by Jamie Zeppa
He named several causes for worry. What if I got sick? What if I had a terrible accident? What if there was an earthquake, a flood, an epidemic, a war? What if, what if. He came up with a hundred stories of people who went off and never came back, dead of unnamed diseases, lost in jungles, swept away by rivers, fallen off mountains, fallen in love, never heard from again. I should have known; I had been raised on tales of worry and what if. “Don’t take chances. Life is too short to live by your own experiences,” my grandfather had told us countless times. “Learn from other people’s mistakes.”
“What about school?” he said. “What about your Ph.D.?” The Depression had cut short his own education before he reached high school, and the value of education was one of his favorite subjects—“education” meaning knowledge that could be practically applied to save you from a lifetime in the coke ovens. I could see what he foresaw for me—the future opening up, the path leading over a low rise just ahead into an assured future, a secure career, a good marriage. He wouldn’t understand if I told him that my future seemed to be closing in, getting smaller and narrower and more rigidly fixed with each essay
I completed.
He had spent his whole life making his world safer, smaller, more secure. The basement pantry was lined with tins of food we would never eat, he saved bottles, nails, envelopes, old wrapping paper, broken toasters, bits of wire, cloth and carpet. “You never know when you’ll need it,” he said. Caution was his religion: you never know, you can’t be too careful, better safe than sorry. In his experience, change meant loss. His own parents had immigrated from Poland, making the dark, cold journey across the Atlantic, moving up through New York, Pennsylvania and Michigan, into Ontario. They settled in Sault Ste. Marie, in the shadow of Algoma Steel, but even after the Depression, when things got better, they were not at home in this harsh new unfinished world, this Canada, and talked longingly of Poland, in Polish, until they died. This is what happened when you uprooted yourself, my grandfather believed: you could not go back and yet you did not belong. He believed in staying put.
I sat in my old bedroom, looking out the small window at the steel plant, with its wire fences, enormous grids and towers, smoke stacks staining the sky all year round. We had grown up chanting the names of the mysterious places inside—coke ovens, coal docks, blast furnace, slag dump. We knew you could grow up and get a job there, make good money working three-to-eleven, eleven-to-seven. “Your father could have been making good money there now,” my grandfather said, shaking his head. “Would have made something of himself by now.” When my father went to Toronto after the divorce, we were in awe. If you grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, Toronto was the ultimate destiny. If you got all the way to Toronto, you did not have to come back. My mother was proof of this; after the divorce she had only gone to Europe, and then she had come back. We did not consider that she wanted to be close to her children, we thought she had just not gone far enough away. My father returned only for brief visits, his long hair falling down the back of his black silk shirt, hundred-dollar bills folded in half and clipped in his pocket. “Your father seems to have done well for himself in Toronto,” people said, their admiration ending in a question mark. “He’s in the music industry,” my brother and I learned to say, “he’s a promoter,” but my grandfather was not impressed. “Working in goddamn barrooms. Would have been foreman by now.” Toronto meant nothing to my grandfather, and he would not allow us to visit there when we were children. Traveling was something you did because you had to—if you got a job in another city, a real job, not in the music industry, but, say, as a dentist, my grandfather’s dream profession—“Look at the Miller boy,” he kept saying, “he’s making money hand over fist.” Traveling was not something you did for fun or experience or love. “Waste of money, that’s all it is,” my grandfather said. It had taken quite a bit of work just to convince him to allow me to leave home to go to university, first in Ottawa and later in Toronto. And now I wanted to go to the Third World. The Third World! It was preposterous! It was for the birds!
“And what about Robert?” my grandfather demanded. “I thought you were getting married. What does Robert have to say about all of this?” My grandfather liked Robert: he was smart and dependable. I had met him at university. My grandfather said Robert was blue-chip stock.
“I’m coming back, Grandpa. And Robert thinks it’ll be a great experience.” I didn’t say that Robert’s initial enthusiasm was declining now that I’d actually applied. “I’ve never been anywhere,” I said. “This may be the only chance I’ll ever get to do something like this.”
