The Sherpa

Sherpas are the native inhabitants of Eastern Nepal. They’re the hardy and forbearing mountain people that make all the Everest expeditions possible, but rarely get the credit for it. They work as guides and bearers at high altitude, carrying and cooking and setting up camps, and sometimes dragging the climbers themselves up to the summit. It was one Sherpa's scar that struck me, and the story of how he got it and what he did to save his life. 

Once I heard someone say, "Keep sharp objects out of the hands of children and idiots" and the chisel that I was using was razor sharp. I was out in the shed prying loose a piece of molding from the door of an antique cabinet that I was restoring. I was finishing up for the day and was tired and careless. I held the door with my free hand instead of clamping it to the bench.

The wood was brittle and uncooperative; I pushed a little harder and there was a loud snap as it split. The chisel shot away and cut through skin and muscle, with a precise stroke as if it was in the hands of a deft surgeon and neatly sliced open my left wrist. The gash was two inches long and when I looked into it, I saw my radial artery pulsating, glistening pink, but miraculously undamaged.

I trudged through the snow back to the house and as calmly as I could, asked Kersti to drive me to the hospital. I was going to need stitches and the emergency room was twenty miles away over icy country roads. After I was sewn up and we were on the way home, Kersti said:

“It was a good thing that I was there to drive you, it could have been a problem if I was working,” and as we drove back through the frozen landscape, I told her the story of a Sherpa that I had met in a mountain village in Nepal many years before.

I was hiking northeast of Kathmandu through the Kathmandu Valley with hopes of getting a view of Mt. Everest. I didn't have a fixed time frame or guide and had an idea that I would follow trails that seemed interesting and that I had heard Tenzing Norgay and Edmond Hillary used twenty years earlier.

I had been out for a couple of weeks taking the days as they came, first travelling in the company of a group of Sherpas who carried their heavy loads in baskets strapped to their heads and backs, and then alone, paying a few rupees for room and board along the way in isolated mountain villages that time had left untouched.

In the Himalayas, all travel is on foot. There are no roads, just stony paths carved out of the mountainsides, in some places no more than a shelf a few feet wide hanging over the abyss. I took a deep breath and without looking down, traversed them with my back against the cliff wall resisting a sensation of vertigo and a primitive urge to crawl on all fours.

The well-used trail that I had been following for days ended abruptly when I came to a rope bridge that was damaged by a landslide. When I threw stones down into the ravine, I was unable to hear them hit the bottom and realized that I had no alternative but to circumvent the gorge that the collapsed bridge had once spanned.

The landscape became increasingly gaunt as I climbed higher, zigzagging around boulders and outcroppings, the steep cliffs sometimes obscured by the clouds that engulfed them. At that altitude, the mountains were devoid of life, or any that I could see.

In my imagination, I thought that I heard the screech of a snow leopard or it just might have been the wind whining down from the barren cliffs and I tried not to think about the myth of Yeti the Abominable Snowman. There were no trail markings to guide me and as evening was falling, I knew that I was lost and would have to spend the night in the open.

The stars seemed so close, and shone so brightly, that I felt I could reach out and touch them. I had never seen the planet Mars before, but that night in the clear air, it was easily recognizable and to my unschooled and unaided eye, looked like a ruby set in diamonds.

I lay shivering in my sleeping bag marveling at the night sky in the rarefied air and mislead by its beauty and my youthful optimism and self- assurance, never considered that I might be in trouble. Had I fallen and injured myself or become ill there wouldn't be any one who would miss me.

I watched the rising sun as its glow illuminated the snow covered peaks in the distance, while the growling of my empty stomach reminded me of the fact that I was lost and hungry and no one knew where I was. I understood then that there was only a fine distinction between a landscape that was beautiful and one that was desolate, and that your choice of words was mostly dependent on how full your belly was. However, hunger was a small price to pay; the day before I had gotten my first view of the range where Everest was nestled, a giant among giants.

I checked my footing on the slippery rocks, leaned over and drank from a silver brook that splashed into a crevice underneath me, an equilibristic feat performed without an audience or safety net. Survival experts say that when you are both hungry and thirsty it is thirst that is the most debilitating, but water wasn’t a problem. 

