Julie and I got married on a hot and smoky August day nearly 30 years ago, in a small meadow beside Gold Creek, which runs into the Salmon River a quarter-mile up the valley from our house. It travels through lodgepole forest and divides the summer pasture of the Idaho Rocky Mountain Ranch.
Julie and I had gone up the previous afternoon and cleared the meadow of a couple bushels of cow pies. We cut down a non-festive-looking dead tree that we didn’t want in the wedding pictures, and cleared a path into the forest upstream from where we would exchange our vows. The next day, to a boombox playing Wagner’s Wedding March, Julie’s parents and Julie would walk out of the forest to the spot where Julie’s sisters, my best man, the minister, and I all stood, waiting in short grass and cropped wildflowers.
The reception was at my parents’ house. Julie had been barbecuing briskets for a week, occasionally creating enough smoke that people drove in from the highway to see if a building was on fire. We had cases of wine and champagne. People ate and drank and laughed and Julie’s siblings sang “Amazing Grace,” and then, while the party was still going on, Julie and I gathered up our backpacks for a trip across Redfish. We camped on slickrock beside a small waterfall a couple of miles up Redfish Creek. We set up the tent, put out the sleeping bags, and immediately fell sound asleep for 16 hours or so, not bothering to eat our brisket sandwiches or open the bottle of champagne we had carried in with us. We packed the champagne out the next day, and I think it may still be down in our crawl space, waiting for a special occasion, maybe our 50th anniversary.
I’ll be 95 on that anniversary, so it’s not guaranteed that I’ll be able to get back up the ladder from the crawl space if I can even remember why I went down in the first place. But if I can, we will do the party up right, with as many of the original guests as we can find. We’ll feed them barbecued brisket and champagne if their physicians will allow it, if physicians are still trying to keep people alive, if beef is still available, if propane for the barbecue is affordable, if cars are still going to and from Ketchum and Stanley on the highway, and champagne is still sold to non-nobility.
It will only be two decades from now, and we know from experience that two decades can and will change us into people we will struggle to recognize, and the world into a far country. Even on good days, the foundations of our reality are built on temporal quicksand.
About the only certainty we have is that if Julie and I are both still kicking on our 50th, and still have our wits about us, we’ll still be married, we’ll still be loving each other, and we’ll still be laughing.
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We didn’t go on a honeymoon right away. At the time I was writing for travel magazines, and a few years before I had been sent by the editors of Travel and Leisure to a newly-opened Aman Resorts hotel on the island of Phuket, in Thailand. Amanpuri, as it was called, was a bubble of high luxury in the middle of a still-developing tourist zone. Its rooms cost $1,000 a night at a time when you could rent a nearby beachside bungalow for $10. We would have loved to have spent two weeks at Amanpuri, but Travel and Leisure had quite sensibly rejected my proposal to turn my honeymoon into an all-expenses-paid travel article. “Our readers don’t want our writers having too much fun,” my editor explained. “Neither does your editor.”
The feeling of luxury persists even in the absence of luxury. I still wanted to go to Thailand for my honeymoon.
Julie said she didn’t mind staying in the cheap places as long as there was a flush toilet.
We left for Bangkok in December and after a quick stay in a hotel near the airport, we took a train to the north, touring the old Thai capitals of Ayutthaya and Sukhothai and Chiang Mai and only occasionally staying in places that didn’t fit Julie’s honeymoon specifications. The food was beyond good, the hotels friendly if sometimes basic, and the weather like sunny summer days in Sawtooth Valley.
A couple of weeks later we took a domestic flight to the southern beaches near Krabi. After ten days of more good food and long walks and talks along the tidelines, we took another train back to Bangkok, there to leave Thailand’s delicious warmth for January in Idaho, which contained our jobs, our bills, our mortgage, our families, and the rest of what we considered our colder-than-a-honeymoon ordinary lives.
By this time we badly needed haircuts, and on our last morning in Thailand we wandered around Khao San Road until, in deference to Julie’s less-than-enthusiastic endorsement of male barbers, we found a female-staffed barbershop. Haircutting in Bangkok has a universal sign language that involves gesturing about the length and apparent momentum of one’s hair until a headshot of a Thai celebrity or movie star appears and is approved.
My hair turned white in my thirties, so when my barber was done, I looked quite a bit older than the movie star I had indicated I wanted to look like. The area around my chair was covered with drifts of white hair, and I pointed to it and said, “Snow. In Bangkok.” My barber laughed, and called to her colleagues, pointing to me and then to the floor, saying “Snow!”
