Among Flowers

by Jamaica Kincaid

  We headed out of Uwa at half past seven, so very glad to be leaving. No one spoke to us, not even to say the usual Nemaste! What a great hurry we were in. And we started up again, going up away from the Arun. It was good to be up but by going up high so early in the day, it meant something bad for Bleddyn. He had wanted to take a short hike up the Barun River and collect some seeds. How disappointed he was to see it, a thin streak of milky white coming down the mountain and ending in the Arun, which was way below us. He cursed the Maoists. We had been walking for six days now and there had been nothing substantial to collect. Nothing for me anyway. I would have done this, even if I had not been interested in the garden. Just to see the earth crumpling itself upward, just to experience the physical world as an unending series of verticals going up and then going down—with everything horizontal, or even diagonal, being only a way of making this essentially vertical world a little simpler—made me quiet. I saw the people and I took them in, but I made no notes on them, no description of their physical being since I could see that they could not do the same to me. I can and will say that I saw people who looked as if they came from the south (that would be India) and people who looked as if they came from the north (that would be Tibet). I saw some people who were Hindus (they were the same people who looked as if they came from the south), and I saw some people who were Buddhists (they were the same people who looked as if they came from the north).

  As usual, we were walking along a ledge and a false step in the wrong direction could land any one of the four of us a few hundred feet down, either in the crown of trees or on sheer rock, for sometimes below us was thick forest, or sheer cliffs at other times. We stopped for lunch after one o’clock. The Arun was in full view and so was the Barun running into it. Even from so far above we could hear the roar of their waters. We stopped for lunch and it was memorable to me because that was the last time we had bread. For dessert, we had toast with marmalade and tea. It was the best toast and marmalade I had ever had, and when eating it I thought, This is all I’ll eat for the rest of the time I am here. But when I requested it that night for dinner, I was told that the last of the bread had been eaten at lunch. It dawned on me then that requests were out, and I stopped asking for anything with the expectation that I would receive what I asked for. On again we marched after lunch, feeling a lot better because we could see our village in the distance and also because the collecting was becoming exciting, at least for any gardener who lives in at least two zones warmer than the one in which I make my garden. We were at an altitude of a little under six thousand feet and among the things Dan and Bleddyn collected were some Hydrangea aspera subsp. strigosa, Boehmeria rugulosa, Costus sp., Acer (maple), Paris polyphylla, Woodwardia sp., Anemone vitifolia, Rubus lineatus.

  It was about three o’clock when we arrived in the village, feeling pleased with ourselves for having avoided the Maoists, but something made Sunam change our camping spot. We had met a man who had just lost the tips of three of his fingers on the left hand. Someone must have told him we were coming for he was waiting for us with his hand outstretched, and he was crying. Dan, who always carries a little first-aid kit in his backpack, cleaned the wound and then put some Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid on the man’s fingers. We had a little debate over whether to give him any of our Tylenol to relieve him of pain right away since we could not part with enough that might give him some comfort for many days. This ended with Sunam telling us that the village would not be where we would spend the night. We would have to march on a little further up above the village. Whatever he learned about our presence in the village, he never told us. We just were told that we would be camping a little higher up. We then took a road out of the village, going around it, not through it, and seeing some beautiful houses made of clay, painted white with some kind of stencil decoration around the windows and doors. I had seen something similar two nights ago when we stayed in the village of Hedangna, but there the stencil was done in the color brown while here it was done in blue. Bleddyn came across a pink Convolvulus, whose fragrance we could smell long before we saw it. But the Convolvulus had no seeds and, after the botonists lamented that fact, we just walked on and hoped to find it somewhere else with seed. We saw it twice again but always it was in flower, never having any seed.

