that it encompasses so much more: hardships, beauty, and most of all forgiveness in the face of oppression.

I feel a little bit Bosnian.

Photo by wader.

Sometimes these labels are benign. You know that mehnwai? He’s the guy who joggles (juggling + jogging). Or the guy who cries all the time. Or the guy who dances with old ladies. Sometimes the labels are a bit more extreme: He’s the guy who killed his wife with a two-by-four. Or the guy who locked his student in a closet for an entire weekend until she fell in love with him. Or the guy who molested boys at the Protestant school until he was finally caught because for some reason he put up a website about quantum physics with his own name and the Florida police found him. All of these “guys who” exhibit patterns of behavior that, while sometimes extreme, fall within the usual limits of “guys who” that can be found hiding out anywhere.

That is, until you meet the guy who bit his own finger off.

There is, of course, a comic element to biting your own finger off. And Jim, the guy who bit his finger off, puts up a comic facade about the subject. After you bite your own finger off and then return to kind of sanity, is there much left to do but call it Stubby and go on with your life? This subject could be funny in that shallow, mocking way that every freak show with a YouTube video becomes. That is, until you really think about it. Go ahead, put your finger in your mouth. Make it easy, make it a pinky. Put your teeth at the joint between the distal phalanx and the middle phalanx. Now bite as hard as you can. Did you even make an indentation before the pain became too much to handle?

It takes real commitment to bite your own finger off. According to Jim, “the decision was not difficult to make, but the act was.” The bone didn’t snap off like the bones of a pickled chicken foot. It didn’t crunch or crack like a raw carrot. No, Jim gnawed through the flesh and bone over the course of minutes, the way a dog will really work on a bone until it finally comes apart.

A grenade came through Jim’s bedroom window one night. He could tell by the casing that it was a fragmentation grenade, filled with steel splinters. He saw that his Pohnpeian wife and their two children were still asleep. The grenade’s blast would kill them where they slept. Given the blast radius, perhaps his boys would be maimed, lose limbs, die in horrible agony with their faces blown to dust. There’s no time to warn them or even throw on some clothes. He grabs the grenade and jumps from the window of his small, tin-roofed concrete house down to the mangrove swamp about fifteen feet below. As he falls he gashes open his leg on the rusty re-bar that juts from the cement columns on which his house was built. There is no pain. Not in the gash. Not in the fall. He falls on his back and disappears under the warm, brackish swamp water. For a second all is calm. The swamp has swallowed him. But in the darkness, he thrashes and gets to his feet in the shallow water.

The grenade is forgotten. He has bigger trouble. He is entangled in a tripwire. He can feel the taut, cold wire against his foot. If he moves, a bomb will go off that will surely gut and mangle his entire squad. He can’t stop to wonder why his squad is here, in the mangrove swamp on Pohnpei and not in Kuwait City. He doesn’t know why the bomb is here — it’s enough to know that they will die unless he saves them. There is only one way out, only one way to save his friends and escape the tripwire: he has to bite off his finger. It’s a hard thing to do, but lives are on the line. One bite and he begins to scream. But he has to keep going, has to get through the bone before time runs out. There are bright, searching lights that momentarily blind him as he gnaws on the finger. Helicopters? He is wet and covered in blood and mud. He’s screaming, but not in pain. He’s screaming just to scream as the finger begins to give and he separates bone from bone.

The lights are the flashlights of the municipal police. Most nights in this quiet, rural area of jungle farmers and fishermen, the police hang out in their pickup truck, drink sakau or cheap rum, and maybe visit one of their girlfriends. On this night, they are called on to subdue a naked, trained Marine whose mental state has left him incapable of feeling pain. So they watch him. They yell at him to get out of the swamp.

“You want to see how fucking tough a Marine is?” Jim yells. “I’ll bite off the rest of these fucking fingers!”

