Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  One quarter of Nepal’s population of thirty million, doubled since 1981, lives below a radically deep poverty line, 46 percent of the nation is unemployed, almost half are illiterate, the median age is an unappeasable twenty-one, life expectancy less than sixty years, and deforestation of the countryside, Nepal’s greatest resource, is endemic. In a country under such socioeconomic pressures, the potential for spontaneous violence seems no greater or less than the prospect for lasting peace.

  In Kathmandu itself, its 1.5 million residents in the metropolitan area have submitted to the daily rhythms of humiliation and ­frustration—electrical outages, spotty phone service, unrelenting gridlock, rising crime, and unpredictable curfews—and throughout the decade the city’s increasing untenability could be easily tracked by the decline and abandonment of its most legendary subculture, the Rock and Roll Raj, expiring of old age or simply packing up and getting out, retreating to The Place Formerly Known as Home, bummed out by disillusionment, stressed out by instability. It was the death of the era of enchantment for the erstwhile travelers of the Silk Road, its second-most-famous terminus, Goa, going to hell as well, the hipster pilgrims in Kathmandu replaced by a much less freewheeling community of expatriates and salaried wallahs, NGO do-gooders, and multinational corporate do-badders. And of course the adventurecrats. The Lairds themselves joined the exodus, moving first to Florida and then to New Orleans, just in time to be creamed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

  As for the extraordinary kingdom of Lo—Mustang and Upper Mustang and the fabled walled city of Lo Manthang—the perspective of a second ten years of openness and access offers both reassurance and concern. In 2008, the king of Mustang, Raja Jigme Dorje Palbar Bista, was himself sucked into the monarch-cleansing vortex of Kathmandu politics and was forced to abdicate his title, if not his funky dilapidated palace or his people’s recognition, still esteemed today by many Mustang residents for his lineage and his piety. Despite the difficulty in just getting there, foreign trekkers continue to visit the region at the rate of over a thousand each year—over two thousand in 2008 alone—each paying his or her fifty-dollar-per-day permit fee and collectively creating a reliable seasonal trickle of hand-to-hand revenue into the local economy.

  I take it as a fact of human nature that affluent, intrepid Westerners will damage the internal stability—the deep social metabolism—of a far-flung place like Mustang, infecting the medieval status quo with aspirations and dreams, the very presence of outsiders and their sensibilities evidence that a more comfortable, less oppressive life, a life a bit more prosperous and hopeful, less weighted by endless hardship, exists and is not impossible to attain. Aliens alighting in your world, no matter how benign, are bound to have an effect. The most overt result has been a major out-migration of Mustang’s young people in the past ten years, not only to Nepal’s cities, according to anthropologist Sienna Craig, but abroad to New Delhi, Seoul, Tokyo, and New York City in search of work and a better life.

  But the real change in Mustang is not the inevitable result of visitors throwing gum wrappers on the ground or inflating the price of eggs (although everything counts). Bigger, more intractable forces are at play, with Mustang on the front lines of a geopolitical Great Game conducted between India and China over influence in Nepal and, sorry, China doesn’t give a shit about the indigenous culture of anywhere and anybody. China presents a macro-example of a Faustian bargain between a people’s soul and a people’s progress, and in that sense it is simply a high-definition mirror for every other nation and its own compromises between past and future.

  The once restricted border between the Tibet Autonomous Region—less euphemistically known as Chinese-occupied Tibet—has been breached by a nearly completed road bisecting Mustang from top to bottom and continuing southward through the depth of Nepal to the tropical plains of India, thus creating only the second (and ­lowest-altitude) drivable corridor from the Tibetan Plateau through the once almighty barrier of the Himalayas. As of 2012 only five and a half miles of the route remain unbuilt, the section scheduled for completion within the next few years, when it would not be unreasonable to expect Mustang’s horse culture to be utterly wiped out by the region’s hyperactive highway culture, considering that the road is but a leveling and paving of the millennia-old salt-trading route between the lands north of the snow peaks and the lands to the south.

  What can be said about this astronomical alteration to Mustang’s insularity? I doubt you could find a foreigner who has hiked or ridden a pony into Mustang who approves of it. And yet the cultures the trekkers represent, willingly or not, have paid rarely more than lip service to preserving traditional ways of life if those traditions ever stood in the way of a bulldozer: Out with the old and up with the new. The Buddhist appreciation for impermanence has many layers, and many of those layers resonate with the dynamics of Western development. Double standards breed in shallow waters, and you can’t be a credible emissary from the modern world devoted to a type of nostalgia that depends on other people remaining shackled to their destitution.

  Opportunity is a human right, and the people of Mustang have an appetite for it as much as any other people. Education, health care, clean water, ample food, freedom from oppression—you know the drill. So it shouldn’t have surprised anyone when the Upper Mustang Youth Society threatened that, as of October 1, 2010, it would do everything in its power to ban foreign tourists from coming to the restricted area of Upper Mustang. The issue was not cultural contamination, or environmental pressure, or anything at all implying a negative impact from Mustang’s modest industry as an exotic travel destination. The issue was money, Mustang’s promised 60 percent cut of permit fees, millions of dollars in revenue for local development and services that never found its way out of Kathmandu.

