They Only Eat Their Husbands

by Cara Lopez Lee

  As if the bird had put him in mind of it, Gunther told me about a dream he had last night. “I don’t have all the words in English to tell you, but the dream made me wake up, and it made me think . . . made me ponder? . . . the most important question: the purpose of my life.”

  “And what is that?”

  “I don’t know.” He smiled. “I said it made me think about it. I didn’t say I had the answer. Maybe I will think of an answer, maybe I won’t. But I believe it is a good question to think about.”

  I had to laugh. I’d been holding my breath, expecting at least a clue to my own unanswered question, expecting someone else to do it for me.

  ***

  The teahouse in Manang has a mirror, and before I left I looked into it for the first time. What I saw struck me with an emotional force I didn’t expect: my face was grimy, my hair oily, my clothes mismatched, yet I looked more beautiful than I ever would have believed possible. This woman, I thought with wonder, who is she?

  Outside the lodge, I gave Gunther a hug goodbye, trying not to squeeze too hard; he felt so fragile, like a skeleton wrapped in fleece. There were dark circles under his eyes. It was obvious the hike to visit Lama Deshi had taken all his strength.

  “Take care of yourself,” I said, “and don’t hike any higher until you feel better.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m going to take a nap, then go to the altitude lecture. So you see, I’ll be going to the doctor today. You be careful, walking alone.”

  It was a three-hour slog to Yak Kharka. The stone settlements grew sparser the higher I climbed. Gunsang’s only purpose seemed to be providing two or three teahouses for trekkers. As I approached one of them, I spotted Lucy sitting alone on its upper terrace, scowling. She forced a smile and waved me up.

  While I drank tea, she explained that Charlie and Allison had left a couple of hours earlier for an acclimatization hike to Yak Kharka and had not returned as they’d “promised.” “I’ve never known so many people to constantly go back on their word,” she said. I said nothing. When I finished my tea and rose to move on, she stood and declared she would join me. “I’m not about to stay here by myself.”

  In Yak Kharka, we found Charlie, Allison, and Ron lounging at a picnic table in a guesthouse courtyard. All three looked half-asleep.

  Ron had decided not to push on to Letdar with Nat and Zack, saying he didn’t want to risk altitude problems. Letdar is only half an hour away, but it’s 650 meters higher than our last overnight stop, while Yak Kharka is only 450 meters higher. The Himalayan Rescue Association’s expert fearmonger had suggested only 300 meters a day. “Nat and Zack are determined to run all the way to Thorung La,” Charlie sniffed. “Well, they can kill themselves if they want. I’m not moving one more step today.”

  I wasn’t worried about AMS, but after my trip to the lama’s perch, another half-hour of walking sounded like an eternity, especially to join people I wouldn’t be able to keep up with anyway. I stuck with my original plan and stayed put.

  As night fell, the lodge pulsed with the pent-up energy of dozens of trekkers: eager to just get there already, bored by our plodding pace, nervous about the obstacles that could still rob us of our goal. From day one, we’ve encountered trekkers returning from the pass, turned back by altitude, by snow, by injury, by illness. In the absence of firsthand experience, Thorung La has begun to take on mythical proportions.

  Frank, a Californian in his mid-thirties, arrived here with his group yesterday. Last night he started throwing up. When his friends took off this morning, he stayed behind. Frank described his plan to catch up: “I know it’s cheating, but I’m going to rent a horse tomorrow and ride it over the pass to Muktinath. Can you imagine their faces when I pull into town on horseback?”

  “I think they’ll be jealous,” I said. “And it may be the only way for old folks like us to keep pace with these youngsters.”

  “We’re not old. We’re just mature.”

  “You might have something there,” Ron said. “Cara’s one of the few people who hasn’t had any real altitude problems. I think it’s because she is more mature. She’s not one to go charging up the mountain too quickly and get sick.”

  I smiled. “Sounds like a polite way of saying old people are slow.”

  “Yes, Mama Cara, you are old. But you are also wise,” Charlie said.

  The girls laughed.

