Anton shakes his head. “What are you carrying?”
A smug stream of smoke shoots from a corner of his mouth. “Bricks,” he says. “Heavy.”
I look outside, and the Tibetans who were waiting with us are nowhere to be seen. A teenager vaults up into the driver’s seat and greets us with a broad smile. His navy blue pants are rolled to his knees and his shock of black hair stands on end. He says something in Tibetan to his companions. His elbow pierces my thigh as he throws the enormous gearshift down and over. I rub my leg as we ease into a downhill roll. Everything feels incredible: to be dry, to be warm, to be moving.
The driver asks to see my watch—not to learn the time, just to see it, as the young monks did. He asks how I like China. I gush about the kind people, especially the truck drivers, and he laughs. With one hand still on the wheel, he pulls a cigarette and lighter of his own out of his shirt and lights up. I look straight ahead at the emerald hills sliding by, obscured by the spattering drops and the windshield wipers’ rhythmic tick-tock. Deep potholes bounce the hard middle seat up against my wound, which I again earnestly pray isn’t infected. The young driver puffs away, and the cab slowly fills with smoke as we wrap around downhill curves.
“This is amazing kindness,” Anton says. “Thank you.”
I whisper to Anton in English about offering them some payment.
“I like to give dollar bills,” he replies, not whispering. “Not for payment but more for good luck. Everyone seems to love it.” He hands me a dollar bill and I find five more George Washingtons in the bottom of my Dry Ice pack. Six dollars. I fold the notes up in my pocket for later.
The cigarette smoke gathers thick, and sheets of rain conceal the world outside, but our young pilot guides the wheel with a single nonchalant hand. I focus my attention on the green and red prayer flags that hang from his rearview mirror. I breathe and meditate. I pray for Michiko, that she is happy and safe on her own, and it all replays: horses, monastery, bliss, beauty, regret. Maybe I’m learning something in this new classroom. I pray for myself, that I gain wisdom about this anger and frustration, that somewhere some new insight awaits.
And I pray for our driver, that he is somehow an old hand at these Himalayan roads. He looks sixteen and too confident. He opens a beer, wrestling its cap free while bracing the steering wheel with a knee. “PSSHT!” cries the large brown bottle. He drinks as he whips us around a muddy bend. He passes the bottle to me, and I hold it a moment, then take a deep swig, wanting to leave less for him. It’s a sweet, heavy, raw barley brew. I pass it to Anton, who samples more slowly but wisely holds on to the bottle. Not to be outwitted, the driver points to the glove compartment, where we find two more bottles. He cracks into one immediately and keeps it for himself. “How old are you?” He glances at me between a puff and a pull, forearms taking turns on the wheel. On an uphill slope, he yanks around the mighty gearshift, leaving the wheel unattended. The engine roars.
“T-twenty-three,” I stutter. “You?”
“Eighteen,” he grins. His name is Lamdo. His brother in back is Jamyang, twenty-two. Ranjie, the thin woman, is twenty-four and a schoolteacher.
Jamyang leans forward and chuckles. “Don’t you worry, my little brother’s a good driver.” On cue, Lamdo leans back and rests a foot on the dash.
“You’re all Tibetans?” Anton asks, looking back at Ranjie. She nods, smoothing a wisp of glossy hair. Her classes are over for the day, and she’s hitchhiking to her parents’ home. Up ahead, a dead end fortunately turns into a hairpin turn, and we learn that the Tibetan family who waited with us is above us now, on top of the open trailer. We veer around the hairpin, and I picture them up there, clinging to the wet bricks. Goldmund’s words dance through my mind: “Travelers accept what heaven’s hand gives them: sun, rain, fog, snow, warmth, cold, comfort, hardship…”
We wind higher, entering the clouds, and under my feet the engine grows hot. Mist gathers around us like a scarf. Lamdo flicks his cigarette out the window, grabs a towel, rubs on the windshield, and cuts a momentary hole in the condensation. I want to help in some way—wipe the window for him, maybe, or just take the damn wheel. But instead my knee collides again with the gearshift as we roar around another bend, and I’m saying something about the driving rain when another tractor-trailer appears out of the mist, coming right for us. It’s twenty feet away, ten feet away, ten inches away, passing by, on our right, gigantic wheels skidding and spitting mud off the edge. Lamdo shoots me a smile, and for a moment he looks like a devil, a giddy, mischievous agent of death. I swallow my breath and leap forward to wipe fog from the glass with the arm of my sweater.
