by Bruce Kirkby
I gathered the crew members in our kitchen and draped silken khata scarves around their necks, a traditional Himalayan Buddhist gift bestowed upon arrival or departure. The scarves had been given to me decades earlier, by Sherpa companions on Everest, with wishes of safety and luck; I passed them on in the same spirit.
Then heavy cameras were hoisted. An audio technician taped wireless microphones inside our shirts while a drone hovered outside our house like a giant mosquito, flitting from window to window.
“Just pretend we’re not here,” said Wes.
Seriously?
Bodi and Taj orbited these cool TV cats, intrigued by their slouchy toques and Chuck Taylor sneakers. Christine and I were too damn busy to pay much attention and quickly returned to checking lists that stretched across palms and up forearms, all the supplies for a journey that would begin at the back door of our home in Kimberley and carry us north of the Arctic Circle, through semi-tropical Asia, and finally, high into the Himalaya.
Our packing strategy was simple. If we crammed everything we needed into two gigantic duffels, I could carry both—one on my back, and one in my arms—leaving Christine free to grasp the boys’ hands, and allowing our family to navigate every situation we expected to encounter: train stations, markets, busy streets, crowded hostels.
Two hours later, after stuffing the boys’ feet into tiny hiking boots, Christine herded them out the back door. The last thing I did before locking up was turn off my iPhone and toss it in a kitchen drawer. Anyone sending an email in the coming six months would receive an auto-response: Back in November. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Frost crunched underfoot and a dusting of late-season snow covered the two canoes strapped atop our rusty pickup. An hour’s drive brought us to the headwaters of the Columbia River, where I chopped down a pair of saplings, using them as spars to lash the canoes together and form a stable catamaran. By the time we had our gear loaded and life jackets on, the early May sun was scorching.
“India, six miles!” Taj declared, thrusting an arm skyward.
“Any fish down there?” Bodi asked, peering over the gunwale as I struggled to spread sunscreen on his cheeks.
“Rainbow trout?” Christine guessed.
“Oh yeah!” Bodi leapt to his feet, grabbing for his fishing rod. “Get ready to eat rainbow trout.”
We paddled north, following the sluggish river through wetlands, serenaded by red-winged blackbirds and the occasional shotgun crack of a beaver tail. The television crew orbited us in motorboats. Like dogs meeting for the first time in a park, we were still sniffing and testing boundaries.
Christine dug through her pack and handed the boys water bottles, urging both to drink. Ignoring her request, Bodi picked up his tiny paddle and splashed the water. Taj waved his fishing rod back and forth, as the lure—hook removed—rattled off hull and hats.
After lunch, storm clouds appeared on the horizon and the motorboats zoomed close. Cameras were raised, and a producer launched into a breathless OTF interview—“on the fly,” in television parlance.
“Lightning!” she intoned earnestly. “Are the kids in danger?”
I found it hard to muster much concern—it was just a distant smattering of dark clouds—but the producer’s obvious worry launched Bodi into hysterics. Christine tried to calm him. Taj swung his fishing rod and I paddled on in silence. All the while, cameras rolled.
That evening we camped on a vast sandy beach, exposed by low water. After recording us cooking a pasta dinner over a driftwood fire, the crew disappeared, whisked away by motorboat to a distant motel. In the stillness of their wake, Christine and I pitched our tent while stars whispered from an indigo sky. We were brushing the boys’ teeth when howls erupted nearby.
“Wolves!” Christine whispered. “They’re blessing our journey.”
“Holy cow!” Bodi gasped.
“Bodi, they are not cows!” Taj said, clutching Christine’s leg.
The pack passed close by, slipping like spirits through the lowland alder. I have always taken the fleeting appearance of Canis lupus as a good omen, like finding a heart-shaped rock or glimpsing the aurora borealis, and I nodded to the passing shadows.
* * *
After five days on the Columbia River, we reached the lumber town of Golden, where we stashed the canoes, hauled our duffel bags to the Trans-Canada rail line, and caught a train for the coast.
