A father and son travel across North America in a pickup truck—talking, laughing, fighting, and bonding.

After years of thinking he’d never have kids, Lee Gutkind became a father at forty-seven and, following his divorce, soon found himself taking over more and more of the primary care responsibilities for his son, Sam. As one of a growing number of “old new dads” (recent studies have shown that one in ten children are born to fathers over forty), Gutkind realized that he faced challenges—both mental and physical—not faced by younger dads, not the least of which was how to bond with a son who was so much younger than himself. For the past seven years, Gutkind’s approach to this challenge has been to spend one to two months of every summer “truckin’” with Sam, a term they define as a metaphor for spontaneity, a lack of restriction: “Truckin’ means that you can do what you want to do sometimes; you don’t always need to do what’s expected.”

What began as long, cross-country journeys in a pickup truck, including one memorable trip up the Alaska-Canadian Highway en route to a writers conference in Homer, Alaska, have in more recent years ranged farther afield, to Europe, Australia, Tibet, and Africa. Whether listening to rock-and-roll music, entertaining themselves with their secret jokes and code words, fishing for halibut, or fighting over tuna fish sandwiches and how best to butter one’s toast, Lee and Sam have learned to respect one another. In the process of their travels and their adventures, Lee has also come to grips with the downside of middle age and the embarrassment of “senior moments,” while Sam has inevitably begun to assert himself and shape his own life. Interspersed with Sam’s own observations and journal entries, Truckin’ with Sam is an honest, moving, and often hilarious account of one father’s determination to bond with his son, a spontaneous travelogue that will appeal to old dads, new dads, and women who want to know more about how dads (and sons) think and behave.

Table of Contents

Preface: “What’s All This Blood, Dad? I Don’t Understand!”
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Africa—July 2009

Part I. The Open Road
Portal—2004
The Evolution of Truckin’
Chasing Madness
Trapped at the Border
Listening to the Road 
Wet Run
The Jack London of Rock and Roll
Hello?
Artful Charlie
The Dyl
Anticipation
Tuna Fish Trouble
Sam’s Dangerous Disease
Another Border Crossing
Buttering Toast
Father Knows Best?
The Rope Test
The “Make My Day” Syndrome
The Red Bike
Hakuna Matata

Part II . Religious Experiences
Laowai—March 2008
Creation Elation
Moshe Dann
Radio Shack
Rose
Aunt Hattie
Getting Lost and Losing It
The Big Picture
Antelope Galloping
Paul and Barbara
Bears on the Brain
Winning (and Losing) the Race
The Summit
Old Men
The Gödel Connection

Afterword by Sam Gutkind
Uhuru
Truckin’: A Final Word, by Lee Gutkind

Reviews of Truckin' with Sam

“In this funny and moving tale about the long strange trip that is fatherhood, Gutkind offers readers a precious truth—that it is only through the eyes of our children that we see ourselves clearly.” — Ariel Sabar, author of My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“This blazingly original memoir has just become my favorite American road story. When Lee Gutkind and his teenage son, Sam, light out for adventure on the highway, what is supposed to be a vision-quest turns into a struggle for the driver’s seat. Gutkind writes better than anyone about the heartbreaking and thrilling sacrifices of parenthood. This book is the Fear and Loathing of fatherhood—by turns hilarious, twisted, and poignant.” — Pagan Kennedy, author of The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution and Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo

“Truckin’ with Sam is a multilevel traveling tale that takes you around the globe in more ways than one. Lee Gutkind has written a superb account of the father-son bond as it evolves in the heat and heart of their many adventures.” — Lauren Slater, author of Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir

TriQuarterly Online has an interview with Lee and Sam Gutkind on their website.

Readings from Truckin' with Sam
(coming soon)

 

 

 

About the Authors

Lee Gutkind is Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes and Professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University; founding editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction; and the author or editor of over a dozen books, including Almost Human: Making Robots Think; Forever Fat: Essays by the Godfather; and The Art of Creative Nonfiction.
For more information visit Lee Gutkind's website.

Sam Gutkind is now a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University.

