The Cubbages

January 9, 2012 (a slightly belated post :) 

This last week I got the opportunity to visit a nomad and farmer area about 4 hours outside of the city we live in.  Recently, our 3rd semester has come to an end and with it begins the spring festival holiday.  This is the Chinese New Year -the biggest holiday in the country and the largest migration of people in recorded history.  On February 8, all the students at our University finished their exams and headed back to their families who might be anywhere from 2 hours to 4 days of travel away.  It was a mass exodus of 1,000's of college students.  I walked out to our street and every 20 or 30 feet there were students waiting with luggage trying to flagdown the green taxis whizzing by.  Normally, I only have to wait 5 minutes to find a taxi.  But that day was different- it was a madhouse of confusion and public travel.  That day I waited 30 minutes with my friend for a taxi.  And it was only by sheer favor that an empty  taxi happened to pull up next to us and not the long line of people spread out over miles around us all trying to do the same thing.  If we hadn't fought for this one, it could have been another 30 minutes of standing around in below freezing weather.  So, we acted quickly and got it.

Nonetheless, we made it to the bus station on time.  It was me and my local T. Friend, Jeff.  Jeff is in our English class that we have taught this semester.  He is an English major and we can talk in English for hours.  He is probably one of my best local friends here.  He also does a pretty amazing moonwalk and plays a mean game of basketball.

We caught the bus just after lunch time and packed on like sardines.  I sat next to Jeff and we chatted and then I fell asleep.  When I awoke, Jeff was nudging me.  We had arrived.  This was a strange idea for me because outside of the window was complete desolation.  Barren, dead grasslands, dry as a bone in the harsh grip of winter.  Not a tree or fleck of green in site.  In the summer this would be a verdant paradise with lush, tall grasses blowing over the pasturelands in a cool breeze.  In the winter it was a frozen Siberian tundra with the skeletons of withered grasses starkly covered in shining frost.

Now I knew that Jeff lived in a remote village.  But I thought it was just that.  A village.  This place did not even have one house, yet alone several in a cluster of anything resembling a  community.   Imagine taking a bus through the desert of Nevada, far from the last suburbs of civilization.  Then it stops and you and you alone get out in the middle of the desert.  You get your bags from under the bus and the driver pulls away and leaves you standing there.  This was the feeling I had in this middle of nowhere 10,000 foot high arctic wild.  Where were we?  Where could we even be going that would even have liveable conditions?

I did not know.  But I knew I was following Jeff.  He would know the way.  Our luggage was a strange assortment.  I had one small Camelback backpack stuffed  with long underwear and heavy wool socks.  It was pretty minimalist and weighed maybe 10 or 15 pounds.  I knew that Jeff and I would be traveling on his motorcycle into remote countryside areas and there would be no room on the back of that motorcycle for bells and whistles. No room for suitcases or hair dryers.  For the next 5 days  I would only wear the clothes I was wearing.  I would take no showers or ever have any desire to take off my four layers of clothes as it was constantly bitterly cold.  I would not brush my teeth and never even saw as much as a tube of toothpaste to do so.

The other small item I carried was a glossy gift bag of Tsampa- barley flour.  Thus was to be a gift for Jeff's family who was to be so graciously hosting us.  It was common tradition to bring a gift for your host and this bag was my small offering of thanks for what I would experience in the next few days.

Jeff had a little more as this was to be a 2 month vacation from school.  He had no fancy luggage.  Only a big, clunky cardboard box full of his old school books from past semesters,  2 backpacks full of clothes, and  a basketball in a cheap plastic bag.

I did not know it then, but these things would turn out not only to be very cumbersome but mildly comical in the venture that lay before us.

We set off into the oblivion.  We walked off the old country road into rising hills and the inhospitable stretches of clumps of stiff, dried up grasses.  We first past a natural spring well with some nomads drawing water there.  I shivered to think of that poor nomad man by his horse's side as he was retrieving the only fresh water for miles and soaking his hands in that chilly water to fill his plastic jug to take back to his family.  He was surrounded by a river of ice that had spilled out of the spring.  It looked like a dangerous and slippery business to be out there getting that water.  The spring itself would well be frozen if it were not pouring from under the ground.

Jeff and I trudged along.  I started to see a few mud homes scantly spread out along the hardened dirt path we walked.  It was obvious that there were  now small traces of life but they were all very simple.  As we walked further and further up the valley our boxes and bags became more and more of a burden.  In particular Jeff's big cardboard box seemed to get heavier and heavier.  Every five minutes we would stop and rest in the stripping wind and take a breather.  We would switch off carrying the box so that one person never had to carry the bulk of the weight for too long.  That worked for sometime. And then we decided to carry it together and distribute the weight between us.

