"The piece de resistance of all this was the ballroom, which was built below the street level and during the war was reinforced with steel beams. One day, when I was ten years old or so, my father took me down on my birthday, opened the double doors that led down a flight of steps, and there, covering just about every inch of the place, was an elaborate electric train set. I would have guessed fifteen or twenty sets had gone into the making of that complex ... just miles of track, dozens and dozens of switches, ten or so mountain tunnels to go through, with little Swiss chalets on the sides, lots of railroad crossings, the bars snapping up and down as the trains went by, three or four stations with platforms, water towers, cranes, lead cattle standing around in a stockyard, transformers everywhere to keep the power pouring through this vast network. My father took me over to a main control panel and showed me how it all worked.
"Whoever put the whole thing together had not populated it in any way. He had not put little lead people here and there doing things, such as standing behind the ticket window, or waiting on the platform with a little dispatch case, or out in the fields with those lead cows. The trains went by-long, lighted coaches with seats inside, everything in exact detail-and no one was sitting there. No one was driving the miniature red cars waiting at the railroad crossings where the crossbars went up and down.
"Then one day I discovered someone. He was sitting in the control cabin of a crane. He wore a bowler. His face was painted pink and he had a mustache. He had a round peg in his backside that fitted into a hole in the driver's seat. When I discovered him among all that miniature machinery it gave me quite a start, this man staring out the little window of his crane. He looked a little startled himself. I gave him a name-God of All He Surveys."
He paused, cocking his head slightly. Debbie Sue was so still I thought she had fallen asleep, but I could see the glint of her eyes in the half-light. The settee hung motionless from its chains.
"Did you go down there often?" I asked. "To the ballroom?"
"Actually I got to like my father's trains," Sidd said. "Especially at night. I'd go down there and turn off all the ballroom lights and switch on the lights in the various establishments in my landscape. There weren't very many-lights at the station, at the crossings, a petrol station or two, and a couple of the farmhouses had lonely lights in them.
"I ran just one train through my system-an engine, and maybe thirty freight cars behind it, so it moved slowly and rather laboriously. Often I took the God of All He Surveys out of his crane and put him in the caboose. He was outsize and barely fit in the back platform. I had to put him in a little sideways, so that he had a quite cockeyed view of that miniature world receding behind him as he traveled along."
When he was twelve Sidd was sent to the Stowe School, a public school near Oxford, and actually on the grounds-Sidd said-of property originally belonging to one John Temple, which amused him: he wondered if perhaps the founding fathers of the place were in the lower branches of my own family tree. He told me wryly that the Temple hospitality in the Pass-a-Grille bungalow was far warmer than it had been at Stowe. He had not had a good time there.
"I felt profoundly lonely. My father sent me postcards and letters. He urged me to steam off the stamps, often very large ones, from the exotic places his explorations took him to-usually of large local birds with gaudy plumage or native dhows with brown sails on a delta. The messages that accompanied these big-stamped postcards were perfunctory. Yet I was always tremendously moved when I received these communications. He was my only ... person. I couldn't seem to make friends at Stowe. I was a terrible athlete. Chasing a cricket ball, I stumbled into a pond. I almost drowned. I had to be pulled out.
"So I'd walk through the grounds in the evening with my horn. Sometimes I'd go down to Eleven Acre Lake and play across the water. There are various miniature arches, and also temples, like teahouses. I'd go and play in them. Their little vaulted roofs made interesting sound modulations."
Apparently Sidd did extremely well academically. In his last year he applied to Harvard. His father felt a change of culture was important. A couple of days after he received notice of his acceptance, there was a knock on the door of his room.
"The `Head' wished to see me. It was a winter night. A proctor went with me to the Head's rooms. Could I have done something wrong? I couldn't imagine what. I was practically a cipher in the social circles of the school. The French horn? The notes drifted a long way in the still-dark afternoons. Perhaps people in the neighboring farm cottages had complained.
" `Sit down please, Finch.' The Head rested the palms of his hands on the table in front of him. `In this life there are many things which are imponderable,' he said. `We have received news, I am terribly sorry to tell you, that your father has perished in an airplane crash in the Himalayas. You may wish the use of the school chapel to pray, and that naturally is granted if it pleases you.' "
The next day Sidd left for London. The two executors of his father's estate met him at Paddington. They sat silently on either side during the cab ride to the London house. In the library, the pair stood in front of the fire, rocking back and forth, warming themselves before they hitched their trousers delicately and sat down opposite him. They were not as direct as the Head. They told the boy that his father had "disappeared" on an airplane flight in "very difficult terrain."
"Disappeared?"
"The plane has not been found."
"I wish to look for him."
The executors said that was quite impossible. He would be returned to school in a week's time, just as soon as his father's affairs were settled. Since the young man was the only heir ...
"I wish to look for him. I wish to leave instantly for the East...."
