Songs of the Baka and Other Discoveries

by Dennis James

  All our meals on the trail are served alfresco. A large decorative carpet is spread out, and we sit on it with the porters and Sherpas, shivering in the dark, hugging mugs of tea. Once again, we regret that, in our effort to pack light, we had not brought enough warm clothes. The cook brings out the food, starting with a big, delicious steaming pot of soup that warms the body and calms the mind. Plates of rice, lentils, beans, pepper bread, noodles, vegetables—and occasionally mutton, chicken, or goat—follow.

  Our dessert is a blanket of stars, circumscribed by the jagged black silhouette of the Langtang Range.

  On November 23, our fourteenth day on the trail, we are to descend from our camp at Magungap (11,440 feet) to Khukmanung (8,035 feet).

  It is raining. There is the usual up-and-down stream crossing, but mostly the trail is downhill and dangerous, on steep, rain-slicked rocks. We go at it for two or three hours. Melinda, Singa, and Gordon are two hundred yards ahead, and Barbara is fifteen to twenty yards behind me. Suddenly, I hear her cry out. I scramble back up the trail to find her sitting on the ground rocking back and forth, holding her right arm and moaning in pain. A Sherpa is holding her. Her foot and pole had slipped, and she had fallen on her elbow. Barbara is shivering and pale and about to go into shock. She tries to stand and walk but passes out for a few seconds. We put our jackets around her. A Sherpa bounds down the trail to get Melinda and Singa, while another Sherpa appears with a first aid kit and wraps the arm to immobilize it and stop the swelling.

  Barbara is in a great deal of pain, shaking her head. Her right arm looks twisted and mangled—she is sure it’s broken. I feel helpless. All I can do is hold her. Melinda and Singa come up the trail, confer, and make a decision: Barbara will be carried down to the nearby village of Khutumsang where they can call for a helicopter to take her to a hospital in Kathmandu.

  The Sherpas, porters, and local villagers quickly fashion a basket into a seat. A villager uses a foot-and-a-half-long kukri knife to cut down and strip a sapling for a backrest. They lift her into the seat and carry her on their backs, alternating carriers every hundred yards and making the transfers so gently that Barbara is only dimly aware of what is happening. Fortunately, she is thin, weighing only about 105 pounds. It takes about thirty minutes to reach the village.

  Melinda calls for a helicopter, but it’s engaged. Barbara lapses in and out of consciousness. After two hours, the chopper appears, and we fly off for a twenty-minute ride over the Kathmandu Valley to the Kathmandu Airport. In the seat of my very first helicopter ride, the bird’s-eye perspective is startling, but under the circumstances not particularly enjoyable for either of us. A van is waiting to take us to the CIWEC, a British-funded clinic specializing in orthopedic injuries.

  To everyone’s great relief, preliminary views from the x-rays show a complete dislocation but no fracture. The orthopedic surgeon, Deepak Masala, confirms the x-ray reading. He is a short, dapper Nepali with an open and positive manner, inspiring confidence. He and the entire staff speak fluent English.

  Dr. Masala proposes that he attempt a closed reduction (pulling or pushing the bone back into its joint without surgery) at the clinic under partial sedation. The other option would require going to an operating hospital for surgery under general anesthesia. Barbara and I readily agree to his first recommendation. Dr. Masala has seen many elbow fractures, but this is only the second dislocation he has treated in his fifteen years of practice. He asks whether I want to stay in the room while he pulls on Barbara’s arm to pop the elbow back into place. I quickly decline. I’m concerned that my reaction may result in his having another patient to treat.

  Barbara later tells me that Dr. Masala and his assistant pulled on the arm twice, causing much pain but failing to reduce the dislocation. They need an additional puller. The doctor comes into the waiting room to request my help again, and I decline for a second time, knowing I would be hesitant to cause more pain, probably botching the attempt in the process. Dr. Masala then turns to a nearby security guard, who is bigger and stronger than I am. He agrees. Barbara reports that they took up their positions like a tug-of-war team, pulled, and the elbow snapped back into its socket on the first try, stopping the severe pain immediately.

