Among Flowers (3 page)

What I was about to do, what I had in mind to do, what I had planned for more than a year to do, was still a mystery to me. I was on the edge of it, though. Here I was in a village in the foothills of the Himalaya. I could still remember the feeling of living in a village in the mountains of Vermont. I could remember that when I spoke, everybody I knew, everybody I was talking to, understood me quite well. I could remember the school building in my village, a nice, very big red brick building that was properly ventilated and properly heated and had all sorts of necessities and comforts, and yet I had found much fault with it and had refused to send my children to school there. I could remember the firehouse just down the hill from where I live and the kind people who volunteer their life to taking care of it and rescuing me if I should need rescuing. I could remember my house with its convenient and fantastic plumbing and water to be had any time I needed it, just by opening the tap in my fantastically equipped kitchen. I could remember my doctor, a man named Henry Lodge, who I often believe exists solely to reassure me that I am not about to drop dead from some imagined catastrophic illness. I could still remember my supermarket, The Price Chopper, overflowing with fruits and vegetables from Florida, California, or Chile, just so I could choose to buy or not buy, strawberries for instance, in summer, winter, any time I liked.

I walked into our camp, something I would do for many days to come, an hour after our plane landed. That sight of the tents and people milling around would become familiar to me. There were three tents set up, one for Sue and Bleddyn, one for Dan, and one for me. But Dan and I were appalled at spending our nights in separate tents, and so we immediately told Sunam that we wanted to sleep in the same tent and that the tent meant for one of us should become the baggage tent. Perhaps he was used to people like us, perhaps something from his own culture informed him that this was not a bad thing, perhaps he knew that there were more important things in this world than who slept in the same tent with whom; he said okay, that word exactly, “Okay,” he said.

I put my backpack inside my tent and while doing that realized that it was an inferno in there. I came out and realized it was an inferno out there. I was wearing some wonderful pedal pusher–type hiking pants—bought at a store in Vermont where all things regarding the outdoors are presented as fashionable—woolen socks, sturdy and altogether well-made boots, a T-shirt made of some microfiber or other. It would have been nice to be wearing less.

I then met my other traveling companions, the people who would make my journey through the Himalaya a pleasure. There was Cook; his real name was so difficult to pronounce, I could not do it then and I cannot do it now. There was his assistant, but we called him “Table,” and I remember him now as “Table” because he carried the table and the four chairs on which we sat for breakfast and dinner. Lunch we ate out of our laps. There was another man who assisted in the kitchen department and I could not remember his name either, but we all came to call him “I Love You,” because on the second day we were all together as a group, he overheard me saying to my son, Harold, after a long conversation on the satellite telephone, “I love you,” and when he saw me afterward, he said in a mocking way, “I love you,” and we all, Sue, Bleddyn, Dan, and I, laughed hard at this. He was a very good-looking man in any Himalayan atmosphere and light, and once, many days afterward, when we were very high up and it was very cold, he took a silk scarf he mostly wore around his neck and placed it bonnet-fashion on his head, and then tying it under his chin he looked like Judy Garland, if she had come from somewhere in Asia. But Judy Garland or no, we could never remember his real name, and always he was known as “I Love You.” Apart from Sunam, our other personal Sherpas were named Mingma and Thile. There were many other people, all attached to our party, and they were so important to my safety and general well-being but I could never remember their proper names, I could only remember the person who carried my bag, and this from looking at his face when I saw him pick up my bag in the morning. This is not at all a reflection of the relationship between power and powerless, the waiter and the diner, or anything that would resemble it. This was only a reflection of my own anxiety, my own unease, my own sense of ennui, my own personal fragility. I have never been so uncomfortable, so out of my own skin in my entire life, and yet not once did I wish to leave, not once did I regret being there.

We walked into Tumlingtar to see what it was like and also to buy something, anything. We thought, beer would do. Our camp was pitched in an almost already-harvested field of something, a non-vining bean or a legume of some kind. On the other side of the field was another set of trekkers, real trekkers, people who were going off to camp at the base camp area of Makalu, not people like us, who were only going to collect seeds of flowers. One group was from Austria but we decided to call them the Germans, because we didn't like them from the look of them, they were so professional-looking with all kinds of hiking gear, all meant to make the act of hiking easier, I think. But we didn't like them, and Germans seem to be the one group of people left that can not be liked just because you feel like it. The other group was from Spain. It was to them I turned when I could not make my satellite telephone work. They couldn't make it work either. One night later, when I was especially worried about Harold, I looked hard at the telephone and saw that the antenna was loose and only needed me to snap it in place.

