by Bruce Kirkby
Despite being blessed with quasi-Olympian strength, Christine had raised the white flag for this journey and asked Sonam to hire an extra porter—to carry Taj. Additya (Adi) Lama was a bashful twenty-one-year-old with spiked hair and a sparse moustache. Hailing from the Sherpa enclave of Darjeeling, he wore the discards of previous expedition clients: skateboard shoes, reflective sunglasses, a down jacket. Taj shook his hand warily, then hid behind Christine’s legs.
But I couldn’t possibly ask one of the porters to carry Bodi—he was almost the same height as the sinewy men. So after cramming his thirty-kilo frame into a far-too-small child carrier, I hoisted him myself.
The porters immediately protested. “No sir! Not possible.”
Sonam appeared skeptical too, and dragged a mangy white mare toward us. “Riding more comfortable,” he suggested. “And more easy.”
But Bodi recoiled from the horse, as I suspected he might. From the earliest age he had been uncertain around animals, turning his back on dogs, cats, even gerbils. Now he began to whimper.
“Let’s not force him, Bruce,” Christine whispered, so I moved off. Perched in the child carrier on my back, Bodi was soon humming happily again.
* * *
There was no celebratory moment or rousing cheer to mark our departure. Instead, after filling water bottles and glancing at maps, we simply started walking.
Ahead loomed the Himalaya, or “Abode of Snow” in Sanskrit, an enormous mountain range stretching 2,400 kilometers, from Pakistan in the west to Bangladesh in the east. Separating the humid plains of India from the sere Central Asian plateau, this natural barrier has thwarted the passage of weather, trade, armies and caravans for centuries. It now stood between us and Zanskar.
A jeep track led up the narrowing valley, a scar bleeding mud and boulders across loose slopes. The track was a remnant of the ambitious Zanskar Highway Project, a plan to carve a strategic road across the Himalaya, from Manali to Leh, allowing the Indian Army rapid access to contested northern frontiers. Construction started following the ’99 Kargil War with Pakistan, but funding dried up when political winds changed, and the foreign workers had long since departed. The fate of the project remained unclear.
I had been unaware of this incursion, and felt mildly disappointed, for despite its flat nature, a road makes for unpleasant walking. It doesn’t blend into the landscape the way a footpath can, giving way to rises and dips, gracefully following contours. Instead it ploughs straight ahead, an incongruous line in a world of curves. For all its ease, walking on a road is comparable to riding a stationary bike; you get some exercise, but the experience remains a ghost of the real thing.
“Track ending soon,” Sonam promised.
Beyond, we would follow ancient footpaths of traders and shepherds.
* * *
The high-altitude sun was relentless and my shirt was soon sodden. Walking beside me, young Adi wore his puffy jacket.
“Keeps me cool,” he explained when I asked.
The television crew dashed ahead to set up shots, soon red-faced from exhaustion. A string of porters trailed behind, carrying heavy cameras and tripods. Occasionally Wes would ask our family to pause while his team prepared. Then, with a whistle, he would signal our advance.
On one such occasion, we rounded a corner to find the cameras set up around a flooding rivulet. They were clearly hoping to infuse our journey with drama, but it pissed me off, because the water wasn’t a serious obstacle; it was barely ankle deep. So I strode across nonchalantly, without pause, carrying Bodi on my back. Christine, Sonam, Adi and Taj rushed to follow.
“For Chrissakes, Kirkby,” Wes grumbled when he caught up. “It would make better television if you stopped and talked to your wife in a situation like that. Try to help our viewers understand what’s going on. And what’s at stake.”
I nodded. He was right.
Christine was less annoyed, and taking my hand, she dragged me out of earshot. We unclipped tiny microphones from our shirts—which recorded every word we said—and popped them into pockets.
“You don’t seem to be yourself today,” she said. “There have been plenty of times when I didn’t think I could take another minute of filming. But let’s try to finish this on a strong note.”
I marvelled again at Christine’s ability to gently rise and counterbalance the frustrations of travel, no matter how trivial.
