Serpentine Page 28

  Conversely, Christopher was at loose ends. He had not yet located any goals within himself. He looked about him and his generation was quiet. The decade of social protest was over, the Sixties were dead. Youth were following the old rules—college, labor, marriage, children, the American cycle. Christopher told Jennie that he was not yet ready to settle into a nest, he had to confront a lingering discontent. He asked for her patience, and Jennie, of course, agreed. Whatever Christopher wanted, be it in work or love, she would accept.

  After a time of meditation, Christopher announced to Jennie that he wanted to take an open-ended trip around the world, in the classic tradition of seekers, not knowing what he was looking for, stimulated by the act of wandering, of exploring both himself and new landscapes. Did Jennie want to accompany him? Or wait for him? “If you think I’m going to let you wander around the world without me,” she said, “then you have found some new kind of drug.”

  The two plunged into an exhausting campaign for funds, Jennie working eighty hours a week as a waitress, Christopher steaming up his hobby of painting weird canvases of twisting, turning abstract figures with sand tossed at random and then set in place by shellac. They were at every flea market, every sidewalk art sale, Jennie hawking the pictures like a carnival barker, Christopher cross-legged on the ground making instant new ones. Within three months they had accumulated $2,000 each—enough.

  Madame Crystal gave a dinner party to wish Jennie bon voyage. A dozen old people came, in their finest, carrying lavishly iced cakes and fruit cobblers and travel advice accumulated over long lifetimes. Their going-away gift was a leather passport case, and at midnight, Madame Crystal emotionally sang “I Love Paris” and “Home, Sweet Home.” Everyone kissed, and Jennie had tears in her eyes.

  Spilling travel folders and guidebooks, their young faces flushed with excitement, the lovers hurried to California, where Jennie wanted to say goodbye to friends and family. Carmen, her onetime best friend and co-adventurer in matters of sex, drugs, and mystical exploration, was astonished. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” she said. “This wild little girl went off to Seattle and then this Earth Mother came back home to the beach. Jennie was into ecology and earth shoes and she didn’t shave her legs or under her arms, and her hair was uncut and unstyled, and she spoke of all the starving people in the world, and how our society dumps on the senior citizens. I sat there and watched this strange girl bend her body like a pretzel into weird yoga positions, and I realized I didn’t know her anymore. She told me that everything we had done together was a waste of time. How can you cancel out your youth?”

  Maggie and Cap also stared at their granddaughter in her latest transformation. Maggie wondered, “Where are all your clothes?” Jennie smiled. “I gave them to the poor people in Seattle who never had anything beautiful in their whole life,” she answered. All she now owned were faded blue jeans, a sweater, and a bedroll. The young couple stayed a few days at Maggie’s home—in the same bedroom—and Jennie fretted over what her very Catholic grandmother would think of the new intimacy. On the first morning, Maggie prepared breakfast and knocked at Jennie’s door and heard scramblings within. When the door was opened, Christopher was curled in a blanket on the floor, Jennie pretending that she had slept alone in her bed. Maggie set down the breakfast tray and asked Jennie to help her bring in something forgotten. In the kitchen, Maggie smiled and tried to be modern. She did not want the children to be ill at ease in her home, however much an unmarried couple sharing the same bed shocked her. “You know, Jennie,” said the grandmother, “I’m not stupid.”

  Jennie giggled. “I know you’re not.”

  “I just want you to know that you and Christopher are … are welcome,” said Maggie, trying not to falter.

  Jennie kissed her warmly. “Christopher and I said our own vows, in a beautiful forest, and we’re as much married as if we’d hired all the preachers in California.” Nodding, Maggie accepted that. It was new and different, but it was not the time for a sermon on morality.

  On the day they left, Maggie took Christopher aside. She was concerned. “I practically raised that beautiful girl in there,” she told him, “and I love her more than I can tell you.” Christopher nodded. He knew the depths of that love. Maggie hurried on, “Then you’ll understand what it’s like to permit a nineteen-year-old girl to go off running around the world with no schedule and not much emergency money … You’re very tall and perhaps strong, but you look frail to me, and I’m worried that you can’t take care of Jennie if something happened.”

