“It’s a looooong drive to Seattle. I don’t know if I can do it every week.”
I was complaining to Cheryl about the turn my job had taken. Instead of simply driving 15 minutes into an office or hospital in Tacoma, I was starting to spend a morning or two each week up north, in the big city, attending meetings, helping run the business.
“What do you want – what can you do about it?”
“I saw an ad in a magazine for books on tape. I think I’m going to give that a try.”
This was in the mid ’80s. Cars still had cassette players, CDs were a novelty, and the internet – well, we called that “CompuServe” back then.
Somehow, I got hold of the phone number for Books-On-Tape, Inc., and requested a catalog. I was pretty skeptical, but I’d always had a secret love for Mark Twain, ever since reading Roughing It, and realising he was not actually a kids’ author, nor was he simply a humorist. In biking terms, as a writer, the guy could hang. It was the ultimate young man’s road trip, heading out across the US by stagecoach, with stopovers in Wyoming, Salt Lake City, the gold camps of Nevada, and HAWAII! Maybe Huckleberry Finn – which I’d heard was the first Great American Novel – was worth a listen.
What captivated me was not just the story, which deserves every bit of praise it has received. But the thing is written all in dialect, unique for each character. In the hands of a nuanced reader, it was very easy to tell Jim from Pap from the Duke and the Dauphin. I quickly became hooked on the concept. The experience of listening to a book – a good book – being read generated in my head the exact same internal sensations I get from reading. An entire universe opened up, the aural and visual landscapes filling my head, replacing the ennui of I-5 at rush hour.
I scoured the catalog for my next book. Seven Years in Tibet, by Heinrich Harrer leapt out. Tibet at that time seemed a cartoon locale, a mystical Shangri-La, kept under lock and key by its twin jailers, the Himalayas and the Chinese communists. Harrer changed all that.
It is an adventure travelogue from the get-go. An Austrian skier (a winner at the 1937 student games) and climber (he was in the first group of four to scale the North Face of the Eiger), he joined an expedition in 1939 intending to climb Nanga Parbet in what was then British India. Some missed travel connections led to his being in Karachi when war in Europe broke out. As a “German” national (remember the Anschulss?), he had joined the Nazi party, and was actually a Sergeant in the SS. So the British interned him in a camp, for his own “safety”.
He made several attempts at escape, with a plan to travel over the mountains to China, and from there make his way to the Japanese-held territories in East Asia, from which he figured he could get safely back home. But he didn’t reckon with either the harshness or the allure of Tibet. Making his way from village to settlement at elevations approaching 5000 meters, he and companion Peter Aufschnaiter (the leader of the climbing expedition) eventually arrived in Lhasa in a state of near starvation.
There, the 14 year-old Dalai Lama heard of their presence. Young Tenzin Gyatso was in the midst of his education within the Potala Palace, and had an inquisitive and open mind. He saw the Westerners as a chance to broaden his knowledge; once he discovered that Harrer had made a few documentary films, and that Aufschnaiter was an engineer, he put them to work. So instead of walking another 2500 miles to the East China Sea, they stayed from 1942 thru 1949 at the roof of the world.
The Dalai Lama had been given a 16 mm movie camera, and an automobile (in pieces). Harrer showed him how to operate both of these iconic elements of Western culture. He in turn learned about the intricacies of Tibetan Buddhism and the gregarious, outgoing nature of the Tibet people. I was completely enraptured by the romance of pre-exile Tibet, and vowed then and there to visit.
I set out to learn more and more about the nation. I found other books from that era, by Eric Shipton and Alexandra David-Neel. I researched the nascent travel companies just starting to enter Tibet, still under some restrictions from the Han Chinese. I talked Cheryl into making the journey with me. We began to make plans, reserving a 20 day tour which would take us to many of the exotic locales Harrer had documented, both within Lhasa, and around the surrounding plateau. We bought appropriate clothes for the dramatic shifts in weather and temperature which occur on a daily basis. The sun would be blazing, even if the air were cool, and the nights might be freezing. I bought a collarless red shirt, hoping to blend in with the colorful clothes worn by the people there. I suppose, though, that unless I could hide my face and keep silent, I had no chance of blending into anything.
We would be going in mid-late September, after the rains and before the snow. All spring, we watched the news as protests in Lhasa against Chinese oppression grew more vocal. This was 1988, the year before democracy protests were quashed in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Two months before our trip, the travel company called to say it was being canceled due to landslides on the road from Kathmandu to Lhasa. More likely, the risk of political unrest was the real culprit. But they offered us an alternative – Ladakh! A part of Tibet, but in India! It seemed to have all the charm and magic, with less risk. To get there, we would first travel to Srinagar, in Kashmir. But the more I learned about Kashmir and the disputes between Pakistan and India, the more I worried about jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. So we pulled the plug on that trip, as well,
By this time, were were getting a bit desperate. We had scheduled time off from both our jobs, a major effort which needed to be planned out four or more months in advance. We had enlisted my parents to spend three weeks at our house, taking care of our children. And we had been primed for an adventure, and were not going to be denied.
(To Be Cont’d)