The Lair
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My family was able to spend several days living in the home village of a Tibetan family in the Himalayan foothills due to a combination of our enthusiasm for adventure and the guidance of a friend. Before commencing on our journey, it was agreed that our purpose would be to avoid giving offense due to cultural differences or personal inconvenience, concentrate on affirmative relationships with our hosts, learn as much as possible about their way of life and, perhaps most importantly, enjoy the process of shared learning. As in any of our adventures, we approached this particularly unfamiliar one with an appropriate amount of caution, as well as a great deal of quiet respect for the people whose lives we wished to briefly share. Our five-hour drive to northwest Yunnan Province in April 2002 took us down unmarked mountain roads at such speeds and with the revelation of such views as to make our hearts stutter. The keen bite of risks embraced and the thrill of a new journey was in all of us, with the exception of those who had eaten a hearty breakfast! For a while the makeshift road ran along narrow valleys that scythed and hacked their way through walls of rock, our progress hampered by old mudslides and the occasional road-crossing stream. Air temperatures chilled with elevations approaching 11,000 feet and, as we reached for warmer gear, we began noting strikingly different architectural styles - in particular the varying fence designs and hay-drying racks that towered above the fields, as well as rooftops pinned down by stones against impetuously grabby winds. The land where our host family lived, an hour northwest of Zhongdian, was a flat pocket valley enclosed by glorious snow-showered mountains.
The matriarch of our host family, a squat woman with a brown weatherworn face, a friendly smile, and eyes that disclosed much wisdom, gave hearty welcome and led us through her home-fortress. Constructed around an open, square, thick walled stone courtyard - where a chained five-month-old dog barked at us in warning - the entire first level housed domestic animals, including a rooster and chickens, a bristly dark boar and a baby yak kicking his heels up in the awkward manner of youth. Upstairs was a large smoke-blackened communal room with low ceilings, an open hole in the roof to vent cook fire smoke, one thick center structural post, brass ladles hooked to a string to dangle above a corner cooking table, no electrical lighting, and lard and meat waiting on a rack at head-height above the cooking coals and kettles. The patriarch, who was a lean, bald man with dark and amused eyes, introduced us to his daughter - a handsome mother wearing traditional clothes with wind-chapped cheeks - and a few others. They were oblivious of inadvertently introducing us to their society as well as their home. In the beginning, there were many embarrassed smiles and stymied attempts to communicate. Our Tibetan hosts could not speak Mandarin, the only Chinese dialect we knew, but our mutual interest in each other soon relaxed into warming smiles, eliciting laughter when our exchanges of gestures and words went awry. They shared ripe yak cheese, eaten with sprinkled sugar, which had a sharp, almost soured flavor and a squeaky texture on our teeth, requiring determined optimism to enjoy. Numerous cups of Tibetan butter tea, a calorie-rich necessity in such a perennially cold climate, were handed around. Unlike the standard fare sold in tourist cafes, this broth was thick and salty, hot and pleasant. We were shown how to toss spoonfuls of a variety of wheat flour to the back our throats prior to sipping, and to distract me from my resulting fit of coughing, I was served a type of home-distilled rice vodka. That first night was one of shared goodwill and laughter, and in the dancing of the soft firelight, life seemed comfortable and rich.
I was soon to learn that every grain of comfort was hard-won. Although laughingly reluctant at first, the matriarch and her daughter Jiejie (“older sister”) allowed me to become their shadow, and so I launched myself into their lives as their humble student. Small tasks, such as unsaddling several small community horses, feeding the animals and carting in stacks of wood for the voracious cook fires, soon gave way to more important duties. One of the most challenging tasks I undertook was hauling water from the communal mountain spring. Men usually carry water in two large buckets suspended from a wooden pole slung over one shoulder, while using the other hand to maintain a steady balance; women employ a single large bucket, propped on their lower backs by one strap and a fine sense of balance. Quite bluntly, as a novice I lacked the fine sense of balance, and my first tentative attempts with the water bucket attracted a crowd, including several ladies who were quick to lend helpful advice and bright chatter. I admit to relief that I could not understand all of their comments! While the weight of the water itself wasn’t excessive, I discovered that the real trick in the ostensible simplicity of not spilling a drop was in balance and rhythm. The expertise of Jiejie made a complex activity appear triflingly simple to master! Several trips in a light snowfall and a drenched back later proved the importance of careful water rationing to minimize the number of trips to the community spring. Often Jiejie, her long black braid tucked into her waistband, became my willing instructor in food preparation, such as the steamed rolls eaten for lunch and the making of Tibetan butter tea. On our last day, she hooked a blunt scythe to her belt, gestured for me to follow, and started up into the high hills. A fresh mountain wind accompanied us all during the long, hazardous trek along a treacherous goat trail across the steep, barren face of a high hill. As soon as we reached an area covered with the same species of short, spiky bushes I had cursed the day before for several scratches, Jiejie pulled a protective glove onto her left hand, laid a long rope along the ground and began hacking at the bases of the bushes with expert flicks of her scythe. Stack upon stack upon stack, Jiejie kept resolutely at work while I watched, wide-eyed at the growing volume of kindling. I volunteered my help, but it wasn’t until I attempted emulating her actions that I understood her grinning skepticism! Together we constructed a second, and much smaller, bundle for myself, and tightly compressed both bundles in turn with the rope and Jiejie’s belt. Plodding down the steep, gravel-littered slope with bulky, cumbersome prickly brush lashed to my back, the wind now threatening to overbalance me, I learned the required style of maneuvering through sheer necessity, shifting my center of gravity by bending forward at the waist and carefully following Jiejie’s footprints. Hailing shouts, and my brother’s jests that I carried Pluto next to Jiejie’s Jupiter, greeted our return.
Although our departure was sorrowful, we parted with gifts of less substance but far more value than the yak cheese and mountain tea leaves in our pockets. Before our visit, their lives seemed undemanding and, due to our naïveté, even quite exciting. Upon reflection, that view was very unrealistic. Their sheer physical struggle to survive was enough to make young Jiejie look much older than her actual years, and every day brought a new struggle to ensure the availability of minimum nutrition; risk of sickness or accident could be catastrophic in such a remote and poor community with virtually no modern medical infrastructure. Their hardiness is a Darwinian consequence of meeting those challenges, and our memories of their good natures invite our early return to their friendship.