* * *
We camped amid rocky flood plains, at the end of the jeep track. Nearby, a derelict yellow sign declared—or warned—BORDER ROADS ORGANISATION BRINGS PEOPLE OF REMOTE TO THE MAINSTREAM.I The next morning we would leave the valley, climbing upward, following a small creek toward the soaring Shingo La pass, still three days’ walk away and hidden from view.II
As the sun dropped, the stout cook, Ani Rai, settled cross-legged on a foam mat inside the cook tent. He chopped onions and carrots while two kerosene stoves bathed his face in blue light, and a pair of cook boys hovered nearby, ready to retrieve anything called for: spices, knives, pans.
Adi soon delivered scalding tomato soup and popcorn to a shaky table. A dinner of fried yak, steamed okra and rice followed, and as we ate, a scattering of clouds flushed pink. The valley sagged toward darkness. A pair of alpine choughs whistled past, their caws echoing across the barrens, and in the silence that followed, I caught myself counting crows.
* * *
Carrying a seventy-pound child is, in my estimation, far more physically challenging than carrying seventy pounds of gear. Gear doesn’t swing wildly from side to side, or peer down at passing wildflowers. It doesn’t press elbows into your spine, or request that you kneel to retrieve shiny pebbles, or deafen you by shouting in your ears. And the rarefied air of the Himalaya only amplified such challenges.
But for me, the costs of schlepping Bodi paled before the rewards, for a backpack full of gear will never run its fingers through your hair, or absently stroke your neck while counting clouds, or engage in an endlessly spiralling game of I-love-you, I-love-you-more.
“Kirkby, don’t kill yourself.” Christine broke my reverie as we ascended steep switchbacks the next morning. “We’ve got a long way to go.”
I was huffing and puffing, but I enjoyed the exertion and pressed on. Adi followed close behind, carrying Taj. Thirty minutes later, the incline eased and we joined the television crew on a high ridge, where they’d been filming our struggles. While the audio technician replaced a sweat-soaked microphone on my chest, Sonam once again dragged the white mare over and encouraged Bodi to give riding a try. He again refused, which confused Sonam, for Zanskari children all ride from an early age. Trying to be helpful, he plucked Bodi from his feet and tossed him over the mare’s back. But Bodi writhed frantically and refused to let go of Sonam’s shirt. Embarrassed, Sonam returned him to the ground.
So Bodi and I climbed hand in hand up the rocky trail, entering an alpine valley where ribs of dark granite soared above and remnants of last winter’s avalanches spread across the floor in sloppy fans. Meltwater freshets, swollen with the summer heat, burbled across these slopes and we leapt over the smallest. Others we crossed hopping from rock to rock. The deepest forced us to remove boots and socks, tiptoeing through water so frigid that sharp rocks passed unnoticed underfoot.
Taj soon fell asleep on Adi’s back, mouth agape, head bouncing at a ghastly angle. Christine tried to stuff a jacket beneath his chin, but it was a hopeless effort.
Bodi raced ahead on the trail and then slowed down, causing me to bump awkwardly into him, over and over. It was a frustrating habit, and for years I’d complained—until finally realizing it was his instinctive way of calming nerves. For many on the spectrum, physical pressure can tame sensory overload. As a teenager, Temple Grandin famously built her own “squeeze machine,” a wood-framed, foam-lined device that she crawled into, and which was capable of inducing a relaxed state that persisted for hours.
Rather than building Bodi a squeeze machine, I chose instead to become one, and for
years had tried to coax the reluctant boy into my arms at every opportunity, holding him tight. It was challenging, for like many on the spectrum, as much as Bodi enjoyed pressure, he also recoiled from personal contact.
“Stop, Dada!” he would scream whenever I bear hugged him. But as soon as I let go, he would quietly ask, “Can you do that again?”
With time he learned to seek out such physicality, which led to this frustrating walk-bump-stumble routine. But we developed our own solution to that. Wrapping an arm around Bodi’s neck as we walked, I tightened my hold until I grasped him in a headlock. Bent in half at the waist, he stumbled along beside me, and anyone witnessing the act would surely judge me an abusive father. But Bodi loved it.
