Among Flowers Read online

  –two pairs of polypro long johns, tops and bottoms

  –three polypro t-shirts

  –two light weight pants, one which converts to shorts

  –one pair of hiking shorts

  –six pairs of socks and six pairs of sock liners

  –one good pair of gloves and five pairs of lightweight glove liners (these are good as they are comfortable to wear during the chilly days without having to wear gloves)

  –one wool sweater

  –one down vest

  –rain parka and rain pants

  –one long-sleeved soft fleece jacket to wear in the camp at night

  –a warm pair of camp pants—comfy insulated pants that I will only wear at night. I will sleep in my long johns.

  –Come up with a suit of clothes that you will only wear at the end of the day after hiking is over; it is rather nice to change into something that is basically clean, warm, and dry.

  –I bought a good insulated sleeping-bag pad. This is important—do not buy an inflatable one. This will keep you warmer and more comfortable than anything else.

  –two water bottles—important

  –two pairs of sunglasses in case one is broken or lost—absolutely necessary to have these as we will be in snow in full sun.

  I have brought three courses of Cipro and I suggest you get your doctor to give you three as well—I am also going to take Pepto-Bismol tabs in Kathmandu as sort of a prophylactic—they say it works. If we get food poisoning, it will be in Kathmandu—we will be perfectly fine while on the trail as long as we only drink boiled water. Damn—I forgot to bring along iodine tablets for water purification. Would you please pick up a bottle for us? I might be able to buy in Kathmandu but not sure. Generally we don’t need them, however, during the beginning of the trek and again at the end, it is HOT hiking and at least I go through gallons of drinking water a day.

  As I mentioned before, get a prescription for altitude sickness—they will know which it is. We are destined to sleep poorly when we get that high—but at least we will have each other to talk to during the night. I experience this really awful oxygen deprivation/panic attack thing for the first few nights above 10,000 feet. The drugs really help that.

  I have brought plenty of foot dressing, blister treatment, so you don’t have to bother with that.

  I still do not have your flight details and they will need this in order to meet you at the airport in Kathmandu. I hope we can fly together home—at least to Bangkok—and go out for some luxurious feast to celebrate the end of this experience. I arrive in Bangkok on the 3rd and leave for home on the 5th.

  You will need money only in Kathmandu and in transit for meals and lodging (easily we can live for $50/day, I think). I cannot recall if our hotel, the Norbu Linka, takes credit cards or not. Kathmandu is fun, and fun for shopping too—We will have such a good time there together.

  Sue and Bleddyn in full swing of training for this—taking six-mile mountain hikes every day, it sounds. Sue will not be in great shape for this, but you two will get along quite well. She is a dear and a trouper. Bleddyn is the one that dove off the cliff after Jennifer when she fell in 1995. He will be very good to have along for us both.

  This is going to be so fun Jams—an experience that we will never forget and you will tell your grandchildren … (There are none yet, are there?)

  Much love—my best to Harold and Annie. I am sorry that Harold is not coming along but it will happen next time, yes?

  Dan

  I had faithfully gone to a store nearby that sells just these sort of clothes, clothes for people who are going mountain climbing or hiking, or just generally going to spend time outdoors for the sheer pleasure of it. I bought everything on Dan’s list, though not in the quantities he recommended (more underwear, less socks, sock liners, and glove liners).

  My hotel was in that area of Kathmandu called the Thamel District. It is a special area, like a little village separate from the rest of the city. It is filled with shops and restaurants and native European people, who look poor, dirty, and bedraggled. But this is a look of luxury really, for these people are travelers, at any minute they can get up and go home. I had read so much about European travelers in Kathmandu, none of it leaving a good impression; seeing these people then in that place did not make me think I ought to change my mind. Of course, I was traveling with Dan, who is of European descent, but Dan had a real purpose for being in Kathmandu: he is a plantsman, and a gardener, and such a person needs plants. There are many plants worthy of being in a garden in Nepal; Kathmandu is the capital of Nepal.

  But to think of Kathmandu again: when I suddenly was in the middle of that part of it, the Thamel, I was reminded of feelings I had when I was a child, of going to something called “the fair,” something beyond the every day, something that would end when I was not asleep, when I was not in a dream. I did truly feel as if I was in the unreal, the magical, extraordinary. People seemed as if they had no purpose to being themselves, as if the only reason to be there was just to be there. The tiny streets came to an end abruptly, going immediately from the confusion of authentic and imposter to the solidly real, and the real was always poor and deprived and self-contained. Just outside the window of my hotel was an area enclosed by concrete, of perhaps forty feet by forty feet. It had pipes, with water constantly pouring out of them—it was a communal place for doing things that required water. People were bathing, washing their clothes, or filling up utensils with water. Because of my own particular history, every person I saw in this situation seemed familiar to me. But then again, because of my own particular history, every person I saw in the Thamel was familiar also. The person in the restaurant complaining about the lack of some luxury was familiar, the person at the public baths longing for luxuries of every kind was familiar, the person confused and in a quandary was familiar.

  On the night of that first day I spent in Kathmandu, we ate dinner at a Thai restaurant. I cannot now remember what I ate. I did notice that my companions, Dan and Sue and Bleddyn, seemed especially kind and gentle toward me. I thought then that it was because I kept looking up for bats; I am very afraid of them. In Roy Lancaster’s book about his travels in Nepal, he mentions the fruit bats in Kathmandu, saying that they look like weathered prunes, and the idea that bats could look like something to eat was unsettling. I had not seen the fruit bats in any tree so far, and so while sitting at dinner, since we were outside, I kept looking out for them. I thought I would see them swooping around in the deep blue-black night air, hoping to realize the sole purpose of their existence: settling into my hair. But I never saw them, not even one. My companions’ kind concern toward me was because going back and forth in back of me was a very busy other kind of mammal, a rat. Eventually, I saw it, and I freaked out but only a little. I made a tiny squeal, I shuddered a little bit, but it was as if instinctively things were immediately being put in perspective: what is a lone rat scurrying in a small restaurant in a crowded city next to a small village situated in the foothills of the Himalaya full of Maoist guerrillas with guns?

  I awoke the next morning to the sounds of the Himalayan crow crowing outside. It is a beautiful bird, black-feathered like the crows I am used to seeing but with a broadish band of gray around its neck. This band of gray is more like a decorative belt than a necklace, and it makes the crow seem less menacing, more friendly, as if it is not capable of the devious cunning of the crows I am used to seeing here in North America. And when seen from afar, a large number of them grouped together winging their way toward some unknown-to-me destination, they looked like a thin, worn, ragged piece of darkened cloth adrift.

  I went to breakfast and ate something with curry and mango and bananas, doing this with a feeling of getting into the local spirit of things. The king had dismissed Parliament, and I wondered how that would affect our trip, for the king’s dismissing Parliament had something to do with the Maoist guerrillas, and I was going into the countryside where the Maoist guerrillas might be,
and since they couldn’t kill the king would they kill me instead? What was I doing in a world in which king and Maoists were in mortal conflict? The irony of me getting into the local spirit of things was not lost on me, but this feeling of estrangement was soon replaced altogether with a sense of being lost in amazement and wonder and awe. From time to time I lost a sense of who I was, what I thought myself to be, what I knew to be my own true self, but this did not make me panic or become full of fear. I only viewed everything I came upon with complete acceptance, as if I expected there to be no border between myself and what I was seeing before me, no border between myself and my day-to-day existence. My tent, for instance: I loved my tent and would have probably died for it, and am now so glad things never came to that.

  After breakfast, I sorted out my luggage, putting away my traveling clothes and shoes and jewelry in a plastic bag, leaving them with the hotel for safekeeping. All four of us had to do this, and this little event suddenly filled us with the excitement of what we were about to do. There was a lot of running up and down the hallway, into each other’s rooms, and asking questions about who had what and did they have enough of it. A last-minute run to a bank, for me, and finding it closed; running to another one and finding it also closed, but it had a cash machine. I was told I needed a certain amount of money so that, at the end of our journey, I would be able to tip the porters and Sherpas properly. And then I was with my companions and our Sherpa guide, a man named Sunam, in a little bus heading toward the airport. On our way to the airport we passed by the Royal Palace, where the king and his family live, and I should have been properly interested in that, but I was not at all. Along the palace walls are some enormous trees, junipers, and in them were fruit bats hanging upside down and asleep. I so badly wanted to see them. I craned my neck out the window, looking up as the bus in a swift crawl passed by, but I could not see them. They were there; everyone, even the driver, could see them, but I could not. Dan would say, “There’s some, there’s some,” but my poor eyes, influenced by a combination of the anxiety, wonder, and strange happiness that I was feeling, could not see the fruit bats. We boarded an airplane that made my anxiety dominate all the other feelings. It resembled something my children would play with in the bathtub, rounded and dullishly smoothed, like an old-fashioned view of the way things will look in the old-fashioned future, not pointed and harshly shiny like the future I am used to living in now.

  And so we left Kathmandu and flew to Tumlingtar, a village in the Arun River valley. We were not long in the air when the scene changed from crowded city to high green hills. I would have called the hills mountains, but surrounding the hills, in back of the hills, were taller heights covered with snow. These hills ended in sharp, pointed peaks and they were tightly packed one against the other, and covered in what seemed to be an everlasting and inviting green. It was my first view of the geography of the Himalaya. From inside the plane it seemed to me as if we were always about to collide with these sharp green peaks; I especially thought this would be true when I saw one of the pilots reading the day’s newspaper, but when I told this to Dan, he said that the other times he flew in this part of the world, the pilots always read the newspaper and it did not seem to affect the flight in a bad way. He then showed me the Arun River, a body of water that I came to count on for many days afterward, as a friendly reference. We landed at Tumlingtar at three o’clock in the afternoon. It was ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit, and I knew without doubt that such a thing—ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit at three o’clock in the afternoon—was a normal occurrence.

  The plane had seemed to drop out of the sky. I was worried about it landing, as I had been worried about it getting up into the air and staying there. It didn’t so much land as it seemed to be skidding across a field of short green grass. We alighted and I put on my backpack, got my walking stick, and walked out toward our campsite, which I could see was just beyond the area of the airport. The airport itself was occupied by soldiers, evidence of the dreaded Maoists, and they were wearing blue-colored camouflage fatigues. Why blue, and not green (for forest) or brown (for desert), did not remain a mystery for too long. In Nepal, the sky is a part of your consciousness, you look up as much as you look down. As much as I looked down to see where I should place my feet, I looked up to see the sky because so much of what happened up there determined the earth on which I stood. The sky everywhere is on the whole blue; from time to time, it deviates from that; in Nepal it deviated from that more than I was used to, and it often did so with a quickness that brought to my mind a deranged personality, or just ordinary mental instability.

  What I was about to do, what I had in mind to do, what I had planned for more than a year to do, was still a mystery to me. I was on the edge of it, though. Here I was in a village in the foothills of the Himalaya. I could still remember the feeling of living in a village in the mountains of Vermont. I could remember that when I spoke, everybody I knew, everybody I was talking to, understood me quite well. I could remember the school building in my village, a nice, very big red brick building that was properly ventilated and properly heated and had all sorts of necessities and comforts, and yet I had found much fault with it and had refused to send my children to school there. I could remember the firehouse just down the hill from where I live and the kind people who volunteer their life to taking care of it and rescuing me if I should need rescuing. I could remember my house with its convenient and fantastic plumbing and water to be had any time I needed it, just by opening the tap in my fantastically equipped kitchen. I could remember my doctor, a man named Henry Lodge, who I often believe exists solely to reassure me that I am not about to drop dead from some imagined catastrophic illness. I could still remember my supermarket, The Price Chopper, overflowing with fruits and vegetables from Florida, California, or Chile, just so I could choose to buy or not buy, strawberries for instance, in summer, winter, any time I liked.