The police decide they better go after him. It takes six of them to subdue Jim. The police are scratched, bruised, wet, and blood–spattered, but they finally get him cuffed and dumped into the back of the pickup, like some enormous, writhing catch that got dredged up from the depths of the ocean. They haul their load to the jail, a small, crumbling building that keeps its prisoners locked in more by mutual agreement than iron bars. A chunk of Jim’s finger sinks into the silty mud of the swamp, food for crabs and eels.

The next night I drink rum and chocolate milk in Styrofoam cups with one of the policemen. We sit on plastic fish coolers near his shack that, like Jim’s, is built over the mangrove swamp. The policeman wants to see me. He wants to know why Jim would go crazy like that. I must know the reason. I’m the only other American who lives in the area — “the guy who dances with old ladies.”

In English we have labels like PTSD, bi-polar disorder, and schizophrenia that effectively distance the rest of us, the normals, from the “diseased.” We think that some cause, like Jim’s job doing forward recon in Gulf War I picking up the bodies left behind by Saddam’s retreat, can have some effect years later, like hallucinating a grenade and bomb attack and biting off his finger. But it’s hard to convey these ideas to someone who is not steeped in our cultural psychology; try to explain this along with our belief in “brain chemicals” that can be “out of balance” and it begins to sound every bit as plausible as the explanation that the policeman settles on: bad magic.

A local witch tells Jim’s Pohnpeian family exactly who it is that has been playing magic on him and making him crazy, and Jim, with about half his wits back, tries to keep them from retaliating. The witch speaks delicate incantations to stones and wraps these stones in leaves. What she tells the stones I don’t know. Then she hides them near Jim’s house to ward off the bad magic. A Catholic priest comes and throws holy water on the house. They are protected. The bad magic won’t come and settle into Jim’s brain any more.

If only maintaining sanity were as easy as a splash of water, an incantation, a pill, or a nice long talk. Jim didn’t get better; he just became dormant. Now he says that “every thought, decision, comment, or action is always questioned in my own mind, then looked at a second time by what I call my ‘sanity microscope.’ ” He has become, even to himself, “the guy who bit his own finger off.” He is his own foreigner. Even as he rebuilds his mind, the “guy who” is still there, will always be there, thrashing in the swamp, struggling to surface.

There is only one runway at Pohnpei International Airport and only one plane arrives per day. While this wayward tuna-hauling plane enjoyed a two-week stay on the tarmac, I was stranded in Hawaii on my return from a conference while my wife was pregnant on Pohnpei. Was she pregnant with my daughter or was it one of the miscarriages? My memories, like the plane, have been chopped up bit by bit and moved to the dump to rust. Some day I will recapture the words I wrote to our two dead children and slipped into their caskets. One child was really a nothing, a mere splotch; the other was nearly formed, a misbegotten doll with a doll’s curious stare. Each week I go to the dump and make my offering to the feral cats that live in the hacked-off fuselage of that plane. I try to remember the timeline of births and deaths, but one memory eats the tail of the next and they all swirl together.

Past the dump, you find the only stretch of straight road on Pohnpei, a road built on a man-made jetty. Here I try to coax my used Japanese rust-bucket past 30 miles an hour, just to give it an airing. You might notice a stubby little tree on the jetty. This is where my wife crashed our car, drunk driving with her lover — a sociopath who was either her half-brother or cousin, depending on whose family history you follow. The only thing separating the car and the ocean was this little tree where the car sat half-perched until I dragged it out with a rope and a friend’s pick-up. Continue straight on this road.

You’re now in Kolonia town. There’s the dock where the tuna is unloaded. There’s the German-built Protestant church. There are banners over the street announcing the latest “fun runs.” For the diabetes run, the theme is [sic] “Your Foot: Love It or Loose It” For the nurses run: “Nurses are Power of Care.” For the AIDS day run: “AIDS Men Make a Difference.” As you pass under the banners, note the Ace Hardware store where I stood in line behind a man, an officer in the Salvation Army, who murdered his wife. He was buying a large metal chain, as I recall. There’s the three-screen movie theater, a little slice of suburban America plopped down in the tropics. The dirty and sprawling one-story building on your left is the hospital. Stay away from the hospital unless you want to die. The hospital is where I chased rats from the maternity ward where my daughter was born, where I dressed corpses, where I listened to the death rattles of my father-in-law, Adidos. Keep driving.

