Such change may connect us as people to earth’s forces. Chinese call this energy Qi; native Americans call it Medicine; the Hindus, into whose Ganges waters the stream at my feet flows, name the force Brahma; the progressives back home call it Gaia. These are forces greater than conservation, speaking of fires extending from the inner being and to the interface of our interacting with the great beyond. Their intent is to regulate individual greed.
The path will be leaps and jerks, as I was reminded when descending from Shipton’s Pass. In descending I was reminded that life changed not in steady regular gradients. I did not feel the slight rising temperature of 1°F every 300 feet, but still at one point I moved from walking in grass to walking through bushes. Nature showed me what I could not feel. Continuing down amid juniper and rhododendron, where I am now I walk between trees. Grasses did not intermingle with bushes; there was a line. Nature changes with punctuation marks. I am in forest now.
Qi, Medicine, Brahma, Gaia, ways of believing, in their philosophies also speak of moments when life breaks through. Daily actions are underway, seemingly serene—perhaps hypnotically so, thinking little is happening like descending through an alpine meadow. Then life, which appears continual, acts with exclamation. I walk alone so I can understand the species whose actions create the new wild.
It is not just life systems on the planet that get punctuated, but the shape of earth as well. Reshaping of the earth stands before me. Ahead the whole valley changes. Behind, where drains the 12 square miles of the Barun Glacier, the valley is spread out and the river curls through meadows. Ahead, the valley restructures from U- to V-shaped, as a river once-caressing through meadows surges, its wavetops flecked white as courses and carves the valley.
The river narrows to a 15-foot-wide torrent that bounces from the south wall, blocking my further descent. If this is a barrier for me, it may have stopped others, especially herders with flocks. The opposite side of this moving fence might be pristine. The depth looks knee height, but I cannot risk being swept away like Lendoop’s daughter. I will use the fast-moving river to sweep me across. So I remove a few key items from my pack, tying those to me, then the pack’s contents are double-wrapped in plastic, and restowed. Uncoiling a light nylon rope, I loop it around a tree, tying my pack to the middle.
Wearing a T-shirt to cut the wind, socks that will grip slippery rocks better than bare feet, I fasten a sling with a metal snap-link around my waist, wrap the doubled ropes through the snap-link, and back into glacial cold water that slams onto my legs. Leaning against the rope, the water’s force angles me against the bottom and I turn my body diagonally like a rudder on a boat, the force of the water pushing me as my feet shuffle along the bottom. The current drives me across like a pendulum.
On the other bank I sink to a quiet space above ground, out of the wind, absorbing heat from sun. A griffon overhead turns. Its hopes for my future are mistaken as I flex my legs, pumping blood down the arteries. Untying the figure eight at the end of the rope, I pull on the line, its middle tied to the pack. As the pack hits the water, it charges downstream. Ten pulls, and soon I pull a candy bar from inside the pack.
One joy of life in the mountains is the time spent regaining our strength and looking at birds move on mountain waves. Currents of nature give movement to our lives. An oak rises above. What is the difference between this oak grown from a fallen acorn that a rodent missed and an oak that would grow if I picked up an acorn here and planted it in my yard in the mountains of West Virginia? Is an oak an oak simply because it grows from an acorn? Is the snow leopard in the cliff behind more alive than the snow leopards in the Seattle zoo? Sprung from similar seeds, when does the wild become a garden?
Thoreau believed that in wildness was the preservation of the world. He might be wrong for people today; for this was an opinion, but also fact based on the life he led. In any case, the world he craved for is no longer with us. That type of preservation is at best now in gardens that have walls around them. In this trip, and perhaps in my crossing of the river, I have come to stand apart from a world of human control. I have come to touch the wild as when it was, as with Thoreau, the entire world, not remnants.
Descending, later I enter a meadow, a clearing I suspect made by an avalanche off of Makalu above. Maples, magnolias, and birches surround, much like those in the zone above Makalu Jungli Hot’l. But unlike Makalu Jungli Hot’l, which is 3,000 feet lower and grassy because of grazing, what made this meadow? Why do no trees grow? Each winter may pound a deluge of ice off the cliff above; perhaps a chute in the rock above channels avalanches that flatten everything that starts to grow except grass that comes back each season as the snow melts.
