Page 61 - ELITE PLUS MAGAZINE VOL4

The last month of 1998 passed without my going anywhere again.Thinking back, I feel pleased all the same that my friends and I came back from Koh Lanta by land, which actually isn’t much fun as a journey. At the time the roads on Koh Lanta had yet to be paved. Downpours turned them slippery and full of muddy holes. As the rain wouldn’t stop, Wicharn had one of his men take us to Trang in a four-wheel-drive. The pickup had to get on a car ferry twice before reaching the mainland. Apart from that, we made the mistake of taking a road that wasn’t finished. Reaching the Thap Thiang market was rather harrowing.All of my friends went back to Bangkok that evening, leaving me and my younger son in Trang for another three or four days.There I told Chang See and Old Warlock to put the small boat to sea one more time without allowing Sing to come with us, because the weather was rather unstable. I knew very well that if I took my son out again, in my heart I would be even more unstable than the wind and the waves. To put it plainly, I had just understood the feelings of a father who sees his child in a dangerous situation, and this made me reluctant to think what my own father must have felt when I was in the jungle for almost six years and engaged in a war.On the day I was trying to go out fishing for the second time, while the car had stopped to wait for Old Warlock at Na Toh Ming I happened to hear the weather forecast coming out of the village loudspeakers, saying the eastern part of the Gulf of Thailand would have waves five to six metres high. As for the Andaman Sea I didn’t hear clearly but could guess that if on the Gulf of Thailand the wind was that strong, it would blow across thesouthern peninsula and reach the Andaman Sea shore with an impact we shouldn’t underestimate.It turned out that in the early afternoon wind and waves did reach us. All of a sudden the sky turned into a black dome and such a downpour started that we almost couldn’t reach the shore in time. In late afternoon that same storm sent a Thai Airways plane crashing in Surat Thani.I was glad not to have taken my son along, but as soon as I returned to the Thap Thiang market close to dusk I was informed that Sing had been hit by a motorcycle as he crossed a street at a crosswalk. Luckily my son wasn’t badly hurt. Nonetheless I couldn’t help thinking that life is full of danger. It hardly matters where you or your loved ones take shelter, as wherever you are, if it is time to be hurt, hurt you will be. Being alive is dangerous in itself.I went back to sitting quietly in Bangkok for many days before the calendar changed to a new year, as in my heart gloom matched the madness of the season.For the past three or four years I have been dreading the month of December because more than one of my close friends have died in the last month of the year. The first left us at the end of 1993; two more lost their lives only one day before 1996 came about. All three had been my comrades in arms, eating out of the same rice pot, going through thick and thin and courting danger innumerable times together. When they went, so did parts of my life.From one perspective, isn’t it true that the world of each of us is only as wide as the number of people we know and cope with as friends and comrades? When some leave for another world or desert us, this world shrinks.In any case, even though Decemberhas become a month that peoples my sleep with nightmares, it is the month during which I have two personal traditions, which are rather joyful occasions. The first is a New Year party that takes place mostly on the last Saturday or Sunday of the year; the second a walk in the jungle restricted to those friends and comrades who have a taste for it.New Year parties at my house actually should be like village merit-making festivals rather than celebrations at change of calendar years. The starting point of such parties was more than ten years ago when I and some of my underdog friends went back to visit our old guerilla base on the Rong Kla mountain. We agreed to meet to look at photographs and have a meal together. Totally by chance the day we met was close to the New Year, so we took it to be a party to celebrate. Taking care of one another’s feelings in an unfamiliar world we had never counted ourselves a part of made many of us feel good and willing to do the same again in subsequent years.Apart from this, to have it better resemble our first expedition, in early December each year we would trek in the jungle together. Therefore, the New Year party and our jungle trek- king traditions could be said to have been born at the same time and linked from the first. There wasn’t much to our basic expectations. We weren’t dreaming of finding something new, merely hoping that the good things that had happened in life would happen again and again – if at all possible.But then again, this was the source of a tragedy. Whose life is ever preserved from change? When will this world ever stand still? Even if we don’t change, the relationship between us and all things will change.As time passed, more people kept joining my New Year party. Many comrades who had come downElite+ 59