Leadville: 300 Days Away
Page 19
“What time is she supposed to be here - not that she won’t be late -”
“Two thirty,” he says.
“You’re gonna love me forever for letting you do this, right? I mean more than Mary Beth, too.”
“Why are you? Letting me do this? I never thought you would.” “Would you have gone, anyway?”
He shrugs his shoulders.
“Not this year,” she says, “but if you did, later, and I hold you back from knowing her, well you'd just be angry at me. And, I don't want you angry at me, not any natural born of hers,” she teases. She stands up and puts her arms out.
“Don’t worry,” he tells her. He kisses her on the cheek.
“Thanks, honey," she says.
She watches him go to the doorway.
“I’m gonna wait for Mary Beth outside,” he tells Stephanie, “less tension.”
“I suppose so.”
“Mom,” he asks just as he opens the door, holding his suitcase in his other hand, “Did she ever send me a letter?”
“Letter? No. No letter," Stephanie says. "She tell you that she sent a letter?”
“Just wondering,” he says. “Thanks, and good-bye.”
Stephanie sits back down on the couch. She doesn’t quite ‘sit’ as much as ‘sink’, her knees ‘just feeling like they couldn’t hold her upright' at that moment, feeling weakened by his question, weakened by her ‘lie’. She puts her forehead into her hand, her elbow resting on the gold-colored, crushed velour of the couch. She watches as Mary Beth drives up in the white, volkswagon van. She watches Mary Beth's smiling face and shiny hair get out of the van and grab the suitcase Stephanie had just given to her boy. A tear forms in Stephanie’s eye and trickles onto her cheek. Stephanie stands up, again, and walks to the window. Just as Mary Beth starts the van, Stephanie leaps for the door handle.
She opens the door and yells, “Wait! Wait! I have the letter. You can have the letter!” she yells, but, it’s too late. Mary Beth has pulled the van onto the route, headed for the Interstate. Stephanie’s words are lost in the sounds of german engineering and tires crunching upon gravel. Stephanie sits down onto her own porch step. She confesses where no one can hear her, “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you,” she says and has, what Stephanie has always called, ‘a good cry’. During this time, Stephanie wonders to herself why she has never seen the ocean. She looks up, bleary eyed, at the tops of white mountain peaks overhead and wonders, out loud this time, "Why did she tell him I have never seen the ocean? And why," she cries, "have I never seen the ocean?"
The End.
Acknowledgements
Leadville. 300 days away, was first written as a blog novel. I wrote and published the story on my blog pages, one section at a time. This story is a love story, and can be considered creative nonfiction, or, as I state on the cover page, a fictional occurrence of nonfiction events. The characters are fictional; however the historical events of the time periods in which the characters are set, are very real and are as accurately depicted as possible to fit into the story. In other words, I hope this novel interests the reader in the history of Tibet, bringing more light to the plight of freeing Tibet, and also brings the reader to further inform his/herself about the topic. This is not a history book and is not intended to document nor analyze; it is a love story written to entertain, and to move you - heart and soul - to understand each other as we exist within our differences, as well as our similarities, on this planet, all together; but I also hope it does lead you to further study texts and journals, articles and websites, about Tibet. I also hope it gives you a glimpse inside ourselves to further analyze what happened in Tibet,
so that we can know our world and our history better; and so that we can, hopefully, prevent such catastrophic events in the future.
During my research of this topic, which admittedly is limited, since I set out to write a love story and not a book of facts, I began to think about solutions. There are many questions to be considered. Questions that several books and journals written by the officials involved in ST Circus at the time can answer thoroughly; like: what could the American CIA officials have done differently? How could Buddists around the world's opinions have been heard, and is it within the rights of the Chinese government to ignore such opinions? The United Nations grapples with such questions every day. My intention in writing this book was to bring the love of the people involved to the minds of the reader, albeit through fictional characters; love for the seven CIA officials whose 'job' it was to take on such a daunting task turning young Tibetan citizens and monks into a faction, a faction of war; love for the primarily Buddist people of Tibet, and a brief look into their customs, their renowned gentleness, and their reactions to the chaos that surrounded them during invasion and exile. I also wanted to write about Leadville, a similarly terrained city, half a continent away that may have looked similar, but was much different. The Tibetans who journeyed there as part of their involvement with the CIA had come, in 1958, from a land where few (if any) westerners, until 1950, had not been allowed to enter. I tried to show the completely foreign 'world' they entered was not so foreign when it comes to our human capacity to love. I hope that if you felt this love - were at all moved by the story - that you continue to involve yourself, through reading and research, writing or joining a group to shine your personal type of light and love, as I have shone mine by writing this story. Here are some recommendations you might take the time to read and visit:
www.candle4tibet.org
www.candle4tibet.org - Light Workers of the World
www.ipeace.com
Journal of Cold War Studies, Official Policies and Covert Programs: The U.S. State Department, the CIA, and the Tibetan Resistance, written by John Kenneth Knaus
When Heaven Shed Blood,
www.theworldbyland.com
The CIA in Tibet, youtube.com
www.globalsourcenetwork.org
Facts about the invasion of Tibet, the Dalai Lama and the exile of his holiness into Darjeeling were referenced from:
wikipedia.org
The Wall Street Journal
Voices in Exile, Joe Mickey
The CIA in Tibet. Source: Youtube.com
En.Tibet.Cn., various internet travelogues written by travelers trekking through Tibet and India such as travelpod.com and theworldbyland.com
candle4tibet.org
www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/publications - declassified record of historic Richard Nixon - Zhou talks in Feb. '72.