By this point it was obvious that this was more than just a walk down the driveway to check the mailbox.  We were like a 2 people overloaded with weighty grocery bags coming out of the grocery store.  The only thing was that we weren't exactly in the handicapped lot.  Comparatively,  our car was a mile away and we had to walk over ice pools and up hills in the middle of winter to get there.  Like a good long book, this journey had to broken into parts.

Now we had too much stuff to carry for a pretty good distance.  But it all would have been manageable with our breaks and all.  That was until the bags started breaking.

First my the rope handles on my gift bag of Tsampa broke.  And this wasn't  a ziploc sized bag of Tsampa.  It was 15 or 20 pounds of heavy flour. At this moment, the reality that this country makes a ridiculous amount of cheap, useless, crap products became hauntingly obvious. I now had to carry this slippery bag under my arm like a bowling ball that kept pulling out from my armpit.  All this while lugging the box with Jeff and managing our 3 backpacks- 1 of which was choked around Jeff's neck by the strap because he had no other way to manage it.  I was really starting to doubt if we would make it to Jeff's family's house.  My arms were tired and I could now barely hold on under the awkward weight of all the packages.  My forearm muscles were quite fatigued now and the distances between every break became shorter and shorter.  I was really losing my grip and strength after carrying the load  the long way. Jeff pointed up the valley and around a hill.  That was his sister's mud home.  It was still yet a quarter mile away.  A quarter mile is a short distance to a sprinter.  But to us overwhelmed luggage carriers it seemed too long.  I could tell that Jeff, too, was pretty done.  Then just as we picked up our cargo for another last push up the hillside, the plastic bag with the basketball broke.

There are moments of mounted frustration in life that are so horribly inconvenient that all you can do is laugh so that you do not just lose it. This was just such a moment.  We had no hand space to carry that basketball without the handles of that grocery bag to carry it.  We stood and looked at each other and wondered how we were gonna be able to stack that rolling, round ball on top of our already large load. It would surely topple off every five seconds.  I figured we could just come back and get it later.  But Jeff had another idea.  He started walking and when he got to the ball he jerked his foot and kicked it.

This was the comic part.  We were in the middle of nowhere and Jeff was kicking a basketball up the rolling plains past sheep. I am not sure if the sheep as they trotted and fled, avoiding the oncoming ball, were more scared or curious.  After fleeing from the foreign attacker, they would gather round it and sniff it through their sheep pen fence to inspect the mystery.   It was a strange site but all we could do.  Inevitably the terrain was uneven and the now dusty basketball would dip away from us and roll too far in a direction that meant walking well out of our intended path to retrieve that little naughty, meandering ball.  Meanwhile Jeff and I kept lumbering and panting (both for cold and exertion at altitude) under our loads.

After a few minutes when we neared her house his sister drove out on a motorcycle to receive us.  Jeff has 5 sisters and is the only boy.  This means that skills and tasks usually reserved for men- including house building and repair, motorcycle driving, and other hard labor- had to all be done by his sister.  She also had kids and no husband.  Which meant that she really was a busy lady between herding and protecting several hundred sheep as a shepherd, looking after her young kids in such a harsh environment, constantly baking fresh bread, cooking (which was done over an open fire and often took up to 2 hours to make one dinner in the absence of electricity or any other modern convenience), maintaining her simple mud home by respackling it's mud walls once a year, and countless other domestic tasks including sweeping, cleaning, washing dishes over water she had boiled herself, and collecting yak and sheep dung to fuel the fire in this treeless wasteland.

So it was unusual that a woman would drive a motorcycle to meet us.  It is now a common site to see small motorcycles with nomad men in their sheep fur lined robes chugging up a mountain valley or through an icy remote stream.  In general, driving in places that no Harley Davidson owner would dare to go.  These guys were in every sense of the word "off roading". Places that may even be difficult to walk due to their obstacles and steepness were somehow navigated daringly by motorcycle. But while the motorcycle has largely replaced the horse in daily tasks and movement and almost every single T. man is a wilderness motorcycle virtuoso I have never seen a woman driving one.  But with no husband and her brother in college, this was the only life that was afforded to Jeff's sister in this far flung land.

So we gladly piled our heavy goods on the back of her motorcycle and she took it into the house for the last 200 feet.  We were glad for the relief, though it was a little late in the procession.

