by Pam Houston
Once, on the Big Island of Hawai’i I got to watch the Earth get made. Not just me, hundreds of people. Kilauea was erupting in such a user-friendly way you could get right up next to a new lava flow with only a mile’s walking, with no fear of getting acid rain in your hair.
I had seen the flowing lava from a distance one time before, seen it pour into the Pacific sending up enormous clouds of spit and steam, but standing right next to it, even straddling little rivulets of it as it found its way through tiny gullies formed in the drying black glass of the prior day’s lava, made the whole thing so intimate it took my breath away.
There was a van full of geology students from some Midwestern state lunging around the new lava like gorillas, wielding pickaxes and scooping big metal fingers full of the blackening goo, and I thought about all of the stories I had heard about Pele tossing—for example—a front-end loader into the sea, driver and all, if she did not approve of the location of a construction project, and I imagined these future geologists of America getting home to Kansas with their samples, and their hair falling out, and their dicks falling off.
In the Tam Nat Lao (Three Elephants) restaurant in Luang Prabang, tourists sit side by side with locals and the humid air seems to be infused with a mist of goodwill. Shy-eyed servers bring chicken curry, banana pancakes, grilled goldfish, dried deer meat, stuffed peppers, noodle soup, meatballs made with fish, spring rolls, stir-fried vegetables, green chili paste.
In the late afternoon, a young monk in a silken saffron robe crosses a courtyard paved with ancient cobblestones, steps into a ray of sunlight and ignites, as if for a moment he has the sun inside him, as if he is the light of the world.
KB #121
THE FIRST TIME I went to the Kingdom of Bhutan, Druk Air, their official airline, only owned two airplanes. They were both British Airways 146-100 STOL Regionals, jets famous for their tight turns and short landing and takeoff specs. Understandable, since the only commercial airport in the kingdom is at the bottom of a torturous 1,200-foot canyon, and even in the STOL it seemed like the pilot would have to shave off a few trees before he got down.
The pilot’s name was Captain George, and he was originally from Yonkers, in Bhutan for ten years to oversee the training of six Bhutanese pilots who would eventually make him obsolete. Captain George was a jolly sort, a Jets fan, and a lifelong Democrat. In explaining why he couldn’t seem to move on to whatever his next assignment might be, he said, “Bhutan is the only place I have ever lived where you are walking down the street and all of a sudden you are holding hands with ten children.”
I was the only Westerner headed to Bhutan the day I flew with Captain George—the country had barely opened to tourists—so he invited me to sit in the cockpit. Everest, K2, Chomolhari, Kanchenjunga—the entire Tibetan Plateau rose like a city of giant frozen temples before my eyes.
Now, more than a decade later, the king is stepping down, the Amman Corporation is building boutique hotels all over the country, Captain George is long gone, and the Bhutanese have traded in their safe little jets for people-movers. The first Airbus A319 arrived on October 19, 2004, the date chosen because it was an auspicious day in the Buddhist calendar.
The Bhutanese sitting next to Ethan and me, back in row 19, looks like he might cry as he talks about his country’s upcoming (in the next auspicious year, 2008) transfer to democracy. “Our king has been like a father to us all,” he says, and his face reminds me of the face of the two-year-old grizzly adolescent I ran into in Dry Bay, Alaska, who had just been kicked out of the den by his mother and needed company in the worst way. “It is not as though democracy has made the people of your country so happy,” he says, and what can we say about that?
The Airbus lands in the canyon bottom unproblematically. Have they cut down the giant pine trees? I wonder. Moved a couple of canyon walls in the name of free enterprise?
The men who come out to greet the plane are wearing the red, black, and gold wraparound fabric called a gho, the national dress that has only recently stopped being mandatory, but once we get inside the terminal, the first three teenagers I see are all wearing DK knockoffs.
In customs, an official wearing a navy blue gho and a jaunty gold tam beckons to Ethan, asks, “Are you carrying any secrets?” and I watch with pleasure as Ethan startles.
“I beg your pardon?” he says, polite, but wary.