Everybody in the place started saying, “Snow! Snow!” If Thai has a word for snow, nobody was saying it. We had a small and noisy celebration of winter there on Khao San Road, one that gets repeated every time Julie cuts my hair.
The next day we got on a plane for Vancouver. We had some difficulty with Canadian customs officers, who thought I was trafficking Julie. Finally we were allowed to leave for a cold, gray, and icy Boise. We had a long wait for luggage, and some slick Idaho roads, before we made it back to our life of placid and austere domesticity.
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I’ve checked the Amanpuri website, and it’s still there, still with beautiful pavilions high in the forest canopy, connected by raised walkways. Its black-tiled pool still gleams darkly in tropical sunlight, and its poolside restaurant tables are still impeccably set. I remember walking into my pavilion and being shocked by the chill of its air conditioning and delighted at the bowl of unfamiliar fruits that waited on the small leaf-shaded balcony adjacent to the bedroom. I stayed on the balcony until I got too warm, then went inside until I felt cold again. In the evenings, after the sun had fallen into the Andaman Sea, it got cool enough to take the walkways and stairways down to the pool, and to dinner.
It was a dreamlike, womblike experience, one that felt out of time. Looking at the website, it’s easy to think that no time has passed since I was there.
Time has passed. Rack rate for Amanpuri is now $3,000 a night for two people. Julie and I didn’t come close to spending that much for our wedding or our honeymoon, and now, even if we could come up with the money, we wouldn’t.
One looks at the inequality in the world, the innocent victims of war, exclusion and poverty, and says, “This is why we can’t have nice things.”
Or if we can have them, it’s why we can’t feel all that good about them without some sort of moral self-blinding.
Part of this feeling comes from being at Amanpuri when some Indonesian military leaders arrived with their mistresses. It took the Amanpuri people quite a while to pack their luggage up to their pavilions, quite a while for them to look around at the other guests, size us up, and relax into a complacent superiority of power. I knew enough about Indonesia to know that these were not poor but honest generals doing the best they could to bring peace and security to their struggling country.
Also, I had never seen such exotic women in my life. They were artifacts of a culture that treats beautiful women the same way the Westminster Kennel Club treats pick-of-the-litter Salukis. God only knew what sort of consciousness a life like that, and intimacy with an Indonesian general, would produce over the brief lifespan of beauty.
I wanted to find out how the human self survived in such circumstances, but none of these women seemed to be available for an interview, even though I thought it would have made a nice sidebar for my article.
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There are many reasons we can’t feel unequivocally good about touring the world these days. Guilt is always a part of our travel decisions. We worry about our carbon footprint, even though it’s tiny compared to people who rack up a million frequent flyer miles every couple of years, or invest in ever more server farms, or drive giant pickups, or have children. We worry that our contribution to CO2 in the atmosphere might be the final kick that sets off a planet-killing climate phase-change. We worry that invisible barriers might disappear, the ones between our place in the educated middle class of Empire and the poor, the starving, the bombed, and the exiled. We worry that the world financial system might go down while we’re in a country that only tolerates Americans because of their money. (That’s all of them, including America.)
Our wedding serves as a small metaphor for the world we have faced for the past thirty years. First married, we thought we were poor in relation to most people, and were accordingly frugal. But with time, and with a marriage that continues to delight, we have discerned that we are incredibly lucky to have what the universe has handed us. We don’t make the mistake of thinking that we earned all that we have. Other people have been essential, including the people who educated us, hired us, and raised us.
But if the world had depended on the amount of economic stimulus we have provided to its economy, it would have been in Great Depression 2.0 long ago. To be able to say we haven’t been rich but have had everything we’ve needed is to evoke a kind of wealth that is real but exceedingly rare.
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We won’t go back to Bangkok for a second honeymoon. All of Thailand has been in a year-long heat wave. Thousands of records have fallen, and people are dying from the heat. Even the cold season has seen lethal temperatures, on the beaches and in the mountains. This April, typically Southeast Asia’s hottest season, is forecast to break more records yet. Combinations of heat and humidity will again pass heat indexes of 50C, which will kill anybody left out in the sun.
It's understandable that Amanpuri charges $3,000 for an airconditioned room, but not so understandable that tourists would visit a country where the heat is killing poor people. This year will see events that should finally break through the psychic defenses of the most adamant climate-deniers, especially if they’re stuck in the tropics without money.
If Julie and I attempt a second honeymoon, it will be in Greenland or Svalbard or Nunavut, if the Indonesian generals haven’t already taken all the best hotel rooms.