Among Flowers Read online

  We got going without regret, without looking back, without even wishing for another moon like the one we had seen the night before. It was the most beautiful moon I had ever seen without a doubt, but I would not spend a night in a field full of leeches just to see another one like it. We marched upward the steep climb to the top. Many times the thick growth of maple, oak, Sorbus, and yew would thin out and clear up and I felt the top was near, but this clearing was only a pause leading up to more thick forests and darkness and moistness and slippery paths, almost falling down in a way that could be dangerous—and this was not a place to have an accident of any kind. To twist your ankle here wouldn’t be good at all; it would cause much misery and inconvenience. Then again, if your heart cracked out here, how much longed-for would a twisted ankle be? We climbed up to nine thousand feet, finally reaching a clearing that was somewhat level. We were at the very top of the ridge of the mountain we had just walked up. Almost as a reward, Dan immediately found a Cardiocrinum giganteum that was almost twice as big as the tallest of us, and that was Dan himself. It had lots and lots of seed. How happy he was and Bleddyn too. And after that we seemed to find nothing but Cardiocrinum giganteum, they were everywhere. I remained deeply in the experience of the night before: The Moon, The Leeches, The Landslides, The Escape from the Maoists, all of it capitalized. We walked down the forested hillside, plunging into a gulley, going more steeply down it seemed than we had gone up the day before; the sun hot overhead, the sky clear of clouds and blue as if it had never known otherwise. Down we went, toward the Arun again, passing through a thick forest of oak, Aralia, and Berberis. I kept my eyes peeled to the ground, carefully picking out each step I took, for we were on moist ground. In fact the earth seemed to be only a leaky surface; I could hear water trickling, I could feel my feet slipping on the sticky wet ground. From time to time I fell and cursed myself for doing so. But then we were out in the open sun and the ground was dry and we were walking in nothing but red-fruited Berberis. But I couldn’t collect any seeds because they are on the list of banned seeds, seeds not to be brought into my country. As usual, our destination seemed farther away the closer we got to it. We could see a village high above the other side of the Arun, and it was the village beyond that was our destination. We stopped for lunch just before crossing a river, that fed into the Arun, at a place called Sampung, and then one hour after lunch crossed the Arun and started climbing up again. That day after the night spent in the field with the leeches, we walked for nine hours and stopped in Chepuwa just a mile or two from our destination, the village of Chyamtang, because it was getting dark. We were so very tired and cross, though not with each other and not with the people who were taking care of us.

  When we made camp in the schoolyard in Chepuwa, we were immediately surrounded by children, one of them wearing a T-shirt that had the word Paris written on it. His T-shirt referred to the city, not the plant. In fact, though the plant Paris was native to the very place he is from, he most likely had never paid attention to it and so had never seen it. In any case, for dinner we had reconstituted food, Chinese food at that. I was not hungry. I went to bed at eight that night and noted that we were at an altitude of seven thousand feet. We had begun the day at six thousand feet altitude, walked up to nine when reaching the top of the hillside on which we had spent the night, walked down to three thousand feet when we crossed the Arun, and now were spending the night at seven thousand feet altitude. If I was suffering from the dreaded altitude sickness, I did not know it. I only felt tired and lonely and my head did ache, but it ached in the way my head always aches. The next morning, on the thirteenth day of October, nine days after we left Kathmandu, each of them spent walking at least ten miles, we walked the two miles to Chyamtang and decided to spend a few days there.

  In that long hike the day before from the field full of leeches to our campsite in Chepuwa, I had felt I was negotiating my very existence with each step. But while I spent nine hours all wrapped up in myself, wondering if this plant (Paris, for instance) which looked awfully familiar and so much so that it had to be something else, was really itself, wondering if I was seeing something new, and always wondering if I could grow it—and when I realized I could not, I had no interest in the thing before me whatsoever. While I had spent nine hours being a gardener, in other words, Dan and Bleddyn and Sue were gathering seeds. They had collected and recorded the seeds of thirty-nine different plants, among them: Anemone vitifolia, Rubus lineatus, Cautleya spicata, Paris polyphylla, Schefflera sp., Disporum cantoniense, Arisaema tortuosum, Tricyrtis maculata, Philadelphus tomentosus, Hydrangea anomala, Crawfordia speciosum, Viburnum grandiflorum, Aralia, and many ferns.