Jeff's sister's home was simple. It was a 10' by 10' mud home. Outside was parked a coal chugging tractor which was easily as long as the whole house.  Inside, it had one raised bed made of mud that took up 80% of the inside space.  It had a small cooking area beside the bed which was basically a fire pit and a few cast iron pots with some child-sized wooden stools seated around it.  This area, conveniently, also served as a fire pit UNDER the bed which helped to warm the bed in those wickedly biting cold nights at negative 20 Celcius.  I particularly liked this idea as this was the bed that I would be sleeping, eating, and conversing on over the next 20 hours.  This type of bed is called a "Kong" and often stretches all the way across a room and can and does house a Father, mother, brother, daughter in law, two or three kids, and maybe various other family members ranging from visiting monk brothers to aunts to the occasional mangy house cat.  John Denver sings a song called "Grandma's Feather Bed" about rollicking good times in a giant cushy bed full of a whole family.  While the Kong is nowhere as soft as Grandma's down cloud (usually the only mattress type padding is one or two woven carpets on the Kong) it does foster a great amount of community and most T. homes' social activity revolve around sitting on these raised beds and drinking yak butter tea while sitting Indian style around a low table.

The only other significant pieces of furnishing in this primitive enclosure are these:

- The lone tiny window. Inside the warm, dark boxy home is a singular window directly opposite the Kong. When fashioning the mud and grass and arranging the wooden hand cut poles that support the home, there was left a 1 foot unevenly square opening which held one piece of glass.  This was the only light that was allowed in at all.  So even in the day under the bright high altitude sun, the house is dark.  Too dark to take any good pictures even with a decent flash (believe me- I tried). This was the epitome of a dim lit Little House on the Prairie.  .

-2 small shelves. Now when I say shelves don't get carried away and start thinking Ikea or anything.  These were four sticks that were rammed into the mud wall while it was drying.  On top of each set of sticks is some sort of impromptu shelf that is about 2 feet long.  One of the shelf panels is a spare and broken pane of glass the other is a scrap piece of wood.  On these is a few bowls, a basket of chopsticks, and some soap.  this almost totally covered the extent of the "kitchen cabinet" space.

- The yak and sheep dung cast iron stove.  This is standard to all country homes.  It is the only source of heat and the way they usually boil their water by placing a large, carbon-blackened kettle on it.  This stove has some beat up stovepipes sticking from it's top and jutting out of the side of the house where it's puffing smoke is a welcome site to any approaching visitor.

This and a few folded blankets on the kong, and old  metal H.A.M.radio looking device, and a few clothes folded in the corner at the foot of the bed were about the totality of the quaint house.

That night we just sat on the kong and ate Mian Pian (noodle pieces in a greasy broth) and boiled sheep meat right off the bone.  We stayed up surprisingly late.  I figured life pretty much shut down here at sunset.  When I have been hiking and camping we call 9pm hiker midnight because there is no artificial light out there in the wilderness to keep you up for extra hours.  I figured this same rule would be true for these simple nomadic folk.  But not so.  Jeff stayed up and chatted and laughed and showed pictures to his sweet sister ( whose long braided black hair easily and gracefully fell below her waist as if it had not been cut in 10 years) and his female cousin until  the actual midnight.  Not hiker midnight.  I pretty much just sat there awkwardly and had no idea what they were saying for several hours.  But that was okay.  I was enjoying the atmosphere and culture of it all.

As Jeff described it, it turns out that these two shepherd women ALWAYS stay up late and chatter like hens in a coop because the next day they know that they can sleep in the fields as they break next to the slowly ambling sheep herds.  I was surprised to see this late night hair-salon-gossip habit among two strong and independent nomad ladies who lived outside of civilization in such an extreme climate.  These were the same women who could carry a hundred pounds of yak dung through the snow in a woven basket on their muscle hardened backs.  The same tough women who could work me under the table any day of the week. They probably knew a good deal about motorcycle repair, fighting off wolves with rocks, and how to tame a delinquent bucking yak. And yet here they were having high plains slumber parties like any American middle school girl would.   I guess some things never change among women no matter how far you go off the map.

January 10, 2012

In the morning I awoke to steam boiling from a pot next to my head on the Kong. Jeff's sister was cooking us breakfast even before we woke.  This was a wonderful way to wake up.  The beams of crisp morning light were gliding through the window and pouring right over me.  What made them so great was that each ray was individually highlighted by the curling steam as it rose from the pot.  It was such a heartwarming sight.  And then to see the steam pour from our fresh cups of hot tea was superb. This was better than any way I could possibly imagine waking up in the city.  The spiraling tips of steam playing delightfully in that still luminescence were their morning wake up news broadcast, their morning newspaper, the few quiet moments of coffee before they rushed out the door into the cold, chill of NYC traffic.