The main road in Tumlingtar was not like a road I was used to: paved with tar and a yellow line down the middle, it was more like a wide, well-worn path. It is a trailhead for going to Mount Everest or Makalu and so people there are quite used to seeing some of the other people in the world. They were used to seeing people who looked like Bleddyn, Sue, and Dan, people of European descent. They were not used to seeing people like me, someone of African descent, but they knew of our existence. I noticed that women in general and old people and children were very friendly and spoke to us with a smile and in a friendly way. The men did not. They looked us up and down and did not speak to us at all, only to each other about us. It was in Tumlingtar that I bought a pair of rubber flip-flops. They were stacked up, in every store we passed, all of them the same. In fact all the stores carried the same things, but I was sure that there were some differences between them that would be obvious to their regular patrons and not at all to me. We walked to the very last building in Tumlingtar and found it to be a restaurant with a patio and proper restaurant tables and chairs. We sat down and ordered beer. It was not ice cold and this was not important. From there we could see up into the hills where people were living, and the houses were surrounded by neatly terraced gardens where mostly food was growing, and we could see cows and chickens, a very familiar domestic kind of situation. It was here we met the sole schoolteacher for all the pupils who went to school in Tumlingtar and the health-care provider for all the people who needed health care in this town. The schoolteacher took us to his school and the four us felt that a good thing to do when we came back to our own overly prosperous lives would be to send money or books to him when we returned home. It was the way we felt then and the way I still feel now as I am writing this. But it only remains a feeling, a strong feeling. I have done nothing to make this something beyond my feelings. I asked the health worker what were the most common diseases to afflict people and he said headaches and fevers and accidents, so I said the word
AIDS,
and he said the word
sometimes
. It was almost dark by the time we returned to our tents. There weren't any electric streetlights or television, or any other distraction from the warm and soft blackness of the night.

We had our dinner in the dining tent, a large blue tent inside which we could stand up, not the small sleeping tent. Inside the tent was a small collapsible table like one used for playing cards and four collapsible metal chairs. The table was covered with a nice blue tablecloth and set with eating utensils and paper napkins. The civility of this stunned me. When I saw the man whose job it was to carry the table and chairs wherever we went, I was appalled that someone had to carry this whole set of civility, especially when so many times it would have been far more comfortable to sit on the ground with our legs tucked under us. And we could not pronounce or even remember this man's name, and that is how we came to call him “Table.” He was always among the last to leave camp because he cleaned up after us, and the first to arrive wherever we were going, to make things ready for us.

We went to bed at around nine o'clock that night, the latest we were up. There was still the excitement of the new, there was still lots of chatter and lingering. In any case, we were not tired. Dan and I lay in our tent laughing and chatting for such a long, loud time that the next day Sue and Bleddyn asked us to tell them what was so funny. It was only Dan telling me about a journey he had just made to South Africa with another botanist and how awkward it had been to observe someone who was married, and having an affair, start up yet another affair, and the unexpected arrival of the lover who was not the husband, bearing flowers and chocolates. That night too, I began reading
The Kanchenjunga Adventure,
Frank Smythe's book about an attempt made to climb Kanchenjunga in 1930, a book I had bought at the Pilgrims Book House in Kathmandu. Until that moment I don't think I had ever heard the name Kanchenjunga before. But I was drawn to it as if a spell had been cast over me; first the book and then the mountain, and all the way on my walk, there was nothing I wanted to see more. For my twenty some days I spent walking among the hills of the Himalaya, I lugged this book around; and for many days after I got back, this book was like a child's comforter to me.

