Category: Memoir

That one time I swam to Myanmar (and back)

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One day twenty years ago or so, somebody at my religiously affiliated high school thought it would be an excellent idea to send our choir to a school in the Mae La camp in Thailand to aid in the construction of a new building for Karen refugees, presumably as a demonstration of American largesse and Christian charity.

I could tell you about how I bathed in a river for a week, how I rode a genuine working elephant (not some tourist pachyderm), how two thirds of us got food poisoning, or how the concrete never properly set. I could tell you that we left having accomplished nothing more than two parallel ditches in a patch of red dirt that the local people had already cleared before we arrived.

I could wax political about the sheer, indecent waste of spending thousands of dollars each to send a bunch of American teenagers to do work that could have been done better, faster, and with positive economic impact for the local community. As a missionary kid myself, I could rail against the sheer arrogance and imperialism — that somehow these American children were making a difference or “helping” the local community.

I could remind everyone that the safe, secure, and “free” Yangon that Anthony Bourdain enjoys today is thanks to a successful military campaign to suppress all the ethnic minorities (such as the Karen) fighting in the countryside for self-determination.

But none of that is especially interesting, so I’ll tell you about the time I swam to Myanmar.

One afternoon after the church service, starring a special choir of children flown in all the way from America, we were walking along a riverbank back to the little village that surrounded the school. Our Karen guide — a fellow teenager from the school — pointed across the river and told us the other side was Burma. Unsupervised by adults and newly invigorated from having survived salmonella poisoning in the middle of the jungle, several American children thought it would be an excellent idea to swim the hundred meters or so across the Moei River, just so they could tell their friends and relatives back home that they had been to Burma.

“Just don’t go past the rocks on the shore — there could be mines,” the Karen girl said. Good to know.

Back home, I was the head lifeguard at our school. I didn’t need to be an adult to suggest that this was not, in fact, an excellent idea. Unswayed, several boys and girls waded into the river wearing their cargo shorts, T-shirts, and brand-new Tevas from REI.

I decided I could at least sit on a rock and make sure nobody died in the water.

Halfway across the river, the current caught one of the younger boys.

I called out, “Do you need some help?”

He nodded sheepishly as he drifted north toward the Salween River, thence south on to the Andaman Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the Indian Ocean.

I took off my own Tevas (they were really big back in the 90’s) and I waded into the brown water. Once I was clear of the mud sucking at my feet, I dove forward and swam toward the floundering boy. I threw my arm over his shoulder and shoved my hip up under his, pulling him up and nearly out of the water — a move designed simultaneously to control and to calm. It’s also a move that puts the lifeguard mostly underwater.

“Just lean back and relax,” I said as I bobbed up and exhaled. A breath, one stroke, up again. “I’ve got you.”

Damned if I was going to play flag football or join junior varsity basketball, I had taken lifeguard certification twice for P.E. credit. This would be my first real-world rescue. But if I could subdue an ex-Marine Gulf War vet who outweighed me by a hundred pounds in our pool, I knew hauling a fifteen-year-old to safety in real life would be quite possible.

I looked up and realized we were closer to the far bank. I changed course and hauled him with my right arm as I scissor-kicked us the rest of the way to Burma. My feet touched round river stones and I pulled the boy upright.

“Let’s rest for a minute, and then I’ll haul you back. I think that’ll be easier.”

We sat there in Myanmar for about 10 minutes, tossing stones into the river.

Our return trip was uneventful. He floated on his back and I hauled him back to Thailand by his collar. (I suppose my story’s boring ending proves that it’s true. The most dramatic part of a good, made-up story isn’t in the middle.)

We never told the adults about all this — the choir director and the chaperones, the parents and teachers. We suspected nothing good would come of telling everyone else of this latest adventure.

On the desk in my office, among the trilobites and bifaces, sits an unprepossessing green stone — a souvenir hastily picked up from the banks of the Moei River, a memento of the day I swam to Myanmar and back.

