Arriving at the banks, apart from the currents, our lives stood in a circular whole. Attention could roam and choose through 360 degree perceptions. But when pushing into the river, the river took hold and we were directed by the force. We cascaded down a vibrating line. A once-circle of options became a defining line. Driven down the line we knew only upstream and had just one future: down, bringing forward life questions about what was before not knowing. If we willed, we could stop here, there, seemingly anywhere. But such were just pauses on the line we tumbled of questions on the until-then-not-solved challenge.
We put the raft into the Tamba Kosi just south of the Tibetan border. Our descent lasted four days and nights. The Sun Kosi system crosses Nepal from the north at the Chinese border to the south as it flows into the Ganges—it also crosses half the country from west to east, carrying a third of the country’s waters.
Two hundred miles were lived. The first day we lost altitude fast; a rapid every eight minutes. The difficult day was the second, with two rapids we ran just right—for on one rapid the side of the river we bolted down, we avoided a jagged cliff that could have shredded the rubber tubes, and through the other rapid we passed a vacuous hydraulic hole where the river swirled into itself. The third day we rode a memorable half-hour of consistent froth.
Our ride was at the end of the monsoon when currents run full, ebbing from the flood. This higher water smothered many boulders, which in planning the trip we worried might destroy us, so we opted for the greater water of post-monsoon. We were aware one could be thrown out, as had been the fate of one of Hillary’s team. But, we wanted the extra water to lift us above the boulders, though we knew that the water was expanding the hydraulic holes to greater size. (Current trips down, now that the rapids and boulders are known, wisely avoid such high water.)
What came with that high water was exhilarating speed. Once we watched a tree riding ahead of us, it was just the massive trunk, its branches torn from it in rapids above, as the tree had been torn from slopes in the jungle above. This tree held to the centre of the current as we stayed on the less turbulent river edge. Bobbing along beside us for a while, the log then abruptly got sucked into one of those hydraulic holes, a moment later catapulted out. We let it ride on ahead. Our air-filled raft floated with buoyancy a log did not have, and it had energetic oars to swing us around the hydraulic hole’s rim. Sometimes it is best to let life pass.
Today, with the river known, in guided trips down the Sun Kosi, tourists are often told by their guides to look for the Yeti in the patches of forest alongside. All river trips are unique voyages, no matter the number of times you take them. The river, every river, is new every day. And in the continual new discovery of this wild, it is a valid urge each of us has to discover the unknown of the way as well as our unknown within.
Today our species pounds forward through human-induced cataracts of a changing climate and a diminishing diversity of species. Our journey brings an ending of the once wild. We have climbed the highest peaks, explored every land, and tamed so many dangers. Few firsts remain—except the unknown journey forward. People ride on a changed planet, not that the planet has changed but rather our understanding of it. The discoveries now are made alongside our journey, not so much in the originality of journeys. The term ‘Anthropocene’ is now used to describe this new human-made age. What we have shaped is more than a warmer climate and a loss of species, a readjusting of the older flow of Nature. One consequence of this is arrogance that Nature holds us less powerfully now, in hubris making us tremble less with its forces.
The human uses of our many energies may have caused the new planetary visage, but we cannot control the age. Time courses on. We must learn to ride it like a river. (Lest we not, cataclysms wake us up.) Whether we fully intended to enter this voyage is no longer open to choice. We ride forces of our shaping—it may help a bit to have technology to keep us out of holes, like a satellite or helicopter view and a conveyance with powerful oars—but we have created and are embarked on a new first descent, one that carries us not down rivers on the planet but through the reshaping of planetary, indeed existential, systems.
We do not know the larger river of Life we now run. The earlier conceit that initiated the global changes races into currents beyond understanding. What carries us on into the unknown is that we cannot go back. Time, like all rivers, runs in one direction, for even if there is a tide that appears to push the river back, the river always runs on.
