“What would you do?”
“You may just need more time to acclimatize. You know what the saying is: climb high, sleep low. You’ve already climbed higher today than you spent last night. So you could go back to Chame, spend another night, and if you feel better, continue up. If you don’t feel better, descend to a lower altitude. It’d be a bummer, but it’s not worth risking your life.”
Mel seemed relieved to hear advice that supported doing what she wanted to do anyway. “You’re right. I hate to do it, but I’m going back to Chame.”
The group suggested she could catch up with us in Pisang, where we planned to spend a rest day. Hugs went around. And then we were eight.
When she left, Nat said, “It’s all psychosomatic, if you ask me. She’s been talking herself into altitude sickness since we started.”
“Yeah. I think it’s all in her mind,” Zack said.
“What do you think, Cara?” Ron asked.
“It may very well be ‘all in her mind.’ But that phrase is kind of tricky, isn’t it? I mean, everything we experience we experience in our minds, whether it’s real or not.”
“Yeah. If she’s a wimp in her mind, she’s probably a wimp in real life,” Zack said.
But Ron said he thought my comment “made a lot of sense.”
Back in Chame, Ron had complained of tingling in his fingers, worried he might have AMS. I asked him if the tingling was gone.
“It’s not so bad. But now I have a headache.” Seeing my concern, he added, “It’s okay. I think all this dust is mucking up my sinuses. Anyway, if it gets worse I’ll turn back. I don’t have a death wish or anything.”
If I had a death wish, I could think of no place more sublime to fulfill it: fatal beauty rushing toward me, my mouth exhaling a final “oh” of unfinished wonder.
***
Pushing ever higher into the unrelenting Himalayas, I feel as if I’ve returned to my body after a long absence. The past is a mythology of memories, a collection of stories arranged to support my view of the world. The future is a fantasy I can forever move toward but never reach. What is the point of trying to live in those places, or anywhere but now, and now, and now?
We crossed the Marsyangdi at a point where the river had built up a good head of steam, roaring over boulders worn smooth by the pressures of water, glaciers, and time. Without command, comment, or consent, our entire group halted on the bridge, a dumbfounded huddle of Lilliputians overmastered by the land of the Brobdingnag: in one direction, our view of Annapurna IV expanded all out of proportion; in the other, a stupendous wall of sheer dirt and rock, called the Paungda Danda rock face, rose like a warning. The wall looked like the end of the planet, its upper half attempting to summit the sky, its lower half rushing toward us like a giant child’s slide. A glacier had scooped out its smooth face eons ago.
Nat stood slump-shouldered and gape-mouthed, and said, “It’s sheer madness, isn’t it?!”
It took something infinitesimally small to steal our attention from something so shamelessly large. Ron groaned with a revulsion that drew us all to gather around and join him in staring at the water bottle he held up against the blue sky. We’ve all been drinking the local water, purified with iodine tablets. So we all shared his stomach-churning disgust at discovering two tiny shrimp-like organisms floating in his bottle of light-tan, cloudy water. Though Ron allowed that, indeed, the creatures were fascinating and the situation amusing, he also expressed the sincere conviction that he might vomit.
“At least they’re dead,” someone offered.
“That’s not comforting,” he said.
We all agreed it was best not to think about it, as we had little choice but to continue filling our bottles with river water.
Further on, at a lodge staked out in the middle of no man’s land, Nat and I sought forgetfulness in our daily candy bars, Western luxuries carried to this outpost on the backs of enterprising locals. Nat pretends to panic whenever he can’t find a Snickers bar, and Zack teases me whenever I buy a Mars bar “for the hike”: “‘For the hike’ . . . right. You know it’ll be gone before you even hit the trail.”
This time I was distracted from the pursuit of chocolate. The woman who ran the place was tending a quiet but unhappy little girl who was lying under a blanket on the dusty ground in the sun. Although the mother’s anxious face made the answer obvious, I asked anyway, “Is she sick?” The mother nodded and pointed out an infected sore or cut on the girl’s cheek, the original injury nearly obscured by an angry red swelling and a white glob of some sort of lotion. She touched the girl’s forehead and gave me a distressed look to indicate the child was feverish.
