The hours pass while my thoughts are elsewhere. Night in a foreign land is when I rethink my own life; what I should have done differently, what I can do better. What will I do next? The bus is silent except for random snoring and the hushed conversation between the middle-aged driver and his young girlfriend, seated on the aisle floor next to him. We stop on an isolated piece of road where towering cactus stand like night sentinels in our headlights. The cargo door opens and a gentleman and young lady emerge to trade places with the driver and his friend, both girls giggling as they switch. Our new driver, refreshed in more ways than one, takes over.
I return to the night and when the first purple streak of dawn slashes the sky we leave Highway One for the service road into Guerro Negro, gateway to Scammon’s Lagoon. On the sides of the road we begin to see platforms topping telephone poles for the osprey to nest on and avoid electrocution. On the beach side we roll past the enormous skeleton of a gray whale that announces this village as a major whale-watching destination.
Behind the bus station, the ever-present Virgin of Guadalupe, haloed by blinking Christmas lights, watches over the parking lot with outstretched hands. A faint whiff of marijuana comes to my nose and stepping inside, two ancient and gaunt vaqueros in straw cowboy hats are drinking coffee and passing a hand rolled smoke. I buy a cold empanada so stale I toss it to a stray dog after one bite.
Because it is close to the ocean, it is often bitterly cold in Guerro Negro at night. This evening I watch my breath rise in hazy clouds to disappear in the breeze. Above me, the Big Dipper sits low in the sky, the end of its handle pointing the way home for when I return. As we leave to continue south, the morning light begins to crawl over the horizon, mingling land and sky that slowly separates into a new day.
An hour’s ride south, the desert floor widens and the road disappears into a cottony ground fog. The top of a distant volcano pokes through it and gigantic Cordon cactus slide in and out of sight in the haze, their upturned arms saluting as we roll past, a vast silent army, icons of the land. We have reached the edge of the Vizcaino biosphere, five million hectares of protected wilderness that covers a quarter of the Baja Peninsula. Suddenly, distant shadows become a herd of wild burros that cause us to brake hard enough to wake everyone and we laugh as the driver must exit and physically shoo them off the road. Kestrels are hunting insects in the morning haze and the cactus appears to be stretching after the evenings sleep. Everyone crowds to one side and cell phones are snapping photos. The quiet night is gone. Across from me, a man in silver-tipped cowboy boots, draws a long pull from a pocket flask then slumps back in his seat, his Stetson tilted low over his eyes.
The fog parts like a curtain and we pass low flat mesas full of sandstone caves carved by the eons. I know if I were to explore them I would find artifacts that hold stories from centuries ago. East of the mesas, rolling flat lands give rise to the Tres Virgines, three active volcanoes, named for the inhabitants of an old folk tale. They sit in a perfect row, descending in height from the one nearest the highway, all mighty vents from the lungs of the planet. Archeologists have speculated that when they last awoke, tens of thousands of years ago, they spewed molten lava up to 100 miles, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, from whose tidal waters on a clear day you can see the hazy outline of the tallest volcano.
Just north of San Ignacio we stop for a military checkpoint where a cardboard soldier holds a sign warning against drugs. An officer with a clipboard climbs into the bus and struts up and down the center aisle, not really looking for anything; more an act of machismo than a search. Outside a sniffer dog scratches at the baggage compartment and after an amused soldier looks inside we are waved on.
People are moving about the bus, stiff and sore after the long night. The driver puts a movie on the overhead screens and cranks the volume up to rock concert level. It is Snakes on a Plane starring Samuel L. Jackson, a very bad B movie that makes me realize that a good movie is not about to play on a public bus in the rural desserts of Mexico.
We round a hairpin turn and from the tiny valley below us, the adobe-tiled roofs of San Ignacio come into view through the date palms. It is a tired and sun-worn village whose main industry is cement bricks and whose people appear to live in slow motion. The town sits astride an impossibly beautiful river full of egrets and herons that contribute to the town’s casual aura. Two hours to the west, gray whales have migrated into the lagoon of the same name for centuries.
