Flying Off Everest (2 page)

It appeared suddenly, like an animal moving toward him along the road. Fast. A long, lingering trail of dust rose from its tracks. Enormous, unlike anything the boy had ever seen. A loud, constant rumble echoed through the mountains.
Like rocks falling, which never stop,
he thought. Then he saw the people inside.

“Oh, shit,” Babu said.

Fifteen-year-old Sano Babu Sunuwar didn’t realize it was the bus that would take him to Kathmandu. He had never seen a bus before. He had never seen anything with wheels. Not even a bicycle. It was the first time he had stood on the side of a road. Anywhere. He was barefoot and carried no bag. Everything he owned was in his pocket: 500 rupees—about $5—given to him by his father a few days before, after Babu graduated from tenth grade, the highest level of school offered anywhere near his family’s village. It was a three-day walk along the river back to his home, which he had never left before, until then. This was also the first time he had had money. Ever. His friend, standing next to him, who had been to the capital city once before and had promised to help find him a job there, prompted him to get on the bus and hand over his newfound wealth to the man collecting fares. The
fare collector gave him the equivalent of $2 back. It was a four-hour ride through the mountains to Kathmandu on a single-lane dirt road.

Babu was running away. To what, he wasn’t sure.

He was born the eldest of two sons on May 30, 1983, just south of Everest and the Solu-Khumbu region in the remote eastern Nepali hill village of Rampur-6.
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Babu’s first name, Sano, means “small” in English. No one calls him this, though he has always been small, even at birth. Because of his bright, happy brown eyes and contagious toothy grin, his friends and family quickly took to calling him by his middle name, Babu, which in Nepali is a term of endearment for a young boy or “child”—even once he was no longer a child. His surname, Sunuwar, denotes his family’s ethnicity. Completely separate, but vaguely similar to the nearby Sherpa clans to the north, the Sunuwar are part of a larger ethnic group known as the Rais, whose origins lie in Mongolia but who have their own unique language and religion, predating both Buddhism and Hinduism. Farmers and fishermen, they have carved a life for themselves out of the forested foothills beneath the mountains for thousands of years, hand-digging row upon row of narrow terraces to grow rice, millet, and barley, casting their hand-stitched nets into the white rivers that flow and rage beneath the world’s tallest mountains.

The village of Rampur-6 sits along the banks of the Sun Kosi River, high on a ridge. The river below is deep and wide, and blue green, except during the monsoon, when it swells over its banks, churning dark orange-brown, thick with alluvial silt. The hillsides, rising steeply from either side, are covered in a dense green forest. Blue pine, juniper, fir, birch, rhododendron, bamboo, barberry. The jungle teems with thars, spotted deer, langur, monkeys, mountain foxes, and martins. Blood pheasant, red-billed and alpine chough, and Himalayan monal.
Snow leopards prowl higher in the mountains to the north, above the snow line, hunting blue sheep.

Six miles to the west, the Tamba Kosi finds its end after tumbling out of the high Himalaya at the mouth of a deep canyon. To the east lie the confluences of the Likhu Khola, the Majhigau Khola, and the infamous Dudh Kosi, the highest-elevation river in the world, which crashes through the mountains from the base of Mount Everest at a rate of roughly 600 feet per mile.

A narrow dirt path winds down around the ridge to the bottom of the pine forest, where a small creek flows into the broad, swiftly moving river. The path picks up again on the other side of the current, zigzagging its way up and over the adjacent hills into the next valley. During Babu’s childhood there were no bridges, no roads.
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The home he ran away from was, essentially, the same as all of the others in Rampur-6. A thatch roof covered a narrow, two-story structure held together with logs, rope, and dried mud. Half was built with uneven stones collected from the terraced hillsides below. The other half was open to the air, a simple covered wooden platform that served as a sort of deck and an extension of the house, which, in effect, nearly doubled its size. The first level had three walls and a dirt floor and acted as the family’s barn. Cows and goats ruminated in the shade on grass grown on the steep hillside below, brought up the ridge for them by foot, usually by Babu. Up a short ladder was a small, windowless room—the family’s main living area. There was a shallow recess in the floor for cooking fires, but no chimney. The smoke collected thickly on the ceiling. A doorless doorway led out to the second-story platform, which was covered by the thatch roof and open on three sides. Hay dried slowly on a head-high wooden rack. There were no chairs, no furniture. Listless bent dogs and thin chickens wandered aimlessly outside.

Babu’s father was a fisherman. Early each morning he would walk forty-five minutes down the ridgeline to the river, where he would fish,
often until dark. He taught his son how to swim in the cold waters of the Sun Kosi, how to move with the swirling currents and survive in a whitewater rapid, should the boy ever find himself unfortunate enough to fall into any of the surrounding rivers. Young Babu loved it, however, and soon began swimming the nearby Class IV
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rapid with his friends, but without a personal flotation device (PFD)—on purpose. It was one of the few things he and the other boys his age did for fun. “Everything else was for survival,” Babu says. “Not fun.” At the age of twelve, he watched one of his friends drown while swimming in the rapids. Babu continued swimming.

As a child Babu was kept busy carrying hay for the cows and goats up the steep ridge from the terraced fields that his mother and he tended while his father fished. He watched after the animals as they grazed in the forest, and he completed a long list of other daily tasks that go along with subsistence living in the mountains in Nepal. If he didn’t do his chores, his mother didn’t feed him, he says. Two meals a day of either fire-roasted fish or
dal bhat,
a spicy rice and lentil dish with roasted potatoes, and sometimes yak meat or beef—usually not.

