Raymond Barnett

The Three Stooges in China:  Pursuing the Sacred Mountain in 1984

A True Record of an Actual Journey

 

 

By Raymond Barnett

www.raymondbarnett.com

 

For Kyle and AJ: Sacred mountain, Sacred friendships

 

The Three Stooges:

 

Ray.  The Professor

          Chinese History and Language at Yale.

          Duke PhD in Biology; has taught at CA State Univ., Chico for 8 years

 

AJ.  The Rebel

          American Studies at Yale; lives in Kyoto; travels Asia studying Qi Gong body work

 

Kyle.  The Adventurer

          Studet of Ray t Chico State; avid world traveler; handsome and sunny

 

The setting:  China, spring 1984

          Eight years after Mao's death and end of Cultural Revolution

          Kyle and Ray return to China for first yeear IIndependent Travelers permitted..

          Their goal: travelf "with the people" to Szechuan's Emei Shan: the sacred mountain

 

 

 

 

Chapter Six:  Second Temple on the Mountain: Monsoons and Dried

Snakeskins to the Bathing Elephant Temple

 

          The storm grew in intensity during the night.  Wind howling down the corridor awoke Ray once, not long after he had fallen asleep.  He lay there, listening to the whoosh of the wind, which nearly drowned out the chiming of the frogs.  The sweet smell of rain mingled with the remnant of the smell of Kyle's candle.  The sound of water cascading off the roof and being blown back onto the balustrade in the corridor was very loud also, seemingly next to him, in the room.  He drifted back to sleep.

 

Bam!  Bam!  Two loud noises woke Ray.  The sound was coming from the corridor.  He pushed the mosquito netting aside and got out of bed, the floor wet and cold on his bare feet.  He groped his way across the room.  As he neared the door, a dim light reflecting down the corridor from the temple showed their hinged window blowing in the wind.  It blew shut again, with another Bam!  He quickly reached out and secured the clasp to keep it shut.

 

Looking out the window, Ray noticed the T-shirt Kyle had washed and hung up to dry was now lying crumpled on the corridor floor.  He opened the door, retrieved the T-shirt, and draped it across the chair beside the desk.  Closing the door, he listened briefly to the roar of the water dripping outside.  Strange.  Even with the door closed, the sound of dripping was still loud.  He turned toward the sound.  Inside the room.  He groped toward it, and found himself touching the third, empty bed.  Well, not quite empty. His daypack sat on the bed.  In approximately eighteen inches of water, which was pouring down onto the daypack from the ceiling above. 

 

"Oh, hell!"  He snatched the daypack off the bed.  Too late, by far.  The daypack and all its contents—everything he had on the mountain save the T-shirt he was wearing—was completely soaked, having sat in water for several hours.  He groped on the desk top for candle and matches.  The light revealed the grim situation.  His passport, his traveler checks, his camera, clothes, sweater, long-johns—everything was soaked, cold and clammy.  He stood there for a solid minute, absorbing the situation. 

 

Kyle stirred.  "What's up, Ray?" 

Ray couldn't answer.

"Ray?" 

 

He roused himself.  "A leak above the other bed.  My daypack has been sitting in a lake all night." 

Kyle laughed.  Then caught himself. 

"How much of a lake?"

"A couple of inches more than the height of the pack." 

"Oh, no."

Ray nodded his head.  "Where's your daypack?" he enquired, looking around the floor. 

Kyle cleared his throat.  "Uh, not long after you came to bed, I heard rain blowing into the room through the window.  I hauled my daypack into bed with me." 

Ray nodded miserably. 

"Didn't dream that there was a leak over the other bed," Kyle added.

 

Ray nodded.  "Me neither."

"Everything soaked?"

"Yup."  He roused himself, and opened the daypack.  Pulled out the passport and travelers checks, shook what water he could off them, and spread them out on a dry corner of the desk.  He hung his own soaked camera in its case from the chair.  Then he got to his clothes, soggy and cold.  With a "Goddammit" he shoved them back into the daypack, put it on the desk, and stumbled back to his bed.  Ray heard the temple bells at four, five, and six.  In the faint light he noticed it was now only lightly misting outside.  He forced himself out of bed and stood shivering on the wet floor in the early morning coolness.  Kyle was still fast asleep, clutching his daypack with his warm, dry clothing and gear. 

 

Ray turned to his daypack on the desk and removed the sweater he had been carrying all over China for a month so he could wear it on chilly days like this on the mountain.  He wrung the cold water out of it and stretched it over his quilt.  No chance of it drying on a cloudy day.  He knew with certainty that there wasn't an electric clothes dryer for fifty miles.  Maybe a hundred.  He sighed deep, and shivered in the cold.  Next came his long-john tops, his polo shirt.  Same story. 

 

As he stood there in the faint light it sunk in with vengeance that the only thing he owned that was dry or likely to be dry for weeks was the T-shirt he had slept in.  That he was several thousand feet high on a mountain and would climb thousands of feet higher in the next several days, with temperature decreasing as he climbed.  And that his companions had no extra clothing to loan him from their few clothes in their daypacks. 

 

Kyle awoke.  He glanced at the wet clothes strung round the room, at the passport and travelers checks spread on the desk.     "Wow," he muttered.  "Damn tough luck." 

Ray nodded grimly.  "Let's go get some hot food," he proposed. 

 

Thirty minutes later they were sitting in the refectory with AJ and Ralph, Ray shivering in wet pants and socks and his polo shirt. 

Ray eagerly shoveled the hot rice gruel into his mouth, feeling only slightly warmed as it went down.  The rest of the breakfast consisted of pickled vegetables and hot tea plus a couple of boiled duck eggs from Ray's own stores. 

"So what are you going to do?" Ralph asked wide-eyed, as Ray tersely recounted his tale of bad luck. 

 

Ray looked at him with half a duck egg sticking out of his mouth. 

"Do?" he mumbled.

"I mean, it'll be cold higher up the mountain.  It's cold here," he informed Ray earnestly. 

Ray paused.  "Ralph," he said with a wry smile.  "I ain't on a sacred mountain every day."

"But, but," Ralph spluttered.  "You'll freeze to death." 

Ray shook his head.  "I'll keep moving, and you guys will just keep stuffing duck eggs in me." 

Laughs and cheers from the other Two Stooges.  AJ reached over and slapped Ray on the back encouragingly, then grimaced and dried his hand on his jeans.

 

Ralph shrugged, and resumed playing with his pickled vegetables.  He uttered his first complaint of the day, about the weirdness of Chinese breakfasts.  Quickly followed by another about the temple's lack of shower facilities, not to mention running water.

"But Ralph, if there was running water, there would be no Heavenly Chambermaid bringing buckets of water to our rooms," Kyle pointed out in mock earnestness 

"So what?" Ralph countered sourly, continuing to poke at his pickled vegetables.

 

Kyle and AJ looked hard at Ralph.  Not joining in the banter was one thing.  Not appreciating the Heavenly Chambermaid was another altogether, roughly equivalent to questioning the cult of the Virgin Mary at a Catholic retreat. 

 

They all finished breakfast, then hurried back to their rooms, stopping at the Marvelous Outhouse with a view.  While there, Kyle had occasion to develop a Zen koan, or question to ponder: "What is the sound of one chopstick falling twelve feet into two feet of shit?" 

They commiserated over Kyle's loss of the chopstick.  The local places where they ate did not serve separate, packaged chopsticks to the customers, of course. Rather, a gourd or bamboo section containing community chopsticks was nailed to a post, and the customers simply picked two from the container.  Presumably they were washed before being put back in the container.  But still, they had thought it prudent to carry and use their own chopsticks.  Kyle, unfortunately, was one chopstick short, now. 

 

By the time they returned to their rooms, the early morning mist had thinned out, so the sky was only cloudy.  The Heavenly Chambermaid was coming down the steps as they approached, brightening the day briefly.  As they packed in their room, Kyle shook himself out of his appreciation of the Heavenly Chambermaid and looked over to Ray.

"You gonna be all right, Ray?" he asked seriously.  Kyle knew from long experience that, being thin with a high metabolic rate, Ray became cold easily, and always wore several layers—dry layers—more than anyone else.  Until today. 

Ray shrugged.  "I think so, friend.  So long as I keep moving and shoving duck eggs and tea down."

 

Ray shook his head, then laughed, with his second wry smile of the morning.  He didn't judge his predicament to be life threatening, with the sky clearing up.  In gathering resolution to meet the challenge, he felt a rising tide of happiness creeping over himself.

Kyle looked over suspiciously as Ray soon collapsed laughing into the chair before the desk.  "Ray?"

Ray hefted his daypack.  "In addition to everything else, I now have to carry a daypack weighing about twice as much as it did yesterday."

Kyle nodded.  "Wet sand versus dry sand." 

 

"Not only heavier, but the clothing more bulky.  I can't fit everything into the daypack now," he observed with a bitter little laugh.

Kyle tossed over a white plastic bag from his daypack.  Ray stuffed the extra-bulky clothing articles into it, passed the end of his dragon walking cane through the bag's handles, and hoisted it over his shoulder. 

"The game's foot," he quipped, attempting a grin but failing. 

 

Kyle raised his eyebrows, and hefted his daypack with a grunt.  They waited fifteen minutes for AJ and Ralph to finish packing, then set up the trail toward the Xi Xiang "Elephant Bathing" temple several thousand feet up the mountain.  They were all in in spirits, Ralph excepted, as they began.  Ray's white polo shirt almost seemed to be drying a bit—if not sunny, at least it wasn't raining.  The Three Stooges put Ralph to good use taking photos of them beginning their serious ascent of the sacred mountain.

    

The trail was thronged with Chinese of all ages.  Young children scampered by them laughing and shoving.  Middle-aged folks climbed with a brisk pace, joking constantly.  Hardly any of them wore packs of any sort.  Presumably they were on just a one- or two-day outing and needed nothing more than a roof and some food.  The Three Stooges were the object of many startled stares as they were passed, but mostly the stares were replaced by smiles and friendly jokes.  These folks may be pilgrims, but they were none of them grim.  One old lady passed them at a rapid clip, as she was being carried up the mountain in a heavy wood chair by four hefty young men.  During the day some half dozen such were seen.

 

As they ascended, more varied shops appeared along the trail.  Instead of just tea, soda, and duck eggs, they now offered various types each of dried fungi, bark, roots, stones, dried snakes, leaves, shriveled monkey paws and skulls.  Ray chatted with the vendors, and learned that different mixtures of these items were boiled to provide tonic drinks to fortify the pilgrims on their journey.  He purchased a monkey skull for his museum back home. 

 

Halfway through the morning showers returned, and then serious rain.  Soon they were hiking through the first monsoon downpour of the season.  Ray had seen it rain harder only once in his life, also a monsoon, in Vietnam his second day in country, in 1969.  His polo shirt, which had nearly dried in the early morning, had become wet with sweat as the climb progressed, so that now everything he wore and owned was sopping wet in the heavy rain.  The rain jackets and ponchos of Kyle and AJ and Ralph soon revealed themselves as not remotely adequate for a monsoon.  Within a minute of the monsoon's onslaught all of them were soaked, rain running down their daypacks in torrents, shoes filled with water.  The others were hoping that unlike Ray, the clothes in their daypacks might stay dry. 

 

Reactions to all this varied.  Ralph, of course, increased the vehemence of his complaints.  He was thoroughly miserable, and doing his level best to spread his feelings.  Kyle could not tolerate Ralph's attitude, and his annoyance soon veered toward anger.  In addition, a rash in Kyle's groin worsened as the day progressed, making every stride painful, although only later did they learn of this.  Meanwhile, Aj's aching knees worsened, so Ray stayed behind with him while Kyle and Ralph went on ahead, sparks flying between them. 

 

Shortly after noon, AJ and Ray caught up with Kyle and Ralph, who were glaring at each other on the side of the trail.  As they came up to them, Ralph held out his hand.  "I'll take my bus tickets back now," he snarled.  "I can't find any butterflies in all this rain.  I'm going somewhere sunny, wherever it may be."  He stretched his hand out further and shook it.

 

"You're leaving?" Ray asked.  "Just like that?"

"Give me my bus tickets," Ralph repeated grimly. 

"Why, sure," Ray replied.  He dug them out of his daypack, and handed them over.  "Good luck," he said, though without much enthusiasm. 

Ralph turned and was off—going down the mountain. 

 

The Three Stooges shrugged their shoulders, and resumed the march up the trail.  For some reason, as AJ and Kyle joined Ray in becoming increasingly and then completely wet in the pelting rain, their spirits rose.  Go figure.  Perhaps they had lost their last craving, that for warmth and dryness, and so achieved liberation from all worldly concerns.  Perhaps they had developed a fever and accompanying dementia.  Whatever, by noon they were in unaccountably high spirits, limping (AJ) and ambling (Kyle and Ray) along the trail singing songs and greeting all they encountered with smiles and courteous bows.  Never had the world seemed more glorious, colors brighter, air sweeter than today. 

 

With Ralph departed, The Three Stooges were once again—well, three stooges.  Simple.  Oblivious perhaps.  Foolish, perhaps.  Stumbling in and out of trouble.  The Three Stooges.

 

Surprisingly, virtually all they passed coming up or down the mountain seemed to agree that the day was glorious.  Their Chinese fellow-pilgrims were not the least bit miserable that they could tell.  Perhaps the monsoon had not surprised them at all, and their flimsy clear plastic raingear was effective.  Evidently the three foreign devils were the only pilgrims on the entire mountain unprepared and soaked. 

 

So the afternoon passed.  The rain poured heavily the rest of the day.  AJ and Ray stopped often, to rest his knees and purchase more eggs and hot tea for Ray.  Kyle was soon ahead of the others on the trail again.  They met him at a spot that passed through a troupe of monkeys—finally the Emei Shan monkeys they'd been warmed about!  There were some dozen of them, Rhesus macaques, and most stayed in the tree branches and chattered at them as they walked by.  A few dropped down and rushed toward various pilgrims, making swiping grabs at pockets and bags.  Some of their Chinese colleagues laughingly tossed peanuts at them, quickly pounced upon by the mischievous beggars.  It struck The Three Stooges that at four feet tall and nearly a hundred pounds of pure muscle, the beggars could readily become more than mischievous.

 

By late afternoon The Three Stooges had dragged their way up a particularly long, steep, grueling incline and could dimly make out the Bathing Elephant temple, about halfway up the mountain, looming before them in the heavy rain.  They passed into a large room serving as the administrative center.  A long, a very long line, of Chinese turned their dark eyes on them as they limped in. 

 

The line began at the little window where one obtained lodging, and snaked around the room and out the open back of the entrance.  It seemed to The Three Stooges that every eye was full of the same question.  Do the foreign devils claim special privilege and barge to the front of the line?  Aren't we just as tired and wet as they are?  At the same time, The Three Stooges reflected that everyone else in line had indeed climbed just as far in the same weather as they had.  Ray wearily handed his daypack and plastic bag to Kyle, and trudged to the back of the line.  Kyle took his daypack off his back and shoved it and Ray's in the corner where he and AJ slumped to the floor, admitting they were exhausted. 

 

As the storm raged outside, a fierce wind ripped through the temple, howling in the open front and screaming out the open back of the room.  It cut right through the line of people, cold and insistent.  Ray of course was completely soaked, wearing only his ineffective rain jacket.  The long line moved at a snail's pace.  After a minute he was shivering.  Five minutes stretched to ten, ten to twenty, and he was not halfway there.  Soon his body was twitching as the shivers escalated.  His former high spirits were shattered thirty minutes into the wait, as he got within sight of the window. 

 

Another ten minutes later he finally arrived.  He croaked, in wretched Chinese, "Four people.  Two rooms."  The clerk at the window shoved a receipt through the window, which was caught by the wind and fluttered wildly off the counter.  Ray grabbed at it stiffly, missing it by a mile. The person behind him in line snagged it and gave it to him.  Turning, he heard the clerk barking something at him.  "Wu kuai chyan!" he demanded.  Of course.  Ray dug into his pockets and shoved five yuan of coins into the window.  The clerk nodded gruffly and looked past him to the next in line. 

 

"Where is the room?" Ray asked in stuttering Chinese.  The clerk impatiently reeled off directions in rapid tones.  Not a single word penetrated Ray's numbed mind.  "Please repeat," he asked.  The clerk repeated, even more rapidly.  Ray shook his head.  "I don't understand."  The clerk exhaled in anger as the people behind them began to murmur angrily.  He glared at Ray for a moment, then turned and angrily barked something at a person behind him in the small room.  Brusquely he gestured for Ray to get out of the way.  Ray glared suspiciously at him.  Again he gestured for him to clear out.  A side door opened, and a fellow emerged from it and jerked his head for them to follow. 

 

Ray yelled to Kyle and AJ, and they all stumbled after the fellow, who quickly disappeared out a side door.  He led them through a courtyard, up stone steps, across a second courtyard, down a long, low-ceilinged corridor, turned right across a third courtyard, up more steps, along the edge of yet another courtyard, through a moon gate into a very weathered, indeed dilapidated building evidently pressed into service only because of the crush of pilgrims, down a dark interior corridor, around a corner, to—one room.  One small room, with two beds.

 

Ray asked the guide where the other room was.  He pointed brusquely to the two beds.  Ah.  They were to share the beds between the three of them.  Ray told him they wished another room.  Not possible, he was told.  Too many other people.  Ray pointed to AJ.  Too large.  Ray pointed to the three packs.  Much too large to fit into the one room.  As the guide shrugged and made to leave, Ray detained him.  Wasn't there another room they could use?  Anything.  The man shook his head in disgust, but gestured them to follow him.  Three rooms down he unlocked a door and opened it.  This room was even smaller than the first, some four feet wide.  It had one bed crammed between the walls.  He defied them to accept it.  Ray stuffed another five yuan of coins into his hand, and he left, shaking his head in disgust. 

 

AJ got the small room with the marginally better mattress, such as it was, due to the throbbing pain in his knees.  Ray and Kyle would share the other room.  As they inspected their new quarters, all agreed that they were the first filthy accommodations they had seen in nearly two months in China.

 

They decided to meet in the larger room in an hour for dinner.  All but Ray discovered some mainly dry clothing in their daypacks, settled in under the quilts, and in five minutes were finally warm and dry, for the first time in ten hours.  Sleep came quickly.  Two hours later they gathered in the larger room.  Ray slapped his wet, clammy clothes back on.  They located an outhouse not far from the rooms, utilized it, and agreed that it held not a candle to The Marvelous Outhouse with a View.  Uncertainly they retraced their circuitous path to the main building. 

 

Ray got directions to the refectory.  On the way they passed a little shop.  Kyle spotted a bottle which appeared to be liquor, which gave forth strong fumes when opened.  Happily he purchased it and took a swig to warm his insides.  The clerk's eyes bulged wide as he saw Kyle swigging the stuff straight.  Kyle gasped and choked, wheezed and coughed, and in a squeaky voice pronounced it just what the doctor ordered.  He offered it to the others.  AJ and Ray took small, cautious sips, and returned the bottled with stinging eyes to Kyle, who happily took another large swig. 

 

They dashed to the refectory through the still-heavy rain.  The huge room was packed and noisy.  They ordered the set dinner, and were served plates of fiery chilis fried in oil, with bamboo shoots.  They ate until they were genuinely afraid of vomiting, which didn't take much.  The food, like their rooms, was the first truly bad stuff they'd encountered in China.  Mouths afire, they dashed back to the temple complex, bought several bottles of beer at the little shop, got lost trying to find their rooms, but finally stumbled onto them.  They sat in the larger room swilling the beer as they devoured the remaining eggs and peanuts from their packs. 

 

Kyle discovered another use for the strong liquor he had bought.  Having confiscated one of the community chopsticks from the refectory, he dipped the new one into the liquor bottle, balanced it on the back of a chair, and put a match to it.  The chopstick burst into intense flames briefly, then sputtered out.  Kyle repeated the operation several more times, then declared the chopstick disinfected and put it into his pack with his old one—now part of a happy pair.

         

During one last trip to their new outhouse through the rain, they discovered a quaint feature.  Due to its location jutting over a side of the mountain given to updrafts, it was impossible to drop your toilet paper through the hole in the floor when you finished with it.  The wind whipped it straight back up and it slapped against your bottom and stubbornly refused to budge.  Several attempts at disposing of the paper proved unsuccessful. 

 

After a considerable amount of laughter verging dangerously on hysteria, the Three Stooges sat there in a row, considering what to do.  They finally resorted to carrying the used toilet paper outside and letting the updraft take it where it would.  At last they hurried back to their rooms through the storm, and snuggled under the quilts, all but Ray reveling in dry clothing. 

 

Outside, in the hallway, their fellow pilgrims played cards and joked noisily late into the night.  Many of them slept there.  And beyond the hallway, the monsoon raged into the night, as The Three Stooges dreamed of the other temple below them on the mountain, and more congenial days there. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Seven:  Down the Mountain: Monkeys and Flying Chopsticks

 

          They were awakened early in the morning by the noise of pilgrims in the hallway gathering their things and leaving.  Kyle staggered to his feet, grabbed his rain coat, and headed for the door outside.  Emerging from it, he saw three large and wet monkeys scamper across the courtyard.  Interesting.  Reaching the outhouse, he peered inside, and to his relief found only humans there.  Well, sort of.  The other Two Stooges peered up at him.

 

"No more fried chilis for me, Bro," groaned AJ.  

Ray, beside him, weakly agreed.

 

Some minutes later they all emerged, disposed of their toilet paper, and returned to the residential quarters.  They surprise two monkeys pulling on the door latch into the building, looking very miserable and hungry.  They frightened the monkeys off with yells, although one of them grabbed Ray's jacket as he opened the door behind Kyle and AJ.  Ray jerked the jacket out of its hands and slammed the door shut behind him.

 

They quickly packed in their separate rooms.  The sound of breaking glass came from the corridor, and then the patter of naked feet scampering down the hallway.  Screams from the few Chinese still lingering there.  Kyle and Ray burst into AJ's room and slammed the door. 

