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HARD RIVER
T
he reality didn’t fit the image. It came up short. Like seeing a radio announcer in person. Pasang Sherpa. The name alone was enough to create visions of billowing ice crystals drifting along a granite ridge. The word Sherpa means “easterner” and yet this Sherpa was here in the west. The West of Nepal being anything to the left of Kathmandu. The East is the region of Katchenjunga, the Solu-Kumbu and all the meaningful place names that run afoul of nationalities. Places like Sikim, Bhutan, and a place called Dorjeling, which the British mispronounced so badly that whole generations of Nepalese mispronounce their own city. Darjeeling. Tea in the mist. Greening in the terraces of the foothills. In Tibetan, they call it Chiyaa, the brown water of life. Brown and translucent like the skin of Pasang Sherpa.
Pasang is asleep now and the Western Man riding next to him in the chartered bus wonders about Pasang’s dreams. He wonders if Pasang dreams in Hindi or in Pali or in Sanskrit and if his dreams have the colors of wisdom or are they just the ordinary dreams of yet another poor Asian, grinding his way along. Like all immigrants, moving to where the money is. This time to guide an Irish-American photographer into the Annapurnas far enough to get him in shape so he can document an expedition into the Eastern Himalayas. I think Pasang is smaller than he should be. If the ethnic grouping called Sherpa is known as the “tigers of the snows,” then they, and especially Pasang, should be bigger, or at least, look stronger. Bigger muscles or something. Five foot six and smiling does not fit the image. The bus they are riding is soft and private by Nepali standards and Pasang’s sleep is quiet and gentle. I notice the faint hint of a smile and have difficulty tracing the origins of this smile, as we are both being battered by this bus ride. Not just shaken, but battered. The road is pockmarked and washed out. It was narrow but smooth until the monsoon. The Monsoon this year came to the north of Thailand with unusual vigor,
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arrived in Nepal a little late, but with more than normal ferocity and left the Indian province of Rajasthan tasting dust and famine, again, before October had really begun. The road to Pokhora courses along the Trisuli. A river big this time of year whose color deceives you into thinking it is not the sewer that you know it to be. Grass huts line the low altitude portions. Bananas and citrus turning to bricks and timber when the road sneaks up on 5,000 feet. I, too, am sneaking up on the high land. Why is it that I think I will feel better up there? Pasang Sherpa jostles next to me. Not thinking. The road is never wide enough. The monsoon has made it less than one bus wide and it swerves on and off the broken path. Pasang sleeps. Pokhara, a big town at the edge of a lake, lurching its way into urbanity. It is raining and the lake is serene. A soft resonant post monsoon rain but I have never seen it rain so consistently. Hour after hour the rhythm is the same. Each corrugation of the sheet metal hotel roof has the same stream in it. The pattern and the sound seem endless. It is hard to see one drop from another. I remember in the Austrian Alps I heard them call this ‘string rain’ because it came down in lines, not drops. Pasang has vanished. I learn later that vanishing and desertion are different. I think Pasang has deserted. Pasang actually sits all day in the hotel lobby listening to the rain and thinks if it should slow or stop the photographer would want him. Pasang must wait and listen. The photographer is upstairs. He does not know that Pasang is waiting and listening. The next morning too, is wet, but dry enough. Beginning today, the roads will not have wheels on them. Hot and steaming, I follow Pasang through the electric green oven of the rice paddies away from Pokhara. The rectangular zigzag paths along the paddies’ edges are sticky little paths through iridescent green earth hair that strains toward the time of streaked brown that announces the harvest. Wet beyond belief but dry enough so that the leeches are temporarily distracted and do not stick to my legs. I begin to think that if you are paranoid enough everything will be OK. Pasang knows differently, says nothing and walks on ahead to Sukiet, a town exactly one long day’s walk from Pokhara. I do not know this yet, but each day you walk up hill in Nepal, you walk back a cen-
