“Okay, Otto.”
The trooper made us wait for a terrible few minutes, and then I saw him stand out of the cruiser and walk toward us. He handed the license and registration back and held another sheet of paper in his hand. “What’s the ‘His Holiness’ stuff on the letter of transfer? And what’s this Rin-poach? I thought you said he had no last name.”
“That’s his title. RIN-po-shay is how you say it. It means something like ‘holy man.’”
In the gray eyes I saw just the tiniest flicker of—well, it wasn’t doubt, exactly. It was more a momentary hiatus, a lacuna in what I guessed was otherwise a worldview of some consistent certainty. Maybe the officer had seen enough of life in his twenty or thirty years on the highways to know that the beast of our strange species could not be kept in a box, that humanity bubbled, mutated, and swirled in ways so unpredictable that it might just be impossible to keep everything simple and clear. This funny looking, robe-wearing Russian in front of him might just be holy—might being the key word—in exactly the same way that a well dressed woman in a Mercedes might be packing a pistol she was itching to use. You never knew. It was a sparkle of not-knowing that I saw in his eyes. I was grateful for it. It seemed precisely the opposite of what I’d seen in the eyes of Winch and Marty.
The trooper handed over the sheet of paper and said these beautiful words, “A warning this time, but be smart about it. Between here and Spokane there’s about a hundred places you’ll get stopped if you exceed the posted limits.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Thank you, man!” Rinpoche echoed from beside me. This was one of those Americanisms he liked to use but didn’t always get exactly right. Calling someone “man” was harmless most of the time, unless, for example, you had a bag of marijuana in your robe and you came off sounding like a stoned-out hippie from the Skovorodian steppe.
The trooper looked at him, blinked, seemed about to say, “Could you step out of the vehicle, please,” then turned and went back to his car.
In the rear-view I watched him make a U-turn and head the other way. I pulled out very slowly.
“This bag, what is?”
I didn’t answer for a stretch, just driving along, breathing, letting my heart rate drop back to something close to normal, thinking about mistakes, errors in judgment, “big forgets,” conceit, humility, love. “Just hold on to it for a while,” I said. “I’ll explain the whole thing in a minute.”
I drove another few miles. Somewhere just before a place called Electric City, I pulled onto the shoulder, asked Rinpoche for the bag, and walked into the rock formations as if I were heeding the call of nature. After making sure the highway was empty in both directions, I set the parcel down between two stones and left it. Those with any interest might find it there, still.
Breakfast at Cave B Inn
Lake Lenore
Washington State on Route 17
15
Shortly after I finished explaining the American marijuana laws to my travel companion (he seemed less than intrigued, as if marijuana, and drugs in general, were a minor-league way of calming the mind—artificial, temporary, child’s play) Rinpoche noticed a sign for the Grand Coulee Dam and looked over at me like a kid who realizes he’s being taken to an amusement park as a surprise birthday present.
“A big one,” I told him. “Biggest in the U.S. if I have my facts straight. A coulee is a trough in the earth, a “gulch” we call it, worn away by water.”
At that moment we saw a bald eagle, soaring over the lake to our left. We passed Steamboat Rock State Park, an amusing sign that said, “Rocks Next Four Miles,” and then we entered Electric City, where a complicated array of high tension wires crossed the dry hills. Not far beyond the Tee Pee Drive-In, Fast Food, we came upon the dam itself, one mile of curved concrete, thirty stories tall. When I parked in a viewing area Rinpoche fairly leapt out of the truck and hurried over to the fence. A massive white sheet of bubbling water cascaded down the dam’s face. Even from a distance you could hear the muted roar of it, ceaseless as the earth’s spin.
“There’s a mini-museum kind of place up the road. We could stop in there for a minute if you want. I’ll still get you to Spokane in plenty of time.”
