Voyager

by Russell Banks

  On the fourth day of the trek, we were ascending a narrow winding trail, making our way up a long valley gouged into the moraine by an ivory-colored river of ice melt off the Bhote Koshi Glacier. We passed packs of resigned yaks descending from Tibet top-heavy with goods, mostly Chinese knockoffs of high-end climbing gear and clothing to sell in the stalls of Namche Bazaar and Lukla to inexperienced trekkers surprised by and unprepared for the cold and the effects of altitude. We were headed for a high-meadow farm settlement called Thame. From there, for the next three weeks, we would steadily make our way deep into the Himalaya, to within three kilometers of Tibet. We would climb half a dozen mountains, three of them above eighteen thousand feet; cross the famed Three Passes, Renjo-La, Cho-La, and Kongma-La, also near and above eighteen thousand feet; visit Everest Base Camp; then trek back down to Lukla and in triumph catch our Air Tata return flight to Kathmandu. That was the plan, anyhow. The hope.

  Crossing the Dudh Koshi River on a narrow suspension bridge strung between two cliffs, I meant not to look down at the milky river crashing against rocks five hundred feet below, but then suddenly remembered Thornton Wilder’s scary novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and looked down anyhow. If the swaying bridge, as in the novel, were to inexplicably give way, I wanted to see where I’d be hurled. What I saw down there was a small herd of mountain goats, the brown Himalayan tahr, grazing on the far bank like suburban deer, six or seven females and kids and a large male with a shaggy mane watching over them. The tahr looks like a cross between a goat and an antelope; it’s rare to see them in a herd, especially with the male present.

  An old goat, I thought. Like me.

  The trail, where we left the bridge, cut sharply uphill, away from the river. Coming down toward us was an elderly man, European or North American, picking his labored, careful way over rocks and roots with climbing poles. Poor guy, I thought. Definitely too old for this. Balance clearly shot, legs trembling, shrunken lungs sucking air even on the descent. Too much vascular hardening, too much lost muscle and bone mass to handle this tough a climb. There comes a point when an old man ought to stay home by the fire, I thought.

  But then behind the man appeared a slim, very attractive blond woman in her early thirties. The old guy drew near and looked me squarely in the face. I looked him back and realized that I was probably the same age as he—a fellow septuagenarian. Neither of us smiled or acknowledged the other. Though we stood and stared at each other for several long seconds, neither of us wanted to see or be seen by the other. We were the same, he and I, and neither of us appreciated the fact. I knew he was hoping that I’d think the young woman was his mistress, not his granddaughter or niece, and that I’d think him an old goat, like the bearded brown alpha-male tahr, and not an old fool. And indeed, I did hope that the young woman was his mistress, not his granddaughter or niece. But I still was not sure he wasn’t an old fool trying and failing to do what’s done best by much younger men. Even—perhaps especially—as regards the young woman coming along behind him. For the first time I saw the problem. Barely four days into the trek and at a relatively low altitude, I’d met my feared true self: a man who could as easily be an old fool as an old goat.

  But wasn’t that one of the reasons, maybe the main reason, why I’d decided to make this trek in the first place, to figure out which of the two I really am? I hadn’t considered it back then. I was just working my way down my bucket list, which was growing shorter by the year. Not because I was checking things off the list, so much as I was running out of time—the lion-in-winter syndrome. Climbing in the Himalaya had been on my list for a decade. But at seventy-two I could remember sixty-two like it was yesterday. Which made eighty-two look a lot like tomorrow. And no matter how you cut it, eighty-two is elderly. It’s not the new sixty-two. It’s not the new anything. I’d reached the age where it was pretty certain that if I didn’t go to the Himalaya now, I’d never get there.

  To pull it off successfully I’d have to lift my level of fitness higher than it had been since my thirties. I’m not healthy because I exercise regularly; I exercise regularly because, thanks to my genes, I happen to be healthy. For years I’ve worked out mainly to counter the effects of sarcopenia, the loss of 1 percent per annum of our bodies’ bone and muscle mass after the age of forty, even while we sleep. Back in November, six months before the Himalaya spring climbing season, I swapped that old, easygoing, three-days-a-week, maintenance-level routine for a more strenuous daily training regimen, alternating aerobic and weight-lifting workouts in the gym with long, thigh-punishing bike rides. I took my body, like an old Volvo, its warranty long since expired, to the shop for a thorough drive-train check and tune—blood work, EKG, echocardiogram, even a colonoscopy—and got prescriptions filled for Cipro (against dysentery) and Diamox (against altitude sickness). Also Viagra—my doctor explained that Viagra was rumored to have been originally developed to deal with pulmonary and cerebral edema associated with altitude sickness. In an emergency, he said, if the Diamox is too slow to act, pop a couple of Viagra and quickly descend. So Viagra’s a multipurpose drug, I thought. Good to know.