Before breakfast I had to get out of bed and relieve myself of the liters of tea I had drank the night before from my never-ending cup of tea.  As I clumsily put my shoes on and stumbled out the door, I was taken back by a tremendous scene of glory.  That night as we were tucked in on the kong under our warm blankets, it had snowed. And as I stepped outside of the mud home, the sun had just arced over the hill country and was gleaming over the snow as if on a mirror.  Little flecks of glitter were gently wafting about my head and sticking to my beard as if a giant airplane had just dumped loads of pixie dust right over my head.   There were only a few tracks in the snow by the house and otherwise the whole land was unadulterated sparkling powder. The mud wall sheep pen was full of hundreds of sheep who still had a dusting of snow that ridged their wooly backs.  I was drawn ever upwards from the piping smoke higher to explore the nearest hill.  As I crested it I saw a whole separate valley unfolding away under me.  There were a few other similar mud compounds sitting quietly in the snow.  They were tucked like swaddled babes in blankets among the folds and waves of the rising and falling mountains.  It was amazing to think that in every valley there were nomads waking up to tend their sheep.

The night before I had come up to this same spot and seen this other valley briefly under the moon (which had also been amazing as it had bright ring that encircled it as if I was somewhere in the North Pole and there was this halo around the whole thing).  But it was just something altogether different in the day's fresh snowfall.

 I returned to the house feeling particularly gleeful from my short, magic jaunt and we ate some Tsampa ( a mushy ball of barley flour) and some fried meat dumplings.  A practice that would be common to all the next 3 or 4 mornings I would spend with Jeff  in the countryside with his family.

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After a lazy morning, we ventured out.  It was time to herd about 800 sheep.  Jeff's sister and other various family members in the valley owned about 800 sheep between them, spread out over a couple mud- walled pens.  Jeff had volunteered to relieve his sister for the day, which meant she could tend to things at home like kids and baking bread.  So, of course, I went with Jeff to shepherd these 800 fluff balls through the hills.  This was to be one of the highlights of my trip with Jeff.

The first step in the day's shepherding ritual was to let the sheep out of the pen.  This meant opening a small gate of plywood (only 3 feet tall or so) and letting the sheep push and butt their way out of the enclosure.  It looked like a fire alarm had just sounded and 100's of panicked people were trying to shove their way out of one tiny hobbit-hole door to escape a dire emergency. Even more crazy than the unorganized exodus was the fact that Jeff's sister had to count all those white, nervously darting tufts as they shot out of the pen.  She did this to make sure that no wolves or thieves had stolen or eaten a single one in the night. This was not an easy task.  They crowded in so tight and flashed so quickly through that oversized mouse hole that it was nearly impossible for me to keep track of them as I peered over the wall.  But Jeff's sister had no problem.  This girl may not have ever gone to high school.  She may not even have been able to read.  In general, she lead a simple, stark, and slow-paced life.  But in this moment, her mind was racing faster than any New York City speed walker dashing to catch the next subway train.  The numbers blazed through her mind with all the agility and ease of high school teen girl deftly texting her girlfriends about the newest hot gossip.    She was counting several sheep per second.  And in the end she had not missed a single one.  There was no question in her mind like there was in mine.  "Were there 542 or 543?". "Did I double count that one that double backed into the pen?".

She intimately knew everyone of those little sheep.  And when they were all out of the pen, she knew exactly how many there were.  She had no clickers or machines or beads or pen and paper. In America, we would probably have an iPhone app for this. But,  she did it all flawlessly in her head with enough confidence to base her entire living, her entire bank account, her entire accumulated wealth management on this ultra rapid-fire  census.

As the sheep poured out of the wall in a frenzied stream, it was obvious that, in general, they were pretty self sufficient.  They knew just where to go.  They did it everyday.  So, in a huge moving and bleating blob, they pushed up the ravine to find the few tussles of grass that they liked to eat.  This was winter.  Which meant that they were forced to nibble on mowed down, mostly nutrient poor, dead stubble. So they moved slowly because they were all weak and thin.  Jeff told me that in the summer he would be entirely exhausted after a day as a shepherd because that meant running circles around the energetic and mischievous wooly wonders.  He said he would spend almost the entire day in a full sprint to reign them into their respective imaginary boundaries.  But the winter was lax.  We might as well have been herding 3-toed sloths as they were slowly advancing to their next prey:  a clump of jungle moss hanging motionless in an ancient rainforest tree.

I think we really did more lying than walking.  Maybe even somewhere in the 2:1 ratio.  I was expecting a brisk hike up rugged terrain.  The terrain was rugged, but after walking ten minutes, we would just lay down on the old grass- something like that of the quality of that outside the Oncler's house by the street of the lifted Lorax.  This made for an excellent time to chat.  About life and sheep and school and everything.  Jeff showed me how to use a handwoven sling shot.  It was made of yak hair and had one pouch you could fit a rock in.  You would fling the thong wildly around your head and all the while centrifugal force would keep the stone in the pouch until you released your finger and let the rock fly.  Jeff could whiz this thing and with a great snap could hit a specific sheep anywhere in the herd from 100 yards.  My aim, however, was a little lacking. Several times I almost took out his head even though he was standing beside or behind me.  Not quite the forward trajectory I was hoping for as the yak wool zinged out of my hand.

