Little was famous regarding Baird as I grew up—and very little was aforementioned. My mother did keep a photograph of him among family portraits on my parents’ sleeping room wall. I’d steal into the space to check that image of my handsome, shaggy-haired gramps movement on a mountain in what I alleged to be a really remote corner of the planet. i used to be hypnotized by the riddles the portrait control. wherever was it taken? below what circumstances? Was my gramps a pugnacious explorer—or a charlatan? Was it my imagination, or did he appear as if a person therefore condemned by itchy feet that he felt boxed in by standard life?
My mother wasn’t however 5 once she waved auf wiedersehen to him on a Hudson pier as he boarded AN liner certain for Asia in 1930. He secure to return back made and famed. He failed to come back,My mother knew what became of him, not where, when, or even if, he’d died. however she’d remark, as I came older and initiated travels to ever additional distant lands, that I’d so inheritable her father’s genes. whether or not Baird did lay eyes on a lost tribe remains a matter, however my very own journeys eventually light-emitting diode ME to a equally isolated endemic cluster deep within the Amazon. the way to absolutely comprehend these odd parallels between my life which of a person I actually have seen solely in recent photographs: our shared love of the open road, our reluctance to quiet down, our several flirtations with “lost tribes”? What was it regarding range and also the Tibetan upland that captivated him and light-emitting diode him to this point from home and family? To what degree has he formed my very own striving? Hoping to search out answers, any answers, I’ve return to the current distant corner of southwest China.
I HAND THE recent pic back to Niue. Not my gramps. Still, this hamlet, with its Buddhist shrine, has the magical quality I imagine he was when. maybe the image of Baird in my parents’ sleeping room was taken wherever I stand immediately, trying down on terraced fields of wheat and, beyond, the snow capped Chengdu Mountains, that recede like waves into time. The scene may have impressed a passage I recall, in Lost Horizon: “Far away, at the terribly limit of distance, lay vary upon vary of snow-peaks, festooned with glaciers, and floating, in look, upon large levels of cloud.”
Sources:http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/yunnan-china-traveler/
