The culprit, I am sure, was the fried egg. Or not quite fried enough, as it now seems.
We were famished when we reached Nakai and repaired straightaway to Trung’s restaurant, a plank-and-sheet-metal shack on the dusty main road. Our hunger was not the hunger of a single day or even of a day of hard travel by foot and boat. It was the hunger of two weeks of deficit, gaining less from food than we put out in energy, our trousers fitting looser, the tails of our belts ever lengthening.
Trung, who is Vietnamese, lounges in his hammock by the chattering TV as we come through his doorless entry. We order one or two servings of everything he has on hand: ant-egg soup, mounds of rice, fried pork rinds, small sweet bananas, noodles nondescript, chew-forever chicken, and a platter of eggs. We gulp down two rounds of sodas before we take to our red plastic chairs and start on beer. While we wait for the food, we gaze at the traffic outside—trucks, chickens, dogs, pedestrians, and the occasional aimless cow. Trung’s place hasn’t windows so much as a gap of three or four absent planks in the front wall, which he has covered with clear plastic sheeting and chain-link mesh. Dust flows in along with light, leaving on everything a film that Trung and his indefatigable wife are forever wiping away. We wash our hands at a tiny basin by the door, near a shrine replete with joss sticks and an offering of bananas. Then we settle anew at our table while Trung hurries from his stove with a succession of plates and bowls. From advertising posters papering the walls, pretty Thai models, Photoshopped to an unnatural whiteness, smile at us as we dig into the food.
A few hours later, having checked into a modest guesthouse managed by Olay’s uncle, Robichaud and I eat again. Simeuang has gone to his home, and, after the briefest of good-byes—we are all too tired and dirty to wax sentimental—Touy and Olay have departed for the bus (Olay, like Touy, felt compelled to return to Vientiane; he promised to rejoin us in Nakai two mornings hence, when we depart for the Nam Mon).
Robichaud and I feasted on our second dinner, not far from Trung’s, at the Houaphou Restaurant, the lone outpost in Nakai offering Western food. It is the creation of a French engineer who came to Nakai to work on the dam and his Lao wife, who has more than mastered French cuisine. We ordered steak au poivre and a bottle of Bordeaux. Life was good.
Until it wasn’t.
I will spare the details, but suffice it to say that I later lay down to sleep with apprehension in my innards. Something was amiss. I blamed the not-quite-fried egg, but it could have been many things. Sleep did not come. What came instead were successive paroxysms of ejection such as I had never before experienced. I feared the bursting of an artery or the breaking of a rib. Every orifice took part, except that my brains did not come out my ears. I spent the night in the bathroom, periodically crawling back to bed and briefly closing my eyes. But no comforting darkness descended. Instead I beheld a vision of glutinous hell. I saw, on the backs of my eyelids, as it were, vast prairies of sticky rice, brilliantly white, puffy, and repugnant, a Great Plains of undigestion stretching to an infinite horizon, the sight of which hastened my return to the plumbing.
I was surprised that my involuntary racket did not wake Robichaud, who was next door. Gratefully, when light at last began to tinge the sky, I felt the paroxysms ebb and was able to remain in bed. But I could not rest easy. We were due to take to the trail again the following day, beginning our ascent of the Nam Mon, and here I was, voided, feverish, light-headed, and as weak as a dishrag. I could barely walk the room, let alone resume the labors of the trail. I was also parched. I found a bottle of water and took a sip. It was alpine cold and felt like starlight on the tongue, then radiated through my core, the finest drink that ever passed my lips.
Nakai, newly hacked from the forest, has the look of a town that is angry at the land, and the land is angry in return. Only a few ragged trees survived the clearing. They rise like the crooked pillars of an ancient ruin. Some exhibit prodigious kinks and curves, which give them the knock-kneed look of a naked beauty trying to cover herself. The shanties and bungalows they shade, clad in red dust, are set every which way, as though they had dropped from the sky.
I am upright, and we are driving to a meeting. Robichaud and Simeuang are obliged to debrief the managers of the WMPA. As I am known to have been present on the expedition, the managers expect to see me, too, at least what is left of me. I am woozy but stable. I took an antibiotic once I thought I could hold it down, and the effect has been salutary. My principal duty is to avoid passing out.
The WMPA offices sit at the edge of Nakai, on a slight rise above the reservoir. The new and handsome building sports a red tile roof that curls up, pagodalike, in swallowtail eaves. The grounds around it, bereft of vegetation, exhibit the rawness of a construction site. We shed our sandals on the broad stairs leading to the entry and go in.
The air in the lobby is faintly scented with formalin and decay. A glass aquarium the size of a fat man’s coffin lines one wall. It is lidded, but not tightly enough, and contains an immense fish, five and a half feet long, belly up in a lake of yellowing preservative. The legend on the tank proclaims that the pickled creature weighs eleven kilos and is a balai fafa—an electric fish. The people of Ban Thameuang (our next destination, en route to the Nam Mon) caught it in 2008 and made a gift of it to the WMPA. Fish experts have opined that it might have been forty years old and that it migrated up the Mekong, the Nam Kading, and the Nam Theun all the way from the sea. If so, it was among the last of its kind in these precincts. The NT2 dam now bars such journeys.
