Pregled posta

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A thin paved road brought us to the remote Mt. He Huan, high in Taiwan’s mountainous interior. We had no intention of coming this far. We’d actually been headed somewhere else. High atop the ridge just below the peak was a parking lot high. It surprised me that there were so many other cars in this place, way out in the middle of nowhere. Shuyuan said Mt. He Huan draws a lot of tourists from Taiwan’s subtropical lowland towns because at 11,000 feet it’s one of the places on the island where it sometimes snows in winter.

Across the road, at the base of the peak, we spotted a restaurant. We hadn’t yet found a place to have breakfast and now it was almost lunch time. We decided to go get something to eat. The moment I stepped out of the car, I felt the chill and noticed everybody else around had on ski jackets and thick winter clothes, even though it was the middle of summer. All I had on was a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. On my feet I wore sandals. We hurried over to the restaurant. It would be warm inside. But when we got there we found it closed down.

By the restaurant there was narrow footpath ascending the rest of the way up to the peak itself. It didn’t look like too difficult a climb. There were children clambering up and down the trail with their parents, and even several elderly individuals. Now that we were here I didn’t see any reason why we shouldn’t climb the mountain before going back. We began picking our way up the trail. There was a family in front of us going up the mountain. At the same time a whole crowd was coming down from the peak. We had to stand aside to let them pass. From down in the parking lot the mountain had looked like it was covered with short grass. But up close, the grass turned out to be a kind of dwarf bamboo almost waist-high that grew in thick clumps. Here and there, pressed to the ground, grew an alpine-looking plant with pretty star-like blue flowers. There were ants way up here. I was amazed to see their busy little highways. I wondered what they were eating and how they survived the winter.

Climbing the trail was mostly a matter of which rocks to grab on to, where to put the one foot, then where to put the other. We hadn’t gone very far before I noticed I wasn’t cold anymore. We stepped aside for another group of people coming down from the summit. They carried their ski jackets in their arms.

At one point as we neared the summit the crowd on the trail for some reason melted away for just a few moments and we found ourselves alone way up on the mountain. I stood there marveling that we should have gotten to a spot like this, where we could stand alone with nature, plumb in the middle of Taiwan’s central mountains. It certainly was not off the beaten track but there weren’t many places on the island as remote, or at least I had gotten to any. Here and there on the surrounding peaks patches of forest crept to higher elevations in sheltered places but mostly the slopes all around, like the one we were on, had no trees, or only stunted ones hiding in the shelter of some rock or under some cliff. What dominated at these elevations was the much simpler ecosystem of this dwarf bamboo. As an undergraduate I’d taken a course with the famous alpine ecologist W.D. Billings who had lectured endlessly about timberline. Of course, I’d seen pictures of it in books. But this was the first time I’d ever come across anything that looked like it in real life. Severe winds, low temperatures and physiological conditions prevented trees from growing above a certain height. What lay all around spread before our eyes was the Taiwanese equivalent of an alpine meadow. I pulled out the camera and snapped pictures.

Then, in the flash of an eye, there were people again in front of us and behind us on the trail again, going up and down. We climbed on up to the summit, and then later came down, got in the car and headed home. The dwarf grassy bamboo, I found out from the internet when I got back to my computer, was Yushania niitakayamensis (Hayata) Keng f., a species also found elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The pockets of forests hiding in sheltered areas would be composed mainly of Abies kawakamii (Hayata) Ito, which is endemic to Taiwan. I posted my pictures on Flickr for friends back home to see, typed in a comment about timberline under one or two of them and went on to other things.

A month later I happened back on the Flickr site. With the intention of deleting some of the less interesting photos, I brought the thumbnails of Mt. He Huan up large on the screen, one after the other. The remarks about timberline I’d posted with them suddenly struck me as strangely beside the point. What cried out to be seen in these photos was so much more rudimentary, so much more important. I could see it now. I must have seen it when I stood on the mountain and snapped the pictures — only I hadn’t realized it at the time. A concept got in the way.