UKIndymedia.com.uk
Facts about Camp Hale, ST Circus, and Leadville, Colorado were referenced from:
wikipedia.org
The Wall Street Journal
The CIA in Tibet. Source: Youtube.com
The famous city of Leadville - yeah Leadville!
and several calls from eye witnesses - much love for calling and sharing your comments, and for being willing to become my source of information.
While writing about the invasion, the Chinese takeover, I thought a lot about war. I wrote this during the war in Iraq from America. Feeling that Tibetan Buddists may well be one of the most peaceful cultures, it was quite a dicotomy to think and write about war from this perspective; and I began to ask myself if going to war after an invasion were a coin toss, what would lie on the other side of that coin? Could there have been a completely different kind of 'response' to the invasion of the Chinese, claiming Tibet, and becoming its ruler? I concluded that a humanitarian approach, I call it religious preservation, could be on the other side of that coin. I likened the importance of our 'responsiblities' to preserving such sacred places and cultures to preserving vegetation and limiting flourocarbons. Quite audacious of me, being an American after all, with our history of the slaughter of Native Americans in our past, slavery just now once and for all overcome with Obama as our new President-elect, and our atrocious 'fatness' on the scale of flourocarbon emissions; however, I think these faults, (somewhat like the Mary Beth and St
ephanie characters) offer two insights: first, that I do not sit in judgement as if the people involved are beneath American wisdom, to be scorned for their failings; instead, I saw each character, each situation of the upheaval on a human level, from the acceptance that none of us are perfect, and not one of us is god. Secondly, I realized why so many Americans, as well as people all over the world, including me personally, look to a place like Tibet with sacred awe, captivated by its majestic-ness, its ancient 'ohm' if you will, that resounds just by reading about it, just by viewing its structures and its landscape - so too with the landscape and quaintness of the structures of Leadville - and I thought there must be a way to preserve this 'ohm', as the homeland it is, rather than as an empty structure or a museum.
Exile, evacuation, genocide, religious persecution, war; ways of depleting these atrocities of their abilities and power to rule countries and harm lives have not yet been devised to the degree of complete avoidance; yet, certainly cultures of peace and resounding 'sacridity' serve to balance the planet's 'chi' or 'mood', filling its well of love, and yet these very cultures, historically, tend to be the ones often easily overturned. Like oxygen to the ozone layer, prayer benefits the cellular structure of the organism, as has been studied and has long been believed by most cultures of the world. Sacred sites are a joy to visit, really they are, for all of earth's inhabitants, whether the visitor is a particular believer in that site's ideology or not; such as, it can not be denied that a visit to the Vatican steeps us in its quiet, sacred beauty completely separate of whether or not we worship the religion practised there. And, if the people of the cultures of these sacred sites are allowed to live and worship without religious persecution, the resounding 'sounds', I feel are somewhat more fulfilling than, say an empty site of ancient past, the people gone and buried like the temple of the Mayans or the pyramids. This can be said for many Native American sites within the U.S. too, where tribes have taken back their sacred sites and reform to worship and enjoy them as they once did, but this is not unexceptional.
In short and in conclusion, I hope this novel, started as a blog novel and edited into a book, has brought out the sweet, sweet love balancing our depleted spiritual outlook like planting a tree brings oxygen to our depleted ozone, maybe by stirring in you, the reader, an interest to 'do something' not just for our 'green' sites, but for our 'gold' ones too, standing up for sacred sites and the preservation of their peoples. For me, the 53rd Light Worker of the World, I hope that you are inspired to motivate lawmakers and government to seek alternative solutions to war whenever possible; and, I hope that you are inspired to join in the cause to liberate Tibetans from religious persecution and exile.
As far as the actual Khampas, there are only three living CIA-trained Tibetan Resistance fighters left alive; all three of whom live in Darjeeling. You can see them tell their stories and recount the events along with actual CIA officials who were involved in the ST Circus operation on Youtube.com in a documentary called The CIA in Tibet. The MIT Press also provides a source for finding literature on Tibet at: www.globalsourcenetwork.org.
Thanks for reading!