nicholas in vietnam

Well I’m back from the forest again. I’m not sure whether this trip was a success or a failure. I remember seeing an episode of Friends on DVD a few weeks ago, where a walk-in character delivers the lines:

“Well, you know I went to Minsk to research the positronic distillation of subatomic particles?”

“Err…”

“Well, after three years, I discovered that… it couldn’t be done.”

I feel rather the same about Saola dung surveys. Although, if I’m honest with myself, I never really expected them to work anyway. Opinion of the Saola working group was that they were the only way, however.

In less tangible ways the trip was a success. I felt like things went wrong, not because I was being inadequate or messing things up but simply because of the innate difficulty of the situation. Of course I’m not 100% sure of this and I’m waiting to see how many things go wrong on the next survey when Barney ought to be coming along as well.

Admittedly I make one truly stupid mistake in picking up an interesting-looking piece of pottery left in the forest. Of course I knew that the K’tu people traditionally bury people who have died bad deaths far out in the forest and thereafter avoid the haunted areas but this knowledge was not in a piece of my brain which was firing that afternoon.  The spirit in question is either is the ghost of a madman, or it sends people mad, or both.  Our two young guides apparently pelted it back to camp when they saw what I was carrying People assure me this is not going to be a problem although I have to admit it does sound like one.

But the trip was a success in that I enjoyed the forest. In fact that is not only too weak a word but a wrong one. I had an odd experience in the forest of seeing my fear and finding it beautiful. I am still trying to find out what to do with this. This week, I cannot muster my earlier enthusiasm for my work. The authors of the statistical text I was reading before like to quote Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance  to the effect that for any observed pattern there is an infinite number of plausible explanations. I have come up with lots of explanations about my not wanting to work. Perhaps I am simply still tired from the trip, perhaps I can sense that this is going to be the last allowable rethink of my PhD before the plans must be put into action and, as always, I hate the process of finishing anything. Perhaps I am on the trail of something which I was meant to be tracking all along, whose footprints are fear, whose forest is everywhere I am. But if that’s true then how should I track such a beast: should I follow the trail or just sit still until it turns and comes after me?