There’s the Last Stop Store. The owner of Last Stop took pity on my father-in-law and gave him a job as a night guard. Every night my sickly father-in-law slept in his minivan (called a “Bongo”) in front of Last Stop. An assortment of grandchildren and other relatives slept in the backseats of the Bongo or else disappeared down the road to find alcohol or sakau. The money Adidos made for this nightly duty generally amounted to a debt because his grandkids were prone to getting drunk and breaking the store windows, thereby rendering his position as “guard” somewhat ironic. The store owner was a shrewd businessman and hired as guards the people he knew would break his windows anyway. At least he had a paycheck to garnish. Adidos would have made more money sleeping at home. And while he was asleep in the Bongo… out in the tall grass, next to the store, is where fifteen-year-old Q-leen was impregnated by her uncle and nobody knew she was pregnant until she decided to give birth in the back of my Isuzu Trooper that had rusted through on the bottom — then it was back to the hospital and the surprise birth of an innocent little boy with funny ears.

I named the baby after a cat I had when I was a kid because that’s the kind of thing that might happen: you might wake up one day wondering how to fix your already beaten-up truck that fills with black exhaust from the many holes in the floor and then you might notice your niece lying in the back of it giving birth, apparently. Then you take her to the hospital and suddenly she wants you to name the baby and the only thing that comes to mind is “Patches” because that was your cat many years ago and, anyway, you’re kind of joking. But nonetheless Patches is brought home the same day and introduced to her grandfather who doesn’t know that Patches is also his half-brother…. so just continue past Last Stop Store where Adidos slept in his last days. The store where I bought cotton balls to put in his corpse; flies were going up his nose and, well, it seemed like a kindness to put cotton balls in his nose.

There is a skinny bridge here, just past the store. It barely fits two cars. As you cross you might be struck by the beauty of the little bay you’re crossing and beyond it, the towering green mountains. If you’re lucky you’ll see teams in traditional outrigger canoes in the bay, practicing for an upcoming competition. More likely than not you’ll spot rain clouds casting dark shadows across the water. It’s a gorgeous scene, but watch the road. The bridge ends and you’re back in the swamp and jungle. You’re now passing into a neighborhood known as Pahnimwensahp — it’s here that you might notice an overgrown tin shack that was once my small store. I called it “Buddo’s Friendly Store,” and it left me in massive debt. Next to that shack (and up some hills, and around some corners) is where I lived for many years. If you dig around in this area you may find some things I left behind when I ran away — a little plastic train from my childhood that I brought from the U.S. for my children, a wealth of Dickens books now used to balance poorly made plastic chairs, even a car that has since been overcome by mold and swamp-growth.

It’s a maddening road with a pestering accumulation of ghosts.

Each bend and incline of the circle road holds some memory of past joys or past terrors. My hands on the wheel of my car instinctively know each pothole as well as each memory. I try to avoid both, but on Pohnpei there is no choice. On a circle road, you’re always going over old ground: that stretch of ocean that I jumped into fully clothed and crying, willing myself to drown in the shallow water, is also the stretch of ocean where my daughter used to lie on a little pier, her ice cream dripping down to the darting yellow and blue fish — she giggled at the ice-cream-eating fish and I was amazed to be the father of such a beautiful creature. I was the happiest of single fathers in those days we spent together — just us against the world. I slept each night with her on my bed near the wall. I slept next to her, a machete perched nearby in case someone came to steal her from me. I was sure that someone in my wife’s family would try to take her. I had gone feral.