On this Sun Kosi exploration, we were free in so many ways—free from an engagement with the quest, then free from the river when the four of us were standing on its banks talking. We believed the river, like life, was to be a grand adventure. To assay ourselves we then pushed in for testing. But once in, freedom was no longer there. We were clutched and carried. And we learnt to live with it so that we could go with it. Cascading down, no longer able to turn away, we were harnessed into this flow, like that log.
In these rivers boulders, like us, also run with the current. They are bottom movers, but still pushed like us by the descending water. The boulders create the rapids we coursed over. Sometimes house-sized, the rocks shift rapids as they roll—and at the end of the monsoon the boulders were rolling. Thuds in waters below echoed in the raft’s rubber tubes. We could feel them. Rivers move mountains and within them mountains move.
Hearing the rapids ahead, our oars strained, a brief moment to poise us in the hoped-for right place, the river accelerating as it approached the sudden descent ahead. Entering the rapids we spun the prow, sped up in the accelerating current by driving the oars to have direction in the desired flow. Without missing a splash the current drove us on.
Eddies, rocks, fields, jungles, spirits, and people; a montage of life passing, the river tying all together—the rhythm of rapids punctuating our lives: forward, downwards, made strong by rain and melted snows. Our destiny was to flow with the push of water that came from the sea, coursing us back towards the sea, water having circled to the sky now heading home. We did not choose our direction and only minutely adjusted our speed. Being inside this movement felt as though inside the arteries of the changing planet.
Our future loomed with questions. Pounded by rapids, the present cascaded with answers, answers that floated into memories in the pools that followed, answers that slipped through our fingers, leaving them wet as fingers gripped and paddled. Carried out of one event, passed to another, the actions by us were to glorify and to enjoy that downward rush of our living. Each splash whetted the way to the next venture.
Early on in the second day we passed the furthest point where an earlier expedition of a friend had stopped. As best as we could learn before our trip, navigating the whole Sun Kosi had been attempted four times. One had been by this friend; he had described the rapids where they lost their boat. Instead of attempting to run the rapids through the middle as they had done, getting themselves drawn back and spun in with one of those hydraulic holes, our route slipped over on the left. After the tumult of those rapids, they had pulled out and walked a slow week back to Kathmandu, happy to be alive. (Another part of their problem was their too-small raft.)
So knowing about those four attempts, we thought now from that point we were the first descending these new waters. Each rapid fresh with uncertainty, the big unknown came closer, the mystery-filled Chotra Gorge. What would be the size of its waters through that final gap in the Himalaya? While the river felt powerful now (our Sun Kosi having gathered the Tamba, Bhote Kosi, and Dudh Kosi), when we entered that gorge, the then-larger current would be joined by the Arun, the oldest river of the Himalaya, and also merged with the Tamur; six rivers running then as one.
With everlasting certainty the current drove on, the unknown was not yet in our present, constantly growing from gathering the streams we passed. The current seemed to pull us towards the boulders, but we kept pivoting in the waters and kept on going. And in those quieter times we floated amid beauty that defined our lives: a strong
blue sky; a hard, hot sun on green growing rice. As the river carried us to lower elevations, we passed fields with ripening rice and saw people harvesting it. Towering cliffs were behind us, and the river was entering the lands of people. The people were working. Waving, sometimes shouting to others nearby and pointing towards us.
The sun scorched our skin. Our sizzled bodies slipped overboard, and the tingling skin melted the burn with the chill. While the raft went down, at times now we floated beside, letting ourselves be carried by the river, made into a particle in the current. Or sometimes we just sat there in the boat, trying to be apart from the river, waiting.
Rapids give news of their arrival first by sound. A growl … then that grows. Approaching a rapids, it first shows as a line across the river. The line of river going down has suddenly a line across. The growl then roars; the lower jaw of the river falls open. Into it our raft then went, throwing the weight of the boat back to land prow high, stroking with the oars to pull the raft forward from backwashing into the chomp of the water’s tumbling teeth.
From Nepal’s central hills we drifted into her sparsely settled foothills. Rounding a bend, we entered a sylvan pocket cut off by cliffs all around, a primeval bank where we pulled ashore. Wild jungles stood, seemingly a protected side-valley holding no people. But people had indeed come a stump cut long ago assured us. In one clump of trees were twin banana trees sometime somehow planted with bananas then ripe, fruits for us and fresh rest for our bodies. We lay on the moss, wet and cool and thick.
