Sin and Zen, #1

by S. W. Stribling

  Arthur and Lotte were also supposed to be heading to Nepal. They would already be there by now. Another reason I wanted the Internet. It would be nice to send them an email to see where they might be.

  They were a funny couple. Not a couple per se, they met on their travels. Yet, like so many other couples who meet traveling, they were fun to watch. A guy alone meets girl alone. They become travel companions. Boy wants girl for lovey, sexy reasons. Girl laughs and keeps boy at arm's length. She likes the company, the free meals and freeboard, but drags along for weeks. It’s so obvious to anybody seeing it from the outside, but they must think they are playing quite the quiet game to themselves.

  I also wanted to check in on my own delusional love, Claudia, and see if she replied to my afternoon email. I told her about my ‘truth’ realization on Love. I was not anxious though, I felt no hurry or worry to read and reply as before. It was such a relief to be so calm, even given my dispute over the hotel and the awkwardness of being the only tourist in this rundown neighborhood.

  I meditated. However, because of a full stomach from two nice-sized egg rolls, the overly loud music, fireworks, and just general Indian traffic noises I only pushed out thirty minutes. The music would have been pleasant I think if played softly. I was just hoping at this point that I would get some sleep.

  The meditation brought to light another positive benefit. After waking up at 4am and having a full day, I felt okay. I was also proud at how my legs and back felt much stronger than they were ten days ago, even five days ago.

  On a more disappointing side, I picked up a pack of smokes. The first of many pillars has fallen.

  Well, time to relax, watch some TV, smoke a cigarette, and dream something that would no doubt resemble Bollywood with the Indian pop music in the background.

  I hoped to find a nice guesthouse in Kathmandu. A warm shower at least. I didn’t mind cold bucket baths, but I felt I deserved some warm water and a clean floor. No offense Air View Guesthouse, but the view of the air in the room is not worth 1000rs.

  I laid my head down, and the music changed. My eyes shut with the walls rattling to Indian rap.

  25

  My three days in Kathmandu weren’t that exciting. I was sick out the ass again. Vomit to boot. Cold rooms and freezing showers.

  I did my shopping, bought everything I needed for my trek and found out not being prepared had its downfalls. I didn’t have a permit to trek, nor a permit to enter the protected areas I would be trekking through. The equipment was cheap and easy enough to find. Too easy to find really, it was the only thing being sold it seemed, besides massages, food, and booze. I liked Kathmandu, but I didn’t take too much advantage of it.

  I met an American and a Canadian while waiting in line to get my trekking permit. They were prepared and had their travel insurance cards and bags packed. I talked about heading up with them, and they said they would wait for me if I got my affairs in order quickly enough.

  I didn’t. I told them I would see them the next day or two on the trail.

  When I finally had everything ready, I grabbed a seven-hour bus ride to Besisahar. The trekking would begin tomorrow. I prayed for my stomach and hoped for my leg.

  IT WAS A ROUGH DAY of marching. Nauseous and weak. Leg. And too much weight. I stopped earlier than I had intended but found the area enchanting. It wasn’t a village, but two metal shacks owned by a family. The family stayed in one shack and rented out rooms in the second shack for travelers.

  It was beautiful, quiet, and peaceful. I stopped in the early afternoon, so the sun was still shining its warm rays against the cool wind. I couldn’t eat anything so I took a book down by the nearby river and read for a few hours. I thought I’d take my bath in the river, but after washing my face, I couldn’t imagine putting my whole self in there. Despite the tropical landscape and warm sun, the water would have been ice if it was still. Looking up the river, I could see my objective. The mountains. The real mountains. Ice-capped, white and gray, and reaching into the clouds.

  I wasn’t sure if I would make it in my current state. There was a comforting thought about just making it as far as I could and then laying down forever. It didn’t scare me and a part of me looked forward to the idea.

  Usually when I think about death, there were a few things that kept me from taking any real action towards it. The first was usually my dog. We were still in the infantile stage of our future together, but there was potential there I couldn’t ignore. Who would take care of him if I wasn’t around? He would no doubt get adopted or put in a shelter, but I didn’t trust people or the world enough to take care of him the way I wanted to take care of him.

  After my dog, I worried about my mother. She always worried, and I was sure my death would crush her to oblivion. The thought of her crying had guided me to stay on this side of the line more than once. Whether I deserved to live I would always debate, but I had no question about whether my mother deserved to cry anymore than she had to. But given my way of living, we barely spoke twice a year, and she could probably live on for a very long time before she ever knew.

  One last thing that usually crossed my mind when debating my life is what to leave behind. Are fading memories of myself enough for me? Or should I write a message? If I wrote a message, it would become a book, and that book would never get finished since I never finish anything. A catch-22 to keep existing.

  Enjoying the sounds, the air, and the view, this freshness of pure nature, I felt at peace with leaving my loved ones and with no message. I almost felt that this was the real reason I had come here. Like the old widows in Varanasi, I came to this world to find peace with myself and then face my end. There was no logical debate to be made, I offered nothing to the world, and took much more than I gave. They say taking your own life is selfish because you are taking away from your loved ones. I saw my existence as selfish, because I took away from my loved ones more alive than I ever would gone.

  I even started to think my whole life was coming to this point. I joined the military to get away, and when that wasn’t far enough, I joined the Legion without a word to anybody to inch closer to the final goodbye in a step-by-step method.

  Now it would soon be time. To take the final step of fading into everything and nothing. I felt at peace and I slept well that night.

  26

  I felt much better the next day. I had Tibetan bread and jam for breakfast with more chai. No vomiting or runs, and I was almost pissing like normal.

  I made it to a small village for lunch where I had some spicy fried pasta with tuna. It was nice and needed, and I held it down. My body was sore and my leg had some rough patches, but it didn’t seem too dilapidating. I ran into the American and the French-Canadian girl (of Vietnamese origin) I had met at the trekking permit line. She spoke to the goats for our entertainment. They both seemed like good people and like-minded. It was welcome to have the company.

  I finished the day early again, only walking for about five hours in total. I could see how out of shape I was. I even unloaded a pair of pants and shirt at my previous stop to take off some of my weight. I doubt it really changed much of the weight, but I figured two pairs of pants and a few shirts was enough. It was the socks and underwear I needed more than anything and I doubted I’d bathe every day.

  The views continued to be amazing as I advanced further and further into the wild. I was told that the circuit I was on would lead me through thirteen different micro-climate zones, starting with tropical where I was now up to the mountain tundra at the top of the mountain pass I was planning to cross.

  I pretended to be a photographer to myself, taking pictures of landscapes, village locals, and colorful spiders I had never seen before. It was a cheap pocket digital camera that did no justice to the image, the idea, and the beauty of all that my eyes were trying to capture. It was living poetry, a poetry that words would always come short describing, and I wanted to drink it all.

  WE WERE FOLLOWING A river and continued to do so. T
he walk with my two companions was exactly what I wanted it to be. During the walk, we each had our own pace, usually within sight of one another and taking small breaks together along the way.

  Matt, the American, was well read in philosophy and knew the names of ideas I did not know had names. We would take these philosophical breaks from time to time while we waited for our third companion to catch up. She was slower in pace. A small girl, but she never not smiled, her spirit seemed unbreakable. I looked at myself, and though I compared my mental and physical strength to be a fraction of what it used to be, my spirit seemed healthier than ever. I wasn’t entirely sure what a spirit was or if it even existed, but something felt right in me despite the years of inactivity and substance abuse after shattering my femur in the Legion. Whatever this spirit was, it was no doubt the only thing keeping me going.

  Maybe Matt could enlighten me on this subject. Until then, I would continue to search for my answers in the waterfalls and flowers that populated our mission.

  WE WALKED, AND WE WALKED. Too many waterfalls to count and the climate zone was changing. We were near 2600 meters now and the pine trees and smell of the much cooler air gave me nostalgia of my youth. The annual Thanksgiving trip with my dad and brother to deer camp. It was always one of my favorite times of the year when I was young. Besides waking up before dark to sit in a tree freezing my ass off for hours waiting for a deer to come to us and only seeing squirrels, I loved the day where nobody would hunt and I would run through the woods alone, creating stories in my head of fantastic villains and devastating wars that I had to save the world from. I still got the urge to grab a stick and sword fight imaginary enemies whenever I found myself in this reminiscent state.

  Unfortunately, the weather didn’t get warmer as we climbed higher and higher. The same effect seemed to work on the water. The only advantage I could see from taking showers with a hose from the river was how warm you felt in the cold after the shower was over.

  I was using work gloves rather than any gloves that provided warmth or water protection, and I was entering a state where I could not feel my hands for the foreseeable future. My sleeping bag was an old army summer-weight bag that did not keep me warm at night in the Himalayan mountains. Coldness had become my closest friend.

  I could only laugh at myself and how unprepared I was. I shivered until I was too tired to care and finally fell asleep wondering how many more nights I would have to feel like this, and if I would even make it back in time to catch my flight.

  I laughed at myself more.

  27

  We started our fifth day of trekking, leaving Timang. The day started well as we went non-stop for the first three hours. Finding a nice place to grab some water, I figured a water break was in order. I finished my water while I waited for the others to catch up.

  Like clockwork, Matt was about five minutes behind me, and Cathy about five minutes behind him. It had been a fairly easy morning being mostly flat, uncharacteristically flat for Nepal. Out of the trees, we sat down on a rock near the river and basked in the warming, rising sun.

  ‘Feels good to get a nice walk like that.’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Matt said, ‘It feels like we are finally making some good ground, we should make it one town further than planned, I think.’

  ‘Is our turtle up for it?’ I said looking at Cathy.

  She smiled. ‘Yep.’ she said. She was always smiling; I didn’t know how she did it.

  I got up to fill my water bottle and put in the water-purifying iodine capsule. I think I’m supposed to wait thirty minutes for drinking it. Matt got up and filled his too. He had a bottle that filtered and purified it immediately.