  We stay at the clinic until ten p.m., waiting for x-rays to confirm that the reduction is firmly set. Barbara is given a cast and sling. The bill for the entire treatment and the staff’s first-rate services, including x-rays, closed reduction, medication, and a follow-up visit, totals nine hundred dollars. We’re amazed. At least one extra zero would have been added to the cost if the accident had occurred in New York City. The only drawback, a small one, is having to wait for the traveling “cashier” to appear with his somewhat outdated credit card reader. Apparently, “have reader, will travel” is a profitable enterprise in Kathmandu. Once Barbara is discharged, we round out the day’s excitement with a very late dinner at a Nepalese restaurant.

  The next two days, we wander through some of the usual tourist stops—Badoe Square in Patan, with its beautifully maintained Palace Museum, and Boktipur, where we buy an antique mandala.

  The Nepali family Rachel is staying with invites us for dinner. Melinda tells us that it’s appropriate for guests to bring fruit, so we arrive with a bag of oranges. The family lives in a two-story house in a newer part of Kathmandu. The father is a civil servant and the mother a teacher. They love Rachel, who has established a close friendship with their own daughter, Safal, also a student.

  The dinner is vegetarian and delicious. Nepalis eat with their hands, but the family has thoughtfully put forks next to our plates. I attempt to eat, albeit clumsily, with my fingers. Barbara, however, has a problem. Using the left hand to eat is regarded as unclean, and her right arm is now in a sling. She apologizes profusely and compromises by using her left hand and the fork. I have no excuse and sit on my left hand to keep myself from using it.

  Over dinner, we talk politics. A Maoist movement, active in the countryside for many years, reached a truce with the bourgeoisie two years ago to form a coalition government, but they have not yet agreed on a constitution. Another dinner topic is the caste system, which plays a big role in Nepali society. Safal’s parents would never allow their daughter to marry a dalit, a lower-caste peasant. She would be shunned if she did.

  Sherpas, Sing Gompa

  On the last official day of the trek, everybody gets together at the Yak, a big, noisy Nepali restaurant. Sherpas, porters, tour leaders, trekkers, and the cook are all present at one long table. They drink prodigious amounts of Everest Beer. There is a special round of applause for the cook, who consistently turned out delicious, comforting, and nutritious meals under demanding conditions. He seldom goes home to his village during trekking season and is staying in the city until his next trek. For him, getting home involves a twenty-two-hour bus ride and three days’ walk.

  The food comes to the table—smoking platters of tandoori chicken, lentils, green beans, and roasted potatoes. There is raucous feasting, drinking, and laughing. Fulsome tips are distributed, and many embraces are exchanged. We express special thanks to the sixty-four-year-old Sherpa who carried Barbara most of the way down the mountain after she fell.

  It’s very sad to say good-bye to the Sherpas. I think about our different destinations. We will fly home to our comfortable apartment in Brooklyn and our life of writing, photography, travel, and indulgence in New York’s cultural offerings. The Sherpas return to their difficult, dangerous, and poorly paid trade (their livelihood dependent on the availability of willing tourists), the arbitrary preferences of tour agencies, and the formidable vagaries of Himalayan weather.

  Chitwan

  Barbara’s arm feels well enough for us to finish our tour of Nepal at the Chitwan National Park. The bus ride from Kathmandu to Chitwan takes six hours, and we’re the only tourists on board. Halfway through, the driver stops the bus and invites the passengers to relieve themselves. The women go to one side of the road and the men to the other. Since
the ground slopes down from the road, with the bus between both sides, there is some measure of privacy. No one, Barbara included, is fazed by this arrangement.

  The national park is in the southeast of Nepal in an area known as the Terai—the plains. The climate is much different from that of the Himalayas—hot and, except for the dry season, wet. The Park has almost one hundred square miles of wetland, grassland, and forest. Within its borders dwell spotted deer, sambol deer, gharielles, macaques, crocodiles, sloth bears, eagles, civet cats, Bengal tigers, rhinos, and wild elephants.

