keep the wild inside

a correspondence about wilderness and art

Annapurna Sanctuary: Into the Himalayas

COMING AUGUST 15

Anxious Mountain

Into the Himalayas in the Footsteps of the Buddha, Absentee Father

An account of two trips to the Annapurna Sanctuary, in the Annapurna Himal in Nepal. The first came on the heels of my father's death, and the second 16 years later as a sort of rejuvenation after being grounded and bothered but not beaten by cancer. Trekking to the Sanctuary was a healing procedure in so many ways, from physical to psychic healths, but most importantly to accept challenges you cannot imagine and have them transform your life when they are accomplished -- or fumbled.

From "Anxious Mountain"

We leave Lucinda in Chomro. Despite her practiced walks the previous day, she can’t go on. We carefully divide up our power granola bars, toiletries and batteries, and leave her one of the two mini-disc players and most of the MDs, including Madonna's 'Ray of Light' and Fiona Apple's 'When the Pawn.' In addition, since she will be immobilized, we leave her all the books. Tough decisions. Now I'm left with my own head and the second mini-disc player, but I'm going to the Annapurna Base Camp and she's not so I feel badly and she feels badly and when all of us hug early the next morning and say our goodbyes I can see the hurt in her sparkling eyes: The trip in a way means more to her than any of us, because it represents the greatest leap of faith any of us made to leave the comforts of home.

I met Lucinda at New Year's Eve when she was out with her sister and Art Attack’s Alberto Gaitan and they were all so smashed their comedy routine was operating with a wheel missing. I came sober and two hours late, a trick I learned growing up among discotheques in the south of Spain, and noticed that Lucinda was a Listener. I suffer from a lifelong case of verbal diarrhea, but when it's necessary I listen to the whole story . . .

In Tabatinga in the Amazon in a town where everybody had a gun but me, I needed to change a hundred bucks and found myself in a building filled with ten thousand bottles of one kind of shampoo, interrupting a transaction between bored-looking men trading heaps of money (with their guns politely leaned against the wall), with Ali the head guy looking me over before asking in accented Spanish, 'Is it true you are from Lebanon?' and when I told him my childhood had indeed been spent in the glory years of the Paris of the Middle East, he sent out the bored-looking men and told me the story of his life for two whole days, at times crying, at times laughing, offering me drinks but not touching a drop himself and at one point, talking about his mother, he simply began to weep and covered his face in his hands and I realized he was trapped in this absurd confluence of river and coca leaf and moreover had never been to Lebanon himself, despite being Lebanese. While he wept I told myself to Shut up and be stoic and when he wants to you'll get the rest of the story, and finally I did: His mother had left him here in the jungle and the water and gone back to the Cedars to drop dead, and he was alone in the world, and I learned then that it doesn't matter if somebody is Arabic or Amharic but you'd better be able to hear everybody as a human being, especially when their smiles and eyes leak telltale squeaks of pain. Ali would not let me spend a dime in the Amazon, and got me onto a mail carrier that barely cleared the trees but got me to Iquitos, and when I tried to give him the original hundred bucks in exchange he waved it away in irritation.

Ever since then, people walk up to me out of the dark and gab away. But Lucinda kept her thoughts to herself that first night, and I kept mine to myself, and it became a sort of competition, each willing the other to speak. In the past year we've been listening a lot to each other but also to the rest of our pals and most importantly to the curious strangers you barely notice unless you're on the lookout for ways of escape. And Lucinda is in the act of escaping herself. Not just the person who needs to get a job and make a Living, but also from the past skins in which she slithered through law school and college and romance and horse riding competitions, and through the childhood and infancy strangled by the sturdy security nets only families can build. Torn between her own wonder at the world around her and the expectations of friends and family, Lucinda has been frozen in action a dozen times since I've known her. Bustling between poses, she's in training for that breakout run that leaves you on the train knifing across the rice paddies or in the hills above the patient waves of the tireless ocean, which like the wind knows the only way to break your opponent is not with a fist or a hammer or a tornado, but with a lifetime of gentle caresses, a billion tiny hugs which in the ocean's lifetime will leave the planet as smooth as a billiard ball, despite the best intentions of the geopolitical champions whose scars of development carry legacies, for sure, but of indictment and not the glory they’re expecting when they spit on their hands and dig their shovels into virgin territory to begin the process of building something meaningful. The joke they don't get! Well, Lucinda is seeing through the best intentions of her friends and family and counselors and bosses. She sees treasure available to people who listen to their own imaginations.

And the ultimate treasure is freedom. Not just to do what you want, but to speak and think the same way. That's why Lucinda appreciates my hatred of cliches, and why she laughs when I sneer at brand names, especially when my friends wear them on their shirts or jogging shorts. When I froth about my plans to build the Gadfly Thinktank, with Eddie Becker as a sort of Failure Emeritus, Lucinda totally gets it and wants to schedule the first graduation ceremony. Because what could the Imperial City with its hallowed gasbags use more than a collection of needle-nosed whiners and misguided pricks? She sees that the struggle to decide between a Volvo or a Honda is a conflict which delays or hides the resolution of the Self, which involves not just admitting addiction to chocolate but admitting that real education and curiosity require a discipline akin to an Olympic pentathlete's.

The night before she left Nepal, Lucinda’s sister Jonelle articulated a lament about how we live our lives in bondage rather than in the ideal, and then provided her own ideal:

'Wouldn't it be great to spend two hours a day reading something difficult, and then two hours practicing music, and then two hours exercising, and then two hours writing, and to do it every day, endlessly?'

