Back in my New Mexico home, many friends — fair-haired friends especially — had told me stories about China.
They talked of train trips in the 80s, during which they met people who had never seen a white person, and those people spent much of the trip trying to hold their hands and stroke their hair.
I figured that I didn’t look Chinese (obviously), but I also wasn’t blonde. Apparently, however, a beard counted. My personal bubble had never been squeezed as much as it was in 2010, traveling along the Tibetan border of Sichuan.
I couldn’t walk far through any market before someone would grab and tug my beard and lift my sleeves to see my tattoos. I wasn’t too bothered, because, often next, I would be offered a pint of barley whiskey, sweet, like it comes in China. I got hearty approval from the tall, bearded Tibetans with their cowboy hats and hand-painted red bikes decorated with good-luck charms.
So, when I spent a day traveling to the Yunnan Province, I wasn’t surprised when the English-speaking driver took it to the next level. He grabbed my beard, called me “Yakman” before I even got into the car, and made sure I got the shotgun seat.
He was an irreverent prankster from the beginning. He started by teaching me the Tibetan words for “I love you! Let’s make love tonight!” and encouraged me to yell it at every girl the bus passed.
I abstained.
So he went back to the original jokes. When we passed the many yaks in the Himalayan foothills, he shouted: “Look, your mother! Look, your sister!” No one I had seen for weeks had a beard close to as long as mine. I could have been offended, but I couldn’t stop laughing.
I was just young and enjoyed the casual camaraderie. We stopped for a smoke break at 5,000 meters, and I smoked just in a t-shirt. They were very impressed by that, the Tibetans commenting that I had a good body. The driver proudly said to the onlookers, “Yes, he is an American yak!”
Now that was a fun story, but this wasn’t the first time I had run into yaks. The first time was far more action-oriented, back at home in rural Mexico at around 3,000 meters This started when a neighboring rancher purchased a number of feral, illegally transported yaks and brought them into the area. Something about them needing additional paperwork and fees to cross state lines. If there’s anything true about New Mexicans, it’s that they hate both paperwork and fees if a little back-road driving will do the trick.
The yaks, free thinkers as always, promptly escaped.
My friends and I were called upon to corner them in pouring snow, out in the woods. We passed around sticks and whips, and someone handed me a slingshot. “Your job is to hit the bull in the nose if it charges anyone around you.”
When a bull charges, you shoot — and dive. I hit it twice — and dove three times. Covered with mud, I had to quickly get back on my feet, realizing how dangerous those horns and those hooves were.
The bull broke our circle a half-dozen times. We started to get frustrated. A number of us grew up around goats, cattle, and horses, but nothing like these highland anarchists.
We didn’t trap the bull yak until a random rancher drove by and coaxed it with some bovine tricks we never learned. I still can’t remember how he used his voice, but within 30 seconds, he had the bull in the trailer.
Turned out, we all survived. The yaks were brought farther out into the mountains. They were illegal, after all.
These two stories have led to a lifetime of yaks as emails, domain names, and usernames. Somehow, I identified with them right away, and they’ve been my “spirit animal” for nearly 20 years. Something about their solidity and stubbornness, a familiar sense of anarchy towards authority … but still ready to work damn hard when they need to. Not to mention the solid beards. That always spoke to me, as if I had found an animal that thinks like I do.
And I dare you to find me another person you know who dared to shoot a bull yak in the buttocks.
