They Only Eat Their Husbands

by Cara Lopez Lee

  Another young man said, “I was told I could keep going as long as I don’t pass out.”

  The doctor’s response: “Well, and you can keep living as long as you don’t die.”

  As for preventative remedies: the locals swear by garlic soup; spiritually inclined trekkers get a blessing from a lama who, no kidding, lives high atop a nearby mountain; and the doctor recommends a pill called Diamox (acetazolamide). Diamox helps people acclimatize if they’re suffering mild symptoms. One unfortunate side effect is a constant and voracious need to urinate. But our group was sufficiently freaked out by words like “coma” and “die” to line up for free pills after the lecture—everyone but me. I’ve been peeing up a storm for days, and I’m just relieved to learn that this freakish change only means I’m acclimatizing normally.

  The doctor gave us his conservative strategy for our trip over Thorung La: take one rest day in Manang, then make our way to the pass in four stages, instead of the three we planned. The idea is not to gain much more than three hundred meters (or one thousand feet) of altitude a day. This idea will insure the further fracturing of our group as we each decide whether or not to follow the doctor’s advice. Ron is leading the campaign for the four-day plan, and the women agree with him. Nat and Zack have voted to stick to three. After the lecture, they teased Ron about “being a man.”

  “I won’t seem like much of a man if I die on the way over the pass, either,” Ron said.

  Nat has dubbed the contagious fear of AMS “altitude madness.” In our group, Gunther alone seems immune. That may be because Gunther, who’s rooming with me, has been stuck in our room with a horrendous case of diarrhea and therefore missed the death lecture.

  ***

  Manang isn’t much higher than Braga, which means that, technically, yesterday was our acclimatization day. However, poised on the edge of the big moment, no one seems ready to leap. With little discussion about either manhood or altitude madness, today we all agreed to remain and put off facing our dharma until tomorrow.

  Lucy hoped this would give Mel a chance to catch up, but she never showed. Later, Lucy found out from a trekker who’d met Mel in Chame that she’d turned back. “So it’s a good job we didn’t wait for her,” Lucy admitted.

  Gunther spent a second day lying in bed, dehydrated, weak, and pale (even for him). Alarmed, I insisted he drink some water. Ron offered some of his rehydration salts. Gunther politely turned him down. “Don’t be stupid,” Ron said. “You can die from dehydration. It’s not as if we’re close to a hospital if you get into any trouble, you know.” Gunther acquiesced.

  The higher we’ve climbed, the more scrupulous Ron has become about health and safety. Yesterday, when several of us teased him about how frequently he washes his hands, he explained that he didn’t want to risk contracting some virulent disease. After Ron gave Gunther his morbid lecture on dehydration, Nat declared, “Once again Dr. Death gives his prognosis, which is, as usual: death.” The nickname stuck, although the women cut him some slack and gave him the gentler appellation of Dr. Ron.

  Confident we couldn’t prevent Gunther’s death by remaining at his bedside, most of us, including Dr. Ron, decided to go on an acclimatization hike.

  Lucy, who had a severe headache, remained behind, saying, “I know it’s bloody altitude sickness. I’m really worried.”

  “Imagine that,” Nat said. “Ms. Whine-er-schnitzel has come down with altitude madness.”

  “I may be a whiner, but at least I’m not a wiener. You’re not that funny anymore, you know. Now you’re just rude.”

  “Wait, let me try to wrinkle my forehead with concern!”

  Between her grousing and his teasing, Nat and Lucy have developed a mutual animosity so strong it threatens to destroy five decades of peaceful Anglo-German relations. She eyed him with disdain and then conferred with the more sympathetic among us.

  “Why don’t you take some Diamox?” Dr. Ron suggested.

  “And get some rest,” I said.

  “Ja, but what if I fall asleep and go into a coma?”

  I told her that was unlikely, but she was not to be mollified. We gave up and left her to dream of her doom while the rest of us hiked to a high ridge some 500 meters above town.

  As we started up the slope, we skirted a glacier-fed lake below. Across the lake, the Gangapurna Glacier loomed, a colossal waterfall frozen in motion.