  Our hotel is located just outside the park boundaries. We take an elephant ride, which is not your ordinary circus oval track stroll. The elephant dives into the forest like a lifeboat into the sea, crunching through head-high underbrush and tearing off overhanging branches with its trunk. Curious to learn more of the lives of the elephants, we visit an elephant training center and are appalled by what we see—young tuskers are taken from their mothers at five years of age, and adult elephants are disciplined by chaining two of their legs to pillars. This treatment leads to pathological nervous behavior. Elephants should be left in the wild, matriarchs of entire herds, stomping on hunters who come for their babies or their ivory.

  We ask to take a jungle walk, hoping to see animals in their natural habitat. I assume that the guides are not going to expose tourists on foot to the dangerous and predatory animals roaming the park and that, therefore, we will stay close to the hotel. I expect to see nothing more threatening than birds, monkeys, and deer. Not so. Our naturalist guide, Komar, gives a short lecture on what to do if confronted by sloth bears, tigers, rhinos, and elephants. We take off on a trail straight into the forest. Komar and a local Thoru tribe villager lead the way, armed with bamboo walking sticks. I drop back and pick up a heavy branch that I know would be useless against most of these animals but that makes me feel better.

  During this dry season, the foliage is thinned out, and the midday sun shines through the trees. We see sambol and spotted deer and macaques, but little else. I relax. About one hour into the forest, the Thoru villager tells us to stop and remain quiet and motionless. Komar says they have spotted a mother rhino with two babies standing in a mud hole. We peer through the dry bushes and, sure enough, there they are, about fifty feet away, turned broadside to us, apparently unaware of our presence. Barbara wants a picture, but Komar vetoes that. “If the mother spots us,” he says, “She’ll charge.” He borrows Barbara’s camera, says he’ll sneak up closer to get a picture, and disappears.

  Rhinos! What did they say about charging rhinos? Run in a zigzag pattern or climb a tree. But rhinos can go twenty-five miles per hour straight through brush. In my prime and on an unobstructed track, I might have been able to sprint at about half that pace—but I’m no longer in my prime. A tree is a better option. But how is Barbara going to climb a tree with one arm in a cast and sling? Quickly, I look around for a tree that I can push her up into and maybe follow behind. While I’m so engaged, Barbara sees the mother rhino turn her head slowly toward us. Suddenly, Komar reappears and says, “She’s facing us now, and I think she’s ready to charge. Now is the time to run. She won’t go far from her babies.”

  We run. Fortunately, the rhino does not.

  The next day, we head back to Kathmandu and fly home on December 1, 2010, with stories to tell.

  Epilogue

  On April 18, 2014, an ice avalanche on Mount Everest kills sixteen Sherpas, making it the worst climbing disaster on the mountain up until that time. Grief-stricken and angry at what they rightly perceive as unfair treatment by tour agencies and the government, the Sherpas petition the Ministry of Tourism for better pay, working conditions, and insurance, as well as the construction of a memorial to the dead. The government’s response is woefully inadequate. The Sherpas refuse to work for the rest of the season in honor of their fallen comrades.

  Almost exactly one year later, on April 25, 2015, avalanches, rockslides, and pressure waves triggered by earthquakes completely level Langtang Village and several other villages in the Langtang Valley. Hundreds are dead or missing. There are few survivors. In news photos, the valley where Langtang Village once stood looks like someone scraped it clean. I think of the people we saw during our stay in Langtang and our Sherpas, who were from a nearby community that had also suffered heavy damage. Melinda Goodwater and Singaman Lama are raising funds for the rebuilding of these villages and relief for the survivors.

  On August 15, 2016, tragedy strikes again. An overloaded bus with seventy-five passengers, some clinging to the roof, veers off a narrow mountain road and plunges nearly one thousand feet, rolling over and over. Thirty-three passengers are killed, and many are severely injured. The driver is found unconscious in a tree.

  The bitter irony is that most of the passengers of the ill-fated bus were returning to their home villages to collect government cash certificates as compensation for the loss of family members and damages suffered in the earthquakes and avalanches of 2015.

  Cameroon:

  SONGS OF THE BAKA

  We stay close together as we follow the local guide through the Dja Forest Reserve deep in the eastern Cameroon rain forest. Most of the time I cannot make out a trail. The red clay forest floor is covered with leaves and an undergrowth of vines that trip us and stickers that catch at our clothes. Visibility is about twenty feet. The guide often stops to clear the trail with his machete. While we wait, tiny black ants crawl up our legs and respond to our idle scratches by biting and holding on. We continue, pulling the ants off and cursing.

