To hold that last shot of red sun through haze over jumbled roofs
Everything moves like slow fluid in this atmosphere
Thick as dreams
With sewage, incense, dust, and fever and the smoke of brick kilns and cremations —
Tom Kelly’s bike rumbles down —
We’re going drinking on the Tibetan side of town.
Beggar with withered legs sits sideways on a skateboard, grinning
There’s a joke going on somewhere but we’ll never know
Those laughing kids with hungry eyes must be in on it too
With their clinging memories of a culture crushed
By Chinese greed
Pretty young mother by the temple gate
Covers her baby’s face against diesel fumes
That look of concern—you can see it still —
Not yet masked by the hard lines of a woman’s
Struggle to survive
Hard bargains going down
When you’re living on the Tibetan side of town.
Big red Enfield Bullet lurches to a halt in the dust
Last blast of engine leaves a ringing in the ears
That fades into the rustle of bare feet and slapping sandals
And the baritone moan of long bronze trumpets
Muffled by monastery walls.
Prayer flags crack like whips in the breeze
Sending to the world—tonight the message blows east
Dark door opens to warm yellow room and there
Are these steaming jugs of hot millet beer
And I’m sucked into the scene like this liquor up
This bamboo straw
Sweet tungba sliding down —
drinking on the Tibetan side of town
“TIBETAN SIDE OF TOWN,” 1987
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/66.
In pursuit of the USC work Susie, Tom, Sri Ram, and I—along with Tom’s sister Pam, who joined us for much of the trip—would drive to the end of one of the few roads and then hike most of a day, sometimes longer, to reach a village. It was worth the sweat and the altitude-shortened wind to visit ancient communities with little connection to the modern world.
Little connection, but not zero connection. In one town they threw a party for us. They built a huge bonfire, which must have consumed a month’s supply of precious fuel for cooking. The town musicians performed: a wildly atonal skirl of oboe-like instruments and drums played at a breakneck tempo in a completely incomprehensible time signature. The young men sprang about in vigorous dance: dark silhouettes against the leaping blaze, like the figures I had imagined while listening to de Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance” as a child. Then a couple of them began to break-dance, busting all sorts of moves, spinning on their necks in the dewy grass.
For our last week in Nepal we headed to the region of Mount Everest, home of the Sherpa people, who practice a form of Tibetan Buddhism. Our “excuse” was that we wanted to inspect the charitable projects undertaken by Sir Edmund Hillary’s Himalayan Trust, with the support of Canada’s Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation. (On May 29, 1953, the New Zealander Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first humans to summit Mount Everest. Hillary bonded with the Sherpas and subsequently set up his trust to benefit them.) These undertakings were not extensive, but were important and mostly practical: a hospital, a new bridge across some impossible chasm, an improved water system, a rather modest reforestation project. Really, we were there to just knock around.
The town of Lukla, a forty-minute flight from Kathmandu, is the most popular starting point for trekkers headed toward Everest. Arriving by air might sound straightforward enough, but consider that in 2010 the History Channel rated Lukla the most dangerous airport in the world, and that was after the runway had been paved. When we got there it was a grassy strip on an expansive ledge nine thousand feet above sea level. To reach Lukla, planes soar between massive mountains that seem to loom just off the wingtips, then hit a narrow runway that runs upward at a twelve-degree pitch and is only fifteen hundred feet long. The runway is bordered with brush and houses and begins (or ends, depending on your direction) at the brink of a cliff overlooking the Dudh Kosi River valley two thousand feet below. Lining the runway were the overgrown, decaying carcasses of crashed aircraft, including the one in which Hillary’s wife was killed. You deplane and you’re in town, which I’m told has grown since we were there, now sporting a Starbucks alongside the Karma Inn Restaurant and Irish Pub.