We wait for our audience with the managers. Windows above the fish allow us to peer into the next room, an office where stern-faced women labor under the sterner glare of portraits of Lenin and Marx. Shortly we are led upstairs to a long, narrow conference room. Ten or more ornate wooden tables, arranged in a horseshoe, nearly fill the room. Several dozen thronelike chairs range beside them. The director is there, in the alpha position at the head of the U, somewhat dwarfed by his throne, which is larger and more grandiose than the others. Four lieutenants attend him, two on either side.
The director, smiling, bids us sit. He is a slight man with a grave manner, but amiable and kind. I don’t know where he hails from, but long ago he became native to rooms like this one, a veteran of a thousand tiresome meetings. Although he is a man of power, he operates under much restraint. There is always pressure from above and resistance from below, which runs strongest on his staff among those he cannot fire, who owe their jobs, and their loyalty, to other thrones. If the director is not an ironist, he should be.
He explains the purposes of the WMPA and the agency’s great concern for wildlife. His monotone suggests that we are not the first persons to hear this speech. When the director is finished, he asks the head of enforcement to describe the number and accomplishments of recent patrols (very few) and the number of patrols contemplated for the future (a great many). The head of enforcement then adds, “We are ready to coordinate our efforts with the district government. We are also building additional ranger stations as a way of increasing our enforcement capacity.” These words are uttered with as little emphasis and inflection as the director had used.
Next, the head of biodiversity conservation invites Simeuang to make his report, which Simeuang does in his usual drone, duly noting each of our councils with village chiefs and the messages they directed him to carry back to Nakai.
Finally it is Robichaud’s turn. He speaks partly in Lao, partly in English, so that I may follow along, which does not disadvantage the director or any but one of his lieutenants, who command the language fairly well. Robichaud is serious in his delivery, as befits his account of the saola’s precarious hold on existence, but also at moments mirthful. He has collaborated and negotiated with these men for years. Their wan smiles suggest that they enjoy his cajolery, or at least that they are used to it. He describes the evident influx of cash to the villages, the ubiquity of poaching camps, and the prevalence of snares. He makes them laugh about the poacher’s phone number posted on a rosewood stump and suggests they make the call. He says he has never seen Vietnamese camps so close to the villages before, which he takes as a sign of collusion between poachers and some element of the village hierarchy. His account is vivid and direct but also tactful. He says nothing shaming or accusatory, nothing that blames. He closes with a grim description of the biota of the Nam Nyang being sucked from the forest and carried over the mountains to Vietnam.
And then he asks for my comments. He warned me he would do so, but nevertheless I am dry-mouthed at the prospect. Throughout the meeting I have greedily eyed a glass of tea that was placed before me, but I do not trust my innards sufficiently to take a sip, lest it trigger something uncontrollable. I feel ghostlike, as though I might float away. Robichaud told me the director might listen more acutely to a foreign journalist than to someone like himself, whose concerns he has heard many times before. An hour ago, the idea made sense. Now it seems absurd. Why should the director listen to anyone so obviously immaterial? Besides, Robichaud has said everything in need of saying.
They are looking at me. One more beat of silence will embarrass everyone. Thick-tongued, I begin to speak. Recalling that compliments seem to introduce every statement in this part of the world, I praise the beauty of NNT and the vibrancy of its communities, but I overdo it and quickly sense the cloud of tedium, already heavy in the room, thickening further. I change course and pursue the first intelligent-sounding thing that comes to mind, which concerns the burgeoning population of the villages and the consequent strain on resources, as the six thousand people now living in the watershed become sixty-five hundred, then seven thousand. But I am quickly in over my head in front of people who know far more than I about birthrates, death rates, and emigration, and so I veer toward the safer ground of my own reaction to the carnage of the snare lines. Now I seem to be getting a little traction: my auditors’ eyes narrow with concern. So boldly I continue, asserting the urgent need for forceful patrol, that not a moment should be lost, that the remote extremities of NNT have been surrendered to poachers, that this is a betrayal of the promise of NT2, that concerned people throughout the world, were they to learn of this, would…
Robichaud kicks me under the table.
I glance his way. He is smiling mildly. Have I been untactful? Perhaps he was just shifting in his chair.
I begin to add a verb to my incomplete thought, and Robichaud kicks me again, harder. The thought is left unbuilt. I have gone too far. I retreat. “You can see that these matters are very worrisome to me,” I say, and thank them for their attention. They nod. Everyone looks relieved. The director intones a few summary comments and tells us our comments are gratefully noted. More nods and smiles. Meeting over.
On our way out, the odor of formalin in the lobby incites in me a surge of sympathy. I feel a sudden affinity with the giant electric fish. All I want to do is return to the guesthouse, take to my bed, and lie belly up, immobile, unfragrant, and grateful for onrushing sleep.