Chom Thong, November 1, 2019

Village become town become road.

Chom Thong was supposed to be only a quiet backwater, northern hamlet in the cool landscape: on one side the mountains tiering up toward Doi Inthanon (the highest mountain in the country), on the other the fields and the downstream of the rivers. Who had the bad idea of building this town along the road? Unless it was the road that was poured in the middle of the town – poured like concrete, and hardened.

Now, the iron machines make the earth tremble.

Street become boulevard become road. A short distance away are quarries, sand and rock to haul and to sell. Heavy trucks trample the town all day long. Square iron trucks, solid and high, now beige, now adorned with flames. Often they pull a trailer, a second bed, and so become locomotive, two-car train. From morning to night it crosses the town letting out hoarse cries and sighs of pulsed air.

There are accidents, a woman of Chom Thong tells me. There are deaths. Many are asking for the construction of a bypass – it won’t be tomorrow’s eve. For now, Chom Thong is this road pounded by the trucks and the buses, bumper to bumper between the two rows of shops, trembling, courageous, which persist in saying town when the road says road. Chom Thong is only this thread, this rope that wounds. There are barely any cross streets, a few soï that soon go off to die in a field – and how calm it is already, strangely calm, just behind the road, on the field side, on the back of the set.

I walk along Chom Thong, because here the sense of width doesn’t exist. I walk on the gutter, in the trench of the road-town.

The wheels of the heavy trucks loom over us, crush us, dilute us, reduce us to pulp – and liquid we flow into the gutter, we mingle with the oily waters that stream under the asphalt.