However formed, the meadow through my hand lens shows that grasses predominate; sedges are maybe 15 per cent. In waves of grass, I have come to an arboretum attended by primeval biology. In this meadow is a place for me to listen inward as well as outward; here, I stand equidistant between unpeopled DNA and the stars, the world before people began changing the planet. At the base of a large oak I prop my backpack against its wizened trunk, two rocks are rolled beside, then my sleeping pad wedged between: a seat with armrests. The clearing is no longer as it was. Tomorrow when walking by the river’s edge looking for prints in the sand, I will leave mine.
I have come for the wild, and in doing so my first actions are domestication. In the millennia before fact-based thinking advanced results-based formulae of the scientific method, human knowing presumed an integrity from the great beyond. Truth came from mystery. Now the assumption is that the method is the way to lead to knowledge. But that does not explain the Brahmin schoolteacher, the villagers of Shyakshila, the recognition of our daughter, or Grandpa and the tigress. The belief that truth comes only by verifiable fact directs people to seek in tunnel vision, crediting they see distance using a telescope, then turn to a microscope trusting they see deeply. Tubes of our making certainly delineate into the beyond, but they also block empathy informed by unknowing.
Himalayan sages speak of secret understandings. These are more than symbols of portals to an unknown enlightenment—they speak of more just as a rocket ship is more than a symbol of a physical voyage beyond the planet, or five interlinked Olympic circles beyond our quest to the limits of the body. In the symbolism of such a calling, the Yeti too is real, embodying from which we have come.
15.2 A Photograph of Two Yaks and Their Herders in the Valley Just North of the Barun in the Qomolangma (Mount Everest) National Nature Preserve
Source: Author
I have lectured at the Royal Geographic Society in London and its Hong Kong audience explaining the Yeti tracks. (This society being the group more than any other that gave the Yeti credibility.) In America, I have presented bears skulls on television (the medium of that nation) and shown how animals with such skulls make footprints that look human. Nonetheless, people still call for a Yeti. The relative people seek is tangibility to human identity. Riding this symbol, life becomes redefining the mysterious wild into a human-faced image while remaining wild inside our souls.
BEYOND THE OAK IN THIS GLEN STANDS A PLANT one-metre tall with dark green leaves and a flower: the may apple of the Himalaya, Podophyllum emodi. The altitude here is low for this increasingly rare plant, but the habitat is appropriately wet. Village plant hunters stalk this, seeking the egg-shaped, purple, pulpy, heavily seeded fruit to sell to pharmaceutical companies. A commercial voyage of sale to cure cancer begins by pulling up these apples by their roots. If I’m finding this plant, I am now beyond the travel of village people, because if people came to the place, this plant also would surely have been pulled.
My eyes probe for other signatures, perhaps the more valuable Rauwolfia. Thirty years of hunting has almost exterminated Rauwolfia serpetina, a red-flowered, coffee-like shrub whose root cures hypertension. At the edge of the meadow, I find Nardostachys jatamansi. A curious little plant, long, tightly furled leaves binding miniature ‘maize ears’ on a stalk; its roots
have a fragrant oil, an apparent cancer cure. Again, to harvest this, the plant is uprooted. If Podophyllum emodi and Nardostachys jatamansi are present, there is no need to study the grasses.
Hunger for cures from the wild circles the world. A quarter of medicines sold in the US originate in plants. Hunting intensifies as potential identifies other plants from the wild which might cure the ills of modern life. Nepalis, pushed by population growth to work marginal land rather than the no longer available valley bottoms have been recruited to seek these alternative crops that they can lucratively harvest but do not need to plant. And, recognizing the pressure on these resources, conservation groups try to save the forests here and around the world. In that, their argument curiously flips: protect forests so more plants can be taken out. Dad and I did this for the nusha bhoota whose aroma puts passers-by to sleep; that was my first ‘big’ Yeti expedition.