  Cathy didn’t need any more water. I think she could walk for days without trouble. She probably just kept at our pace to keep us company. She was French-Canadian, which meant she spoke both English and French fluently, French with more ease than English, but we mostly spoke English, unless Matt wasn’t around, then we would talk a bit in French. She also spoke Vietnamese, her parents moved to Canada as adults, and so she grew up in a house that spoke all three languages.

  What connected with me about her was her demeanor. It was also her look, but mostly her Zen poise and presence. The whole small, cute Asian and Zen thing could be attractive enough on its own, but she reminded me of a character from a book I had read when I was younger. It was a fantasy type book, not books I read often, but I must have read about 20 books by this one author named R.A. Salvatore. Most of the books I read by him were about a character named Drizzt. They were good stories. Then I read one of his books that went away from the normal direction of these fantasy books. He made a cleric, a medicine man of sorts, the protagonist. Apparently few people do that since clerics are usually the less exciting characters, but he did, he wrote five of them I think for the series, and I read all five. The heroine and girlfriend of the series was a small Asian monk, very Zen and very strong. I fell in love with her in the book as the protagonist already had. I started to imagine Cathy staying behind us so should break boulders with her bare hands. It was good to have a badass monk in the group.

  Matt was a manager during the day, an aikido trainer by evening, and a philosopher by study. He made a good protagonist too. I wondered what that made me on this adventure.

  I had a Snickers bar while listening to the two of them talk. The sun was out, and it looked like we would walk in it for some time, so we took off our coats and started to get ready to head back out. I gave them the ‘ready?’ look and Cathy confirmed it by getting up and putting her bag on. Matt kept to his bottle of water and told us to head on up. He would refill and then be on his way.

  Cathy and I started ambling away and exchanged a few words about the area and the trip. We hadn’t had any deep conversations yet, and I thought she was the more reserved type, friendly but reserved. She probably thought I was reserved too.

  We were in a flat area and so after about 200 meters I looked back to see if Matt had left yet. He had and wasn’t too far behind us.

  It didn’t take too long before the flat dirt road turned into a rocky up, up, and up climb. This is usually where I got out ahead. Not because I am physically stronger, I think it was just the old army mentality of ‘attack, attack, attack’ when facing a hill.

  It was windy and steep and I knew I would lose them quickly if I went on too long without them. So after about 30 minutes of walking up, I stopped to make sure they weren’t too far behind. After five minutes, I didn’t see anybody, so I sat on a rock to give a little relief from my bag without taking it off. After about ten minutes, I saw Cathy, her slow and steady pace was inspiring, no heavy breathing or signs of struggle. Just one foot in front of the other, a look up at me, and the same smile she has carried the entire trip.

  I was worried though when I didn’t see Matt with her. It’s true after the first couple of hours he usually lost momentum. So Cathy and I waited another 15 minutes with no sign of Matt. I started to head back down. I eventually found him and we headed back up to where Cathy was waiting. Matt looked exhausted, and we decided to stop one city shorter than planned. Originally, our plan had been Pisang.

  We waited ten more minutes for Matt to rest, but it wasn’t enough. He promised to catch up soon. I waited a few more minutes anyway and let Cathy get a head start. I gave him my second candy bar and told him to eat it for the energy boost. After he finally agreed, I left and saw him start not long after me.

  It was another steep climb, steeper than before, and it looked like there were a few different ways to get up. I took the more direct, steep way to avoid the Nepalese train.

  These Nepalese guys were no bigger than me, smaller even, and they were carrying logs on their backs up these hills. As if climbing with that weight wasn’t enough, maneuvering through the forest trail we were now on couldn’t have made it easier. I wasn’t even sure I could carry that weight. It was incredible. I took a picture. I remembered the guys in the Legion from Nepal, and now I knew why marching
was never a problem for them. I thought I was tough carrying the same bag as the big 120k boys that populated the Legion, but the Nepalese guys, like me, being half their weight, even made them look bad. Mountains and heavyweight meant nothing to these Gurkha warriors.

  It was a good climb, but I didn’t stop until it leveled off, which only took about 15 minutes taking the most direct path. I hadn’t seen Cathy when going up, but I assumed she would be okay, and sure enough, she arrived just after I did.

  This time we waited nearly thirty minutes before I headed down to look for Matt again. I walked all the way to where we left him and I didn’t see him. I took a different trail back up and still no dice. We asked every passersby if they had seen him and it seemed he had never passed by this way.

  It was getting dark and cold, and it had been an hour since we started waiting for him. We assumed he found another way and made the decision to wait for him at the next town.

  Sure enough, he had made it to town. He found a main road that the trucks used and followed it the rest of the way. He was waiting for us at the town's edge. He had made it so early that he checked every guest house in the town for us before settling on one and then heading back to the town entrance to wait for us.

  We called it a day and headed to the guest house he got for us and had dinner and a few beers. The beer went straight to my head. It felt nice. Intoxicating.

  ‘Fuck.’ I said. ‘It feels good to sit down and have a drink today.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Matt said. ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Maybe we should stay closer from now on.’ Cathy said.

  We agreed. There was tension in the conversation as we all seemed frustrated and demoralized. We ate. Matt left to grab a shower and head to his room. I got another beer and Cathy stayed with me.