  While the glacier left us awestruck, after a week of trekking we’ve become somewhat complacent about sheer drop-offs. Then Charlie woke us up. She took one tiny misstep and started to slide off the loose dirt of the narrow ridge. My heart lurched as she pinwheeled her arms for balance. She righted herself, turned to Allison with her hand to her chest, and said, “I have looked in the face of death.” Allison giggled, but we all slowed our pace.

  We reached a point well above town for a magic-carpet view of the pale brown valley and its matching stone buildings. Manang looked like a settlement in a North African desert, yet it had a desolate beauty set against the backdrop of the indomitable Himalayas to the south.

  When we returned to the lodge, a creeping mountain malaise seized control of our wills. We retreated to our beds for what was supposed to be a nap. Instead, we passed out for several hours.

  The late afternoon sun chastised my lazy eyelids, waking me to a guesthouse so quiet it seemed to have fallen under a Sleeping Beauty spell. In a trance, I walked away from the hotel with the hypnotic conviction that I’d “see” something. I did. But first I heard it: the steady, insistent drumming, a sound that brought to mind a Native American ceremony.

  I followed the sound until I reached an open area where dozens of local men and women were gathered for a ceremonial sporting competition. Two young men were beating large drums, while a group of men armed with bows shot arrows into two large wooden targets. Cheers periodically went up and a holiday mood prevailed. I climbed atop the roof of the community lodge, where a group of locals and trekkers were standing for a better vantage. A local explained to me that this event was part of the Meta Festival (meta means archery). As the sun cast its final, red, Svengali gaze over the town, the arrows continued to fly.

  One by one, most of the fellowship awoke and followed the sound of the drums to join me on the roof. Ron said, “I was nearly killed on the way here. There are little boys running all over town shooting arrows, real arrows. For pity’s sake! What do these people think they’re doing arming ten-year-old boys with live ammunition?”

  Only one person failed to show. “Where’s Lucy?” I asked.

  “In a coma,” Nat said. Only he and Zack laughed, but everyone else’s mouths twitched with suppressed grins.

  We watched the archers until it grew too dark to see. Then we returned to the guesthouse to eat dinner, and to listen to the miraculously recovered Lucy extol the merits of Diamox. Her headache was cured, and her transformation to a cheerful human being—a side of her we’d rarely seen—convinced most of the others to begin popping their stash.

  After two days of so-called rest, tonight everyone was in high spirits. After dinner, several people started a card game, during which Nat took up the sophomoric habit of asking people to pull his finger and then cutting loose a trumpeting fart. The “pull my finger” prank was better received than the joke he tried on Allison: with his limited German vocabulary, he constructed the ridiculous phrase, “Would you accept a sperm donation?” The joke received a smattering of polite chuckles, which encouraged him to repeat the foul remark, until Lucy said in a voice foamy with sarcasm, “Ja, and I’m sure every woman would die for this opportunity.”

  Everyone burst into laughter, even Nat.

  The sperm joke marked the only time I’ve seen Allison irritated, although she kept her cool as she explained that it didn’t make sense in German anyway. Charlie, less subtly, told Nat he was acting like an ass and began swearing at him in German. The only word
I recognized was scheizer (shit), but it all sounded as deliciously vitriolic as acid spit.

  I tried to diffuse the tension by remarking to Charlie, “I love listening to you swear. Anger just sounds so much better in German.”

  “ACCCH!” she shouted. “Will no one ever let us forget World War Two?! Still everyone insists on thinking we’re all Nazis!”

  “No, no! That’s not what I was thinking at all. Nazis never even occurred to me. I just like the way the words sound.”

  Charlie took one look at my earnest face and her anger dissolved into giggles. She said she knew that wasn’t what I meant and apologized for her knee-jerk reaction. She explained that she’s met a lot of people who still cling to old stereotypes gleaned from Hollywood movies. The passage of more than fifty years has not been sufficient to erase the images, or the scars on the German psyche, even for Charlie’s generation. I fell into an embarrassed silence.