Humans depend on plants which feed, heal, and house us; our planet takes colour from their diversity, and their luxuriance consumes our wasted gases. Plants are at the base of the pyramid of life. And the species at the top, despite religious teaching, never stops wanting ever more. On this planet of human manufacture, I have arrived in one meadow from which people have not come to take.
Beyond the Nardostachys jatamansi is the jack-in-the-pulpit, Arisaema constatum. My childhood image of this plant was a cobra with an emerald hood hovering over a coral throat. For centuries, Tibetans descended into these jungles seeking this tuber that looks like a yam and if eaten raw makes the throat swell and the eater die. They learned, though, to grate the tubers, wash the shredded flesh to remove the soapy saponin, and then ferment the mash to separate out the toxin. But like so many products from nature that we must detoxify to bring into human life, this mush must be washed again, spread thin to dry, then ground into flour, and then, astonishingly, made into bread. How did the Tibetans figure out such chemistry, as getting flour from barley or wheat is much easier? How many people experimented with eating, choking, and maybe dying? More improbably, how was the discovery made that this flour effectively cured piles?
Jack-in-the-pulpits impart metaphorical lessons too. As with the leech, this organism is both male and female, dual-gendered but not at the same time. A young Jack, if it flowers and produces a lot of starch, gathers sufficient strength to turn female. A ‘He’ becomes a ‘Jill’. Yet Jack cannot mate with itself, for the male flower has died by the time the female matures. So, a gnat slides up and down the soapy male stalk gathering pollen, slips out a hole in the bottom of the cup, flitting on (hopefully) to a female flower. Entering, drawn by her fertility, the gnat slides up and down in her stalk, but in the female exists no bottom hole, and so the insect dies contributing pollen and its now-rotting tissue to the female energy.
If I prove to a disinterested world that the Yeti does not exist, that its footprints are made by a bear, and its voice that of a snow leopard, what animation will replace to speak for an increasingly limited wild? If the Yeti travels to a nonexistent certainhood because we know it not as a wild hominoid, do humans lose the ability to believe in the wild?
Fortunately, other ways exist of coming close with the wild. Whenever possible, I camp with a fire. Fire is humanity’s most ancient domestic possession, a feature we’ve carried across the ages, a source of fellowship that brings us together, where we gather for so many types of nourishment. Burning fires turn humans to believe they are sages. As night falls in this unpeopled glen, I collect fallen branches.
My fire method places two large sticks parallel, then hair-like twigs across that will soon catch; above them larger twigs so rising flames feed crackled sticks. Some people now turn to fire starters, but in so doing they break with a skill perhaps humanity’s oldest, passed across hundreds of generations, connecting today to ancient roots. As a youngster, I carried flint and steel and dry moss, items I traded for from a Tibetan refugee who recently fled into the Himalaya from Tibet. And from hunters I learned which leaves were more water-repellent and might shield dry twigs underneath on a day of rain. Tonight, a match ignites the hair-like twigs.
Flames lap thin stems, releasing life long-passed. Energy is unleashed that came from the sun to the earth years before. Fire can be viewed as the reincarnation of the once dead, as vibrations that journeyed across the solar system again pulsate. As hominoids stepped from wildness forward to domestication with technology, arguably a first step (after using a walking stick) was to gather three stones, walls beside the flames on which to set food—then from the three stones, homes went up, hearths were laid, and cities spread. Humanity’s departure from wildness began with harnessing fire.
The fire before me focuses ideas, helping them dance inside. In the dark heavens above burn stars, taking those ideas to fires light-years away. Two fires grasping inward and out, eyes and I, both see but do not know. As the eye carries over great distances, the mind similarly pierces inwardly, sight and self, adapting from the intensity of the burning to the vastness of the dark around, seeking what is hidden.
To what extent do I have a home in this Himalaya? I grew up here, but am not a native. In coming here, I have walked into its reaches; an alien of different-coloured skin, riding cross-generational questions. A century before our family came as medical doctors giving compassionate care—they also came to evangelize a faith not indigenous to these mountains. I am a new evangelist bringing the idea of empowered people’s owning their future.
