Sailing down narrow tree-lined streets on the back of a Honda Dream Motorcycle. Through small villages, high-fiving the local kids, we made our way from the city of Hue out into the unvanquishable Vietnamese countryside. A kingdom of rice fields and ancestor worship. Over moss rivers, past countless grey walls we forgot our destination and lost ourselves in motion and wind. Lurid temples dedicated to past generations dot the mottled green landscape, reverent to the ancient architects who sowed these fields in years past. These arable fields are eternal, like the blood of men who have proudly harvested rice there for generations.
Met a fortune teller on an old wooden covered bridge. Everything about her was sanguine; her robes, her nails, her sandals and even her auspicious prediction. Three children; one girl, two boys. Rich at Thirty. Long ears mean long life. Three old men idled in the shade of the bridge nearby, all in white, all faintly resembling paintings of Ho Chi Minh with his long stringy white beard. Men decaying gracefully like Vietnam herself. Sovereign to their own destinies. Everyone in this small village escapes the oppresive heat in the cool bridge and awaits the rice harvest festival in two weeks. This year ten countries will participate, big news in this humble town.
The grand tombs of past emperors hide in the vast foliage of this countryside. They sit, crooked and grey, frozen in the act of resurrecting themselves. Wind, rain and age decorate the pale walls like mad expressionist paintings. These labrynthine crypts, circumscribed by shallow lotus ponds, are being awakened by tourism and reconstruction after years of war and neglect. Emperor Thu Duc, a man who valued peace and quiet above all else, ensured his privacy by ordering the beheading of all the two hundred skilled workers who built his magnificent tomb. Although he now sleeps to the footsteps of running shoes and sandals he must be happy, for his country survived history after all.
Surrounded by crumbling citadel walls, a field of mimosa grow where the emperor's palace once stood. The shy flower closes when touched and only opens its modest leaves to the sun when left alone. A flower, much like a nation. Man's narcissism, a senseless need to own grass and dirt, ignorantly expressed with fire and blood, destroyed the masterful monument that once stood on that very field less than a half a century ago. At night, in darkness, the mimosa whisper and giggle nervously among themselves about human folly. In the day, in the trees that line the shadowy cool streets of Hue, brazen cicadas laugh drunkenly in bellowing baritones. This is the sound of heat and history and Hue.
Brandon
