Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

Appalachia offered what seemed like an even more startling explanation. He suggested that the snake that came charging so fiercely down the embankment was not the same snake that had gone up it.
    “Eastern diamondbacks often live in pairs,” he said, “especially during mating or brooding season. Could be that either the male or the female took it upon itself to go out of its way to show it wasn’t going to tolerate any threat to its mate.”
    Had the cold-blooded reptile charged down that bank, risks be damned, to avenge the stoning of its partner, to demand satisfaction for the offense and intrusion? Had it died for honor? For love ? If true, that casts the whole episode in a very different light: no longer just extraordinary and mysterious but romantic. In other words, right up my nothing if not serpentine alley.
     
    My father was helping to string a new electrical line from Lenore up the mountain to Blowing Rock when the right-of-way crew flushed a good-size rattlesnake from its den. One of the workers pinned down the viper’s head with a shovel while a companion yanked out its fangs with his pliers. The agitated but now harmless snake they then stashed in the large wooden toolbox in the bed of their truck.
    After work, back at the Lenore inn where the crew was lodged, they dispatched the cook’s helper, a colored man, out to the truck to retrieve “a mess of huckleberries” they claimed they’d picked that day. “They’re in the toolbox,” they told him, expressing a keen desire for huckleberry pancakes.
    Much to the amusement of the jokers at the inn, there soon erupted a terrified scream, followed first by the crunch of running feet on the gravel drive, then the flap-flop of loose shoes disappearing down the highway. The poor fellow might have run all the way to Africa for all they knew because he never returned to the inn.
    At least that’s how the story went. My father was a resolutely honest man, seldom disposed to narrative embellishment, yet it’s difficult not to detect in this anecdote, especially its climax, a whiff of the apocryphal. And it’s impossible not to detect the odor of racism.
    Race, in those days, was hardly in the forefront of Blowing Rock consciousness. Not a single African American lived in the town or its environs. Even the wealthy summer people didn’t bring along their black servants when they came for the season, finding it cheaper and less bothersome to hire maids and other help from the local white population. All the blacks in my frame of reference were in the movies; and whether it was a sophisticated dancer such as Bill Robinson (hey, he was cool enough for Shirley Temple), a figure of fun such as Buckwheat in “Our Gang” comedies, or the native tribesmen (so strange, so far away) who shared the jungle with Tarzan, they lacked any relevance in my daily life.
    Of course, I’d heard the occasional “N-word,” and while I realized it wasn’t exactly a compliment, even that epithet could possess a degree of ambiguity to me back then. For example, the time dear Aunt Mary expressed alarm at the way I’d dressed myself that morning. “Lordy mercy, Tommy! You can’t go around wearing red and orange together. Those are nigger colors.”
    I have no idea how Aunt Mary came by that interesting piece of fashion information, but I do know that more than twenty years later, when I was at a civil rights gathering in defiantly segregationist King William County, Virginia, I noticed that the only person of either race wearing red and orange was me.
     
    On one of our honeymoons, my wife Alexa and I rode elephants from northern Thailand to the border with Burma (for both humanitarian and poetic reasons, let’s refuse to call it Myanmar), a trip, at pachyderm pace, of three-plus days. Lumbering along atop an elephant’s head is not quite the wild, free, ecstatic experience it appears to be in Tarzan movies or the circus. For one thing, the elephant’s hair, though short, is