His sojourn to Moses Lake with Henry had turned him into a late convert to the outdoor life, and left him with a considerable stock of state-of-the-art gear that he was strangely eager to use. The visit to Bhutan had also been a trigger. This had been preceded by a lengthy series of flights across the Pacific and a brief stay on an aircraft carrier: cramped, crowded, artificial environments not unlike where he would be spending the remainder of his days. Then, just for a blessed few hours, he had climbed out of that chopper into the high, cold, piney air of Bhutan, and gone for a ramble in the king’s Land Rover, and hiked up a misty mountain that had struck him as being straight from a 1970s album cover. And he had done some introspection about the fact that he couldn’t even take such a lovely place at face value but only liken it to such pop culture references. A few hours later he had been back on the aircraft carrier with Dorji and Jigme and about a hundred other Arkers who had been collected in a similar manner from Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal, various provinces of India, Sri Lanka, and scattered island groups. He had been struck by the contrast between how centered, how natural, how autochthonous the Bhutanese youths had looked when he had first seen them on the side of the cliff in their home country, and how lost they appeared in the painted steel companionway of an aircraft carrier, mixed up with other South Asians in equally colorful garb, all equally alienated from their native soil, all looking for a place to stow their priceless cultural artifacts.