  Christopher put his arms around the old woman and she felt strength in them. “However much you love Jennie,” he said, “I love her more, in a different way. We are one, and I promise that nothing will happen to her.”

  Then a baker’s van honked outside, and the travelers were gone in a flurry of kisses and waves and great expectations.

  They were away almost a year, flying first to Luxembourg on Icelandic Airlines, at that time the least expensive wings to Europe, thence meandering about Europe, settling in Greece for a few months, where both worked in a hothouse and tended vegetables. When the job ended, they took the ferryboat to Crete, intending to rest at the ancient Roman caves of Matala, which have for years housed colonies of the young and disenchanted. Playing one day on a beach, Jennie found a pebble whose shape interested her. It seemed to resemble a little potbellied god. Christopher examined it and pronounced that Jennie had discovered a perfect replica of Lord Buddha. With that, the stone fell from Jennie’s hand, almost as if bidden, and disappeared into the sea—like a drowning man. Perhaps, Christopher would later reason, this was the first omen. It disturbed him and they moved on to Istanbul.

  By bus and train and thumb they worked slowly across the world. In Iran they waited for the winter snows to melt further so they could drive through the Khyber Pass with a friend in an old truck. In Afghanistan a trader told Jennie she would be worth six white horses, perhaps seven if it was necessary to bargain. Finally, India, and a sense of awe. She wrote to Madame Crystal: “India assaults me. It is a country of color, hot colors. Reds, pinks, oranges, gold. Everywhere you look, there is something brilliant to see, or hear, or smell. The poverty is overwhelming at first, but after a while you realize that it was here before you came and will be here after you leave. There is nothing you can do about it, except try to see things beyond it … Never again will I take sit-down toilets and showers for granted!”

  Their path wound down the subcontinent to Goa, the former Portuguese settlement that pooches out like a belly button on the western edge of India. Goa became lustrous to the young during the 1960s when the Beatles and Mia Farrow went there to meditate and dance on the clean and then empty sands. In the decade after, tens of thousands of young travelers stopped in Goa, some living for years in thatched huts that rented for ten dollars a month. When Christopher and Jennie arrived, it was hardly the idyllic place of their imaginations. The sun was relentless, Jennie could not walk more than a dozen paces on the beach without burning her feet. The colony of a hundred youths lay soaked in sweat, many of them so deeply stoned that they did not even feel the heat. One night, at an outdoor cafe where a few kids were dancing listlessly to music from an English boy’s cassettes, Jennie and Christopher began to speak with a thin and pale but serene American who was older, perhaps thirty, and who seemed to be at total peace with the world. He told them of a month spent in Katmandu, Nepal, studying at a Buddhist monastery that welcomed Westerners. The experience had been the most important event of his life, and though he was forced by financial problems to return to America, someday he would go back to the Himalayas and devote his life to meditation.

  Jennie found the man to be moderately interesting, but Christopher stayed up until dawn, fascinated. He was actively searching for something new to sink his metaphysical teeth into, and this form of Buddhism—the Mahayana tradition—seemed challenging. “Someday we should go to Katmandu,” said Christopher, and Jennie agreed, not so much as an
endorsement of the plan but to acknowledge the hope that her lover would soon find an anchor. Clearly he was drifting away from her.

  Somewhere along the road, a tiny wedge had developed between Jennie and Christopher, and by the time they reached the steaming sands of Goa, it was widening. “I’ll never know why Christopher is suddenly distant,” wrote Jennie in her journal. “He says he still loves me, but what he says and does are two different things.” For the first time since their relationship began, Christopher had become sexually disinterested. More often than not, the night would end with a dutiful kiss on Jennie’s cheek, then something muttered about the need for abstinence so as not to muddle his fermenting mind. Sometimes Christopher climbed out of his sleeping bag and crept away, finding a place to sit and think and be completely alone. Never before had Jennie felt left out, even for a moment. She tried to be interested when Christopher spoke of the wheel of reincarnation and of the teachings of various lamas from Tibet, but what she really wanted was for her lover to hold her and need her—and mean it.