  We whiled away the evening playing cards until another trekker provided a new distraction. He’d packed a telescope all this way just for the pleasure of viewing the moon through the clear, undistorted air of the Himalayas. He set it up outside and called out an invitation to anyone who wanted a look. As I looked through the scope at the cold, white, unconcerned orb hanging above us, it occurred to me that the moon will have the same craters and markings a thousand years from now, while in a few days I’ll come down from these mountains marked a different person, even if it’s only my belief that makes it so. This is as it should be; unlike the moon, I don’t have millions of years to play with.

  letdar, annapurna circuit, nepal

  It’s not just the walking and the altitude that exhaust us; it’s the nightly slumber party. At bedtime last night, we couldn’t stop giggling, as five people are liable to do when crowded into one small room.

  I was fighting a tug of war with the contents of my backpack, and when I started to curse, Allison, who was taking off her shoes, asked, “What’s wrong? It’s not my socks is it?” That started the first wave of giggles.

  We all smell as pungent as an unwashed, incontinent old dog left in the rain. None of us have showered since the Braga Bakery and we’ve all agreed it will be too cold to do so until we reach Muktinath, on the other side of the pass. Charlie said, “It’s like ‘No sex before marriage’—‘No shower before Muktinath.’” This prompted the next wave of giggles.

  Not only are we all pretty ripe, as we’ve climbed higher, the entire group has fallen victim to a farting epidemic. So when I lit a candle, Allison said, “Better not. One candle and we might explode.” Another wave.

  We settled into our beds to sleep, and the sudden silence was so profound my ears rang. That was when something small and furry tickled my face. I leapt up from my mattress and shrieked, causing a chain reaction of yelling as everyone else was startled from near-sleep. “What?! What?!”

  “Something was crawling on me!” I turned on a flashlight and discovered it was only a moth, prompting helpless giggles of relief.

  “Thank God,” Charlie said, wiping her eyes. “I thought it was another spider.”

  I opened the door and flung the moth outside. After that, I almost got a decent night’s sleep . . . except that Allison snored, Lucy kept calling out, “Stop Snoring!” and Ron talked incessantly in his sleep. On top of all that, everyone except me was taking Diamox and they were all stricken with a constant need to pee. During the night, all four of my roommates tripped over my mattress or stepped on me several times each as they made their way to the outhouse.

  Luckily, it was only a half-hour’s sleepwalk to today’s stop in Letdar, altitude 4200 meters (about 13,800 feet). Ron, Charlie, Allison, and I decided to go on another acclimatization hike. Once again, Lucy opted out: “I want to get some rest, not go on a bloody acclimatization hike. What do you think I’m taking Diamox for?” The rest of us walked up into the rolling green hills behind the lodge for a couple of hours.

  After that, we spent the rest of the afternoon sitting outside the lodge and watching the yaks graze. Acclimatizing is mostly about waiting, and even in the Himalayas this can be dull work. My companions and I fell into the near-catatonic silence I’ve come to call the “Annapurna daze.”

  When I pulled out my journal and started writing, a Nepali porter wandered up and looked over my shoulder, his eyes following the progress of my pen.

  Charlie admonished him in an acerbic tone, “Excuse me! She is w
riting in her diary. Hello! Yes, you. She is writing in her diary. That means it is private.”

  “It’s okay,” I muttered. “I don’t think he can read English.”

  “That’s not the point,” Charlie said. “It’s rude!”

  The porter backed away, looking as frightened as I’d felt when I’d first met her. No one fucks with Charlie.

  I felt sorry for the porter but smiled to myself, realizing that, somewhere along the way, I’d passed an invisible boundary, past Charlie’s defenses into her circle of trust. During the long afternoon of breathless waiting, she and I began an arrhythmic conversation—full of sleepy stops and starts—about growing up in dysfunctional families. Is there any other kind? We discovered that we both had the same authoritarian, distant father. At this revelation, a bond of understanding began to weave its way through the ever-shrinking space between us.

  A late afternoon chill drove us back to the lodge, where our languor was overtaken by a new spate of fear. An agitated young woman was careening from table to table, talking in earnest, forehead creased with worry. When she reached our table she explained that her boyfriend had disappeared somewhere in the hills where we’d been hiking. They’d set out together, but he’d wandered off without her. Had we seen him? No, we were sorry, we hadn’t.