From Lukla we trekked to Namche, the region’s main market town, on the slope above which Sir Edmund’s reforestation project sat, forlorn. The locals apparently cared so little about it that they had let their goats consume all the million seedlings planted by the foundation. We spent the night there. The next day we marched on over a very big hill into the next valley, finding a town, whose name I no longer recall, virtually empty of human life. It was a Saturday, and everyone had gone to the market in Namche. The sky was a brilliant sapphire. The stone and timber houses sat orderly and quaint. The only sound was the rising and falling wind. The only things moving were the prayer flags fluttering and snapping by every house, the wind carrying their message of devotion to the ends of the earth.
As we entered town, the trail became the main street. A dog appeared fifty metres ahead, looked our way, trotted silently across the road, and vanished. A moment later, a particularly strong gust seemed to carry with it another sound: a deep and somber moan broken by an intermittent percussive pounding. We followed it down a side street and around some corners. The sound grew ever clearer until it resolved into something like trombones and drums and cymbal clashes, around the edges of which were human voices.
It was a funeral. In one house, the inhabitants were giving the dead a send-off. While her relatives kept watch, a small group of monks and nuns, robed in a dark red the colour of dried blood, alternately played several six-foot-long bronze trumpets whose long tones rolled over and around each other like eddies in a river, punctuated by percussion sounds, and chanted instructions for the departed, helping her to move on and avoid rebirth into the world.
Farther up the trail we encountered Sir Edmund himself, old but very fit and cheerful. He happened to be there on his charitable business. He made us welcome, introducing us to the Sherpa who was his right-hand man and his wife, as well as their son, an apparently autistic man in his thirties, I’d say, who was a gifted painter of tanka (Buddhist religious scrolls). The son was one of three children born to the couple who survived to adulthood. Three out of a total of thirteen. Tungba was found, and we sat in the Sherpa’s house talking and drinking while Caucasian faces grew redder and everyone became a notch more animated.
Me and Sir Edmund Hillary with the wife of Sir Edmund’s head Sherpa, Nepal, 1987
photo credit: SUSAN WALSH
We carried on our ascent through a magical landscape of frightening heights, heart-stretching vistas, and torrents rushing down deep canyons, walking for hours under a canopy of scarlet-flowered rhododendron trees. At every crossroads stood a stone cairn built by pilgrims over the centuries, each rock carved with prayers and carried to the spot from wherever they came. The whole landscape seemed charged with the energy of the spirit.
As we rounded a bend, we chanced to meet a small party of travellers coming down—an elderly couple who turned out to be Americans, along with some Sherpas. We stopped to chat. The old man told me he had left his teaching job at a seminary in the Midwest to come to Nepal twenty-five years earlier and bring the gospel to its people. He was about to leave to return to the United States and was taking one last opportunity to appreciate the glory of the surroundings.
He proudly told me that he had taught Robert Schuller, of Crystal Cathedral fame, but he was bitter and seemed diminished. In twenty-five years, he said, he had not made a single convert. His words were “These people don’t want to know about God!”
I felt sad for him, as he appeared to be so ob
livious to the spirituality built into the surroundings. He had spent a quarter of a century wearing cultural blinkers, not seeing, not learning what he might have about the Divine. If it’s true that the attribute of God that is supposed to have the greatest effect on us is love, how can it flower in a soil of censure, tribalism, false pride . . . fear of the other? But for Big Circumstance, that could have been me.
As often happens in the sway of travel, Nepal altered my life in at least one very significant and unexpected way. Back in Lukla, we learned that all of Nepal Airlines planes small enough to land there—around four—were grounded in other parts of the country because of bad weather. So we sat, waiting for a lift out. During that time trekkers came streaming into town, quickly filling hotels and guesthouses. People were scattered everywhere, even camping on the runway. We had a hotel room, but Susie got sick with something like the flu. It didn’t seem like the usual travel bug, and I was anxious to get us out of there. No one knew how long our wait might be. Then I got a bright idea: let’s rent horses and ride out! The Sherpas had them—rugged ponies. I thought it was a good idea at the time. It was a six-day walk to the nearest road, but we could sit on animals while they did the work, all sure-footed and obedient! I had no idea what I was talking about. We would have gone over a cliff. Fortunately, everyone else just looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “I don’t think you should do that.”
After three days the Nepali government figured out that they had a situation at Lukla—there were now hundreds of people stranded at the edge of the earth—so they responded, using any aircraft they had to get people out. We ended up on King Birendra’s personal helicopter, a French Puma SA 330 military chopper painted white, not gussied up at all. It was very Spartan for a royal ride. We strapped in on a bench along the starboard side, and as we took off with that special lurch that choppers have, Susie vomited, which amused us both. It seemed an appropriate gesture, given what we thought of the king.
Susie recovered quickly, and we landed back in Canada a few days later. Nepal sent me home with a wealth of promptings. Among the most significant, though I couldn’t have known it at the time, was that I should take riding lessons. I thought that if I were going to be travelling in places where people use horses for transportation, then I ought to know how to operate one. Sometimes you form simple intentions that can take you where you never imagined you would go, profoundly shaping your life. Leaving Berklee was like that, going to Central America was like that, and learning to ride horses was like that. In hindsight it’s clear that the pursuit unlocked a succession of doors—doors of the mind, doors of the body and the spirit, and doors to people and places—that eventually led me into a dimension where nearly five decades of interior walls, having been cracked and cracked again, began to fall, and I found myself, for the first time, throwing my heart fully at the feet of another person. Unfortunately, that person was married to someone else.
There may be a metaphor here—something stereotypical about being lost in a wilderness, but the horse knows the way home. But there was nothing stereotypical about what was to unfold.
High above valley,
Above deep shade coloured with the calls of cuckoos,
The ring of coppersmith’s hammer
high in the hiss of the wind
Wind filled with spirits and bright with the jangle of horse bells
It’s morning
Over the scratched-up soil, scorched-earth wasted,
Long shadows lead women bearing water
I watch the sway of skirts,
Think of moist spice forests —
Still, midnight whispers in my ear
Weavers’ fingers flying on the loom
Patterns shift too fast to be discerned
All these years of thinking
Ended up like this
In front of all this beauty
Understanding nothing
Rhododendrons in bloom, sharp against
Spring snow
Remind me of another time
In Japanese temple —
There was a single orange blossom
At the wrong time of year —
Seemed like a sign —
When I looked again
It was gone
Weavers’ fingers flying on the loom
Patterns shift too fast to be discerned
All these years of thinking
Ended up like this
In front of all this beauty
Understanding nothing
“UNDERSTANDING NOTHING,” 1987
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/65.
16
Around June 1986 I started seeing things. That is, when I looked at a line, like a guitar string, it would be straight, then there would be a little notch in it, and then it would be straight again. Every straight line that I looked at, door frame or anything, was like that. Over a summer filled with gigs, the notch grew until it was clear that this was something I’d better look into. An ophthalmologist informed me that I had a fungal infection in my left eye called ocular histoplasmosis. Tiny spores had sprung forth from the droppings of some passing bird to colonize my retina. They were eating a hole in it, which eventually grew to the point that doctors felt there was nothing to lose by cauterizing the edges with a laser beam. The intense ruby flashes, though mildly painful, were a truly beautiful shade. The fungus died, along with all but the peripheral vision, and for the past twenty-five years I have been legally blind in my left eye.
Adversity being the mother of opportunity, the eye problem sent me spinning into new experiences. I’m left-handed, so I had always assumed that I was also left-eyed, and had thrown that way and sighted that way. When that eye went, I had to become right-handed for anything requiring aiming. Not long after the surgery, I was at Jon Goldsmith’s farmhouse. He and his partner, Kelly, had a dartboard, and I was pressed into a game. I was always useless at throwing darts. Put a projectile in my hand and it would be inadvisable to remain in the room. At Jon’s I aimed with the right eye and threw with my right hand. Bingo. Right on target. Suddenly I was an unembarrassing, if unimpressive, dart player. After forty-two years on this planet, I learned something very basic about myself: my right eye is the dominant one. Good thing I wasn’t born into a hunter-gatherer society!
