Today I ate a handful of mushrooms and went to a waterfall. I wasn’t planning on the waterfall, I had just hopped on the scooter and drove. I was aiming to escape being anywhere near the vicinity of a guy who was hanging around my homestay room. And then I drove back, threw on a long sleeve and headed back out on the road. The traditionally siesta-time sun was not going to thwart this adventure. 

I wasn’t sure which rice fields guarded the waterfall I had heard about but I felt like I would know as I drove past. Still, at the last minute I pulled out my phone and Google Mapped it, right as I was about to be in the right zone. It always happens like that. But then it turned out Google Maps was wrong and I ended up by a small river on a dirt path behind someone’s chicken coop. They said it was back that way. I asked if it was five minutes or two minutes. They considered it, and decided on two. 

The right path was obvious, not from the road, but obvious once I turned down it. It had paved cobblestones and a bizarre bazaar courtyard feeling I had never experienced in Indonesia. It was only about five or six buildings deep. At the end, the woman pointed down the even narrower paved scooter path through the rice fields and said I could park there. I put my scooter under the tree and started walking. Three dogs made their way up ahead of me, stopping and waiting for each other across the raised grass boundaries around the wet rice fields. What a good life. One lone dog, an older puppy from the looks of its soft fur, bounded around in a rogue patch of long grass and flowers, hunting for something or just playing. I thought of the street dogs in Bali. Imagine taking a dog from the country to the city. How heartbreaking. Dragonflies whirred about. The blue meanies were kicking in. Would dragonflies eat me if I died? I had heard from somewhere that dragonflies are one of the gnarliest insects. Big time predators. One landed on my shoulder with such force it felt as if it was a large bird. This is cool, Katie, I reminded myself, calmly taking my phone out of my bag for a selfie. 

The steep jungle drew closer as I walked on the narrow paved path. It bent and straightened around the orderly rice plantings. A house appeared next to two large blue posts, which in a few moments I found out were the posts for a blue suspension bridge across a river. The house was made out of wooden planks and was surrounded by a fence of living trees and a moat of wet rice paddies. I was struck by how many papayas ladened a small tree about as tall as me in a large intersection of the rice paddy boundary grass. A woman came around the house, if you could call it a house. Yes surely it was a house, by all dreams and definitions, with a front yard and a mountain backdrop. The walls were thin planks overlapping each other and so much lichen aged the exterior it appeared light green. The woman seemed so cool. 

Some kids hung around the blue suspension bridge entrance, as kids do. They held some red berries in blue plastic bags. “From the mountain?” I asked. They nodded. “Where do you want to go?” they asked. “To the waterfall,” I said. They nodded, knowingly. I had passed, and walked by them. 

The bridge was made up of the same wooden planks that built the house. There were big gaps and the bridge bounced up and down as I walked, even though I’m quite small. I looked back to see if the kids were bouncing one end as a joke. What is this Western skepticism we have?Where is the trust? Of course they weren’t, they had long since disappeared. I glanced around. The up-the-river, down-the-river views took my breath away. And then straight ahead lay the jungle. I dismounted from the bridge and began walking up the steep path, putting my hands down a couple times since it was so slippery. Lichen, they say in Indonesian. What a good word for it. As I entered, I put my hands together and bowed my head. The great trees greeted me, taller than I could have imagined. Big tribal eyes were carved into their bark, getting smaller as they went up, up, up. Before, I thought the trees here just looked like that, all mystical and significant. But I learned that people bore the holes for the sap. Someone said it is to make glass, and it looks like glass, seeping out, but I wasn’t sure if they were serious.

The entrance to the jungle is always like that. I felt the need to keep a hush of respect for the tall trees and the small trees alike. Obviously, it’s darker as you enter. It also feels more wet. It’s like entering a new room, or rather a hotel banquet hall with the lights off. There were two guys sitting in a makeshift wooden outpost on the side of the path. I waved and one guy waved back, signaling to go back down. He started walking toward me and I walked towards him, as you would a shark or a bear to show your confidence. It’s that way, he indicated. I was Western skeptical that he didn’t want me to enter and see something, and I looked over his shoulder into the dark jungle calling me deeper, but he sent the other guy over to walk me out and I reluctantly followed him back down. He was carrying a huge bundle of kindling on his shoulder and wore rubber slippers that looked like Vans slip-ons. He dropped the wood at his scooter and started walking me towards where the other guy had explained the waterfall was. Between those two houses over there—these ones indeed wooden shacks, not houses. 

Bless the people of Indonesia. Clearly exhausted from whatever day in the jungle he had just had, he still tried to walk more steps than he needed to in order to help me, me in my blue dolphin sarong and tank top, eat pray loving my way to a waterfall in Sumatra. I was grateful when he accepted my refusal of him to walk a step further, and I continued on my own. 

