IT IS JULY 2018, AND I AM AT ELEPHANT NATURE PARK again. Only this time I’m not a volunteer; I’m a visitor. My husband stands behind me, and I’m holding the hand of a small, floppy-haired boy who is almost four.
Our son, Everest.
Jason and I gave him a name that conjures up a challenge, something powerful that stretches to the sky, a wish, a dream. It only seemed appropriate after miscarriage and difficulty conceiving in the first place. He came into our lives as a mighty hope.
This little left-handed boy loves broccoli and watermelon, dinosaurs, and David Bowie. He’s a hiker, a dancer, a puzzle solver. Once, seeing a white piece of dandelion fluff float by on the breeze, he said, “Oh, look. A hummingbird ghost.” He enjoys flopping facedown on top of a map and tracing roads with his pointer finger, asking the names of cities and far-flung places. He’s also passionate about airplanes and wants to be a pilot. He says he will fly me to Greece.
We are traveling through Southeast Asia on a three-week vacation, and because Everest is already a laid-back, adaptable traveler, the twenty-hour flight from Los Angeles to Chiang Mai was a snap. We spent a few days walking the city, climbing temple stairs, and eating our way through night-market stalls. Now I have brought my family to a place that was significant on my solo travels.
I imagined this would be the closing of a loop, bringing my backpacking trip full circle. In all, my journey took me to seventeen countries over the course of one year. I achieved everything on my list for Mom—hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, trekking through the Amazon rainforest, volunteering at a monkey sanctuary, seeing the salt flats of Bolivia, attending a soccer game in Buenos Aires, going on safari in Kruger National Park, exploring the pyramids of Giza, visiting the ancient city of Petra, caring for elephants—and I accomplished many items on my own list. My travels also revealed how much I wanted to be a mother, something I didn’t know about myself when I embarked on that journey.
Returning to Chiang Mai with my son is the culmination of everything meaningful in my life—my journey as a daughter and now as a mom—and I brace myself for an overwhelming, emotional moment. I assume Everest will take to the elephants right away, the way I did. He adores animal shows on TV, especially ones that feature elephants, and this is a rare opportunity to spend time with them up close.
But Everest doesn’t care. He is shy around the elephants and visibly intimidated. I didn’t think about what it must be like for him to see this creature in real life, outside the confines of a picture book or cartoon. They must appear 300 feet tall.
We stand on the wooden deck of a shelter as one of the rescued elephants lopes toward us and nudges her trunk toward my boy. I take half a watermelon and put it in Everest’s hands. My son drops the melon, burrows into my side, and buries his face in my shirt.
“They’re big,” he murmurs.
I coach him through the process again, this time with a squash that is larger, thus easier for the elephant to grab without touching his hand. The elephant is gentle but playful. She taps her trunk on the squash and then swings the trunk toward herself again, as if to say, “For me?” Then she brings it back again and ever so gently plucks the squash from his palm. Everest doesn’t notice. He’s too busy looking up where a spider spins a web the size of a Volkswagen.
“Wow, Mom!” he cries out, excitedly. “Do you see that spider?”
I do. It’s as big as his face.
“It’s as big as my face!”
We spend an entire day with the elephants. We feed them, walk with them to the river to be bathed, watch them roam the stunning countryside. Elephant Nature Park has changed significantly in the seven years since I worked there, but only in positive ways. The sanctuary has expanded, and they’ve rescued more elephants. Stick Dog is no longer around, but there are hundreds of other rescue animals, both dogs and cats, and nice structures to house them. Also the efforts of my pothole-patching are long gone; the new road that leads to the park is smooth and well maintained. Eco-tourism has been embraced by Thailand, with dozens of other sanctuaries that have formed within the past several years; Elephant Nature Park paved the way.
Only one thing is missing: Mae Perm, the best friend and seeing-eye elephant for Jokia.
I spy Jokia from across a field, solitary under a thatched structure, and approach her gingerly. I can’t say for a fact that Jokia remembers me. But it’s a fact that I stand among a group of visitors, and Jokia reaches out to only one of us.
The air shifts. She tilts her head toward the sky, then stretches forward. She tucks the nub of her trunk in my hand, nuzzling me. It’s said that elephants never forget, but research has shown that some elephants are even better with memories than others: matriarchs. The matriarchs of a herd develop strong social memories of their friends, their foes, their family members, because their survival depends on it.
A few tears roll down my cheeks, and Everest wipes them away.
“It’s okay, Mom,” he says. “Be happy.”
I’m frustrated this trip doesn’t hold as much meaning for Everest as I thought it would. At the same time, my own spirit shifts in unanticipated ways. I stand in between the gentle giant I fell for years ago and the gentle boy who claims my heart now, the hot Thai sun beaming down upon all of us. I never could have imagined this, my past and future colliding into one moment.
Elephants in the wild tend to travel the same paths, generation after generation, which might suggest memories don’t die when one elephant does. The herd carries their memories forward.
I know Everest is young and that early experiences don’t make much of an impression, but I say a silent prayer that this one will somehow stick. Maybe he will carry this memory forward long after I’m gone.
EVEREST WAS DOING THINGS IN HIS OWN TIME FROM THE start, coming into the world two weeks late during a C-section.
I’ve heard a lot of birth stories, and people always talk about the moment they saw their baby for the first time or felt the first touch of skin on skin. For me, I will always remember the brassy sound of my baby’s first cry, slicing through the cold, white air of the operating room. Robbed of all my other senses—hands strapped down, nose clogged, a curtain blocking my view—that noise was how I first connected with my child, and it was golden, and it was perfect.
