The Yellow Envelope

by Kim Dinan

  We climbed back in the cab, and our driver pulled onto the two-lane local highway, racing us toward the airport once again. Soon the swampy jungle heat of Colomb Bay would be unimaginable. We were about to trek hundreds of miles around the highest and most dangerous mountains in the world.

  Nepal

  Chapter 14

  Brian and I checked into a damp room in an ancient teahouse. A single, dim bulb hung from the ceiling like a head in a noose, and bugs threw themselves at the glowing light, buzzing and bombing in a suicidal dance. A poster hung on the otherwise bare wall above one of the single beds. It said, Enthusiasm is faith set on fire.

  It had rained all day. I dropped my new-to-me trekking poles and knockoff North Face backpack, which we’d picked up for cheap in Kathmandu before starting our trek, on the floor. Then I peeled off my hiking clothes and wrung them out over the squat toilet, changed into a dry outfit, and walked into the dining room. In the corner a wood-burning stove pumped out heat, and a handful of trekkers huddled around it. Above the stove someone had strung a clothesline the length of the room. I draped our slopping socks and muddy pants to dry. Then I held my red, raw hands in front of the fire, and the sting of the warmth brought them slowly back to life.

  Brian and I sat down at a heavy wooden table next to a woman. She looked up from her book and nodded at me. “Pity about the weather,” she said. “I haven’t seen the mountains since I started walking.”

  “Where’d you start?” I asked her.

  “Besisahar.”

  “Us too.”

  When the Tibetan bread and potato soup I’d ordered from the old Nepali owner of the teahouse arrived, I cupped my hands around the bowl to warm them again. Brian devoured dal bhat, rice with lentils, which the porters we met on the trail claimed gave you “twenty-four-hour power.” As I ate, I stared out the window and willed the thick mountain fog to disappear.

  The Annapurna Circuit was a two hundred-mile trekking route around the Annapurna Mountain Range that we’d started walking five days ago. It crossed two river valleys and wound through Hindu and Tibetan villages. At its height, the circuit crossed Thorung La pass at almost eighteen thousand feet—three thousand feet higher than any mountain peak in the contiguous United States—and touched the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

  Despite the weather, the structure of trekking felt so deliciously right. Brian and I were always at our best in the mountains, and it was wonderful to move at a human pace, to experience the villages and countryside of Nepal on foot instead of inside of a taxi or bus or even a rickshaw. Moving my body freed my mind to wander, and because the looping indecision of my brain had silenced in India, it finally felt great to be alone with my thoughts. There was no Internet out there, no television, and no cell phone reception—not that we had a phone. With none of the distractions of the modern world I had time to process all of the insights I’d experienced in India, and Brian and I had hours alone on the trail to talk. We were connecting in a way we hadn’t connected in years. We’d been right to come to Nepal.

  Through the dining room window I could see the clouds were beginning to clear on the horizon, revealing patches of blue sky. Pulling my hat onto my head, I stepped outside for a better view. In the distance, the seventh-highest peak in the world, Dhaulagiri, appeared through a shroud of clouds, 26,795 feet tall. The Sanskrit name of the mountain, translated, meant dazzling white beautiful mountain. I gasped as it appeared and dug into my pocket for my camera. I’d never seen anything so beautiful.

  After snapping a photo, I ran inside the teahouse and tapped the woman at our table on the shoulder. “You can see Dhaulagiri!” Then I dragged Brian outside without even letting him put on his shoes. We were both mountain fanatics, and now one of the grandest of them all appeared like a mirage in front of us. “Look,” I said, and pointed toward the shadow of Dhaulagiri. It was such an incredible mountain that I felt a twinge of fear as it broke through the fog, humbled by its grandiosity. We stood silently in awe until the clouds thickened and blocked our view again.

  An hour later the rain let up completely. “Do you want to go check out the village?” asked Brian.

  My legs ached from the eight hours we’d walked, mostly uphill, climbing slippery stone steps that had been chiseled into the slope of the mountain. But our tiny room was much too cold and damp for relaxing, and I was getting anxious in the teahouse dining room. “Yes,” I told him.

