by Laura Newman
Maggie is overwhelmed.
But slowly Kathmandu stops vibrating. She comes to realize that no one is shouting, pushing, no evil eye. Make way, make way, everyone makes way. Within the week, Maggie makes way too. And she has a friend; she has begun to speak to Ash. She speaks out loud, because what’s one more crazy? She pictures Ash as an adult, but hazy and a bit see-through, walking by her side. Maggie feels less alone with her brother. He helps her make decisions.
Maggie’s favorite place comes to be Maru Square. She doesn’t know that it’s a caravanserai built by the Newari or that Dorje took the hand of a monk in this very crossroads. Of course she doesn’t.
Ash gets impatient with Kathmandu. He tells Maggie he wants to see the Himalayas, for God’s sake. A long line of buses leaves every morning for Pokhara, six or seven hours west from Kathmandu. Pokhara is the jumping off point for the Annapurna trekking trails. Maggie buys her ticket. The Prithvi Highway is a course of switchbacks whacked out of jungle traversing a river gorge. Goats, sheep, chicken in cages, and passengers ride on top of the buses. Ash rides on top for free. Maggie rides inside, looking out the window, a voyeur peering through a dusty lens. She sees a solitary villager on a suspension bridge carrying a black-feathered chicken. Clothes, dishes, children being washed in public fountains. A woman with tumors on her abdomen showing in the open space between the skirt and bodice of her sari. When the bus stops, vendors run chips, fruit, cucumbers out to the bus windows to sell. A sign that says, Thank you for visiting the first defecation-free zone in Nepal.
Maggie takes a cheap room in the tourist district of Pokhara and finds an outdoor restaurant for lunch. She is the only late afternoon diner. While she is having her curry, two cows wander into the garden and start eating the plants and flowers. Instead of shooing them, Maggie just watches like a child because cows don’t generally go to restaurants in Sedona in a still-living state. But she feels ashamed when the waiter comes out and picks up a broken hibiscus branch, a single yellow flower hanging by a woody thread. The flower floats to the ground and he just shakes his head. He knows what happened. Ash giggles. Sometimes he acts like such a one-year-old.
For the next few days, Maggie watches the many-colored rental canoes ply the quiet water of Phewa Lake. Above, the many-colored sails of the hang gliders look just like upside-down canoes. It looks as if the lake is mirrored in the sky. On clear mornings the Annapurna Range appears and three out of the ten highest mountains in the world stand out like show girls. By afternoon a curtain of clouds will end the show. “Maggie,” says Ash, “I’m tired of the peep-show. Those mountains aren’t going to walk to us.”
The most common commodity on the main tourist street is trekking supplies. And if North Face is really North Façade, it’s good enough to last a month or two. Maggie bought what she needed and looked to hire a guide—her own personal sherpa. Like the porters at the airport, there is no shortage of men willing to carry your backpack and guide trekkers through the high passes. Eenie, meenie, miney, mo, how else to choose? If there’s a fork in the road, follow the sherpa. Tenzin Sherpa filled out her permit paperwork and misread her name on her passport. He calls her Mongolia.
The next day Tenzin hires a cab to drive them to Naya Pul and they start the walk to Ulleri. They are in the low hills on a constant upgrade through rice paddies and all things green. Tenzin walks as if life is a picnic in a basket. Ash sits on top of the basket. Maggie wonders what happened to all the air. Midafternoon, Maggie hears a sound, far off as if she is only catching the wind that carries the sound. They enter a wide meadow hosting a herd of grazing donkeys. The donkeys are wearing bells. “A donkey concert!” whispers Ash. Some are in costume too, with tasseled, embroidered harnesses and color-striped saddle blankets. Maggie thinks the donkeys look as pious as monks and the bells are like the wind chimes that line the monastery roofs.
Reaching Ulleri, Tenzin finds them rooms at the teahouse Luxmi Lodge. Maggie learns that all teahouse lodgings on the trip will be similar: thin mattress beds in plywood-walled rooms, shared bathrooms, and a large dining room. Cold showers. The food items and the cheap prices on the menus will be exactly the same at each stop. The guides eat by themselves, but Maggie insists Tenzin eat with her. She doesn’t want to talk to Ash in front of all the other trekkers. Ash sulks off in a corner but then turns his gaze out the window to the kitchen gardens and on into the yonder.
