Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  Christine and I unfolded ourselves from the Jeep, walked the few steps to the wall, and stood there, focusing, the cold snapping us alert. There was a half-moon, and in its light we could make out the ghostly shape of the mountain, almost opalescent, floating on clouds bivouacked throughout the valleys. Beyond Kangchenjunga, the white nose cone of Everest thrust upward, another apparition. Unlike a hurricane, which you can only experience in fragments of its sum, immensity has never been more consummately packaged than it is in the massifs and peaks of the Himalayas—never more revealed, and never more approachable. Where we stood, the elevation was about 8,000 feet, high enough, actually, if we were in, say, the Colorado Rockies, but Kangchenjunga rose another 20,000 feet above us, incredibly, into the heavens.

  In less than ten seconds since we left the vehicle, something extraordinary happened. As we stood and tried to comprehend the mountain—our first true sight of it—a shooting star blazed down, remarkable in itself, but more remarkable was the fact that the star began to burn below Kangchenjunga’s summit, streaking down at a diagonal right to left, perhaps another five thousand feet, before it extinguished. Christine and I were dumbstruck for a moment, and then I blurted out, without forethought, a line that wholly surprised me. “That was about my child,” I said. I had no idea what I meant, but I had left behind me in the States a wife pregnant, after many torturous years of trying, with our first kid, the only time I was ever able to knock her up.

  In fragments the mountain allowed itself to be defined, sharpened by contrasts of light and shadow. The clouds sank and melted into grayish flannel swaddling the base of Kangchenjunga, and directly below the observation platform I began to see a score of lines emerge from the darkness, strung with hundreds of prayer flags, all intersecting toward the mountain. As dawn broke, the flags gently absorbed their hues, transformed from colorless charcoal to the most vivid saffrons, burgundies, whites, and blues. Twenty minutes before sunrise, Kangchenjunga was as pale and delicate as porcelain, and it was easier to imagine men walking on the moon than actually scaling this colossus. Its slopes pinkened, and then right before sunrise the clouds became restless and began to levitate out of the valleys. Their interplay with the five summits was astonishingly, teasingly mystical and I preferred this hide-and-seek game, since the Himalayas seemed to belong more to the universe than to humanity. Minute by minute the clouds devoured Kangchenjunga, opening and closing windows, here a marble throne room, etched in gilt and bronze; here a sudden glistening crag of summit that makes no visual sense, a shard of earth broken free. Then it’s gone and it is easy not to believe it was ever there.

  “That’s it,” the Australian complained to his wife. “It’s ruined, absolutely ruined.”

  The sun rose, the snow peaks disappeared except for a few lost islands off toward Tibet, jutting from a sea of hazy clouds. The crowd dashed for transport, each driver jockeying for position, and we all descended Tiger Hill in a single roar, back to the lively city, where I fixed myself a hot bath and then packed my bags for a four-hour road trip to Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim. I was happy, waiting for my ride under a sky filled with children’s kites, remembering the falling star, the enigma of its message, the sudden supernatural energy that jerked the length of my spine, the magnetic pull of a nameless passion that lightens the weight of your heart. My wife had insisted that the right to name our child was hers alone (since I’d been the one to name our dogs), but that morning I made a queer and surely ludicrous decision that the kid’s middle name should be the tongue-bending, mind-twisting name of this mountain, Kangchenjunga. In the days ahead I would tell the story of the shooting star to new friends in Sikkim, and they would congratulate me on the gift of such an auspicious omen. A month later I would receive letters from them at my home in Florida, prayers that all was well with the child, that my firstborn would be a son, but by then I already knew that the very hour I had seen the star smear across the face of Kangchenjunga, halfway around the world the fetus had died, a shadow-child forever lost in the cosmic mail, and my wife was in the midst of a miscarriage.

  And so years later alone together on the pass in Mustang, we raise our flags and hold each other, brushing the sting from our eyes, and then move on.

  There would be no other child than the one that lived as a star, and fell.

  Down to the World

  If you let your imagination run to paradise, what shall you find on its balmy shores and arcadian glades, what do you need there, if you’re willing to at least forgo the suicide bomber’s pedophiliac dream of virgin cherry-picking? What’s the proper frame of mind to complement the psychic necessity? I don’t know why I’ve never adorned my vision with extravagances: water, if you’re dry; shade, if you’re hot; soup, if you’re hungry; mineral springs, if you’re sore; peace, if peace has eluded you; love, if you’ve somehow lost it. All my wayward dogs come home. Leafy simplicity and small abundance seem splendid enough, and never incongruous with the paradisiacal, but in truth I’ve never felt an overwhelming need for paradise, and the ones I’ve known have not fared well against the stealthy creep of progress.