Adidos took his last, painful breaths in the hospital. Something was wrong with him, but the hospital was out of X-ray paper and there would be none on-island for at least two weeks. So the most we can say is that he was awfully sick: he was bleeding internally and his breaths were tortured. His only help was a valiant, happy Filipino doctor. This doctor’s girlfriend, a nurse, sat on his lap while we talked to him about the case. So add Adidos’s smiling, toothless ghost to the many wandering the circle road. He was a good man, or at least he became one in old age. He built the road. The first major paved road on Pohnpei and he helped lay the asphalt and steamroll it and now there it is. We can go in circles very effectively thanks to men like Adidos. He held his family together, his thirteen children — some natural born, some adopted, some adopted out to other families, his tangled web of grandchildren and nieces and nephews. Things could get crazy, but they would get crazy around him. He kept the circle from chaos and when he died, everything, including my marriage, broke up and dissipated.

So when I drive my car on the circle road, eleven years after arriving in Pohnpei, I imagine Adidos in his hard-drinking and chain-smoking middle age. There he is, building the road that will one day contain my memories. His children and grandchildren, acknowledged or unacknowledged, pounding the pavement in thin flip-flops.

Most evenings I sit on the side of the road and stir infinity patterns in a Styrofoam sakau cup. Shards of sakau root breach the gray surface of the drink then sink down into the narcotic sludge. The sakau sinks into my bloodstream, and the accretion of memories fades. My daughter is on my lap. Nobody likes to see this. It upsets the natural order of things, but try to pass her off to a woman and my daughter will let loose an unholy screaming. A loud noise is a worse offense to a sakau drinker than a man with a kid, so they leave us alone. If there’s one thing I learned from Adidos, it’s “Fuck ‘em.” I really don’t care about traditional Pohnpeian gender roles.

Just as I begin to get full of myself — the foreigner single father of a Pohnpeian girl who ran from one side of the island to the other when things got crazy and screw you if you have an opinion about it like how I should have beaten my wife and it’s my own fault if I didn’t — my daughter’s babysitter arrives and takes her, asleep, back to my house.

A shirtless old man with shaggy black hair and a fishy smell is sitting across from me, drinking sakau and sitting on a cement block. He looks at me, says “get on top!” in Pohnpeian and then gulps down his entire cup of sakau. We laugh. His “get on top!” is a sexual innuendo that refers to the woman-on-top or “coconut grating” position.

It’s the sort of thing Adidos used to laugh at, and likely is still, somewhere on that circle road.

Often on cold mornings, I stayed in bed for a while after Juan Pablo went to work and thought about home. I had turned down a job leading wilderness trips in New Mexico to return to Chile, and the opportunity costs of my decision played through my head while I lay alone in the darkness. I did not regret the decision, but I idealized the hot desert summer and missed being around other young, outdoorsy people. I resolved to not return to southern Chile during the winter next time, and to wait until a trip to the southern hemisphere would be an escape from the northern cold.

When I finally got up, throwing off the blankets with a sharp intake of breath, I lit the space heater and crouched in front of it. I always feared it would explode. It was just a caged metal screen soaked with gas that purred when ignited. I spread my hands in front it, my chest and stomach roasting while my backside froze. Most houses in the south were heated by a wood stove, but not this one. People took advantage of the radiant heat and constructed metal drying racks that attached to the stovepipe or the wall behind it, so that the wood stove was frequently adorned with panties, undershirts, and socks. This drying method ensured that they would carry the smell of smoke with them when they left the house.

Not having a stove meant that our clothes never fully dried; everything we owned smelled like mildew. During the morning when Juan Pablo worked, I stayed at home reading about the forestry industry — the subject of my senior thesis and the official reason I was there — but I also vacuumed the apartment, cooked lunch on the small two-burner stove, and washed our clothes. On the porch landing, Juan Pablo had knotted short pieces of cord together to make a rope, and looped it back and forth between hooks he had hammered into the studs underneath the roof. I stood in bare feet on the damp porch while I hung our clothes, wet but not soaking from the washing machine he had purchased on credit with his neighbor. The sounds of the woodshop behind the apartment floated up to the porch. The Caribbean lilt of cumbia music from a local station alternated with the flat banging of a hammer, a saw ripping into wood, and the sharp sudden laughter of men. It seemed fitting that my neighbors were wood workers, since I spent so much time reading about forestry.

