The Road To Linzhi

We’re marooned in a bowl of mountains on the road to Linzhi, Tibet. Unlike the mountains of home, which are settled, full-grown, and staid, the Himalayas are brazen, thrusting themselves into the sky. These mountains are an epic in the making. These mountains humble us: forty-four American and European scientists and their spouses, led by a Tibetan guide, Sangkar, who has lived here all his life.

We began our trip this morning with a bus and a driver who, even in this country of reckless drivers, was intolerably reckless. A twenty-something Chinese man with smooth apricot skin and a bowl haircut, he had a cockiness befitting his status of privileged conqueror in this land his country has invaded. His T-shirt said, MIND YOUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS, and he exhibited a terrifying determination to own every curve of the road, pass every car, defy every traffic regulation. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, swayed to some song in his head, shouted into a cellphone, and slowed only when he neared a Chinese checkpoint. He blasted his horn and laid siege to bike lanes, sidewalks, and lanes going in the opposite direction. Yaks, sheep, pigs, goats, motorcycles, bikes, and pedestrians narrowly escaped his tires. We held on to our seats to keep from sliding side to side. My husband, Kevin, and I leaned into each other on the curves. Sangkar repeatedly ordered the driver to slow down, but to no avail.

Two hours into our trip, after a near collision with a tractor, Sangkar gripped the driver’s shoulder and ordered him to pull off the road. We skidded to a stop far too close to the rocky slope of a mountainside. Sangkar turned to the group and said, “Everyone off the bus.” Kevin and I stood on shaky legs and stepped out into cool, thin air infused with golden light and perfumed with Tibetan sage. Sangkar lit a cigarette, watched all of us disembark, then quietly fired the driver. Disbelieving and sullen, the driver yanked open the cargo door of the bus, threw our knapsacks and luggage into a pile, then roared off in a blaze of oily exhaust and yellow dust.

We waited.

Sangkar, a compact, handsome man in his late thirties with dark eyes and the characteristic sun-reddened face of a Tibetan, assured us, “I will get another bus driver. I will tell you that, though life is suffering, life is precious, every moment. I want my life, every moment that I have. To take a life is wrong, any life: human or animal. I would go back to Lhasa sooner than ride on these mountain roads with this driver. Ahead is higher, narrower, steeper. Too unsafe with a man who doesn’t care about taking life. You understand?”

People nodded, shook his hand, touched his shoulder, said, “Thoo jaychay,” (Thank you) and “Ha ko song” (I understand). Sangkar wasn’t reassured. He lit another cigarette and repeated, “Life is sacred.” I wondered at his belief that we would blame him rather than thank him for his decision.

“You probably saved our lives,” someone said.

“You made the only choice possible.”

Finally our guide was satisfied. He turned away and switched on his cellphone to tackle the problem of hiring another bus and driver. Everyone wandered off to find a rock to pee behind.

So we are marooned — temporarily.

I am grateful to be marooned right here, among boulders and rocky corridors and mountains rising in waves of color. A brilliant sun drapes the land in light and shadow. A glacial blue river undulates across a pebbled beach, the clear, shallow water a mirror that reflects the languid white clouds above. The grass is sparse and bleached, the hillsides scattered with boulders that over time have split from the mountains and tumbled down. A few trees languish in the arid climate. Goats sidestep rocks and yaks graze on the other side of the lake, indicating nomads nearby, although none are evident.

I am excited. Everyone is. The geologists gather rocks to examine. The geographers unpack their instruments and take measurements. The anthropologists examine the rock walls that encircle the trees and look for other evidence of human habitation. My husband, Kevin, the only botanist in the group, joins John, a spouse who runs a university botanical garden in Canada, and they locate tiny flowers, strange leaves, and brilliant grasses. John, a good-natured, lanky fifty-year-old with a crown of vanishing gray hair, is as knowledgeable as any of the PhDs in the group. He towers over Kevin, who is small, compact, broad-chested. They wander, heads down, pausing every few moments to drop to their knees and peer closely at a find. Tibet is a botanist’s delight, one of the few remaining places on earth with unclassified plants.

I join a circle of spouses that includes Ellen, a former tour guide, who tells us she has never encountered drivers as foolhardy and fearless as Asians. I lean back against the rocks on this arid plateau with its thin air and aggressive sun. We’re fifteen thousand feet up, and the diminished oxygen induces an almost hallucinogenic sense of colors, sounds, and smells. I drift in and out of the conversation, contemplating the slashed mountain terraces whose scarlet and gold bands interrupt the sky like fire.

I have been calmer here than I have been anywhere else in my life. There is something about these mountains, the chanting of pilgrims, the endless cups of green tea, the astonishing acceptance displayed by Tibetans, who continue their lives in the presence of Chinese soldiers and under a regime so oppressive that possessing a picture of their exiled Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, is cause for imprisonment. I rarely look at my watch, have no idea what day it is, eat when my stomach growls, sleep when I need to. With each passing day I grow more accepting, less convinced of the need to solve the uncertainties and contradictions of life. I seem to understand myself both more and far less than ever before. I’m beginning to see the world as it really is, stripped of the projections we weave into it. This has all seeped into me somehow through the air, through the ground, through the sound of the wind and the chants and the traffic, through the smell of incense and yak butter and raw sewage.

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