Back from the Woods
with a crucial chapter of the novel, and lots of updates from the climate fight
Fresh from a couple of weeks deep in the wilderness (which was badly needed and deeply restorative) I’m back on the beat. Earlier today I published a piece on your money and your carbon, which I will be coming back to in the months ahead. But I wanted to bring you up to date on other news from around the world of climate and energy.
+The Guardian has a crucial piece on the huge “carbon bombs”—the fossil fuel projects that are going to break (if they’re actually built) the back of the climate system
The exclusive data shows these firms are in effect placing multibillion-dollar bets against humanity halting global heating. Their huge investments in new fossil fuel production could pay off only if countries fail to rapidly slash carbon emissions.
And Damian Carrington follows it with another key essay explaining why we’ll have to not just stop building new fossil fuel plants, but shut down many existing ones, if we’re to meet our temperature targets
+New England activists who briefly blocked a train delivering coal to the region’s last coal-fired power plant aren’t going to jail—their three-to-five year sentences were suspened as long as they maintain what the judge called “good behavior,” which seems to require that they “refrain from organizing or participating in any further unlawful climate protests, a requirement Marla Marcum, founder of the Climate Disobedience Center, which helped organize the protest, called “an overly broad prohibition on speech and assembly.”
+TIAA, the pension giant that takes care of retirement funds for most academics (including the people who discovered the details of the climate crisis) is lagging behind its peers when it comes to shunning fossil fuels. A new analysis from the redoubtable Tom Sanzillo found that “for such a large fund, TIAA has very small climate ambitions. It is unclear why the company has taken a hands-off policy toward its total portfolio of $1.4 trillion and only focused on its $285 billion General Account and real estate assets. Put another way, it appears that its plan to adopt a net-zero policy for emissions financed by TIAA covers only about 20% of the portfolio— the value identified in its presentation of the General Account.”
He added, however, that “between April 1st and April 14th, climate organizers held nine actions across the country demanding that TIAA divest from fossil fuels by 2025. Over the preceding two years, university faculty senates and unions passed 15 resolutions letting TIAA know that they wanted TIAA to adopt a policy to divest from fossil fuel companies. rapidly and completely.”
+The fossil fuel industry is up to its usual tricks, mobilizing fake grassroots opposition to New York’s potentially important new climate law. As the NGO Little Sis reported
Although New Yorkers for Affordable Energy sounds like the name of a broad grassroots coalition, and the group phrases its communications in terms of benefiting consumers, the truth is that – in typical astroturf fashion – it’s driven by the very same handful of fossil fuel and utility corporations and corporate lobbying interests that tried to stop the CLCPA from passing in the first place.
+A remarkable account in the Guardian of the impact of the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, which is still burning
“We are using every trick in the book to fight this thing, but the constant wind we have been experiencing day and night is unprecedented,” says Andy Lyon, a spokesperson for the south-west area incident management team. Lyon notes the fire experienced explosive growth the week of 9 May, when there was a 95-hour period of non-stop red flag conditions (the highest alert level from the National Weather Service for wildfire danger), including 50-60mph winds.
+Stanford just took a gift of more than a billion dollars to work on the energy transition—but as a prescient oped in the college paper points out, it will work only if the university keeps it from becoming a greenwashing front for the fossil fuel industry
+From the gifted and veteran leaders Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young-Lutunatabua comes a remarkable new project, designed to help welcome newcomers to the climate movement and provide hope for those who are detaching due to despair. They’re calling thier effort It’sNotTooLate, which is precisely the right message
+Good find from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which outs insurance giant Marsh McLennan as the underwriter for the ruinous East Africa Crude Oil pipeline.
+Not to be a broken record, but Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom is an awfully good idea. From a Bloomberg article entitled “How to Install Heat Pumps in Millions of European apartments”:
Before the war, the EU projected that heat pumps would cut natural gas consumption in buildings 40% by the end of the decade, according to a March 2022 report. That would save nearly 60 billion euros ($63 billion) in annual natural gas import costs, according to estimates. “Heating was completely unsexy before,” says Thomas Nowak, secretary general of the European Heat Pump Association, an industry group. “Now people are discussing heat pumps at their cocktail parties.”
