Beyond the Sky and the Earth (2 page)

All around, the mountains rise and rise, pale gold and brown in the February light. At one end of the valley, beyond a wall of black, broken peaks, one white summit shimmers; at the other end, the mountains grow tamer, softly rounded and turning smoky blue in the distance. On
the
slopes I can see clusters of prayer flags, long narrow strips of white cloth raised on towering poles, floating in the wind.

This is what I flew into, leaving behind the cities of India sprawling over hazy plains. At first, the mountains were far below, plunging into narrow valleys thick with forest, dense, impenetrable. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot said, “we have now begun our descent into Paro, ” and
the
little plane dropped suddenly, leaving me gasping as we skimmed over ridges and dropped again, into one of the few valleys in Bhutan wide and
flat
enough to land a plane in.

 

On the shelf above the desk in my one-room apartment overlooking a strip mall in the northern suburbs of Toronto, there were two blue plastic trays, one filled with graduate-school application forms, and the other marked simply “other.” In the “other” pile was an article entitled “Working Your Way Around Europe,” a yellowing passport application form, and a newspaper ad: TEACHERS WANTED FOR OVERSEAS POSTS. It was 1988, I was twenty-three. Outside my one window, winter was melting into sludge. The ad announced positions in southern Africa and central America, but the one that caught my attention was for an English lecturer at a college in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Two years of teaching and overseas experience were required for the position. I had neither, but I showed the ad to my boyfriend, Robert, who had once been to South America on an international development seminar. “Don’t you think it would be a great experience?” I asked.

“It does look good on a résumé,” he said. But I hadn’t meant that kind of experience. I wanted something outside of professional considerations and career connections, something that wouldn’t fit on a CV Robert and I had decided to get married but that would be several years in the future, when we were both finished with our studies. I was supposed to be starting a Ph.D. in English. But I kept wondering if I should do something else altogether. I want to do something in the real world, I kept saying to Robert—to which I would invariably add, “whatever that means.” It wasn’t that my life felt unreal to me, it just seemed very ...
small.
I was tired of reading theory and writing essays, and, except for a week on a beach in Cuba, I had never been anywhere.

A few days later in the library, I remembered the ad and looked up Bhutan. There were four or five books, thick-paged volumes with washed-out black-and-white photos, all published in the 1960s and early ’70s. I took notes in the back of my journal:
Bhutan, small Tantric Buddhist Kingdom in the Eastern Himalayas. Bordered by Tibet in the north, India in the south and east, Sikkim to the west. Entirely mountainous (altitudes ranging from 150 to 7,000 meters above sea level). Capital: Thimphu. Language: Dzongkha, related to classical Tibetan, plus various other dialects. People: in north and west, of Tibetan origin; in the east, Indo-Mongolian; in the south, Nepali. National sport: archery. Government: hereditary monarchy, established 1907, replacing dual system of government with religious and secular heads. Closed to outside world for centuries. Never colonized.

Modern economic development had begun in Bhutan in the 1960s with the construction of a road linking Thimphu to the Indian border. Until then, the economy had been based on barter; money was virtually nonexistent, and taxes had been paid in kind. Thirty years later, the feudal nature of rural Bhutanese society seemed largely unchanged. Virtually everyone owned land, but, except for the lowlands along the southern border, the terrain was too difficult to permit much more than subsistence farming. Buddhism permeated daily life, and many families still sent one son into the monastery. Relatively few foreigners visited the country; foreign aid was limited, and tourism discouraged.

I skimmed snippets of a British emissary’s journey through Bhutan in 1774, and then studied pictures taken in the 1970s. Two hundred years had not made much apparent difference. The photographs showed mostly mountains, darkly forested, a few stone and wood houses planted along the edges of cultivated fields. It was like the Brothers Grimm. Bramble fences, stone walls, a woodcutter, a haystack. Fortresses on hillsides, overlooking narrow river valleys. An old man in a dark knee-length robe standing in a flagstone courtyard. A woman leading a small, stout horse, two young children following, bent under backloads of sticks. A boy waving a switch at a herd of cows. A barefoot, bareheaded king.

The deadlines for various graduate schools got closer, and the jumble of applications grew larger. I kept thinking of those pictures that were like certain poems that leave a little hole somewhere inside you. I called the World University Service of Canada, the agency which had placed the ad, and asked for an application form for the posting in Bhutan.

“Where the hell is that?” my grandfather asked when I told him on my next visit to Sault Ste. Marie, the northern Ontario steel town where I had grown up. My parents had split up when I was two, and in the ensuing turbulence, my father’s parents had ended up with custody of my brother and me. They had been caring guardians but overly protective, especially my grandfather. My grandmother had died of cancer the year before, and my grandfather, feeling his seventy-two years, was anxious to see my brother and me settled in our lives.

“What do you want to go Over There for?” he said.

The rest of the world was all one place to him. If you weren’t here, you were Over There.

“It’s the same Over There as it is here,” he said, and then promptly contradicted himself by asking what was I, crazy, did I want to get myself killed or something?

I told him that I would be going Over There with a legitimate, government-funded agency that had a long history of placing volunteers around the world, so there was no need to worry.

He named several causes for worry. What if I got sick? What if I had a terrible accident? What if there was an earthquake, a flood, an epidemic, a war? What if, what if. He came up with a hundred stories of people who went off and never came back, dead of unnamed diseases, lost in jungles, swept away by rivers, fallen off mountains, fallen in love, never heard from again. I should have known; I had been raised on tales of worry and what if. “Don’t take chances. Life is too short to live by your own experiences,” my grandfather had told us countless times. “Learn from other people’s mistakes.”

