Perilous Passes in Winter

It was Saturday night, I was with the friend I'd driven over the mountains to visit, but this was no restful evening of dinner and a movie. We were in his nephew's van, heading back down the mountain. This day had gone terribly wrong.

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A couple years ago, during the winter break, I came across a monastery cradled in a small grassland area. There are plenty of monasteries much closer to where I live. Those are either small, or in an urban area. This monastery, 180 kilometers from my home, was large, yet away from any population center. I began to harbor dreams of meditation retreats on three-day weekends, eventually a week-long retreat. I was eager to meet the head Lama, to see if that would be possible. Meeting him, however, was not so easy. Oh, he's approachable enough, a real down-to-earth kind of fellow. But hard to reach. Though the location is not far, 'you can't get there from here'. Few public vehicles traverse the required route, and not at the times suitable for a quick weekend trip. When I did have the time, he was traveling.

When I finally connected with the head lama in May and received a courteous carte blanche for future visits, this getaway spot breathed new life into me. I am passionate about teaching Tibetan college students. Even so, day after day of rambunctious students can wear an older person down. I bought a car last January, no longer dependent on public transport. However, it's been a busy semester; I am lucky if I can free up one weekend a month to travel over the mountains.

From the Tibetan plateau east, the mountains gradually recede in a series of steppes, high mountain passes and grassy plateaus. As the crow flies, it may only be about 600 miles from the western Tibetan border at Yushu-Serxu east to Kangding, the former China-Tibet border. That translates into days of difficult driving on the Chengdu-Tibet highway 318, even when the winter hasn't closed the road off to passenger traffic.

My junior college is at the end eastern end of the road. We are at a mere 4,500 feet, with just one more 7,000 foot pass before the road descends to the Chengdu basin. My students are all from the mountains west of here, right up to the Tibetan plateau.

The school holidays include a month in the winter and six weeks in the summer, when the students return home. I am drawn like a magnet to these mountains. China is a vast country, there are many interesting sights to explore, but I cannot pull myself away. I accept invitations from my students, spending my free time eating tsamba[i], and yak noodle soup, and drinking gallons of salty buttered tea. I learn new Tibetan dances on these trips, drink barley moonshine, and record it all with my digital camera. These families are warm and welcoming. They live with hardship. Harsh weather and high altitudes. No indoor plumbing. Cooking done over wood or dung fires. Telephone service is spotty, mostly available only in the more populous centers of commerce. Farms and most villages are not connected. Cell phones are useless. When a visitor comes to their door, the family circle widens just enough to draw in one more, then closes ranks again.

These people have a reputation as fiercely independent warriors. Over the centuries they have chased out explorers, exploiters and adventurers. The nature of these mountains is more conducive to isolated fiefdoms than a confederated republic. This has left an opening for the Chinese to send banished public servants to set up residence in the towns established along the main road, declaring themselves the occupying government of China. The Tibetans, if they didn't find them too offensive, left them alone. This wasn't much of a problem, until the communists came along.
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As we headed down the mountain, the three Tibetan men kept up a lively conversation. I felt like a shadow, sitting quietly behind Urgyen, not understanding their Tibetan. I was along for the ride because I had created this mess that they were going to fix. It was almost six when we left the monastery, night would quickly engulf us. There were icy patches on the road. We were in the same kind of car as mine, a minivan with rear wheel drive, no chains, but the nephew, Gondun, maneuvered the icy twists and turns with a practiced hand.

I set out that morning before 8 o'clock. I would arrive at lunch time. I tried a few times to phone ahead, but got no answer. Tried both his land line and cell phone. My friend had proudly given me his cell phone number on my last visit a month earlier, but I had never been able to connect. I was to learn he keeps it off until he wants to make a call. The main monastery phone is in a back room of his residence. In winter it usually rings unanswered, except late at night, when I know he would be watching TV not far from the phone. I knew to let the phone ring at least twenty times before hanging up. But I didn't try to call him Friday night. I was dithering, not sure I'd make the trip on Saturday. I would have to return on Sunday, and that was a grueling trip leaving no time to recover before stepping back into the classroom Monday morning. I had promised to bring some English books and tapes, and I had a movie I wanted to share with him. I didn't want two months to pass without a visit. I missed my friend, and the restful sleep I always had when there. So I set out early, dialing his numbers as I left our village, before heading into the blackout area. No answer.