If you want to read chapter 1-68 of The Other Cheek, the archive is here. If you thought I was kidding about the epic nature of this nonviolent yarn, this chapter should prvove my point—nothing like some helicopter action. It’s got Top Gun beat all to pieces if you ask me.
It was hard to tell, thought Wei, precisely what was to blame. She felt dizzy and disoriented, and though her head wasn’t throbbing she had a thin headache that didn’t go away.
Fear was doubtless one cause—she’d been able to relax a little bit in the box on the train because nothing had changed for the two-day journey. But once they’d reached Lhasa the tension had steadily increased. Another forklift put their home in the back of another truck, and there they met a young man named Bhuti, who opened their compartment, liberating them to stand and stretch, albeit in a dark cargo hold lit only by his flashlight. Once the truck had left the city behind, the young man had opened a small passage between the truck’s rear and the cab, and they’d squeezed through one at a time into the front seat. It was dusk, but even so there was far more light than the girls had seen for days, and they blinked at the massive scene spread out before them, great cliffy mountains on either side of a tree-lined river. Their driver, Pema, spoke no Chinese, but his young assistant was close to fluent. He explained to Wei that they could see far ahead, and that if a roadblock had appeared on the horizon, they’d have time to get the girls back safely inside the box—as it turned out, that happened twice in the journey, and the second time a soldier had actually opened not just the back of the truck but the front of the crate, finding the stack of meditation cushions. Bhuti told them later that the soldier had taken took two of the pillows flor himself, and then let them proceed—but the fear had been real, and it stayed even when the roadblock was long behind. They’d climbed down from the truck a few times in the dark, to let Momo wander briefly and to brew tea—and the tea was another problem.
Rinchen had predicted correctly: Wei thought yak milk tea was wretched stuff, salty when her mouth wanted sweet. But she hadn’t complained, of course, just dumped some of it in the dark. So she was doubtless dehydrated, she thought. They couldn’t stop at restaurants along the way for fear of being recognized, and even if they could have there weren’t many—just the occasional food stall near the mountain passes.
The high mountain passes—that was probably the biggest problem, thought Wei, who had spent most of her life near sea level. The tops of the passes were beautiful—prayer flags, which she recognized from the gift shop supplies back in her old mall, though these were hanging from poles stuck in rock cairns, with views sweeping across the great snowy mountains on every side. But even sitting in the truck the air felt thin.
And when she got out at Rongbuk Monastery and tried to walk a little ways, it felt thinner still. Rinchen kept by her side, and Bhuti too—this was, they said, the highest permanent human habitation on planet earth. They’d arrived about 6 a.m., still dark in late October, and eaten a small breakfast in the little dining hall attached to the ramshackle monastery. And then the sun had begun to rise, and from the porch, bundled in blankets against the cold, they could see the mountain rising above them. “Chomolongma,” Rinchen said. “Mt. Everest.” To Wei it didn’t look real—it was endlessly massive, filling up the world in front of them. They were at 17,000 feet, as high as humans lived, and yet the mountain stretched another 12,000 feet above them. There were high mountains in every direction, but this one was different—its peak, Rinchen explained, stuck into the jetstream, hence the long white pennant of cloud that unrolled like a streamer behind it. Like a string of white prayer flags, Wei thought.
Bhuti showed her how to walk without losing her breath—locking your back knee, resting for an instant with just a little weight on your forefoot. “I’ve been to base camp for the mountain, which is five miles away,” he said. “The climbers come there and stay for a few days, just getting used to the air. Then they’ll go up a little ways, and get used to that, and so on. It’s mostly rich people who come do it,” he said.
“You’re rich,” said Rinchen, laughing. “Maybe you’ll want to climb. Women climb it a lot now.”
“No,” said Wei. “I would rather go back in the box.”