  Our way now, having left the village, was a steep walk up a landscape that had not so long ago collapsed. We had to climb up and then cross over a recently ravaged hillside (in any other place, it would be a mountainside), that had perhaps not too long ago been the result of a landslide. The evidence of landslides was everywhere, as if proving what goes up must come down is necessary. We, and by this I mean Sue, Bleddyn, Dan, and me, expressed irritation at this with varying intensity (Dan and Bleddyn minor, Sue almost minor, me loudly) and then marched on. Two men, dragging long thick trunks of bamboo attached to porters’ straps wrapped around their foreheads, passed us as they were going the other way. They seemed to take our presence for granted, as if they knew about us before they saw us, or as if our presence was typical, or as if we did not matter at all. We marched on; by this juncture we were marching—the leisureliness of walking was not possible once we came in contact with the Maoists. When we got to the top, as usual, it was not at the place of destination. What had seemed to us as the top of the mountain was only the place where the avalanche began. The mountain continued up and it was as if the face of the mountain had decided to fall down starting in its middle. We had to go up some more because, for one thing, Cook, who was always ahead of us—he could walk so fast—could not find any water coming out of the mountain. And also we needed to find some level ground on which to cast our tents, forming our little community of the needy, dependent, plant collectors and the Nepalese people, whose support we could not do without. We kept going up, each turn up above seeming to hold the desirable flatness and water too, for how could that not be so when everywhere we looked we could see a milky white and stiffly vertical flowing line of a waterfall. But Cook went flying up and then went flying down to Sunam, and there were consultations. On our way up, past the place where the avalanche began, we met a herdsman, though before that we had met his cows. At first we made way for the cows because we thought we were in the cows’ home and perhaps we should be respectful of them. But the cows remained so cowlike, stubborn and potentially dangerous, if you only considered their horns, and in this case they seemed to really consider their horns. The herdsman managed them beautifully, guiding them down and away from us, taking them into the steep bush-covered slopes away from the path they were used to traveling, just to keep us calm. I would not have thought about this incident of the herdsman and his cows again but I saw him the night after this and three nights after this again far away, for me, from all these difficulties.

  Porters’ loads can exceed one hundred pounds.

  Between the cows and their herdsman and Cook not finding water to cook us supper, we grew irritable. From our place way up above the village, and even from that way up above the place where we had eaten our lunch, we were closed in. The sun was setting somewhere; we could see the light growing dimmer, literally like someone turning the wick of a lamp lower. We, and by that I mean me in particular and especially, began to whimper and even complain. For one thing, from our vantage point, so high above, we could see the porters carrying our baggage and the tents and all our other supplies and necessities, resting at the place where we had eaten our lunch. So if Cook should find a place in which to cast camp, and casting camp always depended on him, we—and we were so important we felt then—could not enjoy camp, for the things that made sitting in camp comfortable were half a day’s walk away. What had the porters been doing all day? someone said—meaning, What had they been doing when we were exploring the landscape, looking for things that would grow in our garden, things that would give us pleasure, not only in their growing, but also with the satisfaction with which we could see them growing and remember seeing them alive in their place of origin, a mountainside, a small
village, a not easily accessible place in the large (still) world? We were then having many emotions, feelings about everything: The Maoists were right, I felt in particular: life itself was perfectly fair, people had created many injustices; it was the created injustices that led to me being here, dependent on Sherpas, for without this original injustice, I would not be in Nepal and the Sherpas would be doing something not related to me. And then again, the Maoists were wrong, the porters should be fired; they were not being good porters. They should bend to our demands, among which was to make us comfortable when we wanted to be comfortable. We were very used to being comfortable, and in our native societies (Britain, for Bleddyn and Sue; America, for Dan and me) when we were not comfortable, we did our best to rid ourselves of the people who were not making us comfortable. We wished Sunam would fire the porters. But he couldn’t even if he wanted to. There were no other porters around.