To Khandbari: Dan and Bleddyn seem to have gone over the map again and again. Should we go by the way of Jaljale Himal and the Milke Danda, more or less the way they had gone before in 1996, or should they go another way, the first three days of which would be the same as the last three days of that 1996 trip? They went back and forth, finally deciding that yes, the first three days of this trip should repeat the route of the last three days of the 1996 trip. This decision was of great importance to these two nurserymen, for a seed-collecting journey is so difficult. Every square foot of terrain must be carefully pored over so that not a single garden-worthy plant is missed, the poor collector not knowing if he will ever be able to come this way again. A true nurseryman is a gardener, a gardener is a person of all kinds, but in particular a gardener is a person who at least once in the gardening year feels the urge to possess completely at least one plant. This form of possession excludes mere buying or being one of the three people in the world who owns something that is variegated or double flowering when the norm is not. This form of possession comes from seeing something in seed on the knife-sharp edge of a precipice and collecting those seeds, and only after the seeds are in a bag realizing that for a few seconds possibly your life was in question. You can hear this form of possession in the voice of someone who will utter a sentence like this: “I saw some
Codonopsis
growing up there, couldn't tell which one it was but I took seeds anyway.” That is no ordinary sentence said in an ordinary voice. The person who says such a sentence is in a complicated state of craving, for they are aware that they haven't invented
Codonopsis
, but having found it in its natural growing area, a place where most people who grow
Codonopsis
as an ornament would shun living, they feel godlike, as if they had invented
Codonopsis
, as if without them no one growing
Codonopsis
as an ornament would do so. Dan and Bleddyn are nurserymen. Sue, of course is a nurseryman too, but she is a different kind of nurseryman. Sue was always quite happy to point out to Bleddyn and Dan a plant in seed as she walked along to our destination.

The nurserymen had decided we would follow the Arun River, spend a day going up the banks of the Barun River starting where it emptied into the Arun, then come back to the Arun leaving it behind when we turned to go toward the fabled village of Thudam.

That first morning, that very first morning after we left Kathmandu, would soon become routine: being awoken at half past five by Table, who brought us a cup of hot tea and a basin of hot water for washing up. I love to be in bed and hate getting out of it quickly, so I lingered then, and always lingered every morning after that. Dan was always first out of our tent, immediately packing up his sleeping bag and mattress, making ready his day pack; and then performing a set of calisthenics—sits-ups and push-ups, all adding up to five hundred repetitions. That first morning when I saw him stretching and twisting, it looked like such a good idea I decided to join him the next day. In the days to come my enthusiasm waxed, waned, and disappeared altogether in that order, and that quickly.

It was already hot at six o'clock in the morning. We had a delicious breakfast of omelet, oatmeal porridge with hot milk, and pancakes. The morning was beautiful, the sky was blue, not the impersonal blue of the sky that I was used to, but as if it was specially tinted that way; and even though it was a wide open sky, very big, it felt confined, as if it was more like a ceiling than a sky. And this confusing notion—sky or ceiling—only grew more so; for a sky is a part of the earth, it is the thing to which you might be exposed, the unfeeling elements raining down on you come from the sky; a ceiling, on the other hand, is the structure that protects you from the sky.

At exactly half past seven in the morning we left camp. We walked through the town of Tumlingtar, the very way we had been the afternoon before where we had met the schoolteacher and the health-care worker, but I didn't see either of them. I didn't see anyone from the evening before and I left the place with a feeling of theoretical sadness, for it was sad that I might never, would never, see any of these people again, or see this place again, and a final parting is a time to feel sad. And so I walked out of the village, up my first official incline. It wasn't at all a very big one, but since I had never just walked up a hill as an everyday thing, I usually drove up a hill as an everyday occurrence, I felt challenged by it. Also, I was influenced by people's warnings about heights and sudden exertion and Himalayan heat. I walked up the incline and thought how good to get that over with and saw that there was another incline and another incline, but then there was a leveling off, but then there were more inclines and then the heat got hot. The path we were walking on was the size of a narrow road, gouged out of the red clay. We walked up a gradual incline, the sun getting a hot I had never known. Up, up we walked, each plateau the beginning of a new, gradual ascent. By midmorning we had gained some height—I could see that—I could look back and see where we had been. But I was used to going somewhere and arriving quickly, and so had to clamp down on feeling impatient. And, there was nothing to collect, certainly nothing I could grow from this climate in the one in which I actually live. I could see
Ricinus
, marigold, and
Datura, Cosmos,
sunflowers growing in people's gardens, and also plots of corn. Below us was the broad, flowing Arun, winding its way down to the Ganges. We passed people who seemed native to India, other people who seemed native to Nepal, and other people who seemed from somewhere in between.