Gardens Today; Gibbets Tomorrow
One green hour south of Jakarta lies Bogor, a city fabled for its gong factory & botanical gardens. For its rain, too, & there was plenty of that.
Evan is out of town this week, attending the world’s least convenient job interview, back in the States. Meanwhile, I am minding our teak-&-tile garret, poised at the start of Chapter Next, but reluctant to hang a character that I’ve rather come to like. This is one of those adult things I should suck up & do. Kill him. The plot requires this death, but I lacked the nerve. I balked. In a huff of failure, I left the city altogether, in search of something green.
As CMC wisely advised me, “Gardens today; hang him tomorrow.”
It’s about time, anyway. It’s been 6 weeks of rooftops, too many traffic jams, too many breaths taken in the snarled, polluted, urban sprawl. (Too many hours in a row spent with no one but my loquacious, imaginary colleagues, the day broken up only by the muezzin calls.) I need mountains. Trees. To trade in fluorescents for inflorescence! It was time to get out of Dodge.
The Kebun Raya Botanical gardens were just the thing. It’s no idyll stroll, of course, let’s not forget where we are: the lavish gardens are also a jungle, humid & very slippery. The dishwater river runs with trash. The total lack of amphibians suggests the presence of poisons. It rains on the half hour & there are mosquitoes. But having studied for a time in Orange County, where I found most superlative beauties paired with some form of appalling plunder (stunning beaches paralleled by miles of oil pumps, for example; sunsets made gorgeous with petroleum coke dust clouds; women finding beauty in surgery), I also knew how to see what I wanted to see.
I saw magnificent old trees & vines. Flying fox, like black figs, hanging in the treetops. Intricate flowers. Lily pads. The details are in a Bogor photo set, which you can find to the right. I went twice over two days, just walking & taking photos, stumbling into young couples making-out on the stairs above the garden’s little mosque, or behind tangled screens of epiphytes & orchids. A bride in white posed among the great, fin-like root buttresses of a ficus tree. Mobs of school kids in their bright uniforms kicked around beach balls. I ate lunch in a breezy café overlooking the forest & lily pond, purple mountains in the background.
Nothing complicated. This was the kind of day in which no one needed to be hanged. I sipped my pineapple-lime juice, which was in fact only pineapple & lime juice. This was like…it was like a weekend.
EPILOGUE
Now I'm back & the gibbet is waiting. It’s time to write this chapter. Remember the Philosophy of Rhinos entry (March 8)? This endangered character of mine, well, his mate is alive but he is much too far away to reach his family by foot. Therefore, the decision is to ‘collect’ this specimen in the name of Art, before he is poached by hacks, & so that future readers might better enjoy him. Art aims to collect this sucker with a single page! Given my artistic marksmanship, however, it may require five or six rounds.
Evan is out of town this week, attending the world’s least convenient job interview, back in the States. Meanwhile, I am minding our teak-&-tile garret, poised at the start of Chapter Next, but reluctant to hang a character that I’ve rather come to like. This is one of those adult things I should suck up & do. Kill him. The plot requires this death, but I lacked the nerve. I balked. In a huff of failure, I left the city altogether, in search of something green.
As CMC wisely advised me, “Gardens today; hang him tomorrow.”
It’s about time, anyway. It’s been 6 weeks of rooftops, too many traffic jams, too many breaths taken in the snarled, polluted, urban sprawl. (Too many hours in a row spent with no one but my loquacious, imaginary colleagues, the day broken up only by the muezzin calls.) I need mountains. Trees. To trade in fluorescents for inflorescence! It was time to get out of Dodge.
The Kebun Raya Botanical gardens were just the thing. It’s no idyll stroll, of course, let’s not forget where we are: the lavish gardens are also a jungle, humid & very slippery. The dishwater river runs with trash. The total lack of amphibians suggests the presence of poisons. It rains on the half hour & there are mosquitoes. But having studied for a time in Orange County, where I found most superlative beauties paired with some form of appalling plunder (stunning beaches paralleled by miles of oil pumps, for example; sunsets made gorgeous with petroleum coke dust clouds; women finding beauty in surgery), I also knew how to see what I wanted to see.
I saw magnificent old trees & vines. Flying fox, like black figs, hanging in the treetops. Intricate flowers. Lily pads. The details are in a Bogor photo set, which you can find to the right. I went twice over two days, just walking & taking photos, stumbling into young couples making-out on the stairs above the garden’s little mosque, or behind tangled screens of epiphytes & orchids. A bride in white posed among the great, fin-like root buttresses of a ficus tree. Mobs of school kids in their bright uniforms kicked around beach balls. I ate lunch in a breezy café overlooking the forest & lily pond, purple mountains in the background.
Nothing complicated. This was the kind of day in which no one needed to be hanged. I sipped my pineapple-lime juice, which was in fact only pineapple & lime juice. This was like…it was like a weekend.
EPILOGUE
Now I'm back & the gibbet is waiting. It’s time to write this chapter. Remember the Philosophy of Rhinos entry (March 8)? This endangered character of mine, well, his mate is alive but he is much too far away to reach his family by foot. Therefore, the decision is to ‘collect’ this specimen in the name of Art, before he is poached by hacks, & so that future readers might better enjoy him. Art aims to collect this sucker with a single page! Given my artistic marksmanship, however, it may require five or six rounds.
posted by Anne E. Campisi at 10:01 PM
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