 

"Jesus!  Those little bastards are ransacking the rooms!" yelled Kyle.

"We're going to have to fight our way out, Bro," AJ declared to Ray, a light gleaming in his eyes.  He hefted his bamboo walking stick. 

Ray grabbed his dragon cane and held it toward AJ.  "I christen this stick 'Monkey Killer!"

AJ grinned, and held his cane to Ray.  "Anthropoid Agony!"

Kyle looked about for a weapon, and settled on his heavy flash attachment.  "I'll sacrifice this to the cause," he pledged.  "We'll taste monkey blood this morning," he promised the other Stooges, with a manic grin.  "Come on!" 

 

They glanced at each other, shouldered their daypacks, clutched their weapons, and opened the door.  The hallway was clear.  They walked over the broken glass and to the outside door.  Another glance among The Three Stooges, then Kyle threw open the door and they charged with a shout into the courtyard, monkey weapons held high. 

 

There they encountered a dozen Chinese soldiers lining the pathway to the main temple complex, busily engaged in scaring away an aggressive troupe of perhaps two dozen monkeys.  They (the soldiers, that is) looked around at The Three Stooges, staring at their raised sticks and camera gear.  Stupidly The Three Stooges stared back, lowered their monkey weapons, and sheepishly walked through the courtyard between the two lines of soldiers.  A few other pilgrims scurried out of the building behind them, and one of the soldiers shut the door and slammed a lock on it.  The soldiers closed around them and kept the monkeys at bay. 

 

As the Three Stooges emerged from the front of the temple minutes later, it was raining hard still.  They could see perhaps thirty yards, then everything shaded into gray.

 

"Which direction, Bro?" AJ asked, with a look at Kyle, then Ray. 

Kyle shifted under the weight of his daypack.  "Won't be much to see at the top of the mountain," he judged.  "Probably considerably less than we can see here." 

 

A pause. 

"How far to the top, Ray?" asked AJ.

Ray pulled his map out, shading it from the rain with his body. "About as far as we came yesterday." 

 

Another pause.  The Three Stooges looked at each other in silence.  Clearly they were not having fun. 

 

After yet another pause, Ray looked to AJ.  "AJ, is all of a sacred mountain sacred, or just the top?"

AJ considered it, then smiled.  "All of it, Bro." 

Ray nodded.  "So…so we've already done it?  Reached the sacred mountain?"

 

Kyle and AJ looked at each other, then slowly broke into broad grins.  "Hey!  You've mean we've done it?" asked Kyle.

"I guess!" answered AJ.  "We've done it!"

 

The Three Stooges laughed, and exchanged high fives, beaming, standing in the middle of the heavy rain.

"Well, hell," Kyle burst out.  "The Inn of the Heavenly Chambermaid is still on the bloody mountain," he said with a grin.  "And besides, I miss the Marvelous Outhouse With a View." 

The other Two Stooges nodded in mock seriousness. 

"And the weather ain't going to get any better here," Kyle concluded.  He turned and took off down the path back.  Aj and Ray brought up the rear. 

 

AJ's knees were worse today, going down, than going up.  And the stone steps seemed more slippery.  AJ and Ray walked through the heavy rain in silence, watching their steps carefully, the high spirits of yesterday returning a bit.  Their thoughts centered on the relatively luxurious rooms awaiting them at the Heavenly Chambermaid Inn, on sitting in the corridor and conversing pleasantly.  On buckets of hot water.  On the Heavenly Chambermaid…   

 

Soon they passed the same troupe of monkeys as yesterday.  Their behavior was not much different than yesterday, but today they seemed less like mischievous imps and more like coarse gangsters.  As they passed them without incident, all were keenly disappointed not have been able to brain a monkey that day.

 

AJ's knees were worse than ever by now.  He had already twisted an ankle in a near fall, and so it was slow going.  Kyle could not brook the pace, and soon was out of sight ahead of them.  As they descended the mountain the rain grew less heavy, and in another hour they were under blessedly clear skies—clear!  Sunshine was bursting upon them!  The Inn of the Heavenly Chambermaid could not be far ahead.  Soon they recognized the stream that rushed to the temple below their old rooms. 

 

Another turn in the trail revealed Kyle sitting on a flat rock, writing in his journal, a crowed of Chinese children gathered around him.  Kyle never failed to interest children.  He stood and joined the other Stooges as they hobbled up to him.  AJ announced that now the temple was in sight, he could go no further without a rest while Kyle and Ray went on ahead.  As they left, AJ eased himself onto the rock with an immense groan.  The children happily again gathered around the auburn-haired giant foreign devil, but several feet further away than for Kyle. 

 

Their hearts were high in the sunshine as Kyle and Ray entered the familiar compound of the Inn of the Heavenly Chambermaid.  At the refectory, Ray attempted to explain to the (new) female clerk that they wanted a room and were three of them, but one of them was not here because he had hurt his knees and would join them soon.  Since Ray never learned the Chinese for "knee," he talked about "one-half leg" instead.  The clerk listened to him for perhaps thirty seconds then cut him off with a raised hand. 

 

"It would be better if you speak English," she suggested in very passable English.  Behind Ray, Kyle burst into laughter and collapsed into a fortunately-nearby chair, still laughing. 

 

"Yes.  We need a room for three.  By the way, is it possible to have lunch now?"

"Lunch is served from twelve to one.  Too late," she replied.          

"Yes.  We apologize for being late.  But we had no breakfast.  Monkeys up the mountain.  We are very hungry."

 

She stared at Ray for a moment, then left her little cubicle and walked to the kitchen.  After a short, animated exchange she walked out, ignoring Ray until she was back in her own cubicle and "official." 

 

"In half an hour?"  she asked. 

Ray nodded eagerly.  "Yes.  Yes, thanks so much.  Very kind of you." 

She nodded back, and suppressed a small smile.

 

AJ limped in fifteen minutes later.  Their room turned out to be AJ and Ralph's former room—whose beds did not leak.  Soon they were back in the empty refectory, arranged around a table close to the kitchen, chopsticks in hand, very hungry.  The door opened, and a fellow emerged with a large pot of tea, three cups, and two steaming dishes.  Shredded pork with onions, and green beans with diced beef.  He set them on the table, and before he made it to the kitchen three pairs of chopsticks plunged into the dishes.  It was like the feeding frenzy of a school of sharks, pausing only to guzzle cup after cup of the hot tea.

 

Only minutes later the cook approached with another dish, fried duck eggs topped with granular sugar.  More flying chopsticks.  The Three Stooges were all smiles as he left, and complimented him extravagantly on the food, which was indeed very tasty.  AJ requested bottles of beer.  The large bottles.  Soon he returned with the beer and two more dishes, thousand-year eggs in soy sauce with pickled loquats, and stir-fried celery with beef slices. 

 

The feeding frenzy resumed, chopsticks darting into the dishes with lightning speed.  The Three Stooges were in high spirits.  A majority of them were warm and dry, they were stuffing their bellies with incredibly delicious food, they had large bottles of beer to wash down the food, and soon the Heavenly Chambermaid would bring buckets of hot water to their rooms as they sat happily in their old corridor. 

 

This surely was a sacred mountain.

 

But then!  As they were imagining all this happiness to come, the cook emerged yet again, with a dish of sliced pork and cucumber topped by scrambled egg, and a white cabbage soup with pork slices floating in it.  He gave each of them small bowls and left a ladle in the soup.  They all looked at him in grateful wonder, and thanked him profusely.  He nodded curtly, with a hint of pride, and returned to the kitchen. 

 

They were already full to bursting, but courtesy to their host demanded that they do their level best to finish the latest dishes.  They grimly set to, and by dint of heroic effort were able to dispose of nearly all the pork, cucumber, and egg, and over half the soup.  Somebody had to do it. 

 

Groggy and full to bursting, they sat there in a stupor.  Ray ordered another pot of tea, on a tray, with cups.  Kyle discovered the bill that the cook had slipped onto the table.  Ten yuan for the six dishes, soup, and beer.  Four and a half dollars for three of them.  A buck and a half for each of them.  They left twelve yuan on the table. 

 

Tea tray in hand, The Three Stooges walked slowly back toward their rooms, but followed a side trail to a ridiculously beautiful red-tiled pavilion, perched with a narrow bridge over the now-rushing stream, surging water surrounding the pavilion.  Sunshine filtered through the trees overhead and shone on The Three Stooges in the pavilion, and the water glittered as it rushed by. 

 

They sat in silence, sipping their tea, listening to the sound of the rushing water.  They were thinking of what would happen day after tomorrow, at the Chengdu airport.  AJ would leave to seek Qi Gong masters in Nepal, Kyle to resume being a contractor in Hawaii, and Ray to being a professor in California.  Never again, most likely, would The Three Stooges be together. 

 

True.  But what a journey it had been!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some Short-term Views of the Journey

 

From AJ, mailed a week later to Ray, from Nepal:

 

Empire saved from toppling

by notorious Inn of Flying Chopsticks

sacred mountain lullabies

monkey armies of the storm

lost found 3 Stooges run around

 

 

From Ye Duzhuang, mailed two months later to Ray:

 

"It has been my great pleasure to have met you in Peking both personally and professionally.  I also enjoyed your lecture on Recent Challenges to Darwin's View of Evolution, which is very informative and well-organized, although some of the viewpoints involved might seem to invite further and continuing discussion and research.  Your lecture was well received by the audience and Dr. Zhou Minchen would like to have some copies of your other lecture outlines in the related field of evolutionary studies if you have some such things handy…With all best wishes to you and your family and hope all's well with your research, Sincerely yours, Ye Du-Zhuang."

 

 

 

From Ray, For Kyle and AJ:  "The Inn of the Flying Chopsticks"

 

We clambered down Emei Shan mountain,

The Adventurer, the Rebel, the Professor,

giddy at escaping monkeys at the temple above

after chilly, rain-soaked April days and nights.

 

The innkeeper had just closed out the mid-day meal,

but our shining faces and the jangle of our yuan coins

persuaded him to return to his battered wok.

Soon heaps of steaming food appeared as if by magic.

 

How the chopsticks flew around the laden table!

Our hearty laughs ricocheted about the refectory

as mounds of pork, white cabbage, and diced beef disappeared

aided by the guzzling of green tea, crisp and hot.

 

We drank yet more fragrant tea on the red-tiled gazebo

surrounded on all sides by a rushing stream, silvery-blue in sunlight.

Would we ever again be as happy as here

In the warm sun of the Inn of the Flying Chopsticks?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Three Stooges after the Sacred Mountain

 

 

The Rebel:  AJ

 

AJ resumed his life teaching English in Kyoto, with many trips to Nepal and India as part of the celebrity crowd around the Dalai Lama.  Ray and his oldest daughter visited him several years later.  They walked The Philosopher's Walk near AJ's rooms, taking an outside table near a picturesque tea house.  A large number of the passers-by seemed to know AJ, stopping to banter with him.  It was a bit like watching people encounter the Pope.  Everyone wanted a piece of AJ.  AJ became a regular contributor to the Kyoto literary publication, with many unique, Taoist-flavored poems, ranging from haiku-like to more complex, including the following. 

 

          Bright crisp mornings in Kyoto                              Freedom warmth solitude embrace    

          Wake up early in the fresh air                               this deep quietude

          Feel the cherry blossoms opening                         of the heart the touch

          Unfolding singing shining light                              of the night the day

          Smile, put the kettle on for tea, sit                       Seeds growing sprouting green

                                                                                   waters currents flowing caressing

                                                                                   this fertile mulch this dust this crust

                                                                                   on our small hot rock world in vast space

                                                                                   so briefly in skin

                                                                                   we know

                                                                                   we do know

                                                                                   this

                                                                                           this

                                                                                                   this

 

 

The Wanderer:  Kyle

 

Returning to Hawaii, Kyle regularly took time off from his contractor activities to receive a large share of the permits to escort groups of kayaks into the remote Na Pali Coast on Kaui's inaccessible north coast.  The coveted spots in Kyle's trips filled up quickly, always.  They rode the surf onto the beach, unloaded a week's worth of supplies, and luxuriated in paradise with hikes and moonlit dinners around the fire.  Ray foolishly never seemed to find the time to accept Kyle's standing invitation to join one of these trips. 

 

Kyle also volunteered steadfastly in crawling up and down Kaui's cliffs, often on hands and knees, to eradicate alien plants that were competing with Hawaii's native flora.

 

And of course Kyle was already famous in Hawaii for his sailing adventures in the Pacific, in which he rescued an expensive yacht off the shore of a remote island in the Marquesas, abandoned by an uncle who discovered there he had cancer and abruptly returned to America.  The uncle, of course, asked his intrepid nephew Kyle to sail the sloop (teak, of course, equipped with Comstat satellite linkups and holds full of lobster and champagne) to Tahiti and gave him two teenage nieces as a crew. 

 

The yacht was beset by vicious storms the entire voyage, the nieces were useless, and Kyle went without sleep for ten straight days navigating his storm-pushed perils and reporting his location every night on the Comstat satellite fix.  Of course, every person in the southern Pacific was glued to this soap opera on their own radio linkups, and Kyle's perils were the top talk of the whole region, eagerly anticipated by thousands every night. 

 

The climax of the danger occurred one evening when Kyle mapped his position and discovered they were hurtling at breakneck speed in a zero-vision night straight for Marlon Brando's atoll in the South Pacific.  They in fact appeared to be right on top of the little island.  Kyle prepared to meet his doom, but—no collision.  They apparently were blown by the island some 20 feet or so from its reefs.

 

 And he did finally get to Tahiti, and from there back to his home in Hawaii, to resume his intrepid life.

 

 

 

The Professor:  Ray

 

At the University in Chico, California, Ray worked with community leaders to found a science and natural history museum; he was named "The father of the museum."  He and his wife Tammy worked with 6 other couples to found Chico's 28-household CoHousing intentional community.  Ray and Tammy have retired to the warmth of southern Arizona, and keep busy keeping up with their family.

His 8 published books are described and his biography and many blogs can be found on his website, www.raymondbarnett.com. 

 

           

         

 

 

 

The Three Stooges: 

 

Ray.  The Professor   

Chinese History and Language at Yale.

Duke PhD in Biology; has taught at CA State Univ., Chico for 8 years

 

AJ.  The Rebel

American Studies at Yale; lives in Kyoto; travels Asia studying Qi Gong body work

 

Kyle.  The Adventurer

Student of Ray at Chico State; avid world traveler; handsome and sunny

 

The setting:  China, spring 1984. 

Eight years after Mao's death and end of Cultural Revolution.        

Kyle and Ray return to China for first year Independent Travelers permitted. 

Their goal: travel "with the people" to Szechuan's Emei Shan: the sacred mountain

 

 

Chapter Three:  Dinner with a Survivor of the Cultural Revolution

 

          One of Ray's prearranged activities in Beijing was giving a talk on "Current Challenges to Darwin's View of Evolution" to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  He'd received the invitation from Ye Duzhuang, with whom he'd corresponded the year before after reading in The New Yorker that Ye was the foremost translator of Darwin's works into Chinese.  Ye had also invited Ray to a dinner at his house several days before the talk.

 

Of course, the dinner was at the extreme opposite end of Beijing from the hotel where independent travelers were required to stay, necessitating riding a succession of three buses to get there.  Finally Ray arrived at the residential compound of scientists associated with the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, located the three-story block-and-cement Soviet-era building where Ye was housed, and climbed the narrow concrete stairway to the third floor.  He knocked on the door.

Ye answered the door himself.  Before Ray stood a tall man, over six feet, lean, with jet black hair above a calm face with a strong nose.  He was 70 years old, but still alert, and moved with little trace of his age.

 

"Dr. Ye?"

"Come in, Dr. Barnett, come in!" he said affably.  Ray walked through a short hallway.  A small room opened to the right, Ye's study.  Ahead was an even smaller room crowded with a round table and surrounding chairs.  From a room beyond this, evidently the kitchen, a handsome woman in her forties or so emerged, an older helper peering out behind her. 

"May I introduce my wife, please?" Ye said.  Ray shook hands with her.

"You are a scientist also?" he asked, noting her quick look of intelligence.

"A physician," Ye answered for her.  "Western-style physician." 

She smiled, although she looked somewhat harried.  "My English…it is not so good," she pronounced slowly. 

Ray switched to Chinese, saying that her English was much better than his Chinese. 

"She is very busy with preparing dinner, Dr. Barnett.  Would you join me in my study?"

 

They walked back to the small study, which was perhaps seven feet by ten.  Ye excused himself for a moment, and Ray noted the simple couch against one wall, a desk and several chairs at the other end of the room.  Bookshelves lined the wall opposite the couch, with the other walls crowded with calligraphy hangings and landscape paintings.  The books included a large section devoted to Charles Darwin, his life and his work, as well as numerous volumes of science, especially botany.  There were as many books in English as Chinese.  Most of the Chinese volumes on Darwin had the characters of Ye's name on the cover. 

 

Ray was trying to decipher the titles in a large section of what appeared to be books of Chinese poetry when Ye returned, moving slowly yet gracefully.  He carried a tray with a glass of amber liquid, ice tinkling in it. 

"Johnny Walker Red," he announced with a hint of pride as he handed the glass to Ray.

Ray accepted the drink, surprised and bemused, but failed to completely dissemble his glance at the ice cubes.

"The water, and ice, in our compound are quite trustworthy," he informed Ray solemnly.

 

A knock on the door drew Ye away, as Ray wondered what a bottle of Johnny Walker Red scotch must cost in China.  Excited voices came from the doorway, and soon three folks swept into the study and were introduced.  Leading the way was a vigorous, ebullient fellow with a handsome face and black hair just barely streaked with gray.  Ray judged he was in his mid-fifties or so.  This was Zhou Minzhen, the Director of the Beijing Natural History Museum and the former, long-time Director of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, the IVPP.  The IVPP and the Beijing Natural History Museum were the official sponsors of Ray's talk several days hence.

 

"So glad to have you here!" Zhou boomed as he shook hands with Ray.  "May I introduce Dr. Miman Zhang, our current Director of the IVPP?"  His English was fluid.

Dr. Zhang was a lady in her forties with a serene but somewhat sad face.  "Pleased to meet you" she said somewhat haltingly. 

"And your interpreter for your talk, Xiaobo Yu," Zhou continued.  Ray shook hands with a young, beaming fellow in his late twenties, black hair pleasantly disheveled, large glasses in front of his twinkling eyes. 

They all sat, quite filling up the study. There followed a fascinating and unforgettable hour of conversation in English, to Ray's relief, covering many topics. When Ray expressed an interest in seeing the site outside of Beijing where Teilhard de Chardin and other anthropologists had discovered the skulls of "Peking Man" in the 1920's, Zhou quickly volunteered to take Ye and Ray there the day before his lecture.

 

Ray and his hosts talked of Zhou's research into Mesozoic mammalian evolution, and the controversy whether mammals' evolution from Therapsid reptiles was polyphyletic or monophyletic.  Zhou thought the Triconodont molar pattern and the existence of Monotremes quite settled the question.  And they talked also of Ye's translations of Darwin's wide-ranging research into finches, earthworms, flowers, pollination, and barnacles.

 

"Better you should have translated Huxley than Darwin," Zhou commented, examining his glass.  Dr. Zhang joined Zhou and Ye in soft, rueful laughs.

"Huxley?" Ray asked, puzzled at the apparent non sequitur.

Ye remained silent, so with a quick look at him, and receiving no disapproval, Zhou explained.  "The Cultural Revolution.  His Darwin helped get my friend Ye into trouble with the Red Guards.  Too Western.  He was 'struggled,' and his precious books of Darwin burned by them—English as well as Chinese translations.  Then he was imprisoned, beaten, imprisoned again, and exiled to the countryside for manual labor.  Very bad."

Silence in the room.  Ye's face was impassive.

 

"And Huxley?" Ray enquired again. 

"Oh yes, Huxley," Zhou boomed.  "Chairman Mao asked me to translate Huxley's Evolution and Ethics for him early in 1970, along with Lecomte Du Nuoy's Human Destiny.  I of course did so, very promptly, managing to involve the entire staff of the IVPP in the project.  Since we had performed a service for the Great Helmsman himself, we were beyond the reach of the Red Guards.  Thanks to Huxley."

Ye's wife appeared briefly and silently at the doorway of the study, her helper beside her, who was Dr. Zhou's wife. "Dinner is served, my friends," Ye announced, rising effortlessly and leading them into the tiny dining room.  The six of them filled the room to brimming.

 

"In honor of the occasion, a dry white wine, from Xinjiang," Ye announced, uncorking a bottle.  Ray sipped the first pouring; it was quite decent.  Because Ye's wife and Dr. Zhang understood only basic English, they slipped into Chinese for the meal.  Most of the conversation revolved around activities at the IVPP, and news of mutual friends, of which Ray understood but a smattering.

Ye was an active host, taking dishes from his wife and serving everyone, popping up constantly to pour more wine, or serve more from a dish if he saw an empty corner in a plate.  Ye's wife kept bringing dishes until nearly a dozen filled the center of the table, most of them involving steamed or lightly fried vegetables, with tofu, chicken, or shrimp, and delicious sauces. 

 

After profuse praise of Mrs. Ye for the meal, they all retired back to the study with a large pot of Chinese green tea, and sat sipping it quietly for some moments.  Ye picked up two jade balls from a side table and absently-mindedly began to roll them around clockwise in his large left hand, by coordinated movements of that hand's palm and fingers. 

Ray broke the silence.  "The calligraphy on your wall is lovely, Dr. Ye."  He nodded, accepting the compliment. "That one is a poem, by an old friend of mine," he explained.

 

With a sweep of Ray's hand he indicated the section of poetry books on the far shelf, adjacent to the many books on Darwin.  "Darwin and poetry, together.  Very unusual."

Zhou roused himself.  "Oh, not at all.  Science and poetry are often together.  What is it that Shakespeare says?  'We shall talk away the time, until we all grow old and the stones turn to barnacles'."

Ray turned in astonishment to Zhou. 

"No, no," Ye murmured.  "Isn't it more like 'Time rushes on, and at the end of time we shall all become barnacles'?"

