Ode to Yom

On the Occasion of Pang Yom’s Second Retirement
Anantara Elephant Camp
Chiang Rai, Thailand

Yom’s wise and gentle, champagne-colored eyes held mine. Her freckled, yard-long ears flapped slowly. Her skin, wrinkled like a dried riverbed, flows from the fingered tip of her trunk to her pearly, half-moon toenails. Her feet are padded so well, she moves nearly noiselessly through the forest. And her rolling gait is so sensuous the ancient Persians suggested their women imitate it.

We met on an October dawn, the sweetest time at Anantara’s Elephant Camp. Yom is a 62-year-old Asian elephant. Like most female Elephas Maiximus, she has no tusks. She stands eight feet tall, weighs in at 4 tons and grazes through 250 pounds of fruits and veggies a day. To greet me, Yom swirls her trunk into an S curve, its tip floating in front of me to read my smell. Satisfied, she returns to scratching her belly, now careful to avoid hitting me on the fore swing. Gingerly, I feed her a banana.

Yom was a logger, a pusher and hauler of teak. When Thailand’s teak forests were (finally) protected, most of their domestic elephants—and their people—lost their jobs. Unlike many, Yom did not end up a skin-and-bones urban beggar, but the pleasantly plump matriarch of Anantara’s Elephant Camp. Here, good people attend her.

First, there is Chamrat Chuenbarn, Yom’s full-time trainer, caretaker, handler and friend—in other words, her mahout. Jamrat began working with elephants when he was fourteen. In 2003, he and Yom became the camp’s first occupants. Generally, mahouts carry an ankus, a hardwood elephant goad that has a spiked iron hook on the end. Jamrat carries a slingshot and a few pebbles. He calls them, "my remote control."

Next is Jantra Kumboonrueng. Better known as Amp, she is the Assistant Elephant Coordinator. A pixie of a young Thai woman, she explains that Amp means "little frog." Although, in her mahout duds and bamboo safari cap, she looks not a bit froggy. In fact, she’s an English and Business graduate of Chiang Rai’s Rajabhat University. Having turned down multiple job offers after graduation and feeling guilty just sitting around, she jumped when she heard about a job opening at Anantara. All she heard, however, was Assistant ‘something’ Coordinator. "Oh no! I’m afraid of elephants," she thought when she discovered the exact position. Now, in her second year, she says, "I can’t imagine leaving them."

Elephant whisperer, John Roberts, is the camp’s Director, the gentle force that makes it happen. John directs Anantara’s els, as he calls them, to prove something. In most tourist camps, the elephants and mahouts barely scrape by, but at Anantara everyone—mahouts, elephants, owners and guests—wins. Wantabee mahouts like me, while learning to love and to ride the els, help pay for it. My three-day mahout training course is the most exhilarating donation I’ve ever made. "The wuzzy course" John calls it comparing training a real mahout. Perfecto.

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Each day, Anantara’s tuk-tuk ferries guests through misty rice fields to the camp’s protected hollow with bamboo jungle rising on three sides. There, the elephants’ bathing pond sits in front of a wide-open space used for training us wantabees. An elephantine open barn stands on the left. The mahout’s houses, stilted and thatched, tuck in back under the palms.

On the first morning, Amp and I chat over coffee while the other wantabees tromp with some of the mahouts looking for the elephants. Other mahouts, dressed in their campy blue-jean shirts and wide-legged pants, cut sugar cane into elephant-sized bites and wheel barrels of bananas to the barn for the elephants’ breakfast.

Jamrat moseys in with my elephant, Yom. He ties her in the barn for our first grooming and bonding session. Jamrat checks her skin. I feed her bananas. Then, Jamrat rides Yom into the pond and swabs her off with a broom. Back on her spa table, an 8x10 concrete slab, I hose Yom down and Jamrat scours her with a scrub brush. She loves it.

Next up are the driving lessons. First, you have to get on. Jamrat does this by muttering something to Yom so she’ll lift her right front leg. Then, he grabs her ear and leaps from her leg onto her neck. Amp bops her elephant on its trunk for the el to lower her head. Then Amp grabs an ear, scampers up the trunk and flips forward—looking ever so like a foxy ‘little frog.’ These are rather different mounts than the three-person push that shoves me onto a kneeling Yom.

Legs splayed and feet tucked behind Yom’s ears, I clutch the ropey ridge that runs along their crest. With little kicks, I nudge her forward. Calling often to the always nearby Amp or Jamrat, "What’s the word for go left?" and "How do you say stop?" Yom proceeds leisurely to go wherever she chooses—first to the sugar cane bin and then, with the rest of the group, back to Anantara’s people camp.

Afternoons, both els and wantabees go for a swim. Down to a 2-person shove, I manage to mount Yom and we wade into the muddy pond halfway up her substantial belly. "What’s the word for lie down?" I shout. "Map long!" Amp calls back. "Mat long! Mat long!" I yell, slapping Yom’s rump. Sinking into the gunk is precisely what Yom had in mind, so she does—holding just her head, and me, out of the water. Then, we’re off to the hills. Yom’s slow sway is comforting. When she stops to eat, I devour the views of the layered hills of Burma running into those of Laos across the misty Mekong.

By the third day, Yom greets me with enthusiastic flaps of her ears and I can get on all by myself. We can maneuver around a series of poles—think slow-mo rodeo. And we can do this both with me riding or with me walking having Yom "Pie my, Pie my" follow me. The I’m-living-a-fairy-tale feeling never leaves me.

While wandering along the bambooed-paths, I make up this ode for Yom:

I sing it to either the tune of Laura’s theme from Dr. Zhivago or a lively Italian opera ditty…it doesn’t matter. Every time I sing Yom her Ode, she loves it. I know this because she begins to squeak—high squeaks, like a mammoth mouse—it’s how elephants show delight. I just keep singing and grinning, delighted with the people, the camp, the Golden Triangle, and most of all Yom.

I think we were destined to be together, we travel by the same drummer—slow, dawdling and stopped to eat.

Kate Crawford    September, 2006