Eventually Bodi paused to collect a handful of colorful pebbles—white quartz, red chert, green serpentine, black andesite lava, mocha limestone—and I asked Sonam how many times he had crossed the Shingo La.
“Too many times. Thirty? Maybe forty.”
As a youth, he’d crossed the Shingo La twice a year—once after harvest in the fall, when he departed Zanskar to attend school in Delhi, and again in spring when he returned to help his family plant crops. Travelling with a pack of schoolboys, he crossed the snowy slopes by night, when the snow was frozen and less prone to avalanche. Wearing thin nylon jackets, their pockets stuffed with barley flour, the boys would rest in a cave near the summit before reaching the first Zanskari village of Kargiak in twenty-four hours—a distance it would take our cumbersome group a week to travel.
* * *
On our third day of trekking, Sonam set out lunch beside a burbling stream—curried potatoes, fried rice, fresh chapattis and tuna salad. Wes ate with us, but the rest of the television crew had not yet appeared, and I kept glancing down the trail, wondering where they could be. Eventually Wes and I decided to jog back and take a look, and Sonam joined us.
From a high prow, we scanned the valley. Nothing appeared to move in that world of rock and ice, where only lavender pools of dwarf fireweed broke the monotony. A sea of icy peaks spread before us, and the high-altitude air was so uncannily clear that I could discern details on their flanks as if peering through binoculars: snow flutings, sapphire glaciers. Far to the south, monsoon clouds boiled. Overhead, a ceramic blue sky spread to the horizons.
Eventually a figure appeared in the distance, striding up the dusty switchbacks. It was a herder in indigo robes. A grimy rag obscured his face, and four black mules scampered ahead, dented jerry cans lashed across their backs.
“Oi!” shouted Sonam, as the man neared, asking in Hindi if he had seen our missing companions. The herder plowed past without breaking stride, only muttering (which Sonam again translated) that a foreigner was lying on the trail far below, being tended by friends.
Before disappearing, the herder turned and shouted back, “If that man comes higher, he will die.”
For a moment, the immense valley was filled with a crystalline silence, broken only by the sound of pebbles shifting underfoot. “That man” was almost certainly Jonathon, the audio technician, who had been struggling with headaches for days.
“I’ll run back and sort Johnny out,” Wes declared and sprinted away. Sonam followed. I watched the pair fade to distant specks with sadness, for I doubted I’d see Jonathon again.
Our party had now reached an elevation exceeding any summit in the American lower forty-eight or the Alps. And much climbing still remained ahead. For Jonathon to ascend farther, while displaying symptoms of altitude sickness, would be irresponsible. The only solution was to dispatch him down the valley in the care of a porter, toward the warm, oxygen-laden air below.
* * *
The afternoon dragged on. With Bodi on my back, I stared at my boots, breath heaving, counting footsteps.
Not until dusk did the tents appear ahead, tucked amid rocky slopes. At the sound of our voices, a cook boy came bounding, swinging a thermos. We sat together on a boulder, gulping cup after cup of sweet, milky tea, dipping orange cream biscuits. When the sun ducked behind a cloud, cold air came roaring down the mountainside like an avalanche, engulfing us.
Our camp stood at 4,500 meters, and once inside the family tent, I checked everyone’s acclimatization using the pulse oximeter—as I did each evening—relieved to find healthy readings. Afterward, Christine and I dozed while the boys crawled back and forth, waging an imaginary battle with Lego mini-figures. Before leaving home, we’d given each a toiletry bag, allowing them to bring whatever fit in. While Taj haphazardly crammed in handfuls of Lego, Bodi painstakingly built a solid cube that filled the bag.
It was almost dark when a clattering of hooves roused us. I unzipped the tent flap horrified to discover Sonam leading the white mare into camp with Jonathon perched atop, pale and unstable.
“What else could we do?” Sonam shrugged.
After coaxing a glass of warm juice into Jonathon, we stuffed him into a tent and he fell into a catatonic sleep. Sonam’s medical kit thankfully included two bottles of compressed oxygen, which could save Jonathon’s life if his condition deteriorated. Otherwise I would have insisted they turn around and descend in darkness.