  When we reached Chyamtang, we unpacked everything and aired out our clothes and sleeping things. It was a brilliant day of heat and bright light. Dan told me how lucky we were. Apparently, it could have been raining, it could have been cold. I was grateful for all that and grateful too for being able to spend the day lying down and reading and certainly not hiking. It was around then that Sue and I said to each other how hard the whole thing was. Sue came down with a cold. I came down with a case of loss of sense of self, but not only was this not new, I actually enjoy this state and were it not for that, I really would be in a state of loss of sense of self, only I would have no way of knowing so.

  All the same, how welcome this day was. A Pause. Sue and I could hardly believe it. Of course, Dan and Bleddyn went off seed hunting or collecting and they expected Sue and me to clean the seed collection from the day before. Sue did her best, I did nothing at all. The day went by.

  Chyamtang is way up north in Nepal, not far from the Tibetan border. It seemed to be a big village because many people kept coming and going by us. By many people, I mean perhaps twelve, but we had seen so few people in the last few days that five began to seem like a crowd. They passed through, they stared at Sue and me, and then they went on. At some point we had to take refuge in our tents, she in the one she shared with Bleddyn, I in the one I shared with Dan. A group of children had come by at lunchtime and stared at us as we ate. We grew uncomfortable and went into our tents. While we were in our tents, a large group of people gathered outside and one person would open the tent flap to show us to the other people. We had to call on Sunam, who spoke gruffly to them and made them move away. But nothing made my rest day not blissful. I was reading my book by Frank Smythe about his failed attempt to climb Kanchenjunga in 1930. Three weeks ago I would have had no interest or understanding of his account of climbing a mountain. I knew of him through his writing as a plant hunter. I had no idea that the mountaineer and the plant collector were the same person. Much later, I came to see that he became a plant collector because it was a way for him to climb mountains. His most famous book of plant collecting, The Valley of Flowers, is full of the many little side trips he took to climb some summit, insignificant by Himalayan standards but major when compared to the rest of the world’s geography. It became clear to me that while trying to climb Everest in the twenties, and then Kanchenjunga in the thirties, the spectacular beauty of a Himalayan spring left such an impression that it either made him a gardener or made him see those mountains as an extension of the garden.

  On October 13, our day off, I lay in my tent alone reading. Sue, sick with a cold, dutifully got up and cleaned the seeds that Bleddyn and Dan had collected. I wasn’t very interested in this since none would survive in my garden. Dan had gone off in the direction of a village north of us, a village called Ritak, which Sunam said bordered Tibet and so he warned us against going there. Dan went off toward it just the same and said he would be careful not to wander into Tibet. Bleddyn had gone back toward Chepuwa. On this side of Chepuwa both he and Dan had seen a gulley that went up into a thickly forested area, and they were both sure that it was rich in pleasingly ornamental flower-bearing plants. That night, over dinner, they went back and forth regarding what to do, should they both go back to it or should they both go up to Ritak? Dan wanted to go to Ritak and
so he did. Bleddyn went back toward Chepuwa and collected in the gulley above it. Dan went out of Chyamtang, crossed the Arun, walked on its banks for a quarter of a mile or so, and then re-crossed it on a bridge made of bamboo. At that point of its life, the Arun is closer to its source than when we first saw it in Tumlingtar. Near Tumlingtar, it is broad and majestic and even calm and forgiving, flowing in a dreamy way, making you long for a swim, lulling you into any kind of romantic thoughts you can have about calm and steady flowing water. But up near its source, it is fierce, roaring, as if trying to escape from an eternal dam. I had never seen water like that, so clear, so translucent, yet thick like a cloud. It looked as if you could see through it, but you couldn’t. Rushing furiously, scouring the earth, it was ready to take with it anything that stood in its path. To see this force, at that juncture about twenty feet wide and I do not know how deep, bridged by a structure made of bamboo, is among the most alarming things I have ever seen in my life. All of the other most alarming things I have seen in my life occurred not far from there. Dan crossed this bridge and went up to Ritak.