Rather than taking the heavily traversed highway 318, I prefer the back road. It is a few kilometers shorter, and the mountain pass is lower. The road is a patchwork of pavement and dirt. Man comes along and paves, using gallon drums to build fires and melt tar, and moving fallen rocks using a wire sling hanging from a pole on the shoulders of two men. Fallen boulders are broken down by men with hammer and chisel. Landslides are frequent. During rainy season I pray that enough cars have gone before me to flatten down the mud to two tire tracks. So far I've been lucky, not stumbling onto a fresh slide. When the rain dries up, the road is a mess of rutted dirt, loose stones, narrow lanes. The river rages on one side, the steep mountain rises on the other. In spots, the rock wall hangs over the road, a passage carved out with dynamite.

I had passed the halfway mark in good time, the town of Danba. I filled up on gas, and tried again to call my friend. No answer.

The road was dry. I hadn't come that way before at that time of day, and the play of brilliant sun and shade as I wove through the folds of mountains was dazzling. The sun caught the river spray over a rocky drop; I had to stop and take a picture. No traffic bothered my line of shot. In fact, there seemed to be no one else on the road but me.

I noticed my windows were dirty. I tried the window washer, but it was either dry or frozen. I thought, I should stop and clean the windows with the handy wipes I carry. But I didn't. I kept pressing on. Almost there! Just thirty kilometers more, I won't quite make it by noon, but maybe there will be some lunch left over.

Climbing up into the last pass, the glare of the sun through the dirty windows blinded me, and abruptly I was in shade again as the mountain road twisted. Before my eyes could adjust, I felt the front end drifting left toward the stone retaining wall, the rear swinging out towards the river. Before I could move the wheel I bounced off the wall, the nose coming around, slowly swinging in an arc, nose to the river, then sliding into the wall. The left rear tire rested straddling the ditch, at the edge of the snow covered road. Well! Now what?
I got out to survey the damage. Left edge of rear bumper against the retaining wall. Front left tire flat, rim badly dented. Fender smashed, the headlight wall-eyed. I went to lift the front hood to get the jack, but the impact had jammed it shut. No jack. I noticed liquid seeping from the damaged wheel. It was quickly freezing. Rubbing a drop between fingers, I recognized it as brake fluid.

A big blue cargo truck came around the bend up the road, and stopped. A guy came down to survey the damage. Help had arrived quickly, I thought. He walked past the car, looking at the road. He gave a passing glance at me and the car. He waved the truck on, there was just enough road to squeeze by. Twenty minutes later, the same thing happened again. I tried to engage the men, asking for a loan of a jack. The truck drove past, the scout listened patiently, then disappeared around the bend after the truck. He didn't look back.

Sporadic traffic passed going down the mountain. Nothing moved going up the mountain. A pair of tractors stopped, looking like something out of the Dukes of Hazzard. The most talkative one, dark close-set eyes, long face, cunning gap-toothed smile, offered to help for three times the amount of money I carried in my pocket. But they were headed down to Danba, 60 kms away, and wouldn't consider taking me the last 30 kms up to my destination, for any amount of money. By tying a rope to my car nose and their tractor box, using the hydraulic lift, they raised the car enough to change the tire. But my spare was flat, so it was useless. They said there was more ice on the road ahead. So I asked them to help me put the chains on, maybe I could limp forward. They hooked the chains around the tire, inexperienced; the chains lay loose upon the rear tires. I paid them the going rate for changing a tire, and they went on their way.

I limped forward on a flat tire. Where was I going? The road nearby had no ice, but the rutted road was peppered with large rocks. If this flat tire was still to be any use, I couldn't afford to tear it up over these rocks. As I stood by my car surveying things, another truck stopped ahead of me. A guy came down to scope things out. He wanted me to back up onto the icy edge closer to the rock wall. I tried, but my rear tired slipped on the ice and wouldn't mount the edge. While they waited impatiently, I managed to creep right to a smoother section of rutted road, edging forward to a snow-covered lip on the river side, just wide enough for my car. The truck was able to pass me. I decided the car wasn't going anywhere else on its own. I pulled out my valuables, packed them in my bag. I used the remote on my key chain to lock the doors, and hand locked the rear door which isn't on the remote system. I started to walk. If nothing else, I wanted to reach a side of the mountain that was in sun. It was very cold in the shade.