  We walked from one side of the village to the other in under ten minutes. Terraced stone walls held the earth at bay around the perimeter of town. A handful of stone buildings leaned at unnatural angles, slumped with the force of gravity and the settling of their dirt foundations.

  A group of boys were lofting a basketball toward a netless rim on a dirt court in front of the village school. We stopped to watch. One of the boys pinwheeled his arm at Brian, gesturing for him to come play. Brian looked at me and gave my arm a little squeeze before stepping onto the court. “Come on.”

  “Nah, I’ll sit this one out.”

  Sitting on a flat rock, I watched from the sidelines. The basketball slapped rhythmically on the ground, echoing against the mountainside in the waning evening light. The boy passed the ball to Brian. He threw it at the rim and we all watched as it circled once, twice, and then dropped through. “Whoo!” we shouted in unison. I added sports to the mental list I’d been keeping of common languages. So far the list included smiling, laughter, food, music, dancing, and fawning over small babies.

  The sky hovered gray as a ghost as we left the village the following morning. On our walk out of town we passed the school again. The windows were dark and the door locked shut, but two preteen boys stood in front of it soliciting donations. Behind them, a handwritten sign explained that the school had been damaged in a recent earthquake and was too dangerous to enter. They were seeking donations to repair it.

  We stopped and stared up at the empty school.

  “Do you think that’s true?” asked Brian, pointing toward the sign.

  “I don’t know. There’s no way for us to know.”

  Brian dug his hand inside of his pocket and dropped a wad of rupees into the donation bucket.

  “We’ll donate in good faith,” he said. “Should it be from the yellow envelope?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  There’d been many times that we’d tipped cab drivers larger sums for their friendliness or bought food for hungry children. And each time we’d debated over whether the gift should be attributed to the yellow envelope or if it was a gesture we were making on our own. The lines between what came from us and what came from the yellow envelope were blurred. Eventually we’d agreed that it didn’t really matter. The yellow envelope made us more aware of opportunities to give, and that awareness made us more charitable. Whether we were giving yellow envelope money or our own felt less important than the fact that we were giving at all.

  One of the boys held out a notebook. The page was filled with the names of donors from all around the world. Brian propped the notebook against his thigh and wrote, Michele and Glenn Crim, USA.

  The morning was misty and the trail slick. The path out of town descended steeply. I balanced myself with my trekking poles and watched my feet, worried that even a second of distraction would result in a sprained ankle. As I focused on my steps, I contemplated the rules of the yellow envelope, running through Michele and Glenn’s letter in my head. They applied oddly well to my life at the moment.

  The first rule of the yellow envelope was Don’t overthink it, which was another way of saying, Listen to your gut. I’d listened to my gut during that momentous run in Forest Park, but I hadn’t been able to face the most painful questions it posed right away. So I’d tiptoed into a new reality, peeling back truths as I could bear them, following the path that my gut nudged me down. In that sense I’d needed to overthink it. It had been necessary to prod and till the landscape o
f my innermost longings, to pluck through every insistent question until I felt content with the answers. The overthinking had been necessary. But now I was done with all of that. I felt content with my choices because I could finally see that they had always been my choices. I controlled my life. I always had.

  The second rule was Share my experiences. Following this rule from the beginning could have saved Brian and me a lot of pain. I’d been ashamed of my feelings, so, instead of voicing them, I’d tried to bully them into alignment with the life I already had. It was only when I shared my experiences, when I told the truth about how I felt, that I started down the road to finding peace.

  And the third rule, Don’t feel pressured to give it all away, was the most relevant rule of all. Somewhere along the line I’d developed the false belief that in order to grow up, I had to leave behind the parts of myself that made me feel alive and free. I’d thought that adulthood should feel like sacrifice, so I’d given the most essential parts of myself away, and then I’d blamed Brian for my missing pieces. But I’d been wrong about that. I’d been wrong about so many things.

