By HARRIET KIMBLE WRYE This trip was a pregnant combination of awe-full and its close cousin awful. After returning from three peripatetic years traveling the globe, my husband and I had settled into our beloved Castellammare home of over 30 years and expunged the vile vibes of the Tenant from Hell by burning a lot of sage, refinishing floors and repainting. Forever uncured, though, the travel bug bit us once again when we heard about a wild tribal horse festival in the remotest corner of Tibetan Szechuan China, and so in July off we went. We flew from L.A. to Hong Kong to Kunming province in Southwestern China to spend a few days exploring the region’s fantastic geology and ethnic richness. Then heading north to Szechuan with our plane’s wings dipping dizzyingly close to the peaks, we dropped into the enchanted hidden Himalayan valley of Dzong Zhien, reportedly the mythical Shangri La of World War II fame. Several bumpy, winding days of four-wheeling took us onto the Himalayan plateau to witness an awesome annual Tibetan tribal gathering, the Litang Horse Festival. In this remote Tibetan area annexed by Red China, feudal costumes hidden from the Red Chinese takeover were donned for days of dancing. Men and women wore fur boots, tiger skin wraps, pendulous coral beads and hammered gold medallions while hundreds of gaily decorated Tibetan ponies and their fearless riders thundered across the plain, competing in races, stunts and archery feats, all at recklessly high speed. We saw more than one near-fatal accident, and one man dragged to death by his pony. Caught in a groundswell of Tibetan spectators, I was nearly clubbed to the ground by Chinese militia as the ages-old antipathy of the Chinese for the Tibetans surfaced. Following the festival, Jim and I set out with our Tibetan guide on a week-long trek into the remote Gorge of the Dongwang River, a tributary of the Yangtze. In this isolated but breathtaking part of Tibetan Szechuan, it turns out, adventure trekking is still practically unheard of, so we basically donned our hiking boots to become our guide’s outback guinea pigs. The first day’s ill-planned trek covered over 20 precipitous miles along a narrow gorge, with an altitude gain of over 5,000 feet. After 11 hours on the rugged trail, we were so done in when we reached the village where we were to pitch our tent on the flat roof of the village headman’s house that we begged just to fall into our sleeping bags sans supper and crash for the night. It occurred to me, however, to ask where the toilet was. (In China that means ‘Where’s the slit in the floor?’) Our host motioned to an anteroom off the roof. We went to check it out, Jim leading the way. I watched helplessly as the earthen roof collapsed under my husband and he fell three stories into, yes, the Tibetan toilet. Terrified that he might have been killed, I screamed out to him’and in vintage humor, Jim moaned back from the bottom of the pit, ‘Well, now you can really call me shithead.’ The fall netted three broken ribs, a badly torqued foot and no ordinary means for evacuation. After he was rescued, codeine allowed him fitful sleep, and in the morning we got to see how a true village works. Our host summoned all the strong young men for a pow-wow that resulted in a rather comically rustic litter. Fortunately we had more codeine, as broken ribs are very painful, especially as Jim had to be roped onto this litter of unplaned saplings. Twelve men formed three teams of four to take turns carrying him back out the same rugged 20 miles, while I begged for a mule which was only reluctantly proffered. (I later discovered why. No one in the village’s memory had ever dared ride an animal along that sheer gorge.) Eleven hours of alternating rain and sun later, our guides, the 12 men carrying Jim on his litter, and my mule and I dragged to the trailhead. From there we jostled seven hours by Jeep through the night to the ‘hospital’ in Shangri La’and the only available treatment of prayer and poultices, a noble tradition except when you require more. It took us another week for Jim to be able to tolerate the 23-hour plane trip home, where an orthopedist and an MRI diagnosed the trauma as a serious ‘Lis Franc’ dislocation requiring surgery to freeze the joints on the top of the left foot. Literally screwed, he spent 12 weeks on crutches. God doesn’t close a door without opening a window, and this catastrophe has opened our pores so wide we feel the whole universe coming in. We’re more grateful for our lives and medical care here, yet still uncured of the venomous bite of the travel bug that brings the awful and the awesome so poignantly into our lives. Initially the prognosis for hiking again with this rare injury was bleak, but Jim has been granted another of his nine lives which we recently celebrated with a five-mile hike in Temescal Canyon. (Dr. Harriet Wrye, a psychologist/psychoanalyst practicing here, and her husband Jim Wheeler, a retired commercial banker, have lived in Pacific Palisades for around 30 years. Their son, Gabriel, is a filmmaker in L.A., and their daughter, Ariel, is a bilingual elementary teacher in Echo Park. Both graduated from Palisades High. Harriet and Jim are inveterate adventure travelers, having climbed Kilimanjaro and peaks in the Andes and Himalayas, and immersed themselves in remote tribal cultures in Borneo, Irian Jaya, and the Amazon rainforest. Dr. Wrye is the author of ‘The Narration of Desire’ and numerous psychoanalytic articles.)
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