“It’s a boy!” one of the doctors shouted. “Ten fingers, ten toes!” said another.
Someone brought the baby to my head and laid him next to my face. I nuzzled him with my cheek, and I felt like an animal—a cat rubbing her kitten—before he was swept away to a recovery room. He was wiped down, measured, swaddled, then returned to my chest.
When he settled upon my skin, I stared at him.
“Who are you?” I marveled. “Who are you going to be?”
The question ran through the days and months that followed, through long nights of nursing and diaper changes, through the moments when he peered back at me with enormous eyes, the black of his irises indistinguishable from his pupils. He was a colicky and unsettled baby, who pinched his face until he looked like a withered eggplant while he howled for hours. I cradled him tight and did my best to soothe the screams from his body, gingerly swaying back and forth in the yellow rocking chair where my mother once held me.
He grew quickly, part boy, part pony. As soon as he learned to climb out of his crib, he burst from his room each morning, spring-loaded with the energy of a colt emerging from a corral. He hardly crawled; he scaled the furniture and ran circles around the dinner table and somersaulted across the floor. Jason and I gave up on the baby gate after the first year of Everest’s life, because it was rendered useless when he built ramps to hop over the top.
I will always wonder if I have condemned Everest to a life with Alzheimer’s, either in his own body or caring for me if I have it in mine. But I have to have hope. That’s the reason he’s here, after all. Jason and I decided risk was a better path than regret.
In moments of doubt, I think back to experiencing the Badlands of South Dakota with my mom, both of us witnesses to the strange theatricality of the landscape, how ravaged it was and how magnificent. The world is too remarkable to keep to myself. I’m grateful to share it.
AFTER THAILAND, MY FAMILY HEADS TO CAMBODIA TO explore temples, visit Bill and Jill, and see the landmine clearing crew in action. We drive into the leafy countryside, a couple of hours away from Siem Reap, where a landmine has been found on a farm, not far from a path where children walk to school.
Everest dons the smallest protective vest, which is still enormous on his thirty-five-pound frame, and a helmet with a clear plastic face visor that goes all the way to his chest. After the team places dynamite around the old explosive, Everest presses the button to detonate it. We are close enough that he can see the plume of smoke above the treetops, hear the boom, and feel the earth shake, but he doesn’t realize what happened until Bill carries him over to the farm where the landmine used to be, places him in the hole, and gives him a lollipop.
“You did this!” Bill says.
Then it’s onward to Bali, a place none of us have traveled before.
Everest’s last day of age three is spent by the ocean. I buy a pink cupcake from a bakery stand, and he eats it while playing in the sand, using his shoe to dig for treasure. And then I spy a treasure that wasn’t on any of our maps: a small sea turtle conservation center in Sanur near the beach.
There are so many obstacles to a baby sea turtle’s survival, which is why most sea turtle species around the world are endangered. The baby sea turtles hatch as a group, usually at night, and they dash toward the brightest horizon they can find. It used to be that moonlight led them to the ocean, but artificial light along the shore can be disorienting, outshining the natural light, and the hatchlings often head inland instead.
This is a problem because if the turtles don’t make it to the ocean quickly, they can die of dehydration, from exposure to the elements, or at the claws of birds and crabs. Some turtles get caught in fishing nets near the beach or die from consuming litter. Many nesting sites are destroyed before the turtles ever have a chance to hatch.
Organizations like this one in Bali protect the turtle eggs and hatch them in a safe environment. When the hatchlings are old enough, volunteers release them into the ocean. And that’s exactly what we do for Everest’s birthday.
Thanks to TV programs, Everest knows words like “migration,” “hibernation,” and “camouflage,” even if he hasn’t seen the concepts presented in real life. We spend a little bit of time talking about the terms that might apply to the turtles. Then my son leans over a large tank where dozens of hatchlings swim.
“That one,” he says. He points to a little turtle, smaller than a deck of cards, that appears to be bashing itself against the side of the tank and trying to climb out. In a tank full of frenetic baby turtles, my son has picked out the wildest one of all. Everest names him Spikey.
An employee from the organization fishes Spikey out of the water with a plastic bowl—you don’t want to touch hatchlings with your hand—and then carefully gives the bowl to Everest. Step by gentle step we walk out of the center and out to the water.
At the ocean’s edge, Everest pauses with a concerned look on his face. He asks how Spikey will know where to go.
“It’s instinct, sweet pea.”
“Instinct?”
“It means there’s something in your body that tells you where to go, or what to do, or how to behave. It’s like knowing without actually knowing you know,” I say. “Instinct tells him that he must be out there, so he goes.”
We wade out into the gentle waves, as deep as we can without Everest getting tugged away by the tide, and he lowers the bowl.
“Careful,” Jason says, even though Everest is moving slowly, tenderly.
Spikey paddles from the shallow water that swirls around us and into the great expanse of the ocean. He swims past the fishing boats anchored nearby, past the bobbing buoys, and then into the vanishing point. That’s where Spikey disappears from our view, traveling to places he doesn’t know yet, traveling to places we someday might.
A warm breeze rustles my hair as I stand in the Bali Sea next to my husband and a boy on the precipice of his own adventures. We have no idea how far this journey will take us, only that we must embark on it.
Everest grabs my hand and whispers, “Go, Spikey, go.”