The King of Carrot Flowers

The light outside the windows was still a pre-dawn inky blue when the freezing cold water hit my back. A cold shower at six thirty in the morning is infinitely more powerful, albeit not at long lasting, as a cup of coffee. After dropping my body temperature a few degrees and having no towel to dry off with, just a dirty shirt and ceaseless ceiling fan, a cup of tea seemed like a good idea so I stopped in at the restaurant downstairs and, after a cup of hot water with some Jasmine leaves swirling at the bottom of it, I climbed on my rental motorbike and set out for Doi Inthanan National Park.

Normally such early morning antics are not part of my travel routine but it had already been made clear to me that if I hoped to make the 200 km journey to the highest point in Thailand in a single day, I had better start moving early. I rode out of Chiang Mai with painfully clenched fists and teeth that chattered uncontrollably at times, but the freedom of having my own transportation paled any discomforts the cold brought about. I had forgotten what freedom a vehicle of one's own can provide and I had never known the freedom that a motorbike provides. A motorbike, whether it be a clumsy scooter like mine or a more powerful, faster motorcycle, is to driving a car as body surfing is to using a board, without the board or the car there is in both case a kind intimacy with ones environment, the pavement, the curbs and lines of paint, the wind and the whip of passing cars and trucks, the grass growing in the cracks whizzing past below your feet, all of these things and a million other details you don't have the time to absorb become a symphony of movement not unlike the breaking of a wave or the rolling of distant thunder, a singular sensation which absorbs and is absorbed by your body whole and instantaneously and yet seems to stretch on forever.

After a 60 or so kilometer ride on the main highway south of Chiang Mai I turned off onto the national park road and began to ascend through the dry grassy chaparral foothills and into the forest proper. My first stop was a small but peaceful waterfall. In fact nearly all my stops on the way to the summit were waterfalls except for one Karin village where I had lunch.

My chief reason for coming to the park was the lady slipper orchid. There are many kinds of lady slipper orchids, which as you might imagine has a flower that resembled a lady's slipper, but the particular variety found here is only found here and nowhere else in the world (in the wild anyway).

I don't know why I have become obsessed with orchids, but every since sitting at Jim Thompson's house staring at the that orchid, I have been studying up on them and wanting to see more of them. The previous day I rode the motorbike up to the Mae Sa Valley where there were a number of orchid farms and a very large botanical garden. It was at the Queen Sikrit Botanical Garden that I first read of the Lady Slipper Orchid that resides solely in Doi Inthanan National Park, and the specificity of such an ecological niche fascinated me. While wandering slowly through various greenhouses full of the same purple and orange and yellow orchids I had seen in Bangkok and elsewhere, I began to wonder why it was that some are right here, right everywhere, while others can require searches that lead to the far ends of the earth whether that be deep in the jungles of Thailand or the keys of Florida. What precisely is that drives evolution in such narrow back alleys that it can produce a plant on one mountain or one corner of a swamp and no other? Do all the pieces ultimately fit that tightly, and if they do then what does it mean when it turns out that the piece does not fit? What if the mountain changes, the icy northern glaciers begin to grow, the temperature drops and the orchid finds itself alone, stranded atop a mountain it never intended to climb?

The basic orchid flower is composed of three sepals which make up the outer whorl, that region which we would generally think of as the flower, but then within this, if one studies the structure closer, that are three additional petals which form an inner whorl. The "medial" petal, which I have come to think of as the axis around which the rest of the petals turn, that lateral line which must be split, if only in the imagination, to arrival at the bilateral structure which I have previously written of, is usually modified and enlarged forming a tongue or lip-like platform for pollinators. The lady slipper belongs the family Pathiopedilum, in which the two lower sepals of the flower become fused together and the lip, instead of being flat, takes the form of a slipper.

From the first waterfall where I lingered maybe an hour studying the water polished rocks along the shore of the river above the falls, I continued upward pausing at the Wachiratan waterfall. The Wachiratan falls were larger and generated a misty shroud of white around there base with rainbows arcing out through the white spray moving and receding as I walked about changing my angle from the sun. To escape from the chill of the spray I wandered down the riverbed among oaks and cashew trees with Tamarind trees reaching high into the sky and massive impenetrable stands of bamboo dark and foreboding in the growing afternoon shadows of the forest floor.

I had the rather optimistic idea that perhaps I could find a Lady Slipper Orchid just clinging to a tree or sprouting out of a rock, but with a flower that rare, one does not just stumble across it. I tried without success to figure out why I even cared, there are after all billion and billions of flowers in the world, why did I care for this one? Perhaps the fascination in some way comes from the simple word slipper; it would not be the first time I had gone out of my way simply because of a well-chosen word. "Slipper" has a number of childhood connotations but perhaps the most obvious is Cinderella. And this connection is perhaps not entirely accidental since as we all know there was only one Cinderella, only one slipper, and so here, only one flower, only one mountain.

Near the summit I paused to let some trucks pass and then waited a while not wanting to ride in the trail of exhaust they left behind. I sat on the bike staring at a pinkish leafed tree which stood out against the otherwise green hillsides. Behind the pink tree an afternoon thunder cloud drifted slowly by. The appeal I realized of Cinderella is the singularity of her existence. Just as this tree caught my eye because of its rarity, so to Cinderella captures our imagination because she is markedly different, rare we might say. And I understand the prince's obsession for once one has seen the rarist of flowers, the rest no longer hold sway. We, like the prince, will move heaven and earth to find that which is rare and we cling to it, not unlike an orchid clings to a rock, once we have found it. And if we lose the rare things we seek it is not simply a brokenheartedness that follows, but a dissolution of life itself, as if, were the Lady Slipper to go extinct, what would be lost is not the personal, the plant, the flower, but the universal, the idea of the plant, the idea of the flower.

At the summit I rested for a while beside a sign that read "The Highest Point in Thailand," which I did not realize was the case, and perhaps not without some irony, was clearly not the highest point in Thailand, which required a five minute walk up from the parking area to the summit of the hill. At the summit after guzzling a bottle of ice-cold water and studying the map for a while I headed back down to a checkpoint I had passed on the way up. This checkpoint according to my information had one of the rare lady slipper orchids growing on the back of the soldiers quarters which the rangers would be happy to show you, if you stopped to ask.

It took only ten minutes of motorless gliding down the hill to reach the checkpoint where I inquired after the orchid. Unfortunately it turned out that the plant in question had died. With little time left before sunset I was forced to give up the search for the lady slipper orchid. I sat for a minute on the steps outside thinking what a different tale if Cinderella had never been found, if the prince simply wandered about forever clutching a glass slipper, never finding a foot that fit, until old and with a long beard perhaps, he wandered out of the Kingdom stopping perhaps at a checkpoint not unlike this one, not unlike the one Lao Tzu is said to have stopped at, where the guards said, please, could you write down what you know? To which the prince might well have answered simply, "I will never understand…"