The Rawness

4:30 am. Before sunrise, in the last shadows of night before the light begins to creep through the smoky haze that is spread over Luang Prabang, I hear the drums. I open my eyes and let them adjust to the darkness of our hotel room.

My hip is sore from the firm mattress but I feel rested, and after three days of waking before first light to the sound of the drums I am growing fond of this morning ceremony. Across the street at Wat Sene temple the drums are vibrating and the earth is listening.

The layers of drumbeats are filtering through my morning grogginess. There is the immediate volume of drumming across the street. A thin Laotian monk is hitting a large suspended drum and a small black gong with a heavy mallet. This happens twice a day. At 4:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. the deep boom of the suspended drum, larger than an oil barrel and floating off the ground suspended by thick rope, sends low notes vibrating across the street and through the thin walls of our hotel. The monk playing keeps a steady beat. Standard time eighth notes that overlap and roll like a succession of waves. The sound envelops me until my eyes are fully open and my mind fully aware. Then I can hear all the layers of the cacophony onion that is peeling so nicely.

It is like a wolf pack call throughout the dry morning of this Southeast Asian hamlet. In between the fading of one boom and the start of another, I hear softer booms in the distance. Identical drums struck with identical mallets throughout the small city of Luang Prabang. Some are beating in unison but some are far off and the sound is delayed in reaching us on the outskirts of town. This sound delay creates a syncopated beat that feels intentional. The effect is thunderous. A continuous deluge of drum beats dancing through the empty morning streets. The last beat is struck and the final echo is resonating up and down the narrow alleyways and bouncing off the French-style store fronts that line the main streets of a small city that feels like it is on the verge of blowing up as the next tourist hotspot. Some might say it already has, and perhaps we were just fortunate enough to be there during a lull in the zoom-lens-and-North-Face onslaught of backpackers and day-trippers. But after a week in Luang Prabang, and a week of 4:30 am wake up calls compliments of the monks next door, my sense is that this place is still raw. It may be cooked one day, but for now it is still raw.

There are pockets in the world, pockets of rawness where life does not flower and blossom, but explodes and oozes down the clay-packed streets of a balmy Mekong River village; where entire families zoom helter-skelter on a 400 cc motorbike along soft river roads. Four deep in a late 80s model Yamaha. Mom up front steering the beast with the youngest child swaddled in soft cloth hung around her neck. The eldest daughter riding behind mom and combing the hair of her grimy Barbie doll. Dad in back enjoying his morning cigarette and gently gripping the bike with his thighs, his beat rubber sandals dangling inches above the ground.
There are pockets in the world where life is not a fluid stream. It is a heavy torrent of water gurgling along ancient silted riverbanks. Where trees are slashed and burned and the thin sheets of riverweed are dried and consumed with a fire-hot, red paste to create some idea of flavor. A thick river of life that consumes everything in its path and spits it out wherever that vein meets the sea.

These pockets still exist. These pockets of rawness and devouring creation that make the hermetically sealed and loud-mouthed airbag SUVS of the developed nations look like arrogant sociopaths. The rawness is not done for bravado, showmanship or stealthy attention. It is the way life exists in these pockets. It is the way life survives and the way these people eat. The world is raw and the safety and hardboiled eggs of the developed world are shattered into a gooey, stringy mess as a twelve-year-old girl rides behind the helm of a dilapidated motorbike. Dark-skinned, bony arms reaching up to the handlebars. Dirty feet and sandals barely reaching the clutch as she pops the bike into third and glides through a soft right hand turn and then rips the throttle into the straightaway sending the wind and sand and haze through her long dark hair. The ground is dropping away beneath her, but her heart is cool and pumping blood with normal pressure. Her pupils are not dilated and her brain is not surging dopamine to her nervous system. She is not thrilled by this experience. She has been doing this everyday for the past two years. She is responsible for one third of the family income, and she wants to be to work on time. She glides past the tuk-tuk we have hired to navigate us through the simple streets of Luang Prabang. It seems like something is wrong. Like I should jump out and stop her and take her back to her family, or at the least plunk a helmet on her melon and wrap her up in reflective tape. But as she sails by, I see her younger brother is gripping to her sides and his small hands are barely holding on to her. His shit-eating grin is priceless as his head peers out from behind her back, teeth catching grit the whole way. The rawness will continue. The world will spin out of control. The drumbeat of life will continue to follow its own scattered rhythm like a percussion set dropped down a metal stairwell. It’s all racket at first and only after straining do we hear and see and feel the raw beat of life.

Life oozes like thick puss from a fresh wound in these places. Pulsating life, thick with the rawness from living on the fringes, and we, in turn, experience this from the fringe. Photographing and eating and playing and stumbling through the beginning scraps of the language. We get only so close in the seven days we are here, but the rawness is inexorable. It consumes you and gobbles you up in the dense smoke of the suppressing afternoon heat. The bright orange glow of the sun like a pastel spotlight behind a soft veil. All the ambient light is diffused and the smoke sparkles in the air. You can feel the sunburn even though it doesn’t seem like it’s there.

This place is on the verge of getting cooked. It is still raw, but you can feel the temperature rising and you can sense the future. A time when the morning drums will be silenced due to complaints from the tourists in the hotels. The monks forced to receive their morning alms by special delivery because they can’t walk the streets without being harassed. Not harassed in a malicious way, but harassed by every person with a camera and a Facebook account. Every person that wants to snap a few shots and run to the nearest coffee shop with Wi-Fi and show the world the monks walking in the morning and collecting their meager meal of rice. Uploading photos while they download a double frappuccino and cheesy bacon croissant.

It is a mixed feeling to be in this rawness. To be in it but to be a part of the cooking as well. To wake up early and watch the monks from a distance, trying to capture a few candid photos as they walk by, and then relaxing with a morning coffee and planning the events of the day.
It is a hard balance to not fall into that alluring and comfortable tourist role. Of spending such small amounts of cash in return for a week of a lavish lifestyle that we could not afford in any other pocket of the world. We embrace the rawness, we sense the burgeoning of a new era for this quaint Buddhist paradise, an era that is perhaps not entirely welcome, and we are adding to the searing of this life. We are adding to the culmination of turning on the television in 10 years and seeing Luang Prabang as the number three tourist Mecca on the Travel Channel’s weekend marathon of one-hundred places you must see before you die.
We will cringe and bite our lip and watch the fast moving clips of crowded streets that were once empty, of power boats that were once slow boats, of monks on display that were once beating drums and waking the city before the sunrise, of an air-conditioned mall that was once a tented night market, of a local girl handing out life vests for the power boat ride who was once motoring down dirt roads with reckless abandon with her brother in tow, and we will remember the rawness. We will remember the breaking point of this fragile city, and we will try to find the next one. The next raw, undiscovered pocket of life, and maybe then we will leave our cameras and gadgets at home.