Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
Phil think that he had seduced her. He was an awkward lover, and
when he nibbled her ear and said nasty words, she had to suppress
her laughter. Back in her apartment and alone in her own bed, she
wrote about the experience in her journal. She was pleased that she
had had sex with him. It was her gift to him. He deserved it. But
would she do it again? Not a good idea. He might start thinking that
the sex was more meaningful than it was. Besides, he had so much
hair on his back it was kind of like having sex with a werewolf.
When Wendy departed on the Burma Road trip, it wasn’t Phil who
was with her but a lover of one month’s duration, Wyatt Fletcher. He
was the adored only child of Dot Fletcher and her late husband, Billy,
the Barley King of Mayville, North Dakota, a town whose motto
flaunted: “The Way America Is Supposed to Be!” This was a town
that fully came together when its native sons fell into trouble, partic­
ularly when the trouble was no fault of their own.
Wendy adored Wyatt’s style, for instance, the fact that he could
not be coerced or co-opted. If something or someone disagreed with
him, he simply “moved on,” as he put it. He was tall, slim-hipped,
hairlessly muscled in the chest and back, towheaded and perpetually
bronzed as those of Norwegian extraction can be. Wendy believed
they were complements of each other. I, however, do not think op­
posites necessarily are. She was short and curvy, with a mass of curly
strawberry-blond hair, skin that easily sunburned, and a sculpted
nose, courtesy of a plastic surgeon when she was sixteen. Her mother
had homes in San Francisco, Beaver Creek, and Oahu. Wendy as­
sumed Wyatt was from a blue-collar family, since he did not talk
much about his parents.
In one sense, Wyatt could be called homeless; his bed was whatever
guest room of well-heeled friends he was bumming in for the month.
What he did for a living depended entirely on where he was staying. In
the winter, he found odd jobs in ski shops and snowboarded in his
spare time, and for housing, he shared floor space with his ski patrol
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