“Sing us a song,” Jamyang says.
Ranjie suggests we sing our “national song,” and it seems plausible, so we launch into the Star Spangled Banner, giving it our full voices. Anton’s a better singer than Byron and we’re able to find the melody. They applaud and respond with a punchy Tibetan song. The singing seems to warm this little chamber, to make it safer. When it’s our turn again, we sing, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star…” We apologize for choosing a children’s song, but they’re delighted, and they hum the melody and ask for a translation of the lyrics. The brothers launch into a Chinese drinking song, but their tune is cut short. Lamdo curses and strips the gears, repeatedly ramming the stick into place. Jamyang whispers to him anxiously in Tibetan while the engine growls like an angry lion.
“How high are we?” Anton asks.
“3300 meters,” mutters Jamyang. “4000, soon.”
This is 13,000 feet, a new record for me. Jamyang says something else, louder, and the brothers disagree. On a steep incline, the truck stalls and dies. It’s over. Lamdo kicks down the brake. We all climb out. Lamdo and Jamyang recline under the front axle and pound with hammers. Anton and I eventually scramble up the grassy mountainside for the view: The trailer yoked to our blue cab contains pink bricks and a family of hardy Tibetans; behind it, below it, black Tibetan yak-cows called dzo dot the hillsides; beyond them, through the mist, mountains stretch inexhaustibly, like massive green sand dunes. The little girl on top of the truck peers up at me, and I realize that if we ever move from here, I should change places with her. Yes. Although… all huddled together there, caring for each other, they seem to have it figured out. Why did the brothers give us the warm cab and give their own countrymen the cold bricks? Is it my place to question their decision? As if hearing my thoughts, the brothers drop their hammers and climb to our vantage, and they smile with us at their beautiful land. On official Chinese maps we remain outside the Tibetan border, but culturally and historically we’re well inside the Land of the Snow Lion. To our companions, this is the Tibetan province of Amdo.
Fierce gusts whip at our clothes, and the rain returns. Unbelievably, as if cured by some visiting spirit, the truck roars to life like a hungry beast, and all is well—we’re climbing the sides of mountains again. New smokes for Jamyang and Lamdo. We learn, through a roundabout conversation, that the weight of the load has cracked the wheels. But up we go, climbing, spiraling to some invisible apex, riding a slippery shelf above the world. Patches of clarity reveal a hang-glider’s view so boundless that for a moment I forget the road entirely.
Then we start to go down. We roll easily and freely, helplessly accelerating, skidding on mud around the bends, and death introduces herself again to the architect of my thoughts. People have existed precariously forever in these mountains; death is the simple, swift consequence of negligence, foolishness, a tough winter, or, perhaps, cracked wheels.
We roll faster—too fast—into the next turn. HONK-HONK! Lamdo has to take the middle of the road and blow his horn through the mist in case another truck is coming. I clench closed my eyelids, feeling every molecule in my body tingle. “Don’t be afraid,” Jamyang touches my shoulder. “Lamdo is a race-driver.” Around another blind hairpin, Lamdo blows his horn, taking the whole road. Race-driver? Race-trucker?
Rolling down his window, Lamdo flicks a cigarette
butt out into empty space. He throws a leg up on the dash, pops another beer, and relaxes, but now he doesn’t have a free hand to sound the horn. We roll faster toward the edge, toward a tight curve, and he whips her around—with just his right forearm. We speed down a steep stretch towards another no-look left turn. We draw near the hairpin; Lamdo waits. We reach the turn; Lamdo waits. At the edge, he whips his forearm across the steering wheel, but it slips. Instead of turning it, his arm slides all the way off the steering wheel. We roll straight for the edge. My mind flashes a vision of a childhood soccer game bathed in sunlight. My heart fills with gratitude for all of these years I’ve had, these highs and lows that make a varied life and that suddenly collapse into a single bright dot.
Lamdo brings his arm around. He places an open palm on the wheel and turns with all his might. A skidding sound. Death disappears off to the right and is replaced by another stretch of muddy road. My heart beats again.
