Among Flowers Read online

  The main road in Tumlingtar was not like a road I was used to: paved with tar and a yellow line down the middle, it was more like a wide, well-worn path. It is a trailhead for going to Mount Everest or Makalu and so people there are quite used to seeing some of the other people in the world. They were used to seeing people who looked like Bleddyn, Sue, and Dan, people of European descent. They were not used to seeing people like me, someone of African descent, but they knew of our existence. I noticed that women in general and old people and children were very friendly and spoke to us with a smile and in a friendly way. The men did not. They looked us up and down and did not speak to us at all, only to each other about us. It was in Tumlingtar that I bought a pair of rubber flip-flops. They were stacked up, in every store we passed, all of them the same. In fact all the stores carried the same things, but I was sure that there were some differences between them that would be obvious to their regular patrons and not at all to me. We walked to the very last building in Tumlingtar and found it to be a restaurant with a patio and proper restaurant tables and chairs. We sat down and ordered beer. It was not ice cold and this was not important. From there we could see up into the hills where people were living, and the houses were surrounded by neatly terraced gardens where mostly food was growing, and we could see cows and chickens, a very familiar domestic kind of situation. It was here we met the sole schoolteacher for all the pupils who went to school in Tumlingtar and the health-care provider for all the people who needed health care in this town. The schoolteacher took us to his school and the four us felt that a good thing to do when we came back to our own overly prosperous lives would be to send money or books to him when we returned home. It was the way we felt then and the way I still feel now as I am writing this. But it only remains a feeling, a strong feeling. I have done nothing to make this something beyond my feelings. I asked the health worker what were the most common diseases to afflict people and he said headaches and fevers and accidents, so I said the word AIDS, and he said the word sometimes. It was almost dark by the time we returned to our tents. There weren’t any electric streetlights or television, or any other distraction from the warm and soft blackness of the night.

  We had our dinner in the dining tent, a large blue tent inside which we could stand up, not the small sleeping tent. Inside the tent was a small collapsible table like one used for playing cards and four collapsible metal chairs. The table was covered with a nice blue tablecloth and set with eating utensils and paper napkins. The civility of this stunned me. When I saw the man whose job it was to carry the table and chairs wherever we went, I was appalled that someone had to carry this whole set of civility, especially when so many times it would have been far more comfortable to sit on the ground with our legs tucked under us. And we could not pronounce or even remember this man’s name, and that is how we came to call him “Table.” He was always among the last to leave camp because he cleaned up after us, and the first to arrive wherever we were going, to make things ready for us.

  We went to bed at around nine o’clock that night, the latest we were up. There was still the excitement of the new, there was still lots of chatter and lingering. In any case, we were not tired. Dan and I lay in our tent laughing and chatting for such a long, loud time that the next day Sue and Bleddyn asked us to tell them what was so funny. It was only Dan telling me about a journey he had just made to South Africa with another botanist and how awkward it had been to observe someone who was married, and having an affair, start up yet another affair, and the unexpected arrival of the lover who was not the husband, bearing flowers and chocolates. That night too, I began reading The Kanchenjunga Adventure, Frank Smythe’s book about an attempt made to climb Kanchenjunga in 1930, a book I had bought at the Pilgrims Book House in Kathmandu. Until that moment I don’t think I had ever heard the name Kanchenjunga before. But I was drawn to it as if a spell had been cast over me; first the book and then the mountain, and all the way on my walk, there was nothing I wanted to see more. For my twenty some days I spent walking among the hills of the Himalaya, I lugged this book around; and for many days after I got back, this book was like a child’s comforter to me.

