Day Four

In prewaking half-dream I pleasantly listened to the atonal singing and staggered recitation of the fourth-graders in the adjacent room. In the misty dark of the previous evening I hadn't realized that Gonga Sonam's bedroom was a fixture in one of the student dormitories. I didn't mind the children, and I enjoyed my normal course of absurd waking dreams as Sonam and his roommates prepared themselves for class. A county official was coming to inspect the school, so although Sonam didn't have a class during the first block, he nonetheless had to get himself ready.

Thursday turned out to be the most amazing day of the vacation, and it began with the most incredible moment of the trip. Sonam greeted me as I stopped pretending to be asleep, and directed me to look out of the window. From the bed I could only make out low hanging white clouds. Behind and beneath the clouds I could still only see white. I rose on my elbows and my gaze met with an expanse of whiteness on the ground as well. During the still night, the year's first snow fell on the small mountain town of Yuke.

I hurried to get out of bed. The air was not nearly as cold as the evening or afternoon of the previous day. There was a calm about the morning after the snowfall that cut the icy air, and allowed the dull warmth of an igloo to pervade the community. Snow sat on the grass that I didn't pee on the night before, the roofs of the uniquely colorful frontier cabins, and every part of the impoverished primary school. It was, for lack of a better word, inspirational.

I ate a breakfast of Ramen-style noodles on the iron stove-box. I enjoy the way that Dorje would eat them in a metal bowl sitting on top of the wood-burning stove, and my bowl had been prepared in a similar manner. It bubbled slightly as I ate my steaming breakfast. I drank a bit of tea, and waited for Dorje to return from playing with the children, somewhere out of sight.

Soon he returned and I let him convince me to wander down to the local hot spring. It was very close; we walked a bit down the main road past the road's "bridge," and soon we found it on the other side of the river. We carefully crossed a snowy log footbridge and approached a large, stone building with a number of weathered wooden doors. Dorje commented that it would be a kuai for us each to enter, but without paying we slipped into the middle of three doors.

The pool was low, divided into two by a yellowing concrete wall. It smelled of rust and sulfur. We disrobed our many layers and eased into the water. It wasn't very hot, but it felt pleasant after walking in the fresh snow. There wasn't any steam. I relaxed and looked up. The most interesting aspect of the bathhouse was certainly its ceiling. The wooden rafters had rustic, reassuring spiderwebs at the joints. The ceramic shingles were loosely arranged, allowing light to stream into the room. It not only acted as a skylight in the low-tech baths, but the light struck bits of dust suspended in the fresh morning air, illuminating them in illusory shafts of light. I hope to remember this detail always.

We had entered the center bath because Dorje felt it was the cleanest. Soon we heard voices in the adjacent chamber, and an old set of eyes peered at us through cracks in the wooden wall. The next pool, although purportedly not as clean, was significantly hotter than the one in which we presently bathed. Some other people, with children, wanted our room, so we scrambled to put our underwear on before they came inside. We quickly ran across the snow with our clothes in our arms, steam rising off the drops of water on our backs. We went into the new room, but this time I felt the need to leave my underwear on as there were a number of other men in the room.

One of the men was an old worker. He looked oddly fit for a man his age. Another man was fat. The fat man wore no clothes and scrubbed himself with a stained washcloth. Dorje and I got into the baths quickly. I was still wearing my new stocking hat. We began an idling dialog with them, though I had difficulty following their rough dialects.

[The reader may be concerned about my lack of discomfort at this part of the story. A neo-Freudian literary analyst would have decried my lack of self-awareness of its homoerotic undertones, although my relationship with Dorje is certainly more innocent than Robinson Crusoe's affair with a brown boy named Friday. I can accept the reader's concern, primarily because of what happened next. Moreover, I apologize to those that revere postmodern academic theory (especially post-colonialism) for some of my following comments and witticisms. But let's be honest; Daniel Defoe sucks.]

The door opened and three Tibetan women slipped inside. Dorje would later tell me that the women's pool is very cold, and recently some of the younger women were flaunting convention and following the warmth, regardless of sex. I'm all for equality, especially when it comes to bathing. The fat man arranged his washcloth triangularly on his loins, not that it made much of a difference. As those of you that have sat in a pool with a naked man (and who hasn't?) already know, refraction and shadow cast the genitals effectively invisible. From the vantage point of the women above the pool, however, the view is much more (or less, depending upon your point of view) accommodating.