  As Brian moved quickly down the slippery steps in front of me, I called out to him. “You know, the rules of the yellow envelope are surprisingly relevant to our life.”

  Brian stopped and turned toward me. Surrounding him on either side of the trail were gigantic rhododendrons exploding with magnificent pink blooms. “What makes you say that?”

  Cautiously, I stepped down the trail and stopped when I reached him. “I don’t know; I was just thinking about it.”

  “But you’re not supposed to overthink it,” Brian teased.

  I rolled my eyes and smiled at him. “No, really, they’re kind of applicable in all kinds of different scenarios,” and I explained my reasoning.

  An hour later we were white-knuckling our way across a perilous suspension bridge made of four ropes adjoined by wobbly slats of wood. “This is how people die!” I screamed at Brian. Beyond my feet I could see a muddy river raging two hundred feet below. “And if we die, it is nobody’s fault but our own.” I paused to catch my breath. “This is crazy!”

  In response, Brian bent his knees and jumped. The impact echoed backward and the bridge swayed under my feet. My hands grasped the ropes tighter and I squeezed my eyes shut. “Never mind,” I screamed again, louder, and with an edge of panic in my voice. “If we die, it is definitely only your fault!”

  Brian called back behind him, “So, how does this relate to the rules of the yellow envelope?”

  Slowly, I stepped my way toward the safety of solid ground. After finally reaching it, I took my backpack off and dropped it against a rock. Then I sunk into a sitting position and looked back at the rickety bridge. “That was stupid,” I said, glancing up at Brian.

  He looked down and fixed a smile on me, his eyes twinkling with adrenaline. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  Lowering my head into my hands, I tried to slow the pounding of my heart. “It’s only an adventure if we live to tell the tale,” I muttered. “Otherwise it’s called a tragedy.”

  Brian raised his head toward the sky and spread his arms out in the morning breeze. “But look at this. If we’ve got to go down somewhere it might as well be here.”

  The gray mist of the early morning had disappeared, and an orange sun crept into the sky, illuminating the mountains that surrounded us in a stunning, peachy light. It was beautiful. But death had never felt as close as it did in Nepal, and I didn’t want to tempt fate by joking about it. “Don’t say that,” I said.

  When we first arrived in Nepal, while we were waiting for our trekking permits to be processed, Brian and I had gone on a rafting trip down the Kali Gandaki River, the mighty Kali, named after the Goddess of Destruction. The Kali Gandaki was one of Nepal’s most holy rivers, and I could see evidence of that everywhere; her banks were dotted with colorful puja, offerings to the Gods.

  We’d paddled past temples and statues of Krishna. Calls to prayer rang out over the water, and colorful prayer flags clung to the mountainsides high above us. Onshore, groups of people built funeral pyres. Bodies lay nearby, wrapped in orange shrouds, prepared for burning.

  On the second day of our trip, we went through a rapid that spit us out with force near the riverbank. And there, floating face up in the doldrums of still water between two giant boulders, bobbed the body of a dead woman. I’d blinked at the body, astounded. My brain knew what it saw, but my mouth could form no words.

  “Is that a human body?” Brian sputtered.

  The others in our raft were as wide-eyed as we were and craning their heads toward the bloated and discolored corpse. But in a matter of seconds we were floating off again, rushing away from the body. It had happened quickly. The body was there, we saw it, the raft moved on.

  Our guide had treated the corpse as though it was as mundane as an apple in a tree, so I’d tried to let it go. But for the next few hours as we rafted toward camp all I could think about was the body. I wanted to know more about the woman and how she ended up in the river. She had probably been Hindu, and I knew it was customary for Hindus to burn the dead in funeral pyres. Perhaps the woman’s family could not afford a pyre so they put her body in the river instead? Or maybe she’d slipped while washing clothes and drowned? Maybe she’d jumped in?

  Later as we pitched a tent along the rocky riverbank I asked Brian if we should report it. “Kim,” he said. “Who would we report it to?” The Kali Gandaki was an isolated river that had carved one of the deepest gorges between the highest mountains in the world. There were not even roads in this region, just a string of rural villages connected by footpaths worn into the mountainside. Brian was right, there was no one to report it to.