  By April my weight was down from 215 to 190, and I was feeling stronger than at any time in the last twenty or twenty-five years. Yet one never knows, as I’d learned in the Andes and on Kilimanjaro, until one is actually on the mountain. My two climbing pals, Gregorio and Tom, had signed up early in the year. Gregorio, who planned to make a film of the trek, said he had cut back on his smoking and was doing some jogging and yoga. Tom, in his role as chair of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, had spent the year traveling and worried that he’d laid on a few extra pounds at embassy dinners. I wasn’t concerned about their fitness level, however. Only my own. Two years earlier, climbing Kilimanjaro for the third time, I’d discovered that in the five years since my previous ascent my sense of balance had gone into serious decline, and though I was still plenty strong enough for the climb, I was working much harder than Tom and Gregorio, taking great care not to fall—like that old guy with his poles—while my pals hopped from rock to rock like teenagers. I’d worked since then on recovering my sense of balance by means of a specified set of exercises, but worried about what new physical or neurological or psychological diminishment I’d discover while trying to climb in the Himalaya.

  Tom, who was in Indonesia on a Fulbright mission, planned to meet us in Kathmandu. Gregorio and I convened in New York to complete our packing and fly out of Newark together. Gregorio was already filming. Making a visual record. It would be hard to lie about this one, I thought, even in print. On my way to a meeting with my publisher, I popped into a Barnes & Noble to pick up a long novel to carry to the mountains in my backpack and chose for its combined portability and length a pocket edition of Great Expectations. I’d somehow managed to reach the edge of old age without having read what was, to judge by the cover, John Irving’s favorite novel. Another, if minor, item on the bucket list to check off.

  A little later, I was in my editor’s East Fifty-Third Street corner office with him and his boss, both men of a certain age—which is to say, baby boomers, men not quite my age yet, but close—and we ended up talking about how all our male near-contemporaries, ourselves excepted, of course, were suddenly getting old. We mentioned mutual friends’ hip and knee replacements, prostate cancers, stents, retirement parties. I observed that nowadays when we wake up in the morning the only thing that’s stiff is our back and heard nervous laughter of recognition.

  Gregorio, struggling with tripod and camera and mike and lights and batteries and cables and laptop, in addition to backpack and duffel stuffed with clothing and climbing gear, filmed our taxi ride to Newark airport. It was amusing and endearing to watch him, a young man obsessed with his self-selected, open-ended task, working alone without financing or a contract—the sort of task, as an aging professional writer, I no longer seemed capable of taking on. He filmed our departure on United’s fifteen-hour flight to Delhi and filmed our overnight wait in Indira Ga
ndhi International Airport for the connecting flight to Kathmandu and filmed our bleary-eyed arrival early the next morning, where we checked into the Dwarika’s Hotel.

  In the sixties, Kathmandu was the first stop out of San Francisco on the hippie trail, and a lot of my college friends had passed through the city back then. I’d missed it in my own youthful wanderings. And Gregorio’s parents weren’t even born then. While waiting for Tom to come in from Indonesia via Singapore, we hit the chaotic, congested streets of the district called Thamel and pushed through crowds of panhandling European and American dreadlocked kids with clustered tattoos and piercings searching for the long-gone ghosts of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. We visited, and Gregorio filmed, the famous Hindu temple Pashupatinath, where we inhaled human ashes blown from the open-air cremations smoldering on platforms above the Bagmati River and watched stoned sadhus, for small change from tourists, lift rocks tied to their penises. We stopped at the round Buddhist stupa Boudhanath, placed like a gigantic white navel at the center of the Tibetan exile community, where during a sudden rain shower we drank beers in the Tibet Kitchen Boudha Stupa rooftop café and agreed that the Hindu shrine and rites were medieval and obsessed with death and rebirth, while the Buddhist shrine and rites, where pilgrims of all ages happily circumambulated the temple even in the rain, were good-natured, almost clownish, an Asian parallel to preclassical Greece, more life-affirming than the Hindu, we decided. Another good reason to climb high mountains: it gets you out of the house. We weren’t just trekkers, mountain climbers. We were travelers, too.

