The bus chugs up into the mountains. Chantal and I give our seats to two old women. She stands in the aisle, facing me, holding onto the luggage rack, our arms touching repeatedly. We’re practically embracing. I can see a freckle on her long, narrowish nose. I can count the moist strands of hair on her forehead and the flecks of green and black in her brown eyes. I feel her breath on my neck. She flashes a smile and a nod at something I’m supposed to get, maybe that this is fun, that this is what it’s like to rough it on the back roads, but as I nod back what I feel is more remarkable, a thrill at something inside me melting, and I balance on this dissolution as we bounce over boulders. I wonder if she’s the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen, or if this is something else. Companionship, solitude, they come and go. A bead of sweat stands on her chest, just above the V of her white tank top, and I can’t help watching it roll down.
Two seats open up and we settle into them. A wrinkled man on my other side starts talking to me about Tiger Leaping Gorge. He’s pleased we’re going there. “You’ll see Golden Sand River, our favorite river. She runs alongside her sisters, the Salween and Mekong Rivers. Do you know the story?” he asks me. I shake my head. “Her sisters were happy running south,” he explains, clearing his throat. “That’s how it was. But Golden Sand wanted to marry the eastern sea. A dream told her to. Therefore, she made a sudden turn east to meet the sea, but her jealous brothers, Gold Flower Mountain and Jade Dragon Mountain, blocked her way. They guarded her passage day and night, until one night Gold Flower fell asleep on duty, allowing Golden Sand to slip past, leaving the deep Tiger Leaping Gorge behind her speedy escape.” He grins at me. “That’s why today it’s the tallest gorge in the world! The towering snow mountains are still there, and it seems impossible that such a huge river could find its way through—the mountains are six thousand meters high!”
Chantal gazes out the window, not following the story.
The man changes gears, starting in on fŭbài politics. “These days, politicians and businessmen here—it’s all about the guānxi and corruption. Except for the princes, they do whatever they choose, marry whomever they like, have all the kids they want.” He shakes his head in disgust and blows his nose.
Chantal apologizes that she hasn’t learned much Mandarin as she lights up a cigarette.
“You don’t get enough second-hand smoke?” I ask her, joking. As always, half the passengers on the bus are puffing on xiāngyān (cigarettes).
She nods without looking at me. “You’d think so.”
When she’s done smoking, she asks me about the story, and I translate it for her as we circumnavigate the first of the great snow-clad peaks, Jade Dragon Mountain. She smiles and listens, and calls it a story of female liberation.
The bus rolls to a stop in Qiaotou, a tiny mountain village nestled at the foot of the gorge. Skyscraping peaks surround us, and the river runs alongside the road. We climb off, leave our hefty backpacks at an inn, and take only water, cameras, and a warm change of clothes.
Golden Sand River might be the man’s favorite because it transforms itself into China’s greatest river, the Yangtze, the river the Chinese call simply Cháng Jiāng (Long River). But here, by our feet, the cute stream gurgling by is actually only one of Golden Sand’s many tributaries. Tiger Leaping Gorge is the vast canyon where Golden Sand appears from Tibet, gathers the strength of a hundred contributors, and with her new, heady unison metamorphoses into Cháng Jiāng and gushes down tall peaks on her way to hydrate the countless realms of the vast kingdom, to irrigate thousands of terraced hectares of ancient farmland, and to run all the way to Shanghai before swimming with her beloved eastern sea, the Pacific Ocean.
We take one step at a time. We cross a small bridge over the tributary and continue on a dirt road upward. Chantal hikes strongly, and we find a pace that soon leaves the river far below us. Another mountain rises across from us, forming a deep, green-walled gorge. Two monks in burgundy robes approach and stop us. “You should take the steps,” they turn to point to a wooden platform fifty yards ahead. “Go down to the river. Walk on the famous stone.” Here we learn another legend: Many centuries ago a tiger wished to leap the gorge, to cross Golden Sand, but he was unable to jump across it. The tiger spotted, with his acute tiger eyes, a stone down in the middle of the river. He leapt out onto the stone, and then a second leap took him all the way across.
