If there had been directions, they might have read, “Travel past the fifth bonfire, then turn left between the two brightest stars and continue past the whispering tree.” Where we were going, wasn’t precisely marked on anyone’s map, it was a blurry space where there weren’t too many lines or clear directions. The driver of the open bed pick up truck where we were lodged between a full load of water barrels, was following white sticks left in the field to mark the turnings. We flew through the cool night under the stars with dust in our hair and no idea of exactly where we were going. About half an hour after we left the military house where we caught our ride, we left the highway and twisted and turned our way in circles through herb-scented hills. Finally, after much laughter and seriously sore bottoms, we heard music from over the hill. In the dark, it was all torch-light and candles, and dust in between our toes as we slid down the hill toward the river.
I started laughing immediately and loudly and I felt that everyone was laughing with me, that we were drinking and breathing laughter all the way down to the river. We laughed as we walked across the supple bamboo bridge spanning the Moei River, and laughed as we scrambled up the dusty banks towards the light and the music of that place.
We were greeted at the top by soldiers with large smiles who laughed as they shook our hands. And there, coming out of the shadows was N, laughing as he said hello. “This is a dream for me, teacher,” he said. “ I never imagined that I would meet with you here.”
As we dropped our bags on the bamboo tables, people came forward to greet my other friends in delight. I couldn’t stop smiling, turning this way and that in the dark to take it all in. “Here I am,” I kept thinking in wonder.
We sat at long bamboo tables to eat rice, chili and potato curry. As we ate one of the benches broke, people came and left and we ate together with friends and strangers and faces in the dark. The night was a dream, sitting in a field in the dark, watching the traditional dances on stage, and talking and laughing.
There were sleeping shelters set up where people spread mats on hay laid on the ground and slept there together under the thatch. We were led past the festivities, past several houses and huts, along a winding dirt path in the dark toward the dim outline of a church. We had a large wooded platform to ourselves with a tarp on the wood below and half a tarp above. We lit candles and spread our blankets, wrapping ourselves up in sweaters and scarves as best we could against the cold. When we blew the candles out, the stars were spread out and glorious in the lush sky between the bamboo thickets and our roof. The last thing I heard as I was falling asleep was the sound of the goat bells and the drums from the dancing in the distance.
We woke before sunrise, when the mist was still tangled up in everything. “I woke up at 4am,” said my friend. “That was about two days ago.” Another friend slept through the cold, the drums and the fireworks, but had been kept away by the tiny tinkling of goat bells in the field where we lay. I woke at least five times during the night, to change position on the hard platform floor and rewrap my blankets against the cold, but I was cheerful.
A few of us made our way down to the river where a few people were bathing. Others brushed their teeth. The sky was dim with the promise of sunrise. I took off my socks and shoes and waded in to wash my face. The water was surprisingly warm and mist rolled off it and lingered in the bamboo overhead. There was a feeling of excitement hanging in the air, too, but the mist muted everything, making our voices quiet and our movements slow.
By the time we had packed up our things and rolled up our blankets, young people were lining up, dressed in brightly woven traditional clothes, getting ready for dancing and celebrations. There were boys with the blue, red and white striped scarves on their heads and girls helping each other adjust the pink flowers in their dark hair. Just beyond them was a group of camouflaged solders, helping each other adjust their red berets.
We joined a crowd of people circling the parade round and then the marching began. There were three divisions on parade: two groups of men with guns and one group of women, unarmed and last. Another group of older men in uniform stood at attention along the sidelines with the crowd, and many other soldiers wandered through the crowd with their rifles slung casually over their solders.
A new General was inducted and inspected the troops, the old one was given a memorial tribute through the explosion of three ordinances behind the parade ground.
Huge clouds of smoke hung in the air afterwards and drifted slowly down the valley. As they raised their flag, a flag most of you will never have seen before and perhaps never will, I heard the most mournful rendition of the national anthem that I have heard sung.
The soldiers dispersed as the day lightened and the serious mood slipped away with the sunshine. People laughed and found old friends again, people took photos and posed with guns. I turned around and there was someone I hadn’t seen in almost a year, and there was an old student running through the crowd to hug me. We sat down together to eat noodles and salty beef curry. It felt like late afternoon, though the morning had hardly broken. We watched dancing, met new friends and old ones and spent a great deal of time on the banks of the river, looking down on the sun on the water and the children playing in the shallows. That scene, like so much around me there, was so powerfully sweet and sad for me. 
Without all the guns, it felt like a lovely day for a party and a picnic. I smiled to see all the young bodies splashing in the sunlight, the older ladies with their sarongs rolled up, wading in after them, the drunk man dripping on the bamboo bridge after falling in. We could have been anywhere celebrating anything, a family reunion, a company picnic, a national holiday. But the fact is we were there, with the river that is also a black line on a map, with a holiday that is all about guns, fifty seven whole years of guns and smoke and fighting without end.
In the daylight, the trip back through the fields was less mysterious and more dusty. The scenery was more spectacular: the river in a valley of bamboo, the mountains beyond that will always be, for me, in the distance, trees rising out of green fields, the brown dirt track wandering it’s way under the dusty blue sky perfumed with the scent of summer-dry grass. Most beautiful though, were the smiles of the good friends I bounced along beside, crammed together in the back of the truck.
I came home and sat out on my balcony after a much needed shower. I had some cool fruit, a good book, and the sunset for company. It was that delicious time of day when everything is quiet and rich and mellow. Everything is peaceful, and I had a better idea, that day, of what peaceful really means. It means that I spent a great deal of my life never seeing a gun, or touching one, or celebrating one. It means my parents took pictures of me with ice skates slung over my shoulder, not a rifle. It means that I never knew a line that divided me, I never knew what it was to be illegal just by breathing in the wrong space, I never had to fight in order to dance, or speak or survive.
January 31st 2006: 57 years of revolution.