In Vancouver, a taxi carried us to the industrial wharf, joining a long line of eighteen-wheel transport trucks delivering cargo containers. Christine gasped when she caught sight of the Hanjin Ottawa’s black hull, three football fields long and soaring skyward more than ten storeys. This vessel would carry five thousand containers—and us—across the Pacific, yet was small by modern standards.
A short man in a tan uniform and orange hard hat waited for us at the end of a frighteningly long gangplank. Four gold bars adorned his shoulder boards.
“Thank god you are not Swiss,” he barked. “It’s always the Swiss travelling by container ship these days. But I think Canadians are less picky, no?”
Peering at us over his reading glasses, he introduced himself as Captain Huth, but in the same breath insisted we call him Captain Klugscheisser, which he explained meant “clever person.”I Stooping to shake our boys’ hands, he added, “I think we may have two more klugscheissers here, no?” Then with a crisp salute, he waved us up the gangplank.
Just four members of the television crew (two camera operators, one audio technician, one producer) would accompany us. Wes and the rest would catch a plane across the Pacific, meeting us in Busan, South Korea, in two weeks.
As we climbed aboard, one of the camera operators whistled to get our attention. Klugscheisser was furious. “The only things that whistle aboard this ship are the wind and me,” he barked. Whistling is considered bad luck amongst mariners, thought to change the winds and rumoured to have been the signal that launched mutiny aboard the Bounty. The camera operator promised not to whistle again aboard the boat.
“This is not a boat,” Klugscheisser roared. “She’s a ship.”
An elevator carried us to the sixth level of the superstructure, and a door marked OWNER’S CABIN. Christine’s face lit up as it swung open, revealing a carpeted suite complete with sofas, wood panelling and mood lighting.
“I did not expect such luxury,” she admitted. “Somehow I’d always imagined we’d be sleeping on hard bunks. In a damp bilge. Infested with rats.”
* * *
The next morning the Hanjin Ottawa cast off. Bow thrusters nudged the towering hull from the wharf, then the ship’s immense ten-cylinder engine—capable of powering a small town—settled into a deep, thunderous rhythm that would remain unchanged until we reached Asia.
A few hours later we plowed past the city of Victoria, and a small speedboat pulled alongside the Hanjin. A rope ladder was lowered toward it, and a man in naval uniform appeared on the deck beside us. After tousling our boys’ hair, the harbour pilot hoisted himself over the railing and lowered himself arm over arm, bouncing against the hull as the ship pitched. Finally, in a James Bond–esque manoeuvre, he leapt into the waiting speedboat and was whisked away.
Land soon dropped behind us. The air grew colder. Sea, sky, mist and waves melded, and we steamed on into a kaleidoscope of blue and grey.
* * *
A decade earlier, Christine and I had moved to Kimberley, a sleepy one-traffic-light town tucked into British Columbia’s Interior Mountains, where homes are heated with firewood and freezers are crammed with elk meat. We bought a ramshackle miner’s house, drove a rusting pickup and had no retirement savings. The pursuit of money was not central to our lives, and we certainly weren’t rich—at least not by the standard measure of accountants.
After graduating with a degree in engineering physics in 1990, I quit my database programming job after four months, preferring the infinitely more rewarding task of guiding whitewater rafts on the nearby Ottawa River, unconcerned by
the 95 percent slash in pay.
Glorious, carefree summers in the Arctic followed, where I led canoe and raft expeditions on Northern rivers. Winters were spent sea kayaking in the Caribbean, skiing in the Alps and biking through Asia. With time, I began migrating toward larger expeditions: crossing Arabia by camel; making a raft descent of Ethiopia’s Blue Nile Gorge; and joining a Canadian team on Everest, where I was responsible for sending satellite updates to sponsors.
When I decided to write a book about these journeys, it seemed a dubious ambition, for I’d failed both English and typing in high school. But a publisher bought the manuscript, editors helped polish my words, reviewers offered praise, and to my surprise, people actually read it. A few years later I wrote another. Soon magazines were sending me on foreign assignments. I started writing a weekly travel column for The Globe and Mail. I returned to the Arctic to work as a guide every summer, but otherwise my income was sporadic and uncertain. I rarely knew where the next paycheck was coming from—and frankly, it didn’t matter. I was happy.
