Travels With Buddha — 4.5 — Western Edge of the Continent, Newport, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, USA — -”Blue skies, smiling at me/Nothing but blue skies, do I see….”

Buddha, who grandly enjoys riding around in my little Doblo vardo van, asks the inevitable questions: “What would it be like if we just kept driving east to Boston? Where would that take us?”

So I answer thusly: Mountains, deserts, more mountains, prairies, cornfields, rolling hills and thunder storms, big cities, little narrow New England back roads and eventually a forest of fire flies.

That’s what I tell him. Right before I tell him that I’ve done it dozens of times in many different trucks and cars, for many different reasons, with different folks, and so forth and so on. Which is what I say right before I say, sorry fella, I’m not doing it again. Well, not anytime soon.

Buddha is more than a little disappointed. During our working visit to the Oregon Coast we found fine weather, friendly folks, temperate water temperatures, a clean wide ocean, and then that sign about Boston. Because Buddha knows we will soon be heading west, far far west all the way to the far far east, he thinks that maybe if we head east instead….well we might avoid this questionable future I have planned for us.

No such luck, my friend.

See, Buddha loves the good ‘ole USA. Big box grocery stores, wide screen cinemas, the zip-zooming freeway and the river bike path, English as the only language, twenty-seven kinds of potato chips, fifty-seven breakfast cereals on every shelf, (And now forty sorts of milk substitute. Avocado-Cashew-Coconut milk…Really?) He loves it. Even the cable TV with enough sex and violence to turn the most devout monkish devotee into a screaming, testosterone poisoned, AR-15-toting mass murderer. Buddha finds all of this fascinating. Totally, dude… he says he never wants to leave.

No such luck my friend.

Needless to say he is not supportive of my decision to join the Peace Corps.

Even less supportive of their decision to invite me to serve.

Far far less supportive of my accepting the invitation to teach English in Myanmar.

Hey, I tell him, it’s a Buddhist country you’ll be right at home.

Theravada Buddhism, he says. They still believe in Nats.

Mosquitos? I say.

Yeah plenty of malarial, dengue fever, ebola-carrying mosquitos. But also Nats.

Mosquitos don’t carry ebola. But what are Nats?

Pre-Buddha, animist forest spirits that are connected to almost every rock, tree, lake, forest and village square. You can’t go anywhere without stepping on a Nat. Most of the time you need to carry an offering or the Nats get nasty.

Fascinating, I say. We are going to have a very interesting time out there.

Boring, says Buddha. Monks and nuns, temples and bodhi trees, burning butter (ghee). I’ve had a hundred lifetimes of it already.

Well, you’ll be quite the guide then, eh?

The look on his face is not serene. He grimaces. But then a light goes on in his eyes and he smiles.

What do you say, Buddha says. Let’s go to that new Tarantino film. THAT should take our minds off Buddhism….

See, he loves America.