  That afternoon Tom arrived, and later we met for a briefing with Samden Sherpa, who, with his energetic mother, Yankila Sherpa, ran Snow Leopard, the outfitter we’d hired for the trek. Back in the early 1970s, before the era of “adventure tourism” hit the Himalaya region, the American writer Peter Matthiessen came to Nepal to search for the elusive, endangered, near-mythical snow leopard, a quest that became, as these things often do, a search for his own soul. With the help of Yankila Sherpa and her late husband, Matthiessen pulled together a group of local guides and porters and trekked all over northwestern Nepal. After Matthiessen returned to the States to write his prizewinning book The Snow Leopard, the Sherpas kept the group together as one of the first outfitters in the country and named it after the book.

  Samden Sherpa also brought to the meeting Dambar Magar, the man who would guide us into the Himalaya, and a second guide, Gaushal Magar, Tibetan-descended Nepalese cousins, both broad-faced, short, stocky men in their early forties. Dambar spoke excellent colloquial English, obviously a man with a gift and affection for language. Gaushal, who seemed not to speak any English at all, smiled benignly throughout the meeting. Dambar had a brightly lit, charismatic flair and intensity that seemed consciously designed to attract and hold our attention. He talked rather steadily throughout the meeting and listened not at all. Evidently narcissism is not culturally specific, I thought, and wondered if in the upcoming weeks we’d be able to meet his need for attention.

  Now, five days later, as we decamped from the high-meadow settlement of Thame and headed up the Bhote Koshi Valley to a lodge at Lungden, my question was being answered. Since landing at Lukla, Dambar had been bugging us endlessly with jokes and song-and-dance routines. He was a knowledgeable guide, experienced and more than merely competent. But his need to entertain everyone in hearing range was starting to irritate us. Perhaps me especially, the Old Goat. At times it was like climbing with Robin Williams or Liza Minnelli. Or both.

  The plan was to acclimatize at Lungden, at 14,370 feet, for a day and two nights before attempting Renjo-La, the first of the three high passes. We were many miles west of the more popular routes into the Himalaya now, so there were very few fellow trekkers and no more yak trains coming across from Tibet or down from Everest Base Camp in the east. We were in high tundra, crossing the arid, wind-scoured zone between the tree line and the snow line, scrambling uphill across scree and waist-high boulders. I could see that if I was going to get over the upcoming passes, climb the mountains ahead, and cross the dangerously melting glaciers beyond, I’d have to focus all my attention on the task at hand. I couldn’t keep nodding and smiling in approval to keep my loquacious guide happy. I decided to confront Dambar and try to explain my difficulty.

  After we dropped our packs on our narrow bunks, I took Dambar aside and said, “Look, I’m an old man, and this is hard for me. To do it successfully, I need to concentrate. To concentrate, I need you to be quiet,” I told him.

  Dambar misread me, however. He said he was confident that I could complete the climb successfully. And not to worry about being such an old man, he said. Plenty of old men who were even older men than I had completed this same trek with total success.

  I doubted that, having been reliably informed by a friend back home that, regardless of age, most of the trekkers who sign on for the Three Passes route don’t complete it. She herself is a mountaineer and guide who had recently returned from the Annapurna region and knew whereof she spoke. “Just pay close attention to your body,” she advised me. “No matter how fit you are, don’t go all macho and push it till you collapse or fall. That’s how these mountains kill people.”

  The cut-stone lodge at Lungden was rough and cold. The common toilet was an overflowing latrine, and the entire building stank of it. There was only one other climber at the lodge with us, an enormous, middle-aged Australian who called himself Rocket. He liked to drive fast, he explained. “Like a fookin’ rocket!” Traveling alone without guide or porter, he’d been at the lodge in Thame the night before and limped into Lungden a few hours behind us, a delightfully eccentric man who told us he was a ladies’ hairdresser in Perth. He had a substantial belly, spindly legs, claimed to smoke six cigarettes a day and carried several, maybe many, pints of whiskey in his huge backpack, which he now and then pulled out and sipped from as he climbed. This was the fourth time he’d gone trekking in the Himalaya, he said. “Me wife says I’m a loner, and I s’pose I am.”