  A central government stealing blatantly from local and regional governments, however, doesn’t qualify as breaking news anywhere in the world. Wealth distribution and resource allocation are, in practice, what they are—platforms for corruption and injustice. The issue is under discussion, permanently, and everywhere.

  In the meantime, trekkers still embark on the arduous spectacular journey to the walled city of Lo Manthang. This will always be, even if they must trudge on the shoulder of a trans-Himalayan highway. Farther to the east, the climbers will arrive from every corner of the earth to summit—and perish—on Everest. This will always be. When the cremation fires have died and cooled, the monkeys of Pashupatinath will scurry onto ghats to scavenge the ashy crumbs of our kings and our queens, and this will always be. The suffering and the joy, the awe of life and the fear of death, this will always be, as will be the holy man’s, or the crazy man’s, detachment from it all.

  Nepal’s eternal magic, born under the lakes of the snake gods and atop the peaks of the thunder gods, these days seems shriven and diluted by mankind’s vanities and negligence, but this too will always be, onward into the infinitude of being, which has no response to Cannot be until nature’s reckoning itself answers, Done.

  (2012)

  Something Wild

  in the Blood

  Hurricane Darby had broken up, humbled by shearing winds into a tropical depression, trailing a steady, bracing suck of breeze that stretched east from Cuba all the way back to the Turks and Caicos Islands, where, on Providenciales, a young islander in swim trunks helped me lug a mountain of gear from my Turtle Cove hotel to his pickup truck. I asked the driver if he was the boatman, too, and he said yes, he was Captain Newman Gray.

  “Good. You can tell me where we’re going.”

  “East Bay Cay.”

  Twenty years ago, when I first came to Providenciales aboard the South Wind, a derelict ninety-eight-foot tramp freighter captained by Tay Maltsberger and his wife, Linda, the forty-nine Turks and Caicos were tiny, arid, sunbaked, and mostly useless outposts of the British Crown, still virgin turf for sportsmen, drug runners, and real estate pioneers.

  Now I was
looking out the window of Captain Newman’s truck at the resorts and casinos crowding Grace Bay, remembering when there was nothing on its austere sweep of beach, when Providenciales did not have a jetport or a store, only an islander-run rice-and-peas shop at its dusty main crossroads and a warehouse stocked with booze, frozen steaks, and a thin collection of building supplies. Nobody was around on the bay then except Tay and Linda and my wife and me. We’d swim from shore to a nearby reef and spear lobsters, perform ballet with eagle rays and sea turtles, and slowly retreat from the tiger shark, big as a sports car, that regularly prowled the formation. At the end of the day, we’d walk carefully back through the thorny island scrub to where Tay and Linda had anchored themselves and were attempting an unlikely enterprise for professional seafarers: Provo’s first nursery and landscaping business.

  “I know that place,” I said to Newman, pointing to the new parking lot and retail office of Sunshine Nursery. I told him there had been a time on Provo when everybody—blacks and whites, and the West Indians especially—knew and loved the couple who started that nursery. But the captain had never heard of my friends the Maltsbergers and made only the smallest grunt of acknowledgment. My memories were beside the point to young Newman, who had migrated from his home on North Caicos to Providenciales to take advantage of the recent economic boom. I was simply the latest job, an American who wanted to be dropped off for ten days on some ideal island, the only criterion being that the place had no people, no nothing, except flora under which I could escape the sun.

  Within an hour we were aboard the captain’s twenty-four-foot cat-hulled reef cruiser, flying toward East Bay Cay, a skinny sidecar that hugs North Caicos’s windward edge, separated from the mother island by a half-mile-wide channel. I had provisioned myself modestly with rice, beans, fresh vegetables, onions and limes for conch salad, beer, a bottle of rum. Otherwise I planned to fish and dive for my food, which is what one does, happily, on a deserted island in these latitudes.

  Captain Newman jutted out his chin to direct my attention to a narrow cut, which I could not yet demarcate, behind a glistening bar mouth between the big island and the cay. “This is the road in,” he announced, pointing to a slight taint of turquoise indicating deeper water—perhaps six inches deeper.

  We came aground about a hundred feet off a rocky point, the terminus of the shaded white-sand beach I had been watching unwind for twenty minutes. We waded the gear ashore through transparent water, the two of us together hauling the heavy coolers and my main duffel bag, and finally it was done. I saluted the captain good-bye and then turned my back on him and (I hoped) every other human being on the planet for the next ten days.

  As his boat receded into the distance, I pulled a celebratory beer from my cooler and sat down to engage myself in what could have been a most illumining conversation about the liberties we finesse for ourselves, but my mind went stone-blank with euphoria and I could only stare at the opulence of color—the blue of jewels, eyes, ice, glass—and the glowing white towers of late-summer cumulus clouds queuing across the wind-tossed horizon.

  I was alone, as sooner or later we are all meant to be.

  Texas, three days earlier.

  More than a few years had passed since I last bunked with Captain Tay, and this was by far the largest space we had shared: an expansive bed in a dim apartment annexed to the house in San Antonio that had once been his father’s and was now his son’s.