  Bamboo bridge crossing a tributary of the Arun

  The climb up to Ritak was steep, Dan said. When he got to the village some people mistook him for a doctor and asked him to come and take care of a man who Dan could see was near death. He didn’t know what was wrong with the man but he thought it might be some kind of cancer. Anyway, he left some Advil and tried to tell them he was not a doctor. Returning to Chyamtang at the end of the day, as he crossed the river over the bamboo bridge, without him knowing it, some boys had followed him. Suddenly, when he was midpoint on the bridge, the part of the journey over any bridge when you feel most vulnerable, the bridge began to shake and sway. Frightened, of course, he didn’t know which way to run, but then he heard some laughing and looked to see these boys jumping up and down on the Ritak side of the bridge. He arrived in camp at around half past three, looking exhausted. He had just seen a man dying and for a moment, on that bridge, he thought he was dying too. Not long after that Bleddyn returned too with a bounty of things, more than Dan had found in Ritak but with no encounters with other human beings. We all went to the little stream that was a quarter of a mile away and washed ourselves and our clothes, for suddenly it had been decided that we should take another rest day. It seemed that there were some valleys and ridges above us that the plant collectors wanted to explore.

  Dinner that night was wonderful even though it was the same as all the nights before: soup, potatoes, rice and dahl, or noodles, one or other, sometimes all of them. It seemed as if all the people living in the area had descended on our camp and were just sitting and looking at us. It was as if we were a living cinema. They watched us eat and talk. Sometimes they peered at me and said things about me to Sunam, but of course when I asked him what they were saying, he suddenly did not understand the local language. One woman did make me understand that she thought I was wearing a mask, that my face was not my real face. She strangely, I thought, bore a strong physical resemblance to my own mother, who had been dead three years then. We saw a beautiful girl, who seemed perhaps eleven years old, perhaps thirteen, we couldn’t tell. She had just returned from tending a field about two thousand feet above us. We could tell this because she was wearing a beautiful primrose, blue, in her hair. Dan and Bleddyn kept trying to identify it. It was a primrose that bloomed in the fall, so they were not likely to find any seed for it.

  In my sleeping bag at last, I fell asleep without worry for the first time in a week, without worrying that I would slip out of the sleeping bag and tent and fall down some ledge, for it was the first time since we left Num that we were camped on level ground; without worrying about leeches, without worrying about Maoists. It never ceased to amaze me how uneven the landscape was. A distance of a city block meant going up or going down, and though Dan, especially Dan, and Bleddyn took to it very well, the extremely uneven terrain was trying for Sue and me. I complained bitterly to myself, and quarreled with the ground as I trod on it, but even then I knew I was having the very most wonderful time of my life, that I would never forget what I was doing, that I would long to see again every inch of the ground that I was walking on the minute I turned my back on it. At around one o’clock that morning I came out of the tent to pee and met a black sky full of stars. Everyone was asleep, everything was quiet, once again I was struck at how far away I was from all that was truly familiar to me, but I didn’t long for anything; I felt quite lost and this feeling led to another feeling—happiness.