I crane back at the peaks. “Must’ve been a big tiger!” I say.
They laugh and wish us luck, telling us that they have to fix a bridge that was taken out by an avalanche.
I translate this second legend for her, and Chantal remarks that we’re entering a place full of mythology. At the wooden platform, we peer together down the steep staircase and spot the big boulder amid roiling torrents of the river. A dozen tiny people walk about on the stone, but she wants to skip it, telling me that there is a higher road than this one, with harder, prettier hiking, and we need to save time. The rock piques my curiosity, but I accede. “OK, you’re the boss.”
She smiles at me. “It’ll be good for your manhood, like the snake.”
We tread along the mile-high shelf of shifting apple-sized rocks. It narrows and we have to pause as two local women carrying leafy baskets of corn approach and pass us. Chantal spies another path branching off straight uphill, and she suggests it could lead to the high road, but when we draw closer we see that it’s not a path at all, but a river—a waterfall dancing down the mountainside. It washes out our path and continues down, plummeting through sideways-lolling bushes and outcroppings of stone all the way to the river. We stop in front of the waterfall, and its frigid spray wets our faces. We remove our shoes to cross the shallowest part on bare feet.
I go first, treading carefully, but I slip on a rock halfway across and slam my hands-in-shoes onto a boulder to halt my fall. Chantal slips too, and she catches hold of me. We proceed so slowly that we’re laughing when we safely reach the other side.
More waterfalls lie ahead, decorating both sides of the gorge, cascading down like rivulets of white tears. I press her about this so-called high road, but she doesn’t know much. She says the New Zealander told her about it but spoke vaguely since she hadn’t been able to hack it and gave up. I ask her about her energy, her physical condition, and she lets out a sigh. “It’s been a long trip,” she says. “So long. Not that I’m ready to go home yet. I’m OK.” This is her first major sojourn abroad. I tell her it’s mine too, and call us “globetrotting virgins,” but she doesn’t like this name much, and she walks ahead of me. I ask her about her thoughts on Québec’s independence movement, and she turns on me, like I’ve slapped her, but maybe it’s how I phrased it. “All right, Mr. America,” she says. “When you’re finally ready to let Hawaii go free, and Puerto Rico, let me know. And when you’re about to go crazy and shoot everyone,” she stops and laughs, glancing at me sideways, “give me a good head start, OK?”
I make the promise. “At least ten seconds.”
Warm winds caress our faces, and we hike silently a while. We’re surrounded by magnificence on all sides and there’s really nothing to wish for. A path diverges downward onto a bare rocky knob that protrudes from the mountainside, and we sidle down onto it in order to rest. We sip our water and feast on the view. Stretching out in every direction, upwards into a sublime cloudless sky, downwards to the rock-pounding brown waters, and forwards and back between tight mountain walls of emerald, the beauty is endless, jaw-dropping, ineffably grand. My spirits soar upward with the geology into the cerulean unfolding of the sky.
Beauty. It is this thing that draws us, that attracts us, that makes us open our eyes.
Chantal sits near me and my eyes are drawn to her anew, as if I hadn’t even noticed her. Strands of her dark hair fly in the gusts, her cheeks glow, and there’s a brown smudge on her nose. I wait for her to meet my gaze, to smile at me, to say she loves all of this too, but she doesn’t, and I realize that I’m staring.
“Ready to go?” sh
e asks when I finally look away. I look at her again, wondering if she appreciates any of it. The view is amazing, she says.
The road carries us further upward. A towering, snow-clad cone comes into view far ahead, and it’s so large it must be Gold Flower, brother to Jade Dragon. My eyes rest upon it, and it is that beauty that I have longed to see, to feel, to understand. The peak’s majesty breaks me open, and I begin to make promises. I will be true to my own beauty. I will live with complete honesty. I will be what I am and trust my own inner knowing. I will look and find beauty everyday, forever.
The peak, like a mirror, reflects sunbeams at me, asking me questions, and I wonder whether I will forget all of this if I don’t see such beauty every day. Is this beauty in all of nature, in all of life, available everywhere? Is it only human creations—the concrete cities, the metal machines, the plastic desks—that are bereft?
