To the Last Breath

by Francis Slakey

  While the Lama was in seclusion, the monastery had a caretaker monk. He was not regarded as a reincarnate; he would not be offering audiences to travelers or dispensing wisdom. He was simply charged with managing affairs until the Lama reemerged.

  And so, the amulet would, once again, defy translation. But we were now traveling on into Tibet and surely, I thought, someone there could translate the amulet.

  There are two generic routes up Everest. You can climb it from the south side, the Nepali side, as I did. Or, you can climb it from the north side, the Tibetan side, as did the Russian I met on the summit. I had never seen the summit of Everest from the Tibetan side until now. We are staring up at it, near the town of Tingri, Tibet.

  Years ago, when I was planning the climb I had to make a decision about which side to climb from. If you climb Everest from the Tibetan side the logistics are easy. You don’t have the two-week-long trek to Base Camp accompanied by a team of yaks hauling a ton of gear and supplies that is required on the Nepali side. Instead, on the Tibetan side, you can drive to Base Camp. Despite that advantage to the Tibetan side approach, when I discussed it with Jim Williams we opted for the Nepali side.

  “If you climb from the north, you drive in and miss the culture,” Jim had said.

  If we had climbed the Tibetan side I would have had an entirely different experience, an entirely different life. That obvious fact was made all the more apparent as I stared up at Everest that afternoon, with Gina at my side.

  The next few weeks were filled with visits to monasteries, sanctuaries, a school for Buddhist monks who memorize scroll after scroll and train in the art of debate. We covered nearly a thousand miles in a jeep, penetrating deep into the heart of Buddhist territory, once joining a group of more than a hundred monks in their circumambulations of ancient temples. You would think that with all those miles we covered we would find someone who could translate the amulet. But no, we didn’t find anyone.

  There were other, perhaps more reliable ways than scouring monasteries. When we returned to the States I would find a scholar, someone who had dedicated years to deciphering ancient Buddhist scrolls, and I would ask him what it meant.

  I still had options; but for the first time I remember having this thought: perhaps the amulet will never be translated.

  Getting into Tibet was easier than getting out.

  We had initially hopped a bus to get into Tibet from Kathmandu, Nepal. We didn’t have a return ticket, since we didn’t want to have a set return date. Instead, we had the name and address of a fixer in Lhasa, Tibet, who could help us get out.

  The address was to a warehouse complex just outside the town center. When we pushed open the door to the second floor, we realized that this wasn’t the den of a stealthy deal maker who gently contacts the right authorities to assist an occasional traveler. This was an industrial-scale operation. The room had about thirty Chinese in it, sitting at desks, working phones, fans whirring.

  We called out the name on our slip of paper and got a shout from a nearby desk.

  “We need two tickets out of Lhasa to Kathmandu,” we explained.

  The Fixer looked back at us, silent.

  We told him who we got his contact information from, hoping that he would recognize his friend’s name and then pick up his phone and start dialing madly, just as everyone else in the room appeared to be doing.

  He didn’t pick up the phone. Instead he simply said: “No tickets.”

  “When will tickets be available?” I asked.

  “Not this week, next week. I will let you know.”

  We gave him our hotel address. There was no problem with waiting a week; that would give us the time to visit a place I had been curious about: Lake Namtso, located deep in the Tibetan Plateau.

  The Tibetan Plateau is one of the harshest environments on the planet, perhaps second only to Antarctica. A major difference between the two is that people actually choose to live their entire lives on the plateau.

  The plateau is vast, four times the size of Texas, and it sits at an average elevation of fifteen thousand feet. Surrounded by a sanctuary of peaks, the only way to enter the plateau is by going over a mountain pass, the lowest point of which is nearly eighteen thousand feet.

  The weather is severe: the average daily temperature hovers around zero degrees and drops to forty below in the wintertime. The people who live here are unique in the world, one of the last of the nomadic people who make their livelihood by driving their livestock across grasslands. The yak is the core of their existence. They eat the meat, make clothes out of the hides, carve prayers into the horns and scatter them along the plateau. They go over the mountain passes to trade the hides in exchange for other goods. The lifestyle seems timeless, unchanged for centuries.

  On the southeastern corner of the expansive plateau is the saltwater lake of Namtso, our destination. It too delivers a sense of deep time.

  As Gina and I stroll along the sandy lake edge, my boots suddenly make a crunching sound, like I’m walking on cornflakes. I look down and find sea shells. We are standing at a point more than one thousand miles away from the nearest ocean, yet here, at my feet, are shells. Those shells had been lying there for eons, the remnants of the unfortunate ocean life that got trapped here when the continents collided more than 300 million years ago.

  This place is time’s mirror. Every shell is a story, the home of an ancient sea creature carried forward in time millions of years. The grains of sand tell the tale of an ocean floor, lifted up tens of thousands of feet in a clash of landmasses. The surrounding mountains are the vanguard, the leading edge of that violent continental surge, finally reined in, slowed, by gravity itself.