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tury in time. Ten days later, I begin to think if you walk up hill long enough you could discover the origin of time. Someone told me that eighty-five percent of Nepalese have never seen an automobile. Photographs, maybe. The real thing, no. To understand this abstract statistic, I reasoned that there were either very few roads or that there were simply a lot of people living in places where roads were extremely difficult to construct. Right on both counts. But it somehow never occurred to me that roads are something that have to be paid for and if the per capita income hovers around one hundred-sixty dollars a year, then the concept and necessity of a road begins to take on another meaning. The valley and the walk are long and flat. The village of Suikhet is at the end of a flood plain valley. From here everything appears to be uphill. I watch the late afternoon light turn the clouds orange. They skate along the ridge tops and, as they depart, I hope it will be the last I see of the monsoon season. Two kerosene generators drone in the dust, then stop. After that, there is no more machine noise. None. Of any kind. Lots of animals and people, but no more machines. The hotel is almost not a building. Its two stories are a testament to innovation, tradition and trust. Stacked stones, corrugated metal, peeled trees and mud. The architecture of necessity. The dining room is a table. One arm long and a foot wide. The table and adjacent bench are on a porch big enough for three people as long as the three people are willing to touch. The menu for the hotel is literally that, a singular menu. A hand-bound paper pamphlet with eight or ten pages of choices, carefully handwritten. I glance inside and see that the kitchen for preparing this vast selection of food is a space three feet by four feet. I decide to keep my order simple. Steaming rice and lentils arrive quickly and I eat while watching the children play with the scrawny red chickens in the mud and stones of the street. A string of donkeys is staked out across the street. A distance of about 10 feet from the dinner table. One of the donkeys actually smiles at me. A good omen. I smile back. Pasang is near but not in evidence, so I stumble into the dark interior of the hotel and recognize the smooth floor as red mud. Yet, it is clean. Very clean. Narrow stairs lead to a door with leather hinges. The room contains
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the delicate piercing light of a single candle. I realize that Pasang has lit it for me and I smile. It is the first time in a long while that I have been aware of a genuine act of kindness. No one ever lit a candle for me before. The trail from Suikhet smells. It is little more than an hour through the fine rain and mist to NagDAADa, but the trail stinks. Difficult to place. Not foul, but acrid and dangerous. A smell that you can taste like brass being polished or maybe closer, damp stone dust, settling slowly after an explosive blast. It probably comes from feldspar, mixed with leeches and donkey dung. Ordinary things here and yet noticed as a smell demanding caution and attention. The rules are different on this trail. Along the way Lumle and Chandrakot, names of villages that slide and stumble off the tongue like my boots along the trail. Mud and wet and steepness. This trail, the main road between these villages, is not a trail at all. Only a drainage way where mud and slime covered boulders make a rock pile that to these people is a freeway. It begins to sink in. Flat is something for the terraces of agriculture. Steep is something for the trails. Sherpas are guides and more. Porters are the people for baggage. A human car trunk, and when in groups, they become a freight train on foot. With no tracks to guide them, only poverty. Our first one faded in the heat of the rice fields. Youth and ignorance cannot always overcome exhaustion and uncertainty. The new porter wears the traditional hat of the Hindu Newari. Siem Baradur, skinny, sixteen and energetic. He has the typical Nepali equipment for traveling into the world’s highest mountains. Shorts, a greasy polyester shirt of indeterminable color and size, a small purse on a cord around his neck containing a cotton blanket about the size of a small tablecloth, his geometrically patterned and brightly colored Newari cap, and on his feet, without socks, are Converse All-Stars. Baseball shoes with rubber cleats. Pasang is very happy with this new porter. Says he is a “good boy, strong boy.” I am too tired and worried about my own skill and condition to question Pasang’s selection of this porter, but I am astonished and intimidated when Siem ties his forehead tumpline to a forty-kilo bag of gear and simply walks away. Without strain, like an Englishman on a bloody morning stroll, effortlessly. Only this time Siem is carrying the bag up a trail so steep that I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler in this country to build ladders rather than stairs.