 

Creation Elation

OUR FIRST REAL truckin’ destination back in 2003, during the era of
the wet run and the Ranger, was the Grand Canyon, where, I told
Sam, he would see such a sight that he could truly conceive of the
notion that, if not God, then something really extraordinary—out of
this world—actually existed. I said this half jokingly, although when I
first visited the Canyon I was, like many people, overpowered by the
pure magnificence of it all. How could such an overwhelming sight
have been created by pure accident of nature? And if so, who created—
what was—nature? These questions are not unique to me; many have
pondered such riddles in a much more sophisticated manner. But truly,
I had really never given God any thought whatsoever. God, to me,
when I was young, was connected to religion, which, I thought, was
kind of a crock. If it wasn’t for religion I wouldn’t have had to go to
Hebrew School after regular school every afternoon from three-thirty
to six, studying for my bar mitzvah, Monday through Thursday. I
could have been playing softball with my friends. If not for religion, I
would not have to wear a suit and sit inside a synagogue during the
High Holy Days listening to a bunch of old bearded guys chanting in
a language I didn’t understand. As soon as I could possibly escape from
religion and God, at thirteen, I did so—like a prisoner released from
lock-up.

But for Sam, early on, religion was a powerful force to ponder and
debate. Sam’s mom is also not religious—she was born Christian—and
when he was very young, Sam liked to tell people he was half-and-half,
although technically, according to the orthodox and conservative Jews, Sam would be officially Jewish only if his mom were Jewish. Reform
Jews are not so selective—or at least, so I then thought. Originally, I
had this idea that I would allow my son to choose his own religious
direction by taking him periodically to different religious services.
We’ve been to many churches and synagogues over the years. Sam says
he is an atheist.

At one point, I decided to enroll him in an Episcopal Church
Sunday school and a Reform Jewish Sunday school, simultaneously. He
would attend alternate Sundays. Perhaps this was foolish and confusing,
but Sam enjoyed the different experiences, until the rabbi from the
Reform synagogue told me that Sam couldn’t be educated as a Christian
and a Jew at the same time, at least in her congregation. So I asked
Sam if he wanted to make a choice. He did. I withdrew him from both
Sunday schools and we have not returned to a church or synagogue in a
regular or structured way since.

But as we traveled year after year, I came to believe that what we
were doing in that truck when we went to the Grand Canyon and then
the following year up the AlCan, ending at the peak of Exit Glacier,
were in many ways religious experiences. In that truck, we were being
monastic—we were contemplating the world in an incredibly intimate
way by talking and relaxing into each other’s silences. We were listening
to the greatest music the world has ever known, from our point of view,
music which demonstrably connected generations and cultures. Traveling,
we were seeing the world, choosing to participate in a spontaneous
and voluntary manner, while sharing the intimacy of a tiny comfortable
chamber, not too different from a confession box, inside the truck. As
Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame might put it, Sam and I, heading toward
the Grand Canyon or Exit Glacier, and later venturing into China and
Tibet and then visiting Auschwitz, were going through a mind meld, an
extended religious experience no church, temple, cathedral, or museum
could ever provide. The Creation Museum, however, provided an illuminating spotlight into a world we had automatically rejected.

WE ARE IN Noah’s Cafe, sitting on high stools at a small high table, a
very chic little place with lattes and cappuccinos and organic wraps featured on the menu, talking quietly, our heads together. Sam in Levi’s
and a wrinkled T-shirt displaying the periodic table is not so different
in appearance from the other visitors to this brand new $27 million
monument to the Book of Genesis called the Creation Museum. But
the swarms of teens roaming this complex have T-shirts and badges
displaying their faith. The biggest group, aside from Amish—there must be fifty kids, maybe more, banded together—display yellow-andgreen
Ts. The front side says “Covington California,” while the back
side reads “Runners on a Marathon Mission for God.”

I am reading to Sam from the literature we’ve collected about this
place, located in Petersburg, Kentucky, about fifty miles south of
Cincinnati, and the few notes I have jotted down in my spiral reporters
notebook.

“The state-of-the art 60,000-square-foot museum brings the pages
of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form
and placing them in familiar settings. Adam and Eve live in the Garden
of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s rivers. The serpent
coils cunningly in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.”
Behind us on the high stone wall snaking through the facility are advertisements for upcoming events, beginning with Answers Family Camp:
Apologetics for the Whole Family, at the Higher Ground Conference
Center, less than twenty minutes from the Museum.