They turned to Ray to adjudicate.  He raised his palms in helpless ignorance.  "Your Shakespeare is superior to mine, gentlemen," he admitted, genuinely embarrassed that his two semesters of Shakespeare at Yale did not raise him to the level of these two scientists quoting the bard in a language not their own.

 

Ye was now turning the jade balls counter-clockwise in his hand, as Ray sat silent, marveling at the intellectual and emotional range of these survivors of Red Guard "struggle" sessions, equally at home discussing Triconodont molar patterns and poetry, Monotremes and Shakespeare—in two languages, yet. 

As a warm golden glow descended upon the room, Ye switched his two jade balls to his right hand, and began the clockwise circuits.  It was Zhou who roused himself from the common reverie.  "Ah!" he exclaimed, nodding his head decisively.  "It is getting late.  We must be going, old friend." 

Ye raised his eyebrows, and nodded sadly.

Xiaobo insisted on some photographs before they broke up, for which Ray was very glad. Turning to Ye, Ray began to thank him for the evening and take his leave as well. 

"Stay a bit longer, Dr. Barnett.  There's no rush."

Puzzled, Ray acquiesced, and joined him in saying goodbye to Zhou, Zhang, and Xiaobo.  They returned to the study, where they sat in silence for some moments.

 

"The Cultural Revolution was a difficult time for all of us," Ye finally said.  "A very difficult time."

Ray vaguely realized, from what Zhou had said earlier, that this must be a huge understatement.  Quietly he asked, "Do you worry that something like it might happen again?"

Ye smiled sadly, and stared at the poetry on the wall.  Finally he answered, softly.  "No.  I do not worry.  If it is to happen again, then we must enjoy these moments of clarity while we have them.  If it is not to happen again, there is no use to be anxious about it."

Another silence, the jade balls in his right hand now traveling counter-clockwise.  Ray saw that Ye was beginning to tire, so he took his leave, realizing with some embarrassment that Ye's earlier insistence that he stay was most likely a courteous convention only, and that he ought to have left with the others. 

 

Ye insisted on escorting him not only to the door but clear across the Institute grounds to the bus stop.  Despite Ray's protestations, Ye stood with him in the darkness until a bus came, some ten minutes.  Ray thanked him profusely for an unforgettable evening and his many kindnesses.  Ye nodded serenely, shook Ray's hand warmly, and helped him onto the bus.

The bus pulled away. Ye stood beside the road until the bus was out of sight, his tall, lean figure straight and sure in the lamplight against the night. 

 

On the day of his talk to scientists of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ray awoke with a bad case of the infamous Beijing Crud—aching body, headache, sore throat.  Great.  AJ had left the day before to visit Xi'an, and meet them in Sichuan in two days—though with AJ such plans were provisional at best.  So it was just Kyle and Ray that rode the several busses beyond the Beijing Zoo to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology for the talk.  Ray presented two bottles of Johnny Walker Red to Ye and Zhou, as Kyle left for the lecture hall to set up Ray's slides. 

Although the topic of Ray's talk might seem challenging to non-scientists ("Current Challenges to Darwin's View of Evolution"), this was Ray's specialty and he was well-versed on the various aspects of the subject.  As he proceeded to the podium in the lecture hall with Zhou and Xiabo, he noticed over a hundred or so scientists there.  After Zhou's welcome, Ray spoke for several minutes in Chinese of his happiness to be there, and began the talk.  Ray would talk for several minutes, then Xiaobo at the podium would translate, and so forth.  The audience was attentive and the talk went well, in Ye's estimation.  With the translations the lecture lasted nearly two hours.  According to Kyle, later, when Xiaobo inadvertently mistranslated a date, and Ray caught it and corrected it, in Chinese, "it brought the house down." 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Four:  Comic Interlude of the Misplaced Train

           

Their train to Sichuan left soon after Ray's talk to the scientists and the attendant thanks and goodbyes.  Kyle and Ray checked out of their hotel, bought roasted beans and lychee fruit for the trip, and arrived at the mammoth train station thronged with thousands of travelers.  Ray was limp with exhaustion, aching all over.  Kyle was definitely in charge.  They found their car and boarded the train, this time in the hard berth reservations—plain doorless compartments open to a side aisle, with three hard bunks on each side. 

Kyle had reserved the lower bunk, Ray the middle bunk.  Walks down the aisle confirmed that the six travelers in each room sat on the lower bunk during the day.  Their roommates were a lady and her grown daughter, and four soldiers.  The soldiers of course smoked non-stop, so Kyle resumed his usual location at the open window, nose pressed against the fresh air entering there.  Ray immediately climbed to his middle berth, eased his aching body onto the thick blanket there, and fell asleep.  By nightfall all the six bunks were occupied and quiet as the train hurtled through north China south and east toward Sichuan.

 

The lights came on at four the next morning, and everyone was up and moving about.  The Peking Crud had moved its misery from Ray to Kyle, who began taking the antibiotics he had brought for such a circumstance.  By now in their trip Kyle and Ray were sufficiently sinicized that they too had wash cloths folded neatly on the dowel below the window.  They joined the exodus to the wash basin at the end of the car to scrub themselves soon after awakening. 

When the lady with the padded tea kettle came by, they nonchalantly extended their cups toward the aisle for her to pour the steaming liquid into them, then filled their cups with tea leaves purchased at the Beijing station.  When the lady passed through selling tickets for the bowl of noodles for breakfast, they too paid the 50 fen for the hot bowl of savory noodles, and slurped them just as loudly as any occupant of the compartment.  And yes, they tossed the emptied cardboard bowls and the wooden chopsticks out the window just as casually as everyone else when finished. 

The final test of their sinicization came when a very blond, light-skinned western lady passed their compartment in the side aisle.  Kyle and Ray jumped just as startled as the others as she passed.  Kyle leaned over to Ray.  "You know, it's true," he croaked.  "Those foreign devils do look odd!"

 

The day was warming up when their train pulled into Luoyang.  Since most stops were ten minutes or so long, Kyle and Ray stepped down past the vendors onto the platform to stretch their legs, Kyle carrying his camera, of course.  On the platform opposite theirs a huge steam locomotive was revving up to pull out, vast billowing clouds of smoke belching from its smokestack.  Kyle snapped a series of photos, until a sound behind them caught their attention.  A locomotive and its cars were pulling out from the track where they had left their train!  With a horrified yell they sprinted over to their track and raced alongside the locomotive, already moving fairly fast.  Only vaguely did they hear the yells behind them. 

 

A grizzled fellow inside the door of the departing locomotive waved them away, forbidding them to jump into the moving locomotive.  Like hell they weren't going to rejoin their train!  Kyle leaped first, disappearing into the locomotive.  Ray puffed alongside for another several yards, the train by mow moving along at a rapid clip.  He watched the door ease away from him, despite his best efforts to keep up.  Glancing back, he gauged the speed of the door in the first car behind the locomotive, and with a desperate lunge flung himself onto it, grabbing the iron handles to either side of the door.  Frantically he hung on, not able to pull himself all the way in.  Finally a pair of hands appeared—Kyle's—and he was dragged unceremoniously through the door.

 

They stared wide-eyed at each other for a moment, then returned to the locomotive where the old fellow there was laughing wildly and jabbering away at them.  Ray couldn't make out a word he was saying.  The fellow pointed out the window, nearly convulsing from laughter.  They looked out the window, and for the first time noticed that only half a dozen of their train's cars were attached to this locomotive.  The rest of their train, including their own car containing passports, backpacks—everything—was still sitting at the station as they sped the opposite direction on this maverick locomotive! 

 

Ray's blood rain cold.  He tried to imagine how difficult it would be to recover their belongings after the train left without them.  It proved impossible to imagine.  Kyle had briefly joined the engineer in laughter at what they'd done, but when he saw Ray's ashen face it occurred to him, too, that they were indeed in big trouble.  They both turned to the engineer, who was still laughing.  Ray's Chinese deserted him as he attempted to explain that they had to get back to that train.  The fellow just laughed harder, nodded his head over and over, and generally ignored them as the locomotive steadily traveled away from their train. 

 

They stood helpless.  Kyle gauged their speed and wondered if they could now leap off the locomotive they had leaped onto earlier.  Ray caught his eye and shook his head resolutely.  It would be suicidal now, such was their speed.  Besides, they had switched onto a track away from the platform, so it was now a leap down to the tracks.  Suddenly they lurched forward as the speed lessened.  They both looked to the engineer.  He began to laugh again.  They both were by now extremely tired of the man's sense of humor.  The locomotive halted, and crews uncoupled the cars that had been attached to it.  Kyle and Ray made to leave the locomotive, but the engineer put his arm across the door and informed them that the locomotive would now return with them to the station. As he said it, the locomotive in fact lurched into motion again, switched tracks, and soon headed back to the station.  Kyle and Ray peered anxiously out the window.  Impossible to hope that their train would actually be there, yet…

 

They entered the station area gain, and there it was!  But already beginning to move slowly away from them.  The maverick locomotive they were on slowed and they vaulted off it, hit the platform running, and sprinted like madmen to the receding last car of their train.  Vaguely they noticed cheers coming from the side as bystanders noticed them gaining on the train.  People from their train were waving to them, urging them on.  Kyle got there first and easily leaped onto the rear platform of the last car.  Ray's legs were beginning to wobble.  He lurched forward a few more feet, stumbled, and felt himself grabbed by Kyle, who dragged him—unceremoniously again—over the iron rail into the car.

 

Thus they exited Luoyang.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Five:  The Sacred Mountain's First Temple:

     Heavenly Chambermaid, Singing Frogs, Rain

 

          The next morning they awoke to a new world.  The train had left dry northern China far behind overnight, and they found themselves in an utterly different green and lush land—Sichuan, the interior-most province of China.  From their berths Kyle and Ray saw figures standing on three lengths of lashed bamboo poling their craft along a river.  Chickens and water buffalo grazed on the green hillsides beyond.  Everywhere peasants walked along mountain paths, balancing loads on each end of springy bamboo poles over their shoulders.  In vegetable gardens farmers ladled the contents of manure buckets onto the rows. 

Near noon they collected their wash cloths from the dowels in the compartment, hefted their backpacks, and stepped onto the station platform of Sichuan's capital, Chengdu.  Curiously, the platform was small and almost deserted, most unusual.  Also unusual:  they had noticed surprisingly plentiful trucks and machinery on the streets as they approached the station.  But then, this was a farming region, not at all an urban concentration.

 

Immediately upon leaving the station they were surrounded by a clamoring throng of young street urchins, offering them rides in their pedicabs to the only hotel for foreign devils.  All wore T-shirts, ragged pants, and dilapidated thongs.  "How much to the hotel?" Ray asked the crowd.  Shrieks of "Five yuan" came back, clearly a fixed price.  And a very exorbitant price for any city in China, much less this remote provincial capital.  Ray caught the eye of a little fellow shyly occupying the edge of the throng.  "Two yuan?" he asked him.  He eyed Ray shrewdly, and shook his head.  "Four yuan" he asserted.  Ray shrugged his shoulders, and pressed ahead.  "Three yuan" he quickly proposed, and Ray accepted.

An older and larger lad, seeing Ray strike this deal, grabbed Kyle's wrist in a rough grip and shouted his own "Three yuan" offer into Kyle's face.  This turned out to be a mistake.  Kyle briskly executed a jujitsu wrist escape on the unfortunate fellow, who backed off with a yowl of pain. 

 

Ray's little fellow recruited a friend for Kyle, and soon they were each sitting uneasily in a pedicab consisting of a very old bicycle hooked up to a seat on two large wheels, barely large enough for one passenger and a backpack.  They settled in to enjoy the ride.  Unfortunately, it proved impossible.  As the pedicabs labored slowly away from the station, they merged recklessly into the stream of trucks and equipment clogging the narrow street.  No such thing as separate lanes for bicycles here.  At about the same time Kyle and Ray noticed that their pedicabs had no brakes.  Approaching an intersection requiring a stop, the boy jammed his thong against the front wheel of his bicycle, and the friction between the two slowed them down enough for him to jump off the bicycle and jolt to a stop, usually well into the intersection.  Ray was decidedly nervous about all this, though Kyle ahead of him sat with arms crossed, gazing serenely about.

 

When they arrived at the foreign devils' hotel, they were more than a bit surprised to find AJ already there.  The small dormitory rooms were not separated by sexes, here.  Not surprisingly, Kyle's room was strewn with bras and underwear and French novels.  On the other hand, also cigarette packs.  Decidedly a mixed bag.  AJ, Kyle, and Ray spent several days bicycling around Chengdu—it was Buddha's birthday, AJ informed them.  They were favored with full-on exhibitions of AJ's ability to attract females—and disappoint them when he returned with his friends to the hotel.  As Kyle commented to Ray, with a dry laugh: "Our friend AJ can't decide whether he's a holy man or a ladies' man." 

"I don't know.  Maybe you can be both," Ray replied with a shrug, realizing he was certainly neither. 

 

As was the custom, they all checked their large packs into the storage room at the Chengdu hotel, and took only daypacks with them for the 3 or 4 days on the mountain.  Several days later found The Three Stooges arriving by bus at the village of Emei, the jumping-off-point of the sacred mountain that was the…object? goal? excuse? of their trip.  Two helpful ladies at the bus station's ticket window explained to Ray that they had to first take a bus to the Ba Guo Temple at the base of the mountain, and there obtain a permit to climb it.  Since they had an hour before the next bus left, they sauntered into the surrounding neighborhood in search of a late lunch. 

A small, narrow noodle shop appeared, where Ray order several plates of Baotze dumplings plus a regular pork dish for them.  The dumplings arrived promptly, but after ten minutes no pork dish had.  So Ray ordered more dumplings.  They again promptly arrived, and soon all three of them were pleasantly full.  At which point a huge plate of savory shredded pork in mushrooms and peppers was proudly deposited before them by a beaming waiter.  AJ pointed out that to neglect it would cause the waiter to "lose face," so the three rolled up their sleeves and manfully ploughed into the dish, which tasted ten times better than it looked, and it looked plenty good.  The eating wasn't pretty, but as Kyle pointed out, somebody had to do it.

 

As the three waddled back to the bus station, a bizarre sight jolted them.  A young fellow with pasty skin and a long nose, wearing bright purple shorts, was perched on a bench with a long-handled net jutting into the air from his hand. 

"Hey, there's one of them foreign devils," Kyle observed.  "Look at that skin, that nose.  Ugh!" 

They all laughed as they approached him.  Conversation revealed that he was a lepidopterist from southern California (of course), a high school teacher who collected butterflies over the world on his summer break.  He was pathetically happy to see other Americans here, of all places.  It was startling for the Three Stooges to realize that they indeed were related to his person, and that the Chinese no doubt saw them much as they had seen him.  "Makes the Chinese even more forgiving and courteous than I had thought they were," Kyle observed in an aside. 

 

The net-wielder eagerly introduced himself as Ralph, and petitioned to join them.  They were somewhat taken aback, so long had they thought of themselves as the three stooges.  But he seemed so lost, and so in need of what he termed "decent" companions, that they reluctantly agreed to his company on the mountain, at least, with as much grace as they could muster. 

Arriving at the Ba Guo Temple—which translated to "Loyalty to One's Country," a peculiar name for a temple, they thought, Ray purchased their permits for all four to climb the mountain and later return to the village.  They piled into the small bus taking them to the trailhead for the climb.  The bus was packed with sweating people and a dozen more chickens than it could possibly hold.  After a sweltering, suffocating ride of thirty minutes they staggered off and into a muddy clearing.  Emei Shan, the sacred mountain, loomed above them, forested and cool. 

 

The Three Stooges grinned in anticipation.  Ralph complained about the conditions on the bus.  He was also hungry.  Soon they entered a dark, ramshackle hut beside the trail, finding it stocked with soda, tea, and large jars of  "thousand-year eggs."  Ralph spurned the weird-looking eggs, but Ray purchased half a dozen, and promptly devoured one.  The eggs were large—duck eggs, evidently—and strongly flavored.  The "white" was streaked with a dark color, indicating that either they had been prepared in some preservative, or that they were infected.  Ray hoped for the former, and ate another one.

 

In high spirits, The Three Stooges set out on the mountain.  Peasant homes sat amidst terraced rice fields, with beans, peppers, and potatoes growing in profusion in the adjacent gardens.  The forested groves were composed of maples and beaches and oaks similar to North America, though different species of course.  Huts dispensing tea, soda, and thousand-year eggs appeared every several hundred yards, attesting to the crowd of hungry pilgrims, all Chinese other than them, winding up the trail around them.

The gorgeous scenery was wasted on Ralph, who was busily bagging butterflies, especially in the forested areas with updrafts, and stuffing them into his "kill jar" of cyanide.  The Chinese pilgrims passing by seemed to be amused by the spectacle, merely another incomprehensible practice of the foreign devils. 

 

As dusk approached they reached the Temple of Myriad Years.  Extensive formal gardens surrounded the temple, in which they saw the first of the monkeys they had been warned about on Emei Shan.  This one was on a leash of a fellow who would allow you to hold it for a small fee.  Noting the numerous bandages over the fellow's neck and ears, they passed by.  Beyond the gardens was a building entirely filled by a statue of the Buddha on an enormous white elephant.  And then two buildings, one of guest rooms and the actual temple, the other the refectory.  Ray obtained rooms at the temple office from the wide-eyed attendant, who had seemingly never seen foreign devils, at the rate of three yuan per double room, about $1.35.  Kyle and Ray shared one room, and AJ and Ralph the other, AJ having lost The Three Stooge's "rocks, scissors, paper" contest. 

 

The attendant led them up a broad row of stone steps to a huge two-story compound. Large, lavishly decorated temples comprised the fronts of both stories.  Stairways to the side of the temple complex led into the outside-facing second floor, where the more expensive guest rooms were located.  Both of their rooms were high-ceilinged with three four-poster beds surrounded by mosquito netting and bright orange silk comforters on the beds.  Kyle, being the official photographer of the group due to his equipment and savvy, took a photo of Ray and AJ in the colorful beds, even though it was he who would share the room with Ray.

 

After depositing daypacks on chosen beds, they drifted out onto the spacious corridor and sat on the balustrade.  Water splashed noisily along a stream below them, with a densely forested mountain rising beyond the stream.  Kyle, AJ, and Ray grinned like idiots.  Ralph excused himself to catalogue his dead butterflies and store each in a glassine envelope.  A movement on the stairway caught their attention.  A remarkably handsome young lady emerged with two buckets in her shapely arms.  She flashed a shy, devastating smile at them, and glided by to deposit a bucket of hot water for washing in front of each room.  She then glided back down the stairs before their enraptured eyes. 

Kyle broke the stunned silence.  "This," he declared, "is the Inn of the Heavenly Chambermaid." 

The chambermaid soon returned, this time carrying two thermos bottles full of steaming water for making tea in your room, a standard provision wherever they stayed in China.  Again they sat in dumbfounded admiration, and collectively exhaled as she descended the stairs.

 

"That lady has achieved enlightenment," whispered AJ. "Clearly she has passed beyond mere earthly concerns and linked up with the Infinite Void."

Kyle and Ray laughed.  "Her fluid movements more likely indicate an advanced level in the martial arts," Ray thought aloud.  "She'd probably make hash out of all of us in a fight." 

They considered it.  "But what a way to go," Kyle mused. He pulled himself out of his reverie with reluctance.  "But speaking of 'going,' did anyone notice a bathroom around here?"

 

AJ and Ray shook their heads.  "Then I'll go exploring for one," Kyle announced, rising and bounding down the stairs. 

AJ and Ray admired the view, and talked of the condition of AJ's aching knees for several minutes.  Kyle reappeared at the head of the stairs, eyes gleaming. 

"Come with me!" he commanded.

AJ and Ray raised their eyebrows. 

"The pisser," Kyle continued.  "It's the most beautiful outhouse I've ever used in my life.  And I've used plenty." 

Laughing, AJ and Ray followed him down the stairs, AJ taking each one gingerly.  Kyle led them across the large courtyard, through an opening, and onto a path leading away from the compound.  Fifty feet further the ground abruptly sloped steeply down and there, perched on the edge of the mountain, was a concrete outhouse some twenty feet long, with its outside edge jutting away from and over the side of the mountain.  The near entrance was marked with the character for males, the far entrance for females.  The near exterior side wall of the building constituted the urinal; you simply relieved yourself against the wall. 

But the view!  The view was everything Kyle had claimed, a long vista of lush green valleys stretching forever, the calls of birds and insects drifting up to them as they stood there relieving themselves.  Inside were simply three holes in the floor on the far outside por

 

They had some time before dinner, so they wandered on up the main trail a bit.  A few bends along Ray found a collection of canes laid out beside the trail.  He purchased two.  One was of sturdy bamboo, whose end had been steamed and bent into a handle.  That was to help AJ on the trail.  The other was some softwood, its handle carved into a gorgeous, colorful dragon head.  Just as Ray finished bargaining good-naturedly for the two and paid, they heard a ruckus on the trail ahead.  Kyle came dashing around the bend at breakneck speed. 

 

"Ray.  Hurry!" 

"What's up" Ray asked, grabbing the two canes. 

"It's Ralph.  He's in a hell of an argument with an old geezer beside the trail.  I'm afraid the old guy might have a heart attack!"

They rushed up the trail.  In a few minutes they got to a crowd of people, most of them angrily yelling at Ralph, who was shouting obscenities at an ancient Chinese fellow with a wrinkled face and body so frail they expected him to collapse any second.  Between them was a cheap spiral notebook, which each clutched one end of in a death grip. 

"Ralph, Ralph!  What's going on?" Ray yelled into Ralphs ear.  He turned frenzied eyes upon Ray.

"This guy's trying to cheat me!" he shrieked.  "He told me the notebook was one yuan, and now he wants two before he'll let me have it!"  Saying this, Ralph gave the notebook a vicious tug, and the old codger on the other end shut his eyes tightly and held on for dear life, his lips turning purple.