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Crossing the Modi Khola, a group of French trekkers, oblivious to Nepali customs and traditions of modesty, bathe in the river. A young woman with more topography than the rounded stones of the river catches the corner of Pasang’s eye. He leads slowly that afternoon and I wonder what he thinks of that seductive Western woman, nude at the edge of his river. If there is lust or irritation, it never leaks through his smile. He saw the woman. He didn’t avoid looking at her and yet she seems to have no more importance to him than where he places his foot for the next step. Very important in the moment. Perhaps the only important thing, but temporary and fleeting. Not something pulled with you from one moment into the next. Letting go. He is twenty-three. His mother and father died when he was sixteen. He has never been to school. I ask what he did before he started to work for the expedition company. He says that he “carry things, mostly, for other people.” And then smiles. His smile is infectious. No sadness, only open humility. Slowly, I begin to learn from this smile. Above GhoDapani is the village of Deorali. A cross-road of sorts. A pass, and a point of decision. From the last town to Deorali, there are a lot of steps. Around three thousand seven-hundred and sixty-seven. A mantra of stone, where counting keeps the rhythm and rhythm is the only thing that keeps you going. My mind begins to reel. Not reeling in, like it has caught something, but reeling out. Looser than it has been in years. I try to imagine how I will describe this portion to people in the West. That is assuming either I find a postcard and a post office or that I actually return. Having questioned both options on this third day away from the asphalt umbilical cord that links my civilization together, I am wondering how I will respond when people ask me what it was like. I know that they probably will not ask, or if they do, they do not really want a response and if they get one, they will probably not understand it. Yet my brain, still running in a western mode, is compelled to formulate an answer to the unasked question. It might be a disease that I have, providing answers for everything. Thinking that wisdom is expressed by response rather than content. “What was it like training in the low elevations of Nepal?” I think, “It is like being in a bug filled sauna and climbing a ladder at the same time. Where the ladder has every third
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rung missing and every other second rung is covered with shit and your hand slips off each time you try to grasp.” They say, “If it was so terrible, why did you go?” I say, “For the silence.” “That’s interesting,” they say, “give me a call, we’ll have lunch.” Nothing ever bridged the gap between the one that went and the one that stayed behind. The fourth day lurks somewhere between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries. Pasang wakes me in the stinking dark. “Time to go, sir.” Blackened broken trail, stumbling, wishing the sun would hurry. Sneaking upon 10,000 feet. Crest the ridge and a pink white softness touches a mountain. Far away. I always thought I understood. A few things anyway. How big things are, for example. How far they are away. Staring now across the Kali Gandaki gorge to the mountain beyond I am lost. Like the Spanish explorers that came upon the edge of the Grand Canyon, I have no way to comprehend the deepest river chasm that humans have ever seen. The mountain beyond is as though it were painted in the sky. An apparition of granite and ice, Dhaulagiri by name, where, in 1969, seven members of an American expedition were killed in an ice avalanche. Chautaara is the village at the base of the mountain where the crumbling end of a glacier makes an icefall. Cracks in the mountain ice, whose movements shriek the broken endings of so many expeditions. A sound I would come to know intimately in the Eastern Himalaya. The icefall and village are so far away I have no sense of what I see. Pasang stands near, with his gaze concentrated on the South face of the mountain, turns to me, and in a voice schooled by climbing expeditions, says, “The South face is over 14,000 feet. Nearly three miles of vertical stone and ice. There are three climbing teams on the face now.” Pasang’s guidebook English ends, inevitably, with a smile. In the silence that follows we are humbled by the presence of the mountain and the pink white morning light. As we turn to walk away, a small wisp of cloud swirls from the summit, much later, I learn the cloud was there because the mountain is so tall it pokes a hole in the jet stream and the cloud is like a vapor trail from the puncture. The mountain is a mass of such density and presence it seems to have been there before time. In the same moment, the same singularity of vision, it is tall enough to penetrate the edge of the sky and enter the blackness of the universe. Leaving behind the small cloud, pointing a delicate gesture in visual memory, pointing the way beyond. As I walk down the trail
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I am not thinking of the jet stream. I am thinking of the cloud as an omen of bad weather that we will meet at higher elevation. Pasang has never heard of the jet stream. He smiles and walks on. The broken granite and feldspar, glinting and sparkling, flowing under his feet. Like a hard river.
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