“Do you have medicine to put on it?”
She looked puzzled.
“Med-i-cine?” I repeated slowly.
She shook her head.
I pulled out my first-aid kit and gave her a small packet of antibiotic cream, pantomiming that she should apply half now and half tomorrow. I felt the unhappy certainty that it wouldn’t be enough. Yet she looked relieved and thanked me.
As I moved on with the group, I realized I hadn’t suggested to the mother to wash the child’s cheek first. I wondered if I should have given her Band-Aids to keep the cream from rubbing off. I wondered if I should have searched my first-aid kit for more remedies. I couldn’t get the pair out of my mind. With an infected cut, the child could either be up and about in no time, or the infection could spread and make her seriously ill. This was the risk of getting “involved,” a slippery slope that took me spiraling downward from curiosity to worry to guilt. All without benefit of knowing so much as their names.
But I’m no Gunther. I didn’t turn back and offer to carry the girl down the mountain to a doctor. I continued uphill and saved my candy bar for later. We climbed the trail to Pisang, which is divided into two neighboring settlements in a small, dust-swaddled river valley. Lower Pisang (3200 meters) sits on the lower side of the river. Upper Pisang (3,300 meters) sits across the river on a hill. Each is a cluster of medieval-looking stone buildings. We decided to stay in Lower Pisang. It felt as if we were walking into a ghost town. As the sun gave up the last of its warmth, few people remained outside in the dust-blown cold. A sorrowful wind blew through the narrow spaces between homes, the warning of another ice age awaiting its time.
In contrast, the dining hall of our wooden lodge was a warm invitation, floating in a haze of eye-stinging smoke from the woodstove in the center of the room. Trekkers and porters gathered around the fire to eat and talk, half-visible in the wafting smoke, like the last laughing ghosts of Pisang. One German trekker lit a joint and passed it around. As usual, I declined.
Alan and a couple of other porters sang a Nepali song, creating a convivial harmony. I asked the meaning of the words. Alan said it was about a scarf blowing in the wind. The lyrics seemed to be based on images, rather than a story or message. Maybe the images told their own story, one that could only be understood by giving up the effort to understand. I floated inside the music until my eyelids grew heavy. Then I went to my room.
All the rooms in this lodge are coated in a thick layer of brown dust: the same dust we’ve been breathing, coughing, and blowing into our tissues on the trail, the same dust that’s been obscuring the Himalayas each time it fails to rain of an afternoon. As always, I’ve spread my sleeping bag atop a wooden bed with a thin mattress. But this time, as I settle in, the mattress and sheets beneath me release a visible cloud of dirt that sets me sneezing.
braga, annapurna circuit, nepal
I awoke to the pressure of dirt-clotted sinuses. I wasn’t the only one. After a night of dust-shrouded sleep, half our group came to breakfast clutching tattered tissues and aching heads. Ron sneezed his way through breakfast, and lamented in an Elmer Fudd voice, “I cambe on this trek to be filled with the power of the Himbalayas, but all I’mb getting filled with is bloody dust.”
&n
bsp; I took an allergy tablet. This later turned out to be a dangerous move. Last night we’d all agreed to take a rest day in Pisang or I wouldn’t have taken a pill known to cause drowsiness. But, by the end of breakfast our sniffling contingent agreed: Pisang’s restorative powers were suspect. Several people declared we should press on to the legendary Braga Bakery and hope for a more restful day tomorrow in cleaner digs.
Lucy was outraged. “This is absolute crap! What about Mel? We told Mel we’d wait for her in Pisang. We said, ‘See you in Pisang.’ We’ll be going back on our word.”
I, too, was disconcerted by what seemed like a decision to desert Mel. But, seized by a sudden paroxysm of sneezing and coughing, I conceded, “When Mel experiences this dustbin for herself, she’ll understand why we had to leave.”
“We don’t even know if she’s going to show up,” Nat said.
“And there are other trekkers who’ll be walking with her from Chame,” Ron said.
Lucy surrendered. However, she grumbled throughout the day about how “it seems like nobody in this world ever keeps their word.”
