Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  There were no maps, only travelers exchanging information. He went to Istanbul; at the legendary Pudding Shop he joined a group of kids on a four-day train ride to Tehran. In Iran, the knot of traveling companions changed again and he found himself on a bus to the Persian border and another bus through Afghan customs and another bus into Herat, which just had the worst blizzard in living memory, the nomads had lost all their animals, and here were all the naive young hippies getting off the bus into a catastrophe, women throwing their babies at them, tearing their breasts with their fingernails in desperation, people assaulting them as they scuttled in turtle formation to the nearest shop and closed the door and the shopkeeper explained they’re dying, all the people of Herat are dying. There’s an eye-opener, kids!

  Already Laird was beginning to feel that Kerouac was a coward, a chickenshit, he didn’t go far enough—fucking Marrakech, big deal. He started to see French and Italian kids OD’ing on heroin in filthy hostels. The girls had bruises on their breasts and ass from being pinched incessantly, and so did Tom, but it had become clear that Afghanistan was taking people away, far away from their former lives; Afghanistan was really the beginning of the adventure, where both the mind and the body began to alter in a way that proved difficult to reverse. Before Afghanistan they were just traveling, but now everybody dressed themselves in local clothes in a silly attempt to blend in; they were hanging out in the bazaars, eating weird food from the stalls that made them constantly sick.

  He took a forty-eight-hour bus ride to Chicken Street, the hippie meeting place in Kabul, passing through the horrible searing bleakness of Kandahar, where three Frenchmen had recently been decapitated by a mob for looking a bit too longingly at a local woman. Kabul was teeming with a pan-ethnic tribe of freaks from across the world, broken into subcultures—drugs, antiques, religion, art. He took another bus to the Khyber Pass and down to Peshawar and then a night train across the Pakistani plains to Lahore, where he booked a thirty-six-dollar flight to Amristar because this was the Indo-Pakistani War of ’72 and the border was closed. By now he had separated from his pod of fellow wanderers and was alone. He rode the bus to Delhi but India was immediately tiring, butt to chest people, the intolerable heat, the filth, the never-ending diarrhea. To escape the heat, all the hippies were bugging out to Kashmir or Kathmandu, take your pick, and after a few sleepless nights he was on the train to the Nepalese border and then standing by the roadside in the savanna-like terai with his thumb out.

  An old American-made cargo truck stopped for him and he crawled in the back under a canvas tarp protecting a load of sacked sugar. It was the monsoon season and it rained all night while they motored up into the hills, and for the first time in months he crawled into his down sleeping bag to warm himself. He awoke at dawn because the truck had stopped and a Gurung woman with twenty gold earrings in both ears had flung the tarp back and the wind was cold. They were on the Damang Pass above the Kathmandu Valley, 9,000 feet high. Given the monsoons, it shouldn’t have been a clear morning and he shouldn’t have been able to see the Himalayas, but there they were in a spectacular panorama, from Annapurna to Everest, the clouds curdled below the peaks.

  Immediately he knew he was at that place he had told his mother he was looking for, and that whatever he was going to do in life, he was going to do it here; just the details had to be worked out. Which sounded insane, of course, but he couldn’t deny the exhilarating physical sensation of his life about to assume its shape, to grasp its purpose. Foreigners visiting Nepal fell under the spell of the mountains and the culture all the time, and now Laird was one of them. He was nineteen years old, halfway around the world from his childhood, and convinced he had come home.

  After a month in Kathmandu, though, his money ran out and he hitchhiked back to Europe destitute, his last five dollars stolen in Kabul, starving and begging his way to Turin, Italy, where he telephoned a Kathmandu contact for help. By then he was possessed with an absolute faith, an iron flame of self-belief burning in his chest, that he could do anything, that nothing could deflect him, but he weighed less than a hundred pounds, parasites were eating his intestines, and he had a kidney infection. Alberto, his Italian friend, put him to work as a gardener at a Baptist missionary school; he was fed huge meals and sent to a doctor and the old missionary ladies gave him The Chronicles of Narnia to read and chamomile tea and he started putting on some weight and scheming about a return to Nepal.

