nantou county, taiwan

The dust is everywhere here. My shoes and sandals are bleached with it. My hair smells like dust, and my t-shirt looks like it will never be clean again. The wheels of our faithful blue van churn up a cloud as they drag us over another hill. The vehicle's strain is tangible, and we crack jokes about the three lonely squirrels allegedly powering its engine.

Our director turns halfway around in the driver's seat. "See if you can feel the change in the, uh, spiritual climate here. It's really amazing, you can really feel it. Try to identify where it changes," he says. We are all teachers at a Christian camp here, but he believes with an intensity and directness that still feels very new to me even after all the weeks we've spent together.

We sit in silence for a few minutes, tentatively feeling for this elusive boundary. "Was it back there, at those two rocks?" ventures a girl. The director considers this. "A little earlier," he says. "But yeah, around there. If you try, you can become more sensitive to things like this."

We are headed to a tea house in the mountains. We've spent a month in the only landlocked county on this island, the central and poorest province. The hills here are all cut into concentric steps to provide level growing surfaces. While the coasts have seen astonishing modernization in the last decade, this area is still given over to dirt roads and rice paddies. The tea from this region, though, is justly famous.

The tea house is near the peak of one of the mountains. From windows facing east and west, we can just make out the water on either side of the island. Even the bathroom here has a narrow strip cut out of the wall at approximately eye level, presumably so that guests can enjoy the view while relieving themselves. The sunset glows golden out to the west, framed between two peaks and reflected from the water below. I wonder if the dragon deities of the east looked something like this, serpentine and luminous and eternal. A wind blows warmly from somewhere behind us, and I imagine that I can make out the scent of the ocean.