October 20th, 2007

A beer is not the solution to this crisis but it can’t make it any worse.

My friend Jim from Lelanau County, Michigan told me when the table of life is suddenly flipped upside down and things are moving faster than you can process them, take a hot shower and shave. Or if you’re standing in a bus terminal at midnight and the ticket window has closed for the night, have a beer. The familiar. In God, George Burns and John Denver were talking in the bathroom about this.

If you’re ever lost and cold in CheonJu Jeollabuk-do and don’t know where to turn, I know a place you can warm up, get a hot meal and two beers for under $10 in the middle of the night. Is this useful information? In the big picture, probably not. Tonight, it was useful.

There are hundreds of Jeollabuk-do’s and thousands of useless road maps in my head. There are times I’d love to press a delete button and wipe it clean, start from scratch, move home and study accounting – my best mark in high school. But all roads do not lead home. They start from there. They led to today and spray off further into an abyss.

One thing about the road, and the abyss it leads to, is that, with persistence, there will sometimes be a pub you can duck into. There’ll sometimes be a table empty in the corner. There’ll sometimes be a woman with deep lines on her face who knows that waitressing is more than just a job and she’ll wipe your table and bring you a beverage. You can sit back, take a deep breath and you will be home. You may not like the music but you will be home – until they clean the grill and turn out the lights.

Most cats sitting alone with a beer in a pub at 2 am have a rollercoaster ride of a story to tell. And no one on a Saturday night out in the city wants to hear it. And thank god for that. He doesn’t want to tell it. He’s thinking of tomorrow, looking into the abyss – where to remember yesterday with clarity is to trip and fall and lose your glasses in the dark.

Take the lesson and run. Sober up. Leave the details behind.

The bus is now rocking back and forth. The narrow winding road follows a stream and splits the valley down the middle. Farmland on both sides stretches flat to the base of the mountains which take an abrupt steep climb and wear a dense forest, like fuzzy green walls of a gorge.

The road is lined with little black tents, a few feet high, millions of them in long rows and columns. They’re meticulously built and seem cared for more than the farmhouses falling apart alongside of them. They shelter the ginseng crop.

At full tilt, we snake through tons of small communities, crammed together in clusters with a bus stop. An old woman with a sack of sweet potatoes hobbles off the bus. An old woman with a sack hobbles on. Onions.

We pass groups of old women hobbling along the road with sacks, hunched over with their chin about a foot off the ground and their rump pushed high up in the air, their eyes sucked deep into their skull and their faces tied up in knots.

They seem to live oblivious to the massive development and progress in the cities. It must scare them. Then again, maybe nothing scares them. Homes are three wall shacks with a dirt floor and a tin roof. Any scrap piece of wood, stone or sheet metal becomes a part of the house. A strong gust of wind could come along and blow the whole town down. It’s zero degrees today. Winter is coming. They’ve survived plenty and are busy readying for more.

We get off the bus in Jinan. Everyone is sitting around in the parking lot of the bus terminal, watching, forever waiting for something. No one has showered in years. People smile, which I notice ‘cause I live in the capital, and are incredibly friendly and helpful. Here, even the bus drivers seem to love their life immensely. The streets are full of debris and lined with banners. It looks like we just missed a big pig roast and county fair.

It’s October. Good times. Hot, sunny days for walkin’ and cold nights for sleepin’. The harvest has passed. Food is plentiful and it’s festival season.