“What about school?” he said. “What about your Ph.D.?” The Depression had cut short his own education before he reached high school, and the value of education was one of his favorite subjects—“education” meaning knowledge that could be practically applied to save you from a lifetime in the coke ovens. I could see what he foresaw for me—the future opening up, the path leading over a low rise just ahead into an assured future, a secure career, a good marriage. He wouldn’t understand if I told him that my future seemed to be closing in, getting smaller and narrower and more rigidly fixed with each essay

I completed.

He had spent his whole life making his world safer, smaller, more secure. The basement pantry was lined with tins of food we would never eat, he saved bottles, nails, envelopes, old wrapping paper, broken toasters, bits of wire, cloth and carpet. “You never know when you’ll need it,” he said. Caution was his religion: you never know, you can’t be too careful, better safe than sorry. In his experience, change meant loss. His own parents had immigrated from Poland, making the dark, cold journey across the Atlantic, moving up through New York, Pennsylvania and Michigan, into Ontario. They settled in Sault Ste. Marie, in the shadow of Algoma Steel, but even after the Depression, when things got better, they were not at home in this harsh new unfinished world, this Canada, and talked longingly of Poland, in Polish, until they died. This is what happened when you uprooted yourself, my grandfather believed: you could not go back and yet you did not belong. He believed in staying put.

I sat in my old bedroom, looking out the small window at the steel plant, with its wire fences, enormous grids and towers, smoke stacks staining the sky all year round. We had grown up chanting the names of the mysterious places inside—coke ovens, coal docks, blast furnace, slag dump. We knew you could grow up and get a job there, make good money working three-to-eleven, eleven-to-seven. “Your father could have been making good money there now,” my grandfather said, shaking his head. “Would have made something of himself by now.” When my father went to Toronto after the divorce, we were in awe. If you grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, Toronto was the ultimate destiny. If you got all the way to Toronto, you did not have to come back. My mother was proof of this; after the divorce she had only gone to Europe, and then she had come back. We did not consider that she wanted to be close to her children, we thought she had just not gone far enough away. My father returned only for brief visits, his long hair falling down the back of his black silk shirt, hundred-dollar bills folded in half and clipped in his pocket. “Your father seems to have done well for himself in Toronto,” people said, their admiration ending in a question mark. “He’s in the music industry,” my brother and I learned to say, “he’s a promoter,” but my grandfather was not impressed. “Working in goddamn barrooms. Would have been foreman by now.” Toronto meant nothing to my grandfather, and he would not allow us to visit there when we were children. Traveling was something you did because you had to—if you got a job in another city, a real job, not in the music industry, but, say, as a dentist, my grandfather’s dream profession—“Look at the Miller boy,” he kept saying, “he’s making money hand over fist.” Traveling was not something you did for fun or experience or love. “Waste of money, that’s all it is,” my grandfather said. It had taken quite a bit of work just to convince him to allow me to leave home to go to university, first in Ottawa and later in Toronto. And now I wanted to go to the Third World. The Third World! It was preposterous! It was for the birds!

“And what about Robert?” my grandfather demanded. “I thought you were getting married. What does Robert have to say about all of this?” My grandfather liked Robert: he was smart and dependable. I had met him at university. My grandfather said Robert was blue-chip stock.

“I’m coming
back,
Grandpa. And Robert thinks it’ll be a great experience.” I didn’t say that Robert’s initial enthusiasm was declining now that I’d actually applied. “I’ve never been anywhere,” I said. “This may be the only chance I’ll ever get to do something like this.”

“I’ve never been anywhere either and it hasn’t hurt me,” he said. “It’s just plain foolishness. Don’t take chances. Prepare for your future and forget about going Over There.”

“Well, I’ve only applied. Maybe I won’t be accepted,” I said, hoping to erase the fret lines from between his eyes, if only temporarily. I hated to worry and disappoint him but I could not lie outright and promise not to go.

The World University Service of Canada (WUSC) called me for an interview. The two interviewers, neither of whom had been to Bhutan, gave a short introduction to the program there. When secular education began in the country thirty years ago, with the help of a Canadian Jesuit named Father Mackey, the Bhutanese government chose English as the medium of instruction. On Bhutan’s northern border, Tibet had been annexed by China and the world had not even blinked. Bhutan did not want to suffer a similar fate; it was time to end its policy of official isolation and enter the modern world. The Royal Government proceeded cautiously, however, and the pace of development was kept deliberately slow. The education system, still in its early stages, was suffering from a severe shortage of teaching staff, which made it necessary to recruit foreign teachers. Although the vast majority came from neighboring India, there were about seventy teachers from volunteer agencies such as WUSC and the British organization VSO at schools and institutes throughout the country. WUSC had a total of fifteen Canadian teachers there, all placed in eastern Bhutan, where Father Mackey had helped start the first English-medium schools in the 1960s. These teachers were provided with accommodations and paid local salaries. Work terms were for two years, although teachers could and often did extend their contracts.

Conditions were very basic, sometimes in fact quite difficult, the interviewers said. Life at the college posting for which I had applied was a bit more comfortable, but it was by no means luxurious. There were few roads in Bhutan, and most of them would be closed during the heavy summer rain and the winter snow. There would be other Canadians, yes, but I would be several hours away from most of them. Basically, I would be cut off, immersed—how did I feel about that? How would I fill up my time? Did I have a boyfriend? How did he feel about my decision to leave him for two years? Did I realize that there were no phones in the eastern part of Bhutan? That most Bhutanese lived in villages and hamlets dotted across one of the most difficult terrains in the world? They proposed several situations—a serious argument with the principal, discipline problems in class, illness, cultural misunderstandings, an accident: what would I do? I constructed answers as best I could, trying to sound sensible and good-humored, ignoring the voice in my head that kept asking, “But what would you really do?”