The Long Haul

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. Every person and company in it is invented.

Westbound

Lobsang Tharchin hauls freight between Kansas City and Denver, twice a week, all winter. He loads in Kansas City in the evening and drives west through the night on Interstate 70, six hundred miles across Kansas and the eastern plains of Colorado. He is home by morning.

He is forty-seven. He was born in the Tibetan refugee settlement at Mundgod, in Karnataka in south India, and came to Colorado at twenty-four to join an uncle. He has driven trucks for fourteen years. He has never been to Tibet.

Before the wheels turn

Every haul starts the same way. He walks around the truck with a flashlight: tyres, lights, air lines, the coupling to the trailer. It is the inspection drivers do before every trip, and he does it slowly, his breath white in the lot lights.

Then he climbs into the cab and, before he starts the engine, says the Seven-Line Prayer once, out loud, in Tibetan. It is a short prayer to Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century teacher remembered for helping Buddhism take root in Tibet. His father said it before every journey, even a trip to the market. Lobsang has never found a reason to stop.

Border people

His father, Jampa, crossed into India in 1959 as a boy of ten, one of tens of thousands of Tibetans who followed the Dalai Lama into exile. In 1966 the family helped clear forest land near Mundgod for a new settlement. Jampa grew maize there for the rest of his life, in a field behind a small tiled house.

Lobsang never sat down to learn the prayer. His father said it on the front step in the evenings, and the boy beside him heard it until it was simply in him. Only the first line ever needed explaining.

It names the place Guru Rinpoche came from: the north-west border of Oddiyana, a land of the old stories. Lobsang asked where that was. His father did not know. "Far," he said. "Further than Tibet." Then, after a while: "A border is where one land stops and the next begins. We are border people too."

Years later Lobsang read that most scholars place Oddiyana in the Swat Valley, in what is now northern Pakistan, though not everyone agrees. It pleased him that nobody could be quite sure. The prayer begins with a place almost no one alive has seen, and it is said every day by people who have never seen their own homeland either.

Half past eight in the morning

While his father was alive, Lobsang called him from the road. Nine at night in Kansas is half past eight in the morning in Mundgod. Jampa would be on the step with his tea, and they would talk through Topeka about the maize, the rain, Lobsang's sister's children, and nothing much.

Jampa died two winters ago, at seventy-five. Lobsang flew to India and arrived two days after the cremation. He still has the number. Some nights, around Topeka, his thumb goes looking for it.

A line a mile

The new habit began in January, on a night of freezing fog west of Hays. He had slowed right down. The fog took away everything but the next stretch of lane and, once a mile, a small reflective post at the roadside that rose out of the dark and was gone.

He was tired in the way that makes a driver impatient, and he did not like it. So, without quite deciding to, he began the prayer again, and this time he gave each line a mile. One line as a post went by, then only the road until the next. Seven lines took seven miles. The short mantra that follows them, a string of sacred syllables, took an eighth.

It was slow enough to give his mind something to do, and too slow to be hurried. He found he could not say a line about following in someone's footsteps and curse the pickup that had just cut in front of him. The pace kept him awake, and it kept him gentle.

It did not replace sleep, and he never pretended it did. One night in February, more tired than he should have been, he pulled into a truck stop, lay down in the berth behind the seats and slept until he was fit to drive. The rules on driving hours are strict for good reason. His father would have told him the same.

Westbound past Topeka, the mile markers count down towards the Colorado line, and in Colorado they keep counting down towards Denver. He likes that. It feels like going home by subtraction.

Two in the morning

Rita Delgado works nights in the dispatch office on the north-east edge of Denver. Around two each morning she phones every driver on the road: where are you, how is the road, how are you. She is fifty-eight. Her father drove trucks for thirty-one years, many of them on this same highway, and he died last April. His dented steel thermos still stands by her window.

One night her call came in halfway through a line, and through the hands-free speaker she heard him finish it before he said hello. "Were you singing?" she asked.

He told her what it was. She was quiet for a mile or two. Then she said her father used to sing to stay awake, old ranchera songs, very badly, and that she would give a great deal to hear him do it again.

After that the two o'clock calls grew longer. They talked about weather and loads and which truck stops had decent coffee. Once she asked whether he ever still dialled his father's number. He said yes. She said so did she. Neither of them said much more about it, and both of them knew what they were not saying.

Half an hour at Colby

The rules make a driver take a thirty-minute break before eight hours at the wheel, and Lobsang takes his at Colby whether he feels he needs it or not. He walks once around the truck in the cold and looks up. On clear nights the stars over western Kansas are thicker than anything he has seen since the settlement. The CB murmurs low in the cab behind him, other drivers' voices passing in the dark.

At Goodland the clocks go back an hour, because that corner of Kansas keeps mountain time. He always thinks of it as a small gift nobody has asked him to return.

The end of the road

In the hours after Colby he sometimes thinks about the homeland he has never seen. He has pictures of it from his father: a river, a barley field, a walnut tree beside a house. They are not even his own. They were carried over the mountains in a ten-year-old's head and handed down on a step in south India.

The morning Lobsang left for America, his father walked with him to the end of the dirt road and waited with him for the taxi to Hubli. Lobsang looked back once. His father was standing at the edge of the fields, very small, with one hand raised.

The last run of winter

By the end of February the fog had gone and the nights were clear and bitterly cold. On the last run of the month, Rita's call came in past Hays. "Last night shift before my week off," she said. "You're due in around half past six?"

"About that."

"I'll still be here."

Past Byers, with forty miles to go, the sky behind him began to lift: grey in the mirrors, then rose. He was on the fifth line, the one that speaks of the gathering of dakinis around Guru Rinpoche, when the mountains came up ahead of him. In Tibetan tradition dakinis are female figures of wisdom; the word means something like "sky-goer".

The Front Range lay along the whole western edge of the world, white, catching the first light before anything else did. He said the line about following in the footsteps, and the one that asks for blessing, and the mantra. Then he let the miles go by in silence.

Dawn at the yard

He pulled into the yard at ten to seven. Rita was standing outside the office door in a long coat, holding two paper cups of coffee. They had talked for nine weeks and had never met.

She handed him a cup. They stood by the cab and watched the light come down the mountains, pink and then gold.

"Which line is the place one?" she asked. "The far-off land. Not the words. Just what it says."

He told her: a land at the edge of another land, a long way off, where the one you are calling to came from.

She thought about it. "Sounds like Kansas at three in the morning," she said, and he laughed, properly, for the first time in a long while.

Then she went home to sleep, and so did he. Neither of them had fixed anything. The sun was all the way up.