  The captain’s one-room apartment had the ambience of an exhibit in some provincial museum—the Explorer’s Room—its walls hung with crossed spears, shark jaws, barnacled fragments of sunken ships, intricately carved wooden paddles, yellowed newspaper clippings, and glossy photographs of adventure.

  I opened my eyes to stare at the ceiling, the morning sunlight a radiant border around the two makeshift curtains pinned over the windows, and finally called the old captain’s name. No answer, and when I nudged him, no response. Captain Tay was a self-proclaimed dying man, an arthritic and half-blind silverback awaiting winter in his bone-strewn lair, and I thought, Well, that’s it for him. Apparently he had slipped away in the night, fulfilling his chosen destiny by dying in the same bed his wife, Linda, had died in thirteen years earlier.

  The night before, the captain had shown me a sketch on a legal pad: the outlines of a human body, front and back views, with twenty-eight red Xs drawing the viewer’s attention to a catalog of the physical indignities Tay had suffered over the years: stitches, concussions, animal bites, punctures, cracked ribs, broken bones, and a shrapnel wound he had sustained from a mortar round in the jungles of Colombia while tagging along with his blood brother, a commander in the National Police, on a 1973 raid against guerrillas. Not indicated on the drawing were the recent, less visible assaults: a bad heart, diabetes, clogged lungs, an exhausted spirit. He had also handed me—one of his designated undertakers—his self-composed obituary, the last line of which read, “He will be buried at sea in the Turks and Caicos,” and his desire was that the burial take place over the South Wind, the ship his wife’s ashes had been scattered over in 1987. As I would be leaving for the archipelago after my stopover in San Antonio, I thought it was damned decent of the captain to die with my convenience in mind.

  But when I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, Lazarus was sitting up, pawing the nightstand for his glasses and cigarettes. He was already dressed because he’d slept with his clothes on. As far as I know he had always done so, ready to leap up at a moment’s notice into the god-awful fray.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “Any day now,” said the captain with a spark in his hazel eyes, lying back down to smoke, his shoulders and head propped up with stale pillows. He’d been lying there for six or seven years, a veteran recluse, the lone survivor of all that he had loved, shipwrecked here on this rumpled king-size mattress.

  I offered him a respite from the soul-heavy inertia of his retirement, as I’d done annually since he had hunkered down. “Come with me, Tay. Ten days on an uninhabited island. The sort of thing you and Linda used to love. What the hell are you doing lounging around here, waiting to croak?”

  This was a bit more irreverence than the captain was accustomed to, and I could hear the growl form in his throat. “I’m seventy-one years old, I’m an alcoholic, my legs are going out, I’ve buried all my lovers, and I’ve done everything a man can do down there where you’re going,” he barked. “Get it through your head. I want to die.”

  I tried to imagine him as he had been four decades earlier: a thirty-one-year-old man carrying a briefcase and an umbrella, dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit, stepping aboard the commuter train in Westport, Connecticut, riding to Manhattan in the glummest of moods, believing he had traded his “real” life for a halfhearted commitment to virtues that read like a checklist of the American Dream—social status, upward mobility, material comfort—but were somehow entering his system tilted, knocking him off balance. He had married Barbara Rolf, a lithe, sensual blonde from the Ford Modeling Agency, a woman whose face was radiating from the covers of Life and Paris Match and who had borne him a son named Mark. Tay was natty, lean, dashingly handsome, husband of one of the world’s original supermodels, and the father of a towheaded three-year-old boy—all this, and yet he was still a despondent man riding a commuter train from Westport into the city. It wasn’t another company job he was hunting for, but a resurrection, some kind of life in which he could breathe freely again.

  He had had that freedom, had pursued it with Hemingwayesque flair—Golden Gloves boxer, three years with the Eleventh Airborne Division during the Korean War, the big man on campus at the University of the Americas in Mexico City, twice elected student body president. In Mexico City he had operated his own gymnasium, teaching boxing, judo, bodybuilding. Exciting opportunities had knocked relentlessly at his door. While doing graduate work in industrial psychology, he had led a group of scientists into unexplored regions of Bri
tish Guiana, Venezuela, and Brazil. There was something wild in his blood that wasn’t going to be tamed, no matter how much he muffled it beneath button-down oxfords and dry martinis. Being Texan was likely part of it, he figured. His family had come to Texas just before the Alamo fell, and his great-grandfather had been a civilian scout for the Mormons on their trek to Utah. On both sides, his family lines were heavily saturated with footloose visionaries and hell-raisers and uncontainable spirits.

  Stepping off that train in Manhattan, he crossed the platform and caught the next train back to Connecticut. Off came the suit, the briefcase landed in the trash, and he hired on as first mate on a sailboat out of Westport that carried tourists around Long Island Sound. And then he was gone.

  “All right, come die in the islands,” I told him. “Save me the sorrow of carrying you back there in an urn.”

  “I’m not moving,” the captain snapped, but then he shifted himself upright and his voice became sonorous with care. “You have a good knife?” he asked. “Something that will hold an edge?” He eased up off the bed to rummage around in his moldy piles of gear. “Here, take this knife. I want you to have it.”