But Jonathon was not the only crew member suffering. An Indian camera operator, summoned at the last minute from Delhi, succumbed to a debilitating headache, and two exhausted producers retreated to their tents without dinner.
With budgets weighing on his mind, Wes was loath to slow our pace, but the only option was a rest day. No one would be going higher tomorrow.
* * *
Two days later, the snowy summits above camp burned like candles at sunrise. In the kitchen tent, singing cooks prepared omelets. After a day of hibernation, the television crew appeared rejuvenated. Even Jonathon was smiling, and his oxygen saturation had returned to normal.
We set out early, hoping to move fast and cross the Shingo La by lunch, then quickly descend on the far side, eliminating the risk of sleeping at even higher elevations. The trail beyond camp was steep and frequently blocked by massive snow drifts, which had become a sloppy mess in the summer sun. Wildflowers bloomed along the fringes of such oases: Himalayan mini sunflower, yellow larkspur and pools of blue iris that appeared to reflect the sky above.
After several hours, a strange noise brought our party to a halt. Thunder? A distant jet?
Sonam pointed to slopes high above. A yellow excavator was carving a path across the mountainside. Dark smoke belched from its exhaust, and the bucket swung to and fro, sending boulders crashing downward with muffled booms. Sonam shouted and waved his arms, and eventually the machine shut down. The operator clambered to the roof. For some minutes the pair shouted back and forth. Sonam reported that a Zanskari monk-turned-businessman, frustrated with the Indian government’s inaction on road construction, was personally financing this excavator.
“One of the brave men of Zanskar,” a porter whispered.
Only a single dirt track penetrated the Zanskar valley currently, running over mountains to the north, near the Pakistan border. Built in 1976, it was notoriously difficult to access, and closed for six months of every year by snow.
“Zanskar need more roads,” Sonam said. “For more education. More doctors. More business. More money.”
Young Zanskari parents, he explained, still tried to time childbirth for summer, when it was possible to reach a hospital in Ladakh’s distant capital of Leh. The porters nodded solemnly, and after more yelling, the digger lurched back into action.
“He is making one hundred feet a day,” Sonam reported. “By August he will cross the Shingo La.”
It was already early July.
* * *
We crested the Shingo La just before noon, finding a mess of prayer flags marking the summit—so many it appeared that an entire village had hung its laundry to dry. Offerings were scattered around the base of countless cairns: quartz, pages of scripture, bronze talismans, empty rum bottles and horns of ibex and bharal—the massive wild goat and sheep of the Himalaya.
&n
bsp; Christine grasped my cheeks and pulled me close for a kiss, staring into my eyes. The boys joined, jumping up and down with arms wrapped around our legs till we almost tumbled. In a biting wind, we yanked on hats while Sonam excavated almonds and carrots from his pack.
Prayer flags, or Lung-Ta in Tibetan, are strings of rectangular cloths bearing the five elemental colors of Buddhism (blue, white, red, green and yellow). They can be found across the Himalaya, strung outside homes, on flag poles, and adorning every high pass and summit. Most bear an image of the wind horse, surrounded by Buddhist prayers in Tibetan script. Tradition holds that the winds scatter these prayers, bringing benefit to all.
When the television crew set up tripods and prepared to interview Christine, I took the boys and scrambled higher up the ridge. We’d only gone a short distance when the view opened before us, revealing row upon row of crumbling peaks ahead, their steep slopes a swirl with lollipop shapes of red, green, purple and mocha rock.
This was our first glimpse of Zanskar: a scene torn from the pages of Dr. Seuss.
* * *
Tucked between the Himalaya Range to the south, and the Tibetan plateau to the north, the Kingdom of Zanskar remains among the highest permanently inhabited places on the planet.
The valley is formed by the union of the Stod and Tsarap Rivers, whose combined waters meander across broad gravel plains before crashing into a nearly impassable gorge,III giving Zanskar what may be its most defining feature: inaccessibility. There is no easy way in or out.