There are six brass plaques embedded in the wall beginning at the
entrance to the museum and spaced throughout the facility, organized
according to the six Cs of History—Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe,
Confusion, Christ, and Consummation.

Not surprisingly, the latter C is passed over quickly—in the blink
of an eye. Signs everywhere: Prepare to Believe.

Bonnie—so says her “Volunteer” badge—approaches and introduces
herself. “You are different from our regular visitors; I can tell by
just looking at you,” she said. “Why are you here?”

“We listened to a feature on NPR about this place. Sam was
intrigued,” I said, pointing at Sam. “So we came.”

Bonnie nodded.

The Creation Museum took us by surprise—first because it is all so
bizarre. I mean, putting prehistoric animals and humans together in the
same place and time, for example, positioning Creationism with Darwinism,
as if they are equally viable.

We had expected an onslaught of criticism of Darwinism and evolutionary
theory, but the rhetoric turns out to be ingeniously subtle.
Very little effort has been devoted to converting the unbelievers; the
entire edifice concentrates on proving—indirectly, subtly—that the
Creationists are right, and demonstrating how wrong the rest of us are.
One of the first of 110 full-sized exhibits in the complex portrays two
paleontologists on a dig working side-by-side at a site of dinosaur
remains. On a video—one of fifty-two videos in the museum—above a
life-sized diorama, both paleontologists address the audience, professing to be good friends and colleagues embarked on the same work with
similar objectives, but different starting points.

The first paleontologist explains that he believes that the world
started six thousand years ago when God created Adam and Eve. It is
all presented in clear-cut fashion in the Book of Genesis. The
dinosaurs, created on the sixth day, as described in Genesis, were on the
ark with Noah, along with lions, giraffes, all living creatures. Later we
learn that the transformations precipitated by the massive eruptions at
Mt. St. Helens are a vivid demonstration of how the Grand Canyon
came into being almost overnight during the flood that engulfed the
Earth. All of his scientific exploration is anchored in that belief. “So, in
fact,” I tell Sam, “taking you to the Grand Canyon to show you evidence
of the existence of God was the most legitimate religious experience
I have ever provided for you.”

The second archeologist, wielding shovel and brush, is basing his
work on the fact that the world was created millions of years ago, as
most scientists currently believe. The way in which the radically opposing
viewpoints are presented—the spin—is quite ingenious and ever so
daring.

“It’s like George Bush,” Sam says. “We’re winning the war in Iraq!”

“It’s a few levels more sophisticated than Bush,” I say. “They’re not
saying that Creationism is right and the rest of the world is wrong.
They’re presenting the dialogue and the discourse so that both theories
are on a level plane, that Creationism and Darwinism are comparable
scientifically. That either theory could be right, depending on your
starting point.”

“If the Bible is your starting point,” Sam says, “Everything follows
and makes sense after that. Wendy has seen the light,” he adds.

Sam is referring to the woman seeking meaning in life in the special-
effects theatre in which the seats vibrate and the sky spits moisture
to evoke a three dimensional image and reconstruction of the impact
wrought by the flood. Wendy begins the show, appearing as a real
person on stage and introducing the movie. “Prepare for some fun and
prepare for some solid answers—some intriguing surprises—and
PREPARE TO BELIEVE” she tells us.

The lights go down and Wendy sits on a stage in front of an artificial
campfire emanating from a triple split screen. Then the celestial
landscape suddenly appears as another voice, a haunting female voice,
asks in the echoing stillness “Does anybody even know I am here? Is
there any meaning? Did God create all of this or did we just invent
God?”

Preface

“What’s All This Blood, Dad?
I Don’t Understand!”

IT MAY SEEM ODD—counterintuitive, even—to preface a book about
father-son bonding with a story about discovering my mother’s menstrual
blood. My editor, in fact, initially advised against it. But sometimes
insights come in the most unlooked-for places. So, here goes:

I am seven years old and living in a tiny walk-up apartment with
my parents in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I see in the toilet one
morning what seems, to me, to be a bucket of blood. I panic.