We pull into the dirt parking lot and I spot Jorge leaning against his van, waiting for me even though we are three hours late. He has one cowboy boot on the bumper above a “Jesus loves you” decal and his arm rests on the bullhorns mounted on the hood. He still wears the aviator shades I gave him two years ago. It is stifling hot under a van Gogh sun.
A stray dog barks at a swirling dust devil and I stare up at the familiar sign over the bus office.
I smile as I read, “Bienvenido a San Ignacio.”
I am back in Mexico.
Bingwen
A Life Not Chosen
I watched the old man for about an hour before I approached him. He sat on a dirty blanket on the street corner, bent like a sextant with age, rats scuttling in the gutter below his feet. That was his spot; I had seen so many like him throughout China: Those without status who survive by their wits.
His clothes were tattered and his four-cornered hat identified him as a Uyghur, one of the displaced Eastern European Muslims trapped on the wrong side of a line on a map. China has declared Xinxiang province to be a “Uyghur Autonomous Area,” but that is only lip service to a minority that is scorned by the ruling Han majority. The Uyghur are Chinese on paper only.
I watched him work with infinite care, carving with a tiny penknife. He was oblivious to the uninterested masses passing him by, focused only on his work. No one stopped to buy or even look at his wares; delicate wooden combs, spoons, and whimsical creatures. He was an artist by any reasonable standards, but his birth status had relegated him to the streets. His leathery skin looked like an aerial map of old dried riverbeds, and his whippet-thin arms ended in gnarled hands bulging with purple veins. They were craftsman’s hands that liberated beauty from old blocks of wood. In another time and place, he might have been a great sculptor, but in today’s China, he was but one of those who do not officially exist. He was the kind of person I seek to have a conversation.
In rural China, Westerners are a curiosity, especially those of us who stand over six feet tall and weigh 200 pounds, so my approach brought with it a crowd, and crowds always bring the police. I sat on his blanket, fingering his works, while he cocked his head studying this strange foreigner who was giving him face by sitting near him. Within a minute we were surrounded by a pushing mass of onlookers including two young policemen who were obviously out of their league in dealing with such a situation. They seemed as curious about me as I was about the old man.
He spoke halting English with a strange accent, so, intrigued, I invited him to join me in a local tea house, I knew that under normal circumstances he would not be allowed to enter. But the Chinese get jittery in the presence of Westerners, especially those with cameras, and I suspected they would not challenge me if he entered as my guest.
All heads turned and eyes stared as we took seats on the patio, while necks craned to hear the strange language being exchanged between this unlikely pair. The waiter served my tea but placed the pot on the table without pouring the old man’s, so I picked it up and made a show of pouring his, as a gasp of astonishment spread across the tables. Then to counter the local arrogance, I called the waiter back and ordered two bagels, knowing them to be a Uyghur favorite, and put them in front of the old man while the waiter glared. The two young police just stood blankly staring, hoping no trouble would start. I am sure they were terrified of something happening, and they would not know how to react.
The old gentleman tore into the bagels with relish and told me his name was Bingwen, which translate
roughly to someone having wisdom. Then, eyeing the room about us, he asked why I wanted to talk to him. I told him his story just might be one of those lost epics that fall through the cracks of society, lost forever except for chance encounters. I told him I chase around the world looking for stories like that. My answer made him smile and he shifted in his seat, trying to decide if I was worth talking to, or maybe a government plant sent to trip him up somehow.
He grew silent, and briefly went elsewhere while his body remained. Then he looked up slowly and held my gaze. “If you want to know, I will tell you,” he said, “but it was so long ago.” He delivered that last line with such world weariness that I felt he was finally casting off a burden.
He said that his father had been one of the last great merchants of the northern Silk Road camel caravans out of Kashgar, and that while quite young he had traveled with his father for the first time, when bandits attacked in the mountains of Afghanistan at a caravanserai on a moonless night. They killed everyone, except Bingwen, who smeared himself with blood and hid under a dead camel until the carnage and looting was over. Now, a homeless orphan, alone for the first time, he made his way to Kabul in a journey worthy of a Kipling novel, begging for food and sleeping on the streets amid packs of roving feral dogs.