  To Khandbari: Dan and Bleddyn seem to have gone over the map again and again. Should we go by the way of Jaljale Himal and the Milke Danda, more or less the way they had gone before in 1996, or should they go another way, the first three days of which would be the same as the last three days of that 1996 trip? They went back and forth, finally deciding that yes, the first three days of this trip should repeat the route of the last three days of the 1996 trip. This decision was of great importance to these two nurserymen, for a seed-collecting journey is so difficult. Every square foot of terrain must be carefully pored over so that not a single garden-worthy plant is missed, the poor collector not knowing if he will ever be able to come this way again. A true nurseryman is a gardener, a gardener is a person of all kinds, but in particular a gardener is a person who at least once in the gardening year feels the urge to possess completely at least one plant. This form of possession excludes mere buying or being one of the three people in the world who owns something that is variegated or double flowering when the norm is not. This form of possession comes from seeing something in seed on the knife-sharp edge of a precipice and collecting those seeds, and only after the seeds are in a bag realizing that for a few seconds possibly your life was in question. You can hear this form of possession in the voice of someone who will utter a sentence like this: “I saw some Codonopsis growing up there, couldn’t tell which one it was but I took seeds anyway.” That is no ordinary sentence said in an ordinary voice. The person who says such a sentence is in a complicated state of craving, for they are aware that they haven’t invented Codonopsis, but having found it in its natural growing area, a place where most people who grow Codonopsis as an ornament would shun living, they feel godlike, as if they had invented Codonopsis, as if without them no one growing Codonopsis as an ornament would do so. Dan and Bleddyn are nurserymen. Sue, of course is a nurseryman too, but she is a different kind of nurseryman. Sue was always quite happy to point out to Bleddyn and Dan a plant in seed as she walked along to our destination.

  The nurserymen had decided we would follow the Arun River, spend a day going up the banks of the Barun River starting where it emptied into the Arun, then come back to the Arun leaving it behind when we turned to go toward the fabled village of Thudam.

  That first morning, that very first morning after we left Kathmandu, would soon become routine: being awoken at half past five by Table, who brought us a cup of hot tea and a basin of hot water for washing up. I love to be in bed and hate getting out of it quickly, so I lingered then, and always lingered every morning after that. Dan was always first out of our tent, immediately packing up his sleeping bag and mattress, making ready his day pack; and then performing a set of calisthenics—sits-ups and push-ups, all adding up to five hundred repetitions. That first morning when I saw him stretching and twisting, it looked like such a good idea I decided to join him the next day. In the days to come my enthusiasm waxed, waned, and disappeared altogether in that order, and that quickly.

  It was already hot at six o’clock in the morning. We had a delicious breakfast of omelet, oatmeal porridge with hot milk, and pancakes. The morning was beautiful, the sky was blue, not the impersonal blue of the sky that I was used to, but as if it was specially tinted that way; and even though it was a wide open sky, very big, it felt confined, as if it was more like a ceiling than a sky. And this confusing notion—sky or ceiling—only grew more so; for a sky is a part of the earth, it is the thing to which you might be exposed, the unfeeling elements raining down on you come from the sky; a ceiling, on the other hand, is the structure that protects you from the sky.

  At exactly half past seven in the morning we left camp. We walked through the town of Tumlingtar, the very way we had been the afternoon before where we had met the schoolteacher and the health-care worker, but I didn’t see either of them. I did
n’t see anyone from the evening before and I left the place with a feeling of theoretical sadness, for it was sad that I might never, would never, see any of these people again, or see this place again, and a final parting is a time to feel sad. And so I walked out of the village, up my first official incline. It wasn’t at all a very big one, but since I had never just walked up a hill as an everyday thing, I usually drove up a hill as an everyday occurrence, I felt challenged by it. Also, I was influenced by people’s warnings about heights and sudden exertion and Himalayan heat. I walked up the incline and thought how good to get that over with and saw that there was another incline and another incline, but then there was a leveling off, but then there were more inclines and then the heat got hot. The path we were walking on was the size of a narrow road, gouged out of the red clay. We walked up a gradual incline, the sun getting a hot I had never known. Up, up we walked, each plateau the beginning of a new, gradual ascent. By midmorning we had gained some height—I could see that—I could look back and see where we had been. But I was used to going somewhere and arriving quickly, and so had to clamp down on feeling impatient. And, there was nothing to collect, certainly nothing I could grow from this climate in the one in which I actually live. I could see Ricinus, marigold, and Datura, Cosmos, sunflowers growing in people’s gardens, and also plots of corn. Below us was the broad, flowing Arun, winding its way down to the Ganges. We passed people who seemed native to India, other people who seemed native to Nepal, and other people who seemed from somewhere in between.