  Clearly, it’s time for all of us to stop talking and resume walking.

  yak kharka, annapurna circuit, nepal

  As we started day one of our long-awaited approach to Thorung La, our group splintered into four acclimatization factions:

  Nat and Zack decided to push for Letdar. Ron, in an apparent fit of male bonding, set out with them despite his misgivings.

  Allison, Charlie, and Lucy, opting for a cautious advance, decided to head to the lower-lying village of Gunsang.

  My plan was part aggressive, part conservative: I would spend the morning climbing the hill to visit the lama for a blessing, then hike to the village of Yak Kharka. This would put me ahead of the girls, but behind the boys.

  Gunther was feeling better this morning, but still a bit pokey. He decided to go with me to see the lama, then spend another night resting in Manang.

  The lama was supposed to bless Gunther and me for safe passage over Thorung La. Yet our climb to the centuries-old monastery filled me with as much foreboding as Thorung La itself.

  At first it seemed simple: a sign pointed out the path to Praken Gompa. But after five to ten minutes, the path petered out. When we lost the trail we were at the level of the high farm terraces, so we guessed it was necessary to climb the terraces like giant steps until we found the trail again. Then the terraces ran out, and there was still no path in sight.

  At that point, we chose to follow a narrow gully. We could see the gompa, or monastery, above and we could see where the gully passed it, but as we continued upward, the cleft filled with dense, prickly brush until it became impassable. This forced us to climb out of the gully and scramble straight up the sheer slope on hands and feet. Loose dirt continually gave way beneath us. I looked down and saw that we were poised at such a severe angle that if I were to wind up in an uncontrolled slide it might be a few hundred meters before a thorn bush stopped my fall.

  My foot started to skid downhill. I quickly drew it back and tried to back up the way I’d come, but that move started a small rockslide. Paralyzed with anxiety, I clung to the side of the mountain like a panicked cat. “Gunther! I’m stuck!” I yelled. There was no answer. Shit. “Gunther?” I twisted my neck to look around and saw nothing but a desiccated slope of dirt, rock, and brush. And you can keep living, as long as you don’t die, I thought.

  After an eternity of seconds, I lifted my foot and tested the earth with one cautious toe until it hit a firm foothold. Then I backtracked to look for Gunther, but he’d vanished into some unseen fold in the mountainside. The monastery was still in sight and, not knowing if Gunther was above or below, I decided to continue upward.

  Finally, I spotted prayer flags ahead. As I moved toward their fluttering colors, an old woman wearing a green apron over thick layers of clothing stepped onto the balcony of the monastery and silently beckoned me. She looked like a Native American, with dark coppery skin and white hair tied in braids. Her expression held the kind of blank serenity one might expect from Prozac. “Which way?” I called out. She said nothing, just beckoned. I pointed left. No response. I pointed right. Nothing. “Fat lot of help you are,” I muttered.

  I was startled by a gentle voice behind me, “Hi, Cara.” It was Gunther.

  “Am I glad to see you! I was beginning to worry.”

  When we reached the monastery, we’d been walking for about an hour and a half, but it felt like hours. We collapsed near the entry, next to a small white stupa, a dome-shaped Buddhist shrine. The old woman appeared again, smiled, and pointed toward the building. We followed her through the entry and down a long hall to a small doorway.

  Hesitating to pass within, we peered into a tiny, dark room lined with cloths: sacred hangings of red and gold, layered over second-hand bedsheets with pink roses. On the floor behind a low table sat an old, bald man with a scraggly beard and a forehead as furrowed as the monastery’s stone masonry. He’s known as Lama Deshi. “Namaste,” Gunther and I said, bowing with palms pressed together. The lama beckoned us to duck through the low doorway and sit on a low bench across from him. His small, bright eyes moved from one to the other of us, and he nodded, chuckling as if we’d just told a joke, though we’d said nothing after our initial “Namaste.” Loosely translated, namaste means: “The divine spirit within me honors the divine spirit within you.” I don’t think that was the source of his amusement.

  “What country?” he asked.