 

More angry shouts from the crowd.  Ray attempted to ask the old fellow whether the notebook was one yuan or two.  He seemed not to hear.  He was trembling badly now, and merely shut his eyes tighter and renewed his tight grip on his end of the notebook.  Ralph gave another vicious tug, and a hysterical note crept into his voice as he began shouting "Cheater!  Cheater!"

Abruptly Ray reached into his pocket and pulled out a yuan coin.  The difference between one and two yuan was about forty cents American.  He pressed the coin into the old fellow's hand.  "Here's your extra yuan," he said in the fellow's ear.  His eyes opened quite quickly.  He cast a quick glance at the coin, then suddenly released the notebook.

As the old fellow released his hold, Ralph suddenly fell backward onto the trail with the notebook in his hand.  He scrambled to his feet immediately and seemed about to lunge at the old codger again.  AJ placed himself between the old man and Ralph, and Kyle pulled the sputtering Ralph out of the crowd and down the trail. 

 

Ray expressed apologies to the crowd.  Based on his own experiences elsewhere, he thought it not unlikely that the old fellow might well have upped his price on Ralph midway through the purchase.  No matter.  Ralph's response was clearly out of line. Dinner later was restrained, since Ralph realized they thought his reaction to the episode excessive.  He went from angry denunciations at the thievery of the "natives" to a stony silence.  The Three Stooges couldn't rise above the atmosphere, especially since the meal was a very mediocre offering of potatoes and hot chilis. 

 

After dinner Ralph barricaded himself in his room with his dead butterflies, while The Three Stooges lounged outside in the corridor.  As dusk fell they heard bells and chanting.  They followed the sound to the far end of their courtyard.  Priests knelt chanting before the altars while others stood ringing bells or hitting bronze gongs.  Incense curled up everywhere, producing a gray haze and pungent smell.  Kyle backed away from the smoke just as AJ propelled himself into the temple and took a place before an altar, groaning as he went down upon his sore knees.

Kyle and Ray returned to the corridor outside their room and sat on the balustrade there, enjoying the night.  Inside AJ's room was blackness.  Evidently Ralph was already asleep, worn out by his adventures. 

 

"Look!" Ray whispered to Kyle, pointing toward the mountain slope in front of them.  "Fireflies!"  The mountain seemed alive with them, which indeed it was.  Just as they thought it could not get any better, the first tentative notes of musical calls rang out from the stream below them.  It was the "musical frogs" of Emei Shan which they had read about, two species issuing different but equally charming calls. 

 

"I don't know about sacred, but this mountain sure seems enchanted," said Ray.  

Kyle nodded with a small smile, and went into their room to work on his journal by candlelight.  A breeze whipped up outside, and the sweet smell of fresh rain reached Ray a few minutes before soft showers began.  The fireflies persisted through the showers, but then it began to rain harder, and they flickered out, the darkness overwhelming the mountainside.  After a few minutes savoring the night, Ray also went into their darkened room, tripped over Kyle's daypack on the floor, took off his clothes, and pulled a T-shirt from his daypack on the third, empty bed where he'd tossed it.  He felt his way to his own bed, lifted the mosquito netting, and slipped under the quilt, falling quickly to sleep. 

 

 

 

The Three Stooges in China:  Pursuing the Sacred Mountain in 1984

A True Record of an Actual Journey--Part One of Three

 

By Raymond Barnett

 www.raymondbarnett.com

 

For Kyle and AJ

Sacred Mountain, Sacred Friendships

 

The Three Stooges: 

 

Ray.  The Professor   

Chinese History and Language at Yale.

Duke PhD in Biology; has taught at CA State Univ., Chico for 8 years

 

AJ.  The Rebel

American Studies at Yale; lives in Kyoto; travels Asia studying Qi Gong body work

 

Kyle.  The Adventurer

Student of Ray at Chico State; avid world traveler; handsome and sunny

 

The setting:  China, spring 1984. 

Eight years after Mao's death and end of Cultural Revolution.        

Kyle and Ray return to China for first year Independent Travelers permitted. 

Their goal: travel "with the people" to Szechuan's Emei Shan: the sacred mountain

 

 

 

Chapter One:  Meeting the People: 27 hours "standing, aisle" train to Beijing

 

          Even in the arranging of it, the train ride boded ill.

 

Ray stared incredulously at the impassive lady within the ticket window.  "No tickets left to Beijing, tomorrow?" he repeated dumbly, in his passable Chinese.

 

She nodded curtly.  The 50 people in line behind him began to jostle and add more than their fair share to the din in the Hangzhou railway station, a vast cavernous structure of ancient stone containing another dozen lengthy lines of impatient Chinese to either side of them.

 

"No hard seat?" Ray asked.

 

Her eyes flickered to the compartments in the ticket box. Another negative shake of the head, this time with a hint of annoyance.

 

He thought quickly, feeling the impatient jostlings behind him.  A glance to his side at Kyle, who looked very incongruous in his battered blue ball cap amidst hundreds of Chinese.  "Nothing at all for tomorrow," Ray commented in English.

 

"How about the day after?" Kyle immediately enquired in his cheerful, can-do style. 

 

Back to the lady.  The Chinese for "day after tomorrow" escaped Ray, so he resorted to the day of the week.  "Thursday?"

 

Another flicker of the eyes.  Another negative shake of the head, but definitely annoyed now.

 

 

"Nothing at all, today or tomorrow?"

She shrugged.  "Sleeping berths," she intoned.

 

Ray's turn to shake his head, quickly and decisively.  Kyle and he were determined to mix with the local folks.  Two years ago they had traveled through China on an official tour, "Foreign Devil Tourists" stamped on their foreheads as they stared at the Chinese people through the windows of a mammoth air-conditioned bus.  This time they were going to be on the other side of that window. 

 

 "And standing, of course," the lady at the window added with a shrug.

 

The word was vaguely familiar.  "Not-sitting?" Ray asked.

 

Finally a positive nod from the head.

Ray turned to Kyle. "Standing is available."

 

Kyle stared at him. "A 27-hour trip?" 

Ray nodded.

 

Kyle broke into a smile.  "No problem.  I mean, how bad could it get?"

The ominous ring to that query completely escaped both of them, although they would come back to it many times. 

Happily, Ray turned to the lady.  "Two tickets, not-sitting," he announced.  "To Beijing, tomorrow."

 

The lady raised an eyebrow, pulled the tickets from a compartment, marked and stamped them, scratched a tally on a sheet, and informed Ray that it would cost him and Kyle what amounted to $12 each to ride 1200 miles across half a continent in a little over a day.  Standing in the hard-seat car.  Like idiots they grinned and handed her the money.  They were really going to be "with the people"!

 

*   *   *   *   *   *

Early the next morning, munching on long, doughnut-like rolls bought from street vendors outside the station, they found the car indicated on their tickets and thrust themselves into the human sea mounting the high steps and flowing into the car.  Pandemonium reigned inside, with much happy shouting and shoving of suitcases and bundles and crates into the car through the windows, some of the latter containing chickens and produce.

 

Kyle and Ray joined the people standing in the aisle, noting that their fellow standers seemed much more poorly dressed, young, and rural than those seated. No matter.  After ten days in China's southern parts visiting tea plantations and classic gardens, they were headed for the ancient capital of the Empire.

 

Before they even thought about storage, all the available space for luggage in the racks above the seats was completed crammed, leaving their backpacks sitting in the aisle along with sacks and duffel bags of their fellow standers.  They were, of course, the only foreign devils in the car, or for that matter on the train, that they could notice.

 

The other passengers studiously avoided looking at them, except for a little girl in the family taking up two facing benches near the door.  She gazed wide-eyed at Kyle for several seconds, then burst loudly into tears and would not disengage from her mother for twenty minutes into the ride.  Ray was not the least bit surprised at this.  Kyle always evoked strong reactions from females, although his rugged good looks and inherent sunny disposition typically brought forth something closer to admiration. 

 

But this was China, in the mid 1980's, and one couldn't be sure.  The week before in a famous garden of Suzhou, for example, Kyle had been mildly flirting with several young ladies when something dropped onto his head from a pavilion above where he stood.  Kyle at first thought it was spittle, but gazing down had discovered a folded note.  Ray's written Chinese was more rudimentary than his spoken.  Examining the note, he informed Kyle that it either said "We Chinese ladies admire you; we would be happy to meet you at 7:30 this evening," or on the other hand might mean "We Chinese resent you flirting with our ladies; you will be dead by 7:30 this evening."  Kyle kept the note, hoping to get a more definitive translation later. 

 

Soon after the train ride began, Ray was adopted by a family across the aisle, whose mother instructed her two young ones to crowd closer together on the bench, thus leaving him six inches or so at the end to perch precariously upon.  It was actually more uncomfortable than standing, but he could not of course reject her generosity, and with many "xie xie"s ("thank you") he followed her fluttering, commanding hand onto the seat, which was very hard indeed.  The occasion of his sitting permitted the others in the facing bench to finally make eye contact, with friendly nods.  Next to the window was a young, scholarly looking fellow with a mason jar placed on the small window ledge in front of him.  Beside him was a young couple, newly married judging from their happy absorption in each other. 

 

Not long into the journey a large family by the door pulled out a picnic basket complete with fried chicken, and happily began munching.  The paper in which the food was wrapped was carefully crumpled and casually dropped onto the floor.  As gristle and small bones were encountered, they were noisily spat out onto the floor, usually towards the aisle where sat Kyle and Ray's backpacks.  They exchanged a bemused glance; how curious.  Quaint, even. Then the newlyweds across the aisle pulled a nectarine out of a bag and carefully peeled it, the peels dropping onto the floor at Ray's feet.

 

With an occasional nervous look at their backpacks on the rapidly-filling floor—the hulls of pistachio nuts from several passengers were falling like rain—Ray gazed through the train window at the magnificent scenery through which the train was passing.  Hangzhou is in the middle of China, close to the coast, and in this early spring the terraced hills glowed with bright ribbons of color. 

 

The upper reaches of the hills were decked with the dark green of newly emerged tea leaves, the short bushes stretching along in neat rows widely enough spaced to permit the ladies gathering the prized "first pick" to move along filling their baskets.  The lower parts of the hills were usually gaily clothed in the bright yellow flowers of the rapeseed plant, whose dark seeds would be crushed to yield cooking oil.  And in the lowlands between the hills the nearly phosphorescent light green of rice beds alternated with dark, shimmering newly ploughed and flooded paddies awaiting the transplant of the young seedlings.

 

They were several hours into the ride now, viewing peasants in the fields outside patiently directing their water buffaloes in breaking up and ploughing the fields. Inside their coach, most of the travelers had finished their initial snacks and were luxuriating in an after-meal smoke.  Now Kyle is normally a healthy fellow.  Robustly healthy, actually.  But Kyle has an Achilles heel. Or lung, to be precise.  He is acutely allergic to cigarette smoke.  So Kyle began to droop as the car filled with smoke, from every male and many females.  All the windows were open, of course, on this warm spring day.  They didn't know about the other cars, but the hard-seat car certainly had no air conditioning, for which Kyle was thankful.  Even so, he turned quiet and his sunny aura began to dissipate as the smoke burgeoned. 

The conductress soon entered the car and bustled up the aisle taking tickets.  When she saw Kyle still standing she scowled and glanced around accusingly at the passengers.  An old fellow several benches back smiled and waved Kyle over as he pleasantly enlisted the support of the conductress to cajole his two bench-mates to crowd together to make room.  The fellow sported a beard, vest, and hat perched atop his white head at a rakish angle.  Kyle graciously declined the favor, but allowed himself to be persuaded and soon was perched on the end of this bench. 

 

Behind the conductress came a young lady, also in train company blue, with a huge kettle of steaming water in a quilted insulating cover.  The young scholar in the window seat opposite Ray's bench whipped out a small tin cannister, sprinkled some shriveled tea leaves from it into his mason jar, and brusquely indicated it to the tea lady.  With a practiced hand she directed a long arc of scalding hot water over the legs of all of the people on the facing benches into the mason jar, spilling not a drop on the small ledge nor, more importantly, on Ray's legs.  Perhaps half the folks in the car also had jars or cups, often quite crude, which they filled with the steaming water and added a store of leaves to it.  The scholar sighed, happily cupping his hands about the jar, and took a gingerly sip, straining the still swirling leaves with his lip at the edge of the jar.  This tea-water lady passed through the car every several hours for the remainder of the day. 

 

Which all leads quite naturally to a trip to the restroom at the end of the car some time later.  Kyle and Ray noticed with interest that a standing passenger promptly occupied the seat of someone who left to visit the restroom, or even just to stretch their legs.  The interloper grudgingly relinquished their new seat when the passenger returned, though not without a brusque command from the returning ticket holder.  As ticketed folks reached their destinations throughout the day and disembarked, though, and their now vacant seats were claimed by standing passengers, another etiquette pertained.  When a former stander made a trip to the restroom, his seat was of course promptly claimed by another stander, and his brusque command upon his return was stolidly ignored.  This seat was now the possession of whomever currently occupied it.

 

Did foreign devils have any special privileges in this scheme of things?  Kyle soon tested the proposition.  When one of the three men in his bench disembarked, Kyle of course merely took the fellow's space quite naturally and quickly, so he was no longer perched on the edge of a bench but was comfortably sitting, a condition noted irritably by Ray, still clinging with acute discomfort to his six inches on the edge of a seat.  Some four hours later, Kyle answered the call of nature.  To Ray's chagrin, he noted that Kyle's seat was indeed promptly claimed by a young man who had been sitting disconsolately upon a duffel bag in the littered aisle.  And upon Kyle's return the young fellow made no move to relinquish the seat, studiously avoiding Kyle's outraged stare.  Not even the intervention of Kyle's old bearded benefactor could dislodge him.  After all, the seat was fair game for all, now.  So Kyle was once again standing.

Ray was able to make several trips to the restroom so long as his benefactor family was occupying his bench—they simply expanded to fill the entire bench when he left, and contracted to afford him his precious six inches when he returned.  In the midafternoon they disembarked, however, with many friendly nods to Ray and many thanks and "Dzai jian"s ("Goodbye") from him.  Kyle was not sufficiently nimble or pushy to elbow his way in the confusion into the now vacant seats, although Ray managed to expand his edge into a real seat on the end of the bench.

 

Thus they spent the day, all the while marveling at the pile of debris growing on the floor.  To the hulls, gristle, bones, wrappers, and spittle already there a new element was added mid-day when the farm boy who had claimed Kyle's seat leaned over into the aisle, placed a finger on one side of his nostrils, and noisily cleared the other nostril onto the floor.  The procedure was repeated for the opposite nostril as Kyle and Ray gaped incredulously.  No one else on the car took the slightest notice, however.  Evidently floors were fair game for any sort of refuse, short of that deposited in the restroom. 

 

This train was by no means an express.  It stopped at towns and villages every several hours, in addition to mysterious stops in the middle of the countryside.  At the latter, all the windows on the train would be opened to their maximum extent and a veritable rain of trash would pour out the windows—the larger chicken bones wrapped by the family next to the door, food containers, disposable chopsticks, plus any trash too large or bulky to be dropped onto the floor.

"Don't let me be caught standing next to a train coming to a stop, ever," Kyle whispered to Ray.

 

As evening approached, some 12 hours into their journey, Kyle and Ray were both standing again and had been for some hours.  They were stiff, tired, and uncomfortable.  Also famished.  They had not been quick-witted enough—and Ray's Chinese was too limited to realize what was happening—when the lady had come through in the late morning selling tickets for box lunches.  When the old man followed her some half hour later distributing disposable chopsticks and small boxes crammed with rice and vegetables and scraps of meat, they could only look on longingly--desperately, even—as their compatriots claimed the lunches and happily munched away. 

So as evening arrived Kyle and Ray prayed fervently for the appearance of the lady selling another round of meals.  Their hearts leapt with joy as she entered the car and made her way towards them.  For the grand sum of 50 fen—about 20 cents—they purchased the coveted tickets.  And as the boxes arrived they were in heaven as they dipped into the rice and vegetables and few meat chunks.  Though simple, the fare was delicious and quite filling.  Needless to say, the lady never made another trip through their car without their buying a pair of her tickets.  When the meals were consumed, of course, their boxes and chopsticks were casually chucked out the windows with all the others. 

 

As the young scholar by the window made to stretch his legs and enjoy a smoke, he motioned to Ray and made sure Ray obtained his seat.  Ray of course was in heaven again as he eased his stiff and aching body and full belly into the seat.  Stars burst in his head as he eased it down onto the narrow window ledge and actually closed his eyes.  The wind whipped fresh, clean air through the window past his nose, and he made a mental note to let Kyle have the window seat if ever again he obtained it—next time, that is.  After several minutes rest he looked up.  His scholar friend was still smoking.  Ray decorously sat up, sighed, and stared contented out the window.  Life was indeed good.  He was sitting, his stomach was full, fresh air was available, and outside the window the countryside of China sped by, hillsides where the dark green of tea glowed above the bright yellow of rapeseed flowers, here and there interrupted by the small domed ancestral burial crypts scattered on most of the hills they had passed that day, the arch of bricks or rocks marking a burial site fronted by a small stick of bamboo with a narrow white cloth fluttering in the gentle breeze. Ancestor remembrance, flourishing still.  Amazing.  Peasants preparing the fields and planting their rice just as they had two thousand—no, just as they had four thousand years ago, surrounded on the flanking hills by the tended graves of their ancestors.  China.

 

Ray's benefactor finished his cigarette, and Ray graciously and with many thanks returned his seat to him.  Within half an hour they arrived at the station of a sizable town, and quite a few of the folks in their car rose from their seats and began to pull luggage from the overhead racks.  Several of them motioned Kyle and Ray to take their seats, and they gratefully complied with alacrity.  Actually, the steady attrition of passengers had opened seats for most of those originally standing in Hangzhou, so competition was not severe, and a lucky stander could always hope that the seat just scrounged would remain open for at least an hour or so.

 

Kyle had actually obtained a window seat, finally, and he desperately clawed at the window to open it fully and stuck his nose out to gulp in the fresh air.  As he thrust his nose out the window he very nearly thrust it into a fudgecycle being offered by a vendor along the platform of the station.  Immediately upon every stop at a village or city the platforms would be clogged with vendors as they were now.  Loudly they hawked everything from ice cream to fruits to rolls to dumplings.  Kyle succumbed to the allure of the fudgecycle at his nose, purchased two, and handed one to Ray.  As experienced travelers on several continents, they shied away from the street dumplings and vegetables, but reckoned that frozen ice cream was a relatively good gamble. 

 

Kyle and Ray looked forward to these periodic arrivals at stations, not just for the opportunity to claim a coveted seat, but for the sheer happy pandemonium that always ensued.  People joyously greeting each other, luggage being shoved through windows in both directions, vendors loudly hawking their wares, children on the platform screaming at the sight of long-nosed foreign devils thrusting their bizarre faces out the train windows—it was all a thoroughly enjoyable interlude to the numbing grind of standing for the great bulk of twenty seven straight hours in an aisle filled with an ever growing piles of hulls, bones, gristle, snot, spittle, and who knows what else. 

But now they had seats!  Hard, to be sure, but seats, including a window seat for Kyle.  And to compound their joy they were not claimed by those boarding at this stop.  They could retain them until the next large town, most likely, and—delicious hope—perhaps all the way for the next 15 hours remaining to Beijing.

 

Dusk gathered as they sped into the countryside, and virtually everyone in the car (except them) proceeded to take turns at the water basin at the end of the car.  Each carefully unfolded a cotton cloth, wet it, then vigorously cleaned their face and neck and hands.  Some used soap, some not.  But all scrubbed away assiduously.  Then the tooth brush came out, and a thorough cleansing of the teeth ensued.  With a final noisy spat of rinse water into the basin, each person would take several deep breaths and, on the way back to their seat, carefully fold the wash cloth in half.  Upon reaching the seat, they neatly hung the wet wash cloth over a wooden dowel which ran the length of the car just above the windows on each side.  Soon the whole car was festooned with these wash clothes, each one neatly folded as it dried. 

 

Kyle and Ray marveled.  That a people who could endure the floor beneath them at present could be so assiduous about their personal hygiene.  They had noticed long wash basins at every railway station, always busily occupied, at all hours, by Chinese washing their faces, their hands, perhaps their chopsticks.  Clearly they were not traveling with the elite, yet just as clearly these folks were, personally at least, very cleanly.  Ray wondered what these Chinese thought of Kyle and him, who travelled with no washcloth handy, and who must have exuded a different smell than they were used to.  Yet their fellow passengers had shared seats with them and shown them many favors, in spite of their strange appearances and smell. 

 

Of course, there was the condition of the floor, to balance against these folks' personal cleanliness.  Ray tried not to think of their packs still sitting in the aisle as he settled back.  The lady with the tea kettle came by one last time.  The car grew quiet as night gathered, no radios blaring anywhere, the folks with the noisy chickens having long disembarked, only the quiet talk of the friends and families aboard filling the car, above the rustling of the wind through the windows.  Ray looked at Kyle's bench, and saw that he seemed to be dozing, his nose still pressed close to the open window.  Kyle's eyes opened, and he raised his eyebrows at Ray.  "Comfortable?" Ray enquired, knowing fully well how hard his bench was. 

He stared back at Ray, then spoke.  "I've got a window.  I ain't moving until we get to Beijing."  This with quiet conviction.

"And when you have to piss?" Ray asked.

"I'm not risking the loss of my window seat for anything," Kyle reiterated.  "I will not piss again until we reach Beijing."  Ray laughed.  But as a matter of fact, it turned out to be true.  Kyle urinated a grand total of twice in the 27 hours they were on the train, both instances prior to this point where he had commandeered a window seat.  

 

Stiff and sore, they dozed fitfully through the night as the train hurtled through the dark, north to Beijing.  A hand gripped Ray's shoulder somewhat past midnight.  The young scholar, up for a smoke and to stretch his legs, directed Ray to his window seat where Ray could rest his head on the ledge and be more comfortable.  Ray politely declined, but the fellow knew very well how uncomfortable Ray was, and insisted.  Gratefully Ray yielded, determined not to enjoy his hospitality long.  Ray put his head down on the ledge, sighed deeply, and fell into an instant deep sleep.  With a jerk he straightened up an hour later.  The scholar was seated in Ray's former seat, thoughtfully smoking still.  Ray returned his seat to him sheepishly, and with many apologies, which the fellow waved aside graciously. 