  Something about him reminded us of Elton John, his affable, unflappable weirdness, maybe, so we called him Rocket Man, which he liked, and soon he began referring to himself as Rocket Man. His knees were in pain, and he wasn’t sure he could make it over the passes and on to Everest Base Camp, but unlike the other climbers we’d met so far, all of whom were intent on summiting, as if cutting notches in their belts, Rocket Man, with an equanimity I envied but couldn’t match, didn’t seem to care. “Nah, if it gets too fookin’ tough, I’ll just head back to Namche Bazaar.”

  He was going straight up Renjo-La the next morning without taking the extra day and night of acclimatization, which seemed at the time like a good idea. None of us liked the lodge at Lungden—it was filthy and dark and cold—so we proposed to Dambar that we skip the extra day like Rocket Man and go up Renjo-La and on to Gokyo Camp tomorrow instead.

  Dambar said he was concerned that without more acclimatization and rest it would be too tough for me. I assured him that I was feeling strong and so far the altitude hadn’t bothered me at all. It seemed clear that, despite what he’d said earlier, Dambar was indeed concerned about my age. In the end we prevailed, and he agreed to depart the next morning at five thirty. It would be a long day, he said and then broke into a Bollywood song cycle and danced away.

  Later, after a supper of dal bhat and momos, Tom, Gregorio, and I, in hats and parkas and gloves, huddled in the common room as close to the fire as possible. With each stop the meals had gotten more and more fundamental, with fewer and fewer fresh components. Between the tree line and the snow line is the protein line, above which no meat other than nearly inedible reconstituted dried yak steak is available. Otherwise it was mostly combinations of rice and noodles and cabbage and turnips and carrots and the steamed clumplike dumplings called momos. The lodges are called teahouses (probably because when you arrive they serve hot tea from a Thermos), but now that we were at the very end of the inhabited world, they weren’t much more than mini
malist barracks. No electricity, no running water, no heat, except in the common room from a metal stove for burning yak chips. Beds were a thin slice of foam rubber on a piece of plywood. Toilets were a shared hole in the ground, or floor, at the end of the hall. Forget washing.

  Tom, who at fifty could imagine being sixty, but not seventy, asked me what was the difference between how I felt about my body ten years ago, when I was in my early sixties, and now. Tough question. Especially since I was in better shape now than I was back then. I said the main difference was fear—fear of being in denial as to my inescapably diminished powers. Which could result in overconfidence and absurd and embarrassing moments of public exposure of weakness and vanity: i.e., exposure as an old fool.

  Back in November, when I had the self-confidence, the chutzpah, to sell Tom and Gregorio on the idea of making this trek, it was on the assumption that I myself could successfully climb these passes and mountains. But if I couldn’t actually do it, I’d be exposed as an old fool. And there’s nothing worse than being an old fool. Climbing Renjo-La tomorrow would be a crucial, self-defining test for me. And unless I passed it, my pride and our friendship, among other things, would be impaired. We three might travel together again, but we’d probably not go climbing together again.

  We headed out the next morning in darkness and cold, guided by headlamps, locked inside our individual thoughts. It wasn’t long before the sun cracked the horizon and revealed Renjo-La above, a V-shaped notch in a jagged line of three snow-covered twenty-one-thousand-foot peaks, Makalu, Cho Oyo, and Lhotse. I chugged steadily onward and upward at my chosen slow pace, while Gregorio lugged his camera and tripod ahead and set up to film us as we ascended toward him; then, when we passed by, moved ahead again and set up at a farther, higher point. Tom seemed to withdraw inside himself and climbed in front of me a ways, more or less alone. Our porters, Yam and Prim, carrying two duffels each, had left the lodge at Lungden even earlier than we and were now well out of sight. Gaushal stuck close to Gregorio and helped carry his film equipment. Dambar stayed by me. I couldn’t tell if it was because he thought of me as the old goat, the alpha male and leader of our group, or the pathetic old man who could screw up the entire climb if he fell and broke his leg or back and had to be helicoptered out. The old man might well not make it over the pass at all—too weak, too old—and would have to go down to Lungden by nightfall and return to Namche Bazaar the next day and wait alone for fifteen or sixteen days while the others completed the trek without him.