  Here we stood, one moment, one drop in time, connected to an entire stream of history. We were part of earth’s story in a way I had never experienced before, not while I was on the top of any summit, not even when I was on the highest point on earth looking down.

  Staring at a shell in the palm of my hand, I felt time. I don’t mean I felt my age. And I don’t mean time as in the “t” of a physics equation. I mean the past, made present. I experienced time, its expanse and roil, the grand sweep of it all.

  I put the shell in my pocket. It would eventually find its place on the mantel, beside the amulet.

  “You don’t need ticket,” the Fixer is explaining six days later.

  He is insistent, confident.

  “Go to airport tomorrow morning, you will get on.”

  “How will they let us board without a ticket, no boarding pass, no exit stamp, nothing?” I asked.

  “It is all arranged.”

  Either this guy was extraordinarily good at rigging the system, or we were being conned. His delivery was comfortable, not a hint of exaggeration, no indication that he was spinning a tale. We took him at his word and paid.

  When we arrived at the airport the next morning there was a crowd of people; more than I would think could fit on a single plane. The majority of them seemed to be from a tour group. Unlike us, their flight plans would have been worked out months ago, confirmed by travel agents and perhaps double-checked or triple-checked by the anxious traveler. We weren’t in the habit of traveling in arranged groups and so instead we stood off to the side, apart from the thick tourist sea; we were ticketless and wary.

  When our moment came, it was hyperefficient. An airline employee walked up to us, picking us out of the crowd.

  He said something like: “Sakey? Elito?”

  That was close enough to Francis Slakey and Gina Eppolito.

  “Yes,” we both responded.

  He waved his hand for us to follow him and we walked past the crowd and onto the plane. No ticket ever exchanged hands, just as the Fixer had promised. He pointed us to a couple of seats near the front and then turned and walked off the plane.

  On our return to the U.S., Gina and I exchanged wedding rings. She had worked with a local jeweler and designed a ring for me that expressed a few key aspects of our relationshi
p. The ring consists of two separate bands of metal; they are bound together, but able to move independently. The ring is heavy; Gina knew that our getting married was a big decision, not to be taken lightly. And there is one last, practical touch to the design. The inside of the ring doesn’t contain an inscription; there are no words, no date. Instead, the inside is filled with dozens of metal bumps—a recognition and acceptance of what two independent people are sure to face.

  In the summer of 2006, we returned to Asia. There was something there I had to finish. I needed to surf the Indian Ocean and I wanted it to be somewhere interesting. I picked Sri Lanka. The beach I had in mind wouldn’t be easy to get to, but it would allow me to check one more box on the To Do List. But first, along the way, we would visit Bhutan because we had both been curious about the reclusive kingdom for years.

  Bhutan is one of the most isolated countries in the world. On a beachball-sized globe, the country is smaller than a penny. To the rest of the world, that’s about all it’s worth.

  Bhutan has no significant natural resources: no valuable ores, no oil, no precious mineral deposits. Tucked deep in the Himalayas and sandwiched between Tibet and India, it is also one of the most mountainous countries in the world. A few paved roads link the largest towns; dirt roads fan out to some of the villages. But it is the narrow footpaths that switchback along the steep mountainsides and connect remote villages that are the real thoroughfares of Bhutan.

  As a result of all this, Bhutan has been completely ignored by history. It has never been invaded, occupied, colonized, or exploited. The great sweep of history that shaped Asia—Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Chinese dynasties, the British, the Soviets—all of them bypassed the Kingdom of Bhutan.

  Bhutan may not have had anything to offer the world, but it did take one thing from it. Fifteen hundred years ago, it imported something that forever after shaped its development: Buddhism. And for the most part, it rejected everything else. Even now, it has limited access to television, Internet, movies, and world news. To preserve their identity, to minimize the intrusion of the materialism that Buddhism rejects, all outside influences, Western culture in particular, are kept at arm’s length. Tourists can only travel on one of a few government-approved routes; no straying allowed. To ensure close monitoring of every tourist, the government tightly caps the number of travel visas it issues each year.

  I understood the reasons for the restrictions. I appreciated their interest in preserving their identity. I just didn’t want to be restricted to only moving along the official route; that wasn’t the way Gina and I traveled. But a colleague of mine put us in touch with one of the few Americans, a teacher, who had traveled freely in Bhutan and had been allowed to stay.

  I contacted the teacher; he was living in the States again, and we talked it over. While he was living in Bhutan he had gotten to know someone who was well connected in the ministry of tourism. His name was Kencho Thukten. He gave me Kencho’s e-mail address and wished me luck.

  It is remarkable, the lines that connect people. You can strike up a conversation with someone, a stranger even, and discover that you have a friend in common, that your aunts were from the same town, or that his best friend can grease your way into Bhutan. It seems on those occasions that we are all like strands of DNA, spun around each other in a double helix.

  I sent an e-mail to Kencho saying that Gina and I were interested in traveling to Bhutan but that we would only come if we could do a bit of roaming. I asked him if he could help arrange it.

  About a week later, I received the briefest of e-mails: “What would you like to do in my country?”