Yes, yes, and more yesses from the Rinpoche, though it took me a few minutes to pull him away from the fence. The Grand Coulee Dam Visitor Center was about what you’d expect: dioramas, a short film we didn’t have time to watch, views out the glass walls at the spectacle, and uniformed guides behind a desk, ready to answer questions. One of them was Phillip, recently out of college, brimming with information, smart and helpful. While Rinpoche stared out the window, transfixed, Phillip took me over to a display and explained how the dam worked. What we were seeing, he said, was merely overflow from a particularly snowy winter; the real work took place inside the structure, where the turbines produced 21 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year, or enough to power 2.3 million households for twelve months. “Twelve million cubic yards of concrete it took to build the Grand Coulee,” he said with some pride. “It’s the largest producer of hydropower in the U.S.”
Since he was such a knowledgeable young man and since we were looking at a topographical map, I asked him about the Columbia River Gorge, and the cliffs we’d seen from our house at Cave B.
“Those were formed by what might be called eruptions,” Phillip said. “Huge floods that occurred when ice dams broke in prehistoric Lake Missoula. They happened periodically, separated by hundreds or thousands of years, and each flood—really a kind of explosion of water—cut through the basalt another hundred feet or so, which is why you see lines on those cliffs.”
“I thought it happened more gradually.”
“Oh, no, sir. Big bursts. Big giant bursts of water, sometimes two thousand feet deep and moving at sixty-five miles an hour. And we’re talking eighteen thousand years ago now. South and east of us you have what’s called the channeled scabland. You should see it from the air—amazing.”
I went over and stood beside Rinpoche at the windows. “You know your geology, man.”
“Power now I am thinking about,” he said. He made a tight fist and held it up to me. “So much power inside the earth. It’s the same inside meditation.”
“I haven’t sensed that, not at all. For me, if anything, there’s a quietness.”
“Quiet first, Otto. But quiet is not the end. You must do with the quiet.”
“Do what?”
“Your destiny,” he said. “Your purpose. The quiet lets you see it, then you do.”
Destiny, I confess, was a word that had always given me trouble.
I watched the water for another few seconds and tried with some sincerity to connect its force to my interior world. Impressive as it was, the Grand Coulee had zero spiritual meaning for me. A brilliant feat of engineering; a Depression-era project that had fed families and left a lasting energy and irrigation source; a disruption of the natural order that eliminated whole towns, prevented salmon from spawning upriver, and flooded tribal hunting and fishing lands that had been used by Native Americans for millennia. Yes, to all of the above. But a metaphor for some pure, earthy energy I might somehow gain access to by sitting still? An energy that would let me pursue my destiny? No sale.
What it did make me think about, strangely enough, was my wife. We had a long aquatic history, Jeannie and I. She would go in for a swim—lake, river, ocean—at every opportunity and in weather that had other people wrapped up in flannel shirts. We liked to ski, too, all four of us. One popular Vermont mountain—Killington, it’s called—has a hotel near the base lodge that sports an enormous outdoor pool, so we could combine our pleasures there. The pool is heated, and kept open year round. In cold weather you can actually get into the water indoors, a few steps from the locker rooms, and swim under a kind of curtain right into the pool without ever letting the winter air touch your torso.
Sometimes after one of the kids’ Saturday sporting events, Jeannie
would suggest we make a spontaneous drive up to Killington and spend Saturday night and Sunday there. This would be in the skiing off-season—September, October, April, May—and it was a crazy thing to do, really: five hours each way for less than 24 hours at the hotel. But it was her way of ensuring we had some family time, and just at the point when Natasha and Anthony were starting to leave us for the gravitational pull of friends. We had the car ride together, stops for meals. We’d take a hike and, always, spend a couple of hours in the big pool.
There, at the Coulee Dam, I was remembering a particular Sunday—late October, it must have been. No snow yet, and the foliage there, high up in the Green Mountains, had long ago lost its color. We had the pool to ourselves. Someone—Anthony, no doubt—suggested a one-lap race. As expected, I came in last, victim of a ragged stroke, but I remember half-floating at the end of the pool, head and shoulders resting on the concrete edge, arms spread there, chest heaving, kids teasing me, wife brushing back her hair with both hands. I remember looking up at the bare slopes and having a moment of the most profound gratitude. I wanted to stop time. The kids raced another length. Jeannie came over and kissed me on the mouth. We all seemed to be absolutely bursting with good health and I remember Jeannie’s body against mine, the wet tops of her beautiful breasts, and her saying, “My good husband,” in a way that had so much raw love in it that it caught and held me on a little cloud of ecstasy. We had our arguments, Jeannie and I. We had places that didn’t mesh well. But we had moments, an abundance of moments, of such intimacy that I felt the vibration of it—a humming oneness—running up and down between my lungs.