He had been a street urchin until a furnituremaker took pity on him and allowed him to sweep out his shop at night in exchange for a little food and a blanket to sleep on. It was in that tiny shop, immersed in the smell of wood, that his muse found him. He knew immediately that wood was his destined medium just as stone had been Michelangelo’s, and paint had been Leonardo’s. The carving tools felt like extensions of his hands, and he instinctively knew what to do with them. One night, using a cast-off block, and with no training whatsoever, he worked through dawn, answering a call from deep within himself. For him, carving wood was the same as prayer. In the morning he astonished his master with a beautifully rendered horse, rearing on its hind legs, perfectly balanced, anatomically correct in every detail. When asked how he did it he just stared at his hands, wondering the same question himself. He had only seen horses in pictures before.
Within a year he had his own studio and a full list of clientele that expanded greatly after the Soviet invasion of 1979. Feeling no allegiance to his imposed home, he was apolitical at first; but grateful that his carvings were popular souvenirs with the Soviet troops who filled the streets of Kabul and who bought everything he could produce. Life was not bad under the Soviets.
At this point he stopped and I could tell the words were coming hard. I poured him another cup of tea as he began to speak of a young girl who cleaned and cooked for him in exchange for a place to sleep, a kindred spirit, child of the street, just as he had been. One night, three drunken soldiers broke in for a night of debauchery. When he came to her defense, they beat him senseless with camel whips. He awoke the following morning in a pool of blood beside her lifeless body. He stared at her for most of a day, and that night he set fire to his studio and walked off into the hills to find the Mujahideen.
In the purple mountains that cradle Kabul he swore allegiance to a local warlord who sensed a rage in his new fighter that few of his own men possessed. He was there to kill Soviets and he would disappear each night, alone, returning in the morning with proof of his kills, an ear, a finger, an officer’s sidearm, driven by the image of the girl in his studio. He was a proficient enough killer to have the Soviets place a price on his head.
One night he attacked the crew of a Soviet tank, who were sitting under their vehicle around a sterno fire. He killed three before the last one managed to slide a bayonet between his ribs as his final act. Bingwen packed the wound with mud made from dirt and his own blood, then crawled into a dry gulley to die. That night was the first time he had noticed the stars since he was a small boy. Their beauty took his pain away and he stared at them, smiling, waiting for the end.
A shepherd found him the next morning, barely alive, and dragged him to his village where the Mujahideen tended him until he was ready to fight again, but something had happened that night under the stars.
Who knows what powers determine our life paths? Certainly, as a child, Bingwen never imagined himself a killer. Our choices can be decided by the toss of a coin, a momentary whim, a sign by the road, or a knife in the gut in a remote desert. Lying under the stars, Bingwen knew that no matter how many soldiers he killed, he could not change the past. It was time to move on.
He left on a moonless night, without provisions or money, AWOL from both sides of the endless war, wandering like a biblical mendicant, unwashed, unshaven, unknown, seeking silent forgiveness from all he met for deeds he dragged around like a stone. His only possession was the small penknife he used to whittle tree branches; his personal meditation.
Perhaps it was divine guidance or just serendipity, that led him to Bamiyan. There he sat in the famous caves with sadhus until they accepted him as one of their own. It had never been his intent to become a hermit, especially a religious one, but his grief was too overwhelming to allow any other life. Living at the foot of a 150-foot-tall stone Buddha, he soaked up Buddhism the way a sponge gathers water.
After months spent in self-reflection, he eventually come to terms with his past, and in time, he left the caves. He felt the need to visit his childhood home, to chase after memories of a life left undone. For a year he wandered the 890 kilometers back to his birth city of Kashgar, China, living off the kindness of those he passed, looking like a wild man with uncut hair and tattered rags. Once there he found that he no longer knew the city. He could not even find the place where he had lived, but while searching for it, he passed a carpentry shop, and the smell of wood called him like a drug, a scent imprinted in his soul.