BANG! Men come running towards us, as if fleeing that mythic tiger. They sprint at us. CRACK! CRACK! Explosions erupt out of the mountainside behind them, hurling careless volumes of dust, dirt, and rocks upward and outward. The men stop and walk back into the billows of smoke and pulverized earth. We wait until the clouds have dissipated before cautiously advancing. The men admire their handiwork. Enormous cubes of rough-hewn black rock overhang the newly widened, now-eight-feet-wide, shelf-of-rubble path. They heave, one by one, large shards of rock to the edge and shove them over, smiling at us as we pick our way past them.
“You can walk in front now,” says Chantal.
“The American isn’t the one with the bombs this time,” I reply. She chuckles, shaking her head. What I know is that we still haven’t found the high path, that cataracts periodically wash out our route, that avalanches can be triggered by explosives, and that the sun is dipping languorously toward the peaks. We need a destination. Just as all of this dawns on me, a small path diverges upwards, towards a house on a little plateau. I share my thoughts, but Chantal doesn’t need to be convinced. We take the path.
A leather-faced man stands in a small garden and thrusts his shovel into the dirt as we approach. He wears a communist-era navy blue coat—a “Mao Suit”—and examines us with sunken eyes. Mao Suits became politically incorrect sometime around 1982. I pull out a map that I found in a Lijiang restaurant and point to a guesthouse called the Halfway House. He takes the map in gnarled hands and peers at the scrawled Chinese, knitting his brow and hopefully ignoring the distortions and advertisements. “Up there,” he points up the mountain. His Mandarin is thick and choppy. The door to his house flies open, and a lanky, shaven-headed 12-year-old shoots out, stopping at his father’s elbow and firing “Hello!” at us in English. His father waves upwards and says something incomprehensible. The two of them lead us around the house to a path that cuts up through dense undergrowth. “Do you know where the Halfway House is?” I ask the boy, who’s wearing a red turtleneck. He sneaks a peek at the map. It’s hard to imagine what there is to do up here besides explore. He nods: “When you reach a bigger path, go left.” His name is Baobao and his Mandarin is clear, so I ask him to be our guide. I promise 5元, and he and his father agree. We shake hands with the father, who resumes turning soil before his mountain panorama.
Baobao darts up the steep path. A rich diversity of weeds and bushes scratch our arms as we follow. He bounds like a rabbit up and around sharp switchbacks, stopping to wait for us only every few turns. My legs quickly turn to rubber. “Do you go to school around here?” I call after him, hoping to slow him down.
“Yes, classes start in two weeks.”
“What grade are you in?”
“Sixth.”
“Where is the school?”
“Gaohan.”
“That must be a long way.” I pull myself up onto the rock where he stands, then turn to help Chantal.
“Do you like American movies?” he asks. “Do you watch American movies often?”
“Sometimes,” I reply. “Not very often these days.”
“I’ve seen them,” he says.
“Let’s take a little rest,” I suggest, when we reach a clearing.
“I like Predator.”
There’s a sucking feeling in my calves as I sit on a boulder. The sun is absconding with every last shred of azure and warmth, leaving the sky violet blue and chilly. “It’s not much farther,” Baobao says. “Ready?”
Thirty seconds will have to do, since this ascent will be a nightmare after dark. Chantal hops up and starts after the boy, scaling a dry riverbed; less energetically, going mostly on will-power, I take the rear. We don’t see Baobao for a long while. Finally we spot him atop a broad horizontal path. He’s smiling and pointing left. “One hour to Halfway House!” he calls. Reaching him, I offer gasping thanks and a brown note. He bounds back down, disappearing around a tall rock.
“That’s one of his hours,” Chantal inhales a gallon of air. I nod, stretching my calves, standing on tiptoe to get the blood flowing. We start up the path in the fading light, seemingly back towards Qiaotou. The narrow trail takes us through sloped cornfields, sloped spinneys of walnut, and sloped glades of azalea and rhododendron that seem to rustle with small creatures. We wend up and down the mountainside, over rocks and between tilted fir and cedar, and we realize something—this is the “high path.” The trail here makes the TNT-fashioned route below seem smooth as glass.