I eventually figured out the proper release time.  But even then, my accuracy and distance was way weaksauce compared to Jeff's impeccable launch.  After twirling the sling shot awhile, we walked lazily up another hill.  I told him all about David killing Goliath with just such a sling shot and he totally understood.  He knew the power of this simple tool.  In fact, he even related a time when two of the young boys in his village  had gotten into a fight and in the course of the conflict, one of them had died from just such an impact of a rock on his forehead. It was a sobering thought to think that this little woven rope could kill a man. And not just in old stories, but even today.

We continued on. We would walk 10 minutes and then lounge in the grass as sheep gingerly scooted by us.  We would lay in the grass 15 or 20 minutes and once all the sheep were out of sight, we would again quickly get in front of them, or push/fence them in to one side so that they did not venture into nearby valleys which belonged to other shepherds and other flocks.  We only had to do this a few times.  Mostly, they mindlessly marched in their routine procession.

We made it to the very high point on the climb up the ravine.  Through the course of the walk, the sun had been fading away behind dreary winter clouds.  By this time, the grey clouds had completely  rolled in and it was spitting snow.  As we crested the last ridge, the wind blew wildly throwing icy flakes against our red, chilled cheeks.  My whole beard was crusted with snow and I zipped my jacket up so that it covered my crack lips from the icy blasts.  I now realized that herding sheep could be either like an inner tube ride which alternately took it's course down a winding, lapping river on some days and ventured through brutal cascading rapids on others.  The shepherds had no days off.  The ball games were never called on account of rain.  They played no matter what the weather was.  Sure, they got a lot of picnics under pristine bright blue skies, but they also had to slosh through mud and shake off daunting storms all while watching out for their sheep in totally unprotected open country.

I was definitely cold.  We could just barely peer down past the curtain of white to the valley floor 1,000 feet or more below us.  Here, on top of the mountain, the ground had sheared off in places from continuous cycles of high altitude freeze-thaw.  It was like ice sheets had melted away from the polar ice caps.  Except this was all dirt and grass.  These areas created natural trenches and windbreaks and Jeff and I stopped in just such a place for a little respite from the clenches of the ferocious wind.

The wind and snow continued for a while, but we went down from the summit and the weather got a little better.  Eventually the sun broke through again and all our bones were dethawed.  Now we were turning around and heading home.

We rambled with the sheep the rest of the afternoon, enjoying the warmth and the precious sunlight.  Jeff and I talked awhile on the ridge while he coaxed them in the right direction.  They took their cue and ambled down steep slopes back in the direction of home.    We took a steep ravine downhill and followed them.  Then Jeff took off in a mad sprint.  As he looked ahead of us, he saw the flock was getting much too far to the left.  They were entering a neighbor's turf into another valley and Jeff was running to stop them from going too far off their usual route.  Jeff bounced Tigger-like down the slippery snow, hidden in the cold shadows of the ravine, and spryly traversed the  several 100 yards to the sheep in the blink of an eye.  Meanwhile, I cautiously tip-toed around the icy patches and barely kept my footing without sliding on my butt down the glazed grass clods.  It seemed like I looked up after going 10 feet or so and Jeff had already bounded across the whole ravine and was already reigning in the wayward sheep with whistles and hoots and hollers.

 How he managed to do that with shoes that had no more support or tread than a pair of worn Converse All Stars I will never know.  In this way, nomads have an amazing mountain-goat confidence in the mountains.  Westerners go out to REI and drop hundreds of dollars on the newest Gore-Tex rain jackets and specialty hiking boots and shock absorbent hiking poles and lightweight backpacks and Clif Bars and all flavors of energy goo to hike for a half hour. But T. Nomads just throw on a pair of cheap Keds ripoffs, a simple, tattered coat, and carry a grocery bag with a scant piece of bread to eat for a whole day of work.  And they go faster and lighter than any westerner in terrain that is both dangerous and steep.  For me it was an intrepid adventure.  But, this is just another day at the office for them.

I ran down the hill, panting like a dog in the summer heat.  The altitude was really kicking my booty.  After awhile, I caught up with Jeff and he was pretty much done catching the sheep.  He did place me in a strategic location as he scurried up various hills to run the sheep back to their flock.  But I pretty much stood there like a brick wall directing traffic and he did all the work.  That was the sum total of my usefulness for the day.

From there we were almost home.  We walked down back to his sisters mud hut and all the sheep hoofed their way behind us.  They plugged gradually back down heading back to the familiar sheep pen entrance hole.  After the cold, full- day jaunt, It felt good to walk back into the dim-lit room and get warm again.  We took our places back on the Kong and immediately were served copious amounts of milk tea.