My father left for work an hour ago, but my mother has been in
the bathroom most recently, so I run out into the kitchen, where I think
she is making breakfast, screaming, “Ma! Ma!” The radio is on, with
one of her favorite programs, “Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club,” but she’s
not there. So that increases my panic level to full-blast. She said she
would be in the kitchen. And at this time of day she is always in the
kitchen, and so I expect her to be in the kitchen, and she is not in the
kitchen. So now she is missing. And I am thinking, “Is my mother lying
somewhere a bloody mess? Is she dead?”

She’s not in her bedroom, nor in my bedroom, nor in our little
living room. No blood spots anywhere I look, either. I check the closets.
I peek under the beds. I look in the drawers and the cupboards, just to
be thorough. No Ma. No blood.

So I run downstairs and out onto the porch. And thank God, there’s
Ma, talking to Mrs. Doris Lindenbaum, her best friend, at the time. My mother’s best friends come and go in cycles. They are in and out—and
in—as is Doris Lindenbaum now, the best friend of the moment.

And of all of the women I remember as friends of my Ma, Doris
Lindenbaum is my favorite because she has a kaleidoscope of blue lines
on her legs, which are called, says my mother, “varicose.” When my
mother has poker games at our house, usually the first Thursday of the
month, I sneak into the kitchen and, when no one is looking, crawl
down under the table, cluttered with chips and cards and coffee and
Coke, and I study the lines of varicose that Doris owns.

My mother’s other best friends have varicose, too, but Doris beats
out everybody. Doris is tops. There’s a map of the world on Doris’
legs—snaking every which way—from ankle to knee, to that place way
up under the tunnel of her dress where those dark, alluring mysteries
lurk. At some point a few years later, I will learn from an older boy to
refer to this secret under-the-dress spot as “Joy City.” But even when I
am only seven, I know deep in my heart that there is something warm
and wonderful going on up there, under that dress, that will someday
yield unforgettable pleasure.

So I see Doris Lindenbaum on the porch that day. It is early. But I
don’t have the patience to wait to say to Mrs. Lindenbaum, “Excuse
me,” or “How are you doing, Mrs. Lindenbaum? How is good old
Marc?” Marc is her son who is in my grade at school. An odd sickly
kid; gets beaten up all the time. Or, “What are you doing here so early
in the morning, Mrs. Lindenbaum? Will you join us for breakfast?”

And neither do I have the patience or the good sense to say to my
Ma, “Can I talk with you privately, Ma?” or “Ma, can you spare a
moment? I’m a little upset and I need to ask you about a few matters
pertaining to a bucket of blood I found this morning in the toilet.” You
know, something preliminary.

All I know is that my mother may be bleeding, losing all that
blood, and if she’s bleeding, she may be dying, and if she’s dying, I am
going to be a boy without a mom, which is going to make me upset and
change my life.

The Evolution of Truckin'

IT ALL BEGAN in a Starbucks near Sam’s school—with a book I was
reading to Sam. This is what we do after school most every day. I get
my coffee, he snacks on pizza from the Italian Village across the street
on Forbes Avenue in Pittsburgh, and I read aloud. We read in the
morning, as well, at a diner, Ritter’s, a Pittsburgh landmark, where Sam
has been eating the same breakfast almost every day since beginning
grade school. Sam gets pancakes, a scrambled egg (well done), bacon,
and milk. As soon as we walk into Ritter’s and settle into stools at the
counter, a waitress invariably turns to Charlie, the short-order cook, and
yells, “Put Sam on the grill!”

I can’t tell you how many books we’ve read together—quite a
few—and it’s a real eclectic mix. We’ve read Lauren Slater’s Opening
Skinner’s Box, for instance. Sam was interested in Skinner and the box
in which he allegedly locked his daughter to test “operant conditioning.”
Sam is a geek—he loves science and technology, so we’ve read
Rodney Brooks, Stephen Hawking, Richard Preston, and Charles
Darwin. But all sorts of literature intrigue him. We’ve read the Greek
philosophers, large chunks of the Old Testament, and short stories and
essays from John Steinbeck, Isaac Asimov, Madeline L’Engle, and
Ernest Hemingway, among other writers.