  One night at a party held under the palms on the beach, Jennie puffed happily on the hash pipe every time it circled, sang loudly, danced with anyone who asked, and if no one asked, then all by herself. After midnight, when Christopher was sitting with a small group of youths discussing nirvana and how to obtain it, Jennie stripped off her clothes and ran to the sea and swam naked, her laughter drawing others. She passed out and spent the night in someone else’s hut, and the next morning, embarrassed and fuzzy, hurried to Christopher with an apology. He looked at her with sadness, but understanding. “Until you understand the meaning of karma,” he said, “there will be more nights like that.”

  They splurged and flew from Delhi to Katmandu, only an hour’s journey but a step back through the curtains of time, to centuries lost. Out the window of their plane, the two youngsters looked out in awe at the Himalayas, white-haired giants patrolling the roof of the world, then thrilled as they plunged through frothy clouds into the eerie green valley of Katmandu. Hardly were they through customs when Christopher was asking directions to the Kopan Monastery.

  It was a place of primitive comfort and surpassing beauty. Founded in the 1960s by a white Russian princess named Zina who wanted a place for Westerners to study Buddhism (Princess Zina would later die of peritonitis while in residence at another monastery several thousand feet higher in the mountains), Kopan demanded an arduous walk before its gates could be reached, a metaphor, perhaps, for the enlightenment offered within.

  The path began for Jennie and Christopher at one of the great Buddhist stupas, or temples, on the outskirts of Katmandu, an exotic, soaring structure whose tower is celebrated for the enormous painted eyes that stare ominously in the four directions, eyes that bore into the soul of anyone who dares look back at them. From there, the couple found a goat path road winding up through terraced rice fields of hot green stretching as far as the human eye could see. Water buffalo also claim the path, and travelers must scurry to give them room. Little temple dogs dart out to yap disapproval, and women with yokes on their shoulders and baskets heavily loaded with vegetables climb surely to their stucco farmhouses, often hidden behind rows of corn twelve feet high.

  The monastery sits atop a graceful hill; often fog so blankets the valley that Kopan seems to hang suspended in the clouds. Students are told of farmhouses nearby that can be rented for less than ten cents a day, but Christopher and Jennie were running low on funds. They decided instead to pitch their tent on a second hill, just above the monastery, between two great firs. A green banner was stretched between the trees to wish happy birthday to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

  “I can’t believe I’m here,” wrote Jennie to Madame Crystal in Seattle. “We are literally on top of the world, and we will stay for 30 days, studying Buddhism and meditating. The first day it was hard to concentrate on the lectures, because I was picking lice out of my hair. We bathe (hah!) in ice cold water from a spring. Christopher and I are fine, a few problems along the way, some pressure and minor traumas, but I think this place will strengthen our love.”

  Writing letters, as Jennie would soon learn, was frowned upon, as were any worldly diversions, particularly drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and sex. For thirty days, the youngsters were put into a metaphysical pressure cooker, the point being to remove distractions, to stop “extraneous input to the mind,” to turn off all the sensory stimuli that continually bombard people before the hill in Kopan is climbed. They rose before dawn and spent an hour meditating, chanting mantras, trying to visualize Lord Buddha by first concentrating on a tiny speck of light and allowing it to grow into a figure with moving hands and surrounded by translucent light. Breakfast was barley cereal and yoghurt, then came a long morning of “discourses” by Lama Yeshe or by Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, who at the age of three, in Tibet, was declared to be the reincarnation of a dead lama. The lamas sat enthroned in the main hall of the monastery, in front of a glass case with dolls representing important Buddhist figures. With their china faces and ornate gold robes, they looked like the toys of a rich little girl.