I met Christine at a Calgary gym in 1999, where she worked as a personal trainer. Raised in a small Prairie town by a welder and a rodeo queen, she was a preternaturally talented athlete, something she demonstrated by jogging me into the ground on early dates. Despite wildly different childhoods—hers included snowmobile races, muscle cars, Wonder Bread and Spam while mine featured a mother growing alfalfa sprouts on the windowsills and a nuclear physicist father—it was clear we both valued experiences over money. From the start, being together was easy.
Christine had travelled widely before we met, backpacking through Australia, Fiji, Europe and Nepal. Although she had never slept in a tent, she dove into the deep end on our first trip, a twenty-four-day sea kayaking journey along Canada’s West Coast. Increasingly challenging journeys followed: a forty-day coast-to-coast trek across Iceland, two months packing horses on the Mongolian steppe (neither of us had ridden a horse before), traversing the north coast of Borneo in a folding kayak, exploring the jungle-tufted islets of Myanmar’s Mergui Archipelago (where we were briefly tossed in jail) and a three-month paddle through the iceberg-strewn fjords of Greenland’s rugged east coast.
Many suggested it was unfair of me to drag Christine on such journeys. Or hinted I was a lucky man to have found a partner who tolerated my “vacations.” The veiled insinuation—that Christine would never willingly choose to pursue such wilderness experiences of her own volition—always felt deeply insulting.
For her part, Christine regarded our journeys with remarkable humility. In contrast to the bravado and posturing common in today’s world of outdoor athletes, none of our trips seemed like a big deal to Christine. If I ever caught her describing the events to her friends, it was as casually as one might talk of camping out in the backyard. To me it was clear she went to the wilderness for the purest of motives: because she loved being out there.
And I loved her all the more for it.
* * *
The idea of taking our boys to live in a Himalayan Buddhist monastery had been kicking around for years—a vague, pie-in-the-sky type of plan, which Christine and I came at from wildly different perspectives.
As a long-time practitioner of meditation and yoga, Christine was an innately spiritual woman, with interests that spilled into psychics, seers, shamans, auras and the deleterious effects of Mercury in retrograde—all concepts somewhat disquieting to my scientific mind. Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha was her favorite undergraduate book. Crystals and dreamcatchers adorned her nightstand. Visits to ashrams and silent yogic retreats were not uncommon. When the weekend newspaper arrived, she flipped first to the horoscopes.
On the other hand, I was a lifelong skeptic with a reflexive resistance to all forms of otherworldliness, raised upon a steady diet of peer-reviewed, data-driven, journal-published science. At times I wished I could share Christine’s unquestioning faith in the inexplicable, feeling somewhat inadequate for not being able to “let myself go,” but the unvarnished truth, if I dug deep, was that I just didn’t get it. Apart from an abstract feeling of divine wonderment in the face of nature, I remained a staunch non-believer.
So spirituality represented a divide between Christine and me, and one we occasionally squabbled over. I suggested reincarnation was not just improbable, but flat out illogical. The earth’s population had increased by over five billion people in the last century. Where had all those new souls come from?
“Oh, Bruce. It’s not like that. I can’t explain, but it’s just something I know inside to be true.”
Such debates were unwinnable, and with time, we learned to accept our differences.
But curiously, I’d always felt open to Tibetan Buddhism. Over the space of a dozen Himalayan journeys I’d found comfort and camaraderie in the presence of Nepal’s cheery Sherpas, the famed high-altitude porters and mountaineers of Tibetan Buddhist ethnicity. When things turned pear-shaped on an expedition, as they inevitably did, instead of shouting and worrying, the Sherpas laughed and carried on. Even in the face of terrible trials, their joy seemed irrepressible. Whatever their secret sauce was, I wanted a taste.
On a deeper level, Buddhism’s core tenets—tolerance, compassion, non-attachment, impermanence—all sounded like common sense to me. I was unexpectedly drawn to Tibetan Buddhism’s spiritual leader, the wildly popular fourteenth Dalai Lama, whose jolly persona disarmed me, while his oceanic compassion humbled me. And his words resonated with simple truth. “There is no need for temples. No need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.”
