you’ll find the wildhood hidden down a mountain trail (and in local friends)
we paid hundreds of dollars a month in canada to a local organization for nature school, for the promise of bringing back a wild childhood, a wildhood.
today we found more wildhood than i’ve ever experienced, in a ‘short walk’ to the beach with our local friends, here in vietnam.
this short walk was down a mountain, through a jungle, over some dodgy bamboo decking and resulted in emerging to a breathtaking, wild beach.
my feet were scraped, my head, fuzzy from the lack of water and steep decline, i ripped off my shorts and jumped into the most pristine water (with no sea lice) that I had seen in ages, here, wondering how the heck we were going to make it back up with the single 500ml bottle of water we brought for the ‘short walk’ down.
when the trail turned into jungle, and you could see how far we were up, how far we had to go, another parent on the hike turned around. that takes balls, i thought - and as much as i was panicking about ticks. the nearly-brand-new puppies the kids were playing with were covered in ticks. at the top of the mountain you would have found me doing a covert google search on my phone about tick borne illness in central vietnam. at one point, i looked up and realised that no one else seemed worried.
ticks, encephalitis - it was all I could think about, trekking through the grass as tall as me on the trail, making a mental note to check stella for ticks, and wondering if the paediatrician who comes to your house is familiar with removing ticks. he must be, right?
just step, one foot in front of the other. don’t touch that plant it looks like a version of nettle. the ticks prefer dogs, the internet says.
i ripped off my shorts and jumped in the ocean, so thankful for the cool water, to ease my temperature, and my mind. feeling slightly guilty that our friends were getting right to work without a dip in the ocean to cool off their bodies, catching the 2-3” crabs that I didn’t realise would be a snack.
someone found lemongrass in the treeline to season the water for crabs. quail eggs, brought along for the journey, were boiled. one pal emerged from the jungle at the top of the beach with a jackfruit, opened it up as a teenager on the trip filled a shallow pan with ocean water, boiling away the liquid, and grinding up the salt, methodically, to dip the jackfruit in and season the crabs.
ripping open the jackfruit with his hands, our friend placed a piece in my mouth - my hands were too sandy - he said, and I ate it - shocked, at the flavour. you’re all in when someone puts something in your mouth. if it were me, I would have hesitated, taken a small bite. jackfruit is one of those fruits that i’ve been avoiding - my experience with it has been disgusted as a savoury vegan option in canada. this fruit was sweet, almost chemically so, like starburst candy, impossibly sweet.
*still not on board with quail eggs. a common local beach snack here in vietnam that still stupifies me when I think about how expensive they really are in the west.
stella ran for hours, in and out of the water, catching crabs, finding sea shells, up the giant rocks, learning from the adults around here to find banana, jackfruit, salt, lemongrass and crabs from the sea. shocked they could make salt from the sea, and regretful she didn’t bring her snorkel set to explore near the big rocks at the shore.
our friends could survive on a desert island, i thought. would i wither and die, my soft-self barely able to make it down the mountain without a panic? i added, jackfruit and banana, maybe goat, to the list of things that we could eat if were stranded on this island.
one of the dads caught the rogue baby goat, after Stella was trying to herd it like someone from biblical times, stick in hand from behind a rock. the goat emerged unsteadily from the massive rocks, looking for it’s mother and only finding a group of wild children, and a couple of adults trying to teach the foreign kids, the expats*, the immigrants, to be self-sufficient, foraging fruit and crabs from the ocean.
the goat and I, both just in awe of at what we found on the beach today.