  We rafted the Kali Gandaki for three days, and when our trip ended we ate lunch on the riverbank. The rafts and supplies were packed into a bus, the heavy things hauled from the river to the road by porters.

  A group of children crowded around us as we ate. A little boy with a brutal burn on his leg pointed to the food on my plate and I nodded yes to each item, an apple, a cookie, and he put them in his mouth. Looking at his scar, I noticed that someone had gathered the skin around his burn and twisted it closed. The result was gnarly; his leg had puckered and deformed. For a moment I considered the yellow envelope, but giving money seemed futile in the face of such immediate needs. He wanted food, so food was what I gave him. Brian sat down beside me, and the boy ate from his plate too. As I watched him gingerly pick food from Brian’s plate, I thought that the point of the yellow envelope was not to spread money but kindness. So although we were not giving the boy money, we were still sharing the intent of the yellow envelope with him.

  From my seat on the riverbank I watched the porters, thin as bone, carrying the heavy supplies up to the bus and thought about how hard life was on them physically. I thought of the woman in the river, of the oxygen-starved altitude, the landslides and the earthquakes that constantly threatened the area. It felt like Nepal’s boarders backed right up to the uncomfortable void of death. It made me deeply aware of my aliveness and conscious of how quickly it could all disappear.

  In India, too, I’d been exposed to the slim margin between life and death. It wasn’t really the presence of death that shocked me but what it represented: that there were customs of dying I’d never considered before and, by contrast, customs of living as well. There were so many ways of being in this world. Of course I’d always known that, but to experience it firsthand had rocked me.

  I held the thought of India in my mind. What was it about that country? Something big had happened to me there, an inner shift from one way of being to another. India had forced me to surrender, I realized, to uncurl my fingers, loosen my grip, and let go. And the world had not crumbled around me—just the opposite. The world had come to my aid and shown me that I could be so much more if I let my guard down and revealed myself.

/>   The next day we walked away from the Hindu lowlands and climbed into the Tibetan plateau, the land of the Buddha, the awakened one. I, too, vowed to be awake while walking, to remain awake, to really see the brilliant skies and the old Mani walls, to really hear the tinkling of the bells that hung around the necks of the brown packhorses as we passed them. I vowed to be awake to the flap of the prayer flags, to the warmth of the sun on my skin, to the stretch of the day as the hours rose around me. I vowed to be awake to my aliveness and to the hum of my own inner voice, because I did not want to lose the lessons I’d learned in India. “Be here,” I chanted to myself as we walked.

  The dirt road we’d been following dwindled to trail. We hiked switchbacks up the side of a mountain, stopping frequently to catch our breath and pet panting, thick-coated dogs. In the distance a Mani wall appeared, a thousand Mani stones propped against it. The stones were decorated with hand painted mantras that had faded from exposure to the elements. Tattered prayer flags blew around it in the wind. Majestic snowcapped mountains rose in all directions.

  My heart beat fast as we approached. I ran my hand along the wall. “This is incredible,” I whispered to Brian. He nodded, silently, and I knew he sensed the sacredness of the place. We’d passed dozens of temples, Mani walls, gompas, and monasteries during our first week on the Annapurna Circuit, and each one had stopped me in my tracks, compelled me to peek through their windows or run my hands along their holy bones. Never before had I been drawn to religious artifacts, but up here on the Tibetan plateau, in the shadows of the Himalayan Mountains, I felt tugged toward them by some unseen force.

  I wandered to the side of the trail and dug a small rock from the ground with my fingernail. Just like I’d done on Amantani Island, I would leave this stone as an offering. Though I thought of asking for the same thing I’d asked for on top of Pachatata Mountain, my heart urged me in a different direction. I rolled the rock between my hands and closed my eyes, squared my shoulders toward the sun, and planted both of my feet on the ground. Then I whispered the most important prayer of all, that blessing of the blessed: “thank you.”