Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [91]
We eat our lunch of bread and cheese and hard-boiled eggs and as I am packing up, I am tempted to leave something behind, to test the stories, just to see what will happen. I tear off a minute piece of chocolate-bar wrapper, but at the last minute put it in my pocket. Tony proposes that we walk to a peak called Brangzung-La, not far from the lake. It is only an hour or so from here, he says, and the view is fantastic. We are exhausted from the long climb up in the broiling sun, but the promise of a view lures us onward. An hour or so turns out to be “or two and a half,” and I trudge along behind the others, muttering and panting and cursing Tony, who must have been a mountain goat in his last life. As we ascend, the tall fir trees shrink into weeping blue juniper bushes and dwarf bamboo, knotted tightly against the cold, and I begin to feel pale and stretched and thin. Tony says it is the altitude. I cannot walk another step but I do and I do and I do. I hate walking, I tell myself, and I don’t care if we can see the entire world from up there, it’s not worth it.
But it is. The treeless peak is marked by a white chorten and ragged white prayer flags, the printed prayers blown completely off by the constant wind. The view lasts forever: snow peaks along the northern border, frozen white fortresses against the blue sky, and far away in the south, the plains of India, shimmering in the last of the afternoon light, and in between the north and the south, the valleys and ridges of eastern Bhutan spread out in waves. The others are taking pictures, but I want to memorize the view. I want to be able to close my eyes anywhere in the world and see this. We are not even very high up, and yet it is the best thing I’ve seen in my life.
“I don’t want to go home at Christmas,” I say suddenly.
“So don’t go,” Tony shrugs, adjusting his lens. He is trying to get a shot of Gangkhar Puensoom, the highest mountain in Bhutan.
Don’t go. But if I don’t go home at Christmas, that will be the end of my relationship with Robert. There will be no way to reconnect after two years.
Exactly, says another voice. It’s not that you don’t want to go home at Christmas ...
Everything about my relationship with Robert, in fact everything about the life I left behind, seems small and narrow in comparison with where I am now. Everything I imagine in that life is repulsive to me: a house in an affordable suburb, a car that I will hate because it is too big, sprinklers keeping the lawn green in the summer while we sit in air-conditioned rooms inside, sealed off from the elements, safe and smug. Part of me knows this is unfair to Robert but the rest of me doesn’t want to hear it. I can see only what I have now, this view, and the dark, bright world below, with its stories of kings and curses and guardian deities, flying tigers and thunder dragons, religious scrolls hidden in rocks and valleys hidden in mountains by magic or Buddhism or both, and yetis and ghosts and the levitating lama in the temple on the ridge the sun rises over each morning, and all the places I haven’t been to, and the stories I haven’t yet heard, all the things I haven’t figured out, like the Situation. Even with the Situation, and the frustration of being in it but apart from it, and the whispers and fear, I want to stay. I can’t go home yet.
The sun begins to set, and a few stars chisel their way out of the pale sky. “It’s only an hour down,” Tony says, but by now we know what this means. We finish the last of our water and chocolate and follow Tony along a tenuous muddy track through dense bamboo. The shadows around us thicken, and Tony urges us to hurry. “This trail breaks off at some point, and if we take the wrong path, we’ll end up in a nightmare of a bamboo forest above Khaling with no way down.”
We hurry but the bamboo does not thin out, and the trail grows steadily worse. I am so tired I want to cry. We have been walking since seven this morning. The track is now the merest memory of a