At times, in an effort to display my competence, I do something like pass a large truck on a narrow and narrowing road, the green side of the truck looming on my left and a rice paddy coming closer to the frayed tarmac on my right and when I hear the hard fast smack of metal against metal my only reaction is to accelerate and hope the tarmac stays under the wheel and the car remains on the road and does not sail into the paddy. When I am performing for the eyes of people I do not know, cannot identify, people who do not exist that assess my actions from some unseen perch with interest and judgment, my desire to demonstrate to those phantoms my competence is more likely to send me catapulting into a rice paddy.
As it is, I am happy to see only the folded in remains of the passenger side mirror on the car we rented for my first self-drive on Java and the truck receding in my still intact rear-view mirror. Here we were on the quieter side road, an escape from the swirling chaos of the Javanese highway and its busses and trucks and swarming motorcycles, motorcycles everywhere on those roads, passing in droves on the left and right, zipping in front after they pass on the left to better pass the bus in front on the right. But we survived, and the rest of the trip, I was indeed competent, the mirror just a recurring topic of good-natured jibes from the rest of my family.
Javanese highways are asphalt evidence that free will is just a useful fiction, because caught in that stream of traffic one must move with it and as it moves. In the United States, even in heavy fast traffic, one can often lodge in the slow lane and just accept the speed, but in Java, there is no slow lane, only spaces that exist to be filled, and if you do not pass the truck in front of you, all the other cars and motorcycles behind you will pass you and create a space in front of you, where there is none. When you sense that the bus behind you is going to try to create a space in the two feet of space between you and the slow truck, it is strong impetus to pass first, and you pull out into the oncoming stream of traffic at those moments when it is only a stream of motorcycles, trusting that they will pull to the side and let you make their lane yours, which they do. Honestly, there is no choice but to drive like that, and once the rhythm becomes clear, the expectations of the road obvious, it stops feeling stressful.
Pacitan, though, a small city at the bottom of a steep winding hill, perched against a bay on the Indian Ocean, did not feel like Java. There was no swirling traffic, no bustling crowds. There were lush unharvested forests, and the ocean was clean, and clear. We found a home-stay about 200 meters from the beach (I think in meters now, but not Celsius, and what need to think about temperature anyway, when the temperature is always the same?), and ate fresh fish, barbecued; Seamus resigned himself to an Indonesian bathroom, with the squattie toilet he has been avoiding for seven months. Across from us a rice paddy, inhabited by a raucous congress of frogs.
Something about this three day trip was right, somehow, though I can’t pin down what it was. I loved driving ourselves around, the sense of independence. I loved the beach. We learned to surf, or at least we took surfing lessons, or at least we paid a couple of Indonesians to come out into the ocean with us and say “Go” and push our boards from behind to help us with momentum. I stood up once, finally, at the end, on a small surge of leftover wave, not all the way up, but up enough to convince myself, finally, that with time I could in fact stand up better. I left, then, with the possibility of surfing, which was enough for me. Graham, to no one’s surprise, spent most of the time, after about an hour, on his feet. Though we lathered up with sunscreen, we all got terrific sunburns, and as I write this our flaking skin is making little trails of decaying humanity all over the house. The kids weren’t much different than they have been, alternately crabby and fun to be with, whiny and then enthusiastic, fighting over the line in the car, and then playing together in the waves, but their fluctuations bothered me less, or stayed with me not as long. We saw one of the most beautiful caves I have ever visited, and spent part of an afternoon crouched under a plastic sheeting drawn over an improbable concrete deck with colonnaded railings built randomly on an overhang over the most gorgeous stretch of coastline I have ever seen, with two fisherman, avoiding the rain. There were nets pulled between tall wooden stakes all over the rugged hills surrounding us, like props for extreme volleyball courts, used to catch the gargantuan bats that flew every night from the coastal caves, and which apparently are good eating. (I would eat bat.) We drove home in a torrential downpour, most of the drive on the crowded highway. Even with the extra money I have to pay to replace the shell of the passenger side mirror, it was cheaper, and more fun, than hiring a car with a driver.
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