The owner gave him a small block and he carried it to the park, savoring its feel. There, the memory returning to his fingers, his penknife removed all excess shavings to reveal a beautiful little camel that had been hiding inside. He had not carved in years and he felt his soul beginning to awaken. He carved like a starving man eats until he fell asleep there in the park, at peace with himself and the world for the first time in memory. When he awoke in the morning his carving was gone but there was a note in his pocket with some money, thanking him for the beautiful creature, and asking if he would carve more?
So that was his story that ended in a Kashgar tea house with an American writer. He had reduced his world to a small square blanket and that was all he wanted. He thanked me for the tea and bagels but I could tell he was uneasy in our situation. He had said all he had to say, and now that street corner was his home and wood was his religion and salvation. His creatures were a fantasy world where there was no violence, no war, no rapes, and he was in control of it.
He had come full circle, from a young child to an old man. Perhaps his childhood home was only a few feet from where he now spent his days, but he would never know for sure, nor did he care. He wanted nothing more from life than oblivion within his blocks of wood, and I think I understood that. For many, there may be a fine line between oblivion and Nirvana.
Travel has taught me that he world is full of Bingwens who go unnoticed every day. Everyone has a story worth telling. That is why I start conversations with strangers when I travel, because sometimes, something as simple as tea and a bagel can bring an epic tale in return.
I am probably the only person who has ever heard Bingwen’s story, and I still wonder why he chose to tell it to me. Perhaps, I sometimes think, our meeting was just a part of some larger carving.
PART THREE
Adrenalin
The Bin Laden train
Common Ground in the Kasbah
The corner table on the patio of the Argana Café in the Marrakesh medina was a perfect place to watch the busiest public square in Africa come to life under a blinding sunrise.
Rabat is the capitol of Morocco, and Marrakesh is its heart, but the medina—its center—is an Arabic word that simply means “town
,” and it is the soul that beats the heart.
Marrakesh is a Berber word that translates roughly to “Land of God.” It was founded by the Almoravid dynasty in 1072 and was so powerful a city that until the 20th century all of Morocco was known as the Kingdom of Marrakesh. The Jamaa El Fna Square, in the medina, is a churning cauldron of humanity that only stops long enough each night to catch its breath for the next day. Its name, Jamaa El Fna can be said to mean “Gathering of Trespassers.”
At sunrise, merchants and vendors flow in like a slowly creeping tide; umbrellas and awnings sprouting like mushrooms, and all appear like spirits through the blinding light. Snake charmers, rock stars of the square, claim their ground with cheap carpets on which they deposit numerous rubber reptiles to give volume to the handful of living ones they actually possess. Next, they bring out puff adders with lips sewn shut, fierce looking but now benign, followed by cobras so tranquilized they cannot strike, while good old American-style defanged rattlesnakes round out the menagerie. Still the presence of such exotic and normally lethal creatures always draws a paying crowd. More than any other attraction, it is the snake handlers in their pointy yellow shoes, playing their flutes, while a supposedly mesmerized cobra sways to its melody that defines the medina in my mind.
Leashed monkeys are trained to take money (and occasionally cameras) from tourists, while red-suited water vendors in their bright red hats hung with multicolored dingle balls, costumes unchanged in centuries, offer brass cups of water, a tradition left from ancient caravan days. Jugglers and fire breathers supply diversions for the pickpockets whose nimble fingers daily relieve distracted tourists of their wallets. Gallabiyahs (long traditional robe) and kufiyahs (flowing checkered cloth held in place by a black forehead band) outnumber baseball hats and sunglasses here. As I sip my chocolate coffee, I notice a woman with henna-dyed hands looking my way through the slit of her burka, her stylish high-heeled shoes clicking on the ancient ground while she sips a fruit smoothie through a straw under her veil. For the men, especially the elderly, beards long and flowing as their robes are the order of the day.
Baboons for Lunch Page 7