But no one speaks for several minutes.
The road winds hurriedly downward, oblivious to who might be traveling its muddy thread.
“Race driver?” Anton finally asks.
“I race trucks,” Lamdo replies.
“One of the boldest around,” adds Jamyang. “Because he’s so fast.”
“Where do you race?” Anton asks.
“Usually on long straight roads. Sometimes right here.” Lamdo grins just as the road flattens, straightens, drops into a valley, and runs as fast as it can from the peaks and the storm.
“Is that how the wheels get damaged?” Anton asks.
Jamyang shakes his head. “It’s these bricks—the heaviest load we’ve ever carried.”
Death. It’s startling to watch it pass on your right or left or reach for companions on top of your truck. The worst is that moment of its arrival, that moment of breath-stealing fear, that moment that is…useless. Without the fear, death might be just another arrival, another serendipitous experience, another conclusion; painful perhaps, but many things are painful, and it might be pleasurable, like a dive off a cliff into a cold lake where the fear freezes you at first, but the shock of impact is brief and the water soon turns warm and familiar.
Anton asks about the Tibetans on top, and Jamyang peers through the tiny back window. “Still there.”
“Did you know them?” I ask.
Jamyang smiles. “Did we know you?”
Lamdo looks at me. “Did you know us?”
“You’re very kind to pick people up,” I say, after a pause.
“They only pick people up sometimes,” qualifies Ranjie.
Lamdo pulls over in the middle of a grassy windswept plateau, and everyone climbs out for a rest. My feet touch the ground—oh, fertile, solid earth, forgotten friend! I stroll out greedily into the chilly air, into a vast emptiness that unfurls like a green prayer flag all the way to distant mountains. The gray maze of mist overhead parts, and the sun emerges like a symphony, serenading everything with its radiance. I close my eyes and inhale deeply to taste this change, this light-switch movement of Tibetan darkness and light. My eyes open again and everything seems weightless, like colored sands falling into a river.
Chapter 30
The First Laughter
火要空心人要虚心
Fire burns only with space in its center,
Man grows only with modesty in his heart.
—Chinese proverb
Sunlight pours through scattered holes in the clouds. The land smoothes out and our cracked wheels hop onto pavement. Lamdo cuts sharply on the wet cement. “We’re entering Sichuan Province,” he announces. Sichuan, or Szechwan, is the California of China: the most populous, rebellious, and diverse of China’s provinces. Sichuan’s cuisine is China’s most famous, and its people number more than those of any European country. The fertile valleys of its East are Han; the sky-scraping mountains up here in the Northwest are Tibetan; and the moist, culturally diverse South resembles Burma. Just this past March, to reduce the province’s size and power, Beijing sliced off its eastern quarter and created a new province.
Lamdo whips down the first side road we come to and pulls over in front of an abandoned building. The truck rolls to a halt.
“Zöigê is just down the road.” He points.
The Tibetans on top of the truck got off hours ago in a splendid, drenched nowhere. Now it’s our turn, and we thank Lamdo and Jamyang warmly and hand them the six dollar bills. They refuse courteously at first, but then accept the exotic pieces of paper with wonder.
The truck disappears around a hill, and a cold drizzle falls gently down upon us. I stare up into the heavens, opening my mouth to catch a raindrop’s blessing on my tongue, and its tapdance deepens the strange pleasure of being alive in the precise middle of nowhere. Anton starts in the direction they indicated, and I follow. Lot after abandoned lot of overgrown concrete lie on our left, while on our right a naked mountain valley unfolds. A bone-chilling shiver shakes me under my pack, and Goldmund’s thoughts come again: “Time does not exist for travelers—they’re children at heart, always living in the first day of creation.” Travelers have always by necessity welcomed this magic, this fate, danger, and discovery. Travelers ineluctably live in the now.