The lights came on at four o'clock in the morning, and everyone stirred and began their procession to the wash basin, including the two foreign devils now, though barbarically Kyle and Ray had no wash clothes. But they rubbed their hands under the faucet, splashed water on their faces, and shook it more or less dry, making a conscious effort to be as noisy as their Chinese colleagues.  The whole car nodded approvingly as they made their freshened way back to their seats. 

 

And everyone said those foreign devils couldn't ever learn civilized ways!

 

More delicious 20 cent box meals for breakfast, which Kyle and Ray tossed out the window with their fellow passengers.  As they approached Beijing everyone began to bustle about.  The tea kettle lady entered the car with a very stiff broom and proceeded to sweep all the incredible profusion of bones, fruit peels, nut shells, spittle and snot before her.  Kyle and Ray quickly and gingerly picked their backpacks off the floor and deposited them in the few spaces now available in the overhead rack, holding the backpacks away from them as far as they could. 

 

The broom-wielder did a thorough job, reaching under every seat and energetically gathering the 27 hours' worth of debris into three hefty piles along the length of the floor of the car.  She then brushed the whole mess into a plastic bag.  Kyle and Ray thoroughly expected her to nonchalantly toss it out the window, but she surprised them by lugging the bag to some compartment at the end of the car.  Then an ancient man tottered into the car dragging, amazingly enough, a mop and a bucket full of water with some disinfectant in it.  He proceeded to mop the entire floor with scrupulous vigor, so that as they rolled into the station in Beijing the floor of the car, believe it or not, was immaculate, just as spotlessly clean as it had been 27 hours earlier in Hangzhou.

Shaking their heads in wonder, Kyle and Ray joined the others in retrieving their luggage from the overhead racks.  They joined the throng happily flowing from the train and into the station proper.  Kyle immediately spotted a restroom, into which he disappeared in some haste.  Ray stood nearby with their backpacks in the incredibly vast station, teeming with travelers, the noise level two notches above a roar.

 

 They had finally arrived at Beijing, the ancient and current capital of the Chinese empire.  After Beijing they would head far inland and south, to the heart of China:  Sichuan, and Emei Shan, the sacred mountain. 

 

Perhaps even by train.

 

 

 

Chapter Two:  The Third Stooge, Ray's Near Arrest, and Bicycling in Beiijing

 

          Ray's long hot shower to remove the effects of the train ride from Hangzhou had transformed the hotel's bathroom into a steam room.  As he shaved he rubbed the mirror to remove the fog every stroke or two of the razor, clearly fighting a losing battle with the steam.  The dim reflection of a bulky figure behind him passed across the mirror, not unexpected since the bathroom was shared by several dozens of rooms along the hallway of this Beijing hotel where travelers not attached to a tour were required to stay.

"You speak English?" he blurted out over his shoulder.

A bemused pause.  "No better than I ever have," came the reply in a soft southern drawl, which seemed vaguely familiar.

 

"The hotel takes 3 days to do laundry," Ray barged on.  "You know of any laundry in the neighborhood of the hotel?"

Another pause.  "You're worried about finding a laundry in a city with nine million Chinese?" the voice drawled again, this time with warm humor, and this time definitely familiar. 

Ray turned around, face half covered with shaving cream, torso wrapped in towel, and peered at this figure in the steam.  Large, maybe six foot two or three, and two hundred pounds or so.  A handsome face surrounded by a mass of curly auburn hair and a short beard below, hazel eyes twinkling.  Suddenly the eyes narrowed, and he learned toward Ray with a quizzical look. 

"You…You're…" he began to sputter.

 

Ray shrank back from the towering bulk, then narrowed his own eyes and peered up through the steam at him more closely.  Neurons inactive for decades began to spark erratically.  "AJ Dickinson?" he blurted out incredulously, naming a college friend whom he had last seen or thought of a couple of decades earlier, on graduation day at Yale University in New Haven. 

The tall fellow nodded in shock, still sputtering.  "Ray.  Ray Barnett?" he finally managed to say.

Ray nodded, and they both grinned wide in the steam for several moments. 

 

"What the hell are you doing here?" Ray finally asked.

AJ paused to consider it.  "Taking a piss," the fellow announced grandly.

They both laughed, and it was Ray's turn to sputter.  "But…My God, it's been, what?..."  He did some quick calculations.  "Seventeen years or so since I've seen you.  And never in a Chinese pisser!  Let me finish shaving and I'll drop by your room."

"Fine, Bro," AJ replied.  "Room 312."

 

They grinned, looked at each other again, and burst out laughing as he disappeared through the door.  As Ray finished his shave he tried to remember what he knew of AJ.  From the upper crust of Richmond, Virginia.  In a secret society with Ray at Yale, called St. Anthony Hall, where he remembered mainly the legends of AJ's drinking and successful way with the ladies.  He had taken a course in Southern history with a roommate of Ray's, turning up at their room just as the roommate, weary from four straight days of study, was leaving for the final exam in the course.  "Can I take a quick look at your notes?" AJ had asked, a request which did not surprise my roommate, since he knew AJ's attendance had been spotty.  AJ had leisurely read through the lectures notes in the first hour of the exam, strolled to the appointed room, and in the last hour of the test had earned a slightly higher grade than my conscientious roommate. Such was the AJ that Ray had known at Yale.

 

Twenty minutes later Kyle and Ray walked into 312, down the hall from them.  "Kyle, this is AJ, from Richmond, Virginia.  We went to college together, seventeen years or so ago.  And evidently haven't changed very much, since we both recognized each other. AJ, how in the world did you get from Yale to a steamy shower room in Beijing?"

He raised his shaggy eyebrows and learned back against the bed from his position on the floor, making himself comfortable.  "The day we graduated from Yale, I knew I couldn't take the path most of our friends were taking—law school, selling stocks and bonds.  Just didn't feel right.  So I joined a circus" he declared with a mischievous grin.

"That's right!" Ray blurted out.  "Now I remember your coming through Tulsa the summer after graduation!"

"And very much appreciating the hospitality you and your folks showed me," he commented, a Southerner to his bones.  "But my days as a circus roustabout were numbered, by the draft board."

 

Ray nodded sympathetically, remembering how Vietnam had wrenched all their lives in those days.  "Did you go into the military?" he asked.

AJ shook his head emphatically.  "No way this boy was going to kill peasants in Southeast Asia.  I got a job teaching disadvantaged kids in North Carolina—a job that gave me a draft deferment."

"And after that?"

He shrugged.  "Lots of wandering around.  Finally got interested in Qi Gong, the Asian way to heal the things that go wrong with the body.  I studied with most of the best masters in America, and developed a good practice in California."

Ray thought of AJ's social background in Richmond, and the incongruity of that with "body work" in California.  "What do your parents think of your profession?" he asked with a wry smile. 

A mirroring wry smile from AJ.  "Whenever I go home," he said softly, "I open the door to my old room and discover a shrine."  His face took on a look of wonderment.  "My parents keep my room as a shrine to the son they thought they had.  Tennis and basketball trophies, the official tie of my prep school in Richmond, diploma from Yale, certificates of achievement.  Of respectability.  A shrine to a dead son." 

 

A long moment of silence.  Kyle, stretched out on the floor, bent arm holding his head, finally breathed out.  "Well, you look plenty alive to me, AJ.  Alive and kicking, in fact."

AJ nodded pleasantly.  "And what brings you and Kyle here, Ray?"

"Oh, I'm doing research for a novel I'm writing, set mainly here in Beijing," Ray began.  "Always wondered if I could write a novel.  And also, Kyle and I were here a couple of years ago on a tour, and felt like we missed something in all the tight schedule and tourist spots.  Like we missed the real China.  So we're here to find it." 

AJ's eyes lit up.  "And where do you find the real China?" he enquired with a smile. 

"In hard-seat trains," Kyle groaned, which brought a laugh from all of them. 

"Tea houses.  And parks at dawn," Ray said. 

 

"And sacred mountains," Kyle added.  AJ's eyes raised as he turned his large head to Kyle and his eyes gleamed.

"Sacred mountains?" he drawled, his voice delicious with anticipation. 

"In Sichuan," Kyle informed him. 

"The mountain is called Emei Shan," Ray added, pronouncing it "Uh-may-shawn" as in the Mandarin dialect.  "Sacred for six thousand years, probably much longer.  Li Po was writing poems about it twelve hundred years ago.  Dotted with Taoist and Buddhist temples, thronged with pilgrims.  We're going to climb it."  Ray looked at Kyle with an unspoken question clearly understood between old friends.  Kyle imperceptibly nodded his assent, and Ray turned to AJ.  "Want to join us on the sacred mountain?" 

AJ stared Ray in the eye.  He straightened his massive frame, formally.  "Sacred mountains can be dangerous," he intoned solemnly.  'Unexpected things happen on them."  He glanced over at Kyle, then back at Ray.  "You boys will likely need help.  Count me in, Bro!" 

They all grinned idiotically.  And in that moment Kyle and Ray knew they were from then on The Three Stooges in China, stumbling from one misadventure to another, lovable but having a grand time.

 

AJ had plans with newly-made female acquaintances that afternoon, and Ray wanted to research a place in the Forbidden City for his novel, so Kyle agreed to meet Ray at an island north of there several hours later. 

In his research for his novel, Ray had learned that some 700 years ago Kublai Khan had constructed a 1.5 mile chain of "lakes" running north-south to the west of the Forbidden City, on the west shores of which officials entrusted with running the Mongol Empire lived.  The lakes were demarcated into three "seas":  Zhonghai (Middle sea), Nanhai (South sea) and Beihai (North sea).  The North sea and its surrounding shore now comprised the public Beihai Park, where Ray would meet Kyle later.  But the area to the west of the lower two seas—collectively known as the Zhong-Nan-Hai—continued to be the site where prominent members of China's ruling class lived and worked through the centuries, up to the Communist Party rulers occupying the area now. 

 

Ray was particularly interested in an ancient Water and Cloud Pavilion standing some six meters off the east shore of the Middle Sea.  A stone tablet stood in the center of the pavilion, with a Taoist inscription on it:  T'ai I Ch'iu Feng, translated as "The Autumn Wind Coursing Over the Sea of Life." 

Intrigued by the ancient pavilion and its cryptic inscription, Ray wanted to incorporate it into his novel; to do that, he had to be able to describe it; to do that, he had to see it and get a photo of it.  Which could pose a problem.  Because the photo would require aiming his camera towards the Middle "Sea" leaders' compound directly behind and beyond the pavilion.  Ray reconnoitered the surroundings, noting the armed soldiers standing every 30 yards or so, keenly vigilant against those who wouldn't respect the absolute privacy of the leadership compound.  Hmmm.  Really had to get a photo of that pavilion and its inscription for his novel.  Ray ambled casually around the perimeter, glanced at the guards to his left and right, then when their attention wasn't focused on him, very quickly aimed his camera and got a good photo of the pavilion.  No outcry, no nothing.  Whew!  He ambled a bit further, past another couple of guards to his right, and took another quick photo from what was marginally a different angle. 

 

Mistake. 

 

This time he quickly found himself herded by two of the armed guards to a small open space near the public park of the North "Sea".  Very soon another dozen or so soldiers arrived, weapons aloft, guarding him ominously.  Then their leader arrived, an old grizzled, hard-bitten fellow wearing a pistol at his waist. 

He glared at Ray a long moment, as if he regretted what he had to do.  He curtly told Ray to give him the film from his camera.  Ray understood the Chinese, but pretended not to.  He volunteered to take a photo of everyone.  He of the pistol elaborately pantomimed what he wanted Ray to do: take the film out of the bloody camera and give it to him.

 

Ordinarily, Ray would have been happy to do that.  But this particular roll was a 72-shot roll, and it had numerous photos of locations he would use in his novel, including his precious pavilion.  He could not lose those shots.  So he offered to take everyone's photo again.  The fellow with the pistol became angry, and shouted something at him. He reached out for Ray, as if to take him into custody.  It was the make-or-break moment.  For some reason—this was Ray's first novel the fellow was about to torpedo!—Ray backed away from him, turned, shoved his way through the fifty or so bystanders, and walked shakily across the street toward the public gardens in the North "Sea", where Kyle was waiting.  Ray fully expected a rough hand on his shoulder turning him around to take him into custody.  He walked further.  No hand.  As he got into the public gardens, Ray ventured a look around.  He was already, miraculously, out of sight of the soldiers, the pistoled one, and the crowd.  He stumbled on, found Kyle on a bench.   

 

"What the hell's wrong with you?" Kyle enquired when he saw Ray's face and his shaky walking.  Ray couldn't answer.  With trembling hands he shakily took the film out of the camera. 

"Take this.  Put it in your backpack," Ray croaked to Kyle.  He did so, to Ray's relief.  He was still awaiting the pistoled fellow to catch up with him and take him wherever they took enemies of the state.  He took out a new roll of film and put it in the camera.  If the pistoled one confiscated the camera for evidence, Ray wouldn't lose his precious photos of scenes.  Ray sat back on the bench, and recounted his misadventure to Kyle. 

Kyle laughed.  Annoyed, Ray turned to him.  "See that high Dagoba behind us?" Kyle asked.  Ray nodded at the faux Tibetan tower in the North "Sea" park.  "From there you can see everything.  Including your pavilion in the Middle 'Sea'.  I put my telephoto lens on, mounted the camera on the tripod, and got plenty of pictures of it for you!"

Ray groaned.

 

He never did understand why the fellow with the pistol didn't pursue him.  Perhaps the fellow didn't think the whole ruckus was worth it; after all, it was just a skinny foreign devil that had merely taken a photo of the distant leader's compound.  Perhaps he had other more pressing things to do that day.  Perhaps he was late to meet his young wife for an afternoon liaison.  Kyle and Ray had seen the limousines squiring President Reagan on a visit to Beijing while they were there.  Perhaps the authorities were avoiding run-ins with American tourists while Reagan was there.  However it had happened, Ray had eluded prison in China. 

 

          Early the next morning, Kyle, AJ, and Ray rented bicycles.  The streets of Beijing swarmed with bicycles.  The main east-west drag, Chang'an Boulelvard leading either direction from Tiananmen Square, was perhaps 50 yards wide, of which a least 30 yards were set aside for cyclers.  Since virtually no one owned private vehicles in China, the only trucks and cars on the streets belonged to work units, and the bicycles vastly outnumbered those. 

Soon The Three Stooges were breezing down Beijing's streets, reveling in the freedom and whooping like little boys, which they felt like very much.  To be part of a thousand people within 50 yards of you, flowing along in a tide of humanity on wheels, was something to celebrate. 

 

From every direction came the pleasant ringing of the bells found on every bicycle.  AJ was so taken with his bell that he rang it incessantly.  He was all smiles and at least a head taller than the rest of humanity around him, beaming and nodding and ringing his bell non-stop.  Soon we entered Tiananmen Square and walked our bikes around the Square for an hour or so.  It was early May, and families were picnicking on the cobblestones of the place.  Children rushed about squealing and having a wonderful time.  AJ, Kyle and Ray never saw a single Chinese child that was not clean and cute and well-behaved in their six weeks in China.  Doubtless dirty, snot-nosed children throwing tantrums must exist in China.  They never saw one, though, in town or country or train stations or noodle shops.  Moreover, the studied indifference or barely-submerged hostility of parents toward children, so frequently seen in America, was never observed by them in China, either. 

In the warm, breezy spring day dozens of kites were being flown in the Square, many of them of elaborate shapes, all of them brightly colored and going through fancy maneuvers.  It struck them that the atmosphere in the Square was that of a small town in America, simple pleasures and family-centered. 

 

As they bicycled out of the Square and around to various sights, Kyle soon formulated his Eight Rules of Beijing Bicycling. 

Rule 1:  Buses, trucks, and taxis have right of way at all times and all situations.  The idea of a motor vehicle courteously making any effort whatever to avoid hitting a cyclist was quickly shown to be laughable. 

Rule 2:  Use your bicycle bell to signal your location at least once every five seconds.  Lady cyclists double this frequency.

Rule 3:  Assume that riders around you are poor cyclists and will swerve and veer and stop for no apparent reason at all.  Partly this is because they are often carrying bulky loads:  shopping bags, crates of chickens, small pigs, or wide sofas. 

Rule 4:  Beware the young hot-rodders.  These males (always) had playing cards stuck in their hubs to make clicking noises against the spokes (which all The Three Stooges had done when younger).  These young men were particularly dangerous and unpredictable. 

Rule 5:  Never believe or, indeed, pay attention to a traffic cop's hand signals at intersections.  Large intersections usually have several such cops directing traffic.  Invariably they are giving conflicting signals.  You're on your own at intersections.

Rule 6:  Left-hand turns on bicycles are free-for-alls, always an adventure and frequently dangerous.

Rule 7:  Use the bicycle parking lots and pay the little white-haired lady her two fen (about a penny).  If you attempt to escape her, she pursues you, foreign devil or not.  But it's worth it; if it rains, she will dutifully drape your bike seat in plastic. 

Rule 8:  Lock the absent-minded professor's bike for him, engaging devices built in behind the seat, quickly and easily engaged—if you can remember it.  Kyle kindly looked after Ray in this regard (and many others). 

Once Kyle's 8 Rules became second-nature, bicycling in Beijing was relatively safe, and opened up the city for them.  Every morning they'd go to a new, nearby park at first light.  The songs of cage-birds filled the air, hanging from tree limbs.  All the people were engaged in some sort of physical exercise.  There were a few joggers—invariably young, Yuppie-looking males.  But everyone else was doing some form of traditional exercise, usually in groups ranging from four to a hundred.  There were old folks merely walking slowly and deliberately, swinging their arms in a stylized manner, breathing very deliberately also.  Others were stretching in a series of poses, both of those a form of Qi Gong.  A few young folks did vigorous martials arts, such as Kung Fu boxing patterns or routines with lances or sticks. 

 

But the most prominent exercise by far was the slow, graceful movements of T'ai Chi Ch'uan, what Westerners sometimes call Shadow Boxing.  As many as a hundred folks, mainly middle-aged or old but including some youngsters, would synchronously go through a 10- or 15-minute routine of whirling, feinting, kicking ballet-like movements in slow motion.  It was beautiful.  Occasionally they'd see a smaller group doing T'ai Chi Jian, in which the dancers wielded a sword, sometimes steel, more usually bamboo. 

Whatever their form of exercise, the people in the parks would slowly break off about an hour after dawn.  But rather than rushing off to their homes or jobs, they'd stick around and mingle, socializing in an unhurried manner, with plenty of friendly bantering.  In another ten minutes they'd reclaim their songbirds and drift away in groups or three or four, still joking.  Not once did The Three Stooges notice anyone looking at a watch. 

 

They soon realized in their rambles around the city that it exhibited a distinctly rural aura. Morning and evening they'd find the people squatting on the stoops before their homes, smoking cigarettes and chatting away, the men with pants rolled up above their knees.  Spitting was quite common, with spittoons found everywhere and well-used.  The warmly-dressed toddlers wore pants with slits in them, and their parents carried them over to the curb or to a spittoon when they needed to urinate.  The basis for this rural feel was straightforward: the country itself was still overwhelmingly rural, many of the city's residents only recently arrived from farms and villages.   

 

Invariably The Three Stooges would end the day bicycling to Tiananmen Square, where a festive air always prevailed.  Families sat on blankets or mats, eating a picnic dinner, enjoying the cool evening breeze in the great open Square.  As the hour grew late, The Three Stooges bicycled down the vast expanse of Chang'an Boulevard to their hotel on the eastern edge of the city, enjoying the cool breeze of the evening and the relative lack of bicycles on the great thoroughfare.  AJ towered straight upon his seat leading them, arms folded across his chest, bellowing an improvised ditty about "Bicycling Through Beijing" as they whizzed along, attracting bemused stares all around them for this bizarre auburn-haired giant of a foreign devil with his gold Bison Instruments hat (festooned with a gold buffalo) and his two companions. 

 

I've been struck by how many different ways folks will look back on their lives and pick out what most delighted them.  Let's take a look at what they say on their death beds, or on contemplating that moment.  We'll consider Georgia O'Keeffe, Claude Monet, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Charles Darwin, and the 18th century French writer Voltaire.

 

 Take Georgia O'keeffe.  "When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore," she said halfway through her life.  What a sense of place!  This wildly successful modernist painter, whose work ranged from flowers to cityscapes to surrealistic combinations of mountains with skulls and flowers floating huge above them, would miss spending her days in the distinctive New Mexico countryside.  It was a home she stumbled onto whilst fleeing her philandering, domineering husband Alfred Stieglitz and the tumult of his New York City.  She fell in love with the landscape of New Mexico instantly, and spent the rest of her life there, returning to New York City only for the wildly successful fall shows where Stieglitz demanded (and got) hitherto unmatched prices for her works.  (And where Stieglitz's exhibits of nude photos of Okeeffe shocked her into tears, and made her an instant celebrity.)  Upon his death in 1946, she didn't return to "the city" at all, but spent her remaining years in the landscape that was wholly enchanting to her:  her true home.

 

Roaming the northwestern New Mexico landscape, exploring the dry valleys, mountains, and towering cliffs, brought her happiness for over half a century.  She purchased an early Ford coupe, removed the front seat so she could mount a canvas there, and sat on the back seat painting what she saw as she roamed the countryside (echoing Claude Monet roaming and painting from his boat on the Seine).  Much of what she painted was direct and representational for the most part.  Much of it was surrealistic juxtapositions of what she saw.  Many days she merely walked the landscape, collecting flowers or skulls or hip bones of long-dead animals.  And painted them, in various spatial relationships, or looking up at the sky through the hip bone's obturator foramen, either in "real time" color or bright red and orange--playing, reveling in the world "as I see it."  She was perfectly content with living in and painting her beloved landscape during the day, then retiring with her hot tea and classical music in her Ghost Ranch or Abiquiu homes; then rising early the next morn to watch the sun rise from her rooftop aery.  Happy. 