  I cannot tell now exactly when in those first few hours of the morning on my journey that my understanding of distances collapsed. I walked through the town of Tumlingtar and the way out led to a sharp incline and then to a set of houses surrounded by cultivated plots that seemed to be resting on a plateau, level ground, but the ground was never level for long, and suddenly, or eventually, I was climbing again, going up and up, and the going up seemed sudden, surprisingly new, for I had not expected it. For those first few hours, I was expecting the landscape to conform to the landscape with which I was familiar, gentle incline after gentle incline, culminating in a resolution of a spectacular arrangement of the final resting place of some geographical catastrophe. But this was not so. I walked up toward a ridge, and I thought that when reaching the ridge my whole being would come to something, the something that had made me there in the first place. But this was never to be so. The Himalaya destroys notions of distance and time, I thought then, plant-hunting destroys all sorts of notions, but this I have always known.

  Nepalese gathering Rhododendron, their primary fuel source

  The road then, sometimes as wide as a dirt driveway in Vermont, sometimes no bigger than a quarter of that, was red clay unfolding upward; the top of each climb was the bottom of another. By midmorning my senses were addled. It took me many days to realize, to accept really that I was going up; it took me many days to understand how far up up was, how there was no real up, how going up was just a way of going there. I began to have a nervous collapse, but fortunately there was no one in my company, botanist, Sherpas, and porters, to whom I could make my predicament matter. Dan had told me of the practice in Nepal of planting two Ficus trees together, Ficus benghalensis and Ficus religiosa, providing shade for the traveler, who from time to time turns out to be people like us. We passed by three such plantings and stopped to drink water, and then at the fourth one we stopped for lunch. As we walked we had been accompanied by a band of children, though not the same ones all the time. As some of them left, others would take their place. When we stopped for lunch, they crowded around and stared at us in silence. They watched us as we ate our lunch. It felt odd but also seemed fair: we were in their country looking at their landscape after all. That day, our first day of stopping to eat lunch, began with cups of hot orangeade, a drink that seemed then extravagant and unnecessary, tasting so hot and sweet, but later we would come to count on and look forward to it. According to the watch I wore on my left hand, a watch that was equipped to do all sorts of things that I could not make sense of, tell direction for one, it was ninety-six degrees and we were in the full heat of the sun all the time we walked. Sue had been walking with her umbrella open, shading herself. When in Kathmandu she had told me about bringing along an umbrella, I had secretly thought it an unnecessary thing to do; now I saw why and I could only look at her with envy.

  We continued on our way that afternoon, the scenery remaining the same as the morning, except we came upon a family who lived in a small house that was in the shade of a huge citrus tree, a tree with fruits larger than grapefruits. At about half past one we came into Khandbari, a town that had telephones connected to the world from which I had just come. I called my son, Harold, spoke not to him but to someone who could say to him that I had called him, and went from feeling pleased with myself for that to feeling sad because I had not been able to tell him that I loved him myself. By that time, it was less than a week since I had been away from my home, but I began to wonder what exactly separated me from their memory of me. I was not dead, but might I as well be? Still, might-as-well is different from the certainty.

  We passed through Khandbari and almost got into trouble because Dan had left his passport in Kathmandu and Khandbari had a checkpoint. I saw Sunam, our lead Sherpa and guide, speaking to a man in military uniform with an intensity and rapidity I had only seen in movies, and so had thought invented for presentation in a theatrical situation, but it worked in the same way; we were allowed to go on. We reached the place where we would spend the night, a village called Mani Bhanjyang, but the best spots had been taken by the two groups of trekkers who were on our same route. They were going to Makalu Base Camp, and we were on the same route as they for the next two days. Sunam found a place for us to camp down from that in the middle of a field, the only other level piece of earth in the vicinity. We were thirty-seven hundred feet up and even then the sky was beginning to be darker and more curved than I had ever known it to be. That night, I called Harold on my satellite phone and spoke to him directly.