I don’t think every couple has that.
In time I was able to prod my brother-in-law away from his Coulee contemplation. We made a brief, desultory tour of the southernmost edges of the Colville Indian Reservation, 1.3 million acres where the cars and pickup trucks had their own license plates and the houses were modest in the extreme. “It’s very poor there,” one of the other guides had told me when I inquired. “You can draw your own conclusion as to why.”
Let’s see, I thought: a billion acres of stolen land, genocide, a brutal crushing of ancient ways in the name of civilization, purposeful infection, the slaughter of one essential food source, the elimination of another. How would those serve as conclusions to be drawn?
Our brief tour was depressing. An even briefer stop in the Coulee Dam Casino did nothing to cheer me up. Left completely behind on our earlier road trip was Rinpoche’s fascination with places like that, with the idea of winning money for no work. He peeked in, stayed close beside me. It was a museum of hopeful indolence, a hundred slot machines whining and ringing in a windowless arena, a handful of desultory gamblers hoping to win a few hundred dollars and pass the time. There were no great destinies being pursued here, at least none that I could see. There was no stillness, no quiet, no secret energy source. If the casino was a symbol of anything, it stood for a society where stillness and quiet had all but gone extinct. We wanted action, busyness, easy riches . . . as if clanging coins and neon had the power to keep death at bay forever.
I played a dollar’s worth of nickel poker, won five bucks by accident, and we walked out.
After a fill-up at Jack’s Four Corners we turned toward Spokane on Route 174, crested a hill, and were suddenly in yet another new world, this one green and rolling. Farmhouses were set at great distances from one another among the huge fields of grain. It reminded me, just a bit, of home. After half an hour there was a town with abandoned tennis courts and a baseball field, a large OBAMA BIDEN sign, then one for RON PAUL. I watched the speed limits carefully and marveled at the way Washington drivers never seemed to rush. No one passed us, no one flashed lights or tooted the horn or came up too close behind. Probably people here didn’t even lock their homes at night. This was not New York.
Haunted is too strong a word, so let me say I was bothered by our brief exchange about power and meditation and destiny. The soothing view of fields to either side could not quite wash it from my memory. As if it were a voice whispering in the depths of me, something nudged at my thoughts then, a half-formed notion. What if the future held some destiny other than what I imagined—another ten years of editing, a pleasant retirement, tossing a ball with a grandchild, traveling the world? What if pain and loss, not comfort and ease, lay hidden behind the veil of time, as it had been hidden behind my moment in the Killington pool? What if Rinpoche could see all that, and wasn’t telling me?
Coulee Dam
Washington State
16
Spokane was the point at which I started to make the reservations for our trip myself, rather than leaving our fate in my sister’s hands. “I’ll get you started,” Celia had suggested in one of our phone conversations that summer. “Then you and Volya can figure out how fast you want to go and where you want to stop. Okay?”
“Fine,” I’d said, because the trip was still unreal to me at that point, not something I wanted to think about or plan. “Sounds good.”
“But he has a talk in Spokane, I should tell you that.”
“Yes, you should, and you should tell me about any other talks or meetings, too. No surprises this time.”
“I think that’s the only one, Otto. I can check and get back to you, though, if you want.”
She may, indeed, have checked, but she didn’t get back to me. I asked about it again, in a subsequent conversation three days before we headed west, but my beautiful sister waxed evasive on me as she sometimes did, using words like “pretty sure” and “probably,” and leaving the door wide open for one of what she called her “big forgets.” “Oops, I had a big forget, Otto, sweetheart. The doctor called yesterday when you were out. He wanted you to bring Jeannie in this morning, if you could, for blood tests. Ten-thirty, it was supposed to be. I’m really sorry. I’m sure you can reschedule.” This was on one of her visits east, and during these visits she cooked and cleaned and had long talks with Natasha on the living room sofa and helped Jeannie bathe and gave her medicine when I was at work, and generally filled the house with such selfless goodwill that even her brother, stressed to the limit as he was, and prone to criticize, found it impossible to be angry with her. I reimagined the phone call from the cell in Coulee City. I sent her good thoughts.
