Bali Moon :

the bike and rev the engine. He tossed the unruly flop of hair out of his eye as he turned to smile at me. "I usually drive my mother on here. This is much better." I laughed and climbed on the back.

We set off to the west. "We'll go to the sea," he shouted over his shoulder as we sped down the winding dirt road beside the rice paddy.
"To the moonrise," I shouted back.

BALINESE COUNTRYSIDE
We passed through village after village, all alight with color and ornate temples, golden gates, and art in every crevice. We saw carvings along the roadside, carvings of beasts, gods, and demonic masks. I could smell roasting bananas and sweet blossoms, incense and musty bamboo mats. We passed seas of terraced rice fields that looked like green ocean waves. Bali is volcanically active and the fecundity is extravagant. The scent of frangipani blossoms saturated the air so thickly, I felt drunk. Prehistoric tree ferns and passionate wild flowers hung down from the cliffs beside the road. Color burst out of the moist ground. And in every village, in front of the thatched huts, children laughed and waved at us. Outside one village, women with sarongs around their waists were washing themselves beside the road in a bathing place under a grove of trees. They had come in from the end of a day's work in the rice paddles. As we drove by the bathing women, they laughed and covered their breasts, waved at us, and splashed water at each other. We passed high above a lush river gorge and I saw red temples hidden in the trees, temples to house spirits of the dead. Through a jungled woods we drove too fast around curves. At the edges of my eyes were flashes and movements among the branches, mystical birds, I imagined, and wild, running animals. If I looked directly into the forest, I couldn't see anything but trees. Finally we reached the sea.

"The Balinese don't look to the sea. We look to the mountains. People are afraid of the sea," said Nyoman Bagus when we stopped on the beach. "But I like it here. I like the life of the sea, the things that crawl out of the water and under the sand, the sea beasts."

We walked along the shore examining the sea beasts. Everything we picked up we would inspect with the utmost attention. We found vibrant purple coral formations that we stuffed into our pockets, perfect sand dollars, hermit crabs and jellied things attached to stones. On our stomachs we lay down to watch tropical fish trapped in shallow tide pools. We skipped down the shore using giant rubbery seaweed tubes as skipping ropes. The white surf crashed over our feet and the salty wind blew warm sultry air on our faces as we gazed into the sand. Then we looked up.

"Look, the moon." Nyoman Bagus saw it first, the sea giving birth to the moon. As orange as the setting sun it reflected, the moon stirred the sky in a hush too soft for human ears. The sea beasts must have heard the rising of the moon because the beach began to transform. Everything was quieter, more muted. Sharp edges of rocks and even the cutting surf adopted subtler tendencies, mistier, as details became lost in shadowy curves and shapes impossible to define. A sea bird cried out for love down the shore. A fish flung itself straight up out of the ocean into the air. I wanted to dive into the ocean, enter the sea beasts' domain. "Oh no, we can't go in there. Poisonous snakes, the sea is full of them," said Nyoman Bagus.

We sat on the sand instead and watched the moon. Nyoman Bagus put his arm around me and asked what my favorite American movies were. Since I’d been traveling on my own so long, it had been months since anyone had put his arm around me. I felt like dissolving my entire body into the sand.

"My favorite movies aren't American, but I like a lot of American movies."

GEENA DAVIS SHOWS HER UNDERWEAR
"The best movies are American," he said. "Thelma and Louise is the very best. I have seen this movie four times. I like the part where Geena Davis shows her underwear to the bad boy with the cowboy smile. My brother wanted cowboy boots after seeing that. I laughed at him. I told him Geena Davis wouldn't show her underwear to everybody in cowboy boots."

"I'm sure she wouldn't. Is your brother an artist too?"

"He's a farmer in the day and a dancer at night. He dances the temple dance in our village. ....