  There was little fun, rare laughter. The teachings of the lamas dwelled upon suffering, of preparing for death. “All is suffering, all is emptiness, all is dukkha,” said the lamas, quoting Lord Buddha. And one is condemned to endless reincarnations until the spirit is cleansed by meditation and thus permitted to leave the wheel of dying and returning—and dying again. The goal is to reach nirvana, the state of bliss. “The first step toward becoming free of suffering is to recognize the cause of suffering,” wrote Jennie in her journal, “and you can be rid of it only through meditation.” She then wrote: “That makes sense.” Karma was not difficult to grasp. Jennie understood within a few days that it simply meant that a person brings on inevitable results, be they good or bad, due to the way a life is lived, or, importantly, the way a previous life was lived.

  “Is karma destiny?” asked Jennie of one of the monks.

  He smiled and answered, “Perhaps destiny is karma.”

  Something curious happened.

  Before the end of the month’s stay at the monastery, Jennie and Christopher switched roles. She became the devoted, dedicated student; he found the study course interesting intellectually, but not one that he could accept fully as a life style. One late afternoon they sat on their hilltop sipping tea and watching the sun die behind the great mountains, a ravishing symbol of the Buddhist belief that all is cyclical. Far away they could hear strange music of drums and horns from the valley, and the subdued giggling of the seventy young boys who were enrolled as monks-to-be in the monastery, some as young as four, all wearing brilliant purple and saffron robes and cognizant that most would never leave this mountaintop.

  At Kopan were several Westerners, including a dozen Americans, who had taken the vows of monks and nuns. Their lives were ones of enormous sacrifice, celibacy, and withdrawal from the world, even to the point of taking new names, never again using the ones on their birth certificates. Christopher remarked that he could never make such a commitment; he did not see the value of retreating from the world rather than challenging and perhaps changing it. Jennie listened and was silent. Then she said, “I could. I think I could find peace here.”

  Christopher did not intrude on her comment, for he doubted if she would feel the same once they returned to Seattle. “Jennie was going through changes,” he would one day remember. “Our directions were not toward each other anymore, but to our inner selves. Jennie began to perceive things differently at Kopan. Up to that point she had been a creature of her environment. Now she realized that she was an individual—incarnate!—and she got in touch with those personal energies that are not forced on you from parents or friends or home town. Jennie began to know that she was much, much more than what she was programmed to think of herself. And she no longer felt guilt over some of the dark moments in her past.”

  Before they left Nepal, Jennie and Christopher decided to climb to a place almost fiftee
n thousand feet in the Himalayas, to the monastery called Lawuda, built on the site of a cave where one of the lamas had lived “in a previous life.” He had vowed to return and build a school for Sherpa children. For Jennie and Christopher it was the supreme experience of their young lives.

  They began at Lamosangu, traditional starting point for the Everest expeditions, the easternmost point on the road to China. For several days, the couple climbed through terraced wheat fields and jungles of rhododendrons afire with pink and scarlet blossoms, passing through several villages a day and besieged by children who importuned for coins or sweets.

  The climb was hard, the red clay dust difficult to wash away, the centuries-old path often so worn by the feet of the ancients that the sides were shoulder high. Each night they stopped at a Sherpa house for shelter, eating rice and dal (a lentil curry) and paying only twenty cents for bed and board. They slept in their bedrolls, thrown down on earthen floors with beds of leaves, next to the farmer’s animals. Up and up they climbed, across narrow ridges, over six major rivers including one so full of minerals, so boiling with its rush from an Everest glacier to tumble down the mountain, that it gleamed white and was called, appropriately, Milk River.

  They stopped briefly at the Namche Bazaar, a trading post in the mountains for Sherpas. These hardy mountain men go in and out of what was once Tibet, now China and officially forbidden to enter, and they return to Nepal with wares for sale—tea, sugar, wool, cups, thermos bottles from Shanghai, cooking oil, kerosene lamps. Jennie was enchanted by the Sherpas, they being scarcely taller than she. Christopher laughed when one of the Sherpas offered her a bite of cold boiled potato from his pocket; the strong little men eat them constantly on treks. As Jennie munched the mushy vegetable with distinct lack of enthusiasm, the Sherpa stared at her with what appeared to be moonstruck infatuation. He began to speak passionately, but Christopher pulled his lady away gracefully.