  This seemed like a completely wide-open offer, not restricted to the Bhutanese government’s preapproved travel routes. It was an opportunity for us to be creative.

  We wanted to come up with something unique, something that would allow us to experience whatever it is that defines Bhutan. It seemed to me that Bhutan’s core qualities, the aspects that have shaped and guided it for more than a millennium, are Buddhism and its noncommercialism.

  There was a book published several years ago titled Material World: A Global Family Portrait. Photographers were dispatched to countries across the globe and asked to take a photo of the typical local family with all their goods spread out in front of them. Two photos are on the cover of the book: on top is a picture of the typical smiling American family, and below it is a picture of the typical Bhutanese family. The American family’s possessions are familiar and numerous. Couches, televisions, desks, beds, cabinets are all arranged wide across the photo, filling the cul-de-sac in front of their Texas home with a two-car garage.

  The photo of the Bhutanese family couldn’t be more different. Mountains rise behind their small stone house and they stare up at the photographer with firm unsmiling faces. The father and mother and two small children wear traditional wraps, one of the older sons wears the robes of a monk. A few farming tools are stuck into the ground behind them and in the foreground they have the sum of their possessions: a few bowls and blankets, some candles, a lamp.

  This wasn’t a photo of the disadvantaged, the poor and suffering of Bhutan. From the things I had read, the people I had spoken with, I had learned that this was a remarkably happy nation. Underlying that happiness, I was told, was Buddhist philosophy.

  “You have to see if for yourself,” the American teacher who’d given me Kencho’s e-mail address had said. “All that talk of nonmaterialism—it’s for real. You’ve got to experience the Buddhism there to believe it.”

  That, I decided, is what I wanted to get out of a trip to Bhutan. I could think of only one way to make that happen. I typed the message out on my computer screen at work and read it back to Gina over the phone: “We would like to learn about Buddhism from one of your Lamas.”

  It was simple, straightforward. It was also practical in a way I hoped Kencho would appreciate. After all, you go to Italy and you drink wine, you go to Bhutan and you take in a little Buddhism.

  Plus, there might be a bonus here. I was getting nowhere decoding the amulet, perhaps if I absorbed some of the philosophy behind it I could make some progress.

  “Let’s see what happens,” Gina said. I pushed the send button.

  A couple weeks passed and I thought nothing would come of it. Then a reply arrived from Kencho: the Lama will meet with you. However, he is in a small village. No tourists have ever been there and there is no hotel. You will have to stay with a local family. Is this okay?

  Okay? It was perfect.

  “We must make it to the turn by four o’clock or we will have to wait two hours,” Kencho says, a touch of urgency in his voice, as we drive down the one main road in Bhutan on our way to meet Lama Kinle.

  “What happens at four?”

  “The road closes to move the dirt.”

  “And why are they moving dirt?”

  “So we do not anger the Snake Goddess,” Kencho replied.

  That answer made perfect sense to him. Gina and I needed more information.

  A few months earlier, the government had decided they wanted to widen the road we were on, and they went about blasting and paving their way down the street, trucks moving steadily forward in a caravan, tar getting laid. Then they got to the mountain turn we were approaching, planning to blast the rock out with explosives. The people who live in the area warned that a goddess lives in the trees just above the turn and that the workers should forgo widening the road. The locals were ignored and the charges were set. Just before the explosives were detonated, one of the workers fell off the cliffside.

  The locals cautioned the government that the goddess was upset and that the worker’s death was an omen. The government appreciated the warning, and respectfully suspended activity for a few days, then they resumed their plan. Charges were placed, and again a worker fell to his death.

  That, evidently, was proof enough. The government decided that rather than blasting the rock, which clearly upset the goddess, they would in
stead fill dirt into the ravine below and run the road straight across to the other side. The job would now take an estimated six months, rather than the two days it would have taken to blast out the rock.

  That decision would never happen in the Western world, but the Bhutanese government isn’t like any institution in the Western world. They don’t address these issues by consulting a technical specialist. Instead, they consult a Lama. And it was the Lama, not an engineer or transportation expert, who had advised that the government immediately cease the blasting and instead fill the ravine with dirt.

  We didn’t make it to the turn by four o’clock, so we pulled the car to a stop and watched the dump trucks go by.

  To pass the time, I thought we’d take a look at the project. I was curious just how much extra work the government had made for itself by opting to fill in the ravine.

  When I looked over the cliff edge I was astounded. The ravine looked to be one hundred feet deep. Filling this in would require thousands and thousands of loads of dirt, like filling a bathtub one thimbleful at a time. Equally surprising was that the curve in the road was modest and all this could have been so easily handled with one simple blasting of the rock. They had created hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times more work for themselves.

  “I can’t believe this,” I said shaking my head.

  “Why?” asked Kencho.

  “All this extra work because they think there’s a goddess?”

  “Snake Goddess, yes,” Kencho replied, oblivious to my disbelief.

  “Would you like to see her?” he asked.

  He was serious. The road wouldn’t open for another hour, he explained, and since we were in no hurry, he would be happy to take us up the cliff to see the goddess.