Back in, in front of our ride, standing up to its knees on a rock in the water and pumping its tail, a white-capped river chat dipped its beak and trilled out ‘SHREE’. Around the next bend, across the river’s span stretched a spider’s web. Its lattice of threads danced with drops scattering light with rainbows. More droplets splashed on to it the instant we approached, quivering on the strands, star prisms sparkling before a blue sky beyond. The current, though, crashed us through, driving us on.
Traditional river navigation in the Himalaya consists of crossings by dugout canoes at pools between rapids. The dugout is towed upstream to the foot of the rapids above. Passengers, perhaps a goat, maybe some chickens, snuggle in. Usually, neither the crew nor the passengers can swim. With gunnels inches above water and passenger fingers clenching the sides, a crew member in the bow and his partner in the stern push off, they paddle vigorously for the opposite bank before the current sucks them into rapids approaching from below.
A lone Nepali waved, calling us to his shore. As we talked, he was, he said, another like us, who had tried using the river to travel. Facing costs of his daughter’s wedding, he harvested a clump of valuable cane, lashed it into a bundle 10 feet across, creating a giant, man-made, floating island that tumbled and rolled as he—clambering to always stay on top—travelled down. He rode his bundle through the Chotra Gorge, across the border into India. ‘I got my money, but never,’ he vowed, ‘never will I do that again.’ So we smiled getting back into our rubber hope. At least from here we are not the first going down.
Waves. Waterfalls. Rocks. Our souls crowded with personal thoughts, plans were remembered, prompting private hopes to be renewed for our life hereafter. At first on this expedition, we tried to protect ourselves from being too close to each other, to maintain a distance as the four of us worked out mutual accommodations. There is pride in trying something never done before. It holds a group together, but there are also the issues that separate. Yet the challenges accomplished brought our group together, for alone Terry, Cherie, Carl, and I could not have made the raft spin and accelerate. In working together, a wrong move by one could flip or sink the rest. In pulling the oars we came closer. Entering the expedition, we had entrusted our lives to each other. Going forward together, when once I was thrown out of the raft, hands from these friends gripped my wrist, tendons bulged, and I was pulled back up over the black tubes into the shared circle.
Then, as the river kept flowing on, our trip was over. The Chotra Gorge, filled by the body of six rivers, turned out to be fast and smooth for our passage. As we exited the gorge, the Indian border appeared ahead. Rivers do not need passports, but people do. Now we stood on a different type of shore where on the plains of India, rivers had banks. Rivers were wide and they ran slowly. It was the same river, of course, but the shore we had reached was of completion. No longer would we run with the river that had been a part of our lives. The river would now run in us. And from this running we came to know that hidden behind the ranges was a call to go back into the mountains.
seven
Towards the Barun Jungles
7.1 Cartoon
Source: Dan Piraro
May 1979 was three years still before we entered the Barun, and my Yeti search had already been underway for twenty-three years. The king’s advice to explore the Barun was to come the day after the lunch I was now headed to with Dan Terry, a companion from school days. We were walking up the path to Bob and Linda Fleming’s small bungalow in Kathmandu, when …
‘EEAL!’ Terry and I turned.
Against the brick wall, half hidden amid ferns, was a six-feet-long grey Nepali rat snake of the genus Ptyas. Disappearing into its mouth, its body pierced by the snake’s razor-sharp teeth, was an ordinary frog of the genus Rana; the frog until a moment before was a resident of the nearby rice paddy. It kicked its legs. The squeal lingered, as Bob opened his bungalow door. On the coffee table waited a tray of teacups, teapot, strainer, milk, sugar, and glucose biscuits.