Shortly after that, I was talking with a friend who owns a music store in Toronto. He asked me how my eye was doing. I told him about the dart game. “Ah,” he said, “you should come out to the range with me sometime and see how you do with a handgun.” That was a surprise. I hadn’t known it, but he was involved in competitive target shooting. I had never fired anything one-handed but an air pistol. I had a nice German piece that I would occasionally use for amusement, shooting out of hotel room windows at passing garbage trucks.
Back in 1970, when Kitty and I first started road camping, I bought a 20-gauge over-and-under shotgun. I was unreasonably afraid of bears, rabies, and biker packs. That gun travelled around with us but rarely left its case. When we moved to our country house, in 1974, I used to blast tin cans in a little gravel pit at the back of the property. I achieved a very low kill ratio. Wrong eye. Who knew?
But now, at a pistol club in Toronto, festooned with earmuffs and safety glasses, I was able to put holes in the appropriate parts of a torso-shaped target with my friend’s .38 Smith & Wesson and 9mm Browning. Exciting! I went shooting a few more times, then went deep. I applied for, and received, a government permit to own a firearm. I joined a gun club north of the city that had a lot of space and numerous well-maintained ranges, then enrolled in a training course under the auspices of the International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC).
Practical shooting, as a sport, grew out of a perceived need to provide civilian shooters with defensive handgun skills. It’s target shooting, but it’s also playing out half of a gunfight—that is, you run through a course of fire, engaging targets as if in a real confrontation, but nobody is shooting at you.
Over the years since it began, practical shooting has become somewhat less practical, with less emphasis on realistic training and more on refinements of equipment (holsters you could never wear on the street, for instance) and excelling at the game. But I still found it a lot of fun, and quite democratic. I was on the line next to people from all walks of life, all sectors of society, all genders and demographics. What we had in common was a love of running around making loud noises and a sense of friendly competition. What we did not share, for the most part, were political views. Most of the shooters I met, many of whom I came to think of as friends, were more conservative than I was, though a few of them were so libertarian it seemed like they’d come full circle to where they merged with the anarchist left.
My involvement in shooting peaked in the early nineties, when I took a long break from performing and could spend many hours working out with my Colt 1911 .45, or the Glock .40 I picked up as a second pistol, or my Remington pump-action 12-gauge, or sometimes with my Hungarian AK.
The AK was semiautomatic. In the United States there are certain people who can legally own full-auto weapons. In Canada there’s no such option, though I would have exercised it if there were. Sometimes I’d fire hundreds of rounds in a practice session, so I learned to make my own ammunition by reloading spent shells.
I did get to shoot a machine gun once. In the late nineties I was dating a woman named Sally Sweetland, who lived in Vermont. She expressed curiosity about my admittedly controversial pastime. During one of her visits to Toronto, I took her to the club. No one was there. It was midwinter, snow everywhere, crisp and beautiful.
I started Sally out on an old Russian SKS, a rifle used extensively by the Soviets during World War II and largely replaced during the early fifties by Kalashnikovs—AK-47s. We were cranking off rounds when four SUVs with police markings streamed into the parking lot, kicking up loose gravel and snow. A dozen large, dark-uniformed, and conspicuously armed men got out and began to approach. The breath that hung in little cloudy puffs around their heads gleamed in the low winter sun. My heart jumped for a moment—no matter how innocent you are, standing there with a gun when the cops show up somehow brings out guilt—until I realized that this was the local tactical squad. I recognized the leader, Casey, who was a board member of the club and was bringing his officers in to train. We were in their way—they wanted to use the range that Sally and I were on.
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