This whole trip has been great fun so far – roaming the country, getting a little work done here and there, pursuing my quest, meeting others who are on the road, and in general doing no harm except for these damnable carbon dioxide emissions that come whenever I drive. I keep telling myself it’s all for a good purpose – if I can help move Alan Drake’s rail electrification plans forward in some small part by my traveling and writing as I go we’ll count it a success, despite the CO2 emissions.
If you’ve been following this series you already know how much I like being outside and this time we’re in for a special treat; far too many years have passed since I last visited this particular bit of wilderness ...
This first part is an old ritual for me. I climb the stairs out of Penn Station and look about for the Empire State building, thusly getting my bearings in lower Manhattan.
I’d stayed the night before in New Jersey with Homer Wang, the arctic geoenineering guy who first got me interested in doing wind driven ammonia production. I very much wanted to go into New York proper since I was so close and he helped me out by showing me the way to a New Jersey Transit station.
The NJT network is pretty smooth – buy your ticket, wait a bit, and the magic carpet sweeps you off to the place you want to go, all for less than the cost of tolls and parking required when lugging along a couple of tons of unnecessary metals ... but it has nothing on New York’s subway system. You deposit $7.50 into the little machine at the entrance, a small, flexible credit card sized Metro Card pops out, and you’re free to roam the city for the day – just slide this wonder each time you wish to pass through the turnstile and board the train. The stations are all underground out of the weather, there are maps posted showing where the network can take you, and then you’re off.
There are some 1960s New York subway system impressions I must dispel. There is no graffiti, not on the cars, not on the walls, not nowhere. Occasionally wall posters get modified by marker wielding youngsters but I don’t think this lasts very long. I’ve spent a couple months of my life in Manhattan for work and I’ve never seen a criminal act on the subway, which I ride nonstop in the evenings as I go about the city. Oh, and you sometimes have to hunt for the entrances – usually there are large, bright "SUBWAY" signs, but sometimes they’re more discrete.
This being New York, you will of course be seeing scary brown people in your travels. As the child of a biracial couple (Norwegian father, German mother) this does not trouble me so much as it might other rural Kossacks. (You’re receiving some culture here, kids – Norwegians tell ethnic Norwegian jokes ... but only too each other ... because no one else gets it :-)
So there I was, right outside Madison Square Garden, which sits atop Penn Station, scanning all of the brown faces going by, until I found this one. His name is Khentse and he is a Tibetan Buddhist monk who lived with me for a time after I rescued him from slavery.
Now I realize I passed through Gettysburg a few days ago and slavery has been legally done in this country for a good long time, but it does still happen. Khentse got an R-1 (religion) visa and was sponsored by an icky little cult called The Church of Shambhala. When I pulled him out of their facility in Omaha, with the help of a few Omaha police officers, he’d just had all four wisdom teeth pulled and they were making him work twelve hour days gluing together their little new age trinkets using epoxy without a respirator. The police officers were quite funny – when they learned that the leader of this thing, a drug addict former truck driver named Ronald Lloyd Spencer, claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ among his many titles, there was one coordinated *SNAP* as three holsters were opened while we stood at the front door. Khentse had studied in India and he was quite impressed by all of this – "How much did you pay for three of them?" He was completely amazed that one could summon law enforcement for the small price of dialing three digits. Those of us who’ve grown up under the rule of law, at least until Bush got into office, don’t realize how precious this is. I hope president Obama will be able to depoliticize the Department of Justice and set us back on a path of which our founding fathers would approve.
So, I rescued him by driving over to this place, pressing three buttons on my phone, and waiting seven minutes for some of Omaha’s finest, but that was just the start. Next came the spare room at the house, the immigration lawyer’s bill, and the price of putting him into the ESL classes at Metro Community College. He already spoke serviceable English but his official job was working as a translator for the various Tibetan spiritual leaders and this was the best way to get him converted to a student visa and advance his career.
Yes, I realize he isn’t dressed as a monk. This is not so uncommon – when he was living with me and going to school he asked for and received permission to set aside his monk’s robes so he would fit in with the other students. Now he has a work permit and he dresses in a western fashion.
We wandered the forests of New York until we located the Chinese Consulate on the lower west side.
So Tibetan protestors had managed to fling a large rock and break a window in the building, which had got their free speech pen turned into a police surveillance pen.
They’d been moved across the street to another little free speech pen and three dozen of them were sitting there, praying and chanting. Khentse stayed behind while I took this photo – it would be a social faux pas for him to appear as a tour guide and not to remain for a period of time.
We roamed the city a good long while, checking out Central Park:
And Chinatown:
And Union Square:
If you take just a few steps off Union Square you’ll find the Tibet House – an art gallery run by Robert Thurman.
While at the Tibet House the elder Thurman was not there, but we got to have a nice talk with his son, Ganden Thurman, about our renewable energy work. I did not see the family resemblance between he and his more famous sister, Uma. He mentioned that His Holiness the Dalai Lama is now giving talks on sustainable agriculture and energy and I learned the name of the current head of HHDL’s office in New York, a monk with whom Khentse is acquainted. I knew his predecessor a bit; after their abuse of Khentse the icky little cult mentioned above pulled some dirty tricks on the Kharnang Rinpoche and a troupe of eight monks traveling with him. More rescue work ensued here – I learned of this event via a call from Sandy Aquila, the owner of the Omaha Healing Arts Center and helped get them set up with Amy Peck, the same lawyer I’d hired for Khentse.
Having been involved in these two events I now have some personal contacts in the Tibetan community who could carry a message that would reach His Holiness. We’ve got a strategic marketing team working on the whole position and message of the Stranded Wind Initiative and once this is done Khentse will help translate portions of the work into Tibetan so that it will speak in a direct, easily understood fashion to the powers that be within the Tibetan government in exile. I think there would be great benefit in having a Nobel Peace Prize winner recognizing and speaking on the benefits of the changes to the world envisioned by Homer Wang, Alan Drake, John Holbrook, and the rest of the crew at SWI.