There was an ample supply from clear alpine streams, and I filled my canteen in the brooks that ran into the tributaries of the tributaries that fed the rivers that eventually flowed into the sacred Ganges.

I walked on without thirst but dreaming continually of a heaping plate of rice and mutton curry. On the morning of my third day of wandering I came upon a trail that seemed to be in use and began seeing signs that there was a village nearby. A mile below me, in miniature as if I was seeing them from the window of an airplane, were the terraced fields and tin-roofed huts of Tarkay Ghiang.

Relieved but famished, I climbed down and was soon followed by a lively gang of curious children. I asked them in my faltering Hindi, a language related to Nepali, if there was a guesthouse or a hostel where I could stay, and they led me to a family that took in trekkers. They gave me a place to roll out my sleeping bag by the hearth, a large pit in the center of the timbered lodge vented through a hole in the roof.

My hosts shared their simple, but adequate meals with me. My first lunch after two days of fasting still remains as the tastiest I had ever eaten, potatoes roasted in the coals of a fragrant cedar wood fire with cottage cheese made from jak milk and stored in a large vat in the entrance way, a sliced fresh mushroom the size of a dinner plate with chili grilled on the same coals, and a curry made from lentils and barley washed down with tea, where sugar and cream were replaced by salt and liquid jak butter.

I picked the bugs out of the mattress seams before I blew out the lamp. When I crushed them between my fingers they left a sharp sweet smell in the air. I had a chronic itching. The red welts were as big as a dime. The bedbugs were small vampires, nocturnal creatures that bit and sucked blood in the night. I scratched continually.

In India, I learned what lice were all about. But I wonder if bedbugs weren’t the worst of the lot? They left welts the size of a quarter and itched for weeks. And in the back reaches of Nepal - there are only back reaches in Nepal - I learned what the term flea bitten really meant.

When I explored the village, I saw the scar first and then the man. He was physically impressive, bullish, squat and sturdy, hardened from a life of working in thin air. His neck was roped with muscle. His legs were as thick as tree trunks with calloused, cracked feet that looked as though they had never seen a pair of sandals or boots. His square head was sinewy with ears that stuck out like little flags and a nose like an old prizefighter. His wiry hair was specked with grey, cropped close and was parted in the middle by a long angry scar as thick as my finger. It ran from the bridge of his broad nose to the crown of his skull. His eyes held a glint that hinted at madness, or mischief, or both, and as if to confirm my suspicion and his even, small teeth flashed in a permanent smile. 

The Nepalese calendar was full of feasts and celebrations, Hindu, Buddhist and secular. The villagers distilled potent vodka called rakshi from fermented millet and that they drank on these occasions. They also smoked a very potent hashish that they made by mashing cannabis between their fingers and then scraping off the rosin and rolling it into balls.

When I asked the man about his scar, he told me with gestures, pantomime, and the few words that I understood that he got it during the harvest celebration. All the men were drinking and smoking ganga. There was an argument over an unpaid debt, and his adversary drew his kukari, the long curved knife that of tradition and necessity, every man carried. He told me that when the fight was over his skull was cut open like a ripe melon and it looked as though there would be a funeral after the festival.

The nearest place for him to get help was Kathmandu, sixty or seventy miles away over the same steep, rugged trails that I had traversed a few weeks earlier. He wrapped a towel around his head and left the village in the middle of the night. He ran and climbed, without rest and with his skull split open. He came to Kathmandu two days later, got the help he needed, and lived to tell his tale.

When I finished the story about my adventures in Nepal, Kersti reminded me of the day our neighbor Ivar fell of his bike and broke his arm, and how he picked up the bike, carried it under his good arm, and walked back to our village, Nävekvarn, so he could call an ambulance to take him to the hospital. Ivar was 86 at the time and our village was six or seven miles away from where he had fallen.

We discussed the question again of what I would have done if I couldn’t have gotten a ride to the emergency room after my mishap with the chisel. I might have been inspired by thoughts of those two men, or maybe it was the just the rush of the endorphins and the painkiller doing their jobs, so I answered:

“I would have walked of course. It’s only twenty miles to the hospital, and I only had a gash in my arm".