  Like hobbits we descend through an oversize and infernal landscape, hypnotized by the barrenness until we come to the top of an austere bluff and look down upon a village wedged into a high glacial-fed valley, so beautiful and so green, that my wife is satisfied we have found it—­paradise, Shangri-la, some place blessed but not too holy. We hike joyfully down and wearily up, down, up, through a series of earth-cracked ravines and, as we lose altitude, increasingly fragrant layers of water-scent and plant aroma begin to pamper our senses—it’s always better to be walking where things grow. Down to the crusty valley floor, past a side canyon blooming red with Sedona-like cliffs and chromatically garish fanglike formations, we trudge past a head-high wall of prayer-carved mani stones reputed to be the longest in the world.

  Atop a mesa separated from the village itself by a deep final slice of ravine, we absorb completely the fairy-tale wonder of Ghami and meet its sorcerer—an eighty-year-old chain-smoking Japanese horticulturalist named Kondo, charismatic and jolly as Santa Claus, his chest draped with the long white wispy beard of a Kurosawa hermit. “I have devoted my life to poverty,” Kondo says, lowering his kiln-dried body onto one of the two chairs his village staff have carried outside the mud walls of the compound where we find him. “Very honorable.” I take the other chair, on his left side, and feel the odd impulse to lift his gnarled saintly hand in mine and hold it. Honorable, yes, my god, yes—I want to ask what crimes of nationalism he is paying off tenfold, beyond the ones obvious to his generation, but I would shame myself, doubting the purity of this old man’s generosity. Four decades ago he annulled his tenure at the National University of Japan and invested the next twenty-five years in the hinterlands of Nepal, the last three in Ghami, where he has laid almost four miles of four-inch irrigation pipe, planted fifteen thousand apple trees, dug carp ponds, built greenhouses for winter vegetables, is growing rice at the highest elevation in the world, and has conjured a hundred-hectare farm out of the desert badlands. As if that weren’t enough, the old man built a hospital for the village, convinced a doctor to staff it, and muled in an X-ray machine that runs off solar power. Life’s better than ten years ago, exalts the village headman, but it’s not because of the tourists, it’s because of Kondo. Kondo the Magnificent, and I am daunted by the fact that he is so unlike anyone I’ve ever met in the dense, busy, self-congratulatory world of altruistic industry, bureaucratic charity, deluded idealism, where money flushes endlessly back to its source, air-kissing the globe’s poor as it passes over the haplessness of their lives. Not a redistribution of wealth, but a contained distribution of influence and power. Sometimes, not often, a Samaritan like Kondo steps out of the system and into grace.

  “Because the government does nothing to help them,” Kondo ho-hos after a meaningful silence, when I ask why he’s here. He wants ten years more from life to single-handedly wh
ip Nepal into an agricultural nirvana. “This is my dream. Many Japanese people help me, God helps me. In the future I will make a forest here. For me”—Kondo smiles impishly, his black eyes radiating intelligence and purpose—“it’s very easy.” What makes him so different from the rest of us, the Christlike magnitude of his love hardwired into the residual imperial impulse to get things done, seems prototypically utopian—Kondo is what humankind was meant to be, if only humankind could ever be trusted to set aside its venality. Probably most villages in the Third World would benefit from a low-key Buddhist sugar daddy like this octogenarian; unlike serene Ghami, probably many of them would drive him away, or crucify him, within a year.

  The horsemen arrive dusty and sore and still nap-headed, their eyes dull from the heat of the ride, and we follow them across the ravine to the village center, where Jan and Mark lay asleep like lambs in the soft grass along the tree-lined riverbank. Water gushes everywhere through Ghami, and its music enters me like a narcotic, emptying my mind, petting my bones.