They slowly wandered the grounds of the monastery as the sun came up, still covered in blankets against the chill. They circled the small golden stupa near the center of the grounds, spinning the prayer wheels. “It’s as good as saying the prayers,” said Rinchen. “In our village we had a little hydro dam, and it spun a turbine for power, and also a prayer wheel.” On the hillside above the low-slung building they pointed out a stone platform.
“For sky burial,” said Bhuti. “We don’t have too much wood for cremating, and the rocky soil makes it hard to bury bodies, so when most people die they put their bodies up there, and the vultures come and eat them.”
Wei shuddered.
“It’s not so bad,” said Rinchen. “Your body is just kind of your shell, and anyway it helps the birds. It’s like—recycling.”
From below, in the monastery, they heard music of a sort, and descended to investigate. “Not so hard going down,” said Wei. The monastery looked bright and cozy below them, with prayer flags fluttering and a big Chinese flag hanging from a pole on the roof. From the bright sunshine they entered a chamber, dimly lit by candles and lamps, smoky, and stuffed with images of the Buddha. Two facing rows of shaven-headed monks sat cross-legged on cushions, chanting from books on small stands before them. A young monk rose and showed them cushions where they could sit, and after a few moments Wei felt herself begin to relax a little. The noise was remarkable: the tonal chanting rose and fell, always accompanied by small cymbals; at odd intervals something like an oboe squawked, and a pair of long trumpets droned on. She had no idea what they were chanting, but she began almost without realizing it to meditate, slipping more easily than usual into a world where her breath, and the rising, falling sound of the monks, were all that mattered. For the first time since she’d left her apartment five days earlier she felt a certain kind of stillness, and she was almost annoyed when the young monk tapped her on the shoulder with a cup of yak tea. She sipped a little, and she stared at the statues—Buddha looked a little like Santa Claus though from a warmer climate, she decided. And she watched the men: it seemed odd that this was their work, like making shower curtains or selling ornaments. And yet why not?
She had slipped back into her meditation—lost track of time altogether—when she felt someone softly rubbing her fingers. She looked up to see Rinchen’s grin, and behind her the young monk. “The abbot would like to see us,” she told Wei. “You know, like the boss of the monastery.” They filed slowly out, and into a courtyard in the sun, where they found a barrel-chested monk. He was maybe in his 40s Wei thought, and he was squatting next to plastic bag filled with gray powder, alongside a small plastic pan of water. Momo jumped out of Wei’s arms and ran to the bowl, beginning to drink; the monk reached to pet her, and then turned to watch the two girls approaching. They could see he had a broad smile, and a pair of glasses taped at the nose.
“You must be Rinchen,” he said. “And you must be Wei. It is a great honor to welcome you to our monastery.”
“It is?” said Wei. “Thank you for having us.”
“It is,” said the abbot. “We have many visitors, mostly people coming or going to base camp. Or tourists in a bus, from the new tourist center at Tingri. But you—and Momo—are very special,” he said, scooping the dog up in his hands and holding him to his face for a look. “This is the first time His Holiness has ever asked us to take care of a guest.”
“The . . . DL?” Wei asked.
“His people,” the abbot said. “We got a message from Dharamsala two days ago saying you would be coming. “I think the hope is you can rest here for a few days until the next stage of your journey.”
“Where am I going?” Wei asked.
“I don’t know,” said the abbot. “Would you like to help me?” He gave her a handful of the powder, and then splashed a little of the water into her hands. “Mix it up so it’s like clay,” he said. “Those are the ashes of the chief nun here at the monastery. She died very recently.”
Wei must have started a little. “I thought—the vultures?” she said.
“Usually,” he said. “But with higher people, we cremate them. It’s nothing to worry about—she did not fear dying. And this is not her, just her ashes.” He pulled a small brass object from the pocket of his robe. “It’s a mold,” he said. “We will take the clay, and we will make Buddha images from it. And when they dry they will go in the reliquary, over there by the stupa.” Wei sat and worked quietly, Momo at her feet; Rinchen had wandered off, and the abbot talked only occasionally. “Many of the tourists who come are from China like you,” he said. “I think for them it is a little like visiting a museum. And of course we can’t tell them too much. Sometimes I know they are thinking that ours is a very poor monastery, without great rooms and towers. And I want to say, ‘you should have seen it before the Chinese soldiers burned it down in the 1960s.’ But of course I can’t—and anyway, I want them to feel welcome. Maybe some of them will remember a little of our world when they go home.”