In my mission I come with assets that few in these mountains have. Though I do not have financial wealth, I can call for a helicopter to lift me out. I can call on the highest leaders in both Nepal and China to work as partners. I can call on banks to lend me money. Although not taking from the place to enrich my life back home, I must ask whether my coming to help grow a national park might be a new colonialism?
Grandpa and Grandma were part of the old colonial. Yes, Americans, not British; yes, missionaries not merchants. The family was not traditionally taking, but because of birth and learning, they gained access to the good life in India—bungalows, servants, first waiting line positions. Against that pressure, to guide the family towards the giving, we had Grandma—she pre-eminently cared. All knew that, certainly I her eldest grandson, for to be a male in India cloaks one with privilege as does caste. Grandma opened understanding that pressed me to go beyond my privilege. She welcomed into our lives hundreds of children of lepers that overflowed her house, she stepped to her veranda sometimes hourly to give medical care. She taught me that touching the outcast brought me in.
I have come here now to touch that which once as a child I knew. Night being still young, I step to the edge of the glen to bring more dry branches. My eyesight stops against the valley’s far wall. Partway up, a light shines. Might it be the moon off mica-filled rock? I step sideways to see if the light disappears. No. From deep in my soul is recognition—only two things make fires, humans, and lightning.
Tonight the sky is clear. I am not alone. Is that fire smugglers? Or is it a fire made by some other? Might it be …? When daylight comes, without its beam, I may have difficulty being guided to its hearth. Rolling up my sleeping bag and putting all into my pack, I throw a rope over a branch and hoist my supplies from chewing animals. Into the dark I step.
The night’s challenge is figuring out the route when walking. Steps are easy, a flashlight shows that far. But the beam does not reveal the trail. Lit is a tunnelled path showing more what is left out, causing the dark to feel even bigger. As I walk towards the distant fire, to prevent my approach from being seen, my hand covers the lens, separating my fingers to let light sliver through. On that distant slope the reddish light continues to glow. It’s likely not herders; this is not the season. Plant hunters? Possibly. It could also be the Yeti … ridiculous, even if I am in its sanctum sanctorum. Most likely, smugglers. Approaching a smugglers’ camp at night….
This most remote part of the Barun is where Yetis would be, if they’ve survived. And if Yetis exist and
if they’ve survived, why could they not know how to make a fire? Doing so here would be safe, for they know what the plants have also now shown me: humans do not come here. Having a fire speaks of an animal that gathers with its kin—eats cooked meat. Having a fire says that the Yeti, if it lives, does so with a population.
With fire to fill their eyes, those sitting by it will be less likely to see my tiny light as fingers open a larger slit when I must see more, then narrow to almost nothing when steps are routine, always making sure never to point the lens to that slope. In the heavens above a satellite circles. On this earth today, not just here but in a few other remaining jungles, it is possible to walk towards pre-humanity while satellites circle above.
I try to be quiet, then laugh, there’s no way they’ll hear me from here. It was the answer of moments ago that is the most logical … and smugglers do not appreciate being walked up on in the dark. Cautioned, I turn back to camp.
Before crawling into my sleeping bag I notch three sticks, tie them in the centre, and splay them out into a tripod. A fourth stick is aimed carefully through the fork like a rifle to point the direction in the morning. In the warmth of my sleeping bag I wonder what would I do if I met the Yeti. A first need, if I ever meet the Yeti, must be to communicate no danger to this animal is that has survived by not communicating.
What should I say, hominoid-to-hominoid, if I just happen to come upon a Yeti, and it seemed possible I could communicate. It is an intrigue I’ve pondered over the years. Walking upon a tiger and a bear I know not to shout. But with the Yeti what is the action? Maybe speaking Nepali or Tibetan should be a first attempt, or should my sounds be simply some tone? How about: ‘I’ve been following your footprints for thirty years, quite an elusive trail you’ve left’.
Would it talk back and say to me: ‘That’s strange, because your imprints on the land changed my world forever’.
Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Page 31