  Alberto invited him along to a party in Geneva; Laird shaved his shoulder-length hair, put on an Afghani skullcap, wrapped himself in a Tibetan chuba, and went as the exoticism of the moment. Encouraged to speak his callow mind, he launched into a soliloquy about the spirituality of Nepal and wrapped up with a sales pitch: All he wanted to do, he told the gathering of beautiful people, was to make a movie about the efficacy of Tantric Buddhism—the philosophic notion that you could employ any human activity to achieve enlightenment, an idea the hippies had seized upon with great vitality, using it to legitimize the two pursuits—sex and drugs—at the pinnacle of their enlightenment list.

  Inconceivably, Alberto’s patron, an eccentric Italian millionaire living in Geneva, gave Laird $50,000 after listening to his rap. Glory, glory. He had won the lottery, his karma runneth over, and the one remaining question of his good fortune was: Would he piss it all away? With the money, Tom persuaded three contacts back in Provincetown involved in photography to fly to Geneva with several trunkloads of film and equipment and then travel overland with him to Kathmandu. The filmmakers had all just finished college and were on their way up in the world: Frank, who would become a professor of photography at Amherst; Gary, a future computer wonk at NASA; and Billy, who would eventually come back to earth as a software specialist in Silicon Valley. Because it was a living Buddhist homeland, they went to Solu-Khumbu, Sherpa territory, for a year documenting tribal society—the same thing Laird would do in Mustang almost twenty years later.

  Laird rented a house, began taking Nepali lessons, carried his own water, cooked his own food, trying to live like a Sherpa peasant, and was very proud and arrogant for his efforts at assimilation. He found Buddhism from the ground up; saw, felt, and touched the quotidian culture; did his homework; learned the mythology, the cosmology; stayed at the monasteries where he was offered a graduated understanding of the basic forces that govern our lives; and slowly comprehended that he would be a much more difficult person to be around if he had not studied these things. Maybe other people didn’t need to learn these lessons but Laird did, over and over.

  Here Laird met an old man living in a cave who would become one of his three Buddhist fathers, the men he encountered who most expressed the ideal of humanity, the models he most wanted to be like himself. (The second was the Dalai Lama; the third, the old amji, the practitioner of Tibetan medicine, in Mustang.) The first, Au Leshe, was the greatest living Sherpa thangka painter, now dead. Under the Au Leshe’s mentorship, Laird began to look at the murals on the temple walls and pay hyper-focused attention. Art isn’t art, the old painter told him, music isn’t music; these are tools for developing your consciousness, created for the purpose of diverting us from greed, anger, ignorance, lust, and pride—the five sins. With these tools we develop compassion, wisdom, and love for our fellow human beings. Unlike the five sins, these virtues were not natural human states, they were cultivated.

  Tom idolized the sage and the team took a thousand pictures in the cave and temples for a slide show that he hoped would capture the spirit of Au Leshe. The show premiered at Asia House in New York and the annual conference of the American Ethnomusicological Society, and the team released an LP with Lyrichord Discs, the first reproductions on a high-end Nagra recorder of Tibetan puja music. By 1974, Laird wasn’t yet twenty-one but was proving to be somewhat of a wunderkind.

  Back in Geneva sorting through the team’s raw material, he sought refuge with the sixteenth Karmapa, the head of one of the four main sects of Buddhism, who w
as living in Geneva at the time and had a physical presence as commanding as a quarterback for the Denver Broncos. Laird, increasingly inclined toward mysticism, read every available Buddhist text in translation at the time and, casting aside his atheism, became one of the first, quote unquote, Western Buddhists, absorbed by the spiritual fantasy that had spellbound the West for so long—Shangri-la, Shambhala. The Karmapa threw a monkey wrench into the plan, however, forbidding him to record any more Tibetan music. Laird, who had been the team’s soundman, thought the Karmapa’s reasoning was primitive; it made him depressed but he obeyed the dictate. He had come out of Solu-Khumbu with a wealth of pictures and tape recordings, a book in progress, and a firm commitment to live in Nepal, but all the camera equipment had been stolen in Kathmandu, and he had squandered the fifty grand. I forgive you, said the patron in Geneva, but now I want you to do some work on Hindu medicine and the Vedhyas. I really want to continue with Sherpa mythology, said Laird. No money, said the patron. Tom sailed back to the States and promptly decided he’d made a terrible mistake, a blunder that would take him three years to resolve, but in 1977 he had saved enough money to return to Nepal, and this time he was back for good.