On our way out of town, we passed a Mani wall. In silent, single-file procession, we set the squeaky prayer wheels spinning. We do this in every village, never asking each other whether we do it to pray, or for fun, or just because the walls are there. I do it for all three reasons.
For me, a prayer is a kind of focused thought. This is no minor thing. If thought is energy, and if energy and matter are made of the same stuff, then prayers must have power. Each Mani Wall reminds me of the opportunity to transform the energy of my prayers into the energy of action. These days my prayer rarely varies: “God, please help me discover the purpose of my life and help me fulfill it.”
Zack confessed he just prayed for less dust in Braga.
As we climbed the northern route out of town, the Himalayas seemed to surge in size. Their white peaks touched the ceiling of the sky until they appeared as if they were forced to bend and lean over me, threatening to crush me with their overwhelming weight. In the thinning air, it’s increasingly difficult to perceive the distance that separates me from the scenery.
If the switchback trail that led uphill to Ghyaru had been a ski run, it would have been a double black diamond. Everyone’s stride shrank and slowed to that of eighty-five-year-old wheezers in need of walkers. My breathing sounded like that of an emphysema patient. As the leaders neared the top, a voice called down from above, “You’re almost there!” To which Zack responded, “That’s it! I can’t take it anymore,” and started to run. He ran five steps, then slowed to a near halt as he gasped for air.
I was second to last to reach the top of the rise, where a teahouse came into view, along with the group sitting around a picnic table grinning at me. “We ordered daal bhat for you, Cara,” Ron said. I thanked them, relieved that this would reduce my waiting time for food.
Lucy arrived a few minutes later and was informed that they’d ordered daal bhat for her, too. “But I don’t want daal bhat,” she said.
“You might try saying thank you,” Nat said. Instead, Lucy threw herself down on a bench, red-faced and scowling.
As we dug into our meals, the guys suggested we should have a daal bhat eating contest sometime, which I knew would never happen. This macho discussion ended when everyone turned to stare at my plate. I’d completely cleaned up a substantial pile of the food while everyone else’s plate remained half-full. The table burst into laughter.
“That’s bloody-fucking amazing!” said Nat, The Constantly Amazed. “You’re, like, the tiniest person here. Where do you put it all?”
Ron came to my defense. “They say a hearty appetite is a good sign that you’re acclimatizing to the altitude.”
“So, Cara, you must be way acclimatized,” said Zack.
Although I ate much, I said little. The allergy tablet had made me drowsy, the hill had taken everything I had, and we still had a long way to go. I crossed my arms on the table and rested my head. Charlie said it wasn’t like me to stop chattering. I smiled, but said nothing.
After lunch, my exhaustion became dangerous as I somnambulated along the high, narrow mountain paths. My eyes began to close. Several times my head nodded and jerked me awake. When I dreamily pictured myself sleepwalking off the side of the mountain, the image jolted me sufficiently out of my daze to realize my danger. I decided to take a break at the next town, regardless of the plans of the others.
The stone village of Nagwal was even dustier than Pisang, and spookier. Soon several in our group were murmuring that this town made them uneasy. Even though we saw people working and talking and children playing, a peculiar silence enveloped the village. Sound doesn’t carry well through thin mountain air, but this silence went beyond that. I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that the villagers were aliens who communicated by telepathy.
We threaded our way through a narrow cobblestone maze flanked by grey stone walls to a small guesthouse where we ducked under a tiny doorway into a dirt courtyard. The courtyard was empty, so we climbed a makeshift wooden ladder to a rooftop terrace where a befuddled man of about fifty greeted us with a blank stare. He seemed confused by our presence, despite the sign outside that announced the place as a guesthouse. The imagery of gothic horror was now complete. Our unnerved group stopped just long enough for Ron to refill his water bottle.
More afraid of falling off the mountain in a doze than facing the supernatural or inhospitable, I stayed an extra twenty minutes to drink hot tea, eat a couple of stale cookies from my pack, and shake the cobwebs from my head.