  As dusk fell and the temperature plummeted, a palpable anxiety took hold of the lodge. Nervous glances skittered toward the girlfriend, then away. People began debating the merits of a search. Someone said there was no point in risking more people for a guy who had willfully wandered off alone. Wasn’t there a rescue group who handled this sort of thing?

  The philosophical among us considered our mortality. The pragmatic saw it as a reminder of the serious nature of our undertaking. The compassionate pitied the girlfriend. One or two dared to feel sorry for the missing guy.

  Just before Letdar was mantled in total blackness, just when I began to think no one at this lodge was going to get any sleep, the young man returned. He muttered some excuse about trying to see the glacier and walking farther than he’d realized. The five of us exchanged a silent look that made our feelings clear: we all secretly hated him.

  thorung phedi, annapurna circuit, nepal

  If we simply keep moving in the direction to which we’ve committed, we have little choice now but to reach our goal, whether it unnerves us or not. Today we reached Thorung Phedi, final stop before the push over the pass.

  There’s no traditional village here, just one lodge. If it weren’t for trekkers, this inhospitable, sere rock would suffer the blasting of wind, snow, and sun without any company to share its brutal loneliness. The lone lodge is a place to fuel up and to wait, to gather courage and to celebrate the coming day of truth.

  Inside: while the lodge’s kitchen staff pounds out homemade pasta for the evening meal, trekkers arrive in a steady stream and the tense excitement notches up to an insuperable pitch. If an outsider were to walk into this setting without knowing what it was, that person might assume it was a reunion of fifty or so longtime friends.

  Outside: the lodge is surrounded by peaks so brown and stark they’re an extreme beyond beauty or ugliness. To one side of us stands a mountain peak topped by a fall of ice, glacier, and snow. To the other side, a fold, a crease, a promise of the unseen pass hidden above.

  When we arrived, Dr. Ron asked if I thought we needed an acclimatization hike. My firm opinion was “no,” even when he pointed out other people heading uphill for that purpose. The benefits seemed outweighed by the benefits of resting and gathering strength for tomorrow.

  Ron nodded as if in grave deference to authority. “Well said. That sounds very sensible.”

  “Of course it is. She’s Mama Cara,” Charlie said, and gave me a look of fond respect.

  Ever since Manang, the group has increasingly sought my input in decisions. I get the impression they’re not just being polite, that they honestly value my opinion. Among these people thrown together by chance, I feel a sense of belonging I’ve never felt before. This is no minor hike. It’s a full-on trek, with all the dangers that implies. Trust means a lot. Our lives are in each other’s hands.

  This afternoon, when I rushed out of the main lodge and across the windy compound to grab something from our dorm room, I received a small shock: when I stopped running, my heart started to flutter like that of a small, frightened bird. Soon the flutter began to happen every time I made a sudden move. A couple of times it was so startling I hyperventilated. I asked Charlie, who I’d also seen gasping for air, if she’d noticed a heart flutter. “Yes. It’s terrifying. My pulse is so fast. I’m beginning to think this is crazy to be up here.”

  Then came another, more pleasant shock: Gunther showed up, looking much better. He accepted our exuberant hugs with a pleased but diffident smile. He still wore the lama’s yellow ribbon around his neck, and he remarked that I still wore mine.

  “I’m not taking it off until after the trek,” I said.

  “Yes, me too, although it’s already very dirty.”

  As if the ribbons were symbols of a bond between us, he gave me a more unguarded smile than I’d yet seen. I called him my “soul brother” and he blushed.

  After he and the group caught up, Gunther and I talked for a long time. I mostly listened as he shared his life goals and plans. He’s studying to be a teacher, but he loves music and would rather make guitars for a living. He said he wants a life of simple harmony, much like the life of the mountain people we’ve seen.

  “Yes, but we only see the surface,” I said. “We don’t really know what their lives are. To us it looks like harmony, but if you lived it every day it might seem more like hardship.”

  “Of course. That is true. But I will not be living in a country as poor as this. I think it’s possible to have balance without being so . . . so . . . ”

  “Deprived?”

  “Yes.”

