Today, in their ancestral homeland of Tibet, these tenders of the land are ever more rapidly being pushed away, of course, in favor of the karaoke bars and shopping malls and high-rising hotels that deface modern Lhasa, blocking the view of the Potala Palace from the central Barkhor marketplace. A railway line is coming up to link Golmud, in China, with Lhasa, and it is believed that when it is completed, before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Tibet as we know it may be gone forever. Some of the restless boys I met in Dharamsala seem almost to have gone through the same transition, internally, from natural, traditional, regular forms of nomadism to the fractured, displaced and man-made movements that shape them now.
"When they're in Tibet, they dream of coming to India," one of the Dalai Lama's close associates told me this spring when I mentioned all the young boys who had come across the mountains to join their leader but still seemed itchy, somehow on the move. "Now they're in India, they all dream of America. Who knows what they will dream of when they get to America?"
In The Songlines, his last great testament, the compulsive traveler Bruce Chatwin suggested that it is in our souls and blood to move. Wandering is the first step (quite literally) toward wondering. Wandering is how we think, and tap out a theory in our heads; it is, he suggests, what we were meant to do. A Tibetan I met in Dharamsala this spring spoke of America's original inhabitants as his brothers, their roaming tribes, like his, displaced by what we think of as progress. Two weeks before arriving in Dharam-sala, I had been in the Australian outback, watching the circle of increasingly marginalized aboriginal wanderers who had given Bruce Chatwin his ideas.
When I look at the faces in these pictures, it's hard not to think of what we stand to lose. Few of us in the comfortable West would want to share the Changpas' lives of austerity, daily hardship, early death and captivity to the land (a form of imprisonment in its way as confining as our imprisonment to the machine). Yet that need not prevent us from thinking that if they go, something will go within ourselves. Like those naked, yearning songs of homesickness I heard in Dharamsala this spring, which opened up space inside me, the people in these pictures speak for something almost primordial in us that links us to something beyond us (the rhythms of our grand-fathers, the heavens, the soil). With them goes some aboriginal part of ourselves that we need to maintain if the future is to be something more than just the past badly lost in translation.
