Smoky Mountain

The first time you saw Smoky Mountain up close, the stench was unbearable and you had to stop the car and retched. Your big breakfast of steak and eggs was wasted. You made a mistake of driving with the windows down. You wanted to save money. Besides, it was late December and the weather was not that hot. No, this Smoky Mountain was not verdant and effulgent with vitality like the one along Tennessee and North Carolina border. This one is near Manila, the Philippines, and serves as a landmark for local denizens. It was a gigantic tower of garbage infested with rats and writhing maggots, and growing bigger with each passing year, as Linda later told you, with the debris and detritus of urban life. The huge dump got its name from curls of grayish methane that hovered and hung over it. As the car got closer to the dump, what might have been taken for animals swarming over it were young children and old people. They were scavenging over the city disgrace, over a mountainous mass of steaming and stinking garbage. Your eyes were filled with tears from the acridity and pity. There is a garbage dump like this near Hanoi, Vietnam, but over there the scavengers ply their trade at night, right after the garbage trucks begin emptying their contents at the dump, and cease working once light breaks out. You wondered why here the locals have to work in the heat, under the glaring sun. It could be that over here the trucks dump their contents during the day.

You also wondered why some people, especially Vietnamese immigrant upstarts, with proudly acquired cockamamie "Republican" values, talked about self-help and no need for governmental social interventions. The Smoky Mountain should be a redoubt against hard-nosed cynicism and cold-blooded indifference to poverty.

Where you grew up in Saigon--former capital of the now defunct Republic of (South) Vietnam, there are mounds of garbage scattered around the city, but none is as gigantic as this Smoky Mountain. The one you got to know most intimately was the one in your neighborhood when you were between two and ten, in the 1950's. The experience of living quite closely to this dump shaped your outlook on life. Nothing else would come close on having an impact on how you think about social issues, especially as they relate to the poor. Normally, those who escaped from oppressive, stultifying poverty tend to forget their past and align and wed themselves to the present and the future. Not you. You couldn't forget the past, not childhood poverty, not first love ending badly for you.

Later, well fed and lubricated, and ensconced in a leather armchair in a hotel suite overlooking Manila Bay, you watched the night sky take over. The moon slowly made its ascent, surrounded by the icy gleam of diamonds of distant stars in a galaxy that does not know that you exist and does not care if you live or die. Meanwhile, faint but urgent sounds of lovemaking echoed from the suite next door. You wondered if the muffled, persistent sounds reflected inarticulate expressions of love and affection or merely cries of animal lust. Regardless, they made you ache with loneliness.