The executors stood up. One couldn't just leave instantly for the East. He was not of legal age to make such decisions. Quite impossible. He was now the ward of legal guardians.
"I gave them all the slip," Sidd told us. "It was really quite simple. I wrote the school saying I was not returning because of the circumstances of my father's disappearance. I drew a bank draft sufficient to cover my expenses, in particular an airplane ticket to the East. I packed a small bag, got into a cab, and with the staff standing in the street I loudly announced, `Paddington,' and went instead to Heathrow for an airplane to Bangladesh. It took them a time to sort everything out, and by the time they had I was heading into the mountains from Kathmandu. I wrote the executors a polite letter apologizing for my subterfuge. They made quite an effort to get me out, informing consulates and so forth, but I was quite a few steps ahead of them. I had contacts.
"A number of people knew my father, of course. One of them was an elderly Tibetan named Karma Paul, who lived in Darjeeling. He was involved in the organization of a number of Everest expeditions-a charming man who spoke five languages. He thought me eccentric and foolish and too young to be looking for the wreckage of an airplane in a Himalayan ravine. He worried about eccentrics coming to this part of the world from the West. He had helped Maurice Wilson. Do you know of him? He was a Yorkshire mountaineer who tried a solo climb of Mount Everest in 1933, a man of almost no experience in the mountains whose motivating theory was that mountaineers were too fat. Wilson ate only uncooked grasses, like a sheep, and when he died on the mountain-astonishingly high up-Karma Paul told me, `I should never have let him go. I shouldn't let you go. Your father is in the snows, and that is that, my dear boy.' He went on to say that Wilson had been discovered by the Eric Shipton expedition-a skeleton in an old wind-shredded tent. One of his boots was off, lying beside the bones, and the other was still on the foot. Wilson was bent forward in this queer way, the laces of the boot still entwined in the bones of his fingers, as if he were preparing to dress and rush down the mountain to escape the cold. I remember that Karma Paul suddenly stopped in the middle of telling me thishe realized, of course, he was describing a scene that could very well be paralleled in the wreckage of my father's small plane, up on some mountain ridge, and he bowed
his head and apologized. He was very helpful after that.
"I went up into the foothills. There are forests of azalea up there, and junipers. The smells walking through these groves are intoxicating. There are willow plantations, and I spent some time in a monastery on a hill of willows beyond Syang. Usually from the window you can see a shrine, a chorten. Butterflies. The flowers outside the window are purple. The temple bells from the valley. You empty the washbasin on the floor and the water runs out a hole in the corner. When I first lived there I worried that a cobra or a krait would come up through the hole during the night, so I put the basin over it and I waited for it to move in the night.
"The grass is tall and shines in the sun. At higher altitudes the pines are twisted the way you see them in Chinese paintings. The prayer flags are strung across the monastery roofs. When the banners flap the prayers printed on them blow out into the wind, and it's supposed to bring good luck. The flags are called `Horses of the Wind.' . . . The clouds and fog at that altitude seem to pulse with color. The shadows are abrupt and dark. In the winter the winds are fierce. The gusts ring the bells on the yaks-seventy miles an hour, sweeping down along their flanks, by the horns-so that downwind you can hear this sound above the roar of the winds."
"Do the bells for us," Debbie Sue asked.
Sidd smiled and said he wouldn't do the terrible winds -it was a strain on his throat-but he did a few bells for us-a dull distant clanking.
"That was the kind of country my father had gone down in-near a place called French Pass, which is a glacier between two enormous mountains-Dhaulagiri and a twin, Dhaula Himai. Another plane went down there in 1969, seven years before. It was supporting an American expedition trying to climb Dhaulagiri. We went by the site, going up through the French Pass, and my heart jumped when I saw the glint of metal among the snow and rocks.
"We gave up after a while. No sign of Father's plane, or even rumors-the elevations were so high and desolate that a tribesman turning up at the campfire and telling us that he had seen a bright flash in the sky ... that sort of thing ... was simply out of the question."
But, as Sidd told us, he did not return home. He spent almost six months wandering through Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan, even up toward the Tibetan border.
"Once in a ruined monastery called Chorten Nyima, I stayed in a small room with a naked monk who sat motionless in the posture of a Buddha. He was meditating. His body was dusted blue, which symbolizes space, emptiness. I laid out my mat and slept. I could not hear him breathing. It was like occupying a space with a large statue. He was in the exact same attitude when I awoke in the dawn and left the monastery."
The settee creaked on its chains. "Are Tibetan monks circumcised?" asked Debbie Sue.
"I didn't notice," Sidd said.
"It was your chance. You should have looked. Are there nuns?" Debbie Sue asked.
"Yes. Ane la. They live in separate quarters. At the Rongbuk monastery at the foot of Mount Everest there's an empty oxygen cylinder left there from some expedition that is used as a temple bell. When it's time for the monks and the nuns to go to their separate quarters, someone comes out and bangs it with a bar."