It was so great to see the pillars of steam drift to the ceiling like winding, spiraling beanstalks creeping up a vine.  This warmed me as much as the tea in my belly.

After a brief rest, Jeff and his sister went outside to pack the motorcycle.  It was almost dark out and we were now preparing to ride a motorcycle for 2 hours to Jeff's parents house.  I was left alone in the mud hut and took the occasion to put on ALL my long underwear and clothes.  I had spent the day shivering with sheep in the biting mountain winds.  Now I was about to ride on the back of a motorcycle at 10,000 feet in the dark heart of winter through the open tundra. This would add at least 30mph to the wind chill as the air surged past my frozen eyeballs.  I had no doubt that this was going to be one of the coldest experiences in my life.

After I had tucked in all my clothes and closed every available opening in my multilayered winter suit to prevent the wind from sneaking in and robbing my body of much needed heat, I mounted the motorcycle.  But mount is a bit of a compliment for whatever I did.  It was more like an awkward stumble.  Jeff was already on the front of the motorcycle and all of our luggage - minus the basketball- was strapped on the back.  Imagine a large cardboard box and a backpack and a whole bunch of other stuff on the edge of the back seat and Jeff on the front.  Somehow I managed to sandwich myself between the items and sunk low right against Jeff, just a little more close than two guys would normally like to be together.  It was go time.

The old motorcycle chugged out of sight of the mud home and we waved goodbye to Jeff’s sister and the 100’s of sheep.  It was not a roaring peel out by any standard.  The motorcycle was old enough and weak enough that it barely could get out of it’s own way.  It had been bought used 5 years ago.  And been on a lot of nomad bumpy roads since.  This was not exactly a Harley Davidson Road King Classic with 1690cc’s of  Engine Displacement.  This was a no-name rip off which had the engine about the size of an old dirt bike.  And it was about to go over a mountain pass with two full grown men and a lot of stuff on its grandpa back.

As we approached the hill after 15 minutes of riding through the flat grasses, the motorcycle started to choke off like an asthmatic kid in pollen season.  It was obvious that no amount of weight shifting and thrusting and throttling was gonna take this guy up the hill.  It was sputtering.  So I ineptly dismounted and Jeff hit it and barely climbed the high point by himself.  I, meanwhile, huffed behind like a fat kid trying to catch his school mates who had gotten ahead of him.  I stumbled over rocks and and grasses  and made it to the top where I again flopped myself behind Jeff. After that it was downhill. 

We cruised a bit down some little paths that were barely wide enough for our motorcycle.  There were several loose rocks and landslides that had left the country, unpaved road totally blocked. Not even a Smart Car or an ATV could make it by on the narrow space that had been left by the shifting land and rocks. The only space for us was a tiny 3 inch wide tire track that had been cleared by other motorcyclists along the way.  Jeff weaved in and out of large rocks that had been scattered along the terrain as if he was precisely threading a needle. At this point I began seriously holding onto to the metal crossbar on the back of the motorcycle.  It looked to me like at any moment he could have slid out or rolled the motorcycle given one false move of the motorcycle through the rock mine field.  

After that disconcerting part of the drive, we tumbled and jolted over an uneven impromptu rock ramp down onto an actual paved road.  This was good and bad.  Good because now we weren’t bumping up and down on rocks and we had a good, clean, safe surface for driving.  Bad because it meant we would get up to 40 or so mph surrounded by no trees, ravines, or any type of feature that would possibly block the wind off the high winter plateau.  This, I knew was to certainly be the coldest section of our evening escapade.  It also posed another problem.  As we snaked around winding roads, cars started to pass us and we past other motorcycles. That didn’t bode well for me.  I was on paved road now but so were other cars who were flying by at night.  If anyone has ever ridden a motorcycle at night, you know that you aren’t exactly the center of attention on the road.  And out there in the middle of nowhere, people aren’t exactly taking a lot of pains to pay attention to a sputtering motorcycle on the side of the dark, unlit road.  

Another 15 or 20 minutes went by. My grip never loosened on that precious little hand rail next to me.  Then we turned off.  I sighed in relief.  We had not been hit by anything or been in any high speed accidents on the road.  Now we were surely close to Jeff’s village.  Or so I thought....

After relaxing a bit, I pondered our strange turn off.  There had been not a single road sign or marker where we exited the paved road.  This was all a vacuous space.  I don’t even think I saw an unpaved dirt road veering off at an angle.  The spot where Jeff turned off could have easily been 15 miles up or back down the road.  It was all just dark, frozen, lifeless dried grass coursing into bleak abysmal nothingness.  Yet he seemed to know the point with great specificity as if someone had given him directions and told him “Turn left at the only stop light in town onto Bell View Road”.

