Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

  With our backs propped against boulders, Ruit and I settled down to wait for Tabin, enjoying the sun.

  “I want to say something to you very clearly,” Ruit told me. “I know I can be very hard on Geoff. I don’t know any other way to be. I have to be straight with everyone I really care about. But, you know, I love him like anything.”

  I nodded and unfolded my topographical map, tracing the route to our next destination, the village of Dhovan. If I was reading the terrain lines correctly, we had what looked like a steep seven-thousand-foot descent before we’d be there.

  Tabin hopped down from boulder to boulder, back to us. “I had Jean for a minute up there,” he said. “But I lost her.”

  “Come, Geoff, we better get going,” Ruit said. “It’s a long way down to Dhovan.”

  Tabin and I began walking while Ruit coaxed an exhausted Satenla out of a sitting position and handed her his stick for extra incentive. The trail dropped gradually for the first thousand feet, and Tabin took the opportunity to critique my hiking technique, telling me I was walking too fast, rolling my feet too much from side to side, and wasting energy righting myself after every step. “Try this,” he said. “It’s called the ‘guide’s pace.’ ” I followed his foul-smelling shoes, putting my feet where he planted his. At first I didn’t notice much difference, but after a mile or so I realized we were chewing up the terrain pretty efficiently. “Watch the porters,” he said. “They walk as fast as they can but fry themselves after twenty minutes and have to drop their loads and recover. If we keep up like this, we’ll pass all of them.”

  The trail turned off the ridge and plunged, far more steeply, down a dry creek bed. Now there was no walking, at any pace. We were hopping or sliding down, from boulder to boulder, and with each impact, my Achilles tendon protested. We traveled like that for five more hours, hopping down slick streambeds and steep, stony trails, stalked by a downdraft of cold air that blew past us like a premonition of disaster.

  We had no way of knowing it, since we’d moved so far ahead of the main group, but nearly everyone was struggling. Ajeev Thapa, entrusted to carry the precious Oertli phaco machine in a leather briefcase, had tumbled headlong over a mossy boulder and cradled the device, letting his body take the impact. In the process, he’d badly twisted his knee. Ruit, too, had fallen from a rock, strained his knee, and was moving slowly, leaning heavily on the trekking pole Satenla had given back to him. One of the porters—whom we’d passed, as Tabin had predicted—had also taken a bad fall in a slippery creek bed and had broken his ankle.

  Tabin seemed to be the only one immune to the rigors of our descent. Whenever he spotted an exposed ledge, he scrambled up rocks to its highest point, aiming his cellphone fruitlessly in all directions, like a thirsty dowser divining for water, failed time and again by his forked stick. By late afternoon we spotted a suspension bridge a thousand feet below that spanned the Maiwa Khola near the spot where it met the Tamor and led, we hoped, to Dhovan. The last stretch of the trail was lit by fires farmers had set to clear their fields. They burned on the darkening hillside like smoldering pits leading to a subterranean world, and we walked through choking drifts of smoke until we reached the river. Tabin skipped and I hobbled across the suspension bridge to the tent site by the water’s edge where we planned to spend the night.

  We stripped off our clothes, balanced on boulders in icy pools at the edge of the Maewa Khola, and washed away the smoke and sweat before lying on our backs by the riverbank, waiting for the rest of the group to arrive. They straggled in, limping toward us in small groups, pulled their packs off, and sprawled on the ground. An hour later, Ruit still hadn’t arrived.

  Ruit’s knee was worse than he’d let on, and as he crossed the swaying suspension bridge, he was just allowing himself to picture collapsing at the campsite and calling for a cup of tea when he was met by a party of village elders who’d heard he was coming, waiting for him at the far bank. “They told me a man was in grave danger,” Ruit explained to us later. “He’d been gored by a bull and needed my attentions urgently.” They led Ruit away from the campsite to the center of Dhovan, where a man in his mid-twenties, wearing a burnt-orange baseball cap with the logo of the University of Texas Longhorns, was lying on a wooden bench, clutching his stomach where the thrust of the horn had punctured him.

