On Trust

Earlier today, while I was a passenger on a motorbike passing through a particularly harrowing traffic circle, I looked down and noticed there were two flip-flop sandals more or less flattened into the pavement. One was adult-sized, one was child-sized. A few inches away, a broken off piece of motorbike handle.

Last night, while I was a passenger on a motorbike in the worst traffic jam I've ever seen, I thought about how much of a role trust plays in everyday life. Granted, you don't necessarily have to be on a motorbike here to be taking your life into your own hands--just google "crossing the street in Saigon" to see some videos of how it's done in a place where traffic is the perfect example of a free-for-all.

With confidence

At 6:45 AM, this can really get to you.

There seems to be a silent contract between drivers on the road here--don't do anything stupid, and I won't hit you. That being said, people do the stupidest things while on motorbikes, sometimes stacked four deep, with little Jimmy right up front in a kiddy lap chair. Or, Sparky the family dog. Or, a refrigeration unit. There's really nothing that can't be done on a motorbike, except the hauling of my luggage, which I had to demonstrate first-hand to a girl at my guest-house before she would call me a taxi.

At any rate, there's a lot of trust at work here. Bikes swish from every direction into traffic, trusting that the other drivers won't completely flatten them. Pedestrians step out into a never-ending stream of motorbikes and buses and taxis and bicycles, trusting that everyone will slow down, or at least go around them. I hop onto the back of a motorbike everyday trusting that a person I've had maybe two or three full conversations with will get me to my destination alive.

There's not much more you can do.

I liken it to getting on an airplane. One of life's grand illusions is the one that suggests we are in control, and though we are far more likely to die in traffic than fall out of the sky, flying frightens us because we are not in direct control. We have to trust a perfect stranger to negotiate the physics for us, and a handful of other people on the ground to guide us in.

So I trust my driver, and to some extent the others on the streets.

This isn't to say I haven't had some close calls. My knees have come disturbingly close to being tapped by several bumpers, and on at least one occasion, a mother-trucking bus. But I'm thanking my lucky stars that my flip-flops haven't flown off yet, because that can only mean one thing.

I used to marvel at this in the US--the concept of driving vehicles, or being in traffic. That is, I marveled at it before I allowed it to completely unravel my humanity. I remember a Jerry Seinfeld routine about cars, and our fascination with them, how we're "Outside, but still inside, moving, but sitting still." I wrote in one particularly bad poem that cars must "Move together, move in order, but we must never touch."

It's a shared experience, minus the intimacy such an experience might suggest.

In countries like the US, it's a shared experience that no one wants to share. It can introduce homicidal fantasies to the most mild-mannered American around--it's made me invent some particularly creative ways to use curse words at least, and probably spiked my blood pressure a few times.

In Vietnam, traffic is approached with pretty much the same attitude the Vietnamese approach everything: Meh. What're you gonna do?

Because you have to go to work, you have to make deliveries, you have to bring your kids to school, and you have to make that money. I'm just thankful everyone's on motorbikes. If they were in cars, I don't think they would be as forgiving.

For one, they certainly wouldn't be going anywhere.