For one reason or another almost every other part of the drive made me nervous.  Either because of speed or other cars or terrain.  But here we just flew free in the grass lands and it was as flat a country as the middle of Kansas.  These were open, untamed prairie lands. I even peeled my cold hands off the metal rail behind me and let my hands flap beside me on either side like a hawk in flight looking for prey scurrying below under the starlight.  I could handle this.  It was liberating to feel the wind zip by my face and watch all the patches of grass blur by together in one Stygian streak.  

I was startled from my reverie after 15 or 20 minutes.  We drove around a sharp corner and crossed a dirt bridge.  On both sides of the motorcycle were drop-offs of several hundred feet. And there was no guardrail on either side of us.  We had now reached the edge of the plateau and were about to drop down 1,000 feet or more in a steep canyon.  If you have ever been to the Grand Canyon you know what this is like.  The road next to the Grand Canyon winds between chapparal and stubby junipers along a level plane.  You can imagine being out there and being one of the first pioneers traversing the high Arizona plains.  Bumbling through thick brush for hours, hacking their way through high grass on large open stretches.  Then suddenly they stumble through a clearing and are standing just feet from a vertical mile dropoff plummeting next to them. Absolutely harrowing.  

Now this canyon certainly was not as high as the Grand Canyon, but it produced the same effect when suddenly we left the unbroken pancake-flat scapes and started descending on a twisting dirt  road down into the belly of the beast.   

This was ultimately the last and most alarming of all the sections of our nocturnal journey.  We were most certainly on a 7-10% grade and every couple hundred feet we would switchback around steep turns.  Like the earlier bridge, there were no guardrails.  Only a few feet, littered with rock slide debris, stood between us and a long way down the canyon.   

Then the engine went off.  Jeff had turned the motorcycle off and we were coasting down in total silence down the serpentine bends.  Surely, he was a very good driver and had control of the motorcycle at all times over the rapid descent.  So he knew what he was doing.  But when the rumble of the doddery engine ended it fell like all control of the bike was gone.  I consciously still knew that the brakes still worked, but somehow I felt like a helpless little leaf being hurriedly driven down a waterfall.  The sinking road, barely visible in the poor light of the old headlights, was the river rushing beneath me. I did not know it was possible to do so, but my grip certainly tightened  until my fingers were totally deadlocked around those metal bars behind me.  I completely understood why I was the second or third white person to have ever visited this village in human history.  This was not easy to get to.  On the upside of the whole thing, I can say it most certainly enriched my pr@yer life.  

We  slanted around several hairpin turns and then I saw it.  There was a tractor - what they call a “tuolaji”- rumbling down the hill in front of us.  This was the same type of tractor Jeff’s sister had.  It was obviously a farmer returning back home for the night.  But the machine had no headlights.  While we spun down in eerie soundlessness, that driver plugged down in secret darkness.  We could only spot him ahead of us because of the moon and star light.  Passing the tractor seemed like it would be quite a feat.  It meant being forced -on a single  car wide canyon road- to one side, the side closest to the river below.  Dangerously close to the precipitous drop off.  All past a moving vehicle with no source of light to see us.  

I can’t remember if Jeff turned the engine back on or not. All I could think about was hoping to make it by the tractor in the razor thin area left on the road without being forced off it.  But I do remember the moment we glided by that black tractor.  I was soo happy to be by it!  I am positive I was upheld by @ngels the whole time - but especially in that moment!

With a few more turns we were down by the river!  All the tensioned poured out of my head and hands.  We were down that fearsome canyon, we had passed the tuolaji, we were almost home! Grateful did not begin to cover my emotions at the time!  

At this point, as I scooted back away from Jeff.  During the course of the ride I had gradually slid down the motorcycle until I was all over Jeff’s back.  I regained my sense of personal space and “man-dignity” and pressed back against the box behind me.  I also realized that my feet - even with two layers of super thick mountaineering wool socks on each - felt like ice cubes.  Being gripped against the metal bars on the bottom of the motorcycle for 1.5 hours, most of that time in nervous rigidity, had made them fall asleep and become numb in the windchill.  I moved them up and down a bit just to loosen up a bit and warm them.  

We drove along the gurgling moonlit river for some time past trees and grasses and then we pulled into Jeff’s countryside village. It was hard to see in the dark, but I could tell that we were navigating the labyrinthine network of some 100 mud home compounds that were hugged closely together.  Halfway into the heart of the village, I again had to dismount the motorcycle because the paths between the homes required some pretty acute skills to drive a motorcycle up and through the maze.  As I got off and shuffled behind Jeff, I could tell my legs were asleep and quite sore.  I finally caught up to him as he was opening a metal gate to enter his parent’s particular farmer mud compound home.  