“Secrets! Are you carrying any secrets?” the official says, this time with some impatience.
You can’t even imagine . . . I want to say to the uniformed man, even though I know that what he is really saying is cigarettes, having just answered the question myself.
37. Tsedang, Tibet
The Tibetan sun, a lot like the Colorado sun, only more so, is streaming in the car window. Rectangular flags of primary colors are flapping in the wind. It was dark when we left Chengdu and dark most of the way to Tibet, but thirty minutes before we landed, it got light enough to see peaks, hundreds of them, and hundreds of snow-covered ridges, blue and white and receding toward forever, shrouded with morning fog. Off in the distance, head and shoulders above the others: Everest, K2, Chomolhari, Kanchenjunga, the rooftops of the world.
Then the plane stretched out and landed in the big brown valley of the Yarlung Tsangpo, which in India becomes the Brahmaputra, the highest river on earth. Hailey and I stepped out onto the tarmac in the middle of the valley, lined by brown foothills, blond dunes forming at their base, the river braiding and braiding and just the tips of the mountains catching the sun’s first light.
Now we have driven a hundred kilometers downriver, past villages made of mud huts with yak dung drying on the walls for fuel because Mao harvested all the trees, snow-covered mountains peeking every so often through the foothills, an old woman working on her loom in a courtyard, stacks of golden hay against gray mud in the long winter light.
Denzing is driving with a small smile on his face, and Tsering keeps waiting for Hailey and me to collapse from the altitude, and we keep telling him we live at altitude. I say, “I’m so happy to be here!” and Tsering says, “I hope so and I think so.”
I always say I can spot an only child of alcoholics across the room, and sometimes people want me to do it as a party trick, and that is how I met Hailey at a magazine launch in an apartment full of strangers five years ago. The editors were aghast because not one word had passed between us, but I saw it in the determined way she sliced the celery and carrots, the seriousness with which she stirred up the dip.
When we get to Tsedang, Tsering says we have to rest in the massive empty and frigid former Holiday Inn for two hours, and we say we aren’t tired, and he says we have to rest anyway because he didn’t get permission from the police for us to go out and walk around. The police here are called the PSB, though Hailey and I will persist in calling them the PBS. Everyone including Tsering is afraid of them, and he is right to be afraid. If you are Tibetan you can get thrown in jail for fifty years for saying or doing almost anything, and if you are a guide you can get thrown in jail for something the tourists you are paid to look after say or do.
A Chinese woman in the lobby of the frigid hotel says, “You like massage?” and the next thing I know I am laid out in an extremely cold room getting bent and twisted and thumped on by a tiny woman in a bright orange parka with the hood up, dyed orange fur all around her face, and she is snapping my fingers and toes so hard it is making me scream, which has no effect on her behavior whatsoever.
The slipcovers in our hotel room say over and over, Who’s a good luck to you, in a repeated pattern, which reminds me of the sign in Chengdu that said, Get on in the park! Tsering says, How you say, about six times in every sentence, and then just plows right on, which reminds me of a friend of my father’s named Jack Here, who we used to call Here-Here, who let the phrase On it there pepper his sentences the way some people might use like or um.
After our rest we visit Yumbu Lakang, the oldest known dwelling in Tibet, 1,300 years old. When I walk
into the inner sanctuary all the smells, sounds, and feelings of Bhutan come back, the yak butter candles, the big happy-faced golden Buddhas, the sunlight pouring in on the primary colors of the thangkas, the prayer wheels spinning with the heat of the candles, and I think, If these prayer rooms were my prayer rooms, I’d hardly do anything but pray.
We come back to the hotel room an hour before dinner, and I fall into that baby sleep like I did on my first trip to Bhutan, in the Valley of the Black-Necked Cranes. We’d been traveling all day, a long day, and were going to be sleeping in someone’s house. There were no hotels in Bhutan then, no electricity in the whole sacred valley. It was getting dark, and there were hundreds of giant pines out the window, but spaced apart so that you could tell you were in a valley. It was so peaceful, and we were in a traditional room with painted crossbeams: yellow, orange, red, blue, green; everyone was drinking tea and smiling at each other and I just put my head right down on the hard hand-painted wooden bench I was sitting on and went to sleep.
Hailey got so excited earlier today when we saw the Tibetan black-necked cranes that Tsering said, “When we get to the nunnery, Denzing says he will put wings on and fly for you and you can take a picture.”
“Oh,” Hailey said, “our driver flew away, it was very beautiful, but now we don’t know what to do.”
38. Taos, New Mexico
Listening to Joy play her saxophone, read her new poems, wishing there was something in my heritage that made my belief system more like hers.
Later, at the Sagebrush Inn, around a fake fireplace, she tells the story of buying her angelfish. How she decided, after her old dog finally died, that she felt too guilty when she traveled, a fish being the right amount of pet to hold down the fort while she led her gypsy life.
It was only the second time she brought her suitcases out from under the bed that Joy noticed that the angel’s fins—she had named her Darla by then—were drooping. Then she noticed other behaviors, the PMS that led Darla to slam her head against the glass repeatedly (there would always be a little string of eggs in the water the next day), the way Darla would pout when Joy returned from a trip, hanging in the back corner of the tank for days until she decided Joy could be forgiven.
Joy brought Darla a mate but she ate him the first day. Joy went to a pet psychic, sat quietly in the back until it was her turn, clutching the tiny snapshot of Darla while others held gleaming 8-by-10’s of golden retrievers and prizewinning Thoroughbreds.
“Your fish really likes being pretty,” the psychic said, “you should tell her she is pretty every day. She is very happy right now,” the psychic said, “I see her surrounded by white clouds of happiness,” and Joy gasped because just that morning, for the first time, she had released a baggie of brine shrimp into the tank, and left Darla darting among billowing pillows of white.
In the lobby of the Sagebrush Inn, a woman who is teaching a class called “Writing for Social Change” is complaining bitterly to the management about her room out of one side of her mouth while talking on her cell phone out of the other.
I had lived with increasingly unignorable back pain for ten full years before I finally fessed up to myself and went for an MRI. When I got the report back it was filled with alarming words like severe end-stage degenerative disk disease and multiple spinal lesions so I called my doctor to ask her a few questions and she said, “We are used to our patients being a little more educated than this,” and I said I’d be happy to talk to her anytime about Moby-Dick or The Canterbury Tales.
She sent me to a surgeon who looked at my chart and said, “Seems like we ought to operate. ’S’not that likely to work.”
When I told him I was thinking of trying acupuncture, he looked up from his chart and said, “You think the Chinese know more about backs than we do?”
I said I wasn’t sure but they had been carrying bags of rice around on theirs for a couple of centuries. The surgeon flipped my chart closed and put his hand on the door, said, “Call me when you become incontinent.”
In Pueblo, Colorado, there is a burnt-out shopping mall a few blocks from downtown that says, The Center of Everything. I took a picture of myself underneath it by balancing my camera on the hood of my car.
Last night at the Harwood Museum I walked around the Agnes Martin room saying the names of her paintings over and over so that I would not have to hear that night’s live performer, a few months shy of his seventieth birthday, read poems about masturbating into a tomato and tweezing black hairs out of the shaft of his dick.
The paintings are simple, horizontal bands of varying width, a whiter white and a bluer white taking turns. Lovely Life, Perfect Day, Ordinary Happiness.
39. Breckenridge, Colorado
Watching High School Musical in the home theater with Ruby, Will, and Kara.
Before dinner, when Ruby asked Kara to taste her pasta sauce, Kara, fifteen, put about a milliliter of it on the tip of her tongue and shrugged, said, “It’s not your best work.”
Now she’s got her head on my lap, and I’ve got my legs stretched out across Ruby, while the horrible girl in the movie, whose name is Sharpay, gets exactly what is coming to her, while the sweet girl with the doe eyes and the good singing voice gets the lead role in the play.
Ruby took a writing class from me when she was single and Kara was two, and even though it was only a one-day class we had the good sense to recognize we were meant to become some sideways version of family. Ruby threw my fortieth birthday party, where we made up a game called Six Degrees of Helen Reddy where one person starts a song and everybody sings it until another person pulls a word out from that song and starts another song, and in that way “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” can turn into “Ain’t No Sunshine” can turn into “Touch Me in the Morning” can turn into “Dock of the Bay” can turn into “Changes” can turn into “It’s Too Late,” and so on for hours until the game ends with a not-as-campy-as-you-might-imagine version of “I Am Woman.” When Kara turned twelve I gave her the choice between London, Paris, Alaska, and Hawai’i and she picked Alaska because she knew that was the place I most wanted her to see.
It’s hard to believe it’s been a decade since Ruby and Kara came out to visit me in Bolinas to gear up for Ruby’s impending divorce from the husband that fell between Kara’s real father, who now lives in Sydney, and Will. Kara was five, and what she liked best about California was the cinnamon rolls at the bakery, and Amy’s frozen macaroni and cheese.
I had been in Bolinas for six months at the time, trying to recover my own balance after Peter Sawyer left me with the note. I was renting a funky old house that used to belong to a sea captain, and it was sliding down the hill into Bolinas Bay. There was only one bedroom, a dining room table that sat twenty, and no television. We took Kara to the Exploratorium, to the Aquarium, on every kiddie ride at Pier 39 in the hopes she would fall into bed right after dinner.
The night before Ruby and Kara went home to Colorado, we were sitting around the kitchen table, all three of us eating out of a family-size microwaveable Amy’s with forks.
Ruby said, “Kara, can you think of something we managed to do without all week and we didn’t even really miss it?”
Kara squinted up her eyes, “Daddy?” she said, cracking Ruby and me up.
A few months ago Kara, playing Adelaide in Guys and Dolls, the junior high version, belted out the song about post-nasal drip and boys who won’t commit like the only professional among so many amateurs, and Ruby and I exchanged a look that said, We’ve given her everything we can, but on the subject of men she is totally fucked.
Now Sharpay frowns as the cute boy asks the doe-eyed girl to the formal and Will rolls his eyes and Ruby opens a roll of unbaked cookie dough and Kara sits up in front of me, says, “Will you braid my hair?”
40. Playa El Triumpho, Mexico
The pelican’s body lies in a little nest of desiccating feathers, wings outstretched in the position of crucifixion, in the compromised position of a dive. O
ur guide Rori says a lot of the young pelicans die early, they hit the water at the wrong angle, and break their supple necks. Ethan said the Tampa pelicans weren’t the diving kind, but I saw them do it. Maybe it was the red tide and the hurricanes, the stink from all the dead fish and rotting sea turtles that turned their world upside down and finally made them hungry or confused enough to try.
This morning the other guide, Josh, told us frigate birds are intimidators, that they’ll use their swallow tails to swoop down on the pelicans and scare them so much they’ll regurgitate their food. Then the frigates will plunge again and snatch the food right out of the sky.
Yesterday, at Ensenada Blanca we met a dog whose real name was Capitán, but someone on a previous trip had named him Noam Chomsky which Josh had misheard as Noah, and by the time Rori tried to correct him, everyone had started calling him Norm. He was a stocky white dog, somewhere between a boxer and a pit bull with a nasty flea rash on his belly and big brown bedroom eyes.
It was the shiny gold shirt that gave the guy away, and the red kerchief at his neck like it was 1976 and he was headed for the disco. The dog had been in all of our laps by then, had already chased the sting-rays out of our paths when we crossed the shallow water carrying our kayaks out for flip drills. He had offered his belly up for each of us to rub.
The borracho was standing near the kayaks, swaying slightly. He’d been there for fifteen minutes watching us load our dry bags: twelve kayaks, eleven women, one man; you could almost hear his brain doing the math. If he made a move to come closer, I missed it, though I was keeping a pretty close eye. Whatever happened, Capitán decided he’d had enough. Not an aggressive bone in that dog’s body, any of us would have said, but he went after Mr. Gold Shirt, three warning barks and then a lunge, biting his hand, drawing blood, the man too drunk or too stymied to run.