  “To tell you truthfully, I was terrified,” Ruit says. “It had been so many years since I’d practiced general medicine that my mind raced, thinking of what to do.”

  Ruit couldn’t bring himself to look at the wound. He stalled, inspecting the man’s tongue and taking his pulse, knowing that if he examined his abdomen and saw feces, that would mean the bull had punctured the man’s intestine and, likely, condemned him to die.

  Ruit called for a bag of medical supplies and told himself to breathe slowly, think clearly, and be the sort of doctor his siblings had needed when their lives had been threatened in a place more distant than Dhovan. He spoke to the man quietly, calming him, and learned that he’d recently arrived home from working in the Middle East and had married only three days earlier. When the bag arrived, Ruit pulled the man’s T-shirt aside. “His intestine was hanging out from his lower abdomen,” Ruit says. “But as I probed at it, I could see it was not punctured.” Greatly relieved, Ruit cleaned the wound with antiseptic and lifted up the man’s abdominal skin, until the viscera slid back inside. He lined up the wound edges and bound them together with heavy strips of Elastoplast, then asked Khem Gurung to fetch a bottle of ciprofloxacin, so he could put his patient on an intravenous drip of antibiotics.

  Ruit told us the story later that night as we sat on the ground, eating our dinner of dal and rice in the dark. He showed us pictures he’d taken, and he said that a rescue mission was under way. He had convinced the village elders to organize an “ambulance,” a stretcher hauled in shifts by a team of ten men, to carry the gored man up a steep trail in the dark to Taplejung, the district capital, where a jeep could be hired to take him to a hospital. If they got him there before severe infection set in, Ruit said, he should live.

  Meanwhile, two of our already exhausted porters had gulped their dinner and begun a four-hour hike uphill to retrieve the load of their colleague with the broken ankle, so the gear could accompany us in the morning. The trail was too treacherous for them to carry him, and they planned to leave the injured man on the mountainside for the night, until another “ambulance” could be organized by the people of Dhovan to fetch him down. Something as simple as a road would have solved both medical emergencies, but the road to Dhovan, shown as a dotted line planned for future completion on my map printed by the Nepalese government, remained a rumor.

  It seemed to take all of Ruit’s strength to shovel food toward his mouth with his fork. When he’d finished, he pushed his plate aside and stretched out flat on his back. “All day, when we were fighting our way down the mountain, I was worried I’d made a mistake choosing this route, and I was cursing myself for putting my young daughter through such a thing. But because we came this way, I don’t think that fellow will die.” He looked away from us, up into the darkness, toward the stars shining faintly through the branches of the riverside trees. “I feel,” he said, “like I was brought here for this.”

  Four hours into the third day of our trek, I was wondering whether I could continue. The pain in my ankle had only gotten worse, and our “trail” was a steep climb through thorny scrub on the east bank of the Tamor. We took almost as much time searching for the route as we did hiking on it. That morning, before we’d set out, I’d pulled out my map, pointed to a broad line on the west side of the Tamor, and insisted to Ruit that it must be the main trail. No, he’d said, he’d sent a screening team along the route weeks earlier, and the correct path to follow was on the east bank.

  Ruit’s father had told me stories about his trade route along the Tamor, traveling with caravans of twenty yaks. But this couldn’t be it. Not a single yak could pass this way without slipping to its death
on the boulders below. We clung to a muddy route slashed from heavy undergrowth, along a thirty-degree slope that threatened to pitch us into the river if we didn’t hang on to the vegetation. Since much of it was barbed or thorny, my fingers were bleeding, and my palms were bruised from thrusting them out, again and again, to break my frequent falls.

  We came to a large tributary that entered the Tamor from the east, and we had to wade the shallows and scramble over mossy logs that locals had propped between boulders across the deepest channel. “This can’t be the usual route,” I said to Ruit.

  “You were correct about the main trail being on the other side of the river,” he said, pointing to a faint line that traversed cliffs five hundred feet above us on the opposite bank. “It’s up there. But I’m told much of it is washed out from the rains. This is the route local people use when the weather makes that one impassible. This is the winter trail.”