A lone billboard depicts a hot mug of green tea, and the wisps of steam take me on a journey far away, fueling a desire not to be here, not to be now, to be somewhere else, to be warm, dry, home. Harried souls dart through the rain, not even wasting time to stare, and then we enter Zöigê, a collection of buildings in the new architectural style—solid drab concrete and blue tile. Every store and door is closed. In the truck, I made a note about a hostel, and I extricate the LP with my shivering fingers. The Zöigê Government Hotel is “filthy” and “putrid,” I review, and the status of Zöigê as a whole is “unclear for foreigners…but don’t worry, the police will find you if they want to.” We locate our putrid destination at the far edge of town, and it’s actually of the old style—covered in lovely, intricate paintings that seem to fade away with charming nonchalance right before our eyes. A rotund woman opens a metal gate, takes our money, and kindly shows us to a second-floor room that’s covered with murals of mountain landscapes. Greeting us inside is the smell of mildew. Our wet packs fall to the floor, Anton hangs his poncho on the door and collapses onto a chair, and I fish my towel and soap from my pack and speed like a downhill racetruck to the shower. In a wooden shed, a nozzle sputters as I strip naked. Hot rivers stream, spray, pound, and soothe the muscles of my shoulders, back, and legs. I wiggle my toes and roll my neck, grinning, imagining every cell of my body diving into a warm pool.
Having finally washed my riding wound, I ask Anton to attach a bandage to it, realizing with an odd certainty that I would never ask a man to do this at home. “It really doesn’t look too bad,” he says, casually lifting a huge weight from my shoulders. “It’s a cut, it’s almost healed.”
I pull my blue sweater over a cleaner T-shirt and for a moment I can’t stop grinning, and I’m floating with a sparkling lightness back to the monks and the mandala, remembering that other happiness, that gratitude for simplicity, that pure uncomplicated awareness of existence. “Isn’t it amazing?” I say. “This moment. This life. We’re alive. Everything that we need already exists. Nothing needs to exist that isn’t already here.”
“It is amazing.” He smiles at me. “Well, I could do without the rain.”
He gets his wish. The Zöigê market peacocks a panoply of colors amid the town’s baldness. Radiant in slanting afternoon light, fresh fruits and vegetables, so rare up here in the mountains, beckon to us: red peppers the size of pinky fingers, fat purple grapes, fuzzy kiwis, bright orange persimmons, white melons, long succulent green beans. People are everywhere now, leisurely buying and selling, conversing with friends, perhaps planning a family dinner. A man pushes a giant wheelbarrow of spinach past, and the smells of the green leaves and rich earth rise to my nostrils. Three children fly by on a bicycle, hollering and splashing through a br
oad puddle. It’s already seven, but the lingering raindrops glisten in sunlight since the entire nation runs on a single time zone—“Beijing Time”—as if to remind us all who’s in charge. The clocks say seven when the sun says four.
Anton craves fruit and insists we stop for a snack. We haggle gently with a vendor for bags of grapes and persimmons, and one of the fist-sized orange fruits soon surrenders its juices between my teeth. We stroll on through the town, passing between cinder-block homes. A horrific squealing pierces our ears. In front of one house, a small man holds firmly onto the large neck of a pig; the man repeatedly braces his knee against the meaty body as he brandishes a long knife. The animal shrieks again in terror, hurling its cries skyward, throwing wails off the walls of the homes. Then, silence. The door of a different home stands wide open as we pass by, and I see a family at a table: Two adults poke into bowls of rice, and a little boy sings, filling the air with a chaotic melody.
Dimness grows from the shadows around us as the sky overhead shreds into pink and purple. We stop into what must be one of the town’s finer restaurants, and a man with smoothly combed hair strides out of the kitchen to greet us. He takes our order, and our choices arrive on artistically arranged platters: thin, smoothly sliced tŭdòu sī potatoes; fragrant, ginger-kissed bok choy; and sizzling tĭebăn níuròu (iron plate beef). Everything looks unbelievably divine, and with the first bite, my eyes slide closed to savor the scents and the flavors, the spices and sauces intertwining their textures on my tongue. A frisson of pleasure courses through me.
Anton pincers a morsel of beef and asks where I’m off to next. I’m not sure what to say. He’s made the decisions thus far, but he seems unconcerned as to whether we travel together or apart. He mentions Jiuzhaigou, China’s largest national park, and coincidentally it’s the place that Li Song, quite well-traveled himself, called China’s most beautiful. It could be next for me, but Anton says he doesn’t have much time. He still wants to see Xishuangbanna, a lush jungle region in the south that borders Burma, and he’s leaving China in eleven days. We agree for now just to keep moving, together, to make a decision on Jiuzhaigou tomorrow.
Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China Page 24