I know where the Oregon summer goes

It is the final day of 2014 and my last chance to make a visa run into Myanmar before my passport stamp expires on Jan. 1. The van picks me up in Chiang Mai before 7 and proceeds to collect another 10 aging white guys at various guesthouses before heading north to begin a 10-hour round trip over winding mountain roads. But then we stop and go back -- because one of these hosers forgot his passport, i.e., his Whole Entire Reason for Going in the First Place.

Barely an hour out of Chiang Mai the van pulls into some tourist trap-y row of shops with a bogus geyser out front. (You can hear the pump that pushes hot-spring water into the air, for god's sake!) I strongly suspect that the van operator has cut a sweet deal to deliver a steady stream of farang visa runners for this not-needed 20-minute "rest stop."

This is the last visa extension I can get, by the way -- Thailand changed the rules last summer because too many foreigners were abusing the system and overstaying their welcome. But that's OK, I'm eligible for a one-year multi-entry visa when I get back to the states.

The ride up and back is made miserable by Mister Passport Forgetter, who is also a chain smoker (not in the van, thank goodness) and an apparent black-lung sufferer ... although it is the rest of us who are doing the suffering. He hacks and hacks. And with every productive cough, the air reeks of dirty ash tray.

Back in Chiang Mai at sunset, our driver drops me near the corner where I can catch a Yellow Car, the fleet of covered pickups that provide mass transit to Hang Dong. The Yellow Car drops me in front of our gated community, but I am too late to catch the shuttle to my neighborhood. I have no choice but to walk and run the mile and a half home, where Lian is freaking out because we're already late for the New Year's Eve party at Tuck's house.

I am a panting, sweating, disheveled mess, but there's no time to shower or rest. Lian tosses me a less-terrible shirt and we're out the door.

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We stroll up the street to our landlady's place, where the party has achieved liftoff. My good friend Johnnie Walker fits right in with this crowd: everyone is drinking whiskey Thai style, a small shot in a tumbler with soda and ice. It moves you into The Zone ever so gradually. But it gets you there, boy, it gets you there.

Whiskey is the lubricant for tonight's real party engine: karaoke!



Asian people really, really love to follow that bouncing ball and belt out the hits, the farther off-key the better. Everyone takes at least one turn at the mic; Tuck, in the white shirt, takes many. To the great surprise of our fellow partiers, I actually know quite a few Thai melodies that I can mumble/scat my way through.

Fun with fire.

At midnight we usher in 2015 the same way Thai people celebrate umpty-ump other holidays: by attempting to burn down their neighbors' homes with free-floating incendiary devices. Happy New Year!

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Not six hours after falling comatose into bed, I am shaken awake by my wife, who insists that we go "for making donation." Feeling wretched, I pull on last night's clothes and we trudge the half-mile to the community center carrying bagfuls of nonperishable food for the monks.

There, hundreds of our neighbors are already unloading groceries atop the long row of white tables lining the road as we wait for the monks to arrive. Quite a few ashen faces in the crowd, and a fair number of folks are still wearing pajama bottoms.

The neighborhood waits to make merit.

At last the monks show up for their first skim of the year. They file past as the faithful drop food into their beggar's bowls, which the monks empty into larger bushel baskets carried by helpers, who upend the baskets into the bed of a pickup rolling along behind. I ask Lian why the people don't simply throw the food into the truck and eliminate the middle men. "No, cannot do," she replies.

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I feel very at home here right now. And by that I mean: Chiang Mai feels like western Oregon in late May. The mornings are brisk and at night we sleep under blankets. The afternoons can be hot but not oppressively so. The air in the shade is cool on the skin.

I'm flying back to the winter version of Oregon in 11 days. By the time I return in February, northern Thailand will be tropically hot-and-getting-hotter once more. So I'd better enjoy summer while I can.