Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life Read Online Free PDF

stiff and wiry. One feels as if one’s posterior is bouncing on a beanbag chair made of steel wool.
    In addition, elephants are given to cooling off (and it was summer in Thailand) by frequently misting themselves with any available water, often from a ditch. The rider, naturally, is sprayed along with his or her mount. It’s actually refreshing -- until one begins to notice that the spray contains a certain amount of mucus. An elephant sprays with its trunk, which is, one is eventually reminded, its nose. At the end of each day, my bride and I were covered with a thin, slick coating of elephant snot.
    Let’s forget viscid nasal secretions, however. I’ve been talking about snakes, and it happened that one afternoon a very long, very heavy serpent crossed the trail in front of our pachyderm party. One of the elephant drivers chased it down and dispatched it with his machete. We were told it was a sing snake. Sing is the Thai word for “lion.” If you’re a consumer of imported beers, you may recall that Thailand’s national brand is Singha. “Singha” was the name of a powerful lion figure from Southeast Asian mythology, although the beer, being a meek Buddhistic brew, seems more representative of bunny rabbits than of the king of beasts. Sing? Ha!
    At any rate, our guide mentioned that the elephant drivers would be eating the sing snake for their dinner, whereupon I insisted that I must have some, as well. So, the men hacked off a chunk about seven inches in length, weighing about half a pound; wrapped it in a banana leaf, and, when we made camp, presented it to our cook.
    The cook proceeded to prepare it nicely with sticky rice, bamboo shoots, and, as is the local custom, enough red chili paste to give heartburn to the Human Torch. Having de-snotted ourselves in a river, Alexa and I sat down on a palm log, bowls on our laps, chopsticks in hand, our hospitable palates poised to welcome in a culinary stranger.
    Well, I can truthfully note in my résumé that I have dined upon lion snake. But what does lion snake taste like? I have no idea. Definitely not like the proverbial chicken -- unless that chicken had just reentered Earth’s atmosphere. Every one of my nine thousand taste buds was preoccupied with trying to protect itself from third-degree burns. For at least an hour after dinner, I felt as if I’d been gargling napalm, and as an antidote, no amount of Singha beer could cut the mustard.
     
    In the African nation of Namibia in 2004, I was struck by a black mamba, one of the world’s deadliest reptiles. Compared to a black mamba bite, a rattlesnake bite is little more than a hickey. (Refer to Barbara Kingsolver’s splendid novel The Poisonwood Bible for a graphic description of the accumulating physical horrors a black mamba victim usually experiences in the fifteen minutes or so between the bite and death.)
    Obviously, since I’m writing this account, I wasn’t bitten. The strike missed. It missed because the open electric cart in which my guide and I were seated (we had ridden out in the bush to observe up close and personal a mother and baby rhinoceros) lurched forward inches out of fang range at precisely the right instant. Suffice to say we didn’t stick around for a second chance. In black mamba baseball, it’s one strike you’re out.
    The mamba was long, slender, and graceful, and in striking it rose so high it was virtually vertical, as if balanced momentarily on the tip of its tail. It resembled a self-propelled licorice whip from the Marquis de Sade’s candy shoppe, a sleek six-foot bold italic exclamation point meant to emphasize a single message: DIE! DIE! DIE!
    As thrilled as I was to find the incident in the hours following its agreeable outcome, it was also, believe it or not, to arouse in me a lingering sibilation of romantic nostalgia: the fond memory of another black snake in a very different context from an earlier time.
    During my ninth year, when I was in the fourth grade, my