The Wood Between the Worlds

It’s Saturday, March 9, our last full day here on Koh Chang. Phil is off on his motorbike again, exploring, and I’m reading, listening to audiobooks, and working on some writing. And thinking about our time here.

C. S. Lewis’s book The Magician’s Nephew contains the description of a green, quiet wood where nothing much happens and where a sweet, mild drowsiness overcomes visitors to that magical place. There are many small pools amid the trees, each one a portal to a different world. But when one is in the Wood Between the Worlds, one forgets about the existence of the other places, and only feels drowsy and peaceful. 

That’s kind of how spending these eight days on Koh Chang has felt. We are between hot, noisy, and polluted Bangkok; and chilly Minneapolis in the last barren days of winter. We’re in a bit of a magical place—tropical warmth, soft breezes off the Gulf of Thailand, gentle rain showers, the ocean waves moving rhythmically to the shore, hypnotizing and anesthetizing. Nothing much happens here, except meals, sleep, and strolling. Memories of the worlds we’ve left and are returning to are growing faint, misty, unreal.

But that timeless feeling will soon stop.

Tomorrow (Sunday) we will pack our backpacks and jump back into one of those magical pools that will take us back to Bangkok Airport. We will spend the night in a nearby hotel, in a room so small we won’t be able to fit our luggage in. We’ll get up early, head to the airport, and fly six hours to Seoul, South Korea, and then thirteen hours to Minneapolis, arriving earlier in the day than we had left it in Seoul.

Yesterday, as Phil and I were eating dinner at one of the oceanside restaurants, he remarked, “Can you believe we’re really here?” He swept his arm out toward the ocean, with the sun riding red in the clouds and the beach stretching to the lapping waves. 

I said, “Right now, at this moment, we’re living in a memory.” Humans are the only creatures, I think, with a sense of time passing, and the awareness that the present will shortly become something that we remember. When we are back in the world of the Midwest, we will look at this picture and remember the feeling of being there—the soft air on our faces, the moist warmth of the late afternoon, the sound of small wave moving up and pulling back. 

But now we are still living in this memory, this Wood Between the Worlds. One more day.