I had never been to Spokane, never, in fact, seen any of Washington State east of Smith Brook. Using my magical phone, I’d made reservations at the downtown Davenport Hotel, which turned out to have one of the most spectacular lobbies west of the Waldorf and bright rooms with old mahogany night tables and forceful showers. The chicken burrito had gone down well and quickly, and I was hungry again, in the mood for Italian. “There’s a place you can walk to from here,” the concierge told us. “It was ranked in the top twenty-five Italian restaurants nationwide.”
I will, out of kindness, decline to give the name of this restaurant, and I will decline to speculate about the nationwide survey, such as it was. Suffice it to say that, after Rinpoche and I had made the walk of several blocks on that hot evening and settled ourselves at a window table in what seemed to be an authentic Italian American setting, I had a good salad followed by a criminally overcooked puttanesca. I have no Italian blood. None. Zero. I’d be ashamed to repeat the words my parents and their friends used, so blithely, in referring to the three Neapolitan families who lived in Dickinson in the years of my youth. Had there been any places to have an Italian meal in our part of the plains, Mom and Pop would surely have found the cuisine too spicy and garlicky for their taste. “Hot” is the word my mother would have used, and it would not have been a compliment. But Jeannie and I and the kids adored it. In fact, Frank Sinatra’s former hangout, a place called Patsy’s, on Fifty-Sixth Street, just west of Broadway, was the site of almost all our important celebratory meals. When Shelsa was born we dined and toasted there, sending good wishes from fifteen hundred miles away. When Natasha was accepted at Brown, we immediately made reservations at Patsy’s. Same with Anthony
and Bowdoin. I took our most valued authors there for lunches. Stuffed squid. Escarole soup. A wine list to frame and hang on the wall. It was, to my mind, an almost perfect cuisine, on a par with Indian and Thai, and for that reason I found poorly cooked Italian food to be a sin against the delightful religion of eating.
Rinpoche, of course, paid no attention to things like overcooked pasta. He said he was in the mood for a bit of meat and asked for one meatball and the small house salad, and consumed it attentively and gratefully, as always. My dissatisfaction remained at the level of a very quiet muttering because, having waited tables for a brief spell in my late teens, I tip in the 20 percent range and try never to make the server’s life more difficult than it already is. I had come, in my travels with my brother-in-law, to divide the restaurant staff into two camps: those waiters and waitresses who treated him like a human being despite his getup, his penchant for physical contact, and other odd ways; and those who shot him a nasty look or demonstrated an exaggerated trouble parsing his English, or who gave you the feeling they’d be gossiping about him, uncharitably, on the other side of the kitchen door.
Our waitress on that night fell into the former category. I told her what a nice first impression Spokane made, and that was true. Parks, a waterfall, older buildings in a low-rise grid with the stately Davenport at its center. “But what’s the story with Sprague Street?” I asked. It ran past the back of the hotel, and we’d walked along it in the last of the daylight. It seemed to me that every other person we saw was either high or drunk.
“Oh, Sprague Street’s a place we avoid,” she said.
Which, naturally enough, made me decide to take that route again on the way back. It was the kind of thing I’d done with Anthony and Natasha in the old days, before Manhattan went sanitized and safe. Without ever risking their well-being, I’d walk with them along Ninth or Tenth Avenue and through Times Square at dusk, watching them and the people around them like a grizzly with his cubs, wanting them to see with their own eyes that the world, the real world, was more than Bronxville’s sedate downtown or the shops of the Upper East Side. When they asked, Jeannie and I told them what the word ‘prostitute’ meant. We let them hand a dollar to subway musicians in torn jeans and bloody bare feet. At age eleven or so, Natasha inquired about an adult bookstore we drove past, and we told her the truth, in a tasteful way, and she said, “That isn’t very nice, is it?” We were trying, on instinct, to suck all the bad power out of the taboo subjects, to leave the kids open-minded, sensible, unafraid, hard to shock, unprecious. I like to think it worked.
Lunch with Buddha Page 12