Tenzin speaks English, Hindi, Korean, and several local dialects. He shrugs his shoulders; how else can one be a guide? And he is born to it. Sherpa is the name of the occupation of mountain guide. So all guides can be called sherpas, but not all guides belong to the highly regarded ethnic group with the surname of Sherpa. Tenzin Sherpa does.
In the morning Tenzin leads Maggie up the countless staircases cleaved out of the mountains to Ghorepani. The steps are carved out of granite and tree roots and are always, always, always uneven. They climb through a dim forest skirting a stream so clear it lights their passage. Ash plays with the wood faeries because they can see each other. Maggie thinks she is going to die, her heart fast as a hummingbird wing, she starts counting steps fifty at a time. Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, rest. Tenzin is fine.
Other trekkers and guides pass them, fall behind. Porters (Tenzin is not a porter) with large cone-shaped baskets secured by cloth around their foreheads pass them, fall behind. The porters carry everything up the mountains, from banana gum to refrigerators. Every one says Namaste. Hello, goodbye.
They reach Ghorepani, 8,792 feet, and stay a few days at the Nice View Front teahouse because it has a nice view, a large broiler in the dining room which acts as a fireplace, and the apple pie is tarted up with a dollop of peanut butter on top. Tenzin normally wouldn’t sit by the broiler, wouldn’t talk much to his clients. He has usually been part of a bigger group; never alone with just one girl. Just a girl like this one. Mongolia. He knows she’s traveling with a ghost and it doesn’t bother him; his mother does the same.
They drink ginger tea and ginger beer and he tells Maggie that he is at university in Kathmandu for a degree in engineering, but it’s slow progress. He goes to school half a year and then guides half a year to raise tuition and to give money to his parents. After he says this he is embarrassed because he thinks she will think he is angling for a larger tip. He shouldn’t be here, sitting with her. But she one-ups him and says, “I’m here because I killed my brother.” It’s a confession, she has never said the words aloud before. She looks at Ash and his burn scars flare up, or is it just the broiler behind his shadowy self? Tenzin is hesitant to reply. Americans! He is unsure if she is telling a truth or exaggerating. He wants to ask questions. But Tenzin is from a quieter culture, he has a Buddhist understanding of the nature of suffering. Sometimes words should be swallowed. They drink their tea and eat their pie.
Before the dawn Maggie and Tenzin (and Ash) climb from 8,792 feet to 10,531 feet without resting. There is a line of people on the ascent. Seeing the sun come up at Poon Hill is like watching it go down at Key West—it’s a party. Tenzin tells Maggie that Poon is a Mongol tribe name. At the top is a wide knoll with an unobstructed view of the entire Dhaulagiri and Annapurna Range—fifteen massifs. Maggie wanders. She would like it to be quiet. She wants to sear the sight of the mountains into her soul and hear the wind through the prayer flags, the sound of the dry thistle breaking beneath her feet, the small poof of feathers from the passing bird. She would like to hear the sun pull itself over the top of Dhaulagiri and be just quiet enough to hear the snow melt at first light. She wants to hear the ancient memory of the hoofprints of the Golden Horde.
Eventually the trekkers trek back to Ghorepani and the numbers dwindle. But Maggie lingers, even though it is very cold. A plane on its way to Jomson flies by. She is not disappointed. She never expected quiet. But she didn’t expect to hear James Taylor either.
There is always that backpacker with the soul of a minstrel who carries h
is guitar and knows that when the maddening crowd has thinned, his time is at hand. A young national sits on a bench, fifteen mountains behind him, and plays that guitar. He sings a local folk song in Nepalese, and Tenzin finds himself quietly translating the song to Maggie: My heart flutters like silk in the wind. I cannot decide whether to fly or sit on the hilltop. The folk song is followed up with “Fire & Rain” and “You’ve Got a Friend” in English. Ash is smiling like he set this up. Maybe he did. When the minstrel finishes, Maggie knows it’s time to go. They walk back to Ghorepani.