The women helped each other remove their Tibetan dresses, which consist of a number of large pieces of material wrapped around the body. Because I was trying to only look at them indirectly, the only respectful way in my country, I couldn't clearly see if they were wearing bras. My guess is that these forward thinking women of the Tibetan cultural avant guard were not. Most nomadic women see no need for them. They removed everything but their hair ties and underwear.

The group of men continued chatting, although fitfully. At one point Dorje and I moved near the opening at which the hot water sprang from beneath the ground. I put my legs deep inside and opened my toes with the clean, therapeutic stream. Soon Dorje offered to wash my back, and after he scrubbed me I returned the favor. My attention was mostly on the girls, though. I feigned incognito, which is to say I played the I'm-Not-Looking-At- You-But-I'm-Trying-To-Sneak-Looks-At-You-Without-You-Seeing-Me-Though- I-Want-You-To-Know-I'm-Trying-To-Look-At-You-Anyway Game, a personal favorite of mine.

One of the dakinis, who was very flat chested and cute and who had a small growth of some kind on the right side of her neck, looked at me through her opened toes and the steam of the bath. Her and one of her friends each had a single gold tooth replacing a maxillary lateral incisor. Dorje supinated his body completely, stretching almost flat on his back with his face above the water to fully receive the effects of the bath. After a while, though, I felt I had cleaned enough dirt off of me and picked up enough sulfur and rust to call it quits. Dorje's and my fingers were raisins.

We awkwardly dressed, trying to hide our bare asses with our jackets as we removed our wet drawers and put on our pants. I knew that they would not dry in the cold by the time we needed to leave, and I was not looking forward to riding the motorcycle commando back to Daofu. In our haste I forgot my soapdish, even though we hadn't used the soap in the first place. The snow had largely melted. Dorje and I spoke excitedly as we walked back to the primary school.

"Don't tell anyone about the women in the hot spring," he asked me in his accented English. I pressed him on why not. "Because it not our custom for the men and women to have a bath together." I promised him I wouldn't tell his sister or the students in our class in Guza. I also told him that I would definitely tell all of my friends in America. I was excited. "It is very bad for us to look at women in Buddhism," he remarked. He asked me how long I had had my tattoo, and after telling him that I got it four years ago (wow!) I said that I thought a fiery Dharma Protector would make an excellent tat. He responded that good Buddhists shouldn't have tattoos.

"Why not," I asked, "I have seen a lot of Tibetans with tattoos of dragons and all sorts of things." Tibetan men and women, especially nomads, like to wear colorful accessories, like feathers in their hats, yarn in their hair, or earrings and heavy stone necklaces.

Dorje appeared slightly austere. "In Buddhism, our body is not our own. It is borrowed. We should treat it like it is not our own, because when we die, we will give it back." I agreed with his logic, though I feel the indiscretions of my past are completely excusable. On the other hand, I hadn't removed my Chenrezig medallion when we got in the baths, and when we were getting out I noticed that most of the other Tibetans had taken off the necklaces that their lamas had given them. That was three strikes against the Three Jewels; I realized that I was not a very good Buddhist. It was certainly no surprise. Vanity led me to my trespasses, and I still do not know the Tantric antidote to pride. I do know that it prevents one from seeing one's faults, and is related to the jealousy that prevents one from rejoicing in the accomplishments of others. I'm also a jealous guy.

When we arrived at the school, Sonam had finished whatever duties the morning required of him, and I invited him to walk around town with us. It is a short walk, and he led us to a couple of old, small temples. Each had a handful of large prayer wheels, suspended from the ceiling. We turned them clockwise. I made seven rotations in the smaller temple, and in a larger temple we completed three full circumambulations. I learned from Michael that three and seven are auspicious numbers in Tibetan Buddhism. It's also good to add a few extras, in case the aspiration or intent or one's mind was not in the correct place during one of them. For screw-ups, you could say.

We left the back of the town and walked into a large meadow. Tibetans almost exclusively call meadows "the grassland" in English. By now the snow had melted from everywhere except the yak paddies. I am uncertain as to what it is about dried piles of yakshit that prevents snow from melting. We walked to a shrine in the meadow. It was a small, cubic stone structure with countless poles coming out of the top. A colorful flag was attached to each pole. About five meters away from the tower of flags sat an altar covered with partially burnt juniper boughs. Dorje, Sonam, and a number of my other students are fond of calling these shrines "the mountain gods." It is a holdover, I discovered later, from the indigenous Tibetan religion called Bön.