Once, a woman approached our table in blue scrubs and stood and
listened as I read “Indian Camp,” a story in which Nick Adams, a character
Hemingway based on himself, observes his father deliver a baby to
an Indian by caesarian section only to learn that the newborn’s father
has committed suicide during the procedure. When I finished, she said,“My dad read me ‘Indian Camp’ when was I was young and I decided
right away I would become a doctor. It inspired me. Your son will be
inspired by something you read to him, too, one day.”

In The Car, a young adult novel by Gary Paulsen, the book that initially
inspired our truckin’ experiences, teenager Terry Anders is abandoned
by his parents with a few dollars, a couple of loaves of bread, and
a “kit” car his father was in the process of building, called a Blakely
Bearcat, which Terry nicknamed “the Cat.” Terry finishes building the
Cat and begins driving to Portland, Oregon, to search for a long-lost
uncle. On the road, he meets two nomadic Vietnam vets, Waylon and
Wayne, who quiz him about literature, history, and contemporary
American culture: Terry is clueless. Wayne and Waylon conclude that
he needs to be educated—to see America—so, on the spot, they propose
to take him “Truckin’.”

Before The Car, Sam and I already had the habit of driving around
the city aimlessly, listening to the radio, a routine we still follow even
now with Sam at eighteen, but back then we finally found a word or a
metaphor for it: Truckin’. And with the word, the possibilities became
more vivid—at least to me. We weren’t just seeing sights when we were
driving around, I told Sam; rather, we were truckin’—as in the classic
song of the same name by the Grateful Dead:

Truckin,’ got my chips cashed in.
Keep truckin’, like the doodah man.
Together, more or less in line,
just keep truckin’ on.

I assumed that Waylon and Wayne were Deadheads—and I made the
connection for Sam by talking in depth about the entire rock-and-roll
era, beginning with The Grateful Dead but moving expansively back
and forth in time.

So from that point onward, Sam and I went truckin’, taking longer
and longer sojourns, listening to those whispering echoing sounds of
my past—Mick Jagger, Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison. Sharing
their music with Sam, it seemed as if I was just this moment discovering
them myself. Dire Straits. Mark Knopfler. The music was turning
me on all over again! Why—when—had I stopped listening? I wondered.
How could I have forgotten the compulsive passion of these
tunes that had once so inspired me?

Whereas I was prone to sing along with the music, sometimes at
the top of my lungs, Sam consumed it all in silence. He was happy to
talk about the artists—personal details about the vocalists and the
bands—but avoided conversation about the sound and the lyrics. It put him in a trance. As to the “Truckin’” song, the concept interested him
much more than the song itself. Truckin’, I told Sam, could be interpreted
as a metaphor for spontaneity—a lack of restriction. “Truckin’
means that you can do what you want to do sometimes; you don’t
always need to do what is expected.”

“Like taking a shower?” Here he saw a way out of a responsibility
he found annoying and senseless.

“Well, it is important to shower every day; it’s an unavoidable thing
that people do. Like breathing. Eating. You keep yourself clean. But, if,
one day out of the blue, you decide not to shower, well? So?”

“So you’re truckin’,” said Sam.

“Breaking the rules. Changing the pattern. Going with the flow.”

“Like watching Volcano,” Sam said.

This was Sam’s favorite movie of the moment. We were into disaster
movies at the time. We watched all of the Airport movies made in
the 1970s (five of them) along with Dante’s Peak, The Towering Inferno,
and Twister—repeatedly—and then we talked about them incessantly,
mostly about how stupid and unlikely they were. In Volcano or Dante’s
Peak, the stars, Tommy Lee Jones and Pierce Brosnan, respectively,
could outrun or come dangerously close to rivers of lava, thousands of
degrees hot, showing hardly any effect. “They should be boiling! They
should be dead and disintegrated, and they are not even sweating!” we
would yell at the TV monitor. “Why are they stopping to kiss [the leading
ladies were Anne Heche and Linda Hamilton] when they could be
saving thousands of lives?”