This area - easily as big as a baseball infield- had it all.  It had a few pens to keep their family’s sheep and cows inside the walls.  It had a mud-spackled outhouse that housed two side by side holes in the ground.  And a courtyard surrounded in a square by several rooms and doors.   

We entered one of the main rooms and were immediately greeted by his excited and most welcoming family.  Inside the house was Jeff’s mom and dad, his sister and her new husband and a small child - which belonged to another one of Jeff’s sister.  In this culture it is very common for the grandparents to watch the grandkids in the younger toddler/baby years while both parents go off and work. 

It did feel good to warm up by the cast iron stove and drink some tea.  But then Jeff’s family offered us some Noodle soup.  We had just eaten before the motorcycle ride and after such a long ride I was ready to crash.  But I obliged because it would have been totally rude to have gone off to bed and not at least stayed and talked a few minutes.  I engaged a bit as they asked questions about America and my college life with Jeff.  But mentally all I could think about was being able to close my eyes and go to bed.

I managed to consume about half the bowl of soup and was totally full after it.  The worst part was that the soup was quite greasy and made with lots of fat. For them the fat is the best part and they do not cut it out or spare it as we would. This made it tasty but it gave me quite a bit of gas and really turned my stomach upside down.  My stomach was not used to such food! And that, in any T. home, is not a welcome feeling.  You see, T. people believe it is absolutely rude to fart.  It is the forbidden taboo.  You can burp or hiccup or cough and that is all just fine.  You can slurp your noodles and you are good.  But to break wind is the ultimate insult.  In 1.5 years spending a lot of time with T. nomads at lunch and at college and in their homes I have NEVER heard one of them emit even the faintest rectal sound.  This would be grievously embarrassing for them.  And, for me, upon meeting Jeff’s parents for the first time it would be horribly inappropriate to do such a thing considering their overgenerous hospitality to have me for a few days.  

So I held it in for all I was worth for more than a half hour!  The pressure kept building up and my stomach felt like it was about to explode.  I sat quietly and my stomach churned and murmured and complained as it twisted over itself in anxious knots.  This, coupled with the worn-down feeling after the motorcycle ride, made for a considerably uncomfortable evening. I endured the introductions  in politeness and civility and tried not to show what I was going through, but inside I was the poor victim of the medieval torture rack.   

Eventually as a gap in conversation presented itself, I excused myself to the outside squatty potty and as soon as the door was shut I let out the longest and bubbliest flatulence I have ever heard.  It was like a balloon popped and was whizzing around the courtyard releasing it’s contents.  It felt sooo good! My stomach unraveled and sank in heavenly relief!  

I returned from the outhouse and felt much better. And then headed to bed.  That night I slept with 2 huge blankets on me and was still cold.

The next day I awoke and ate breakfast with Jeff’s family.  After breakfast we let the sheep out and took them by a tributary of the canyon river we had passed the night before so they could drink and feed.  The next few days would be spent in and around that same home.  Jeff and I would explore the village for all it was worth.  We played some high altitude basketball on a dirt court with a deflated basketball.   We took a motorcycle ride down into some natural hot springs where the villagers took their yearly or bi-annual bath.  I even got to visit the village chief.  That was an amazing encounter to sit in his home and have tea with him and Jeff.  He brought out a tray full of yak meat - much of which still had little hairs sticking out of it- and I would cut it off with a steak knife and eat it with my hands.  Most of the time, I could not understand the conversation in T. language.  But the chief did eventually ask me what our Book said about sacrificing sheep.  He had heard that there was something in our worldview that promoted that.  I told all about the Passover lamb and the old sacrifices and how Dad had given himself once and for all as the last Lamb.  This was good news for the chief because they view killing animals as a great sin.  And it made for an interesting conversation.  It was a great honor to be in that house.   He was a noble man and was very kind to me. He presented me with a gift of candy wrapped in a sacred white scarf as I left.  I had nothing to give him except an old token from America:  an old 50 cent piece I had carried in my wallet for some time.

Over the few days, my stomach adjusted better to the food.  And it was fun to see what farmer and nomad life was really like.  I consider it to have been a great distinction to have been one of the first white people to have ever visited Jeff’s family and his village. It was a great way to spend part of my spring break!  And, after it all,  the ride back up the canyon wasn’t quite as terrifying as the ride down in the dark :) We drove up the canyon and as we pulled back onto the paved road, the bus pulled up out of the middle of nowhere and I dashed on with my bags and several loafs of bread Jeff’s mom had made for me as a parting gift.  It was perfect timing.  Two hours and I would be back in our city of 2 million. And thus I was transported back to the 21st century.