  It was that next morning that I began to see the flora of Nepal. We had left our campsite at half past six in the morning and started walking toward what, I did not know yet. It was ninety-six degrees by seven, according to the watch I wore, and we walked up and up for two hours straight. In fact we were just walking through, and also just walking toward, the end of our journey, but I did not know this yet. I still had the idea that we would walk to something and then leave it for something else. But that was never so. We were walking, and every place we walked was something, every place we walked was important, certainly from the point of view of a gardener. It was just that this gardener lives in Vermont. In any case we were walking, and it was very warm and I kept my eyes closed, in a way, because the climate I was walking in was not the climate in which I make a garden. The climate in which I was walking, the things growing there would count as annuals for me. As a gardener, I have a fixed view of annuals. They really are ornamentals. That is, they are ornaments for the more substantial and, so, really real perennials. In any case, we were walking and I was with Sue. For Dan and Bleddyn had raced ahead as would always be the case, and suddenly I saw these pink flowers everywhere—at my feet when I looked down and somewhat above eye level when I looked up, and then alongside me when I was just going forward. I recognized them from shape and texture, only I had seen them in another color, deep purple. I had seen those same flowers in a nursery in Vermont and in a garden in Maine but only in deep purple. To see them now in pink while remembering them in purple enhanced my feeling of anxiety and alienation, and so when I said to Sue, “What is this?” and she answered me matter-of-factly, “That’s Osbeckia,” I was comforted.

  The plant I had seen in the nursery in Vermont and in my friend’s garden in Maine had a dark fleshy-colored and coarse-skin stem with deep purple flowers. I had always wanted to plant them in my garden, but they seemed as if they were not really annuals, they seemed too late-bloomi
ng and too woody in stem for my climate. On the whole, in my garden (and all the time I was walking around in Nepal I was mostly thinking of my garden) annuals need to be delicate-looking, while at the same time bearing flowers non-stop as if they do not know how to do anything else. Now as I trudged along, not knowing really where I was going, I was thinking of something I had known in passing, a plant seen in a nursery, and in a garden in Maine, trying to latch on to it as if it were one of the certainties in the whole of life. Much later I learned that the deep purple form of Osbeckia comes from Sri Lanka, the one before me was native to the place in which I was seeing it.

  That day we walked eight miles going gradually uphill. We stopped for lunch in the middle of a village and I asked for a cola soft drink, and received it. That was the last time such a thing happened. It was then that I began to notice this phenomenon. I saw a girl, about the same age my daughter was then, seventeen, combing the hair of someone else with much carefulness; she was combing through her familiar’s thick head of straight hair because it was riddled with lice. This was all done with a loving fierceness, as if something important depended on it. The person combing the hair used a comb that was fine-toothed and carefully went through the hair again and again, making sections and then dividing again the sections into little sections. This engagement between the delouser and head of hair made me think of love and intimacy, for it seemed to me that the way the person removed the lice from the head of hair was an act of love in all its forms. I saw this scene over and over.

  That day, for lunch, the vegetable was something I knew by the name of “christophine” and which was familiar to Sunam by another name in Nepali. It is a soft, fleshy, watery fruit originating from somewhere I do not know but is used as a vegetable by people who come from the tropical parts of the world. It is not grown in Antigua, the island in the Caribbean where I am from, but it was grown on the island of Dominica, the island my mother is from. This vegetable was a staple of her diet when she had lived there, and I was remembering the lengths to which she would go to find it and incorporate it in my diet. I hated it then, and so imagine my surprise to find it for lunch in a small village in Nepal. It was the most delicious thing I ever tasted.