 

Or the French impressionist Claude Monet.  On his death bed in 1926, he looked back on his long and incredibly successful career and admitted "All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it."  Somewhat earlier, he had observed that "I have no other wish than to mingle more closely with nature, and I aspire to no other destiny than to work and live in harmony with her laws."  This was a person entranced with the interplay of sunlight, wind, and waves at the Norman seashore, and with the Japanese bridge and water lilies of his pond created by the diversion of a tributary of the nearby Seine.  This was all he needed to inspire him to a career of 66 years of paintings of wind, water, skies, ponds, and flowers.  By broad consensus he was the apex of French painting.  Unlike Okeeffe, for whom a particular place entranced her, Monet was rather entranced by the interplay of natural processes, "to let my brush bear witness to it."

 

Water, sky, and flowers dominated Monet's work, whether at the seashore of Normandy or from his boat on the Seine or from his famous garden at Giverny.  When ponds were not available at Giverny he petitioned the local authorities and created his own, planted it with bamboo and water lilies, then doubled its size and added a Japanese bridge.  He had long been inspired by Japanese woodprints, and filled his home and kitchen with them on his walls.  He gardened incessantly.  "I dug, planted, weeded myself; in the evenings the children watered."  The kitchen garden provided food for the table; the flower garden provided subjects for his paintings.  Even as his eyesight failed him, he painted still, his canvases becoming larger and larger, filled to bursting with the beauty of the world.  By the end, he built a huge, high gallery to accommodate paintings six feet tall and 20 feet long, soon after his death to fill the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris and awe centuries of visitors—his witness to the beauty of the universe. 

 

American naturalist and cultural critic Henry David Thoreau led a troubled life alternating between the close study of his beloved New England, especially the Concord River, and his thorough disgust at the lives of "quiet desperation" of the people who lived there.  As a young man, he was deeply unhappy, and urged by his best (and nearly only) friend, the poet Ellery Channing, to move to Walden Pond: "go out upon that (land)…and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you."  In his famous Walden, or Life in the Woods, Thoreau alternates between two moods:  exalting the intellectual life of books and spiritual explorations in Eastern civilizations through the centuries, on the one hand, and losing himself in the present daily beauty and rootedness of the natural world, roaming the rivers and forests of New England, on the other.  Early in his short life, and in the Walden Pond book, he seems to favor the exotic, ageless intellectual glories of books. 

 

But later in life, Thoreau mellows, becomes more interested in the rivers and woods; he throws himself into a study of the native Americans and how they live immersed in the natural world, observing their daily lives and accompanying them on hunting and foraging trips. Thoreau had contracted tuberculosis at age 18.  Upon his death bed, at age 44, with Ellery Channing beside him again, he says in a low, gentle voice, "Now comes good sailing."  Finally, Thoreau is at home in the winds and waters of the world.  Then, whispered softly, "Moose," and, finally, "Indian."  Here is his home at last: the forest, and the animals and humans living there, in harmony with the earth, even as Thoreau joins that harmony at death.

 

John Muir kissed the cheek of death more often than perhaps any civilian who ever lived in his adventures throughout the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges on America's west coast and the huge glaciers of Alaska.  Environmentalist Bill McKibben has observed that Muir "invents, by sheer force of his love, an entirely new vocabulary and grammar of the wild…a language of ecstasy and exuberance."  Truly he is declared the Father of the National Park system and the Father of American Environmentalism.  Near the end, in his home in the Alhambra Valley north of San Francisco, he feels his lungs filling with fluid, and updates the home with new furnishings and conveniences for daughters Wanda and Helen.  He pens his last entry in his Journals, thinking of death: "The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang—home-going.  So the snow-flowers (snowflakes) go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil.  Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death's arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit—waited on, watched over, noticed only by their Maker, each arriving at his own heaven-dealt destiny.  All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried.  Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life's feast—all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love.  Yet all are our brothers, and enjoy life as we do, share heaven's blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity."  The masterful, assured Muir invites us to explore and rejoice in the natural places of our beautiful world, and to join him there in life and in death.

 

Muir's life was filled to bursting with these explorations and rejoicings.  As a youth, Muir walked a thousand miles from Indiana to Florida, collecting plants.  When a bout of malaria prevented him from his planned trip down the Amazon, Muir sailed to California and began several decades of exploration of the Sierra Nevada range, where he discovered relic glaciers.  Intrigued by glaciers, he spent another several decades exploring mature glaciers in Alaska, often alone.  He early learned (to his amazement) that he could make a living by writing about his explorations for Eastern magazines and newspapers, and his joy in the beauty of the natural world.  His writings were full of chapters devoted to water ouzel birds, or to the Douglas squirrels of Sequoia forests, or to the Wild sheep of the mountains, or to the glories of Sugar pines, "the noblest pine yet discovered, surpassing all others not merely in size but also in kingly beauty and majesty."  Through his writings and his life, Muir became the confidante of mountain men, Presidents, railroad magnates, and countless common folk encountered on his journeys.  He indeed teaches and shows all of us that the earth's creatures—including humans—"all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love…die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity."

 

Charles Darwin's last words are not particularly uplifting.  He had been shattered by the early death of his favorite child, ten-year-old Annie.  He avoided the funeral of his father and his great mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell—probably because all the graveside promises of life beyond death in the mansions of a loving (yet strict!) God seemed so utterly unbelievable, indeed repugnant, to him.  Darwin had looked forward to the birth of his first grandson in 1876, and was in attendance bedside with his son Francis for the event.  After the birth of the grandson, Bernard, Francis and Darwin watched, helpless, as the wife Amy suffered agonizing convulsions and died shrieking.  So as he lay on his own death bed in 1882, Darwin had no edifying words for us.  Amidst pain, nausea, and spasms, he retched blood for hours, which soon made his white beard red and sticky.  "I am not the least afraid to die" he said, anticipating that his friends and enemies would wonder.  To his wife Emma he said, "My love, my precious love."  As the night wore on, he muttered "If I could but die," again and again.  Then he was gone.  The photographs of the caped, elderly Darwin, with his ineffably-sad face staring somberly into the camera, give us an accurate record of the man.

 

The closest thing to inspirational might be Darwin's closing words of his great work The Origin of Species:  "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."  Yes, our world is marked by beauty and wonder, and we are nestled within it part and parcel, thoroughly at home even amidst its pains and heartbreaks. 

 

Finally, and very briefly, a description of the towering writer and philosopher Voltaire's last words.  Upon his death bed, the officious attending priest urged him to explicitly renounce Satan.  Replied Voltaire, "Surely this is no time to make new enemies." 

 

Indeed. 

 

I've had a couple of near-brushes with prison in my life, the first, almost comical; the second not at all comical.  Let's begin with humor, then go to drama. 

 

I was in my one year of seminary after graduation from Yale.  It was at the Union Theological Seminary, in New York City sandwiched on the Upper East Side between Columbia University a few blocks to the south and Harlem the same distance to the north.  This being spring of 1968, student protests were in the air, mainly against the ongoing war in Vietnam ("Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids you killed today?").  A large group of student protestors led by Mark Rudd of the Students for a Democratic Society (sic) had taken possession of Columbia President Grayson Kirk's office in the administration building, barricading themselves in and generally trashing the office and daringly smoking cigars throughout the week or so of the protests.  A few of my fellow seminarians had joined the protestors  It was, of course, of keen interest to all of us, being as we were merely a couple of blocks from the excitement. 

 

With amazingly bad timing, I decided to go see what was happening that day, on the morning of April 30.  As I arrived, NYPD officers stormed the campus with tear gas, roughly yanked the protesters out of President Kirk's office, and shepherded some 700 protestors to the rows of "paddy wagons" awaiting us, the acrid smell of tear gas hanging in the air.  Yes, "us."  Young Ray found himself in a large group of very disheveled, wild-haired, smelly protestors being herded toward the paddy wagons. 

 

"Hey, I'm not a protestor!  I'm just a curious bystander.  Hey!"  I finally got a cop to look at me.  Quite in contrast to the others, I was wearing a coat and tie, had recently shaved and showered, even combed my hair.  He squinted at me, shook his head with a growl, and said, "Get outta here, you idiot."  I eagerly agreed that I was an idiot, and removed myself speedily from the group and retreated to the peace and calm of my seminary room to study Old Testament history.  I guess I'm not much of a protester; I was happy to concentrate on my studies from then on.  (Though Columbia and many other campuses these days are still seeing protests, aren't they?  I'm glad I'm retired.)

 

As it turned out, the majority of the 700 protestors at Columbia were from other colleges around the country, semi-professional agitators who fancied themselves to be saving America from a mistaken war in Southeast Asia.  In fact, they succeeded, as LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson) did indeed decline to run for his second term of the presidency due to the turmoil engulfing the country.  And by the second month of my 1969-70 tour of duty with the U.S. Army at Headquarters, US Army, Vietnam in Long Binh (but that's another story), I had also concluded, somewhat belatedly, that the protesters in fact were entirely right.  I even suspected that we (the U.S.) might be fighting a losing battle on the wrong side of the conflict; I had reason to think that I was not the only one harboring such a suspicion. But that's all ancient history.

 

However, my finding myself in a group of protesters being herded to a paddy wagon was somewhat comical, despite the agonizing history associated with the Vietnam War.  My second, not-a-bit comical brush with prison, occurred in Beijing, China, in the spring of 1984.  I found myself surrounded by several dozen Chinese soldiers armed with rifles, with a crowd of some 50 bystanders eagerly watching what was about to happen to the skinny young foreign devil who had most unadvisedly spied on the leadership compound in the Second "Sea" of Zhong-Nan Hai Park in the Forbidden City. 

 

What the heck was I doing in Beijing, China in the spring of 1984? I had co-led a tour to China two years earlier, with my buddy (former student, now close friend) Kyle in the group.  Kyle and I chafed under the restrictions of the tour, led by a Chinese lady whose responsibility was taking us to sanctioned locations, and generally keeping us out of trouble.  Kyle and I, characteristically, had come back to China to wander about the country on our own, not perhaps to get into trouble, but to do what we wanted.

 

I had corresponded with the Chinese scientist Ye Duzhuang, who had translated all of Charles Darwin' work into Chinese, wondering whether I might speak with him while I was in Peking.  To my surprise, he invited me to give a lecture on May 7 to the scientists of the Academia Sinica by invitation of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), concerning "Current challenges to the Darwinian view of Evolution."  (The IVPP was the successor to the paleontologists, including the Catholic priest Teilhard de Chardin, who discovered the Peking Man skulls in the late 1920's.) I gave my lecture to a crowd of over a hundred scientists, prefacing the talk in my rudimentary Chinese, then in English translated by a young Chinese fellow, Yu Xiaobo (with whom I have remained friends and corresponded for these 40 years). 

 

After the talk, and a fascinating dinner at Ye's home (see chapter 23 in my 2021 Forgotten World for an in-depth history of Ye's tumultuous life and my dinner with him and his colleagues), I got to work on my secondary agenda item for the trip: research scenes and locales for what would be my first novel: Jade and Fire (Random House, 1987).  In my research for the novel, I had stumbled across a reference to a small Chinese pavilion located some 15 yards off the shore of the Middle "Sea" constructed by Kublai Khan.  Within this "Sea" (Zhong-Nan Hai) is located the compound of China's leaders, now as well as then.  Though Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai had died in 1976 (prompting the massive demonstrations in Tiananmen Square soon after), in 1984 the top governing officials of China still lived in this compound, a sort of combined White House, FBI, CIA, and National Security Council gathering in one heavily protected place.

 

So here was the challenge:  to get the photo of this pavilion (and its extremely evocative inscription, which plays an important role in Jade and Fire), I had to direct my camera towards the Middle "Sea" leaders' compound directly behind and beyond it.  I reconnoitered the surroundings, noting the armed soldiers standing every 30 yards or so, keenly vigilant against those who wouldn't respect the leadership compound.  Hmmm.  Had to get a photo of that pavilion and its inscription.  I ambled casually around the perimeter, glanced at the guards to my left and right, then when their attention wasn't focused on me, very quickly aimed my camera and got a good photo of the pavilion.  No outcry, no nothing.  Whew!  I ambled a bit further, past another couple of guards to my right, and (I did a lot of stupid things like this, especially when young) I took another quick photo from what was marginally a different angle. 

 

Mistake.  This time I quickly found myself herded by two of the armed guards to a small open space on the side of the bridge separating the Middle "Sea" and the public park of the North "Sea".  Very soon another dozen or so soldiers arrived, weapons aloft, guarding me ominously.  Then their leader arrived, an old grizzled, hard-bitten fellow wearing a pistol at his waist. 

 

He glared at me a long moment, as if he regretted what he had to do.  He curtly told me to give him the film from my camera.  I understood the Chinese, but pretended not to.  I volunteered to take a photo of everyone.  He of the pistol elaborately pantomimed what he wanted me to do: take the film out of the bloody camera and give it to him.

 

Ordinarily, I would have been happy to do that.  But this particular roll was a 72-shot roll, and it had all my photos from Hangzhou and its tea gardens and Taoist temples on it, not to mention my precious pavilion.  I was very opposed to losing those shots.  So I offered to take everyone's photo again.  The fellow with the pistol became angry, and shouted something at me. He reached out for me, as if to take me into custody.  It was the make-or-break moment.  For some reason—this was my first novel he was about to torpedo!—I backed away from him, turned, shoved my way through the fifty or so bystanders, and walked shakily across the street toward the public gardens in the North "Sea", where my buddy Kyle was waiting.  I fully expected a rough hand on my shoulder turning me around to take me into custody.  I walked further.  No hand.  As I got into the public gardens, I ventured a look around.  I was already, miraculously, out of sight of the soldiers, the pistoled one, and the crowd.  I stumbled on, found Kyle on a bench.   

 

"What the hell's wrong with you?" he enquired when he saw my face and my shaky walking.  I couldn't answer.  With trembling hands I shakily but carefully rolled up the film to its end in my camera.  (Most of those reading this will not know how an old 1984 camera worked.  You could physically roll up the film and retrieve it from the camera, containing whatever photos you had taken until that time.)  I took the film out of the camera. 

 

"Take this.  Put it in your backpack," I croaked to Kyle.  He did so, to my relief.  I was still awaiting the pistol fellow to catch up with me and take me wherever they took enemies of the state.  I took out a new roll of film and put it in the camera.  If the pistoled one confiscated my camera for evidence, they wouldn't find anything on the (new) film.  I sat back on the bench, and recounted my misadventure to Kyle. 

 

He laughed.  Annoyed, I turned to him.  "See that high Dagoba behind us?" he asked.  I nodded at the faux Tibetan tower in the North "Sea" park.  "From there you can see everything.  Including your pavilion in the Middle "Sea".  I put my telephoto lens on, mounted the camera on the tripod, and got plenty of pictures of it for you!"

 

I groaned.

 

I never did understand why the fellow with the pistol didn't pursue me.  Perhaps he didn't think the whole ruckus was worth it; after all, it was just a skinny foeign devil that had merely taken a photo of the leader's compound.  Perhaps he had other more pressing things to do that day.  Perhaps he was late to meet his young wife for an afternoon liaison.  Whatever.

 

Why, you ask, did I get into these scrapes?  Those of us who were college-age in the late 1960's realized that we were living in unusually turbulent times in America.  I've been very cognizant during my teaching career from 1976 to 2008 that my students lived in such different times, times when you didn't face the unalterable threat of being drafted and sent to a war in Southeast Asia.  Those times were incredibly difficult for those of us faced with such drastic life choices. 

And a similar turbulence had ruled China since—well, since the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, actually.  Wars, warlords, kidnappings, assassinations; the civil war between Nationalists and Communists, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four.  Unavoidable threats convulsing a whole society.

 

You want turbulence?  Several American Sinologists in the last year have come to the conclusion, based on various good reasons, that sometime in the window of 2025 to 2027, current leader Xi Jinping will decide China is strong enough to invade Taiwan and forcibly reclaim it for the Motherland, thus becoming the greatest Chinese leader since Mao.  At that point, America's president, whomever it may be, will be forced to decide whether the defense of Taiwan is worth a full-out war with China.  A nuclear-armed China, at that, perhaps aided by its ally North Korea, with our West Coast well within the range of their nuclear missiles. 

 

There are times when, lamentably, I'm almost glad I'm about to turn 80, and not expected to be so active in our national life.  Yes, we're living in a turbulent world.  Good luck to us all.

 

Postscript.  You can read Jade and Fire to discover the evocative inscription on the pavilion; pages 344-345 in the Random House hardcover edition. 

 

 

 

 

A Taoist?!  You're Kidding.

 

No, I'm not kidding.  Why in the world would I self-identify as a "Taoist" in my approach to living life?  Several reasons.  Some of them may offend some of my friends and readers.  Apologies for this.  But here goes. It's a longish tale, but we'll get to Ray becoming a Taoist, I promise.

 

Directly upon my graduation from Yale (focusing on Chinese Studies), I spent a (tumultuous) 1967 and 1968 (yeah, that 1968) at New York City's Union Theological Seminary, a non-denominational seminary.  I had been active in my Presbyterian church's youth league in high school, and, idealist as I was, considered the ministry a possible vocation.  But while at Union Seminary I discovered that many of the beliefs fundamental to Christianity just didn't seem to make sense to me.

 

Take the idea of a God who created humans, alone, in His own image, and gave these humans the whole rest of the created world for their exclusive and unrestricted use.  This tenet is vividly reflected in the early (un-"revised") King James version of Genesis 9: 2,3: 

.  "And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every fowl of the air and upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you."

 

Gosh; that didn't seem at all the way a fair and loving Christian God, creator of all the world and its marvelous creatures, would set things up.  Then I ran into Theodicy: the tension between the Christian omnipotent and benevolent God and the widespread existence of evil in human and natural history.  The most prevalent explanation for this apparent contradiction is that God has given humans free will, a gift sufficiently precious in His view to allow humans to make evil decisions.  Again: that just didn't seem something a loving, benevolent Christian God would do.  I'd been a history major at Yale, concentrating on American as well as Chinese history, and been struck by how very much cruelty and monstrous evil humanity had wrought throughout its history. 

 

Faced with what I, upon reflection, regarded as fundamental problems with Christianity, I wrote my draft board, rejecting my 4a exemption for seminary.  (What a stern idealist Ray was in those days; go figure.)  I was immediately put in the draft pool, with a very low number and thus the inevitability of being soon drafted and sent to the war in Vietnam.  So I enlisted for three years (rather than the two of a draftee) and thus was able to choose my military occupation.  If I was going to Vietnam, I was determined to go there in the medical corps. 

 

Upon arriving (in the midst of an incredibly intense monsoonal rainstorm), I was assigned to U.S. Army Headquarters, Vietnam, in Long Binh, as a medical records specialist.  Being the headquarters, there was a surprisingly adequate library at the base. There I stumbled upon several books about natural history, and became fascinated with the world of nature.  After my tour of duty, having developed a somewhat misanthropic attitude toward human history, I decided to get a PhD in biology, despite having taken no courses whatsoever in the subject during my four years at Yale.  (Again: go figure.)  Among a dozen curt rejections from various universities, Duke University took me on a trial basis, and 4 years later I had my PhD in Zoology.

 

Being a "certified" biologist at this point, I began reading about Charles Darwin, the central figure in biology (a pursuit I'm still engaged in).  In David Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, Darwin's views on creation are given: "Special creation?  Divine providence? Godly design?  Darwin had found no support for those notions in biogeography, the taxonomy of barnacles, or the fates of certain innocent children.  (This latter referring to the heartbreaking death of Darwin's favorite child, Annie, at age 10, a watershed moment in Darwin's life.)  'Everything in nature, he concluded coldly, is the result of fixed laws.'  Had an impersonal First Cause (God) of some sort, a Supreme Being in the fuzziest sense, given rise to the universe and set it in motion according to the mechanics of those fixed laws? Maybe.  For much of his adult life, including the period when he wrote The Origin of Species, that's what Darwin felt inclined to believe."

 

Aha!  That was the moment I identified myself as a Taoist.  I immediately recalled the Chinese history class at Yale, nine years earlier, where Taoism had been discussed.  The Tao was (is!)  a mysterious (but utterly immanent and this-worldly) force that had brought forth the world and coursed, inherent, throughout the world, not giving a fig for humans, particularly. But most importantly: impersonal.  Not capable of anger or Commandments or human emotions, whether love or hate.  Here in the world, in all the "ten thousand creatures" as well as rocks and rivers and clouds and sunsets.  The Tao, as described in the ancient Chinese classics Tao De Jing and Chuangtze, provided exactly the ongoing, inherent creative force that set the fixed laws by which the world moved as Darwin "was inclined to believe."  And which made sense to Ray as well; Ray the newly-minted Taoist.

 

Maybe I've read too many mystery stories.  But like Sherlock Holmes in The Reigate Squires, I need to have things make sense.  As he put it, "I make a point of never having any prejudices and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me."For me, this tenet has led to my adopting the Taoist point of view.  It makes sense of the world, to me at least. 

 

Nor has this been merely an intellectual satisfaction.  This view of life thrills my heart as well as my head.  Knowing that I (all of us, actually) am part of a grand, ancient process of creation according to fixed laws gives a zest to life.  We're all in this together, humans as well as all the equally marvelous creatures and rocks and sunsets of the world, inextricably linked to each and to our lovely planet orbiting an obscure sun in an obscure universe at the edge of the Milky Way. 

 

Let us conclude by recalling the final paragraph of our Mr. Darwin's The Origin of Species, Darwin the unknowing Taoist himself:

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."  (Italics mine)

 

 

Note:  for readers wishing to know more about Taoism, you might consult my 2004 Relax, You're Already Home: everyday Taoist habits for a richer life.   As it turns out, my mentor John Muir was also, like Darwin, an unrealized Taoist.  See my 2016 Earth Wisdom: John Muir, Accidental Taoist, if interested.  Both available on Amazon.  Barnett—the Taoist—out. 

