Domestic Lives
Lessons From a Year in Bali
By CHARLOTTE BACON
Published: July 6, 2011
THE jungle noise was especially shrill at night. With the geckos, the owls and the insects, the din could sound as if all of them had studied under Philip Glass, then flown off to Bali for a long collaboration. And, even far past sunset, it stayed hot.
The author, her husband, Brad Choyt, and their children, Thea and Toby, at a Balinese temple.
The open-air home library.
The family home (background).
Toby with an Atlas moth, which stayed five days.
I lay under damp towels and dreaded having to go to the bathroom, which required a flashlight, quick feet, a certain steady resolve. Snakes could visit in the dark, as might a kind of frog that blinded dogs with poisonous spit.
How unlikely it all was. We had left New York for Bali with our two children. We were starting a school there. We lived in an open-air bamboo house on the edge of a cliff. Why, I’d wonder from below my towel, had we thought this was a good idea?
Really, it was my fault. Late one night I had awakened my husband and said: “We should do it. When we’re old, we’ll want to say, ‘Remember those crazy years in Bali?’ ” Such decisions should never be made at 3 a.m., but we followed my instinct and there I was, darting across the room with my flashlight, running to the bathroom, scattering mantises from the netting as I dived back into bed.
We moved to Indonesia in 2007 to help develop a school that was based around a curriculum of sustainability. It was a fantasy that strongly appealed to me. Growing my own lettuce in volcanic soil. Creating a community of teachers and students. Having my children learn another language and experience a vibrant part of the world. Hiring someone to give me a hand with the children so I could find more time to write.
It called on the spirit of “Walden,” an intentionality of living, blended with a darker dose of the colonial: I could hire help for very little and not spend all day attached to a sponge. Anything freighted with that much desire and contradiction is bound to fail, and my dream soon did. What’s consoling is that even though I gained little of what I’d hoped for, I was happily changed in ways that I had neither planned nor expected.
We lived for much of the time in that bamboo house, without a lockable door or a pane of glass between us and the jungle and the Balinese who lived in the nearby villages. It had been designed to give when the wind blew, and it did, as did the three coconut palms that pierced its floor and traveled through the roof. Imagine a thatched miniature Sydney Opera House, but with two stories, two bathrooms, and an aerie that was intended to be my writing room and was reached by a rickety staircase.
It will probably always be the most beautiful place I’ll ever call home. The patterns of the thatch were curved and flowing, a fantastic geometry of straw rising at least 30 feet in the air. From the porch each dawn I’d see three volcanoes, and butterflies traveling on eddies of air. Everyone who walked into our house stopped, stared, coveted. Except the Balinese, who said politely, consistently, you people are nuts to live here.
They were right. It wasn’t only the hiccups with the water and electricity. There was the ever-present noise of temples, scooters and, soon, colleagues, who lived in similar houses so close to ours that we could hear conversations, phones, coughs. Our mynah bird did an uncanny imitation of a human sneeze every time he heard one, and soon after our neighbors had arrived, he sounded like a man with chronic allergies.
Then there were the geckos, ants, chickens, vipers, scorpions, occasional dogs and not-so-occasional rats. The ant train could stretch 30 feet long and a foot wide, a metropolis of creatures moving from a coconut tree to the kitchen for reasons entirely of their own, pheromonal making.
The rats lounged in the long tubes of bamboo that served as house beams and spent nights there sharpening their teeth. The green vipers decided to nest elsewhere, though they sometimes turned up in the bathtub.
We were living in the world’s loveliest tent and to all these animals it looked a free Four Seasons. Was it harder to adapt to venomous reptiles or to the pseudo-compost toilets? Let’s say that ever since, I’ve cheerfully embraced plumbing that flushes.
There were difficulties beyond the house: starting a school, hiring teachers, finding students. Everything on Bali, especially dealing with expatriates, had a heightened, manic intensity. We met men who captained pearl-diving ships. Mothers with tie-dyed dreadlocks. More self-styled yogis and reiki masters than the world could sustain or even need.
Many, many times people looked me deeply in the eye, placed a hand on my shoulder and whispered intently: “Aries.” Or “Capricorn.” Or “Scorpio.” (No one ever got it right; I’m an Aquarius.)
Poor Bali. Everybody landed on the Island of the Gods expecting it to amaze them with its peaceful people and their philosophy of spiritual balance. It was a tough awakening when visitors realized the island was highly developed and plagued with dirty beaches, plastic bags, motorbikes and mosquitoes carrying dengue fever. “Eat, Pray, Love” is an attractive notion, but “Eat, Pray, Leave” might be a more likely reaction.
Yet I did love it, every scrap of it. The work, the house, the jungle, even those sticky nights dashing with my flashlight to the bathroom. Why? Because it was good to revise my notions of risk and to extend them. And to realize I could withstand certain inconveniences; they were so small next to true difficulty.
What I miss most, in fact, are the Balinese, experts at graceful living within hardship. I saw this sensibility most directly each morning, when the women who worked in our house would tie on sarongs and make offerings, small packets smoking with incense, that they placed everywhere, including my husband’s motorcycle and the rice cooker.
These were young women with little education whose stories always included the death of siblings, lovers, parents. Divorce, poverty, illness, hunger: they lived where drastic, sudden change was normal. And it was true that no day ever went like any other, and often in dramatic ways. The lights would go off for 24 hours. The cook needed an emergency C-section. Geckos dropped from the ceiling and landed in the soup.
But throughout the upheaval in our or their lives, the Balinese around me would say, “Tidak apa apa.”
“No what what” is its literal meaning in Indonesian, but it’s more like: “No worries, we’ll manage.” And so we did. We built a school. We tended the children. We went to funerals and mourned the dead. We celebrated the birth of the cook’s baby.
And then we left. By early 2009, it was time to go home, for a variety of reasons. But our stay was astonishing while it lasted.
By sharpening my sense of what actually constitutes a danger and how to confront that danger with calm, Bali made me observe the world much more attentively. When you chance meeting a snake on your way to the bathroom, you watch where you put your feet. The larger, uncontrollable risks of life — well, you adapt as cannily as possible.
Perhaps more important, Bali renewed in me those productive, melancholy questions of where home actually lies. One day my husband found himself at a Dunkin’ Donuts across from a towering statue of Arjuna, a major figure in the ancient Sanskrit epic known as the Mahabharata. After texting me about this funny incongruity, he wrote: “Where is home? Only with you.”
He was right. Home is portable, internal, connected to and enriched by people and memory. Every incarnation of a home carries gestures from a past one, but not only in the inevitable haul of curios, the statuettes and trays.
I keep in touch with Balinese friends and still speak Indonesian to my kids. I also comfort other people’s children on the playground because that’s normal in Bali. These, too, are talismans of my home there. The danger in choosing not to make contact with others seems so much larger than the danger in doing so. Making room in our lives for more people is what we are meant to do, even if they eventually leave, or we do. Remaining open to what may come. Enlarging a sense of home, one small risk at a time.
Charlotte Bacon’s fourth novel, “The Twisted Thread,” was published by Hyperion/Voice in June.
Sunflowers bloom July 6 in the Nimaibashi area of Iitate, Fukushima Prefecture. (Toshiyuki Hayashi)