"We do not pray at the mountain gods," Sonam explained. "If you pray at a mountain god, when you go to the next mountain god it will know." We also did not do korwa around the shrine. "The next mountain god will feel very jealous, and you will have bad luck." I earnestly searched my soul, and discovered that I indeed did not have any desire to pray at the Shrine of the Mountain God.

I don't remember what we ate for lunch. Soon afterwards we pulled the motorcycle away from the primary school among a horde of children shouting, "Goodbye!" and "Good Evening!" and "Hello!" The town's workers had already completed the section of road in front of the school, and we quickly rolled out of town. Near the "bridge," we passed the old man from the hot spring. I had to walk the length of the makeshift bridge once again.

Soon after leaving town Dorje offered to teach me to drive the motorcycle. The sky was still cloudy from the snowfall, but the pine-covered hills were beautiful. Everything in the valley was alive with an alpine lushness that I hadn't considered possible. I had already been daydreaming about the many similarities between Steven T. McQueen and Yours Truly, so I of course agreed to an impromptu lesson. I'll spare you the details for once; suffice it to say that it is not difficult on flat, traffic-free roads. I'm very good at shifting up. Hills are a bit tricky. I'm terrible at down-shifting, and I stalled it a couple of times.

As we approached the pass, low clouds began to blow over the edge of the mountains. There was still a large amount of snow in the upper areas, and the road was wet. Dorje rode slow and carefully, but I became anxious as the last bit of blue sky was enveloped by dark clouds. It began to hail as we approached the pass. I hadn't heard any lightning, but I was nervous to say the least. As we passed between the peaks, the wind became almost unbearable, and I was on the back of the bike. Dorje had no goggles, so I'm sure he was in a great deal of pain. Small bits of hail began to hit my cheeks, and piles of it were mounting where my thighs pressed against Dorje's back. He did an excellent job steering the bike.

I daydreamed idly, mostly about what it would be like to write an autobiographical novel. I would embellish it dramatically, and give it a self-important title like "500 Days." It would chronicle the 500 so-odd days between the April Fool's Day in which my friends and I found a dead guy at the Rice Stadium and last August, when I watched a Nepali man be cremated at a riverside ghat. Death is so dramatic when it happens to people other than you. I would use everyone's real names, and they'd be very upset because of my propensity to speak truthful hyperbole. My roommates in the Houston Heights would receive special treatment, because of how much I now realize I cared for them, despite their and my imperfections. Shuchin and Lamar and Nath would be major characters as well, and I'd deal heavily with my stint in the Houston underworld, my dead-end job, and the self-made vicissitudes of my relationship with April. In the course of six months I visited Hermann Memorial Hospital three times; Jay contracted pneumonia, Sonny suffered a heart attack, and Nath hurt. Sonny passed a month after I moved to New Orleans. The story would investigate the conflicting determinisms of karma and postmodern existential atheism (two things about which I know very little but claim to know a lot), in much the same vein as Yukio Mishima's Runaway Horses.

About halfway down the side towards Daofu, he was ready for a break. We pulled off at a small group of buildings on a plateau on the hillside. We found an opening in the fence and pulled it up to a black tent. Inside, a woman and her daughter were tending a fire. There was a large pot of tea at a constant low boil. We sat down beside the fire, and they served us tea. Soon a young man with long curly hair and an adult monk joined us in the tent, and Dorje dried his wet gloves next to the embers. My toes were frozen. I drank black tea, and Dorje had milk tea. We gave the woman some candy for the children, although I didn't see any children around. By the time we rose stiffly, it had ceased raining.

We rolled happily down the hill into Daofu. Dorje had to run a quick errand in town, so he left me with a distant aunt at a roadside stall. She offered me a bit of tea, and explained (after quite a bit of trying) that the following day was the Chinese Moon Festival. She offered me moon cakes, which were rather delicious in fact, though I couldn't eat them as fast as she asked me to.

On our way back to Dorje's home, we caught up with his parents and uncle receiving a ride on the back of a tractor. It was fun for them to see us on the motorcycle after our journey. It began to rain a bit, but I was elated. It was not yet dark, and soon after we returned to his home we had dinner. I was too exhausted to remember anything of significance that evening. It's very likely that nothing really happened. Nothing ever does.