The settee creaked on its chains. Debbie Sue murmured what a beautiful and lonely sound that must be.
He imitated it for us; the bungalow filled with the bell sound, which he made echo off in distant folds and ravines, dying away, until we could hear the frogs once again, bellowing out in the back.
Where in all of this, I asked, had Sidd learned to throw a baseball with such astonishing skill? "Can you tell us ...?" I felt myself leaning forward from my chair; I heard Debbie Sue stirring.
Sidd nodded and explained that most of the physical feats in that part of the world involved the practice of lung-gom. (It startled me to hear the same word we had heard from Dr. Burns in Frank Cashen's office.) He told us that some of the monks who practiced lung-gom became so light that they wore chains to keep themselves from floating away like balloons.
"Come on!" Debbie Sue exclaimed.
"I have read about it, heard of it," Sidd said. "It was not of concern to me-floating up into the snowfieldsbecause what I did was to apply lung-gom not to the leg but to the arm. It surprised the monks. The leg is much more important to them. They must use their legs to get around that difficult terrain. In their way of life the arm is involved in the simplest of things-to ring a temple bell, to bang a little drum, to raise a cup of buttered tea to the lips. But I got very interested in the idea of causing a commotion at Point B when standing a long distance away at Point A. To throw an object that connects those two points is a very heady thing to be able to do ... especially if you can do it time and time again with accuracy. It is something archers and hunters know all about-the trigonometric closing of lines.
"The preparatory exercises are mainly spiritual.. . mental concentration on certain elementary forces, along with the recitation of specific mantras, ngags, to activate the psychic centers. For a long time throwing hard with accuracy did not seem much of an accomplishment. The monks were befuddled. I would take a short walk from the monastery to search for a perfect stone in the thang, which is the word for pasture, and I would throw it across the thang at a rhododendron tree.
"One day the khempo, the head lama, called me in. He told me that the yaks in the pens were being disturbed by a big predator coming down out of the snowfields. Two young yaks had been taken. There was great consternation among the other yaks. They kept their heads turned toward the mountains to the north. The monks thought it was probably a snow leopard-a pair, they thought-but it was possibly-and the head lama's eyes widened-a yeti-the Abominable Snowman! No one had actually seen what had gotten into the pens. So the head lama assigned me to sit in the ravines above the yak pen and peg rocks at whatever it was that was coming down from the snowfields."
Debbie Sue asked if the people didn't have something more suitable to deal with snow leopards, or the yetis especially, than pegging rocks. A gun for instance?
"The Tibetans use slings," Sidd told us. "And they are very good with them. Some of the slings have rubber that stretches back far behind the body where they twirl them and take aim. Dop-dops can aim at a leaf and knock it off a tree."
"Forgive me. What is a dop-dop?" I asked.
"He is a person who works in the monastery. Sweeps. Helps in the kitchen. The dop-dop ordinarily would be the person to keep the snow leopards from bothering the yaks in their pens. But I had a contest with a dop-dop. It was seen by a monk standing in the shadow of a rhododendron forest. The dop-dop said that he was better with his sling than I was with my arm. I replied that if I wished to knock a leaf off its line of fall with a pebble I could do so. He was scornful. `Nah!, nah!, nah!' He snapped the rubber of his sling.
"So the dop-dop put the half-shell of a hen's egg on a rock about seventy feet away. I said it was too close. The egg was as big as a half-moon. The dop-dop hooted with scorn. He took aim and popped the egg with a pebble from his sling. He was a fine shot. He walked out to put another eggshell on the rock for me to throw at and I told him to keep walking ... waving him on until he reached the edge of the forest. I could barely hear him. `Nah, nah, nah.' When he put the eggshell down, I threw. He jumped back and I could see the pieces of the eggshell flicker up into the sunlight.
"So the head lama called me in. The monk had told him about the contest. The lama said he had always been impressed by the Westerner's ability to throw objects. Once in Kathmandu he had seen a movie about baseball. What was it? He tapped his finger alongside his nose. Pride of the Yankees -that was it. Most interesting how baseball players throw the ball to each other, so accurately and with such dispatch!
"So I stayed in the rocks above the yak pens waiting to peg whatever came down. It was a good place to meditate. I was so still I became one with the rocks. I could imagine lichen growing behind my knees. I waited for a week. The moon shone on the flanks of the yaks in their pens. I could see the sheen of their horns. One afternoon the hor
ns, dozens, turned to the north, and I knew something was coming down from the snowfield.
"It was the snow leopard-like a shadow. He moves without moving, as if he were on a moving stairway. What gives him away is the black tip of his tail. It twitches. I am told it is a genetic characteristic-so the leopard cubs can follow their parents in the glaze of a blizzard. At first I thought the slight movement up among the boulders was a pack rat, popping in and out of sight, but then the outlines of the leopard emerged....
The Curious Case of Sidd Finch Page 8