(Tibetan) Cowboy, Take Me Away

Hey Yall,

As night fell on our make-shift campsite, things had started looking up. As I alluded to at the end of the last email, that night, the rain stopped and the clouds broke up, revealing a starry sky. The next morning, we awoke and packed up as quickly as we could. After chewing on some cookies that we still had left, we started back up the canyon.

We had decided to turn around. Instead of continuing down this canyon to lower ground and then onto where ever, we decided to climb out the way we had come down, out of the canyon, up to the meadow where we had gotten lost. The plan was that, at the meadow, we would see if we could figure out how to get to the lake and the national park that we were originally aiming to get to yesterday. And so we climbed back up the canyon.

Slowly and softly, the verdant but narrow canyon gave way to a wider forested valley. The forest dissipated and we found ourselves in a small meadow two hours after we had left camp. This is not the giant meadow that we had gotten lost in yesterday, but a smaller meadow, about a thirty minute walk from that big meadow. The day before we had seen two houses clinging to the hillside in this meadow, but they were apparently empty, so we had kept going.

I stopped to take a picture of the meadow. Shannon and Katherine started yelling at me. "Lee, get over here!" They had spotted someone, the first soul we had seen in twenty hours.

How should I begin the description of our hero. He was a Tibetan cowboy, making his living by grazing sheep, yaks and cows. He lived in one of the two houses we had passed by the day before in the small meadow, (he had still been watching over his flock somewhere else when we had passed by). He wore the coolest hat in the world. It reminded me of the WWII bomber hat that my grandfather had, with its felt lining and giant ear flaps. But, unlike that bomber hat, the body of the Tibetan cowboy's hat was more like a golden turban, shining bright like a little lighthouse, reflecting the morning sun. Though he wasn't that old, maybe 35 or 40, his skin looked as tough and tanned as leather. Not Chinese but Tibetan, his skin was browner, more like that of someone from Bombay than Beijing. Part of that was from spending every day of so many years trudging across open fields beneath the Tibetan sun, in the thin Tibetan air. A grungy mustache circled his lips and chin. His clothes looked like they were fifth generation hand-me-downs, though they weren't that old, his tshirt had the phrase "New York 32" on the front.

When we first showed up in his little meadow, Shannon and Katherine yelled, "Ni Hao" to him. He acknowledged the greeting, though he seemed perplexed at what the heck two white girls could be doing in his field in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Tibet. I climbed up the hill to his house to meet him. As I shook his hand, I detailed our travails from the night before to him.

"Yall went down THAT canyon?" he said, gesticulating the way we had come. "You know there's no road down there, right?"

"Yea, we found out when we went down there. But we were lost and we didn't see any other way."

"But no one goes down there. There's no road down there, you know that, right?"

He had trouble accepting that we had gone down a canyon that had no road.

After he calmed down (after two or three more "you know there's no road down there, right?"), I talked to him about the lake and the national park. "Yea, I know where the lake is. My other house is over by it," he commented.

"Oh really, would you be willing to take us to it? We need to get back to civilization. We'd pay you 100 rmb (US$ 14.5)."

"Sure. I'm going towards there anyways. But I need about thirty minutes to pack up."

We sat down in the mud in front of his hut, and our Tibetan cowboy packed up his house. Pot(s), water, rope, roof (a blue tarp), he gathered every thing from his house, and packed it up on the back of his three horses. Then he took the rest of his stuff, stuffed it into a basket and tied it onto his back. Everything he owned, except the wooden structure of his hut was either on his back, or on the backs of his horses.

And that's how we were rescued from the wilderness by a Tibetan Cowboy.

Thirty minutes after we left his hut, we emerged over the crest of the hill we were climbing and descended down into the big meadow that we had gotten lost in the day before. It was the same place but a different scene. Before, all we had seen was a blinding whiteness, but now every thing in the meadow was green or brown, flourishing and peaceful. The sky was blue and seemed almost eternal, like the big sky of Montana. The meadow was surrounded on three sides by peaks over 14,000 feet (we were already at about 12,500 feet in the meadow). These not-so-distant peaks were capped with a fresh dress of white from the day before's blizzard. I'm guessing Shannon and Katherine would not agree with me, but I kind of thought that getting lost and risking hypothermia in the blizzard was almost worth the beautiful scene we got that day.

As we spent an hour or so crossing the five or six mile long meadow, I talked with our Tibetan cowboy. How often does he have to migrate to reach his flock? (Most days), How much did he make a year selling meet and wool (10,000 rmb, roughly US$1500), Why was no one living in the big meadow (Still too cold). I also asked him about his silver dagger. He claimed it was actually just for cutting trees and things, not for fighting off demons.

After a few hours, we came to what I think was his other house. He tied up his horses, and then took us down the road. We had finally arrived in the national park, the doorstep to civilization.

And that was almost the end of our adventure. .

After we got on a tourist bus, we just sat, mostly silently. It was already late in the afternoon as the bus snaked its way through asphalt pathways that traversed the green valleys and small mountains of the national park. I was leaning silently against a pole when Shannon shouted, "Lee, Look!"

Our cowboy made one last appearance. He was leading his three horses alongside the road, in his eternal search for green pasture, and our bus passed him by. I stuck my head out and shouted and he waved back at us, grinning as we rode off into the Tibetan sunset.

And that was it.

Taken away by a Tibetan Cowboy,
Lee

I want to sit and not run, I don't want to sleep on the hard ground
I want to look at the horizon and see a soulless Chinese building standing tall
I don't want to be the only one for miles and miles around
I want to stand in a flood of Chinese on hard paved ground

Oh it sounds good to me.

(Tibetan) Cowboy, Take me away
Fly this guy as far away as you can from this wild blue
Set me free, oh I pray, closer to KFC and far away from you
Far away from you

"Cowboy, Take Me Away"
Written by Dixie Chicks, Modified by Me
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTYyMTcyNDg0.html