  We were hungry and tired. It really was getting dark. The sun was going away, not setting. We couldn’t see it do that, we could only see the light of day growing dimmer. Still, we could see the porters. They were far away. Way below us. The most forward of them were not even near the place where we had come across the fragrant Convolvulus. And there was no real place to camp. No doubt I will always remember this evening, for it was the evening where we could not decide where we would stay, among other things. At just about the time some of the porters were traversing the unpleasant landslide, Sunam decided that we would cast our camp at a spot that was the only level site in the area. Cook had found a stream nearby, in any case, and that was always the deciding factor. We were three-quarters of the way up a steep rising of rock covered with some Taxus and Sorbus and, instantly recognizable to me, barberry and some kind of raspberry (Rubus). We made our way through them and found we were in a field that had growing in it mostly wormwood, some kind of Artemisia. What a relief. And then someone pointed out a leech and then another and then another, and we soon realized that we would camp, we would spend the night in a field full of leeches.

  Immediately as we entered this area we were attacked by them. At first it was just one or two seen on the ground, then leaping onto our legs. Then we realized they were everywhere, like mosquitoes or flies or any insect that was a bother, but most insects that were a bother were familiar to us. The leech was not something with which we were familiar. And why was it so frightening, so strange? It was just a simple invertebrate, after all. But a leech is a different kind of invertebrate. To see it whirl itself around as it gathers momentum to fling itself dervishlike onto its victim is terrifying; to see the way it burrows into clothing as it tries to get next to a person’s warm skin so it can first make a gash that cannot be felt, for it administers an anesthetic as it bites, is terrifying; to see a thin, steady stream of blood running down your arm or your companion’s arm is terrifying, for the leech also administers in its bite an anticoagulant. Was it because it was silent, making no noise of any kind that made it so reprehensible, so shudder-making? A leech, just the mere words would make us jumpy, cross. When Dan had first told me of this journey, he had mentioned leeches as one of the disturbing things to be encountered. He had also mentioned altitude sickness and deprivations of everyday comforts such as showers, bathrooms, people you loved, but I remembered leeches more than I remembered Maoists, even when I got to Kathmandu and saw the evidence of a civil war, soldiers with submachine guns everywhere. I remember Dan saying that there will be leeches but we will have so much fun. That night above the Arun River, on the opposite side of the Barun River, looking into the Barun Valley, I was not concerned with anything but the leeches. And so when we walked into our campsite and I saw these little one-inch bugs whirling around and then leaping into the air and landing on us, my spine literally stiffened and curled. I could feel it do this, stiffen and then curl. I screamed loudly and silently at the same time. And then I did what everybody else was doing, Sherpa, porter, and fellow botanist, I forged ahead, grimaced, laughed, searched for the parasites, found them, and picked them off and killed them with great effort and satisfaction. Even so, the disdain and unhappiness for spending the night in a field of leeches never went away.

  The stoves were lit and Cook began to make us food. There was no room for our dining tent so the table and chairs were set out on a tarpaulin. We had tea and biscuits, nothing could stop this—and how grateful we were for this. Night fell suddenly, as if someone, somewhere, decided to turn out the light because it suited them right then. After being hot all day, suddenly we were cold and wanted very much to put on our warm clothes. But the clothes were way down below. Sunam had gone back down to hurry up the porters who were carrying our suitcases. The laxness of the porters made Dan and Bleddyn annoyed not only because they couldn’t change into dry clothes but also because they wanted to review their collections of the day, try to do some cleaning of seeds, and make some entrances into the collection diaries. We were sitting on our chairs in the open air and looking out on the Barun Valley at night in the Himalaya. It was beautiful. But the leeches kept coming at us. Finally we set up a sort of Leech Patrol; each person, the four travelers, looking for leeches in four different directions.