  “U.S.A.”

  “Germany.”

  These neutral responses seemed to amuse him even more than our entrance, and he chuckled and nodded with increasing enthusiasm.

  “Married?”

  “No.”

  “Friends.”

  More chuckling.

  It seemed to me his soft laughter was simply a way of smiling out loud. Maybe it encompassed all that he guessed about us: our clumsy climb to see him, our inexplicable desire to cross over Thorung La, our unspoken quest for meaning. How often have I made the offhand remark, “Life is funny”? Maybe that’s the ultimate truth. Maybe enlightenment renders everything into comedy, which is, after all, merely tragedy set on its head.

  Lama Deshi stopped laughing, donned his tall, red gnome’s hat, and gestured for me to come forward for the Puja ceremony. He poured oil into his palm, sipped some of it, and smoothed the rest into the sparse hair over his forehead. He then indicated I should do the same. As he began chanting, he picked up a book of Buddhist scripture and held it over my head. He then chanted over a bit of yellow ribbon and tied it around my neck. He smiled at me, pointed at the ribbon, and said, “Good luck.” Then he pointed at his flexed bicep and said, “Strength for Thorung La.”

  He repeated the ritual for Gunther. Then he asked us each for 100 rupees.

  Afterward, he chatted with us for a few minutes, in his limited fashion, while the old woman brought us hot tea and a handful of tiny boiled potatoes, which we ate with our fingers. He pointed at himself, smiled, and said, “Eighty-three.” Then he pointed at the woman and said, “Eighty-two.” He chuckled again and told the woman that Gunther and I weren’t married. Intimidated by his holy status, I refrained from asking whether he and the old woman were married.

  He gestured at the tiny passport photos that wallpapered one wall of the little room and told us he’d blessed trekkers from many countries. Then he began to list the countries, carefully enunciating each one: “U-S-A, Eng-land, Ger-ma-ny, Aus-tra-lia, Is-ra-el . . . ” I reached into my money belt and offered him one of my spare passport photos to add to his collection. With an air of reverent ceremony, the old priest opened a container of paste, applied it to the photo, and indicated I should place it in an empty space on the wall.

  Before we left, I asked Gunther to take a photo of me with the lama and the old woman, for which Lama Deshi once again beamed his Nirvanic amusement. As I stuffed my camera back into my bum bag, the woman spotted the Mars bar I’d packed “for the hike.”

  She pointed and asked, “Chocolate?” with
a hopeful look.

  “For strength on the way down,” I said, and closed the bag.

  She only smiled.

  We left amid warm goodbyes and mutual thanks. I sat outside by the stupa and took a bite of my candy bar. As I chewed, I thought about the tea and tiny potatoes the old woman had given us. My throat constricted. I wrapped up the rest of the candy bar, walked back into the building and, as reluctantly as Amy March giving up her Christmas dollar, handed it to the woman. She smiled broadly and thanked me, chuckling like the lama.

  Gunther and I returned down the correct path—the obvious path, now that we’d found it. Breathing was easier on the descent, and we took the opportunity to talk. It was the first time we’d ever had a private conversation. Gunther explained that Lama Deshi is of the Nyingma sect of Buddhism, a different sect than the Dalai Lama, who is of the Gelugpa Sect.

  “Have you studied a lot about Buddhism?” I asked.

  “Yes. I like Buddhism very much.”

  “What is it you like so much?

  “In Buddhism, enlightenment is attainable for everyone. And we all have it, inside us. It is something you can do yourself. You don’t need a priest or someone else to do it for you, or to tell you how to do it.”

  A vulture chose that moment to fly overhead, so close we could hear its wings straining against the thin mountain air. We stopped to watch in silence. To me, until that moment, vultures had always symbolized death. Some Buddhists still invite vultures to eat their dead, in the high country of Tibet and Nepal where trees for cremation are scarce. The ceremony is called a sky burial, or jhator, which literally means “giving alms to the birds.” Yet here in the east, death leads to rebirth. I saw this vulture not as an omen of danger, but as a harbinger of renewal.