I stepped back inside, rubbing my hands together and held them in front of the heater. I had dragged it into the main room before hanging the clothes so that when I came in from the porch the chill would be gone. Sitting next to the heater at the one table Juan Pablo owned, I cupped my mug of tea and opened my laptop. Juan Pablo stole wireless internet from next door, and it was hit or miss. On the mornings it did not work I felt especially isolated, and usually walked into town to use the wifi at a café. But today I was in luck, and I began writing a long email to a college friend, Anna, who always responded quickly and with equally detailed letters. We were both outsiders in someone else’s home that summer; she had moved in with her boyfriend in his hometown in upstate New York. They lived across the street from his childhood home in an apartment his family owned, and in spite of a stint at a bakery in town, she had ended up working for the family company alongside him, his parents, and his brothers.

“Everything is his,” she would write to me. “I feel like there is little here that is mine alone.”

I felt the same way in Chile. Although Juan Pablo had recently moved to Puerto Varas, compared to me, he had been there forever. He blended in on the street, understood the puns in the newspaper that went over my head, and never needed to calculate how much something cost in dollars before comprehending how much it was worth. We visited his friends at night, he gave me places to stay while researching in other cities, and he picked our weekend destinations.

“It makes me angry sometimes that he takes his belonging for granted,” I wrote to Anna. “All I want is one thing or place of my own, something to show off to him.”

My desire to have experiences independent of Juan Pablo drove me away from him for some time. I also needed to do research at a university library, so I spent weekdays in Valdivia, a coastal city three hours to the northwest, coming back to him on weekends. He had introduced me to some family friends there, Oscar and Celia, who welcomed me into a small spare bedroom tucked underneath the stairs. Oscar worked for the forest service, and even though his experience had awarded him an administrative position, he still wore flannel shirts, canvas pants, and boots to the office every day. Celia stayed at home, and through the thin walls I could hear her singing in the living room and kitchen as she prepared dinner or once, afternoon tea. The house smelled faintly of oranges because Celia set the skins to dry on top of the stove.

At night their friends came over, and often I joined them around the small kitchen table. Under the buzzing fluorescent light I tried to laugh along with them, but they talked so quickly. The jokes were the worst because not only did I have to understand what they said, but why that certain combination of words was funny. When Oscar laughed, he removed his glasses and pinched the corners of his eyes, his great belly and broad shoulders heaving. Celia would nudge or wink at me, but the best I could do was smile and nod. Sometimes they stopped to explain it to me, but this just made me feel more out of place; besides, a joke explained is never as funny as it is the first time.

But on other nights, when just Oscar, Celia and their two grown-up children were home, the conversations were warm and inviting. Often we camped out on the floor and watched the news. Celia and I knitted while the others taunted us, asking if we were ever going to finish. I sat next to the wood stove, and the kitten that always curled beneath it played with the ball of yarn.

In those moments, I didn’t miss home. When I did, though, I ached for it. I had to limit myself to an hour a day of computer time, usually after breakfast. I wrote emails to friends and checked their Facebook profiles, feeling panicked if I had no interviews or research planned for the day. My mind would wander if given too much free time, and I had to schedule myself activities to keep busy.

One particularly lonely night, I made a list of the good things that had happened that day in an effort not to be so negative. I surprised myself and wrote more than I expected. I began with “good, cheap mandarin oranges.” On a whim I had walked a different route home and stopped by a fruit stand. Wooden crates overflowed with bruised fruits that had been rejected for export — grapes, apples, and mandarin oranges. I picked myself two-dozen of the best-looking ones and took them home, eating a few along the way. As I walked, I threw the peels into vacant lots where they shone among the wet grass and trash. The oranges were delicious, sweet and not at all sour.