Moei River on Wikipedia

A fairly well-populated section of the Moei River, nothing like the middle of the jungle where I swam across, hauling an embarrassed fifteen-year-old kid

The day I corrected Roger Ebert

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The great movie critic Roger Ebert died today after a lengthy battle with cancer. It’s not often I’m personally touched by the passing of a “celebrity,” but Roger Ebert was first and foremost a writer, and someone into whose orbit I was inexorably but briefly pulled one day back in March 2006.

Roger Ebert

A young Roger Ebert in 1970

Seven years ago, Roger Ebert posted a review of V for Vendetta, observing:

Britain is ruled by a man named Sutler, who gives orders to his underlings from a wall-sized TV screen and seems the personification of Big Brother.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of my favorite books, and the movie starring John Hurt is one of my favorite literary adaptations in cinema. So when I saw that John Hurt was playing Sutler, I thought Mr. Ebert had missed something. I hit the Send Feedback link and wrote a brief email:

Dear Roger,

Although you compared John Hurt’s character to Big Brother in your review of “V for Vendetta,” I’m a bit surprised that you didn’t note the irony inherent in the fact that Hurt played Winston Smith in “1984.” I think it was a brilliant piece of stunt casting.

Andrew Becraft
Seattle, WA

I never expected a reply. But a few minutes later, I got this amusing response from Roger Ebert himself:

Ohmigod. You;re right!

A few minutes later, he replied again:

I have now incorporated your insight into the review, for which I thank you.

I went back to the review, and Ebert had added:

And is: Sutler is played by John Hurt, who in fact played Winston Smith in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1984).

I wrote Roger back:

Excellent! We all have our little obsessions, and “1984” is one of mine.

All the best,

-Andrew

Again Roger replied:

I love the whole of Orwell — all his novels, and those four thick volumes gathering his miscellaneous writings.

Best,
RE

I was so tempted to continue talking movies and literature with the world-famous Roger Ebert in more and more of these brief exchanges, but I didn’t want to seem obsessive — even though I was giddily forwarding these little emails to all my friends and doing little dances at the office.

Exactly three months later, Roger underwent the first surgery that removed his ability to speak. The ultimate writer (the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, back in 1975), he quickly turned to the web, embracing RogerEbert.com more than ever, along with the nascent social media boom. The written word became his voice, and his fan base grew and grew even as he mostly retired from public view.

I hear people today talking about how much he interacted with fans and engaged with them intellectually since his illness, but it’s obvious to me that Roger Ebert was doing exactly that long before Twitter or Facebook.

Roger Ebert loved what he did, and loved to share his passion with like-minded people — movie buffs, writers, and readers of great literature. For one afternoon seven years ago, I found myself sharing my love of George Orwell with the great and wonderful Roger Ebert.

The world of film will be a dimmer place without him.

My Fellow Americans [Part III]

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Continued from Part I and Part II.

March 18, 2003

The candles wouldn’t stay lit. We walked around the police line and huddled on the north side of the Jackson Federal Building as we tried to light the tiny candles stuck inside plastic cups. Out front, banners flapped up into faces and it took two hands to hold our signs.

The daytime crowds had long since dispersed, and I counted twenty of us lining the curb, facing the street for the benefit of the occasional motorist driving through downtown at 9:00 o’clock on a Tuesday night.

At our backs, an equal number of Seattle police defended the empty building, lined against the glass windows in their finest riot gear. Feet shoulder-width apart, they carried plastic handcuffs looped on utility belts that sagged with pouches. Handguns in holsters, eyes forward behind plastic face shields, they carried rubber-bullet rifles with orange stocks across their chests, at the ready.

I was afraid of them. These were the men who had put down the anarchists in 1999, who had pushed, shoved, and dragged away those who’d marched down the wrong street earlier today.

We gave up on our candles and held onto our signs. Black marker streaking the paper in the rain, mine still read “Would Jesus bomb Iraq?”

Most drivers waved, honked, or flashed the peace sign, but one passenger in a red pickup leaned out of his window, pointed at my sign, and yelled, “Yeah he would, asshole!” before giving us the finger as his buddy hit the gas pedal and they screeched down Second Avenue.

The wind began to die. Cameramen and reporters stepped out of their vans to smoke. They set up lights and tripods for the 10 o’clock newscast, said some things we couldn’t hear from across the street, and then went back inside their vans. I have no idea what they said about us, standing there in the wind.