Not on anybody's schedule but your own? Wouldn't it be great?

Jonelle can say it because she's got a steady income and is caught in the harness of somebody else's scheduling, but I can see from the face of her sister Lucinda -- the listener -- that such a life is not as lamentably far away as everybody might think. Lucinda was still thinking about her sister’s ideal life formula as Jonelle's Cosmic Air twin-prop lumbered down the highway toward Katmandu while the rest of us waved at all 16 windows. Maybe such a life could come as soon as we got the Baba from Brooklyn up and safely down the mountain.

Try to live that life, though. I can't, and I'm comparatively free to do what I please. I’ve experienced a constant, grinding poverty most of my life which required some witty hustling for me to jet all over the world in the name of science and art. Now I’ve got the cash flow fat, and my time is violated only by my own whirlwind plans, and I still can’t approach that ideal. People with means can't either, especially rich people who can live dashing lives around the world without ever finding anything valuable. It's not money. It's not time. It's a blending of desire with the imagination, and Lucinda has been working on this trick in between despairing the useless and wasteful routines and responsibilities many of us describe as a full life. So when I told her five months ago that I wanted to show Eddie a town in India where people go to die, and then take him up the mountain to recover his intellectual energy and vim, she signed on without question. The trip for her had nothing to do with being on some intellectual balloon crash. It was a chance to break out of her own definitions for living, and find a cure to those two chief pollutants of the soul, boredom and mediocrity. For her sister Jonelle and for our snake-charmer Raven (who is now in Rajasthan and reports 4,000 offers of marriage which leaves me wondering if there is a link between declining self-esteem and marriage, but this is a delicate and complicated subject, so --) the trip has offered an escape from a situation rather than to a situation, and for Sandra the trip was undertaken out of sheer loyalty to speed, as in, Lookit this train is zooming by and see how easy it is to jump on? Expecting something conclusive, Lucinda risked returning from this trip to find herself in the same situation she’d left behind, and the summit in the Sanctuary was a metaphor for stepping out of herself into something higher.

And now Lucinda is frozen again. Left behind in Chomro with four books and six hours of music and a revolving door of trekkers passing each other up or down, with the mountains green and the hot springs below. Her friends get to trudge up to the glaciers and peaks only partly glimpsed miles away peeking out of the clouds and the foothills. What bitching, dratted bad luck.

We leave at daybreak and descend to old Chomro, which I passed through sixteen years ago but cannot remember from Saturn. The roads through Chomro are huge slab slates pieced together in muddy avenues between stone walls which hem in milk-producing buffalo and chickens or which support terraces of millet or rice. A small temple signals good-bye as I walk carefully on its left (keeping my right -- purer -- side closest to it), and then a pagan creche appears in the last wall where the town's gremlins and witches hide, and at this creche are a few cigarettes and hay and ribbons and knick knacks and I start thinking about a super-natural plotline involving a sportscaster trying to find his biologist brother in a small town where the women turn into leopards, etc etc. All I have to do is scribble some shit together and call it “The Sanctuary” and describe just like in this sentence and some lawyer in Manhattan will give me five thousand bucks so he can brag between real estate contracts that he’s getting into the movie biz.

The Gurungs came from the north, farther than Tibet, hundreds of years ago. They killed animals and ate them until they realized there was nothing left alive. They moved because it's in the nature of humans to shit until you have to leave home behind and start all over again, and they came south toward the sunshine and perhaps toward the hills to get away from some man-made enemies. They developed their own caste system, which is most rigid in its regard to marriage. The Gurungs don't care too much about virginity or the sanctimony of marriage -- a young woman can 'marry' three times and walk away from all of them and still be choice marriage material -- but they care a great deal about keeping the caste pure and strong, and in this sense the word caste really means neighborhood or, better yet, barrio. For 500 years, the barrio has slowly changed from meat-eating multi-theistic democracies to veggie-cultivating multi-theistic dependencies as other cultures have encountered the Gurungs and told them, You are poor. The caste business is always disheartening to me, because at its upper levels you can make a case for its usefulness in keeping neighborhoods in balance with each other and preventing homogeneity, but the system ultimately depends on the Untouchables, who are treated like shit because shit is all they have left to deal with after everybody higher on the scale scarfs up the tangerines and goats and railroad directorships.

A young girl walks with buffalo shit gathered in a basket on her head to make fuel, and she is an untouchable. An old man comes to a house full of tears with his platform rickshaw and removes a dead body to the embalmer or to the firestarters at the pyres at the holy houses on the river, and he is an untouchable. A young boy at the bus chowk cleans out the toilet stalls with a water hose and collects the buckets filled with toilet paper bearing cholera and dissenting amoebas and all the hepatitises in the alphabet, and he is an untouchable. (And the toilet paper comes from the foreigners; the vast majority of the subcontinent uses the left hand for wiping, and there’s always a little spiggot to the left as you sit where you can clean your hands.) Two thousand years from now, society will pay the biggest salaries to whoever is willing to clean up the greatest amount of shit, instead of the way we have it now, where the CEOs get the bucks and leave behind the Superfund sites. Unbelievably, in this part of the Earth where Nirvana is simultaneously so close and distant, it is we, the educated and wealthy foreigners who are the most untouchable of all, and I'm delighted to see that Eddie Becker ignores the sign 'No visitors in the kitchen, please' to stroll into the kitchen with buffalo dung smeared over his Vasques and socks as he rubs his unwashed hands together to inquire, 'Alright, what do we have cooking in here for dinner?'

See the Himalaya preview photos on August 15