Wei sat for much of the morning making small statues with the abbot, who talked very little, but smiled at her regularly. She could feel the fear lifting a little, and even her headache lightened. Eventually the ashes were all gone, and he led her to a small sink where he washed out the mold and then they cleaned their hands. “Perhaps you would like to take a nap this afternoon,” he said. “It helps visitors get used to the altitude. You are welcome to join us any time in the prayer hall—the funeral will be going on all day.”
Wei slept for a few hours, and by the time she emerged from her small, tidy room the sun had begun to go down, leaving Chomolongma washed in a golden glow that caught her breath. She sat down on the porch, wrapped herself in a blanket, and just watched as the light slowly faded, as the bright blue of the sky turned into dark blue turned into black—and as the blackness took over, stars began to wink into place. One moment they weren’t there and the next they were. Wei had never seen stars like this before—even the village she’d grown up in was near enough a town that the sky was never really dark. But here it seemed as if the night sky was more real than the day—that a curtain had been lifted and suddenly she could feel the depth of the universe. The great mountain still loomed over them, but she could see only its outline—the Everest-shaped space where there were no stars. That morning it had been the largest thing she’d ever seen, and now it seemed almost homey against the scale of the galaxy. For a moment she wasn’t even quite sure where she was—on the earth, or spinning out in that darkness.
Wei heard something move behind her, and broke out of her reverie.
“Hi,” said Rinchen. “I brought you a little food, before it could get cold.”
She had a bowl. “Thenthuk,” she said. “Noodle soup. And some balep, which is just bread.”
“Thank you,” said Wei. “You should not have to bring me food.”
“You are our guest in Tibet,” Rinchen said. “Anyway, I didn’t want to interrupt your view.”
“It’s—well, I remember standing on the Bund and looking at the Pearl of the Orient tower, and thinking that was the greatest sight in the world,” said Wei. “I was wrong.”
“People in China have a lot more money,” said Rinchen. “But people in Tibet have a lot more stars.”
“For a minute I wanted to take a picture of it and put it up on my page,” said Wei. “I am very glad Tashi took the battery out of my phone. I’m not certain I could have sat there and watched. I might have looked something up, like ‘how many stars are there?’”
“Some monks know the names of many many of the stars,” said Rinchen. “But that seems almost wrong to me. I’m not sure they are ours to name.”
“I was supposed to go up in a rocket,” said Wei. “But I didn’t want to, because of Momo. And I don’t think I needed to anyway. This is like being in a rocket. But better, because you can breathe the air, and smell wood smoke. And have soup. I don’t think I ever knew before that we lived on a planet.”
The two girls sat in the darkness as Wei ate her food—by now the moon was rising, and the snowy mountain wall in front of them began to turn white again even as the stars faded. Wei felt almost relieved: Everest was enormous, but comprehensible. She slurped the last of the noodles, and then they went inside to their rooms.
When she woke the next morning, Wei found the prayer hall silent and empty. She sat there on a cushion for an hour, with Momo cuddled in her lap. She found it easier and easier to slip into meditation, and though she knew others drifted in and out of the room from time to time she didn’t really surface until she felt the dog jump up. Opening her eyes, she saw the abbot sitting next to her, holding Momo with one hand and making funny faces at the dog.
“You are a good meditator, I think,” he said. “I should make the novices come and study with you. Would you like to see some of the images in this room?”
“Yes, please, if you have the time,” she said. “There are too many things for my eye to focus on—it’s all a shiny blur.”
