The Loaves and the Fish

We’re sitting in the airport at Luang Prabang, waiting for our flight to Chiang Mai, Thailand. According to tradition, we have just finished stuffing our faces with sweet, salty, fatty, bullshit food sold for crazy big money at the airport snack shop.  And when I say, “we have just finished stuffing our faces…” I pretty much mean I have just finished stuffing my face.  Oreo cookies, Lays potato chips, a Snickers bar.  All of it down the pipes in something like three minutes, the wrapper and crumb evidence laying around like so much fur, blood, and bone from a recent kill.

At one point (I think while I was licking small chip fragments from my hand) Rebecca asked me if I was snorting.  I considered my fellow passengers, waiting patiently in clean, organized rows, before allowing, “Probably.”

This all as a preamble to something I observed two mornings ago, while at our guesthouse restaurant in the river-side town of Nong  Khiaw,  an open-air affair with a stunning view of the surrounding peaks.  I had finished my coffee, and, while waiting for Rebecca to conclude some task on the computer, I watched as the blue and red riverboats plied the waters of the Nam Ou River.  Bored, I picked up the small cup in which was served a sweet, condensed milk-- a staple with the heavy coffee of Laos and Vietnam.  My gaze fell on the cup’s lip and side, where a ribbon of sweet milk clung like white tar.  Along the edge of said ribbon, tucked in like piglets on their mother’s teats, were hundreds of tiny ants, lined domino-like to dip their antennae into the sweet goo.   Behind them, waiting their turn, were a flurry of their peers, eagerly rushing about in search of any spot vacated by one of their suckling brethren.  It was all very frenetic, though business-like and orderly nevertheless.  

One could see, given the amount of milk in the offing, and the very small bodies of the ants, that there was plenty to go around.  Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if, among the boys in the back waiting their turn there wasn’t something like anxiety.  An ant angst, if you will, around their chance to sup, and a particular relish among those who had already found their place, a hesitancy to let go once they’d had their fill.  After all, someone was, finally, going to do without, but who?

 I squinted and held the cup close, trying to determine if there was a runt of the litter.  Or, more likely, some errant ant who laid back and scoffed at the foolish efforts of his peers, trying to make time with the young ant-babes in the pack. 

“What are you doing?”  Rebecca’s voice jarred me from my study.  I considered whether it was worth going into it.  After all, she lacks the spirit of inquiry I seem to be burdened with, and I hate to drag another soul down.  Thinking it best to keep things simple, I went with my last thought.  “Do you think ants find each other, you know, attractive?” 

“What?”

“Ants.  There’s a bunch of them on this cup, and I was wondering…” but she had already turned back to whatever it was she was doing on the computer.  I set the cup on the edge of the table, away from the gathering ants on the table cloth surrounding the base of the cup, and marveled at their almost instant recognition of the change.  Their shift as one to the new location.  I turned back to the river boats making their slow way downstream, into the heat of another Southeast Asian day.

The next morning I was once again visited by the vision of the ants on the cup—except this time, I was the one feeling somewhat small and inconsequential.  Earlier that morning we made our way to the bus station to catch the morning bus into Luang Prabang, a distance down river of some one hundred and forty kilometers.  I dutifully handed the guy behind the glass my eighty thousand kip (ten bucks for the two of us) and received my ticket.  Then asked, “Where’s the bus?” to which, with a nod of his head, he indicated a small, open-sided truck parked just in front of his office.  These vehicles are everywhere in south-east Asia, and are typically about the size of a small pick-up truck. They’re known locally as a sorngtaau, and passengers sit on two benches facing one another along the sides of the bed.  A metal framework and vinyl cloth covers the back, protecting the passengers from sun and rain, though just barely.  We’d certainly been in our share of these babies, but typically as taxis, taking us maybe five kilometers at best.  A one hundred forty kilometer trip could take four hours, and I knew from the ride up (in a mini-van) the road was anything but smooth, with large areas of construction and crater-like potholes with steep, bone-jarring lips. 

I tried again, in what I hoped was a generosity-inducing tone, “No bus?”  He set down his cigarette and seemed to consider, then said, “Maybe later, one o’clock, we might need bus.”

“And if not?”

He shrugged, clearly enjoying his spot inside the office.  “Maybe bus. Maybe truck.  Maybe tuk tuk.  Maybe you wait and go tomorrow.”  With that he looked past me to the dread-locked dude waiting his turn. Tickets in hand, I hoisted our bags onto the roof of the truck, which was already surrounded with passengers for the eight-thirty departure.

I looked around at the loose gathering of young Euro-hipsters, a couple of local (Lao) women, a young monk in saffron robes, and counted fourteen total.  No way could this truck hold that many.  But then the driver showed up, and cheerily asked for our tickets as he ushered us into the back and opened the passenger door of the cab, into which quickly scooted the younger of the two Lao women.  Slowly but surely, we made our way into the maw of the truck’s back end, scooting tighter and tighter until it seemed the only one left out was the young monk, who stepped around to the driver’s side and slithered into a spot behind the driver’s seat big enough for a small family of hamsters.  And we were off!

The truck groaned under our weight, rocking gently over the rolling undulations of the road.  We picked up speed and settled in, getting to know each other in the companionable way people do who are suffering a mild strain as one.  My general sense of the young travelers we encounter is that they are solicitous and kind, probably imagining their own parents in Rebecca and myself.  Then, not twenty minutes into the trip, we pulled over.

Seated under a bamboo and grass shelter were two more women and an older man, each with a small satchel.  They exchanged a few words in Lao with the driver, then made their way around the truck, surveying their options.  The old dude stepped nimbly into the back, smiling in an apologetic way as we puller in even closer, making room for his narrow butt on our meager bench.  The women both somehow found space in the cab, against the woman in the seat, and straddling the truck’s gear shift. 

I tried to calculate our combined weight, including the bags on the roof, and gave up as we slammed into a pothole.  We were now eighteen souls, including the driver; the breeze through the open side was hot and dry.  We settled into holding on and fighting thoughts of collision and carnage. 

Not long after, we pulled over again, this time for a young man with an assortment of power tools, which he slung into the crevice at our feet.  He gave us all a broad smile as he stepped up onto the truck’s tailgate and perched his ass onto its edge, facing the road as it spooled out into our wake.

It would be fun to report our stopping three more times for additional human baggage, but that wouldn’t be true—and I’m all about the truth.  Yet I feel certain we would have stopped had there been a need; if someone was heading our way and required assistance.  Somehow, room would be made.

And somehow, we all survived.  The experience left me with an insight, of sorts, into the biblical story of the loaves and the fish, in which a miracle of plenty was brought about following a talk by Jesus to his many followers.  His handlers were concerned that this multitude would suffer from lack of food, to which Jesus summoned forth the meager supplies among them:  a couple of loaves of bread, and one skinny little fish.  Not enough!  Yet Jesus told his guys to start handing it out anyway, and to give everyone as much as they needed.  Somehow, the food stretched and stretched and stretched, leaving the masses groaning with plenty. 

Of course, the story places great credit at the feet of Jesus.  And I’m guessing this little blog won’t change that general view much.  But here’s something:  what if the story was intended as an allegory in celebration not of one man’s ability to muster miracle, but rather in the power of many to find room (in their hearts, on the bench seats, at the river of sweet milk) to provide for each other in their need? 

Wouldn’t that be miraculous?