glyph theory

The Lao boatmen lashed our packs to the roof and packed us shoulder to shoulder onto the boat’s twelve hardwood benches. There wasn’t an inch to spare. Then four late-waking Australians showed up and were promptly wedged into the aisles. “I vas here nine years ago,” said Hermann, a red-faced German thirty-something squeezed into the seat in front of me. “I vas ze only von. I, unt vun ozzer. But zis—” he implicated the rest of us with a toss of his hand — “all zis is so not vat it is about.” No doubt all of us had read a blurb in Lonely Planet Laos, or Let’s Go Laos, or The Rough Guide to Laos. And no doubt, as our Lao handlers debated where to put the three Italians who had slept even later than the Australians, each of us was thinking our own version of Hermann’s This is so not what it is about. Hermann, of course, was making the added point that, because he had been here before it had been “discovered,” he was not as lame as the rest of us — a bit of bluster on his part to cover up his own embarrassment. In fact, all of us felt a little embarrassed, not just for ourselves but for the whole enterprise of adventure backpacking. Embarrassed, and resentful. How had these rough edges gotten so softened up? Who had beaten down this off-the-beaten path? Each of us wished that all the rest of us would go away, so we could go back to being real.
In a way it’s similar to how city dwellers feel about hipsters. Nobody ever self-identifies as a hipster, ever. Yet there seem to be tons of them. Who are they? They’re “them,” of course, but actually they are us. And we hate them/us. Still, we like having the health-food place around the corner and the new boutique down the street. But “Die, hipster scum” is never far from our lips. A more appropriate slogan, however, might be “Save the neighborhood — kill yourself!” When I arrived at my first Burning Man festival a few years back, I found myself a contrarian in a makeshift “city” of twenty-five thousand contrarians. (Did that make me a conformist?) In the same way, my fellow backpackers unnerved me because they reminded me that I was not as unique as I had supposed, and that I had far more in common with my loathsome tourist brethren than I would have liked to believe. I had met the enemy, and he too was on a slow boat down the Mekong.