By 10:30, the only cars on the road were empty taxis. Cabbies began to slow as they passed us. As though a signal had gone out over the radio, they began to honk when they drove by. One driver lifted his hand through his window and raised his fingers in a V. Another pulled up alongside us at the curb, leaned over to roll down his window, and said, “For peace, yes? No war!” His teeth flashed in the dark under a black mustache.

“Yes, yes, peace,” I said. I wanted to say something in Arabic, to use the few words I’d learned over a summer digging up potsherds and goat bones in Jordan. But I couldn’t know where he was from.

“No war,” I said.

“Thank you very much!” he said and began to pull away.

A white and black motorcycle rolled down the hill from Marion, turned on its lights, and pulled over the taxi.

A second taxi drove past, honked, and a second motorcycle cop pulled him over.

Spotlights glared from the rear windows of the cabs. They let them both go, and the cops drove off into the dark.

Another taxi driver honked and waved. They were waiting for him, too. Again and again, red and white lights flashed off yellow paint.

The news crews remained hunkered in their white vans.

Finding a sense of place among the Becrafts of Sedro-Woolley, Washington

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As a child of ex-pat parents who moved all over Japan before we moved “home” to the States when I was a teenager, there are few places on Earth I feel I’ve put down roots in the way those who were born and grew up in the same city, state, or even country feel they do. Oddly perhaps, this has given me the freedom to lay claim to whatever place I feel a deep connection to, from the darkened roads of Tillamook to Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey; from the inner chamber of Newgrange to the aircraft carrier USS Midway.

My feelings about family and cultural heritage are as convoluted as my sense of home. It might come as no surprise that my primary comfort food is cold soba noodles with fishy dipping sauce green with wasabi, but I also feel a warm glow of connectedness when I pick up a morsel of mesir wat with my shred of injera. After all, aren’t we all Ethiopian?

Nevertheless, I’ve felt an increasing compulsion to connect with my more recent family heritage over the last couple of years (resulting in exploration of my Loyalist Canadian lineage, for example). Living in Seattle today, I’m most interested in the stories of the first Becraft families who arrived here in the late 19th century.

Family photos show great-great-grandfather James Samuel Becraft with his logging crew in Skagit and Island Counties north of Seattle, but oral family history only seems to begin when James Samuel joined the Seventh-day Adventist church, and everything about the rest of his family and their ancestors remains a mystery.

James Becraft and McCoy Logging Crew

This next photo shows James S. Becraft with his father, James Thomas Becraft, about whom I knew very little until doing a bit of research.

James Thomas and son James Samuel Becraft

As it turns out, James Thomas Becraft (born in 1827 in Booneville, Kentucky) traveled overland to Plumas County, California in 1853 with his wife Rebecca. He worked alternately as a gold miner and logger until 1873, when he became a farmer. Rebecca died in 1878, and by 1900, James T. had moved north to Oregon, then on to Sedro-Woolley, Washington by 1910 to live with his son Charles Edward, until James T. died the next year.

My wife and I visit friends in Sedro-Woolley fairly regularly, so I did a bit more research before a trip up there last week and confirmed that James T. Becraft was indeed buried in Sedro-Woolley. My friend Josh is a bit of a historian himself, so he and I drove to the Union Cemetery in Sedro-Woolley this past Saturday and scoured alternate rows for my relatives. There are seventeen Becrafts buried in Sedro-Woolley, and we had found nearly all of them — but not my direct ancestor James Thomas — when we called it a day and drove off.

As Josh sped up, I noticed what looked like a map on a sign by the side of the road, and I called “Wait!” He turned the car around and we began looking through the section of the cemetery we hadn’t noticed before, where Oddfellows were buried. Within a few minutes, we had found Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Becraft.

James Thomas Becraft gravestone

There’s a sense of place that emerges from the overwhelming cultural significance of the archaic structure one stands within — Newgrange or Westminster Abbey — and the sense of connectedness that place brings you as a member of the broader human species. But to stand before the grave of my forefather is another sense of place entirely and a very different kind of connectedness.

To the list of places where my roots spread beneath the ground, I now add Sedro-Woolley, one of my many homes.