  Mahendra and Tomay unsaddle the ponies and feed them a mixture of wheat from his own fields and Chinese peas. Our campsite is a former threshing floor attached to a rustic roadhouse where a beautiful young mother perpetually feeds a stove, making butter tea and porridge for travelers. A puppy plays at her feet; the family dog, her husband says, was eaten by a monster last winter. They never saw the beast, just heard the terrible growling and snapping outside in the dark, and in the morning, the dog was gone without a trace. After dinner we stand watching a lightning barrage behind Annapurna, thankful that the monsoon has receded back to the south slopes and left us, if you could forget the wind, with ideal weather. Having walked the entire day, I roll into my tent with barely enough energy to remove my boots, shaking with chills.

  According to the map in the morning, five passes, including the col above Geling—Nyi La, the highest of the trip at over 13,000 feet—separate us from our next camp at Samar. Although we bypass Geling, Laird remembers it well, if not fondly. Ten years ago coming through Kagbeni, the monks at the temple wouldn’t have anything to do with Laird and his cameras but Kagbeni wasn’t Lo, so he paid no attention to their resistance. But Geling was the first place he really tried to document the heritage of Mustang, and the first place he heard the disheartening message to go fuck himself. Visiting Geling’s monastery, he noticed a voluminous pile of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century thangkas of tremendous value gathering dust in a corner, but the lama would not consent to let Tom photograph them for fear they’d be stolen, which they were anyway—stolen—five months later. Laird felt great relief he hadn’t photographed them, then great sadness that they were gone forever. Without the documented means to identify them, the thangkas could go direct to Sotheby’s with no questions asked, and there was no way to ever get them back—a tragedy, because the layers of history in Lo had mostly evaporated except in the art and architecture of the last five hundred years, wafting away into obscurity with successive generations, and once the artisans were gone, the Lobas sank back into a subsistence primitivism, that place we all seem headed for, after the next world war.

  The day unfolds immediately into a hair-raising series of verticals, descents too steep to ride, ascents so extreme that the trail has been stepped with flagstones, the horses clattering up staircases in the middle of this strange prehistoric wilderness, our knees clamped to their ribs, our bloodless fingers wrapped in their manes, Mahendra and Tomay leading the frightened women, yanking the horses up to the high passes. The route seems impossible, it seems blaringly lethal, but although there have been accidents here, no one’s died on horseback in at least ten years, or so Mahendra assures us. We cross a side river on a high suspension bridge, my wife channeling Helen Keller, sightless and deaf and mute in her not fully suppressed hysteria. On the approach to Samar, the incline is angled so radically that my saddle slips straight back on Jamling’s haunches, causing me to yank the steel bit so hard into his mouth that the horse surely thinks I’m trying to rip his jaw away, and he jigs and skitters wildly on the precipice until I can fling myself off to the ground, my blood hammering in my ears.

  We camp that night in a wet, grassy apple orchard in Samar and awaken at dawn with our water bottles half-frozen, the lot of us groaning and grousing, wanting our warm beds, getting too old and unresilient and psychologically arthritic for this shit, given the demoralizing reception we ran into up north. Laird keeps scheming out loud at mealtimes about moving with Jann back to Florida to nest in the semi-bourgeois life he chucked in 1972.

  Later, when we step inside the village headman’s house for a cup of tea, it seems his family and friends have been working on a version of the same idea. The older women wear traditional bukkhoos, but the younger ones wear tracksuits, and except for the lumps of turquoise planted in their earlobes, the guys are dressed like caddies on a golf course in Seattle. World music plays on a cassette player. Out comes the salt butter tea, out come the photos of vaguely prosperous grown children in America, Japan, one of twenty-year-old Jigme, working at a hotel in New York City—Laird photographed him as a boy helping thresh the village harvest. “Ten years ago we hadn’t been to the West,” says Tara, a sexy young woman in sweatpants and emerald fingernail polish who is one of seven Lobas out of twenty-four staffers who work for ACAP in Mustang. A good job taking her nowhere. “Yeah, it’s hard work [overseas] but take me. I’ll wash dishes, I’ll cook, clean floors. I’ll clean toilets. I’ll go make money and come back.” Sure, you want to tell her, let’s go, indenture yourself to that other world where your own fantasies reside, send money home, but don’t ever expect to come back to Mustang except in your dreams.

  The father, the village chief, knows. His son hasn’t written him in three years. “When they go to foreign countries,” he laments, “it’s a lot of pain.”

  “Tom,” I had heard Pema Wangdi, the mayor of Lo Manthang, say happily, “have you noticed how much we’ve changed? We’re richer now,” and that was in part because of trade with China, but mostly because Lobas were going abroad, creating their own modest diaspora around the world. Tourism as an agent of change wasn’t even on the mayor’s list.