What always amazed us about these disaster movies is how quickly
and neatly they ended. In Volcano, hundreds of thousands of people are
probably dead, the city of Los Angeles is in ruins and it will take a
quarter century to rebuild it, but now it is raining, which magically
cools down the lava, and Tommy Lee Jones and his teenage daughter,
who had been working in a hospital caring heroically for casualties
during the disaster, are holding hands, while Anne Heche and Tommy
are smiling and looking at each other in that very alluring way—a
promise of passion in Joy City in the very near future.

All of which brings me back to this afternoon at Starbucks when I
began to hatch a plan to make the idea of truckin’ a reality—an on-theroad
adventure for Sam and me to share on a number of levels—a multiple
bonding experience—music, reading books, male camaraderie,
with a little geography and history, educational components, rolled into
the package.

For a while, I began to think about recapturing my motorcycling
days by buying a new BMW and truckin’ on two wheels. I had sold my old BMW, the one that had taken me all around the country while
working on a book about the motorcycle subculture, a few months after
Sam was born because, quite surprisingly and suddenly, after two
decades of riding, I didn’t feel safe anymore. Motorcycling became
scary—a gamble not worth the danger.

Every time I got on my motorcycle, I began to think that something
terrible was going to happen, that I would smash up and die
before I saw Sam, again. Or worse, I’d be mangled and twisted in an
accident, and then I’d be wheelchair-bound, a quadriplegic. who could
only talk to Sam by blinking my eyes or biting on a computer cable and
transmitting artificial voice sounds—a Stephen Hawking–like figure,
without Stephen Hawking’s fortitude and intelligence. So motorcycles
weren’t in the cards for Sam and me, but I concluded that if I was really
going to entice Sam into truckin’, which I suddenly seemed to be
doing, it would have to be in the right way and in the right vehicle,
which was, necessarily and undeniably a truck.

Everything that happened in Starbucks from that point on just
seemed to happen spontaneously, although I have to admit that there
was a certain amount of scheming behind it. We were sitting there,
Sam and me, talking, and while we were talking, I snatched a discarded
newspaper from an adjoining table and leafed through the pages in the
Want Ads section. I hadn’t discussed this idea—I hadn’t even worked it
out in my own mind. But I was responding to this nugget of an idea of
cementing my relationship with Sam.

My eyes were on the Used Trucks for Sale section of the paper. I
spotted an ad for a 1998 Ford Ranger four-cylinder pick-up, very clean,
only used for gardening, and I showed it to Sam as I slipped my cell
phone out of my jacket pocket and punched in the phone number, all at
once, but casual-like.

Jeff—the owner of the Ranger—was home, working in his garden.
“He’s a middle-school teacher,” I tell Sam. I am talking with Jeff and
Sam, back and forth, Jeff at home, Sam beside me. “Jeff once taught at
St. Edmunds,” I tell Sam. This was Sam’s school.

“Jeff says that he only uses the truck to haul mulch.” Jeff lives fifteen
minutes from where we are sitting.

“We can come over and test-drive the Ranger right now, this very
minute, if we want to.”

Laowai—March 2008

THE RAT-TAT-TAT OF gunfire awoke me. It was just a single burst—a
rapid, thundering slash into the silent darkness. I was out of bed and
fumbling with the curtains at the window in an instant.

I had heard that same disruptive sound earlier that night, and had
assumed, half-asleep, that it was simply a car backfiring. But then as I
lay there, the tense events of the afternoon played back in my mind:

The Jokhang Temple, the spiritual center of Tibet, usually surrounded
by waves of prostrating pilgrims, suddenly closing as we were
about to enter; the shopkeepers and street vendors packing up their
merchandise in the popular Barkhor marketplace surrounding the
Temple during the height of the market day; the police in their loosefitting
green and khaki, emblazoned with bold red stripes and lettering,
suddenly appearing; then the soldiers in dull brown emerging out of the
shadows, their stern, wary eyes lazering the streets; and our guide,
Tenzin, his bronze, sharp-featured face tightening with tension,
announcing softly, but insistently, “We must go. Now.”