  A third day of rest was called for and it coincided with the decision to explore the valleys above us. From Ritak, Dan had been able to see a forested ridge above Chyamtang and he thought if we could go above that, we would find things even I could grow. Bleddyn and Dan then argued over the way to get there. Dan had seen Bleddyn’s suggested route from Ritak, and since he did not like heights and did not like traveling along narrow ledges, he had ruled it out. Of course if he had been told that ripe fruit of the most unusual primrose or peony was to be had at the end of the most narrow ledge in the world, he would have lost his dislike for high, narrow ledges immediately. Also from Ritak, he had been able to see that the ledge ended and dropped off into nothing, empty air, not a route that led up above them. Sunam then made some inquiries and found a man who said that he knew most certainly of a way up from the ledge to the forests above. We took a lunch and with the man guiding us, Dan, Bleddyn, and I started out for the ledge itself, which was an hour’s walk up from our camp. I could soon see what Dan objected to. It was a narrow path, hardly big enough for one person, certainly it would be difficult to pass another person without their cooperation. I walked along clinging to the granite walls of the mountain, trying hard not to look down at the sheer nothing on the other side of me. The ledge took turns curving around so that we could not see what was coming and then jutting out so that we could see all too clearly how it snaked up. Still it was full of plants in seed, none of which would be hardy enough for me to grow, most of them mysterious, most of them new to me. But it was no place for the leisureliness of collecting, from Dan’s point of view, and so he and I turned back to camp, picked up Thile Sherpa, and set off for the same forests above Chyamtang but from another direction. That day, we walked up to ten thousand feet, the highest we had walked up in our nine days of walking. We crossed open sunbaked meadows, through deeply shaded and moist areas; we went down and up, but mostly it was up. Once when emerging from a forested area, I looked back and saw in the not too far distance, a gleaming white pyramid floating above the green-clad mountaintops that surrounded it. Kanchenjunga, I was told it was, the third-highest mountain the world, and it was less than twenty miles away. Each night before I fell asleep in my tent, I read Frank Smythe’s wonderful account of the failed attempt to climb this mountain in 1930, and among the thrills of reading it was becoming familiar with some people and a terrain between the pages of his book and outside the book, this at the same time. To now see this mountain that I had never paid attention to before I came to Nepal, so nearby, looking as if someone had just now placed it there a minute ago, left me openmouthed, in awe. I made Dan take a picture of me with it in the background, and when we started walking again, I kept looking back at it as if I was afraid I would never see it again. And I never did see it again, for when we came back down a great mass of clouds hid it from view, as they did for the rest of my time there. We saw blooming along the banks of the many streams we crossed the same beautiful primrose that we had seen decorating a girl’s hair but there weren’t any with seed. In that area, above Chyamtang, Dan and Bleddyn collected the seeds of so many things: Vaccinium, Anemone, another primrose, Thalictrum, Smilacina, Begonia oalmatumeuonymus, Codonopsis, clematis (species and Montana), Cardiocrinum, Gaultheria, Arisaema, Clerodendron (in many places its red fruit reigned dominant), Hypericum, Delphinium stapeliosmum, Rhododendron arboreum, Ophiopogon intermedius, Ligularia fisheri, Strobilanthes sp., Begonia sp., Jasminum humile, Sarcococca hooker
iana, Pleurospermum sp., Cotoneaster microphylus, Gaultheria fragrantissima, Clematis sp., Holboellia latifolia, Meconopsis nepaulensis, Aconitum tuberosum, Rodgersia nepaulensis, Aralia cachemirica, Sorbus cuspidata, Roscoea auriculata, Hydrangea sp., Polygonatum cirrhifolium, Zanthoxylum nepalense, Hedychium sp., Lyonia sp., among many others, just to name some of them, but I was not so very interested because almost none of it would thrive in my garden, as Dan mockingly pointed out to me.

  Author posing against the peaks of Kanchenjunga

  Returning to camp, I did not see Kanchenjunga, but I enjoyed all the same the novelty of seeing a way I had come going in the other direction. On my journey, there was no coming and going, I was always going somewhere and everything I saw, I saw only from one direction, which was going forward, going toward, and then I was going away. So often I read in Frank Smythe’s The Kanchenjunga Adventure, of him going from a camp at one altitude to the other, and I came to see how comforting this back and forth in a strange place could be. It seems to me a natural impulse to begin to think of every place in which you find yourself for longer than a day as home, and to make it familiar. Dan and I descended more than twice as quickly as we had ascended, practically greeting the path as it wound through forest, pasture, over steep mounds, dividing a roar of water as it rushed to meet up eventually with the great Arun. How happy we were to see our tents there in the middle of the village, the only flat place for miles around, the only flat place until the next village, which was miles away. Cook had made a special dinner of rice with a special dahl and a cake even, but I couldn’t eat anything. I felt sick and so went to bed right away, and was asleep by eight. Much singing and carrying on was done late into the night, Dan said, by Sunam, Mingma, and Thile, and the porters. I awoke at two o’clock in the morning to silence and crept outside for my nightly pee. So soft everything was, in the blue-gray moonlight, the moon no longer completely full; how permeable the landscape looked, as if I could just walk through the hills and the trees, walk through them, not over them, as if they would yield.