My Mountain

Mary Lou O’Brien celebrates the beauties of Doi Suthep in this poem published in 1928.

My mountain has a wardrobe filled with frocks of varied hues, And loves to change from gown, to gown, from dark greens into blues. I think she tries to charm the sun, with all her garments fine, And when she is successful you should see how he will shine.

She may be very moody, and I think she is quite vain, In one frock or one color she will not for long remain. She makes me rather dizzy, for I try to see them allHer garments for the summer, and her colors for the fall.

I can’t decide which I like best, the purple, blue, or green I seem, like her, to change my mind when each new frock I’ve seen. She sometimes wears a mist of white, so gossamer and frail. I think that she is playing bride in someone’s wedding veil. Of all her little vanities this is the worst by far, At night she pins into her hair a shining, golden star, Then she forgets the sun, this fickle one, and all too soon, Begins to weave a spell about the old man in the moon.

I long to paint her portrait, but I know it would not do, For she would want to change her gown before I quite got through. Then, too, how could I find such blues, and sunshine-mottled green, And color of a dew-drop with its cool and sparkling sheen?

My mountain is not young, I know, she’s very cold, indeed, And from such tricks of vanity her old age should be freed. And yet the sun and moon are surely old enough to know

My fickle little mountain has a heart as cold as snow.

Siam Outlook, July 1928, p. 335

Then and Now

It is difficult, indeed almost impossible, for those of us who have come to Siam but recently to even begin to realize what the Siam of the pioneer missionary days must have been like. We who travel over wonderfully fine roads, ride in automobiles, (albeit they be Fords) read by electric light, have daily supply of ice, travel to the north on the express which makes the biweekly trip in twenty six hours’ time (a trip which is the early days consumed six weeks’ time and had to be made by boat), take for granted the friendly attitude of the Siamese toward us and our work, read daily papers, English and Siamese, and go about Bangkok in trams can only travel at the courage of those pathfinders, and at this safe distance of time wish, half-heartedly, that we had experienced some of the hardships of those days.

Even in Nan, the most remote station of all, a missionary Ford has opened the way for road improvement, and within four years’ time a motor road from Prae to Nan will be ready. Thus does the romance of olden times give way to the spirit of modernity. The most beautiful road in Siam connects Lampang with once-remote Chiengrai, a distance of about one hundred and twenty-five miles, and buses fly back and forth each day of the week.

Siam Outlook, October 1928, p. 304