We walked rapidly for fifteen or twenty minutes, following Tenzin,
who was communicating with our driver, Chamba, by cell phone.
Chamba, in our Landcruiser, was blocked from entering certain streets,
so we had to keep walking, chasing Tenzin’s back and his quick jerky
strides, as he zigged and zagged through alleys and winding, narrow
partially-paved side streets, his cell phone glued to his ear, until he and
Chamba could devise a rendezvous plan.

“Dad? What’s happening?” Sam asked.

“I will tell you in the car,” Tenzin interjected. But even after our
rendezvous with Chamba, Tenzin tactfully avoided providing substantial
information. There was a “one-land” demonstration further down in
the Barkhor, some blocks from where we were, Tenzin told us. “It has to
do with the D.L.,” he said.

“You mean the Dalai Lama?” I asked.

Tenzin nodded without responding directly to my question. “Ears
are everywhere,” Tenzin said. Since the Han occupation, Tibetans did
not speak the name of their Priest and King, head of the Monastic
Hierarchy of Buddha, out loud, he informed us.

That evening, the streets around our hotel were cordoned off.
Gaunt Chinese men in cheap black suits and wrinkled white shirts
milled on corners and in doorways, chain smoking cigarettes and talking
softly, glancing at us, as we walked up Beijing Middle Road toward
the Tibetan Steak House. We intended to eat yak steak and blood soup
on our first night in Lhasa. “We’ll be yakking it up,” Sam said.

We had already sampled yak butter tea, a warm, oily concoction of
tea, sugar, butter, and salt at the home of an old lady Tenzin had introduced us to, who lived in a neat hut in a rock-strewn alley in the middle
of Lhaza. The old lady had served us a number of Tibetan delicacies, a
few of which Sam had sampled. At home Sam remained a conservative
eater over the years, difficult to please, but lately, on the road, he could
let go and experiment. Slumping on a quilted bench and sipping the
warm, oily yak tea brew, he allowed the old lady’s filthy cat to jump up
on his lap, and he stroked it gingerly. The old lady, her face a coppery
tan, continued to smile and stare at Sam.

Tall and lanky, Sam had been a curiosity the moment we landed in
Tibet. His narrow shoulders and smooth white face framed with light
brown hair loomed like a mast over the crushing waves of dark, short
Tibetans and Chinese, who consistently whispered the word for foreigner—
laowai—as we walked by. Sam was unaware that he was
attracting attention; he is often oblivious to his surroundings.

The Tibetan Steak House was closed, an accordion of sheet metal
rolled over the door and front windows—airtight—as were most of the
other businesses on Beijing Middle Road. Our neighborhood was in
the heart of the Han district, and the tension and anger—and fear—
were thick in the air. We joined a dozen westerners back at our hotel, in
a nearly empty restaurant.

“What is happening out in the streets?” I asked a young Tibetan
man—a student—who had been having dinner with friends and volunteered
to help translate the menu.

“You will find out tomorrow,” he said. His voice was bursting with
restrained excitement. “No one will talk with you now,” he added softly.
And then in a whisper: “Tomorrow will be a beautiful day.”

All of this came back to me as I lay in bed after the first burst of
gunfire, dead tired from the flight into Lhasa from Chengdu in China’s
Szechuan Province the day before where I had been teaching and touring
with Sam, and the shocking adjustment to the altitude here in the
snow-capped Himalayas, from 500 meters in China (1,640 feet) to
3600 meters (12,000 feet) in less than two hours. But I was on edge,
unable to succumb to the sleep I desperately needed.

So when the sound came a second time, the jarring, unnatural
crack and pop of gunfire, that haunting, threatening rat-tat-tat, I knew
that whatever was happening in Tibet on this night was much more
than a minor, temporary disturbance. Something serious—life threatening—
was taking place in this country and to its people—and perhaps to
me and to my son.

I ripped open the curtains and saw the soldiers illuminated in the
streetlights, marching rapidly, equipped with riot gear—full-body
shields, bamboo batons, and automatic weapons, and heading in our
direction.

And then I thought, as I sank into the chair next to the window
and peered across the darkened room at the long sinewy shape of my
beloved son, bundled under his blankets, so peacefully sleeping,
unaware and innocent of all of the angry, violent commotion outside:
“What have I done to him this time?”
That was 6 months before Kilimanjaro.