Once, going past the Jama Masjid in Delhi in a bus on a scorching June day, I noticed a Tibetan stall tucked in between the sugarcane juice vendors. Two middle-aged women dressed in heavy Tibetan bakus were sitting in it, knitting. The stall was stacked with the usual brightly colored woolen goods. The women were smiling cheerfully as they bargained with their customers in sign language and broken Hindi. A small crowd had gathered around them, as though in tribute to their courage and resilience.
I found myself looking around the restaurant, involuntarily, for another Indian face, someone who had been properly invited, unlike me. I suppose I was looking for some acknowledgment, not of a debt but of a shared history, a gesture toward those hundreds of sweaters in Trivandrum. I couldn't see any. (Later someone said they'd seen a woman in a sari, but they couldn't be sure; it might have been a Somali robe — this was, after all, New York.)
When I next caught the monk's eye, his smile seemed a little guilty: the hospitality of a poor nation must have seemed dispensable compared to the charity of a rich one. Or perhaps he was merely bewildered. It cannot be easy to celebrate the commodification of one's own suffering.
But I couldn't help feeling that if the lama, like the actor, really wanted to make Tibet a household word in the Western world, he wasn't setting about it the right way. He'd probably have done better if he'd turned it into an acronym, like TriBeCa or ComSubPac. And sold the rights to it to a line of detergents or even perhaps a breakfast cereal.
TiBet (where the Cause is): doesn't sound too bad — marketable, even.
FOUR CORNERS 1989
IT BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE to ignore the Four Corners once Route 160 enters Colorado's Montezuma County: chevroned signposts spring regularly out of the sand and scrub, urging you toward it. Even if you had never heard of it before, did not know that it is the only point in the USA where four states meet, you are soon curious; it begins to seem like a major station, a Golgotha or Gethsemane, on this well-worn tourist pilgrimage.
The size and sleekness of the trailers and traveling homes heading toward it are eloquent of its significance. These are not the trailers you have grown accustomed to seeing in small towns in the South and Midwest — those shiny aluminum goldfish bowls that sit parked in back yards until the ballgame in the next town, when they get hitched onto pickup trucks and towed out to the ballpark to serve as adjuncts for tailgate parties. Not these; these are no ordinary trailers, they are recreational vehicles (RVs) — if not quite palaces, then certainly midtown condos, on wheels.
You get a real idea of how big they are only when you try to pass one on a two-lane road in a Honda Civic that lost its fifth gear 8000 miles ago. Before you are past the master bedroom, are barely abreast of the breakfast nook, that blind curve that seemed so far away when you decided to make a break for it is suddenly right upon you.
It teaches you respect.
Their owners' imaginations are the only limits on the luxuries those RVs may be made to contain.
Once, on a desolate stretch of road in the deserts of western Utah, I watched an RV pull into a sand-blown rest area right beside my battered Honda Civic. It was almost as long as a supermarket truck, and the air around it was sharp with the smell of its newness. A woman with white curly hair stuck her head out of a window, tried the air, and said something cheerful to someone inside, over the hum of the air conditioning. A moment later the door opened, a flight of stairs clicked magically into place under it, and she stepped out, throwing a wave and a cheery "How you doin'?" in my direction. She was carrying a couple of chairs and a rack of magazines. Her husband climbed out too, and in companionable silence they pulled an awning out of the side of the vehicle and unrolled a ten-foot length of artificial turf under it. She waved again, after the chair, the magazine rack, a pot of geraniums, and a vase with an ikebanaed orchid had been properly arranged on the patch of green. "I call this my bower," she said, smiling. "Join us for cakes and coffee?"
Never had a wilderness seemed so utterly vanquished.
Often those RVs have striking names: Winnebago, Itasca… The names of the dispossessed tribes of the Americas hold a peculiar allure for the marketing executives of automobile companies. Pontiac, Cherokee — so many tribes are commemorated in forms of transport. It is not a mere matter of fashion that so many of the cars that flash past on the highways carry those names, breathing them into the air like the inscriptions on prayer wheels. This tradition of naming has a long provenance: did not Kit Carson himself, the scourge of the Navajo, name his favorite horse Apache?
There are many of them on Route 160, those memorials to the first peoples of the Americas, bearing number plates from places thousands of miles away — New York, Georgia, Alaska, Ontario. Having come this far, everybody wants to see the only point where four states meet.
There cannot be many places in the world quite as beautiful as the stretch of desert, mountain, and canyon that sprawls over the borders of the four states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. For the people who inhabited it at the time of the European conquest — the Diné, who came to be known as the Navajo — it was Diné Bikeyah, the country of the Diné, a land into which the First Beings climbed from the Underworlds through a female reed. To them it was the Fourth World, known as the Glittering.
Route 160 runs through some of the most spectacular parts of the Glittering World: around the caves and canyons of Mesa Verde and through the spectacular mesas that border on Monument Valley. Curiously, its one dull stretch comes when it dips south of the little town of Cortez and heads toward the Four Corners monument. The landscape turns scraggy and undecided, not quite desert and not quite prairie, knotted with dull gray-green scrub, and desert scarred by a few shallow ravines and low cliffs.
That is why it is impossible to miss the Four Corners monument.
It springs up out of nowhere, perched atop nothing, framed by the only stretch of dull country in the region. There is nothing remotely picturesque about its surroundings — no buttes, no mesas, not even a salience of rock or an undulation in the plain. With the greatest effort of the imagination it would not be possible to persuade oneself that this may once have been, like so many places in the Glittering World, a haunt of the Spider Woman or the Talking God or the Hero Twins. Legends of that kind need visible metaphors — wind-scarred buttes or lava fields — to attach themselves to the landscape. For the Four Corners monument the landscape does not exist; it sits squatly on the scrub like a thumbtack in a map, unbudging in its secular disenchantedness.
There is something majestic and yet uneasy about the absoluteness of its indifference to this landscape and its topography. It is simply a point where two notional straight lines intersect: a line of latitude, 37 degrees north, and a line of longitude, 109 degrees and 2 minutes west, the thirty-second degree of longitude west of Washington. These two straight lines form the boundaries between the four states. These lines have nothing whatever to do with the Glittering World; their very straightness is testimony to a belief in the unpeopledness of this land — they slice through the tabula rasa of the New World, leaving it crafted in their own image, enchanted with a new enchantment, the magic of Euclidean geometry.