  Barbara is behind me, followed by our Cameroon guide, Jonas “Jones” Nijfuouta; a Forest Ranger (mandatory within the Reserve); and two Bantu porters carrying twenty-five-pound bags of rice and salt and our tents. We are seeking the encampment of a band of Baka Pygmy.

  We spent the previous night at Mama Rose’s hostel in the Bantu village of Somalomo on the edge of the Reserve. In the morning, the porters paddled us upstream on the Dja River in a leaky pirogue, fighting the twisting currents that ran deep under the Dja’s deceptively calm black surface. Jones is a big and amiable man. It is the first and only time we have seen him afraid. He confesses that he cannot swim. Not until the porters beach the boat does he relax.

  The trek into the rain forest is the culmination of a twenty-one-day visit to Cameroon. Our goal is to meet, observe, and interact with people whose way of life is largely, if not completely, unaffected by contemporary Western culture and technology. We chose Cameroon because it has a wide variety of such traditional cultures.

  Just as I become resigned to a long, indefinite slog, we hear voices and smell wood smoke. The guide gives a brief shout, eliciting laughter. After a few more turns in the trail, we stop, stunned to behold a scene that our distant forbears might have encountered.

  Before us is a gently sloping half-acre of land cleared of underbrush. Several ironwood trees stand in the clearing like Roman columns, their arches, one hundred feet high, forming the forest canopy. Fifteen huts made of sprung sapling frames thatched with dried leaves are scattered about the clearing. Clouds of fragrant smoke rise from smoldering logs in front of each hut, the smoke hanging above the camp like burnt incense in a temple. At the base of the slope, just inside the entrance to the camp, is a hard-packed area, about twenty feet square, bordered by crude tree-branch benches.

  It takes a while before we notice two men in grass skirts sprawled on one of the benches. They return our greeting with a nod and a smile but remain seated and are otherwise impassive. Jones encourages us to walk around the compound. As we do, other Baka, mostly women and small children, emerge from their huts. When not attending to the infants, the women are busy at various tasks: chopping manioc, a starchy derivative of the cassava root, making grass skirts, and sorting ground nuts. The children play in the dirt, staring at us and staying close to the women. A gray-haired man squats in front of a smoking fire, curing green tobacco leaves.

  “Where are all the other men?” w
e ask. The women tell us that most are out hunting and trapping and will return by evening. A few, who had hunted the day before, rest in the camp. Some women are gathering wild food.

  Baka boy at home

  Roasting tobacco

  Our conversations are slow and halting. The local guide translates their answers to Jones in French, who then converts the responses to English. The process reverses when we ask a question. But the system appears to work because everyone is smiling patiently.

  The Baka are not unlike the Pygmies I recall pictured in National Geographic magazines. The adults stand about four and a half feet tall. However, the Pygmies in those magazines invariably looked sullen, bony-limbed, and poorly nourished, with protruding bellies, some wearing cast-off western clothing. The Baka in this encampment are solidly built and good-humored. Their legs are short and muscular, their arms long and slender. The men are barrel-chested. The women are full-bodied and proud of it. No one is obese. Baka noses are flat, their skin French Roast brown. They are tough and strong, able to carry loads of dressed game, fish, or baskets of wild root vegetables and fruit over miles of rough trails.

  We look inside their huts. They sleep on pads made of sticks and leaves. Jones says that, if necessary, they can break down and transport an entire encampment in minutes.

  The dress code here is grass skirt. The smallest children go naked or wear tiny green leaf skirts held up by woven twine. The one exception is an infant in a striped shirt who is wrapped in a red blanket. The women pass babies around, occasionally handing them off to be hugged and cuddled by the men.

  There are several school-age children in the camp. According to Jones, Baka children don’t go to school and cannot read. However, by adolescence they know every footpath and game trail in their region of the forest. They can climb almost any tree. They know what berries to pick, what plants are edible, what mushrooms are not, what herbs to cure which ailments. They know how to hunt, fish, trap, and live in the wild. And they know how to dance, drum, and sing.