The Truth about Mountains and Rivers

The Truth: A poem by Beppe Coleiro
Roses are red, though sometimes they’re not,
And violets are blue, though you’d imagine they’d be violet,
And sometimes people kill each other with machetes.

I thought I’d start this bit of writing with a poem to ease into the hollow void of nothingness that I have to write about. That is to say that my mind is pretty blank right now, but I’m willing to wing it anyway. We have moved on from Vang Vieng, Laos, to a place called Luang Prabang on the Mekong river; leaving behind the throngs of ‘Keemon Mai San’ English boys and the ‘Ohmygod Backy’ American girls. Here the people are more ‘Hmm loowk a lizard’ and ‘Cor its hot innit?’, which is altogether more pleasant and reflective of my frame of mind. Uninspired as it may seem, at least there WAS a lizard and it IS hot... it’s so hard to fault people for being accurate even if only pointlessly so. I suppose the mighty reservoirs of stored up conversation have begun to dry and fill with mosquito larvae... but that’s okay. I can handle it. I’m made from mountain and river stuff so I’m basically good to go.

Mountain stuff. The mountain is the unchanging soul of man, weathered by wind and water but also added to by the occasional bird dropping or say, a dead lizard. This is the stuff of personality that remains, no matter what, essentially the same. Tim is a mountain man, and believe me I have on more than one occasion wished I could leave him on his mountain, but I’m more of a river boy myself and I like to take people with me. This is the problem with being a river. Rivers get lonely quite quickly and they cannot help moving towards an ocean. Well, actually I don’t know if that’s strictly speaking geographically true, but you know... figuratively I think it holds water. No pun intended. Really. “Puns are the lowest form of wit” said my mother, when I was waaay too young to really care... but she’s a river like me so I’ll build a bridge an get over it. Which I suppose is my next point about mountains and rivers.

You can work with a river if you’re willing to give in to its flow, but a mountain is always an obstacle. You can go around them, but mountains have big personalities and they tend to get in the way. On the other hand, if you conquer the mountain... well, that’s a pretty great feeling; but you never lose respect for the mountain. If you’re serious, you can divert a river, but you only beat a mountain by not letting it beat you. However, and this is quite a big ‘however’... you never tell the mountain that it won or was hard to beat. Not to the mountain’s face that’s for sure. The only way to really talk about it is through the use of metaphorical language on a blog that you’re pretty sure it doesn’t read anyway. That’s how rivers and mountains talk. Also, a final point about rivers is that you can wash your clothes in them and so they’re definitely better than mountains no matter what. Rivers always win.