Postcard no.3 from Chiang Mai, Thailand

[What the elephant knows.]

I fed an elephant yesterday.

I didn’t anticipate telling you about this. Plenty of travel writing covers the adorable elephant, the dish of pad thai, dusty songthaew, golden Buddha: the cover photos for every package tour of Thailand. My hope is to capture something a little more nuanced about traveling life. I prejudged this day trip to an elephant sanctuary, where tourists eat a vegetarian lunch and mingle with elephants, as beneath my aspirations for Good Travel Writing.

The elephants knocked me off my high horse.

One hundred elephants live here. A few are young, but most old—the oldest was 97. Most are females since they tend to be more docile and therefore put to work. When they can’t work anymore, they’re brought here, finally allowed a dignified retirement after decades of doing whatever the humans running around their tree-trunk legs asked them to do: giving saddled rides until it wore out their skin, hauling logs until it broke their shoulder joints, breeding until it broke their backs. Two elephants had mangled feet from stepping on landmines. Now, they’re fed all the tons of healthy food they need. They’re given medicine. They rest. Sometimes they plod down to the river to cavort with their friends, let the rushing water fill their trunks and cool their skin. The river gives even elephants a moment of easy buoyancy.

What do we do for them? After all they’ve done for us? We feed them. We squish overripe bananas into a bin of rice and form the mush into snowballs. We cut the rinds off watermelons, too—the old gals often don’t have teeth anymore, and it helps to peel their fruit.

I focused on one in particular whom the guide called Number One Friendly, swinging her trunk from side to side in agreement. I put a rice ball onto her enormous tongue and gulp, it was gone. I put another in the nimble, muscular curve of her trunk and she swept it to her mouth, letting it catch air like a piece of popcorn. Searching for another rice ball, her trunk rubbed a muddy streak on my shirt. I was elated—evidence of contact with the giants! A nearby elephant, impatient with the pace of our feeding interspersed with too many photos, came around the paltry little fence and helped herself to the bin of watermelon. Oh, so sorry, we told her, laughing.

I wanted to keep apologizing. How to make restitution to an elephant? If I were some kind of healer, I would press my hands to her trunk, as high as I could reach. I would erase the decades of injury, the exploitation of exactly what makes an elephant wonderful—massive strength, gentleness, intelligence. I would ask her to forgive us.

But here’s what I learned in the presence of elephants. She’s bigger than all that. She hasn’t forgotten a single thing in her long life. It’s been brutal and she bears the scars. But here she is, this huge goofy giant swinging her trunk and her tail and flicking her expressive ears, scarfing down rice balls. This is what the elephant knows: Life is good today. We’re here on a sunny afternoon hanging out together by the river. Let’s go for a swim.