  I walked into our camp, something I would do for many days to come, an hour after our plane landed. That sight of the tents and people milling around would become familiar to me. There were three tents set up, one for Sue and Bleddyn, one for Dan, and one for me. But Dan and I were appalled at spending our nights in separate tents, and so we immediately told Sunam that we wanted to sleep in the same tent and that the tent meant for one of us should become the baggage tent. Perhaps he was used to people like us, perhaps something from his own culture informed him that this was not a bad thing, perhaps he knew that there were more important things in this world than who slept in the same tent with whom; he said okay, that word exactly, “Okay,” he said.

  I put my backpack inside my tent and while doing that realized that it was an inferno in there. I came out and realized it was an inferno out there. I was wearing some wonderful pedal pusher–type hiking pants—bought at a store in Vermont where all things regarding the outdoors are presented as fashionable—woolen socks, sturdy and altogether well-made boots, a T-shirt made of some microfiber or other. It would have been nice to be wearing less.

  I then met my other traveling companions, the people who would make my journey through the Himalaya a pleasure. There was Cook; his real name was so difficult to pronounce, I could not do it then and I cannot do it now. There was his assistant, but we called him “Table,” and I remember him now as “Table” because he carried the table and the four chairs on which we sat for breakfast and dinner. Lunch we ate out of our laps. There was another man who assisted in the kitchen department and I could not remember his name either, but we all came to call him “I Love You,” because on the second day we were all together as a group, he overheard me saying to my son, Harold, after a long conversation on the satellite telephone, “I love you,” and when he saw me afterward, he said in a mocking way, “I love you,” and we all, Sue, Bleddyn, Dan, and I, laughed hard at this. He was a very good-looking man in any Himalayan atmosphere and light, and once, many days afterward, when we were very high up and it was very cold, he took a silk scarf he mostly wore
around his neck and placed it bonnet-fashion on his head, and then tying it under his chin he looked like Judy Garland, if she had come from somewhere in Asia. But Judy Garland or no, we could never remember his real name, and always he was known as “I Love You.” Apart from Sunam, our other personal Sherpas were named Mingma and Thile. There were many other people, all attached to our party, and they were so important to my safety and general well-being but I could never remember their proper names, I could only remember the person who carried my bag, and this from looking at his face when I saw him pick up my bag in the morning. This is not at all a reflection of the relationship between power and powerless, the waiter and the diner, or anything that would resemble it. This was only a reflection of my own anxiety, my own unease, my own sense of ennui, my own personal fragility. I have never been so uncomfortable, so out of my own skin in my entire life, and yet not once did I wish to leave, not once did I regret being there.

  We walked into Tumlingtar to see what it was like and also to buy something, anything. We thought, beer would do. Our camp was pitched in an almost already-harvested field of something, a non-vining bean or a legume of some kind. On the other side of the field was another set of trekkers, real trekkers, people who were going off to camp at the base camp area of Makalu, not people like us, who were only going to collect seeds of flowers. One group was from Austria but we decided to call them the Germans, because we didn’t like them from the look of them, they were so professional-looking with all kinds of hiking gear, all meant to make the act of hiking easier, I think. But we didn’t like them, and Germans seem to be the one group of people left that can not be liked just because you feel like it. The other group was from Spain. It was to them I turned when I could not make my satellite telephone work. They couldn’t make it work either. One night later, when I was especially worried about Harold, I looked hard at the telephone and saw that the antenna was loose and only needed me to snap it in place.