  For two years Laird lived by himself in Solu-Khumbu, interviewing the Sherpas, writing on a tiny portable typewriter, cutting and pasting, finally publishing “Mountains as Gods, Mountains as Goals,” in 1979 in the CoEvolution Quarterly, a long article translated into a half-dozen languages and cited by mountaineers—Rheinhold Messner et al.—in debates about the misuse of Sherpas by Western climbers. Laird’s point of view was derided as “hippie philosophy” at the time, but he had interviewed Edmund Hillary for the piece, who agreed with Tom that climbers were letting Sherpas take the risks, the whole dynamic that led to guided commercial tours and the tragedy described by Jon Krakauer in Into Thin Air.

  Instead of Switzerland, he started junketing to Japan, teaching monthlong English classes to make the rent. For years he had been shooting pictures compulsively, as a hobby, but now he started to think more seriously about photography and in 1981 in Japan he contracted as a stock photographer with his first agent, who gave him credentials and letters of introduction and suddenly he was getting visas when nobody else was, taking bullshit pictures for tourist brochures, and the Nepalese apparatchiks found him enormously useful.

  For the next several years he went back and forth between Japan and Solu-Khumbu, snapping pretty pictures and working “on this fucking book” about Sherpa mythology. One day someone in Kathmandu said to him, “Hey, Tom, you speak English and Nepali—you want to lead a trek?” Thirty-five bucks a day sounded damn good to someone without steady or reliable income. By the late ’80s he’s leading treks, eventually for most of the agencies in Kathmandu, and he’d been picked up by stock agents in Paris, London, New York, and three in Tokyo. He was leading a trek in the Everest region when his father died in 1989, a soul-battering event that for Tom, then thirty-six, finally marked the overdue end of the weird, peripatetic party that was his childhood. Nepal’s revolution began immediately thereafter, and in the fall of 1990, on his last commercial trek, he met the woman who would become his wife, Jann Fenner, his staunchest ally and fiercest defender. That year had been a tumultuous one for Nepal, which had only recently installed its first television network, exposing the population to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the overthrowing of dictatorships throughout Eastern Europe. For three months in the spring of 1990, the Himalayan nation came under intense scrutiny itself from the international media as its own masses took to the streets demanding democracy, culminating with riots in front of the king’s palace in Kathmandu, a bloody massacre, and the end of the two-hundred-year-long Shah dynasty’s grip on absolute power, although the royal family remained, in the hearts of the people, living gods.

  Laird wasn’t the only Western photographer on the streets that day, and he wasn’t the only foreign journalist being shot at—we have argued about this before. Nothing about his role in the sequence of events had been scripted, but he emerged transformed. “Regardless of what others say about me,” he had told me, “I did become the photographer of the revolution.” Well, okay. There’s no doubt that the revolution provided Tom (and plenty of others) with a bonanza of high-profile opportunities. Before a crowd of one hundred thousand demonstrators, he pushed aside guards and kicked in the glass doors of a hospital to photograph Ganesh Man Singh, the father of Nepalese democracy, who was being held inside under arrest. Laird’s pictures of corpses in front of the palace were photocopied, enlarged into broadsheets, and pasted on street corners. He sold his first pictures to Time and Der Stern ($5,000 for one shot). AsiaWeek ran a six-page spread of his work, then put him on the masthead as a reporter. For a guy whose formal education disappeared with high school, and whose one and only fairy godmother had quit the case fifteen years earlier in Geneva, the revolution was a hell of a break, and the new Nepalese parliamentarians loved the exposure—as far as they were concerned, Laird had total access.

  Laird himself would describe his political savvy as naive, but the ideal, his ideal—democracy—had come to Nepal and he was on the bandwagon, part of the team. Before being sworn in as the country’s first prime minister, G. P. Koirala took him aside and said in effect, We owe you, what can we do for you? Laird had no response. The next day again Koirala repeated his offer. Laird had thought about it, falling asleep the night before with Jann, who had just moved in with him, and he had an answer—he wanted to be the first foreigner since Michel Peissel in the early 1960s to live in Mustang. The prime minister took his oath of office in the spring of 1991; by summer’s end, the home minister had granted Laird permission to enter and remain in Mustang to document its history, its culture, and, most significantly for him, its art. He kissed Jann good-bye and was gone.