“It’s funny,” he said with a grin. “Buddhism is supposed to be a very simple idea, but we fill it up with lots of stuff. Maybe I’ll just show you this one in the center for now,” he said, leading her down the aisle between the cushions where the monks had been chanting the day before. He stopped before a stone statue of a smiling man—garlands hung round his neck, but Wei could see the seriousness in his eyes. “We call this Chenrezik in Tibetan,” the abbot said. “It’s a boddhisatva, a Buddha image,” he said. “Someone on the path toward sainthood. This one looks on all beings with the eye of compassion. It’s said that His Holiness the Dalai Lama is an incarnation of this boddhisatva.”
Wei stood there for a minute, remembering the little cartoon DL on her phone, and comparing him with this stone man. She had no idea how they were connected, except that somehow both made her feel a little stronger.
“I can show you more tomorrow,” the abbot said. “For now your job is just to rest—to recover from the journey that brought you here and to prepare for the one ahead.” When she looked up at him she saw Momo was sitting on his shoulder and lapping at his ear.
And so for the next two days Wei fell into a cycle of sleep and meditation and simply staring up at the mountain. Sometimes Rinchen was nearby, and sometimes Bhuti; someone always seemed to have an eye on her, and the monks, especially the younger ones, would often come up and borrow Momo for a few minutes of play. She felt strangely at home, and at peace—and so it was especially jarring when, fast asleep one night, she felt someone shaking her shoulder. She opened her eyes to see the abbot, holding a flashlight and looking very upset.
“We have a problem,” he said. “It embarrasses me to admit it—it is painful to admit it. Earlier today we found one of the monks trying to send a message about your presence here, a message to the Chinese authorities. We’re not sure if he succeeded, or if it was even the first one he sent. It’s not easy to get a message out, but he had a satellite phone—apparently he’d been sent here to watch us, and it was lucky only that he was not too smart. It took him these three days to figure out who you were.”
Wei was sitting up in bed, tense because the abbot, who had always seemed so calm, seemed fearful.
“I apologize for the people of Tibet,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “No. I mean, that’s like me apologizing for the people of China burning down the monastery.”
“Our job was to keep you safe,” he said. “But we can no longer move you on by truck as we had planned. The authorities will be watching now, every road. And there aren’t many roads.”
“Do I hike, like the DL?” she said.
“The DL was used to the altitude,” he said. “And there were not so many Chinese then. There are no unguarded passes now. No, we have a different idea. We’re not sure it will work, but it may be our best chance. Please, come with me now.”
He’d already taken Momo in his hands, and now Rinchen appeared, with a small rucksack. She followed them out of her small room and through the corridor, then out the main door of the guesthouse. It was dark, and a cold sleety rain was falling, but they bundled her into an aging pickup before she could get wet. The abbot drove, and Rinchen and then Bhuti squeezed in, pinning Wei almost atop the gearshift. They started slowly up a potholed road, as the abbot talked.
“We’re sending the truck down as scheduled later today,” he said. “We’re assuming the soldiers are watching for it, and that it won’t get past Tingri, certainly not Gyirong. But when it’s searched they’ll find nothing out of the ordinary. Hopefully they’ll assume you’ve been delayed a day or two—that’s what our poor spy of a monk is going to text them in the morning. Meanwhile, you will be traveling in style—helicopter!”
“Helicopter!” said Wei.
“Yes,” said Bhuti. “There’s a helicopter at Tingri, recently purchased. It’s for rescues on the mountain—the climbers pay a lot to go up Everest, and sometimes they get hurt. Or tired. It belongs to the Chinese, but in the interests of fraternal understanding they’ve trained Tibetan Sherpas to fly it. Also, the Chinese don’t really like high altitude.”
“But I’m not a climber,” said Wei.
“True, and there really aren’t any climbers this time of year—only 15 people have ever gone up the mountain in winter,” said Bhuti. “Two were my cousins. But there are a few trekkers this late coming along the hiking route from Tingri, and we’ve sent word that one reached base camp with edema—that’s when your brain swells up from the altitude.”
“When they get there though they’ll see I’m not sick,” said Wei.
“The pilot is another one of my cousins,” said Bhuti. “He knows what’s going on. His job is to get you to Nepal.”
“Is that allowed?”
“Not allowed,” said the abbot. “But we kind of have a plan, and this weather should make it easier, as long as they can fly at all.”
The weather had turned to pelting snow, and the truck was edging ahead, around great holes in the road. But Wei thought she could see the sky lightening a little.
“Are you coming with me?” she asked.
“We can’t,” said Rinchen. “We’d be on the other side of the border without any papers. You’ll have a set as soon as you arrive, but it’s hard to come up with false ones on short notice. So Bhuti and I have to get back to Lhasa before they come looking for you up here.”
“None of us like this,” said the abbot. “You are our friend now, and this is dangerous. But we think we have no choice. If the soldiers find you, it will be bad.”
And so they sat and waited in the truck. Every few minutes the abbot would turn on the engine to run the heater, and when he turned it off they could hear the wind that was blowing the snow. As it grew lighter they could see more of base camp, which looked sort of like a garbage dump, with big piles of discarded gear and plastic. And then came a muffled whump in the distance, growing steadily louder, till out of the clouds a few hundred feet above their heads a blue and white helicopter descended, hovering for a second above the road and then touching down directly in front of the truck. The pickup shook in the gusts from the rotors, but they soon clicked to a halt. The pilot jumped out from the copter, and Bhuti from the truck, running up to give him a hug.
“This is Tenzing,” he said to the others.
The pilot, who was wearing a baseball cap and a flight suit, bowed to the abbot, and greeted Rinchen and Wei. “And this is Momo?” he said. “You are a very famous dog. I saw you on tv. I’ve never had a dog in my helicopter before.”
Wei gave the abbot a small bow, and said “thank you very much for taking care of me. I hope it doesn’t cause you too much trouble.”
The abbot said simply, “meditation will help you, I think.”
She shook hands with Bhuti, and then gave Rinchen a tight hug. “Thank you for being a good friend,” she said. “I hope I will see you again.” “Send me pictures of Momo,” Rinchen said, and then the pilot was showing Wei the door into the cockpit. He hoisted her into the seat next to his, strapped a harness around her, put the dog in her lap, and took a pair of headphones off the hook behind her seat and placed them on her ears. “Can you hear me?” he asked. “It’s going to get loud in here, but if you speak into the microphone by your chin we should be able to talk to each other.”
“Yes,” said Wei, and with that the rotors began to twirl, slowly at first and then quickly blurring into a spin. The three on the ground were waving, and Wei waved back as the helicopter lifted gently off the ground—she was surprised at how smooth it was, much less of a bump than the forklift raising the crate. The craft rose straight above the truck, and within seconds it had disappeared into the swirling snow—the helicopter was in a gray world of its own, and they couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of them.
“Welcome aboard,” said Tenzing, sounding loud and scratchy in Wei’s ears. “This is a Eurocopter EC725, owned by the People’s Liberation Army and based at Tingri. It’s designed for high-altitude mountain rescue, and can carry 29 people. But today it’s just you and me.”
“How can you see where we’re going?” Wei asked.
“I can’t,” said Tenzing. “Except with these instruments,” he said, pointing to the a screen in front of him. “It should be enough to keep us from running into the mountain. Normally we would not fly on a day like this, of course, but don’t worry too much. I’m actually a pretty good pilot.”
“I’m sure you are,” said Wei.
“Be quiet for a minute,” said the pilot. “I’m going to open a channel to my base.”
“Tingri base, this is SAR 1, repeat SAR !.”
“Roger, SAR 1,” said a muffled voice through the headphones.
“I have on board a Caucasian male, 46 years old, suffering from severe cerebral edema,” Tenzing said. “He is semi-conscious, disoriented, and lethargic. I have administered dexamethasone 20 milligrams, and he is receiving supplemental oxygen. His traveling companion is also aboard. Visibility zero, request return routing Tingri base.”
“Roger, SAR 1,” said the voice. “There is no other traffic in the air, proceed on usual vector. Emergency medical unit is standing by.”
The pilot clicked off the channel, and said to Wei, “okay, now for the hard part. We’re not headed to Tingri, because that’s a Chinese army base and that’s the last place you really want to be right now. We’re headed across the border, to Nepal.”
“But won’t they know?” she said. “Don’t they have some way of tracking you?”
“Yep,” said the pilot. “Which is why we’re going to have to do this,” he said, holding up a hand to keep her from replying, and clicking back on the open channel.
“Tingri Base, Tingri Base, this is SAR 1. Do you read?”
“Yes, SAR 1, we copy.”
“Tingri Base, Tingri Base, this is SAR 1. Do you read?”
“We copy, SAR 1,” said the voice.
“I have lost radio contact,” Tenzing said. “Repeat, I am not receiving radio contact. I have lost all instrumentation,” the pilot said, making his voice sound a little strained even as he winked at Wei. “I am flying blind.”
“SAR 1, we hear you loud and clear,” said the voice.
“Tingri Base, I have lost radio contact,” the pilot repeated. “I am flying without instruments. Repeat, flying without instruments. I am going to try and touch down, but ceiling is zero. Repeat, zero ceiling.”
Then Tenzing switched off the channel. “Let’s hope they believe me,” he said. “It will buy us more time.”
“Time for what?” said Wei.
“Time to crash,” said the pilot, with another wink. The copter began to drop, and then after a minute rise quickly, and it seemed to be zig-zagging. After several minutes, he held up a cautionary finger again, and opened the radio channel.
“Tingri Base, Tingri Base, this is SAR 1. I have no instrumentation. I have lost radio contact. Ceiling is zero, visibility is zero. Tingri Base, I have no idea where I am.”
“SAR 1, you are nearing the Nepali border. Repeat, you are leaving local airspace. Head east on a heading of 124 degrees, repeat 1—
“Tingri Base, Tingri base. I have lost radio contact. I have no visibility and no instrumentation. Tingri Base, if anything happens please tell my parents that I am thinking of them with affection. Tingri Base, Tingri Base. I have lost rad—
“SAR 1, SAR 1 Head east on new heading, 135 degrees, repeat 135 degrees. Hold an altitude—”
“Tingri Base, Ting”—he cut the channel in mid-sentence. “How did I sound?” he asked Wei.
“Won’t your parents be very scared?” she asked.
“Not so much. I told them what I was doing this morning,” he said.
“What are you—we—doing?”
“We are landing right about . . . there,” he said, as the helicopter suddenly ducked out of the clouds and over a craggy but green landscape, unlike the rocky scene they’d left at Rongbuk. A massive gorge appeared out of the mist, and Tenzing put the left skid of the helicopter down on its far edge, with the right one dangling in mid-air over the drop. “Out you go,” he said, reaching across Wei to unstrap her harness and open the small door. She clambered out, and ran a few feet, ducking under the whirring blades, clutching Momo and the small rucksack. As she watched from behind a boulder, Tenzing climbed into her seat, and then reached back and hit a button before diving out the door. The rotors began to slow, and as they did the helicopter began to lean to the right, out over the abyss. The blades turned one last time, clicking to a stop, and as they did the craft tipped, toppling down the hillside. Wei scrambled back to the edge, and they watched it tumble over and over down the almost-sheer cliff, until it finally disappeared from sight.
“Kind of a sad end to a $25 million-dollar machine,” he said with a smile. “But the army has plenty—there’ll be another in place by the time climbing season begins next spring.”
“But—but what about you?” said Wei. “They’ll think you’re dead.”
“They sure will,” he grinned. “If they bother to go down and look, they’ll find that thing burned to a puddle of metal—I’ve got a couple of friends down there with gallons of kerosene, ready to produce some nice smoke.”
“But you—that was your job,” said Wei.
“Was,” he said. “But now my job is to get you to Kathmandu.”
Wei looked up at him for a minute, and then she handed him Momo, and sat down on the ground and began to sob, loudly.
“I was a shopgirl,” she said. “In the service economy. And now I’ve been in a box and a truck and a soldier searched it, and then a helicopter and now it’s crashed, and you don’t have a job any more and you can’t even go back to your country and I’m going to a city I’ve never heard of and I wish I had never won the lottery,” she said.
“You got Momo, at least,” he said, but her shoulders began to shake even harder.
“I could have had him anyway,” she said between gasps. “I had the 300 yuan and the old lady would have taken that. And I could have paid the rest later. And now I don’t even have my phone.”
“I’ve heard that sometimes people who win the lottery regret it later,” said Tenzing. “But first of all don’t worry about me. Sherpas live on both sides of the border. I have family here, and eventually I can probably go back to Tibet. A good thing is the Chinese think we all look alike. And I think you do have your phone—check in the rucksack.”
Wei dug through the small sack—there was a change of clothes, and a bottle of water, and some fruit, and also her phone. It had a note stuck to the front from Rinchen. “Don’t put the battery back in till you get to the U.S.,” it said. “But when you do you’ll find a message from me.”
“I’m going to the U.S.?” she asked, starting to weep again.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just getting you to Kathmandu.”
“But why are you doing this for me?” she said. “I’m not important, and now your life is as changed as mine.”
“For me it is a chance to help His Holiness, which is the—well, anyone would. It’s the most important thing,” he said.
“But why does he care about me?” said Wei.
“He . . . knows things,” said Tenzing. “You’ve heard how he became DL?”
“No,” said Wei, who was rubbing her eyes on her sleeve.
“Well, when the last Dalai Lama died, the head of his corpse faced northeast. So the search team went that way, far toward Takster, near the Kumbum monastery. And they heard about a small boy, an unusual boy. So they went to his house, far in the countryside. And the head of the search team, a high lama himself, pretended to be a servant, and he sat in the kitchen playing with some prayer beads that had belonged to the 13th DL. And the boy, he was so little, he said he wanted them. And the lama said, ‘if you know who I am, I will give them to you.’ And the boy said, ‘Sera Lama, Sera Lama.’ And he said it with a Lhasa dialect event though no one there spoke that way. Even his mother could not understand it. And that was how they knew. It was kind of like you winning the lottery, although of course it brought him much pain also.”
“But he was special—I was just lucky. Or thought I was,” she said.
“Well, he thinks you’re special, which means something,” Tenzing said. “And we should be walking, because we have a bus to catch. A few hundred yards up the edge of the gorge he found a scrubby trail, and they followed it for about twenty minutes, Momo sprinting ahead and then running back. Wei felt a little easier too—the air seemed thick and moist after the high cold of the mountains, and the trees so green.
Eventually they reached a paved road, and walked down it perhaps a mile, till they found a small gaggle of people waiting. Tenzing brought them dumplings from a stall—“potato, not yak,” he said apologetically—and before long a crowded bus came into view around a corner. They were the last to board, and sat on the stairs next to the driver, looking out the door. Wei’s chest still heaved every few minutes, but she watched with increasing interest as the scene changed: greener with every mile they traveled, dropping constantly down a long valley, with occasional glimpses of the great mountains growing less frequent. Wei chatted with Tenzing a little, about where he’d grown up, and the long years of training to be a pilot. Soon they were in farming country, with men and women bent in the fields, and then before long on the outskirts of what was, to judge from the suddenly smoky air, a great city.
The bus slowed, weaving its way through clots of traffic—there were temples on every side, and at one Wei could see monkeys climbing the stones. And advertising banners hung from building after building in flowing Nepali script—the only word that Wei could make out was “English,” because it was in English. “Many people here want to learn so they can go to America,” said Tenzing. The bus finally rattled to a halt in a vast lot full of other buses, their exhausts turning the air a milkish white. Because they were sitting by the door, the two fugitives were the first ones off the bus, and they’d hardly gone ten feet before a small Chinese lady intercepted them. “You must be Wei,” she said. “My name is Lee, Barbara Lee. I am very very glad to see you both.”
great episode!