I often found myself dreaming the aging monk would run for political office, instead of today’s bitterly partisan leaders, for I’d support his platform of love and practicality in a heartbeat.
So Christine and I—each in our own way—were curious to know more about this ethereal religion. Or philosophy. Or whatever it was.II Neither of us had ambitions to create little Buddhists of our boys, but we both felt that immersing them in the uncluttered life of a Himalayan monastery could do no harm, and possibly a world of good.
Still, the idea of dropping everything and taking our family to live in a Buddhist monastery remained a distant dream, something that might happen someday.
Until the Cheerio Epiphany.
* * *
But where in the Himalaya should we go? And how on earth could we arrange for our family to stay at a monastery?
Christine and I were both drawn to Bhutan, a nation widely recognized for its policy of placing gross national happiness ahead of gross domestic product. I’d visited the reclusive country years earlier on a photography assignment and found myself enchanted by the gentle people and their firmly held traditions. But situated on the southern flanks of the Himalaya, Bhutan catches the brunt of the monsoon. My interest waned upon learning of thick forests that would limit opportunities for trekking and exploration. Stories of rampant leeches were enough to dissuade Christine.
Next we turned our eyes to Tibet, the fountainhead of Himalayan Buddhism. Following China’s invasion some fifty years earlier, travel remained tightly regulated and foreigners required a government-assigned guide to stray anywhere beyond the capital of Lhasa. It was clear our family would never be permitted to live freely in a monastery.
We considered India’s colorful hill stations of Sikkim and Darjeeling, and Nepal’s ancient enclaves of Mustang and Dolpo, but nothing seemed quite right.
Then an old friend with decades of Himalayan mountaineering experience suggested Ladakh. The normally taciturn man described in reverential tones the ancient culture and warm-hearted residents. “Ladakhis might even outstrip Sherpas in terms of pure, genuine friendliness,” he gushed. “They are 9.5 on a scale of 10. Seriously. You gotta go.”
It was high praise for a land and people I knew nothing about.
* * *
Ladakh—or La dags in Tibetan, meaning “land of the high passes”—is perched in the outermost reaches
of northern India, on the very edge of the Tibetan plateau, shoehorned between the disputed borders of Pakistan and China. It is a severe and forbidding landscape of crumbling mountains, relentless wind and cruel sun—a high-altitude desert tucked in the rain shadow of the Himalaya.
Once a remote backwater on caravan routes criss-crossing Central Asia, Ladakh was closed to foreign tourists in 1947, following the partition of India and Pakistan, and only partially reopened in 1974.
A pair of hastily completed military highways brought the first whispers of change to the region. The first road, running east–west, connected the Ladakhi capital of Leh with the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar. It was carved out in 1963, following the discovery that Chinese forces had slipped across the murky borders a decade earlier and constructed infrastructure on Indian soil without detection, an act symbolic of how vast and unpeopled the western Himalaya remained. A second road was constructed in the 1980s, running north–south from Leh to Manali, allowing for the hasty transport of Indian troops and weaponry toward sensitive frontiers.
With the roads came the ineluctable creep of modernity—loss of traditions and erosion of social cohesion. Heaviest hit was the capital city, Leh, which now sees over a million tourists every year.
But vast swaths of central Ladakh remain beyond the reach of roadside Coke stands and smoke-belching trucks, and it was while studying maps that I first spotted Zanskar. For centuries this remote valley—tucked between the Great Himalaya and Zanskar Ranges—remained notoriously hard to access, and even today, continues to exist in relative isolation.III Home to some fifteen thousand souls, sprinkled between forty hamlets and a dozen monasteries, the ancient agrarian society has endured nearly unchanged for millennia.
By coincidence, friends from Kimberley had recently returned from trekking in the region. Caught by a freak blizzard while on the trail, they’d sought refuge at Karsha Gompa, the largest Buddhist monastery in Zanskar.IV The Head Lama took the pair in, offering lodging and copious amounts of tea in exchange for a week of roof shovelling.V