The day before we left Bangkok we went to the Grand Palace and Wat Pho, where we saw The Reclining Buddha. He was amazing. 50 feet tall, 150 feet long. All gold. Huge. The Jesus people should get in on this big-god thing. It works really well. It was very hot. I didn’t have pants. I had shorts. So I had to rent pants. Actually, borrow the pants with a 100 baht deposit. Cover the knees. Cover the shoulders. Do not touch or approach the monks. Be respectful. At The Reclining Buddha there were big signs that said (in Thai and English) near his huge inlaid feet: DO NOT TOUCH, MOTHER OF PEARL. There was a large tour group of Russians who, clearly, could not read Thai or English, because they were all taking turns touching the Buddha’s feet.

We got to the Grand Palace by taking the Sky Train to Chao Phraya where we took a river taxi north. This was nice and cool, which was a relief from the neighborhood we were staying in – the Sukhumvit. We got back to the hotel and the nice cold pool. Walking down Soi 11; more old white men with young Thai girls. It’s super super sad. Sad for the women. Sad for the men.

That night we went to Bed Supper Club. You get dinner in bed. Not tucked in. It was pricey. Delicious, but pricey. They were doing the club thing. A dj. A girl walking around with a jacket made of polar bear toys. A guy walking around in a polar bear suit. Polar bear videos being projected on the walls. Later the guy’s got his polar bear head off and there’s the mini-mouse-model-girl and he’s offering to take a polaroid with mini-mouse for 100 baht to support the polar bear/World Wildlife Fund. Meanwhile, on the menu: oysters and venison flown in from the US, other things flown in from everywhere… and all of this served to us (taxi to Illinois terminal, Champaign bus to Chicago, Chicago fly to Tokyo, Tokyo fly to Bangkok, taxi to Bangkok, taxi back to airport, Bangkok fly to Chiang Mai, Chiang Mai taxi to Lampang… and back again). Every single customer there was white – American, Australian, European – and not nearly as hip as Bed Supper Club was wanting to be). So we paid our 100 baht, got the Polaroid and dined on hypocrisy (embrace the tourism…be the tourist).

We flew to Chiang Mai. Took a taxi to Lampang and the Thai Elephant Conservation Center (TECC). From the highway, the TECC looks like every cheesy U.S. national/amusement park entry – booths selling all kinds of tchotchkes. There is confusion. Where are we staying? What course are we on? Who are we? Everything about contacting the place had been confusing… and it continued to be confusing.

We end up in a “homestay.” A mahout and his wife. Open porch, covered, like a combination living room, kitchen, deck. But it slowly becomes clear that it’s definitely considered part of the home (it’s not a porch), so take your filthy shoes off, you filthy bald man (self-flagellation – all mine. the mahout and his wife were nothing but kind). TV’s going constantly with the Southeast Asia Games – soccer, volleyball, track and field. O.k., now before I go further I want to say that the mahouts that we met were super-sweet. We were there for six days. They seemed to be truly kind people. Some of the older mahouts were cranky – but if you started talking to them, the crankiness slipped away very quickly. So, when I write about mahouts and elephants – it’s not all black and white.

Jen and I stumble up to the place where they’ve got a couple of baby elephants and their moms. We arrive just in time to see a mahout punching and whacking a baby elephant with his ankh. The baby is bellowing and screaming. Hugely upset. Ah fuck. That’s pretty much the first thing we see at this place – a mahout beating a baby elephant.

When I was growing up, our back yard neighbors were the Klingers. The father of the clan was named Dick. Dick Klinger. He worked at Honeywell designing torpedoes. Seriously. I’m not making this up. His kids were afraid of him. If they did anything wrong they would get spanked. If they did anything really wrong they would get … The Belt. This was late 70’s, early 80’s. Kids getting beaten with belts by torpedo designers with names like Dick Klinger might have been common in the 50’s, but ideas about raising children evolve. These days? The Belt? No. Bad idea.

My dad told me that raising kids was a lot like training golden retriever puppies. These days there seems to be a couple of schools of thought about training dogs. There are the dogs whose owners are using those torture-chamber-looking collars, the ones where the slightest tug on the leash digs multiple 3-inch spikes into the neck of the dog. And then there are the dogs raised by people who read that book written by dog-training-monks. All positive reinforcement. All love. Because dog backwards is god.

So, I’m guessing that the traditional training of an elephant is a lot like training golden retrievers. The kind of golden retriever training with the 3-inch spikes. There’s a name for this kind of Thai elephant training – phaajaan. I’ve read a few things about phaajaan. One is that it’s only practiced in very-rural (read “backward”) places – the village at the end of the road. If you google it and watch any videos about phaajaan, do it when you’re feeling certain of your place in the world – otherwise you’ll end up looking for a bottle or a high bridge. I’m fairly certain that this brutal tradition was not part of the TECC, but what do I know?

Here’s something else I don’t know: I’ve heard that training an elephant is all about control. When an elephant is a baby, the trainers chain her to a post or stake. She can’t pull it out because she’s not strong enough. As she gets older, she gets much bigger and stronger – so much bigger and stronger that she could break any chain and yank out any stake – but she doesn’t believe she can do it, because she could never do it as a baby.

Phaajaan goes way past a chain and a stake.

But, see, there’s this split.   There are the elephants inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the Buddha’s feet, the elephant-headed god Ganesh sitting atop shrines throughout India and Southeast Asia, the cute cartoon elephants plastered on products from beer to showers, the countless wooden and gold-leaf encrusted elephants offered at the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok.  And then there are the living elephants.  No big surprise.  Gay Bradshaw writes about it in her last chapter of Elephants On The Edge.  It’s a psychological split called “doubling.”

Part of the elephant show at the TECC included playing a recording of a bunch of kids singing a nursery rhyme-song that’s all about elephants.  It seems that most people in Thailand grew up singing this song.  Here’s a recording of the concierge at our hotel in Bangkok singing the song – Chang chang chang (chang is Thai for elephant).