I had a very strange week in the Sonoran Desert here in southern Arizona in late January, about 3 or 4 days on each side of the Chinese Lunar New Year.  For the few months I've been trying to figure out what the devil was going on.  Though I was "neat, clean, shaved and sober," as Philip Marlow is described on the first page of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, my account of what happened sounds like something from an Uncle Remus ride in Disneyland (before the lovable old fellow was "cancelled" there recently).  So I think I'll just describe what happened—true story, no embellishment nor exaggeration—and end with some provisional interpretations. Feel free to think whatever you want about it.

 

It began one morning as I sat in our (east-facing) front courtyard enjoying the early sunshine over Arizona's Catalina mountains: movement between the homes across and up the street, those bordering the Sonoran Desert in which our retirement subdivision sits.  Yes; it was a bobcat, sauntering across the front yards, perhaps 150 feet away.  A gorgeous animal, tawny gold with the bright black and white stripes on the legs (that you never see adequately depicted in the field guides) and the same color spots on the ears.  John Muir often commented how clean wild animals are—always with bright colors and free of dirt or mud.  That sure was this fellow.  Bobcat sightings are not that rare here, due to our proximity to the desert, so I enjoyed it but didn't regard it as anything unusual.

 

Until the next morning, when Tammy and I were doing our stretches facing the picture windows looking into our back yard.  "Tam! Bobcats, to the right!" I announced in an urgent voice.  Yes, two of them, probably mother and yearling, ambling the length of our yard, looking alertly around them as they glided oh so gracefully by.  I watched, mesmerized by the two of them and their beauty, while Tam ran for her phone.  She got a photo of one looking back at us ("Hey! What's all the fuss?  Never seen a bobcat?" it seemed to be thinking) just before they disappeared over the wall into the neighbor's yard. 

 

Wow.  Three bobcats in two days; now that was a bit unusual.  It won't get any better than this, I thought. 

 

Until the next day, as I sat on a favorite bench ("Ray's laughing place") a ten-minute walk from our home, along a finger of the desert that stretches through the neighborhood. Before me stretched an arroyo some 60 yards across, pretty thick with cholla and prickly pear cacti, palo verde trees, and acacia shrubs.  Movement, close to my right.  And yes, another bobcat glides into my field of view not more than 10 feet from me.  I sit stock still.  Directly in front of me, he pauses, catching my scent, I bet.  He turns his head, looks straight at me, then leisurely resumes his fluid movement, and disappears into the desert terrain.  I sit there, bemused, wondering what I'd done to earn the good will of the bobcat gods.   

 

The next day, I walked my wonted loop through the full-on desert just north of our home, a route that takes me well away from any homes, with nothing but desert for as far as you can see to the north.  Someone has thoughtfully provided a crude wooden bench about a mile into the loop, on which I was sitting, drinking hot tea from my thermos.  Since we get an average of 12 inches of rain a year here, this desert has a very high species diversity of plant life, compared to the other three deserts in North America.  I was straddling the thin bench, facing west with 180 degrees of view from the north to the south, though limited by the cacti and thorny shrubs.  Movement to the north amongst the cholla and prickly pear cacti.  A glimpse of two large ears moving along, appearing then disappearing amongst the vegetation—a mule deer? No, our deer here are the white-tails from back east, smaller ears.  But these ears were huge.  A break in the cacti, and I see—what the heck?  Loping along, almost the size of a small deer, but no.  Loping.  A jackrabbit?  But the largest jackrabbit I've ever seen, coming almost straight toward me.  I'm frozen, steaming cup of tea halfway to my mouth.  The creature lopes up within 8 feet of me, and pauses.  Wind must be blowing toward me, because he takes no notice of me as he forages around on the ground for maybe 6 seconds.  Right in front of me; I'm obviously just an inanimate extension of the bench, though sort of funny looking. 

 

I gaze on the creature, thoroughly mystified as to what species he is.  Clearly, he's a very large species of jackrabbit, maybe 24 inches long, with those huge ears, at least 8 inches each.  But he's glowing with color and it isn't the color of the Black-tailed Jackrabbit that I'm very familiar with from California.  No, this critter is bigger than that jackrabbit, and not grizzled brown and black fur but gloriously white fur—again, spotlessly clean--on his flanks and belly, grading to grey speckled with black on his back.  Now, I'm a mammologist, who taught the subject for 32 years, emphasis on California, but this guy was completely new to me.  He positively glowed with health and color, and the naked interior of those 8-inch ears was a lovely soft shade of blood pink.  The most beautiful thing I've ever seen?  Close to it.  And 8 feet from me!  He soon loped away, leaving me very nearly breathless.  I finally resumed lifting my cup the rest of the way to my mouth, gulped the tea down, and poured myself another cup with shaking hand.  I didn't have my guidebook with me, so I had no idea what species of jackrabbit this fellow was (turned out to be Lepus alleni, the antelope (or "Mexican") jackrabbit, who's not supposed to be this far north and west).  But he had sure given me a treat.  I got up to resume my walk, and from the high ground on which the bench sat, I looked across the desert and, believe it or not, I could see him picking his way amongst the cacti as he loped along.  Amazing. 

 

But my strange week in the desert wasn't over, by any means.  A couple of days later I made my weekly car trip to Sabino Canyon, on the other side of the Catalina mountains.  On the walking road into the canyon, you pass a hill to the east, then dip down a long descending stretch of road.  Atop the hill is a rugged stone structure, used for water storage in the past.  Because my good wife and daughter #3 tell me I need to get some "cardio" workout in my walks, my routine is to walk to the low point of the road, then turn around and vigorously walk the 300 feet or so of elevation gain to the trail leading to the hill, then another 400 feet of elevation gain to the top.  No, 700 feet of elevation gain is not a lot, but vigorous walking—and doing the whole thing twice—gets my heart beating faster than usual. 

 

At the top of the hill, beyond the stone structure there, I typically sit on a rock overlook and enjoy the view.  The canyon and Sabino creek stretches far to the northeast, between high sloping walls on either side, stately saguaro cacti strewn over the hillsides.  To my east the creek flows down the canyon and away to my right, where it empties into the basin on which Tucson sits.  A picturesque dam interrupts the flow of the creek just below me. 

 

As I approach "my" rock this day to drink tea and munch a granola bar, I notice something on the rock.  It's a roadrunner, the iconic desert bird, a large specimen, about two feet long counting tail, with dark brown-black coloration, and crested head.  He (probably, from his coloration) appears to be enjoying the view before him.  He doesn't dash away as I approach, as all other roadrunners have.  As roadrunners should.  Rather, he placidly turns and gazes up at me, some 10 feet away.  "Uh. That's my rock?" I stupidly inform him.  More gazing at me.  I take another step.  He calmly gets up, hops over to another rock some 6 feet to the right but with a short palo verde tree providing him some privacy, sets himself down on it, and resumes his contemplation of the view.  Ignoring me. 

 

I make some racket getting onto my rock (it's a pretty good fall beyond the rock, and I've got to be careful as I stow my hiking sticks and get out my thermos and so on).  Doesn't bother my neighbor a bit.  We sit there together, sharing the view, about 6 feet from each other.  This is very strange.  Definitely not roadrunner behavior.  Any more than my mystery jackrabbit was acting like a jackrabbit should.  The bobcats?  They're pretty blasé—top predator and all that—and generally not that spooked by humans.  Though not typically such close humans as me on the bench at Ray's laughing place several days before. 

 

I'm feeling weird, sitting there with my roadrunner neighbor atop the hill in Sabino Canyon, remembering my bobcat and jackrabbit experiences just days ago.  And I remember sinologist Mark Elvin's 2005 Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China.  That book contains Hangzhou nature poet Xie Lingyun's "Living in the Hills," in which he lists the large mammals abundant and frequently encountered around Hangzhou Bay in his day, the early 400's AD (aka CE):  gibbons, badgers, tigers, wolves, bobcats, two species of bear, jackals, big-horned sheep, elk, and muntjaks.  Xie Lingyun's list would have been even more extensive, of course, during the Neolithic, four thousand years before, when "civilization" had not yet so seriously impinged on the original wildlife.

 

Elvin observes: "All these species, without exception, seem to have vanished by (our) modern times (from the Hangzhou region)…It would be a folly to overromanticize this fifth-century world. Tigers and wolves are dangerous.  But human beings grew up for several hundreds of thousands of years with animals all around them (culminating in the Neolithic hunting-gathering-gardening period).  A strange silence has fallen (in the ensuing millennia since the end of the Neolithic). An emptiness.  One cannot help wondering what the long-term implications of this are for the balance of our minds."

 

The "strange silence" which has existed since the end of the Neolithic between humans and our fellow creatures, according to the American historian Lynn White in a pivotal 1967 essay, is grounded in the view of Abrahamic religions as expressed in Genesis 9, verses 2 and 3 (I give the original King James translation, not the "revised"):

"So God created man in his own image…And God blessed them, and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth on the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea-- into your hand are they all delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you" (italics and boldface in the preceding paragraphs are mine). 

 

It dawns on me.  Somehow, for some or for no good reason, it seems I've been granted a week in the Neolithic, when we humans still had an unusually close association with our wild neighbors, our fellow inhabitants of this good earth.  Before the "fear and dread" of humans came into being.  It's been thrilling. Sitting there on my rock with Sabino Canon stretching before me, I smile.  Then laugh. My roadrunner neighbor doubtless hears the laugh, and stirs a little uneasily, but doesn't move, continuing his amiable contemplation of the view. 

 

I drink my cup of tea, finish my granola bar.  "See ya later," I say, softly, to the roadrunner.  He doesn't acknowledge me.  I gather my hiking sticks and quietly leave, awed by this curious week I've been given in the Neolithic, smack in the middle of the Chinese Lunar New Year.

 

Make what you want of it, but it was quite week.

 

 

The sun was just cresting Haleakala to the east as I hefted my snorkel bag and Big Agnes collapsible camp chair and headed for Kama'ole 2 Beach Park.  With the trade winds revving up early each day here on southeastern Maui, I wanted to be in the water when the first light filtered down onto the reef, before the wind and waves roiled up the water (as had happened yesterday).  It felt great to be walking down South Kihei Drive, with hardly any traffic, the tourists and homeless campers not yet up, and perhaps the most scenic (and snorkeling blessed) stretch of beaches in Hawaii on my left the whole way from our rented condo.  

I dropped my shoes and chair against a dune at the north end of Kama'ole 2, and continued along the high ground of beach access across the point where I'd be snorkeling, a relatively recent lava flow from the aforesaid volcanic mountain several thousand years ago, the frozen rocks creating an incredibly varied and "friendly" reef habitat for creatures swarming the waters there.  A minute later I walked down into the south end of Kama'ole 1 Beach Park, left my snorkel bag amonst the black lava rocks there, and walked into the water with my mask and snorkel atop my head and fins in hand.  When the water deepened, I put my fins on, pulled my mask and snorkel down, and turned to swim out to skirt the shoreline rocks against which the surf was lapping.  

Not 60 seconds into my swim, with more sand than rocky reef below me, there it was:  a Spotted Eagle Ray pulsating slowly beside me, its undulating "wings" propelling it effortlessly through the water.  The holy grail of my underwater career, a creature unsurpassed for beauty of appearance and movement.  While my Scuba-experienced high school buddy Jim has seen plenty, I've avoided Scuba (yes, I'm at heart a Luddite) and seen only one Eagle Ray in my water-surface-snorkeling experience of half a century.  (See my blog for August 2019.)   And this morning:  my second Eagle Ray, flowing past me as gracefully and beautifully as the first time.  I broke my wonted rule and followed her for maybe a minute, until she showed some signs of being annoyed, then broke off with a benediction to her.  

It figured I'd see another Eagle Ray in the sandy-rich area; these rays are not filter feeders, like their more well-known (and larger) cousins Manta Rays.  Instead, the Eagle Rays search through the sand for buried molluscs, and upon finding one simply crush the (substantial!) shells with their fused teeth of each jaw (powered by sturdy jaw muscles, analogous to our masseter muscle).  Spit the shell fragments out and feast on the mollusc flesh! 

While a bit anticlimactic, the rest of the 45-minute snorkel was also good.  This area had been turtle-rich last year, and I wasn't disappointed.  Most of the dozen Green Sea Turtles I swam amongst had just awakened and risen from the sandy bottom when the sun's rays brightened their habitat, and cleaner fish were clustered around them thickly, scouring the shells of the algae encrusting it.  The smaller turtles looked almost like balloons, so thick were the feeding fish around them.  The big guys, though, sailed serenely through the early morning waters in their calm, unhurried way, ignoring the fish clustered about them.  I sensed something big beside me, and twisted about to see a large adult turtle, maybe four feet long, had glided up within a foot of me.  After my adrenaline rush had subsided, I swam along enjoying his company, visions of a St. Francis of the Sea glimmering in my head. Soon he veered down toward a tempting clutch of red algae, and I was just Ray again, rather than a soggy St. Francis. 

Eagle rays thrill me.  Sea turtles reassure me; they radiate an aura of certainty of their place in the scheme of things, going unhurried about their daily business with not a care in the world.  Sea water becoming acidified due to global warming?  It'll pass, give or take a thousand years.  Pollutants washing down from growth of coastal farms and businesses?  It'll pass too, in a millennium or two.  I'm doing my thing, they seem to say; and my kind will be here doing their thing long after you foolish humans are gone.  And you know what?  I think they may very likely be right.  

Lots of fish in the Butterflyfish family pass below me amongst the rock reefs, usually in pairs, all brimming with yellows, oranges, and black: the raccoon, four-spot, teardrop, threadfin and more.  Many sex-changing wrasses too, especially a breathtaking swarm of the red/green/blue ringed Christmas wrasse.  Lots of the blue and black, spotted trunkfish, with their boxy shape.  And large schools of the Yellowfin goatfish, their yellow stripes glinting from the white bodies massed together.  

Then, of course, my favorite, perhaps, the reef triggerfish, sporting whites and golds framed in black, with a touch of red, whose Hawaian name (humu-humu nuku-nuku apua'a) I required my Pacific Basin Natural History students to memorize.  (This was often the only thing the students remembered from the course a decade on, according to many I'd meet long after the course.)  

I was tiring; 77-year-old guys don't have the energy for long snorkels that they used to.  Swimming back to the shore, I noticed a moray eel poking his head out a hole in the rocky reef.  Then, my gear stuffed into the bag, I paused atop the beach access trail at the point between Kam 1 and Kam 2,  enjoying the feel of the sun on my skin as I gazed out at the waves surging over the emergent rocks of the point.  Yes, I think the sea turtles are right.  Everything is doing fine out there, and because the ocean is so huge with so much inertia, the creatures out there will take all the perturbations of climate change in stride and come out fine on the other side in a couple of thousand years.  Even if in our foolishness we stumble into a nuclear war and poison the air and water with radioactivity, that too will get absorbed, maybe even sparking some mutations that help creatures get through the tough period.  

But it will be alright, as it is now.  I take no pleasure in being persuaded to the conclusion--based on research for my last two books, and the scientific articles I've consulted--that our inadequate response to the various phenomena associated with climate change will very likely destroy human civilization, and very possibly extinguish the human species on our planet.  Here I join others similarly persuaded.  Certainly, whether our kind will be here after the thousand years or more of recovery from climate changes' catastrophes is an open question.  My hunch is probably not; we're very dependent upon the hugely intricate mechanical/electrical/computerized system that we've woven around ourselves.  But perhaps, just perhaps, some few of us in sheltered, out-of-the-way places will survive, and remember how to grow our own food and tend the soil, even how to fold the raising of chickens (and their manure!) into the system as my buddy Al does on his farm, to create a balanced, sustaining, self-enclosed practice.  Any survivors will have reverted to the hunting/gathering/gardening mode that modern archaeological research shows characterized our kind's first 10,000 years as settled villagers, before the momentous events of about 2,500 BCE (leading to urbanization, patriarchy, misogyny, extraction and production of luxury goods, and warfare) changed it all and led us directly and inexorably to where we are today.   

Perhaps.  But either way, the oceans and their creatures will remain, tho perhaps a bit changed genetically to cope with the new conditions.  Life will continue to pulse and flow serenely onward amongst the sun rising over Haleakala and the tides pushing in and pulling out.  Eagle Rays will glide effortlessly along the sandy bottoms, and fish will clean sea turtle shells, and all will be well.  I grin in the sunlight overlooking the wave-splashed point, adjust my snorkel bag on my shoulder, and stroll toward Kama'ole 2 and an hour lolling in the morning sun on my Big Agnes chair until my good wife passes by on her morning beach stroll.  All is well.  

 

(For an account of the momentous events clustered around 2,500 BCE, see Raymond Barnett's Forgotten World, available from Amazon.)

 

 

For a fellow who grew up in land-locked Oklahoma—maybe because of it—my happiest times out of doors have always centered on water.  I don't discriminate; the water can be salty or fresh.  Hawaii has provided the former; by the time my son was 11 years of age he'd traveled there 12 times with us.  Tide-pooling and snorkeling the reefs have always been at the top of the agenda, there (see my blogs of Nov. 6, 2014; Aug. 3, 2018; Aug. 24, 2019).  Most of the year, of course, it's fresh water activities for our family, back on the "mainland." One favorite such spot is in Yosemite Park, where the Lyell and Dana creeks come together to form the Tuolumne River in the famous Meadow.  We've had many marvelous times alongside Lyell Creek, particularly, in the campground there. 

 

But for most of the year, for the past 46, it's been our home-town Big Chico Creek that emerges from the Sierra Nevada foothills that my family and I have frequented.  My wife Tammy and I were married by a rented minister on the banks of the creek, whose cooling breezes comforted the volleyball and horseshoe players after the ceremony.  Our two kids ("second family," following my "first family" of two daughters) celebrated most of their birthdays in picnics with their CoHousing friends in shady groves alongside the creek.  Every 4th of July the Barnetts would host a gathering at Raspberry Hole in the creek, watermelons kept cool by the waters.  Even the hard days involved Chico Creek.  When my daughter Holly died at age 23, her mother and sister and I bicycled into the upper region of Chico Creek above the turbulent Iron Canyon, hiked a creekside trail far into the narrow canyon there, and tenderly placed some of her ashes on a sharp slope above Salmon Hole, amidst many tears.  Holly and her sister had spent many summer days swimming and sunbathing in that creek.

 

So when Tammy and I moved from Northern California to Southern Arizona recently (see my blog of Sept. 9, 2022), many things changed, but one did not:  I found a favorite creek at which I'm spending much time, and took our two kids there when they visited.  The interesting thing is that while of course Sabino Creek is located in the Sonoran Desert rather than the oak woodlands of the Sierra Nevada foothills, in many respects my new creek is extremely similar to my old creek.

 

How so, "similar"?  Well, the vegetation bordering the creek—the riparian zone—is composed here largely of Fremont Cottonwoods, Arizona Sycamores, and two species of Willow.  In Chico, the riparian zone along the creek is largely Fremont Cottonwoods, California Sycamores, several species of Willow, with White Alder thrown into the mix.  As you tromp up the creek in Chico, hopping or swimming from rock to rock, you notice territorial patrolling by the Flame Skimmer and Green Darner dragonflies—the same dragonflies that also patrol along Sabino Creek here!  And the petite Bluet Damselflies are much in evidence here, as they also are in Chico Creek.  Ditto for the insects in the creek:  water striders and water beetles, for example, as well as the larval forms of the dragonflies.

 

It's no surprise, upon reflection, that the creeks and their riparian zones are so similar:  whether a creek in Arizona or California, there's a relatively constantly supply of fresh water, and the wind-blown propagules of trees and shrubs spread from creek to creek to creek over long distances.  These same environmental conditions give you the startling similarity of creeks and riparian zones across the entire continent. 

 

But as I float on my back down a calm stretch of Sabino Creek here, gazing up at the slopes of Sabino Canyon, I see a very different sight than I would see floating down Chico Creek.  There in Chico, the canyon floor and walls featured patches of valley oak and blue oak woodlands, interspersed among thick grasslands composed of species brought by the Spaniards five centuries earlier.  Here, the dominating trees are the stately Saguaro cacti, reaching 40 feet tall with anywhere from two to a couple of dozen "arms" stretching upward around the central column.  The late spring demonstrated that these bizarre-looking plants belong to the same "Angiosperm" clade of flowering plants as our California cottonwoods and willows, when their white flowers bloom atop the arms, and develop into the sugar-rich, seed-containing fruits which the Sonoran indigenous peoples gathered at festive late summer gatherings. 

 

While the Saguaros dominate, the Palo Verde trees are also common, looking much more "normal" to our eyes; they are not cacti.  But the tiny leaves of the Palo Verde are sparse and soon drop; the tree can't afford the water lost by evaporation.  How do they accomplish the photosynthesis fueling growth and seed production without leaves?  Easy!  The chlorophyll that powers photosynthesis has been moved to the outer surfaces of the trunk, branches, and stems.  The trees are green all over!  And happily making sugars and proteins and DNA from the abundant Arizona sunshine, leaves be damned

. 

And of course Sabino Canyon's slopes also feature abundant species of the smaller (than Saguaro) cacti.  Like the Saguaros, all cacti have long abandoned leaves and relocated their chlorophyl to their stems, similar to what the non-cactus Palo Verdes have done.  Some cacti have relatively flat, disc-shaped stems: the Prickly Pear species, which are effectively protected by arrays of formidable thorns.  They also are flowering plants, remember, so they have spectacular, colorful flowers on the perimeter of the flat stems, of which Tammy has taken many dozens of photos, and depicted many in her paintings.  These flowers develop into masses of high-calory carbohydrate fruits, which the indigenous peoples would also harvest and eat, in addition to the young disc stems.  (Note:  these original peoples of the Sonoran Desert were adept at methods for removing the thorns before ingestion!) 