Midmorning the little group heads out for Tadapani farther up the mountains at 8,891 feet. It is a quiet day of walking through the lali gurans—rhododendron trees. The trees have lost their leaves to fall but Maggie imagines the trail of petals in spring. Dhaulagiri comes into view like the giant it is. Tenzin tells her there are only fourteen mountains on earth over an elevation of 26,000 feet. Dhaulagiri is the seventh highest rising out of and creating the Kali Gandaki Gorge, the deepest in the world. Maggie is silenced, to see something so deep.
That evening as the sun falls out of the sky, the clouds gather and they see just the tip of Machapuchare—Fish Tail Mountain—in the distance, rising higher than the clouds, struck end-of-day gold. Tenzin tells Maggie that is the direction they are heading.
The road to Chomrong is downhill, only to climb right back up, almost all of it through a tangle of jungle, thicker than what they have been in before. The light is green and comes in shafts like art lighting in museums. A ray highlights a single tree covered in moss and canopied with ferns, many falling into each other, rotting slowly, others thrusting up. Maggie sees white-faced monkeys. The path leads down staircases of roots. When the sun breaks through, it follows Maggie’s blond hair and puts a halo-light around her.
Eventually they leave the jungle and walk through rice paddy terraces and fields of buckwheat, the trail cutting through front yards. Playing children stop to look, or don’t stop. Trekkers are a common sight. One of the children sees Ash, and she sees him as a toddler. He stops and plays with her, rice pattycake, everyone knows that game, and then catches up.
At last they reach Chomrong, 7,200 feet. Directly across the valley looms Annapurna South, over 26,000 feet; to the east is Machapuchare, over 22,000. Maggie sits out on the stone patio of the Kalpana Lodge drinking ginger tea and watching the late afternoon fan dance of the clouds. From the angle of Chomrong the two-pronged tail of Machapuchare is visible, splashing out of the tide of clouds. Maggie thinks the mountain looks like a Japanese koi. She could draw it on white rice paper with a few black strokes of ink.
Chomrong is a bigger village with terraced farms, a school, and a sports field. It has shops with items from Tibet and there is a German bakery and an Italian pizza parlor, but really they are a Nepal bakery and a Nepal pizza parlor. On the patio of the teahouse, an old woman has set up a small store with knit hats and gloves and intricately sewn scarfs. The merchant says she is from Tibet (she calls it Tea-bet) and Maggie wonders if her life in Chomrong is better than it was in Tibet, and what the term better might actually mean to her. Maggie buys three scarfs—for her mother, Violet, and herself. While she is paying, Tenzin is pleased to find them together, comes over and introduces Maggie to his mother. Dorje. Dorje puts her hands together. Namaste.
Let’s leave them there for a moment …
… And go back some years ago when Dorje stood in the caravansari in Muru Square and took the hand of the Dalai Lama (who wasn’t the Dalai Lama at all).
Now here is a strange thing, and Dorje and the monk both knew it: women don’t touch monks. It is forbidden. But they did it. And for Pradeep it was the first time he had been touched by a woman since his mother hugged him goodbye on the monastery steps when he was six years old. He was the youngest of four boys, his parents could not afford him and so gave him to Buddha, a common thing. Pradeep was never discontent with his life until he held Dorje’s hand. Which is of course exactly why women aren’t allowed to touch monks.
Pradeep took her back to his monastery and she was left with the nuns to regain her health. It took over a year while they fed her little bits of fatty meat and yak cheese and doses of oil and butter tea. The monastery was away from the city, up in the low hills, a very quiet place of bells and the sounds of water and prayer wheels. Dorje found the silence elegant. For in this year of outward silence she screamed on the inside. Each piece of food she ate, could not resist eating, was a slice of guilt.
Dorje believed the only thing she could do to redeem herself was to become a nun. But once a person has been weak in this world, has abandoned what is known to be right, it’s not so hard to do it again, now is it? Pradeep sought out Dorje in the quiet places she liked to go, inside the hay barn where the cats sleep, in the copse of aspens, to the donkey meadow. They never touched again. But a year later, when Pradeep asked Dorje to leave the monastery and marry him, she said yes, yes, yes. Because she did not want to be a hungry ghost, because she wanted to forget, because she wanted to be touched and full. Because he had Dalai Lama eyes.
Pradeep and Dorje were ever poor but they had their son, Tenzin Gyatso Sherpa, and Dorje buried her past somewhere high up in the Himalayas where mostly it stayed under snow.