  Like Peissel, Laird had arrived inspired with almost fanatical purpose: to record and disseminate, in Peter Matthiessen’s words, “the extraordinary artistic expression in the unfrequented monasteries and palace-forts of the Kali Gandaki River trade route.” Which is what, for eleven months, Laird did, with the assent of Mustang’s king and nobles (though with the disapprobation of their former serfs). In 1995 when their collaboration, East of Lo Monthang, was published, the prime minister hosted an exhibition in Kathmandu’s Patan Durbar Square to celebrate the occasion. Twenty thousand Nepalis came to view Tom’s photographs and Robert Powell’s paintings of Mustang. The politicians had successfully opened the Land of Lo, but people like Laird and Matthiessen, Robert Powell and the journalist Manjushree Thapa had opened the world to Mustang, irreversibly, and, for better or worse, it was no longer the lost or hidden kingdom.

  Yet in his incarnation as a bridge, Laird ultimately felt walked on by everybody. His early dream, and supreme ambition, was to shoot the art—centuries-old frescoes, thangkas, and sculptures as accomplished and significant to civilization as anything in existence, and deserving of equal stature—show it to the world, and then become involved with the people restoring the precious work, perhaps be anointed as the cultural liaison. Whatever, whomever—the Getty Foundation, the American Himalayan Foundation, it didn’t matter to Laird, not at first; he only wanted the art preserved, and its admirers to multiply. But nothing happened—he was out of the loop. At dinner one night in Kathmandu, he offered Richard Blum his Mustang files gratis—ten thousand photographs—and never heard back. He had walked out of Mustang $25,000 in debt on Jann’s gold card. Like most books printed as an act of love, neither he nor Matthiessen ever made anything off of East of Lo Monthang. On he went with his life. AsiaWeek upgraded him to a contributing reporter, publishing hundreds of pages of his photos and text. He wrote Into Tibet, a book-length chronicle of the CIA’s history in China and the Buddhist kingdom, and, with the Dalai Lama, he began compiling a history of Buddhism for a second book. Still Mustang haunted him, as if somehow he had misplaced himself there, as if he had left things unfinished. Dreams. Redemption. Expiation. I don’t know.


  The Upper Gorge

  Ten years before our adventure, in a conversation with Mustang’s King Jigme, Laird heard a bit of information that seemed extraordinary. The raja mentioned that, since a recent flood, at certain times of the year it was now possible to ride a horse through the upper gorge of the Kali Gandaki. Laird and two other Americans were the first foreigners to traverse its cavernous depths; the following year, Laird guided Peter Matthiessen through its labyrinth. Now we are attempting to be the third party of Westerners to enter the upper gorge, with its swift water and countless river crossings—nothing glorious about that, but an uncommon challenge nevertheless, especially since Tom is fulfilling his decade-long promise to take Jann to Lo Manthang and so we are dragging our spouses along, as well as our friend Mark, and the two bons vivants from Bangkok.

  In the chill of sunrise, the mules are hobbled together on the flagstones below the Red House Inn, snorting into feed bags packed sweet with corn. Several more mules have been added to the train to carry fresh barley hay and extra sacks of grain for the upper gorge. At all costs, reincarnation as a beast of burden is to be avoided. One of the animals has a bloody fist-size patch of hide ripped from its side where the wooden frame of the panniers was inadequately padded, and every mule displays white-haired scars along its spine, the flesh rubbed raw by the incessant shift of its load. I can’t conjure the physics of crossbreeding the toylike Nepalese burros, not much bigger than standard poodles, with the comely mares of Mustang, until Mahendra explains the process: The Lobas dig a pit, back the mare into it, and thus facilitate the romantic designs of the pipsqueak donkey, a stud by any other name.

  No one dawdles at breakfast; we shovel in the porridge, gulp coffee and tea, refill our bottles with boiled water, and leave. Where we must go, past an ancient mani wall and its canister of prayer wheels, is to the government checkpoint on an elevated plaza at the edge of town to present the permits allowing us to enter the restricted area for thirteen days. Inside the low, dark building, the stone walls are hung with ACAP anthropological displays and photo boards (many of the pictures taken by Laird), maps and regulations. “Oh, Americans,” says the sleepy young policeman behind the bare wooden counter as the group crowds in to sign the registry. He hasn’t seen many Americans this year, maybe because of the Maoists. I wander around, scanning bits of Loba lore from ACAP’s earnest posters: