The Mekong River Reverie

Usually, when I think of the Mekong River, I don't imagine roosters, strutting along the river promenade in Luang Prabang. No, I think of the Vietnam War – of the images I saw on TV growing up: a river rife with destruction and brutality, fear, dread. Of course it wasn’t the river per se, it was the Mekong delta. But such distinctions mean nothing to a child.

When I think of the Mekong River, I think of my father too, and of the summer of ’66: my brother had just graduated high school, and itching to get out from under our father’s control, he wanted to join the Marines. He wasn’t yet 18 and needed my father’s signature, which was not, at first, forthcoming. My father and brother argued, yelled. My mother wrung her hands together; her face etched with tears, my father’s with grim worry. My father, a WWII vet, saw the futility of the Vietnam War, disagreed with our government's reasons for being there and wanted his son to go to college, not to war. But my father did sign the papers; my brother joined not the Marines, but the Navy and went into the sub-service, stationed on the East Coast, out of Norfolk, Virginia. My parents exhaled a collective sigh of relief – their son was not off to Vietnam. All I understood was that my brother was not in Vietnam, but underneath the Atlantic in nuclear subs –whatever the heck those were.

But the image of the Mekong as a nightmarish hell (furthered amplified years later of course by the movie, Apocalypse Now) stuck with me, until two years ago, when I first beheld the river with my own eyes. I was traveling in the Golden Triangle region, where the Mekong River connects three countries and not so long ago, fostered a thriving drug trade. But the river I saw was not the river of American TV and movies; it was a broad, peaceful, beautiful river. Of course I hadn’t expected to see Willard on a makeshift PT boat, nor guns, nor furtive VC; nonetheless those were the images stuck in my head.

On this recent trip, I ate breakfast alongside the Mekong River in Luang Prabang, watching longboats with tourists, barges with equipment, and smaller skiffs with local fishermen make their way up and down the river, which ran brown and fast and full (as it is wont to do in the rainy season) . One evening we dined alongside the river and watched the lightning beyond the mountains on the west bank of the Mekong. The lightning was vivid, and yet so far away, we never heard the thunder. Like my childhood memories – I can still see those images, but the sound of their fury no longer shakes me.

Like any river, ithe Mekong shapes the lives of those who live alongside it. The Mekong brings fresh silt and water for agriculture – and floods and pestilence. The villagers and townspeople that live along its banks draw fish from its depths to serve for dinner. Boys play in it; teenagers steal furtive kisses from each other in the lush growth along its banks. It is a major road for commerce. And a major source of political and national wrangling as the countries through which the Mekong flows wrestle with
one another over damming and the blasting of
rapids.

But the river itself is unconcerned by the needs and desires of countries, of people, and pays no heed to the metaphors we create about it, the stories we tell about it. It begins its journey in the highland of Tibet, and runs 2,600 miles long, from those Tibetan highlands, through China, along the Myanmar-Laos border, along the Laos-Thailand border, into Cambodia and Vietnam, rolling toward the South China Sea and creating a vast delta region in Cambodia and Vietnam. I wonder how that delta compares

with the delta in California, where my brother's
family plays in the summer: boating, skiing, fishing.