As I walked on the grass rice field borders (which I hope you can picture by now, the raised grass surrounding each slightly lower, and wet, rice field), following the sound of rushing water, a water wheel stood in the way, implanted in the earth. Sometimes life guides you and shows you which way is wrong. I could walk through those rice fields on a new path every day, for the rest of my life, winding and weaving whichever way life takes me. I was brought back to doing that in the grid streets of the Outer Sunset in San Francisco. My type A roommate would always take 48th straight shot down from the T streets all the way past Sloat, Riviera, Quintara, Pacheco, to turn up Ortega, and get to our house on 44th. I’d zigzag straight, right, left, straight depending on what the universe threw at me at each four-way stop, pretending my electric car was manual and doing my best not to full stop. 

Anyways, I reached the waterfall as the light was just starting to turn to deep afternoon. There was a little stream to bathe in at the bottom. It was beautiful, but I looked up and wondered (don’t we all) what magic world lay at the top. I decided to check and then come back and dip in the little pool. Placing my bag on a flat rock, I started climbing with feet and hands up the strangely square and diamond rock face. As I started, I spotted a young boy walking along the stream towards my bag. I stopped and stared. He stopped a ways down and entered the stream to his knees. I realized he was just stopping for a bathroom break. Western skepticism. I continued up. 

There it was. The most enchanting, bewitching lagoon I had ever seen. It seemed that I had to leave my phone behind to enter this place. I looked around and I was hidden in this magical spot, raised and inset in some dark stone world before time. I had left my bikini in my bag as well, so I dropped my sarong and pulled off my tank top. I pulled off my plastic plumeria hair clip, and plunged into the cool water. I kicked across to the rock half-submerged in the cavern. My heart was pounding by the time I got there. Could there be crocodiles in here? My friend was just telling me a story about a girl in a lagoon who almost got eaten by a crocodile. She had the scars to prove it. I didn’t tell anyone I was headed here today. I didn’t really mind the idea of dying up here in this world but I didn’t want to be ‘missing’ for days. I counted to twenty and didn’t see any sign of a croc. They can’t hold their breath for that long, I presumed. Okay. I dove gently and swam back to the original spot at the entrance. I looked back. Fuck that is beautiful. I started to put my clothes back on. 

My mom always rushes from place to place, power-walking through the grocery store and across the parking lot. She had instilled in me something about the afternoon that made me feel like I had to be home before the sun goes down. I looked up. I had plenty of time, even though the clouds looked like they were building up grey color and moving from the edge of the sky towards the center. I plopped back down on the rock, still naked. I crossed my legs and quickly fell into a meditative mushroomie existence. Meditating was easier high. Or maybe that’s not that point. Or maybe it is. 

I opened my eyes, five minutes or two years later. Fuck the lagoon looked beautiful. There can’t be any crocs in there, I reasoned, and I was warm from sunning myself on the rock. I tried to see if I could walk through the water back to the other rock in the middle of the lagoon. The water was a milky aquamarine and if I unfocused my eyes, I could just barely see the bottom in some parts. Something about freshwater pools, lakes, ponds really freaked me out. I got to the other rock and craned my neck, looking further, up towards the little falls on the opposite side of the lagoon. You gotta do this. I sighed a big breath out. If something happened to me here, it’d be okay. Everyone would get on with their life. My parents’ suffering didn’t cross my mind, just my ex-boyfriend’s. 

I dove headfirst into the water and calmly stroked to the other side. I tried to reach my feet down and didn’t touch the soft silky sand. It was deep. I gracefully shifted into pure panic mode, splashing and kicking towards the black rock shelf in the deepest reaches of the cave lagoon. The closest thing to me was a knobby brownish rock, half submerged and more long than wide. OMG was that a massive crocodile? Massive crocodile head or a rock? Bumpy lumpy rock or a four-meter crocodile, half submerged? As I swam against the waterfall current, my only option was to grab onto it at this point. My heart was pounding out of my chest. 

Pretty sure it was a rock, as I stood on top of it, but at any second, I knew it could turn into the crocodile again. A meaty spiderweb was strung just above my head so I couldn’t stand up all the way. 

Well, Katie, you did it. I was deep in the lagoon-cave in the jungle and I had semi-conquered my fears. I dove back in and doggie-paddled, head out of the water, letting myself be swept all the way back to the other side. I will have to come back again with my ex-boyfriend and have him take me, upstream further. If the crocodile attacked he’d come save me, for sure, and at least we’d be in it together. I wrapped my sarong back on and pulled on the tank top. I emerged and clambered back down. My bag was still down at the bottom on the stream bank. The clouds above now looked heavy with grey weight at their bottom edge and the waterfall was flowing stronger. Yes it was time to go.

On my walk back, I waved at the dogs again, who seemed to have followed me, at a distance. At the end of the path just before the courtyard where I parked my scooter, I noticed the most vibrant wall of rainbow color I had ever seen. Then I saw a white blonde, tan old man, burning the dead leaves from the rainbow hedge. I smiled a big smile and told him the colors of the plant were beautiful. I think he was stoked that someone had noticed. He smiled back with genuine joy, and I think I happened upon God. I walked back to my scooter, which the courtyard people had moved to be more protected under the tree. The woman said, “Good, right?” “Yes," I said. “I will come back here.” She smiled and I waved goodbye to the kids, merging back onto the main road and shaking out my hair, letting the lagoon water dry in the breeze.