The Himalayas

Our trek through the Himalayan foothills was long and grueling. We spent three nights in Nepal at the height of the uprisings and five nights in India at the height of nothing in particular. We lived off rice and dhal and a sparse six cups of tea a day. We slept in brutally soft beds with relentlessly warm blankets, tucked deep within cloyingly considerate guest houses. Our back ached under the weight of all of the water we would need for the eight hours it took us to hike to between villages with harrowingly exotic names like Thonglu and Sandakphu.

Furthermore, we had little to no contact with any human life along the way; encountering only two groups of Indian soldiers, four Germans, two Kiwis, two Scots, four Americans, a British bloke, a Japanese guy with a rumbling deep voice and bad diarrhea, and 20 Nepali sherpas doing the trek barefoot. But we kept our heads throughout our veritable isolation.

We sought out the mighty Everest in the distance and spent three mercilessly clear days walking straight at Kanchenjunga- the third highest peak on the planet. We climbed to heights of 3600 meters. The views were transcendental. They affected us in deep, elemental ways.

We navigated the height of darkness for eight days, criss-crossing borders as easily as rivers, and returned on the ninth to find the world in much the same state as we left. The grass was still green, the sky was still blue, and President Bush was still an idiot. Nothing had changed. Nothing except for us. We couldn’t have been more different.

I wore a fierce mountain beard two weeks in the making. It was almost visible if my chin caught the light just right, but most of the time house mothers just tried to wipe it from my face like chocolate. Ben wore a bamboo bow staff across his back and a squint that made people think he knew how to use it. In reality, the squint was battle damage from trying to strap the bow staff into its harness, but it was mean and convincing nevertheless.

Both Ben and I had the cool hard expressions of men who had been deep into the wild and sacrificed all but shreds of their humanity to make it out again. We knew could not burden our fellow man with the paralyzing account of our trials, so we made a pact then and there, on a precipice above Darsheeling, to never tell a sole what we had seen and done. Without a doubt it was the easiest promise I have ever kept, for when we got back to town, no one asked.