  Our luggage still had not arrived and there was much discussion regarding what the porters had been up to all day. And there was no chang, a fermented beverage made from millet, or any other kind of alcoholic beverage as far as we could tell, in the Maoist area. We—I, really—felt small, as if I were a toy, inside the bottom of a small bowl looking up at the rim and wondering what was beyond. The person who lived in a small village in Vermont was not lost to me, the person who existed before that was not lost to me. I was sitting six thousand feet or so up on a clearing we had made on the side of a foothill in the Himalaya. Only in the Himalaya would such a height be called a foothill. Everywhere else this height is a mountain. But from where we sat, we were at the bottom—for we could see other risings high above us, from every direction a higher horizon. The moon came up, full and bright. And it looked like another moon, a moon I was not familiar with. Its light was so pure somehow, as if it didn’t shine everywhere in the world; it seemed a moon that shone only here, above us. It sailed across the way, the skyway, that is, majestically, seemingly willful, on its own, not concerned with having a place in the rest of any natural scheme. It was a clear night. We sat on the tarpaulin, on the chairs around the table in a circle, huddled toward the middle to see more clearly and readily the leeches. We were looking up at the sky, clear and full of stars, the light from the moon outlining the tops of the higher hills, and they were hills when placed in context of the true risings beyond which we could not see.

  It must have been near nine o’clock when we had our dinner. I should have been hungry but I wasn’t. I felt sick, my stomach hurt, I wanted to throw up. I was served but could not eat. Dan said that perhaps it was the altitude. We were up at about six thousand feet. Dan flossed and brushed his teeth. I did not. I don’t know what Sue and Bleddyn did. Dan and I went into our tent. He reminded me to check my shoes and socks for leeches, to check myself for leeches, to check the space around my sleeping bag for leeches. All was clear and then we settled in to have our nightly review of the day’s events, which mostly resulted in huge cackling and laughter. We had finished our cackling and laughter and were about to go to sleep when there occurred a huge storm of fierce thunder and big rain—the kind of thunder and rain that made me think it was pretending to be so fierce and then I thought it was the end of the world, we would never leave this place, the storm would so change the world that we would be forced to stay in the leech field in our tents forever And it reminded me that this was my first question when confronted with the landscape of the Himalaya: Is this real? It is real enough. We heard Bleddyn calling out to us, Dan and me, that we should check our tent window. Dan and I turned on our flashlights and saw an army of leeches trying to penetrate the window, a square made of mesh netting which served as ventilation on the side of our tent. It was horrifying, not only bec
ause we were so far away from everything that was familiar to us. All day as we had marched along, taking a new route to escape the Maoists and their demands, which we felt might include our very lives; we felt endangered, assaulted, scared. In reality it was just about a dozen leeches, but how to explain to a leech that we did not like President Powell? How to tell a Maoist that Powell wasn’t even the president? At some point I stopped making a distinction between the Maoists and the leeches, at some point they became indistinguishable to me, but this was only to me. Fortunately I had acquired some DEET, against Dan’s advice, that justifiably denounced insecticide, and I always carried it with me. I reached into my day pack, which was at the foot of my sleeping bag, and sprayed it furiously on the leeches trying to get into our tent and they just fell away and I hoped they were dead. I could not sleep. I wanted desperately to pee but when I thought of the leeches leaping up and then burrowing themselves in my pubic hair, I decided to hold it in. But then I couldn’t fall asleep and so I went out of our tent, just outside the entrance, and took a long piss. This was a violation of some kind: you cannot take a long piss just outside your tent; you are not to make your traveling companions aware of the actual workings of your body. Not to allow anyone an awareness of the workings of your body is easy to do in our normal lives, where we have access to our own bathrooms, thirty-minute showers of water at a temperature that pleases us, toilets that allow their contents to disappear so completely that to ask where to could be made to seem a case of mental illness. After I had my pee, I took another sleeping pill and went to sleep and did not dream about Maoists, leeches, or anything else. And then I was awakened by a terrifying sound of land falling down from a great height, an avalanche. It sounded quite close by. The morning didn’t come soon enough. We got dressed rapidly (I did not brush my teeth), packed up, ate, checked ourselves for leeches, and left. We never wanted to see that place again.