  Gunther made it clear that this was an ideal he’d long held, not some romantic whim inspired by his surroundings, only to be forgotten upon his departure.

  Because we’ll have an early start tomorrow, tonight our group went to bed at eight. Once again I stare into the dark, listening to everyone’s snoring and dreaming and tossing. Dave, the girls, and I all lie squeezed into five narrow beds butted more tightly together than our beds in Yak Kharka, not an inch between them; there’s no way in or out without crawling over someone.

  When we shut off our flashlights, Charlie’s voice probed the darkness, uncharacteristically soft and tentative: “Last night I dreamed about the pass. It was a terrible nightmare. I could not reach the top, no matter how I tried. My father was there and he was very angry with me.”

  Funny. When I dream on this trek, my dreams are invariably about the past: I’ve seen Sean and Chance, I’ve talked with my grandmother and my father, I’ve seen old friends and those people in dreams who you seem to know even though they don’t look familiar at all. But, although it’s very much on my mind, I never dream about the pass.

  muktinath, annapurna circuit, nepal

  Lucy’s travel alarm started beeping at four a.m. Lucy, Ron, and I groaned. Allison laughed. Next to me, Charlie was so silent I knew she was pretending she hadn’t heard. I felt neither excitement nor dread, just exhaustion. After lying in denial in the dark for ten minutes, we rushed to dress and pack by the inadequate light of candles and flashlights. Murmuring voices broke the morning stillness as trekkers throughout the compound did the same.

  In contrast, the main lodge sounded like a high school cafeteria. The race was on: fifty or so people all wanted to eat breakfast, pay their bills, and be first up the trail. Nobody really knew how long it would take to reach Thorung La: four hours? five? six? Nor did we know how difficult it would be. Nor how long it would take to get down the other side. We’d only heard secondhand accounts, all of them wildly different.

  At six a.m. w
e were the last group to head up the slope in the amorphous glow of dawn. “Goodbye didi!” a lodge worker called to Lucy. “Goodbye dai!” she replied. (Didi means sister, dai means brother.) Lucy’s trekking poles clattered across the courtyard cobblestones, until they met dirt and fell as silent as the rest of us.

  The mountain had a look of expectation in the growing light. Each day the pass is renewed, virginal and pure, and each day another group of trekkers enters her folds, ending that momentary innocence. I looked up to see several groups ahead of us, snaking up the trail slowly.

  So slowly.

  I led the way. We agreed last night that the slowest person should walk in front and set the pace, to ensure no one would get left behind. Ron and I read a horror story posted on the wall of the lodge, about a young man who died on the pass a few years ago: he suffered severe AMS, got separated from his group, became disoriented, wandered off the path, and fell. A snowstorm buried his body, which wasn’t found for weeks. Humbled, the six of us swore to stick together.

  As we began the steep ascent, Charlie, usually feisty and full of laughter, looked worried and miserable. Her eyes rolled like those of a spooked horse. For the first fifteen minutes several of us repetitively asked how she was doing, until she snapped that she was fine and to stop asking.

  There wasn’t much talking after that. All our energy was focused on the next step upward . . . and the next.

  Each time I stopped to catch my breath, I turned to watch the dawn break. The sun’s rays crept over the snow-and-ice covered ridge behind us, turning its jagged edge to cold fire, until the sun leapt from its hiding place, shattering the morning with its brilliance.

  Then I took another step . . . then another.

  In the lead, I pressured myself to increase my usual effort, so the others wouldn’t feel frustrated with my pace—this on the hardest day of all. The lanky Dr. Ron was always on my heels. A few times, I felt that scary rapid flutter in my heart and my lungs seemed empty of air. Each time, I’d stop and hunch over my thighs, gasping until I felt my breathing become even. Then I’d continue. Whenever we stopped to rest I didn’t bother to remove my backpack, just dropped where I stood, falling backward onto my pack like a helpless turtle. I lay there in a half-stupor, eyes closed, denying the moment when I’d have to rise again. Each time, Ron asked, “Cara, you okay?” Each time, I smiled, nodded, and gave a silent thumbs-up or okay sign. I really was okay, just stretched to the limit of endurance.