No Clambering

On the crumbling rim of the one remaining hot-spring pool, his feet dangling over the river and with the concrete in pieces at one side, a skinny man sits with a gold-plated Taoist charm hanging from his neck. He ignores me, but the tattoo on his thin bicep, a geisha in black ink, casts me a dark look and, as if to cover her bare breasts, tries to raise her sleeve. At his back, water pours from a fissure in the cliff rock and fills a shallow pool where his two friends lay sweltering like drunk frogs.

I knuckle down in the hot water and the larger of the two men claps his hands to welcome me. He likes my enthusiasm, he says straight away. He’s a real convert. He says he comes here at least once a month all the way from a town just outside Gaoxiong, Taiwan’s center for both heavy industry and organized crime. He extols the virtues of the steaming water at length, but the two friends he brought along this time don’t seem too impressed with the dilapidation, or the heat.

Is this hot-spring really that much better? By means of an answer, he gets up, shakes the water off his shorts, and stretches out again directly under the break in the rock where the running water has left a long, creamy sulfur streak. He rests his head and feet on stones so they stay out of the water and remains that way as long as he can stand it, before getting up and out with slow bravado. Red, grinning knowingly, he says it’s my turn. As if this were a Taiwanese drinking contest - in which we all drink until someone’s too sick to move - he insists.

When I don’t lift my feet, he wags a lazy finger and does it for me, sticking a stone under them. The heat is terrific. My body goes numb. My skin starts to buzz and the inside of my eyes show red. Sweat pours from my head, and after about fifteen seconds, he calls it quits - it’s dangerous to stay in too long, he says, lifting me out. Shaking, I slap him on the shoulder and hurry out of the water.

The rest of Wenshan’s in total shambles, with one pool entirely lost and the third only a torn pipe sticking out from the concrete and feeding hot water straight into the river five feet below. A circle of large river rocks have been clustered to pool the hot water before it’s lost to the river, and mixing with the frozen water, stays hot just enough to bring the pink fluster over my mom’s face and chest below. At her side, and in a typical display bizarre prescience, Jake has greeted the white-haired man occupying the pool next to him in Russian, and they’re conversing cheerfully. He runs a bed and breakfast on the Baltics, he says as he rubs black sand on the back of his Taiwanese girlfriend, holding back the straps of her awkward pink bikini in a tight grip. They’ve been there for hours already, he says satisfied, soaking and snacking on tiny green mangoes that had just come into season. His girlfriend he met on the internet, and as he tells Jake this she stays silent, face frozen in a weak smile.

The way down to their pool is along the fallen pieces of foundation, and as I grab a piece of rebar to help me down, I catch sight of an older woman, probably sixty, crouching on her haunches away from everyone else. She’s wearing a nightgown and dumping bucketfuls of sulfur water down the front of it, reaching a bar of soap inside with the other hand to lather. Her run-off flows down the trenches in the foundation, and where it seeps into the river the rocks and leaves have been coated with sickly white soap film. She must live here, and probably doesn’t speak a word of Mandarin. She’s too taike not to be, too local, too far on one side of the island’s North-South divide.

Despite knowing next to no Taiwanese, I find myself alongside taikeren all the time, and gangsters too, for that matter, hopping fences and ignoring street signs. This old woman’s probably been using the hot-springs to bathe most of her life, knows the people who tied the rope that leads down and who battered the gates in, and for her the government’s squeaky rules matter about as much as they do to petty gangsters or the Polish man and his mail-order bride.

And that’s the group of us, settling in to the river, taking our lives into our hands. Still fuming from my contest on the ledge above, I rush into the cold river and let the current lift my arms and legs. Behind me, the river breaks into violent rapids. Far above, Taiwan’s young mountains loom with their jagged edges, slowly weathering into something more permanent.