Picking up the teacup Bob just handed me after he’d added a dollop of buffalo cream, I mentioned the Marsyandi Gorge from where Terry and I had just come, specifically the jungle where the gorge narrows between the Annapurna range and the Manaslu massif. I’d heard of this jungle from the traders who first shared their bun manchi stories eighteen years before. So, on this trip when we headed to the Manang Valley on a medical research expedition, I stopped in the village, telling Bob now how the villagers believe jungle men come into their fields at night, and in defence they build fences around their fields.
Bob knew how the trail there runs on the side of the gorge, mentioned the thin black cliff above, with a jungle all the way to the trail, and spoke of how the place gets extra moisture as the weather rushes through between the mountain massifs of the Annapurnas and Manaslu. He agreed that it was biologically rich, but he was dismissive of the possibility of finding unknown animals there given the limited area of the jungle, and he was certain that what invaded the fields was a monkey or a bear.
I was not persuaded. People don’t build fences because of their imagination. Bamboo fences would not stop bears, and monkeys would hop over.
Terry pointed to the obvious fact that villagers knew monkeys and bears. So why make up the bun manchi when they recognize bear and monkey signs? Terry and I were cautious, for through our school years Bob’s knowledge of Himalayan natural history had us in awe. After finishing his PhD, he had now spent fifteen years exploring the Himalaya nearly full-time.
Bob tweaked our relentless persistence, ‘You two have looked for Yetis even inside cars.’ He was reminding us of how in 1968, we had a VW van that we drove from Germany to India and had named the bus ‘Yeti ka Bhai’ (Yeti’s brother).
It was the summer after my first year in graduate school. Three days before our trip Terry sent a message to my Harvard mail slot: ‘You buy VW van in Germany. Rendezvous June 1st Switzerland. I pay gas to India.’ The year 1968 was when the Beatles were riding their yellow submarine, and hippies were headed to Afghan hashish and Indian religions. Yeti searches made sense in that era. But Terry’s cryptic message did not say which airport in Switzerland. So on 1 June, having in my possession a USD 400 WV van, I met all the flights from the US in Zurich and, via long-distance phone, paged all the flights arriving in Geneva. Terry paid the phone bill as well as the gas bill.
We sold seats by the mile to hippies. Adjusting the clutch under Yeti ka Bhai in Ankara, Turkey, we learnt that Bobby K
ennedy had been shot. South of Mount Ararat we dodged bandits. In Afghanistan’s Baluchistan Desert, with the temperature a blistering 121 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, our crankshaft bearings burned out. Five days later, we were driving on bearings laminated up from a Spam can and Harvard stationery. The bearings blew again, this time with the engine entrails flying through the crankcase. When we arrived in India, Bob laughed seeing the blue and white Yeti ka Bhai. Many would have called it an abominable bus.
I was half expecting Bob now to make another joke. He set down his teacup, leaned in, and dropped his voice, ‘I’m not putting you guys off. I doubt the Yeti is bun manchi, or a hominoid, but six years ago McNeely and Cronin showed me a plaster cast of the footprint they found. It was made by no Himalayan animal I know, was similar to a gorilla’s footprint with a primate-like thumb. McNeely and Cronin’s other field discoveries have held, like their honeyguide, which was then a new bird for Nepal, so I doubt this is a hoax.’
Bob shifted in his chair and, in the discomfort of the moment, suggested that we move to the lunch table. As we resettled around plates of entwined spaghetti, no one said anything. The evidence was before us. Bob, if not a Yeti believer, seemed at least to be a puzzler, and appeared unsure about how to state his position. Then he said what we all knew: something was making footprints no one could explain.
None of us responded. Bob was seated at the head of the table; Linda, at the other end. She smiled as Terry and I focused on noodles and sauce. Let Bob work himself in deeper, we thought. Bob could not explain the photographed footprints and was also puzzled by a plaster cast he has held.
Bob carefully separated the issues. He pushed aside allegations of the bun manchi, which he believed to be a monkey or a bear, noting that their prints could appear hominoid. He believed that Cronin and McNeely’s findings as scientists were reliable. Some real animal visited their 12,000-foot camp on that high Barun ridge. Outside their tent were tracks that did not belong to any animal he knew.
Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Page 12