I chatted, in a very limited fashion, with the innkeeper and another local. They perked up when they discovered I knew three or four Nepali words, and some of the eeriness of the place fled at the sight of their smiles. I didn’t understand the conversation they directed my way, but it didn’t matter. I’ve spent my life engaged in endless chatter, while other people have waited their turn to speak. I wonder if we ever really hear the individual words anyway. The smile, the laugh, the touch, the bow or handshake or embrace: aren’t these the things we truly ask for with all the words we say?
Revived by the exchange, I moved on to Braga alone, but awake. The trail traversed rolling desert, flecked with sparse alpine shrubs, stunted pines, and trickling streams. I passed several Mani walls that had no prayer wheels. Instead, the low walls were topped with haphazardly broken tablets of stone. The tablets were carved with gracefully inscribed prayers, or Mani, each including some variation of “Om Mani Padme Hum.” There was nothing to spin, so I brushed a finger over the indentations in the sun-warmed stone.
When the legendary Braga Bakery appeared, it looked as isolated and out of place as a mirage in the desert. Although in another part of the world such a building might appear plain and unremarkable, here it seemed a truly pretty place: a two-story cottage of grey stone and blond unfinished wood. The Marsyangdi River flowed behind the lodge, and Annapurna III and Gangapurna rose to fill the sky beyond.
A bacchanalian nirvana, the Braga Bakery lives up to its legend, at least in terms of a mountain trek. The spicy homemade veggie-burger is the best I’ve eaten anywhere, and the apple pie is the best yet on the trail. For reasons obvious to any Westerner who has ever spent extended time far from home, many optimistic trekkers keep ordering apple pie from the catch-as-catch-can guesthouse menus, knowing full well that this dish remains a misinterpreted mystery to many of these mountain people—most of whom only have a vague impression that it has something to do with apples and dough. But this time, if the apple pie is not just like Mom’s, it’s close enough to rouse the memory of Mom. There is power in that image. The scent alone is a mantra sending up the love of home, however imperfect or broken.
The prices at Braga are high, but we don’t care. Walking on the Annapurna Circuit is like working out on a stair climber for four to six hours a day—while suffering oxygen deprivation
. After six straight days of torturing our legs and lungs, we’re ready to be pampered.
At sunset, I washed a few clothes in a freezing cold bucket of water behind the lodge. As I wrung out my last shirt, my hands red and raw, Zack stepped onto the back deck to gaze at the Annapurna Range. He remarked how beautiful the snow looked in the setting sun. “That rose color on the snow?” I said. “In Alaska they call that alpenglow.” In response he put an arm around my shoulder and gave it a brotherly squeeze. I leaned there for a moment as we admired the deepening ruby and indigo of snow and sky.
Then he glanced at his arm on my shoulder and said, “That’s something I missed in Taiwan: affectionate people.” His words broke the spell. There was an ineffable idea that separated us, a worldview thrust upon us by memories we could not erase. As close as we stood, there was no way I could explain the gap he’d exposed. I silently moved away, turned to hang my clothes on the line, and went to my room.
I’m sharing a room with the girls, and as we climbed into bed they all exclaimed at the blessed lack of dust. In spite of myself, I gave silent thanks to Zack, who had prayed for something practical.
I suppose praying for more oxygen would be too much to ask.
manang, annapurna circuit, nepal
We arrived in Manang just in time for the daily altitude scare. Just a half-hour walk from Braga, Manang is the last sizeable village before the push over the pass: Thorung La. At 3,540 meters (11,600 feet), Manang is also the last chance for the Himalayan Rescue Association to frighten the piss out of everyone with a free lecture on altitude sickness.
Several in our group are already suffering minor symptoms: mild headaches, loss of appetite, and sluggishness. My only complaint is sluggishness, but then that’s been my family’s complaint about me for as long as I can remember.
Some two-dozen trekkers gathered outdoors to listen to an AMS expert, who, with very little effort, convinced several bug-eyed listeners that their lives were in imminent peril. The doctor explained that high altitude headaches are caused by swelling of the brain. He warned us that puking one’s guts out is definitely a bad sign, as is becoming dizzy and disoriented, or losing coordination: someone who continues to climb higher with those symptoms might lose consciousness, go into a coma, or die. I could swear one guy wasn’t just taking notes, but hastily scribbling his last will and testament into his travel journal.
They Only Eat Their Husbands Page 24