“I’ve never been anywhere either and it hasn’t hurt me,” he said. “It’s just plain foolishness. Don’t take chances. Prepare for your future and forget about going Over There.”
“Well, I’ve only applied. Maybe I won’t be accepted,” I said, hoping to erase the fret lines from between his eyes, if only temporarily. I hated to worry and disappoint him but I could not lie outright and promise not to go.
The World University Service of Canada (WUSC) called me for an interview. The two interviewers, neither of whom had been to Bhutan, gave a short introduction to the program there. When secular education began in the country thirty years ago, with the help of a Canadian Jesuit named Father Mackey, the Bhutanese government chose English as the medium of instruction. On Bhutan’s northern border, Tibet had been annexed by China and the world had not even blinked. Bhutan did not want to suffer a similar fate; it was time to end its policy of official isolation and enter the modern world. The Royal Government proceeded cautiously, however, and the pace of development was kept deliberately slow. The education system, still in its early stages, was suffering from a severe shortage of teaching staff, which made it necessary to recruit foreign teachers. Although the vast majority came from neighboring India, there were about seventy teachers from volunteer agencies such as WUSC and the British organization VSO at schools and institutes throughout the country. WUSC had a total of fifteen Canadian teachers there, all placed in eastern Bhutan, where Father Mackey had helped start the first English-medium schools in the 1960s. These teachers were provided with accommodations and paid local salaries. Work terms were for two years, although teachers could and often did extend their contracts.
Conditions were very basic, sometimes in fact quite difficult, the interviewers said. Life at the college posting for which I had applied was a bit more comfortable, but it was by no means luxurious. There were few roads in Bhutan, and most of them would be closed during the heavy summer rain and the winter snow. There would be other Canadians, yes, but I would be several hours away from most of them. Basically, I would be cut off, immersed—how did I feel about that? How would I fill up my time? Did I have a boyfriend? How did he feel about my decision to leave him for two years? Did I realize that there were no phones in the eastern part of Bhutan? That most Bhutanese lived in villages and hamlets dotted across one of the most difficult terrains in the world? They proposed several situations—a serious argument with the principal, discipline problems in class, illness, cultural misunderstandings, an accident: what would I do? I constructed answers as best I could, trying to sound sensible and good-humored, ignoring the voice in my head that kept asking, “But what would you really do?”
Afterward, I went back to the library and flipped through the books again, studying the pictures, trying to place myself in them. I had a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I was standing at the edge of a cliff.
The letter of acceptance from WUSC came in September of 1988, along with a Briefing Kit, a spiral-bound book of information on travel, health concerns, culture shock, and a list of things I should bring. I shoved my incomplete applications to Ph.D. programs into a file folder, restored several tomes of literary criticism to the university library and turned my attention to the list. The List! I could recite it in my sleep. I returned from daily excursions to hardware stores, sports stores, electronics stores, drug stores, grocery stores, mountain-
equipment stores and the Tropical Diseases Institute, to count and organize items on the bedroom floor. There were piles of Warm Clothing (thermal underwear, flannel shirts in dark colors—winters would be cold, the Briefing Kit said, and the houses would be unheated); Medicines (Gravol, antibiotics, delousing shampoo); Equipment (hand-held water filter, Swiss Army knife, assorted tiny tools, $50 high-tech flashlight with a five-year warranty); Other Useful Items (vegetarian cookbook, plastic containers with lids, Ziploc bags, lighters, packets of dried food).
Robert stood in the middle of the room, staring at the piles. “Surely you don’t have to take all this,” he said.
“I do,” I said, stuffing woolen socks, tampons, and The Norton Anthology of English Literature into a hockey bag. “It’s like preparing for a two-year camping trip.”
“It looks more like you’re preparing for a natural disaster. What kind of place are they sending you?” he asked, reading the instructions on the delousing shampoo.
“It’s a remote posting, Robert.”
“Well, maybe it’s too remote,” he said. “After all, you haven’t really been anywhere before. Couldn’t they send you to an easier posting? What about—”
I put my hands over my ears. “I don’t want to hear it, Robert,” I said. “I am going to Bhutan.” I was suddenly overwhelmed by a desire not to go.
Robert spoke my fears aloud. “It’s just so far away, and for so long. Two years—I won’t even be able to phone you.”
“You could apply too,” I said. “We could go together.” We had talked about this possibility before, but I knew that Robert had other plans for his life now. He had been a professional musician before I met him, but it hadn’t paid off, and he’d given it up to return to university. It had been a sad and troublesome choice, to give up the thing he loved best, the music in his head, in order to have something more tangible, a degree in his hand, a guaranteed job in teaching or administration. My grandfather wholly approved, but secretly, I sympathized with the part of Robert that missed his music. He was rebuilding now, he said, putting the pieces in place, he wanted to have something when he finished. This was not a time to go anywhere.
I could call up the office in Ottawa, I thought, and tell them I can’t go. I could cite personal reasons. I could still apply to graduate school. I could take a year to think about it. Two years was a long time to be apart—I should think about it. But I knew that if I didn’t go now, I never would. And lots of people had relationships over long distances, I told myself. We knew several couples who had survived long separations.
I went back to the List. I would take my portable keyboard and lots of batteries, and books I’d always wanted to read: a collection of Buddhist readings, Lost Horizon, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I selected photos of Robert, my family and friends, a few postcards to stick on the walls of my new home, a miniature blue teacup I’d had since I was a child. My luggage grew heavier; I bought another hockey bag. This comforted me. I wasn’t going out there with nothing. In between the shopping and packing, I argued endlessly with my grandfather on the phone. We debated travel v. academic qualifications, the first world v. the third world, challenge v. goddamn stupidity, the chances of contracting dengue fever on the other side of the planet v. the chances of being run down by a milk truck outside one’s childhood home, for the experience v. for the birds. Another letter came, fixing the departure date for February 16, 1989, several weeks away. I called my friends to say this is it, yes, I am going, goodbye.
A few days later, I got a phone call from the head office in Ottawa. The principal of the college in Bhutan, a Canadian Jesuit, had rejected my application. He wanted someone older, with more experience. Apparently, he was uncomfortable with the fact that I would be the same age as some of the students. The man on the phone was very sorry, but...
But nothing! I thought. I’m packed, I’m ready, I am going. I said, “I’m all ready to go.”
The voice said yes, but ... and I said yes, but ... and this went on for several minutes until he asked if I would be willing to teach in a junior high school. Junior high meaning grades one through eight. In a more remote posting. There was still one position open, although it was, uh, quite different from the one I’d applied for. There was no electricity, for one thing.
“Yes, fine, grade eight in a more remote posting,” I said.
“Well, you’ll probably be assigned to grade two.”
“Fine, fine,” I said. Grade two in a more remote posting. Kindergarten on the Tibetan border. I didn’t care. I was going.
“Jesus Christ, Jamie Lynne! I hope you know what the hell you’re getting yourself into,” my grandfather kept saying.
I said I knew. I had been to the library, I said, I had looked things up. I had seen the maps. I knew how far away I was going.
In truth, I had no idea.
People kept asking why I was going, and I gave the entire range of possible answers. For the experience, I said. I’ve never been anywhere. I’m tired of school. I want to learn about development, the Himalayas, Buddhism. I want to do something different. I want to travel. I don’t want to be a tourist. It sounds fascinating. I don’t know. I knew I seemed a fairly unlikely candidate for an adventure into the unknown. And secretly I doubted that I had what it took, whatever it took, to head off alone to a country most people had never heard of. In light of this, my determination to go puzzled me. It was more than just growing up under the smoke stacks, dreaming the small-town dream of escape like my parents before me. And it was more than feeling that I was going to wake up one morning soon trapped in my future. For all my years of study, I wasn’t sure I had actually learned anything. I had gained intellectual skills and tools, yes, but what did I know? I wanted to throw myself into an experience that was too big for me and learn in a way that cost me something.
I spent my last night in Canada with Robert, trying to forget that I was leaving the next day. I held his hand tightly long after he had fallen asleep, the names running through my head—Paro, Thimphu, Pema Gatshel, Bhutan Bhutan Bhutan.
He took me to the airport in the morning. We held hands, we kissed goodbye. It was only two years, we told each other, and we would be together again at Christmas. We would write. It wouldn’t be easy but we would stay connected, because we loved each other, because we wanted to get married, because I was coming back. But on the other side of the security check, I sat and cried. I loved Robert. I didn’t know why on earth I was leaving him.
Orientation
Mountains all around, climbing up to peaks, rolling into valleys, again and again. Bhutan is all and only mountains. I know the technical explanation for the landscape, landmass meeting landmass, the Indian subcontinent colliding into Asia thirty or forty million years ago, but I cannot imagine it. It is easier to picture a giant child gathering earth in great armfuls, piling up rock, pinching mud into ridges and sharp peaks, knuckling out little valleys and gorges, poking holes for water to fall through.
It is my first night in Thimphu, the capital, a ninety-minute drive from the airport in Paro. It took five different flights over four days to get here, from Toronto to Montreal to Amsterdam to New Delhi to Calcutta to Paro. I am exhausted, but I cannot sleep. From my simple, pine-paneled room at the Druk Sherig hotel, I watch mountains rise to meet the moon. I used to wonder what was on the other side of mountains, how the landscape resolved itself beyond the immediate wall in front of you. Flying in from the baked-brown plains of India this morning, I found out: on the other side of mountains are mountains, more mountains and mountains again. The entire earth below us was a convulsion of crests and gorges and wind-sharpened pinnacles. Just past Everest, I caught a glimpse of the Tibetan plateau, the edge of a frozen desert 4,500 meters above sea level. Thimphu’s altitude is about half that, but even here, the winter air is thin and dry and very cold.
The next morning, I share a breakfast of instant coffee, powdered milk, plasticky white bread and flavorless red jam in the hotel with two other Canadians wh
o have signed on to teach in Bhutan for two years. Lorna has golden brown hair, freckles, and a no-nonsense, home-on-the-farm demeanor that is frequently shattered by her ringing laughter and stories of the wild characters that populate her life in Saskatchewan. Sasha from British Columbia is slight and dark, with an impish smile. After breakfast, we have a brief meeting with Gordon, the field director of the WUSC program in Bhutan, and then walk along the main road of Thimphu. Both Lorna and Sasha have traveled extensively; Lorna trekked all over Europe and northern Africa, and Sasha worked for a year in an orphanage in Bombay. They are both ecstatic about Bhutan so far, and I stay close to them, hoping to pick up some of their enthusiasm.
Although Thimphu’s official population is 20,000, it seems even smaller. It doesn’t even have traffic lights. Blue-suited policemen stationed at two intersections along the main street direct the occasional truck or landcruiser using incomprehensible but graceful hand gestures. The buildings all have the same pitched roofs, trefoil windows, and heavy beams painted with lotus flowers, jewels and clouds. One-storied shops with wooden-shuttered windows open onto the street. They seem to be selling the same things: onions, rice, tea, milk powder, dried fish, plastic buckets and metal plates, quilts and packages of stale, soft cookies from India—Bourbon Biscuits, Coconut Crunchies, and the hideously colored Orange Cream Biscuits. There are more signs of the outside world than I had expected: teenagers in acid-washed jeans, Willie Nelson’s greatest hits after the news in English on the Bhutan Broadcasting Service, a Rambo poster in a bar. Overall, these signs of cultural infiltration are few, but they are startling against the Bhutanese-ness of everything else.
The town itself looks very old, with cracked sidewalks and faded paintwork, but Gordon told us that it didn’t exist thirty-odd years ago. Before the sixties, when the third king decided to make it the capital, it was nothing but rice paddies, a few farmhouses, and a dzong—one of the fortresses that are scattered throughout the country. Thimphu is actually new. “Thimphu will look like New York to you when you come back after a year in the east,” he said.