Two hours labor by, and then in utter darkness we come upon a village nestled into the mountainside. A wooden sign in front of a stone farmhouse reads “Halfway House.” Exhausted, we knock at its gate. A gaunt man appears with a lantern and guides us to a room with two beds. I watch Chantal collapse like a dynamited mountainside onto one. The man asks about food and beer, and I nod.
Minutes later, we’re dining out on the porch in delicious, private bliss, toasting beers in the moonlight. The central courtyard of the inn is bounded, on one side, by a barn, on another by our porch, and on a third by the innkeeper’s living area; directly before us stands the mountain face. The river murmurs far below.
When we’ve finished eating, I visit the open living room, where I find a whole family gathered around a television. The grandparents are in chairs, the parents on wooden crates, and the children sit cross-legged on straw mats. They stare at me. I smile and they smile, and delightful moments pass by in the ancient pleasure of observing something unusual. I ask about showers, and the innkeeper points through a dark doorway, promising to bring water. Three stairs lead me down into an outhouse where cold boulders make an uneven floor. I strip naked, and the slosh and gush of water overhead announce the arrival of, first, just a few drops, then a steady sprinkle, and finally a hot storming stream on my bare neck, shoulders, and legs, massaging me like a heaven with fingers.
Dressed, relaxed, feeling sublime, I sit again on the porch as the evening temperature nosedives. The wife is pouring water for Chantal. The innkeeper takes a seat beside me and compliments me on my Mandarin. He asks politely for my help in making a map for this place, showing me an indecipherable drawing that he started. “Halfway House” is scrawled in the middle, so I begin with the name. “It has a bad meaning in English...”
He looks confused.
“A better name might be Halfway Hostel or Tiger Leaping Gorge Hotel.”
Chantal yanks my eyes away when she returns from the shower covered tightly in a towel, and the perfection of the notion of being near her as the world darkens pushes everything else from my mind.
“I think I have a sore throat,” she says, without sadness, coughing as she passes into the room. She’s going to read and get in bed, she adds. I almost joke that she should have a smoke, but I hold my tongue. Fitful coughs emanate from the room before the sustained silence of her sleep prevails.
I stay up several hours with the innkeeper. We devise directions, translate food listings, make new sketches, and add advertisements for “cold beer” and “exquisite showers.” By the end of the night, when I’m hugging my blue wool sweater closer to my sides, his ma
p is surely the best in the Gorge, better than anything I saw in Lijiang. I tell him to put copies in restaurants in that city, but he seems aware of the benefits of advertising. He’s a shrewd man.
“Since I’ve helped you,” I yawn. “Perhaps you can give us a discount.”
He gushes that it’s obvious and proper. Grateful to him, pleased with existence, comfortably shot, I withdraw, check on Chantal, and climb beneath the thick blankets of the other bed. Like a waterfall grabbing a green gingko leaf, sleep swiftly whisks me away to another world.
Chapter 35
A Tiger and a Butterfly
天外有天人上有人
There is a man beyond every man.
There is a heaven beyond every heaven.
—Chinese proverb
Steamy breaths of morning fog clothe the mountainsides. Chantal and I share breakfast on the porch of the renamed Halfway Hostel, and I tell her why we might not have to pay for our stay. She stretches her arms, pulling on her elbows in turn, content, knowing as I do that between us we have 242元 ($29.13), no way of getting more, and no ticket onward to anywhere. The innkeeper greets us with a smile, holding a scrap of paper. “75元 for everything,” he announces.
I give him a meaningful look.
“Of course. I’ve included a discount!”
“75元?” I ask, to ensure I’ve heard right. It’s high, especially for the middle of nowhere, especially because I’ve helped him, especially because it could strand us here in the hinterlands of Yunnan Province.
“Your showers are free!” he announces.
“Showers?”
He shows me his list, which includes meals, drinks, beds, and showers. Two 3’s under “showers” are dramatically crossed out. He nods at me proudly. A bitter taste rises in my mouth. I refuse to pay. Chantal looks mystified by my anger, and I finally hand over my share, throw on my backpack, and stomp off down the path.
Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China Page 30