Another high point of that day had been “the run in the morning to Fundo Isla Teja Norte.” The fundo was a nature preserve on the far corner of the large, suburban island where Celia and Oscar lived, and I frequently ended up there on my runs. I set out from the house, jogging down the street through the mist and smoky air. I crossed the avenue, feeling tense as I anticipated the inevitable whistle from the construction workers repairing the street, and then up the hill, past the charred house that had burned down just the week before — a fact of life in a city heated by wood.

The nicest homes sat at the top of the hill overlooking the River Cruces. All the streets were named after Chilean painters, musicians, and artists. The homes themselves were expensive and interesting, with large metal prows, turrets, or curved archways. I ran past these homes, squeezed through a fence that had been cut back for such a purpose, and into the vacant lot that separated the homes from the preserve. Horses grazed in the tall grass, and occasionally I glimpsed a young couple lying together on a blanket.

On the far side of the lot, horse trails wound through the lush woods. Hanging vines wrapped around the branches and trunks of huge trees, and I leapt over puddles decorated with fallen leaves. The woods smelled fresh, a mixture of mud and the ephemeral scent released by wet leaves after a hard rain. As the trail approached the river, I could see a tugboat quietly churning down the narrow channel. A small clearing had been cut in the forest on the far corner of the preserve, and I sat here and looked out over the river. The forest grew textured and thick on the far shore before giving way to delicate waving marsh grasses and finally the steely gray of open water. The grasses bowed over when raindrops struck them, and the surface of the river seemed to vibrate. When I sat there, I could forget I was in Chile. There were no Spanish signs and no one to speak to. But as soon as I ducked back around the fence and jogged down the street, the street signs, micro buses and conversations I overheard grounded me in Valdivia.

On the way back to the house, the rain stopped for about ten minutes, a fleeting break in what had been six continuous days of rain (I would note this moment in my list that night). In New England, where I’m from, it rains but it comes and goes throughout the day. Puddles may not dry up immediately, but between the rains the pavement smells metallic and steams into the clearing air. Here, it doesn’t stop and the light is gray and even, hardly changing between morning and evening. On the third day I asked the Chileans I was staying with if this was normal, and they shrugged. But by the sixth day they were complaining along with me and poring over the weather page in the newspaper, looking for a respite. Rivers swallowed bridges and swamped roads, isolating rural communities for days after the storm ended.

During the storm, I was staying in Valdivia, which stretched along the banks of the confluence of three rivers. One day I had put on my raincoat and waterproof pants and walked down to the nature preserve to mark how high the water had risen. Roots of trees disappeared under the silty waters; a bench became no more than a submerged backrest. The day after my run, the rain let up, and I stood outside in the sunlight that glinted silver on all the puddles. If the rain was good for something, it was moments like these: my upturned face seeking the fleeting winter light, the rich smell of mud and wet leaves.

By the end of the summer, my list of the simple pleasures that brightened what were frequently dreary, long weeks of research had grown. I took a bus to the coast on a whim to find the beach deserted except for two men who were sawing up an enormous tree trunk that had washed up on shore and towing the wood uphill in an ox-cart. I had discovered a café that served tea in glass pots so that you could see the tea swirl through the darkening water. Once, when I was locked out of Oscar and Celia’s house, I had knocked on their neighbor’s door and started chatting with the woman who lived there, a Colombian veterinary student named Bibiana. She served me tea as we waited for someone to let me in, and we talked about being foreign in Chile. I assumed that as a South American, she must be having an easier time than me, but as I listened to her, I began to doubt my assumption. Her fiancé lived in Colombia, and although she called him every day, it was obviously not enough. She enjoyed her studies, but felt excluded by her Chilean classmates. She described the women as cold and the men as either too interested or not at all. Her few friends were all exchange students. Eventually I heard a car pull into the driveway, and I thanked her for the tea. We exchanged phone numbers and I and went back to Oscar and Celia’s, excited about my new friend.