 

Cylindrical stems are present in the big Barrel Cacti and the smaller Hedgehog cacti, each with many species and armored also with thorns.  But the most formidable (many would say "vicious") thorn-protected cacti are doubtless the chollas (or "choyas").  These exhibit thinner cylindrical stems, and the species of chollas vary from relatively small (the "Teddy-bear Cholla", which is anything but cuddly) to the 20-foot Staghorn cholla and "Jumping" cholla.  This latter plant produces easily-detachable segments whose plentiful thorns seem to leap onto your arms or legs or any clothing you might think would protect you, and thus make you a disperser of the clonal segments—all upon the slightest hint of contact.

 

So, yes:  the plants on the slopes of the canyons in which Sabino Creek and Chico Creek merrily flow are as startlingly different as the riparian zone plants and insects are startlingly similar.  What about the mammals you may encounter in the riparian and canyon slopes?  Some are found in both habitats:  pocket gophers, packrats (tho in Arizona the white-throated woodrat, instead of the dusky-footed), ground squirrels (tho here the Rock and Harris Antelope ground squirrels, rather than California's Beechey); but the very same bobcat and mt. lion prowl both canyons, as well as Raccoons and Ringtail "cats".  Surprisingly, a variety of the Eastern White-tailed deer is found in these portions of the Sonoran desert, just as the Black-tailed deer is in Chico Canyon.

 

Sabino Canyon also contains two rather spectacular mammals not found in California at all, tho.  A mainly arboreal member of the raccoon family common in Central and South America, the Coati Mundi, ambles throughout the upper reaches of Sabino Canyon, tho it is not commonly seen.  (My son Louis spotted one his first saunter alongside Sabino Creek; but then Lou also spotted the only Cloth of Gold cone shell I've ever seen in a Hawaiian tidepool.)  I finally evened-up with Lou on my first rock-hopping jaunt up Sabino Creek high in the canyon, where after swimming through a deep 40-foot pool in a narrow spot between sheer rock walls, I emerged, sat on a rock to rest (Hey! I'm 77 years old!), and heard a Coati foraging in a cottonwood some 20 feet away, all oblivious to any human presence in such a high spot.  He soon caught my scent some seconds after I saw him, and promptly did the only sensible thing, fleeing clumsily away from the weird, dangerous naked ape.

 

The other mammal in Sabino Canyon you won't find in Chico Canyon is the Javelina, or Collared Peccary.  This scruffy but amiable fellow is a New World member of the Suidae, a cousin to our domestic pig and the wild boars of the Old World.  He's only 30 to 50 pounds and not a yard tall, but he's unmistakable.  Unlike the Coati, he's comfortable around humans, and groups of a dozen or more regularly barge into our neighborhood in search of food to complement the Prickly Pear stems and Palo Verde pods found in the Sonoran proper.  (This commonly happens on mornings when the garbage containers are waiting to be picked up and emptied, a task to which the Javelinas are only too happy to contribute.) 

 

Birds?  Southern Arizona is famous to bird-watchers for its incredible diversity of birdlife.  Sabino Canyon is full of Gila woodpeckers, Cactus wrens, and Roadrunners, all unknown to Chico Canyon.  But you will find the occasional Phainopepla (a striking black bird with a crest and red eyes) in both canyons.  Mourning doves are common in both canyons, tho the White-winged Dove only in Sabino.

 

Ah, the reptiles.  The Sonoran Desert Tortoise is common here, and a very appealing fellow, but not remotely a denizen of the Sierra foothills.  Diamondback rattlesnakes are found both places, but southern Arizona is also famous for its dozen-some additional species of rattlers.  I've encountered the Ridge-nosed Rattler (Arizona's "state reptile") on one of my jaunts up Sabino Creek, tho my encounters with Diamondbacks have only been in the desert surrounding our community.  I am acutely conscious of the fact that perhaps the most elusive and fascinating Arizona reptile, the (so-called) Gila Monster clothed in dramatic orange/red and black bead-like scales, has been seen (so far) by only one Barnett:  my good wife Tammy (whose family nick-name is "Hawk-eye," and rightly so). 

 

Access to Sabino Canyon is dramatically different than that to Chico Canyon.  You can of course bicycle and/or hike into Chico canyon, even its upper reaches, which I often did.  But only a rough dirt/gravel road is available for vehicles, which is often closed in the rainy winters.  Sabino Canyon?  Private vehicles into the canyon are prohibited, but there is a daily open-air, electric-powered tram/shuttle which will take you on-the-hour (for a small fee; better make a reservation online) from the Visitor Center up into the Upper Canyon, the well-maintained asphalt road crossing 10 bridges over Sabino Creek as it hugs the creek all the way up.  There are nine stops on the route, and you can hop on and off at any place.  For first-time visitors to our new home, we take the ride all the way to the top, and walk the 4 miles back, a leisurely stroll which is very near the top of my favorite things.  Ray being Ray, I often stop and take a dip at water-fall-featuring spots or, really, any particularly scenic swimming hole, which tries the patience of my dear wife.  Fortunately for me, since she has taken up painting, she whiles away the time by making sketches of the flowers and scenery.

 

The open-air shuttle is used mainly by tourists, tho.  All the day long, the citizens of Tucson and surrounding areas walk up the road into the canyon, by the hundreds and hundreds every day.  All types of folks: Anglos, Hispanics, Asians, all types of Americans and foreign visitors, lone males and females, groups of friends young and old, and families galore.  You won't believe how many babies are pushed into the canyon in strollers by their moms and dads every day. The strollers are left on the road a mile or two in, as the families take short side trails to the always-nearby creek and set up umbrellas and picnics.  In sum, Sabino Canyon is heavily used by a complete cross-section of the citizens of the Tucson area, with nary a spot of litter ever visible. Tellingly, restrooms and trash bins are available periodically all the way into the canyon.  And because the canyon's entrance is a dozen miles from downtown Tucson, perhaps, the chaotic tents and social turmoil that, alas, is so often associated with the lamentably poorly-met challenges of homelessness are, so far, absent from Sabino Canyon. 

 

The availability of water in which to enjoy the creek and canyon differs between the two spots also.  There is almost always water in Big Chico Creek in Chico Canyon.  Sometimes there is too much water, and turbulent spring flows amongst the large rocks of Iron Canyon (Bear Hole (aka Bare Hole!) and Salmon Hole) claim the life of a young, over-eager but under-cautious swimmer every couple of years.  But typically it is only as Chico Creek enters the Sacramento Valley and flows through the city of Chico that the creek frequently de-waters in the summer.  But the rest of the year, it flows clear into the Sacramento River, and thence out San Francisco Bay into the Pacific.

 

Sabino Creek marches to the beat of a different drummer.  It sits within the Sonoran Desert, remember, an area that typically gets only 12 inches or so of rain a year—less than half what the foothills of northern California typically get.  This rainfall is split between gentle winter rains of December thru February, and the intense late summer afternoon "monsoon" rains of mid-June to mid-September.  So the creek tends to be flush during the winter and early spring (I have swum it in mid-March), but drops rapidly in the dry late spring and early summer, to stagnant pools here and there.  The "monsoon" rains come, tho, and the creek fills rapidly, permitting swimming throughout the late summer and early fall.  Then it dries up again in the fall, until the winter rains come.  So:  you have to know your creek, and be aware of the rainfall, particularly of flash floods after heavy monsoon rain days, which can be deadly.  I'm still learning, but even only being here from February to now (mid-September), I've had plenty of wonderful times.

 

And I confidently look forward to many more wonderful times swimming the deep pools, rock-hopping up the rough, turbulent stretches, and floating down the placid stretches of Sabino Creek in the future.  Depending on how many years I've been given, I hope to accumulate a store of heart-filling experiences in Sabino Creek winding its way down Sabino Canyon.  Who knows?  Maybe some day my wife and kids will tenderly place my ashes in this creek, and watch them swirl and spread amongst the dragonflies and past the foraging Coati Mundis as the Saguaros bear witness from the slopes.  I look forward to that happening—at the proper time.  Barnett out. 

 

 

(Warning:  this is a story of how two otherwise sensible people turned their lives upside-down.  Then having done that, they proceeded to turn their upside-down lives on its head—again—and ended up somewhere even more unexpected.  Fasten your seat belts.)

 

Part One.  It seemed such a simple, innocuous notion as the summer of 2021 dragged on.  Tired of Northern California's past three years of summer/fall wildfires and bad air? Of the realization that the fire that destroyed Paradise in 2018—19 miles from our Chico home—was not a one-time aberration but merely the first of a predictable new summer reality?  Tired of air purifiers chugging away inside your home and donning masks most of the summer whenever you go outside?  Leave it!  Drive east from California until you find fresh air, and then camp in that glorious, deep-breathing freshness for six weeks of July and August! 

 

We invested a thousand dollars in camping equipment, jammed it into our all-electric Chevy Bolt, and headed east over the Sierra Nevadas for Reno, where we struggled to lucidly explain our solution to summer California wildfires to Tammy's Dad.  No matter.  The next day we resumed our eastward escape.  Halfway through Nevada's Great Basin Desert, the Air Quality Index (AQI) had begun to drop toward safe, healthy levels.  By the end of the day, as we entered Utah, we could roll the windows down and take big, deep gulps of healthy air.  "Fresh air!" became our byword as we ploughed further east out of Utah to the Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. 

 

Our Wawona 6-person tent (with added vestibule providing cover for cooking or just lounging out of rain or too much sun) was our Colorado home for the next two weeks.  Fresh air every morning—and all the rest of the day!  The camp grounds were huge, sites large, and a free (hot!) shower was a pleasant five-minute walk away.  Pinyon pines and Gambel oaks surrounded us, and the ancient cliff-houses of Pre-Pueblo peoples awed and inspired.  "Monsoon" thunder storms also awed us, with incredibly dense rainfall several afternoons a week. But the new tent held up fine, and the storms cooled everything off.  We experimented and finally perfected healthy, simple meals on our two-burner Coleman stove.  Lots of walks to the surrounding mesas and mountain flanks.  And infinite quantities of—yes, fresh air. 

 

But Santa Fe and Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch beckoned.  Ray had explored both with his travel-buddy Al on several trips, and had promised Tammy she'd soon see them.  So we reluctantly left Mesa Verde and made the short-day drive to a campground/RV park outside of Santa Fe, pitched the Taj Mahal of tents there amidst more Pinyon pines and now Western junipers, and soaked in the fresh air of northern New Mexico.  But here, in addition to golden sunsets dazzling us from our lawn chairs outside the tent, we had culture aplenty to enjoy.  The old Plaza in Santa Fe's historic center; the nearby St. Francis Cathedral with roots stretching to 1598; the anthropology museums on Museum Hill south of town; and most important the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum just west of the Plaza.  It was all wonderful.  Short drives took us to the Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings in Bandelier National Monument; the old village of Chimayo in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo range, with its cathedral dispensing healing soil; a bit further to the old village of Abiquiu, where O'Keeffe lived in the winters; and to Ghost Ranch, where the indomitable artist invented a new, iconic genre of American landscape painting—the surrounding skulls, flowers, mountains, and mesas. 

 

It was in the evenings, watching the sun set in glory and the stars emerge from the darkening sky above our Santa Fe campground, that it happened.  Completely unforeseen, we began to wonder: could we have more of all this than just six weeks a year?  Why not escape the drought and heat and wildfires of California—altogether?  We laughed, skeptically, as we both admitted to these weird notions.  Ridiculous.  True, our kids and my daughter from my first marriage had all left Chico.  True, Chico was still crowded with refugees (and traffic) from the 2018 Camp Fire that had destroyed Paradise.  True, Tammy had just retired from three decades of teaching, only weeks before our Fresh Air Tour began.  And the future in Northern California promised nothing but continued—expanding—occurrences of wildfires, drought, congestion, and dropping levels of water in our beloved Chico Creek two blocks from our home. 

 

But—ridiculous.  Tho Tammy was still in her 50s, Ray was in his mid-70's, and had solemnly vowed that our last move 12 years ago would be his last.  People in their 70's don't pick up and move to a new state, leaving friends and locales cultivated since 1976 (for Ray) and 1984 (for Tammy).  They just don't.  But the notion wouldn't die.  We were genuinely sad as we packed up the tent outside of Santa Fe.  We journeyed a day's drive north to Boulder, Colorado, where our daughter Ashlyn was in the grad program at U. of Colorado.  As we left the arid southwest of New Mexico, we heard of fires in the great forests of central and north Colorado.  We had a hint of elevated AQI.  We had a marvelous time with Ash and her partner Steven, but were glad when range anxiety about traveling over the high Rockies in our electric vehicle (and spotty distribution of recharging stations) persuaded us to return to our Southwest route to get back to California; we had become rather fond of Utah and New Mexico.  We stopped at southern Colorado's Pagosa Springs, and swam in the San Juan river bisecting the town.  We climbed up to the massive red-tinted sandstone Wilson Arch south of Moab in Utah, and stayed in Green River just beyond. The incredible Black Dragon Canyon (rocks over 250 million years old) west of Green River bowled us over. All these portions of the Southwest, so closely clustered together in easy drives, provided not just fresh air, but beauty and a distinctive landscape; yes, we had indeed become very fond of the region. 

 

The upshot:  during our return drive to Chico after 6 weeks of camping and enjoying the American Southwest, the notion of relocating, of beginning a new chapter in our lives, had shifted from something ridiculous and laughable, to something worth exploring seriously.  Both of us were retired, with a living income appearing in our bank account the first of every month—why not?  It was a push/pull sort of thing.  California drought, wildfires, congestion and social unrest pushing, and the Southwest's awesome (and novel) landscape, history, and culture pulling.  Returned to Chico, we had two weeks before leaving for our annual month in Hawaii.  We took a deep breath, thought it through again, then contacted a real estate agent: let's just gingerly dip into the market while we're gone.  Nothing serious, of course.  No prepping our home, no big repairs or painting.  Just informally, tentatively, see what might happen. 

 

We had our usual marvelous time on Maui.  Snorkeling, walking the beaches, swimming, lying in the sand learning the constellations gleaming brightly above us at night.  The Southwest grew a bit dimmer over the month.  Moving to Hawaii also seemed attractive, but the finances really, really didn't make that feasible.  Moving to New Mexico?  Only slightly less outlandish. 

 

The day we arrived back home from Hawaii, we received an offer for our home that would be hard to reject.  We accepted it.  Called the kids and told them we were moving to Santa Fe.  The word quickly spread around our CoHousing community.  Universally, the reaction was either a stiffly polite "Really? That's interesting" (the kids) or a stunned, stammering "Ahhh…" (the friends, who later admitted that it translated to "You guys must be out of your minds!").  We persisted.  Having received bids from moving companies to pack and move us for $14,000, we decided to do it ourselves.  The kids agreed to gather in Chico over Christmas to help us pack what we'd take with us to our new home (close of escrow was January 4).  They duly gathered: daughter Ashlyn and Steven from Boulder, son Lou and daughter Heather with our two grandkids from the Bay Area.  The evening of the first day, one of the gang tested positive for Covid.  All scattered, as per common sense and Covid protocols, leaving only Lou with us. The young fellow knew he was coming down with the disease (which he did), but was determined to pack up those books of Dad's vaunted library which were coming with us to Santa Fe (which he also did). 

 

Tammy did an incredible job of selling a very large portion of our belongings (our lives?) on Facebook Marketplace.  We piggy-backed on the yard sale of a neighbor.  It was still a huge, formidable job to pack up what we had determined to bring with us to Santa Fe into boxes—plates, bowls, utensils, clothes, photo albums, wall-material (photos, paintings), furniture. Und so weiter.  We threw away tons of things into the dumpsters behind schools, at least until we very nearly got arrested for doing so.  Finally the home was empty, and our belongings (our lives?) sitting in a Chico storage locker.

 

Exhausted, and not at all sure that we were not, in fact, "out of our minds", in early January we put our beloved (and by this time thoroughly spooked) cat Inky into her travel cage in the backseat of our rented car (no way the little Bolt was remotely large enough) and drove in three stages to Santa Fe, where we wearily unpacked our bags into the lovely home of Brenda and Kent, former Chico CoHousing friends who had moved to Santa Fe a few years previous and were about to visit grandkids in southern California.  We began to acquaint ourselves with the real estate market in our new home town.

 

Part Two.  To make a long and agonizing story short, Tam and I within ten days in Santa Fe realized two things.  Several snowstorms and many frigid mornings brought home the fact that Santa Fe winters were quite unlike balmy Santa Fe summers. We had moved into a distinctly colder winter climate.  Beyond that, houses in our price range were few, and you had to add 10% onto the asking price and be prepared to hand over cash promptly to even be included in the frenzied bidding for a home.  In other words: winter temperatures too low, home prices too high. 

 

Gulp.  Yes, we ideally should have figured this out before.  But remember:  we were in the very middle of what the Prussian von Clausewitz had described as "the fog of war."  In any enterprise of importance, you make your plans as best you can, and then when the enterprise begins and you are quickly enveloped in uncertainty and unanticipated catastrophes, you just remain nimble and imaginative and make your way boldly through the fog.  I reminded Tam and myself of General George Patton many times in the ensuing days: driving his Third Army tank corps brilliantly through the debris of war toward Berlin in December of 1944, he defied all known laws of military tactical logistics and abruptly wheeled his forces 90 degrees north to rescue 101st Airborne paratroopers facing annihilation by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium.  He succeeded.  Then got his tanks to Berlin.  We would do the same.  We would visit and camp outside Santa Fe every summer—but we wouldn't reside there.  We would, instead, live in—in—uh…   Where the devil were we going to live? 

 

Our new home would be somewhere in the Southwest, clearly. We researched and pondered possibilities in New Mexico other than Santa Fe.  Up north in the countryside around Abiquiu, our much-loved Georgia O'Keeffe country? Down south in Las Cruces, a lovely university-town near the Mexican border?  In the Jemez mountains to the west of Santa Fe, close to Bandelier?  Or—how about checking out that "active retirement community" our friends Harold and Janet had moved to a year ago, and described with enthusiasm in their Christmas letter?  Where was that?  Oh yes: Arizona.  Hmmm. Just north of Tucson, a small burg called Oro Valley. Where the heck is Tucson?  Oh, here it is, way south in Arizona, in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, yet.  We investigated all the possibilities, both New Mexico and southern Arizona:  the winters, the water supply, the recreational opportunities, the housing market.  Southern Arizona proved especially intriguing. Tucson had been stockpiling water from the Colorado River for decades, and was flush with the stuff.  (Oro Valley hadn't, tho.)  Of course, where our friends lived, one of the Del Webb "Sun City" developments, was by definition full of old people (or at least 55 years of age, which wasn't really old).  Best of all, we discovered that Tucson and Oro Valley really did have very mild winters.  You could hardly call them "winters," in fact. 

 

So into the rental car goes Inky, again, 1,200 miles under her feline belt and another 500 to go to Tucson.  Two things are clear to us:  we are going to seriously investigate living in water-rich Tucson, and we aren't going to live amongst a bunch of retirees in water-dicey Sun City.  Arriving in southern Arizona, to be polite we have lunch with our friends in the Sun City community restaurant.  Food is delicious; a bright red Vermillion flycatcher flits about in the nearby trees; a tour of the shared community facilities reveals several swimming pools; ceramic studios with virtually free clay and kiln use; a watercolor studio whose artists painting that afternoon welcomed Tammy with open arms; a well-stocked woodworking shop the size of a shopping center; a stained-glass studio; a pool room with excellent tables; tennis courts galore.  But most surprising:  active, attractive, lively residents happy to show you around these facilities, not just making things but learning the ukulele or swimming or bicycling or walking around the community.  All yours to enjoy for a monthly home-owners fee of—prepare yourself—$178. 

 

Tammy and I return to our car after our tour.  We sit silent in the front seat, both staring straight ahead. She finally speaks.  "Well, what did you think, Ray?"  I reply, in a tentative, hoarse voice.  "I want to live here, Tam."  She turns to me quickly, her face alight.  "Me too! I never want to leave!"  So we canceled our upcoming meeting with a Tucson realtor, found a Sun City realtor and soon a home in our price range (no 10% addition required) that we really liked (and so did our kids, when they viewed its Zillow entry). We made an offer the day we toured it, and by that evening were the proud owners of a new home in sunny southern Arizona.  Three weeks later, Ray and his friend Bruce drove a rental truck stuffed with our belongings 20 straight hours from Chico to our new home, where Bruce's wife Jody was keeping Tam company.  After Bruce and Jody's departure, we stared at the ocean of boxes crammed into our new home for another two weeks, until Ashlyn arrived from Boulder, and promptly unpacked all the books Lou had packed back in Chico, which got us started. 

 

As of this writing, we have lived here six months, and love it more every day.  All the kids and grandkids have visited us, and approve of the new home.  We play pool, we swim, we explore the surrounding parks and trails.  We belong to the Tucson Botanical Gardens, and visit regularly. Our neighbors in Sun City, Oro Valley are wonderful, and uniformly friendly and interesting folks.  Tammy and I walk together around our new community every evening, she taking dozens of photos of the stunning sunsets.  Tam is a regular at our immediate neighborhood's Happy Hour on Friday afternoons.  In the mornings, Tam takes long exploratory walks in the community, while Ray traverses two blocks to an entrance into the surrounding Sonoran Desert, and completes "Ray and Tam's double-loop desert walk."  As a biologist, Ray is completely fascinated by the flora and fauna of the Sonoran Desert, far and away the most diverse and interesting of the four North American deserts.  Tammy has taken up painting again, and is exploring the discipline with characteristic verve and imagination (check her Instagram page).  Ray is a desert rat, and also spends a day a week exploring Sabino Creek in Sabino Canyon (google it!), where he swims and spots wildlife to his heart's content. 

 

So that's the story of how Tammy and Ray took a fresh air tour, which turned into a journey, as we had the eyes to see one chapter of our life together closing, and another opening. At times the journey was frightfully difficult, both physically and emotionally. We stubbornly moved forward, and amidst some stumbles kept searching until we found a place that felt right to us. Somehow we landed on our feet. We understand that this sort of journey is not for everyone.  But it worked for us, our marriage stronger by virtue of our shared struggles and decisions.  We are happy here in southern Arizona.  And yes, it is definitely a new chapter.  Come visit.  Barnett out.