Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [7]
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