I reached the monastery around 5 p.m. As I passed the temple back door, on the way to my friend's compound, I heard his voice. He was coming down the stairs. Had someone run ahead and told him I was coming? It sounded like everyone else was still inside chanting, in the midst of evening prayers. He asked why I was on foot; I told him my story. He instructed me to sit
down and rest, and that after prayers were finished we'd go after the car. As he turned away he pulled his cell phone
from his breast fold of his robe. I settled myself in his compound, but I saw no signs of dinner. It was unusual to find not even a thermos of buttered tea. Must have been a long day of temple prayers, where buttered tea is served lavishly.

Forty-five minutes later, his nephew had arrived and we were headed down the mountain.

I hadn't met his nephew before. Gondun was about 5'9", built solidly. His hair was smoothed back, ending in a neat braid down his back. He had already driven to my van, after his uncle called, but without the key he couldn't do more than change the tire. And lock the doors. He no sooner laid eyes on me than began berating me for not locking the car. My language skills deserted me, I had neither vocabulary nor energy to defend myself against this charge. If I simply said, "I did lock it," he would think me daft or an artless liar.

It was dark when we parked my car in Urgyen's compound. His sister and niece arrived, and put together a dinner of noodles. While we waited, I brought out the store of things I had brought for him. A bottle of hand lotion from the States, to combat the very dry winter climate. How often had I seen him use butter on his hands. A few copies of an English text book, and its tapes. His monastery hosts a school for village children, and he has included English in the curriculum. And finally, the videos. I brought a couple of movies that were made with a Tibetan cast, speaking Tibetan. Before dinner arrived, he animatedly berated me for causing such anxiety to his nephew, by having left my car doors unlocked. What shame it would bring him if his guest's car was found the next day by the side of the road stripped. Again I wished to defend myself, but couldn't find the mental or physical energy to do a dictionary-search conversation.

To change the subject, I suggested we watch a video. We fumbled around with the wiring, we old folk don't have the agility of the youth for sorting out all the reds, whites, yellows. After some false starts we finally got the picture and sound on the screen. But the dialogue was coming out in Cantonese! I asked him for the remote control, so we could use the menu to select the Tibetan track. He produced three remotes, none of which worked on the DVD player. I knew the video by heart, so periodically I updated him on what was going on, feeling so disappointed that he wasn't getting the full effect of this delightful movie. He said maybe in the morning he'd be able to find the remote. The warm meal had made me sleepy. I filled my hot water bottle, grabbed my chamber pot, and found the bed that Urgyen had set up for me. I don't know what time his kin left, but my bed was on the other side of the wall, so I know he stayed up late watching his satellite-feed TV.

As is my habit, I rose early. I wrapped myself in the sheepskin coat and went across the courtyard to the kitchen, hoping to find a lit fire. Urgyen's sister soon arrived, finding me huddled in the wool quietly building up body heat. She fired up some coals and carried them up to the house. I savored the quiet hour, communing with the peace and spirituality of the place.

Breakfast of tsamba laced with his wry humor brought me out of the cold gray dawn into a day of brilliant blue sky with the late sun hinting its presence behind the mountains. We talked a bit about the icy roads, and both agreed my life would be safer if I left the car parked in his compound until late February, when the ice begins to melt. He probably doesn't mean to yell, but I've noticed that when he speaks with others his voice is soft, but when he tries to communicate with me, he employs the 'louder is better' method of communicating with someone who doesn't speak your language.

Talking sternly, as a Dutch uncle might, he yet again went on about my leaving my car unlocked. I opened my mouth but the words wouldn't come. The shock I had just experienced, on top of all the pent-up frustrations of this term, the exhausting schedule that choked off normal activity--academic research, language study, writing, sustaining friendships, leisure activities--broke through fortified denial and poured out in tears cascading silently.

He looked on mutely, a man accustomed to managing a staff, directing and instructing monks of all ages from the most tender years, but not accustomed to dealing with weeping women. After a silence he gently asked again, "When will you come back with a week to spend?"

After breakfast I packed my bag and headed out the door, to begin the long journey by public transport back to college. He told me not to worry about the car, someone would take care of repairs, it would be safely parked until the spring thaws.
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footnote:
[i] Roasted barley added to Tibetan (salted, buttered) tea, along with two to three tablespoons of butter and some sugar. Worked with the hands to form a ball of dough. Pieces pinched off and eaten, with sips of buttered tea.