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Back at home, I collect my two buckets of rainwater from below the eaves. The tap water has been off for two days, but the rain has been plentiful. I am managing. In the evening, I am surprised by the sound of a vehicle outside my window. A white hi-lux has wedged itself in front of the building, and boxes, crates and tins are being unloaded onto the muddy ground. My Australian neighbor, I think, and it is. He knocks on the door later, a man with tufts of greying hair standing on end and a big grin. He introduces himself as Trevor and starts handing things over. He has brought my tin and a note from Sasha, bread from Thimphu, Swiss-made cheese from Bumthang, peaches and plums from Tashigang, and letters from home that ended up at the field office. I start to help him cart his luggage up the stairs but he waves me away. “Go read your mail,” he says kindly. I tear open the envelopes and read hungrily. Then I put my groceries away, arranging things carefully on the shelves. I feel immensely rich and unaccountably lucky, as if I had just won a lottery.

At my desk, I start a letter to Robert about the difference between arrival and entrance. Arrival is physical and happens all at once. The train pulls in, the plane touches down, you get out of the taxi with all your luggage. You can arrive in a place and never really enter it; you get there, look around, take a few pictures, make a few notes, send postcards home. When you travel like this, you think you know where you are, but, in fact, you have never left home. Entering takes longer. You cross over slowly, in bits and pieces. You begin to despair: will you ever get over? It is like awakening slowly, over a period of weeks. And then one morning, you open your eyes and you are finally here, really and truly here. You are just beginning to know where you are.

I write about all the things I have learned. Mustard oil must be heated until it smokes before you fry anything in it. Climbing a mudslide is easier barefoot. Water has a lower boiling point at high altitudes. Now I am knowing, as my students would say. All my former knowledge and accomplishments seem useless to me now—all the critical jargon I carry around in my head, tropes and modes and traces, thirteen definitions of irony, the death of the author, the anxiety of influence, there is nothing outside the text. So what? That doesn’t help me in the least now. Let Jacques Derrida come here, I think. Let him stay up half the night scratching flea bites and then deconstruct the kerosene stove before breakfast. I have had to learn everything all over again, how to walk without falling headlong into bushes, how to clean rice, how to chop chilies without rubbing my hand in my eye and blinding myself. Eight year olds have had to take care of me. My ignorance amazes me.

Now when I long for the small comforts of my Canadian life, I remind myself that someday I will be home, longing perhaps for the misted view of mountains from my bedroom window, the smell of woodsmoke, a room lit by candlelight, the sound of rain moving into the valley. The rain has stopped, and the clouds are shifting to reveal a sharp, thin crescent moon and one bright star. It’s the kind of moon you can climb into, a silver boat, a rocking chair. Robert, I write, I am just beginning to realize where I am.

Movement Order

Early in June, the

rains set in, and

were so constant

that ... there

generally fell a

shower in some part

or other of the

twenty-four hours,

and the tops of the

hills were constantly

involved in clouds.

—Samuel Davis

in Bhutan, 1783

Rangthangwoong

The start of a three-day holiday, and I have a list of things to do: get rid of the rat in the kitchen without the aid of the trap that so horrified my students (oh miss, they told me, you is killing this rat, then you is coming back as rat for many lifes), fix the screens that let in a thousand flies a day (the same karmic rule applies to killing flies), bake bread using the old pot-in-the-pot-on-the-kerosene-stove