I turned forty in 1993 and began manifesting symptoms of a midlife crisis. I whined about the responsibilities of marriage, two kids, a law business, and a mortgage. All the responsibilities and obligations were sucking the life out of me. Buying a Harley didn't cure it.
One evening my wife slapped a brochure down on the coffee table in front of me and said in a steely tone, “Why don't you do this? Go climb a mountain.” The brochure advertised a Himalayan trekking expedition. I'd lived at sea level in Indiana most of my life and had no trekking or climbing experience. But I had done a lot of rugged outdoor activities, so I was intrigued. Alicia may later have regretted her “go take a hike” therapy, because I fell in love—with the mountains.
My friend and chiropractor, Long John, and I went trekking along the Everest Base Camp trail in Sagarmatha Park, Nepal, in the spring of 1995 in a five-member group through an American expedition company called Snow Lion. The group had an American guide but was really led by a sirdar (chief trekking guide) named Ang Nima Sherpa, and it was staffed by Nepalese mountain dwellers. I had never met anyone as strong, kind, and admirable as Nima, and the spectacular beauty of the Himalayas turned me on like no other place in the more than thirty countries I had visited in my travels.
A dventure travel was part of my life before travel companies packaged it in brochures. As a teenager I hitchhiked across the United States and traveled around Europe on buses and trains. In my twenties and thirties, I motorcycled around Mexico, scuba dived throughout the Caribbean, went horseback riding and four-wheeling in Belize, and kayaked around islands in the South Pacific and the Ionian Sea. From each of these experiences, I was enriched through encounters with different lands, cultures, and people. But my encounter with the Himalayan mountains and Nepalese-Tibetan culture on that introductory trek in 1995 touched me so deeply I could hardly wait to return.
During the next two summers, I took introductory and intermediate climbing courses at Seneca Rock, West Virginia. I joined my first mountaineering expedition to Ladakh, India, in 1996, led by the renowned American climber and writer John Roskelley. I went back to Nepal on increasingly challenging expeditions in 1998 and 1999. I didn't climb 8,000-meter (25,000 foot) peaks or attempt extreme climbs requiring oxygen tanks and hanging off sheer walls in bivy bags. As a father, husband, and attorney with staff and family to support, I knew becoming a climber bum wasn't in the cards; and I'm far too cheap to spend $65,000 and six weeks to attempt Mount Everest. Trekking for a couple of weeks and climbing 20,000-foot peaks was sufficiently challenging and wonderful for me.
For a middle-aged Hoosier flatlander, Himalayan mountaineering and trekking is difficult in terms of the conditioning required and the physical and emotional stress of a long trek followed by twelve to twenty-four hours of climbing. It's grueling, and when weather conditions are bad, it's dangerous. But I loved it. The Himalayas pulled me back each year. That is, until the disastrous expedition to Mera. The experience of advanced acute mountain sickness, barely escaping an avalanche, and seeing three porters disappear broke the mountains' grip on me.
Six months after my return from the Mera Peak expedition, I was driving home from my office in downtown Indianapolis. Without warning, tears started streaming down my face, and I had to pull over to the side of the street. I sat in the car and cried. I could no longer hold in the feelings of guilt and shame. The picture of the three porters just before they were enveloped in the tsunami of white snow was seared in my mind. I had done nothing to try to help. I could do nothing to help. But the memory wouldn't release me.
The author of Ecclesiastes (1.14–15) wrote, “All is futile and a striving after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight.” I found myself overwhelmed with existential despair, feeling the unfairness of life and the futility of trying to do anything about it. It was unfair and awful that the lives of those three hardworking men could be snuffed out in an instant. I had no more thirst for adventures in the Himalayas; my throat was dry.
I had participated in four Himalayan expeditions in five years. But after the avalanche, I did not return to Nepal for four years. It was no longer safe to visit anyway. SARS had broken out in Asia, and Nepal was undergoing a violent Maoist revolution against the king. The army was shooting demonstrators in the streets of Katmandu, and Maoists were blowing up buildings and bombing buses. In a shocking incident in June 2001, Crown Prince Dipendra shot and killed his parents and siblings as they sat down to dinner, and then shot himself. Political instability followed, because many Nepalese distrusted the new king, Gyanendra, brother to the murdered Birendra. Some even suspected that Gyanendra was involved in the murders. Nepal was put on the U.S. State Department's travel warning list. Then came 9/11.
The allure of Nepal as a magical kingdom for Western adventurers was lost. In 1999, more than 500,000 tourists visited Nepal. By 2002, less than half that number entered the kingdom.
Religious people equate a “mountaintop experience” with a spiritual awakening or a transcendent connection with God. Why equate being on top of a mountain with experiencing God? Because feeling the awesomeness of the natural world on top of a mountain is such a glorious feeling that the limitations of language force us to call it “God.” Every day of a mountaineering expedition or high-altitude trek, that feeling is available.
John Muir described “the ecstasy of the surrender to nature.” He meant that by opening oneself to natural beauty, the soul is magnified to a point of transcendence beyond the ordinary consciousness of task-oriented living. During each of my Himalayan expeditions, I surrendered to the ecstasy of nature. I learned and lived what John Muir described.
But after the disaster of the 1999 Mera Peak expedition and what followed, I'd had enough. The dark side of nature then got a hold of me. I was sick of being tired, cold, and sick. To hell with the Himalayas. I was done with mountains. So I went kayaking and diving in sunny Palau, a remote archipelago near Micronesia.