  We crossed so many tributaries that I lost count, and on the far bank of each stream, we had to climb up out of the steep gorges the water had cut. I’d thought our seven-thousand-foot descent the day before would be the low point of the trip, but our third day of trekking was far worse. After wading another tributary, I stood with Tabin, looking up at a steep six-hundred-foot climb that snaked up the face of a granite headwall.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” I told Tabin. “I’m running on fumes.”

  “You never know what you’re capable of until the bridges are all out behind you,” he said. Tabin talked all the way up, while I struggled simply to breathe. “Ruit’s really slowing down,” he said. “He used to always have to be at the front of the pack, leading the charge. But I’m slowing down, too.” Tabin’s talk of his diminished powers didn’t seem to prevent his powerful legs from churning uphill. They were the source of his physical strength, I realized. “I used to be able to run endless eight-minute miles,” he told me. “I mean endless. Night and day. Able to keep on at that pace for as long as I wanted. Now I’m up to ten minutes. That’s why my days of big mountain climbing are over. My margin for error is gone. But you know what’s weird?” he asked, heaving himself over a boulder at the top of the headwall.

  I wasn’t able to breathe well enough to ask as I clambered up behind him.

  “Age hasn’t affected my surgery,” he said. “Not yet. My hands are still steady. And if anything, I just keep getting better. So my first ascents from here on are going to have to be medical.”

  We looked down and saw Ruit following Satenla up the trail at the base of the cliff, and continued on. It was hot and windless in the Tamor River Gorge. My water was nearly gone, and I sipped just enough to keep my tongue from sticking to the roof of my mouth. We walked the ledge for perhaps another mile, and then the trail simply ended. We were at the base of an upslanting field of huge, house-sized boulders that looked like they’d been blackened by fire. Tabin scanned the boulder field and found a line he felt we could climb. With ropes and climbing shoes, and without having just spent ten hours fighting our way upriver, it might not have been much of a challenge. But under the conditions, my mind spun at the thought of attempting it.

  “Give me your pack,” Tabin said, and I handed it over. He shouldered my much heavier bag, full of cameras and books, and wedged his slim bag sideways under its lid, cinching the straps tight. Then, with my eyes locked on his feet, we began to climb. There were crevasses between the boulders, wide and deep enough that a fall into one of them would be, at the very least, a bad idea. People had jammed logs and piled stones into some of the narrower gaps, and after scaling each boulder, we tiptoed across these unsteady bridges, my pulse pounding in my temples. The black rock reflected the heat from the sun, sweat soaked through my mud-spattered clothes, and I resisted the urge to swallow the last of my water. “Hey,” Tabin said, standing on top of a massive boulder, holding his wrist with one hand and looking at his mountaineering watch. “Check it out! My resting pulse is only seventy-five beats per minute!”

  We finally left the black boulders behind, clambered down a slope of scree, and stood on a wide stone ledge overhanging the Tamor by five hundred feet. There was a small mud-and-thatch hut there, built on top of the rock. I collapsed where I stood, and Tabin sank onto a bench built of stacked stones.

  The family who lived in the hut came out to have a look at their unexpected visitors. Those who could see, that is. The elderly matriarch of the family had massive white cataracts and gave off an overpowering aroma of smoke and alcohol. Her daughter and three grandchildren stood in the hut’s doorway. All four sets of eyes shifted from side to side in their sockets, like the lenses of cameras trying to focus and failing. “Oh jeez!” Tabin said. “That’s just terrible! That shaking of the eyes is ‘nystagmus.’ I think they have a condition called ‘foveal hypoplasia.’ The center of the retina doesn’t develop fully, and the brain directs the eye to keep searching for receptor cells, trying to send visual information, but the eye can’t do it. Can you imagine living in a place like this with a condition like that?”

  “Is it curable?”

  “Not if that’s what they have. It only gets worse.”