After completing his morning chores, collecting milk and carrying hay, Babu would walk to school. It took him twenty-five minutes to get to the small, government-funded Level 1 school in his village. It offered classes up to Grade 3. He attended whenever he could, when his parents didn’t need his help at home, which was rare. After completing third grade, young Babu started making the forty-five-minute trek to the nearest Level 2 school. His main goal was to learn how to
read and write, which proved difficult in a school with no books. After completing sixth grade, it was an hour walk each way to his Level 3 school, which went to eighth grade. No lunch was offered during the day. He ate in the morning and at night, if he finished his chores. And that was becoming increasingly difficult with his now two-hour walking commute to school. The nearest Level 4 school, the highest offered, was in a neighboring village called Dudbhanjyang, across the river and over a small mountain.

Babu crossed the Sun Kosi Monday through Friday just after dawn on an old, inflated tractor tire inner tube that had been carried in from the nearest road, a three-day walk away. He didn’t even know what a tractor looked like. It took three hours, one way, gaining and losing 1,000 feet of elevation in each direction. He carried a notebook and a pencil, supplied to him by the school. The high school itself, which sat on top of a similarly narrow and inconveniently accessible ridge in the next valley, consisted of two long stone buildings covered in cracking white plaster, with red wooden roofs and cold, bare concrete floors. The windows held no glass. The teacher would have to close the red wooden shutters to keep out the wind and rain, making the classroom, lacking electricity, eerily dark. Unlike most of his classmates, whose parents often kept them at home to help with farming and chores, Babu managed to complete tenth grade, the final year offered, at the age of fifteen. He knew how to read and write in Nepali, making him one of the 54.1 percent of Nepalese who could at the time.
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And yet he had nothing to read.

The idea to leave the village came from the river. Standing on the riverbank or high on a ridge, doing his chores or walking to and from school, Babu often saw strange things float past, bobbing in the waves. They would always be brightly colored. Blue. Red. Yellow. Green. The floating things were odd, he thought, but it was the people on top, or sitting inside of them, that captivated Babu’s imagination the most.
They were kayakers. Whitewater rafters. Foreigners with light-colored skin who spoke strange languages. English. Chinese. French. He didn’t know anything about them, other than that they came from upriver somewhere and went downriver to … well, somewhere else—someplace far from where he was. “That’s all I knew,” he says. He would watch them from his family’s house, as they rested on the riverbank below, drying wetsuits, napping, playing games in the sand. He imagined what it would be like to be one of them. Not having to milk cows and goats each morning. Not having to carry hay or walk three hours to school each way. To just step into the river each day with a small, happy-colored boat with a big stick, and float downstream to something new. Playing in the water. Following the river.
That must be a good life,
he thought.
Maybe the best life.
Certainly better than the one he was living at the moment, he thought. So Babu began to dream of kayaking and a new life of adventure.

When Babu graduated from school, his father gave him some money to attend the graduation feast put on each year by the high school in Dudbhanjyang: 500 rupees. It was the first time Babu had ever had money in his possession. He knew the small wad of papers that his father pressed into his hands was an opportunity, though. And not just an opportunity to eat well and get drunk, which was the intended purpose. It was his ticket out of the hills, a chance at a new beginning, one without goats or cows or the job of carrying hay.
Perhaps even a chance to go kayaking,
he thought.

Babu consulted an older friend who had made the trip out of the hills once before and had returned after working for some years in Kathmandu, the country’s capital. They made a plan, which started simply enough with walking into the hills and out of the village, without telling their parents. Away from everything Babu had ever known. Then, they would catch this thing called a “bus,” his friend told him, that would take them to the city. Babu would learn how to kayak—somewhere, somehow—and convince somebody to pay him for it. A few days later, when it was finally time for the graduation feast, they
said good-bye to their families, without telling them of their plan; crossed the wide blue-green river using the old inner tubes left on the bank for the purpose, past the dirt trail that led up the opposing hillside to Dudbhanjyang and their graduation party; and kept walking westward over white stones. Three days through the forest, along the river to the road.

Babu knew it was not a safe time to be traveling. Nepal was three years into a civil war. People left their villages only if they had to, because when they did, they tended to disappear.

On February 13, 1996, when Babu was just twelve years old, members of the Communist Party of Nepal attacked police posts all over the country. The guerillas, led by a man named Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who called himself Prachanda, killed the officers and took their weapons, hoarding them for future attacks in what he accurately anticipated was going to be a long, bloody struggle for control of Nepal. It was the beginning of what would turn into a horrific ten-year civil war—“the People’s War,” Prachanda called it. The conflict would eventually cost more than 12,800 lives and displace over 150,000 Nepalese from their homes. The economy crashed. Unemployment reached nearly 50 percent, the country left, for all practical purposes, in ruin.

For hundreds of years, ten generations of the Shah dynasty had ruled Nepal, as either an absolute monarchy or a constitutional monarchy, constitutionally immune to prosecution. The Maoists, Nepalis loyal to the now infamous Communist Chinese revolutionary/tyrant Mao Zedong, claimed that Nepal’s rulers had failed to bring genuine democracy and development to the people of Nepal, which was true. In the eighteenth century, members of the Shah family had cut off the lips of their challengers. A hundred years later, they were dropping uncooperative subjects down wells. More recently, a member of the royal family had allegedly run over a musician on the street with his Mitsubishi Pajero. The man hadn’t played his request.

The day-to-day economics and development of Nepal also hadn’t gone so well for the Shahs. By 1996, 71 percent of Nepal’s population was living on less than $1 a day—absolute poverty. More than half of the people in Nepal were illiterate. And foreign debt accounted for at least 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Even today, Nepal is still listed as one of the twenty poorest countries in the world by the United Nations, just ahead of Uganda and Haiti.