Standing in front of her apartment building, she began to count the number of floors that were below her home. She did this by counting each window below it. There were fifteen. In some of them, the lights were still on. She enjoyed these apartments the most because of the silhouettes that would sometimes appear in front of them. For all the others, the lights were off, and the curtains were pulled close. She stood for at least half an hour, on the sidewalk,even after counting, until her cell phone broke her from her focus. She looked at the display. It was her mom. At the same time, the light came on in her kitchen window and she could see her mom's figure, holding the phone and looking out over the street. Not onto the sidewalk.

She put the phone back into her breast pocket where it lit the interior of her coat with each ring until it stopped ringing and the it became dark again. Upstairs, on the sixteenth floor, the kitchen window light turned off and her mom walked back to her bedroom. She hadn't wanted to go home, but she felt obligated to, that once in a while, it was a necessity.

There had been an accident on the road earlier. A man crashed his scooter into the front end of a taxi cab at full speed. His body flipped over the handlebars, across the top of the taxi, bounced off the trunk and into the car behind it. The light was green and it was sudden. No way that traffic was able to stop in time to keep the body from being dragged underneath the frame of the second car, even as the driver slammed the brakes. Nothing stops instantaneously. She heard the crunch of the impact, of the body, of the scooter, of the cab. Each sound was distinct and though it happened among many other competing sounds, each was sparse in their placement and delivery. They traveled through the hard plastic shell and padding of her helmet. There was a long silence afterward as everyone tried to assemble and playback what they just witnessed.
"Damn," her boyfriend said. She was on the seat behind him, her arms wrapped around his torso, hands crossed at the wrist, fingers hanging loose and unhinged.

People ignored the traffic lights. Everything was stopped. Even though the light was green, the intersection was still. When the initial flash of the event became an echo, a ringing in the ears, the scooters and cars proceeded through the intersection, driving around the wreckage the second car with the body underneath. Tip toeing.
"Hey, pull over," she said when she felt the vibrations of the scooter getting shoved from neutral to first gear her legs. She tapped the back of his helmet with hers. He extended his arm out to signal a turn, pulled the scooter up over the curb and dropped the kickstand.
"Fuck. Did you just see that?" he said.
The question irritated her. Of course she saw that. Everyone saw that.
She turned towards the people further down the river. They were strolling along the sidewalk, standing by the railing, or on benches. The boats, lit like brothels in their hot pink lights, floated along. Maybe they didn't see that. But the people here at the intersection did.

The cab driver stepped out. To her, the act was a long process, the opening stage of an evolving choreography. First, the door opened. Then a foot extended down onto the street. Then the second foot. Then the cab driver pulled himself forward, looked at the scooter embedded into the hood, rubbed his forehead and then, with a flourish, turned around to the car behind him. Like the impact, each action was spaced and apart from the others. Distinct and profound in its own wake. Like most cab drivers in the city, his hair was gray and combed into a thinning side part. He wore a blue shirt and khaki trousers. He had taken off his glass and held them at his side. They were silver.

The driver of the second car was already on the street. He had come out as her boyfriend maneuvered his scooter through the pedestrians to where they were now, next to the railing of the bridge. The driver was crouched on his knees and on a cell phone. He looked like a salaried version of death in his black overcoat, black trousers, black shoes and black tie. She had noticed him at first. Unlike the cab driver, there was an air of calm about him. His being there, on the ground, on the cell phone, was very natural. The gracefulness of his crouching, the way he seemed to talk into his phone, pulled her towards him. No nervousness. No exasperation. The body laying on the ground wasn't keeping him from going home to a wife waiting for dinner to get cold. There was nothing for him to go back to. He was meant to be there crouched on the ground evaluating bodies which found their way underneath his car. She wanted to be the person on the other line.
"Is he breathing?" she would say, "Tell me where you are."
"Yes," he would say, "East Beiping Rd. by the River Ai, next to the Film Archives."
"Don't move him. We'll be