When I returned to Puerto Varas the following day, Juan Pablo met me at the bus station — another one of my simple pleasures. I loved watching him step out of the car he had borrowed to pick me up and move through the small crowd that had gathered outside the bus to hug me as I descended. As I wrapped my arms around his warm, solid body, I looked around at the other passengers who were embracing relatives of their own, making impatient calls on their cellphones or waiting for someone to arrive. For once, I felt equal to them: we had all traveled alone and we were all being picked up by someone who cared about us. The sense of belonging, of having a place and a person to return to when I was so far from home, never ceased to be a novelty to me; every time he met me at the bus, I felt that simple joy.

In the car on the way back to the apartment, Juan Pablo asked me how my week of research had been. I dutifully recited the research highlights — an interview with an ex-guerrilla, and a relevant book I found — but enthusiastically told him about Bibiana in a level of detail I reserved for exciting stories I thought would impress or entertain him. She was mine to describe, and I did so with pleasure.

That weekend we visited a national park neither of us had ever been to. It was named after the slow-growing alerce, similar to the redwood, a tree native to the wettest parts of the temperate rain forests near Puerto Varas. After an hour of driving down steadily worsening roads, we parked in front of a homemade sign that indicated the one trail into the park. We opened the cattle gate and let ourselves in.

Juan Pablo hiked slowly because he was always pausing to take pictures. Frequently I turned around to find him crouching to photograph the tendril of some vine or the soft petals of tiny flowers. He noticed things I did not — a blade of light that cut through an opening in the canopy, electrifying one fern, and the pattern drawn by yellow-tinged rot on fallen leaves. But I detected odors he could not; ever since a motorcycle accident the year before, he had been unable to smell. The injury’s only visible scar was a thick white line that ran over his scalp from ear to ear. The doctors had peeled back his face and replaced the fractured bones with metal plates. When the swelling had diminished a few weeks after the motorcycle accident, two things had changed: a light touch to the space between his eyebrows could now be felt on his cheek, and he was unable to smell.

I didn’t know him before the accident, so there was nothing to say when he claimed it had changed him. But I didn’t doubt him; even simple things were different afterward, like the way he cooked. He no longer cared to add spices to his food, only doing so when I complained that it was bland. He bought cilantro for me when I visited because I liked it; to him it was just a bouquet of expensive leaves.

More infuriating to him was the way he experienced the outdoors. In between snapping pictures, he stopped me to ask, “What does it smell like here?” And I would tune in, trying to describe the ulmo flowers that made the most delicious honey, the sweetness of crushed grass or the raw smell of water beneath a cascade. Fortunately he had experienced all these odors before, so I didn’t have to describe the intricacies of each one, but merely name them as they came to me. Even though it frustrated him, I liked this game because I had access to something he did not. I had something to offer him, for once.

We returned from our hike wet and cold, as usual. We turned the space heater on high and burrowed in the bed as we waited for the apartment to warm up. Juan Pablo pressed his face into the back of my neck, whispering that he was trying to find the taste of my scent, el sabor de mi olor. He said if he sniffed hard enough he could feel certain odors as a tingle on the back of his tongue. I think that he knew he was going to lose me; I was going back to the United States after my winter of research and would not return. So he pressed his nose into my skin, inhaling, trying to find at least a trace of a taste. But taste is not like smell. We do not stumble into tastes, only to find ourselves suddenly transported to some distant place.

But I can smell, and certain odors make me remember him. I left Juan Pablo and our relationship in Chile at the end of that August, but on various occasions since then I have stepped out of my house in Maine and smelled the woodsmoke in the rain. The wood here is native to Maine and smells differently when burned than Chilean wood, but the way it hit me jolted me back to the lingering dampness and wet darkness of that winter.