  Meanwhile, the deadly descent between Samar and Kagbeni is standing in the way of the safe completion of our journey. “The horses cannot be ridden down,” announces Mahendra, nursing a rakshi hangover. The skin on my face, deep-fried by two days of ultraviolet sun and dry cold wind, needs tending to, my wife decides unilaterally, and she thinks she’s doing me a favor by slathering jojoba oil onto my forehead, then smearing a layer of sunscreen over the moisturizer. By the afternoon we will both have cause to regret her well-meant doctoring.

  Higher up on the slopes above us, juniper and birch forests have inserted themselves into Mustang’s lifeless ecology. First with gusto, then with increasing caution, finally with abject fear, we begin going down, the path nothing more than a groove along a sheer wall that drops a thousand feet to the floor of a side canyon tumbling out of the mountains to the roiling Kali Gandaki. At the trail’s most frightful narrowings, my wife clutches my hand and makes me stop until she can open the flue on her vertigo and clear out necessary headroom, and even a whiff of her internal spinning sends a whirlwind jolt of imbalance sloshing through my own viscera, a sudden loss of one’s primary sense of gravitational force. Oh shit, the body thinks, I can fly. We press ourselves against the overhang of upside wall to let a mule train pass, our nostrils filled with the beastly smell of foaming sweat, dumb acceptance ready to ignite with panic. Halfway down the mountainside, in the welcome stretches when it’s safe to glance around and not focus with such obsession on our feet, we look eye level out into space at vultures auguring the air, corkscrewing out of sight below us as others, as if on counterweights, pop up back into a holding pattern. There’s a reason for this activity and my suspicion is confirmed a hundred yards down the path, where a mule has lost its footing and Brodyed over the side, its carcass visible far far b
elow on a talus slope, where the birds peck and tear at its mangled body.

  At Chele we are free of the greater heights, no longer obliged to shuffle like penitents, our heads bowed, our eyes downcast, reduced to measuring the world one fiercely planted step at a time, knowing that one pays for even the smallest mistake with the ultimate price. We clamber down the last escarpment to the Kali Gandaki riverbed and its promenade of crushed cobble, pausing to gaze knowingly, a final time, into the throat of the upper gorge before the hike to Chuksang to rendezvous with the horsemen.

  Yet this freedom from fear is only temporary, and we have reinherited the wind, so demonically violent beyond Chuksang—forty, fifty miles per hour—that it staggers the horses as we ride them through a blizzard of dust and grit. Mouths and noses hide behind bandannas. We strap hats on with scarves knotted beneath our chins, pull the bands down upon our brows, and ride slit-eyed, leaning over the necks of our ponies, like gut-shot renegades. Captain wears goggles; Mike’s a Bedouin manqué. Abandoning Submarine in Lo Manthang, Mark hasn’t been on a horse since and now he’s somewhere ahead of us high on the cliffs with the indomitable Sherpas, wings on his feet along a trail only a foot wide, interspersed with shale slides. Without the Sherpas to shadow, he would have stopped to second-guess himself, monkeyed back down to the floodplain where we clop onward with our horses, because more than once the path would lead him around a corner only to be slammed by a wicked gust and he’d think, Fuck, if another gust hit me right now I’d pitch off.

  Sand blows under my sunglasses and into my eyes, burrowing into my scalp, my vision already blurred by floating oil slicks that have melted off my forehead, and I can barely see through the dancing blobs. Mahendra, however, has developed enough confidence in my horsemanship to let me lead, to judge the fords by myself, and so I get way out front with the captain, Michael, and Ang Tsering (on the revitalized Submarine, who appears to have had a sex change, female to male, in Lo Manthang); we canter up to the river crossings and splash across and keep going, determined to have this over with. To the west, we pass another side canyon, a confluence spurting coffee-colored melt from the snowpack. Laird gallops up with word from Mahendra to halt: The river is high and too dangerous to ford at the next crossing. We are forced over to the cliffs, but where the trail leaves the floodplain we all stare at its extraordinary narrowness and steepness and edginess, wishing for a funicular. We’ve taken the horses far past what we once believed were our limits, human and equine, and became, had to become, master horsemen, and fearless, instantly. Mahendra says its possible to ride the path but in the wind, now blowing fifty, punching the horses backward as they stand, we all share a rare moment of collective sanity and refuse.