  The thought of a family with a degenerative eye condition living on a rock five hundred feet above a turbulent river seemed almost too much to bear. I took my pack back from Tabin and rooted around in it until I found some candies. The children sucked on their treats happily enough, but they needed so much more. They needed to be airlifted into another life.

  One by one, members of our team stumbled in from the boulder field, tore off their packs, and collapsed. Even the Sherpas looked exhausted. Ruit and Satenla arrived last. Satenla looked tired, but her father seemed hardly able to take another step before he slid onto the stone bench next to Tabin. His light blue polo shirt was soaked a shade darker by sweat, and he seemed about to fall asleep sitting up when his eyes fastened on those of the family. Their need affected him like smelling salts, and he struggled to his feet. “What do you think, Geoff?” Ruit said.

  “I’d guess hypoplasia of the macula.”

  “Could be the optic nerve also,” Ruit said. “We won’t know until we dilate them and have a look with an ophthalmoscope.”

  Ruit began questioning the mother and grandmother, and his tone got angrier after each of their answers. When he was done interrogating them, he turned to me. “I asked why there are no men around when they’re in such a state of need. They said the men went to Malaysia to make some money, but they haven’t been sending any home. I told them to follow us to Sinwa, where we can examine them properly. I told the old woman I can fix her eyes very easily. But she said she didn’t want to walk so far. She planned to drink herself to death right here. So I got little bit angry with her and told her she can do what she likes with herself. But I warned her not to prevent the children from coming.”

  And then, as if the electric cord connected to his healer’s impulses was suddenly kicked from its socket, his knees buckled and he sat heavily beside me. “Oh, these legs are getting old,” he said, gulping from his water bottle. “I’m sorry. That road was really tough. I didn’t know. By all standards it was too much. There’s a teahouse not far from here where my father used to stop with his caravans. We’ll spend the night there. I’m too tired to go on.”

  It’s incredible what water when you’re thirsty, a few hours of rest when you’re tired, and a plate or two of warm food when you’re hungry can do to your spirits when you think they’ve been shattered. Ruit, Tabin, Satenla, and I sat cross-legged on the veranda of the teahouse, on a bright Tibetan rug decorated with a phoenix in flight. We sipped spiced tea, picked at fried potatoes, and nibbled hacked bits of chicken fried with chilies. I was unaccountably happy.

  “This is a very romantic spot,” Ruit said. “Don’t you think?”

  I did. It was almost impossible not to be caught up in the romance of the evening, on a covered platform suspended over rustling jungle ticking with the impact of raindrops, the glossy fronds of vegetation lit by o
ur oil lamps. And it was harder still not to be swept up in the romance of Ruit’s work. I remembered something an Australian management specialist had said to me recently. He’d volunteered to assess the human resources structure of the complicated machine that was the new Tilganga and offer recommendations for how it could be run more efficiently. “The thing about Tilganga, like most organizations built by charismatic leaders, is it’s top-heavy, it’s all Ruit,” he said. “For the newer employees, he’s a distant figure and it’s just a job. But for those who’ve been with him for years, who’ve been through the wars, he’s a god. They’d charge through machine-gun fire for him.”

  It was two hours farther up the river in the dark to Sinwa. And after warming themselves with tea at the guesthouse, the rest of Ruit’s team had volunteered to charge through rain, if not streams of machine-gun rounds, to trek on muddy trails in the dark and set up the operating theater so surgery could begin as soon as we joined them in the morning. Ruit pulled the bottle of single-malt scotch I’d handed him at the beginning of the trip out of his bag and held it up for me to see. “Does Your Majesty agree this is an appropriate occasion?”

  “I could be convinced.”

  We had no glasses, so Ruit unscrewed the metal cap and filled it to the brim. He handed it first to me, then refilled it and passed it to Tabin, before helping himself to a capful.

  “So, Geoff,” he said, after he’d let the scotch linger on his tongue, “are you going to fix things up with your family so they can stand all your absences?”

  “I want to,” Tabin said. “We have so much fun when we’re together, but I’ve just let it get worse for a long time. There’s tension every time I leave for a trip, but I’ve just been taking the easy way out and stopped discussing it.”