Travels & Misadventures: Henry's Golden Cure
An enlightening dissertation from an 89-year-old backpacker.
Travels & Misadventures
I made it two months without getting sick before feeling that first dreadful tickle in the throat that means I’m about to get slapped with a virus that’ll last way longer than it has any right to. Oddly, the primary plague vector in my house hasn’t shown any new symptoms despite having had a runny nose for a few weeks now, so I’m not entirely sure where I caught this bug. But the how of it all didn’t matter so much once I hit a point where it felt like someone was trying to suck my sinuses out through my tear ducts. After putting the munchkin to bed, I took a big swig of cough syrup straight from the bottle and settled onto the couch to read for a bit (Jhereg by Steven Brust). By the time I’d finished the book, I was in that liminal state between lucidity and blankly staring at the world without seeing much more than shifting blobs of color. Too out of it to read or even grab the TV remote to see if there was anything to watch, I wound up digging through my old writing archives and getting lost in things I’d completely forgotten ever writing. With good reason, mostly. A lot of it was bad. Bad enough that if ever do share it here, it’s going out to paid subscribers after I’ve published a few books that have garnered me the kind of weirdo (heart emoji) fans who really want to read that dreadful angsty stuff from when I was trying desperately to be a Serious Literary Author.
But I did find a few things in my travel notes that made me smile. I’ve decided to share one of them here in its unedited original form, because at its heart The Traveling Librarian is as much a fantasy travelogue as anything else. Earlier this week I was revising a scene where the main character, Rowan, has to change foreign currency back to his own. It’s not at all important to the plot, but it’s one of those little moments that comprises the greater traveling experience. Especially if you’ve traveled in the days before smartphones and internet in your pocket. Rolling up to a random money changer in some backwater town brought with it questions like: Are these rates any good? Is that math accurate? How much of a cut are they shaving off the exchange? If you were a grubby backpacker trying to make every penny stretch as far as you could, these things mattered quite a bit. If you later discovered that you’d been scammed and gotten a terrible exchange rate, you could at least trot out the story over drinks with fellow travelers as an example of how little you, a seasoned backpacking veteran, now resemble that naïve tourist who’d fall for something so stupid. Of course, you never admitted to anyone it had only happened three days earlier.
Meeting new people is one of my favorite things about traveling. There’s something about the shared experience of being an outsider that makes it easier for an introvert like me to strike up conversations with people I don’t know. Sometimes you become traveling buddies and spend several weeks together, and sometimes people waltz into your life for a few minutes or an hour and are then gone again, having left you with a story that still leaves you shaking your head and chuckling a decade later.
The following story is a real thing that happened to me in 2013 when I was hanging out in Bangkok trying to shoot a portrait project with members of the local fixed-gear cycling scene. The photos didn’t turn out as I’d hoped and never saw the light of day, but I did get to spend time in one of my favorite cities eating well and meeting all sorts of interesting characters.
Like Henry.
Henry’s Golden Cure
“I am eighty-nine years old,” Henry said to us, “and if you would like, I will tell you my life story. When I was sixty-nine, I had cancer and I came to Thailand to die.”
Henry is from Singapore and had approached us in Sanam Luang park to ask if we knew which bus to catch to get to the Pratunam area of Bangkok. I’d just met the two other travelers accompanying me, and with the sun high in the sky we were trying to eke out a bit of shade to while away the heat of the day without spending any money. Of course, we wanted to hear Henry’s story.
Twenty years ago, Henry learned he had cancer and that his odds of survival were very low. Rather than worry his family and die in a hospital—a very expensive prospect in Singapore, he told us—Henry decided to pack a few belongings and come to Thailand. He’d taken a room by the water in a small beach town and soon realized that the owners of the guesthouse would take all of his money and belongings if he died. Feeling he didn’t have much time left, he went to the nearby temple and donated everything he had to the monks.
The head monk sat with Henry and talked to him about his illness and his reasons for coming to Thailand. Henry liked to go out and watch the sun rise and set each day, but the head monk told him this was unhealthy and that he should stop. Henry protested, saying that each day he could see the sun rise and set was another day that he was still okay; the day he couldn’t see the sun anymore was the day he’d be nearing his end.
Henry and the head monk met regularly over the next few days, and one day the monk suggested something called urine therapy to help cure Henry’s illness. With nothing to lose, Henry ingested his own urine daily in accordance with the monk’s recommendations, and every day he was still able to go and watch the sun as it rose and fell in the sky.
Time passed and Henry started to feel better. He no longer felt the weight of his cancer pushing down on him, and he realized he was going to live. The problem now was that Henry had donated everything to the temple and had vastly overstayed his tourist visa. What’s the point of worrying about visa timelines when you think you’ve come to die? When the monk learned of this, he bought Henry a plane ticket back to Singapore and wrote a letter explaining Henry’s situation and asking that he be allowed to travel with no consequences for letting his visa lapse.
Twenty years later we sit in a park where Henry preaches the miracles of drinking our own pee. He explains the concept of fighting poison with poison, clarifying that it’s best to drink your own urine instead of someone else’s. Had some careless fun with local working girls? Urine will cure those pesky genital problems. Sliced your arm open? Just pour a bit of urine on the cut to help fight infection. To this day, Henry still quaffs two daily doses of urine to keep himself healthy. The only catch is that you can’t mix urine therapy with any other form of medicine, or it won’t have any effect whatsoever.
Henry wraps up his story and one of my temporary traveling friends notices a large scar on Henry’s inner thigh just above the knee. “What’s that from?” he asks.
“Oh, that is where I was shot. If you like, I will tell you the story.”
We did like, and despite the dwindling shade and tortuous sun that branded me with my first sunburn of the trip, we spent another hour listening to the adventures of eighty-nine-year-old Henry before he shuffled off to catch his bus.
Yeah. I think I’ll stick to cough syrup and other marvels of modern science, thanks.
Chapter 4 of Whisper of the Wilding Woods drops this Thursday. If you want to catch up, you can start with the Forward & Prologue.
If I don’t see you out in the world sometime soon, I’ll see you among the stacks!
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