Dorje invites Maggie to their home for dinner and serves platters and platters of food. They all get a little drunk. The cat jumps up on the table. Maggie kind of falls in love with Dorje. Dorje recognizes that Maggie has some sort of wound and she tries to salve it with a good soup.
Chomrong is the last year-round village stretching out in terraces a thousand feet down to the Modi Khola River. Beyond are only seasonal teahouses to service the trekkers. Maggie and Tenzin (and Ash) cross the river on a suspension bridge that feels like its true job is not to transport travelers to the other side but to weed out the weary and the knock-kneed with a quick, plunging death. Tenzin holds Maggie’s arm for the slow crossing. On the other side they climb right back up into a creaking bamboo thicket. There is only one way into the Annapurna Sanctuary. As they climb higher the jungle recedes and the gorge opens up wide, deep, and vast. The gorge is gorgeous. If Vincent had been allowed to paint there, he would have cut off both his ears, or neither of them. They climb higher and seem at last to meet October. The jungle is gone, the plants more hardscrabble, the vertical cliffs of the canyon split by a hundred nameless falls. Last flowers grow close to the ground and lose a petal even as they pass by. A mist falls from the north and makes the trekkers quiet. Machapuchare is hiding, but they know exactly where.
A lone Nepalese with a light load in his wicker basket and a cheerful Dhaka topi hat emerges from the mist. He carries a fistful of wildflowers. Maggie wonders where has he come from, where is he going? She’ll never know but imagines him with his wife at their dinner table that night, flowers in a jar. It marks the soul of a man who will stop to pick the late last blooms of autumn and carry them the long way home.
The next day they continue the trek through the valley to Machapuchare Base Camp at 12,139 feet, the last stop before Annapurna Base Camp at 13,549. They are high in the mountains now. Tall dried stalks of a summer plant lining the path make a scarecrow sound as they pass. The teahouses emerge in the mist. They have the same blue tin roofs of all the teahouses but appear more solidly built, like barracks. Maggie’s room is small and narrow, lined with windows that the 2:00 a.m. cold will completely ignore.
Maggie and Tenzin (and Ash) bundle up and head out behind the teahouse to climb a steep rise. Tenzin takes her to a place he usually keeps to himself. The mist slips away with the sun and the sky turns that final shade of blue just before black. They head for a line of prayer flags on the far crest. To Maggie they look like forgotten laundry, but if you know how to read them, they tell a story as clearly as a stained-glass window in a church. Lung Ta—Wind Horse, surrounded by four hundred mantras, rides the middle of each flag, a symbol of speed and transformation of bad fortune to good. Te
nzin tells Maggie that Tibetans believe the mantras will be blown by the slightest wind to spread compassion. They are not individual prayers but for the benefit of all. “Including me,” thinks Maggie, standing downwind. The moon comes out from behind one of Machapuchare’s lower peaks, large and oddly shaped as if the thin air can’t quite support the October moon.
That night is ice-on-the-windows cold. Tenzin wakes Maggie at 4:30 a.m. with a knock at her door. Ash wants to sleep in but Maggie makes him come. They climb into the bowl of the Annapurna Sanctuary in a complete surround of very close mountains, not one of them under 20,000 feet high. It’s a clear day and they can see forever.
On the longest day of summer there are only seven hours of daylight in the Sanctuary. Desolate and stark, the mountains command the environment. Maggie thinks they are speaking, if she only had the ear to hear them. Annapurna 1, the tenth-highest mountain on earth, shrugs its shoulder and snow drops like a white velvet cape. The glaciers in the crevices below them creak and creak and then break with a muffled boom. The wind goes where the mountains tell it to go.
The grass at their feet is at year’s end and damp with morning. When they walk, the smell of hay and ice rises. It is a place of Wind Horses, cairns, and avalanche. Tenzin tells Maggie that the Gurang people believed the Sanctuary was the repository for gold left by the Indian serpent-gods, the Nagas. When the sun breaks over the crest of the peaks, the snow is gold, and Maggie believes it. She believes the mountains could get up and walk around if they wanted.
Tenzin is a good guide and he knows when Maggie wants to be alone. She wanders off with Ash, and at last gets her nerve. “Ash,” says Maggie, “can you forgive me for killing you?” She starts to cry. It’s taken her fifteen years and a desperately high walk to ask this question.
