Nha Trang

If at dawn you walk the streets of Nha Trang, Vietnam, you may see blocks of ice being hauled by modified bicycles, bound for paying customers. In looking at this you may remember your grandfather, who mangled his legs as a kid in the 1920s when he got drug behind an ice truck (if I remember the story correctly, he was trying to nab some free ice). His injuries were severe enough that when later he tried to join the military during World War II, he was refused.

Also, you may recall a footnote in David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas, in which he details how ice made its way to Panama in the mid-1800s. It’s fascinating:

The ice was supplied by the Boston and Panama Ice Company and it sold for as much as fifty cents a pound when first introduced on the Isthmus. One ship from Boston carried seven hundred tons of ice packed in sawdust all the way around the Horn to Panama City, with a loss from melting of only one hundred tons. But in the process of getting the ice from ship to land to the Panama icehouse, a distance of two miles, another four hundred tons melted. Yet such was the demand that the sale of the remaining two hundred tons paid for the voyage. Within a few years, ice on the Pacific side was being supplied by ships from Sitka, from what was then knows as Russian America.

Finally, in looking at this scene—particularly if you notice the dripping—you may consider ice as symbolic of the human condition. The ice does in a matter of hours what your body will do in a matter of decades. What begins as defined blocks commences a change of state from the moment it is released into the world. The race is on.

The scene conveys a sense of urgency, speaks to the value of time, mirrors things about yourself. You stand and watch the ice drip till the driver returns. Then you walk on toward the beach, stretching your own block of flesh and spirit further into space and time, feeling it drip. And as you settle into the sand to watch a blazing sunrise, this is what you hope: that you will have more value than even the best cargo from Boston or Sitka, and that one day when you finally die all the way, you’ll be nothing like the wasted puddle on asphalt.

The U.S. Coast Guard would be appalled, but drinking while adrift is a daily scene off the coast of Nha Trang, Vietnam. The "floating bar" is part of a popular all-day boat trip to outlying islands and it works like this: Shortly after lunch, a crewmember swims maybe 100 feet away from the boat with several bottles of (very cheap) Vietnamese wine. He is followed by a small horde of travelers, all of whom are hungry for this novel mix of alcohol and the sea. Within a matter of minutes the bottles run dry, plastic cups are gathered, and everyone hauls themselves back onto the boat so that we might chug toward the next destination (I think it was snorkeling).  While the floating bar says little about Vietnamese culture, it says a lot about Vietnamese entrepreneurial skills.

There are at least as many reasons that people drink as there are nationalities in this picture.  In “Pray Without Ceasing,” one of Wendell Berry’s characters is said to have “stood, letting the whisky seek its level in him, and felt himself slowly come into purpose; now he had his anger full and clear.”  Another character, this one in C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, explains:

But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine.  I understood why men become drunkards.  For the way it worked on me was – not at all that it blotted out these sorrows – but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and reverend for feeling them.

As the people in this photo leapt from the ship to the sea to swim to the Vietnamese sailor with spirits, I don’t think anyone was doing so with the intent of being great and reverend, or to feel their anger full and clear.  Maybe the Vietnamese guy in the very top of the photo said it best.  Swimming back to the core of the group for a refill, he saw me still on the boat and yelled, “Joel jump, its so fun!”

And so, tucking my camera away, I jumped.