Bhaktu, Dhruba, and Mati appeared like clockwork, and for the last time, at our tents in the morning to wake us and carry our duffels down to the airstrip. The field behind the lodge was wet with dew and it was still chilly enough that washing at a trough outside was bracing. Sanga came out of the lodge and reminded us we would eat breakfast in the lodge and then walk down to the airport for the flight back to Katmandu.
The previous night before dinner, Sanga told us he had learned from the lodge's staff that Bill had arrived at the Number Lodge the day after we had been in Phaplu. Bill, Dax, and David had flown to Katmandu the day we were in Basa. We would see our three compatriots back in Katmandu.
Bhaktu, Dhruba, and Mati guarded our duffels at the Phaplu airstrip while Arjun, Sanga, Karen, Carl, and I ate breakfast at the lodge. When we arrived at the airport, they lined up and bowed to each of us in the traditional acknowledgment of respect. Karen, Carl, and I responded in kind, and then we each hugged them in the less traditional Western way. Sanga gave the three porters instructions and off they walked. They would be back in Basa before nightfall
Arjun, Sanga, Carl, Karen, and I spent most of the morning waiting for the prop plane to fly into Phaplu from Katmandu. Karen, Carl, and I were the only “white people” waiting for the plane. The little terminal was cramped and not air-conditioned. The five of us sat outside under a shade tree, leaning against a boulder just off the dirt runway. We killed time reminiscing about the past week and telling stories of other travels. Arjun cracked open some type of shelled nuts and passed them around.
I told the others about an experience I'd had in the island nation of Palau.
After getting blown off Mera Peak and thinking I was done with the Himalayas, I solo-kayaked in the Rock Islands of Palau for the first time in 2001. My plan was to paddle from Koror to Jellyfish Lake and back, camping out on the islands by myself for four or five days.
By 5:00 p.m. the second day of paddling, I was wearing out from pulling against two- to three-foot swells and fighting the tidal current. I had been paddling since nine in the morning, except for a two-hour lunch break and nap on an island beach. At five, there was only an hour of sunlight left in the day and I needed to find a campsite. I was gassed.
I was bothered both by doubt and weariness. It had been cloudy and misty all afternoon; as sundown approached, visibility was getting worse. The closer I got to Eil Malk, the island of Jellyfish Lake, the less sure I was that I knew which point of land I was supposed to track to find the inlet to the dock below Jellyfish Lake. On the map, Eil Malk looks like three fingers extending north from the palm of a hand, but with small rock islands sprinkled all around the fingers. In the misty dimness of early evening, I wasn't sure which points of land were fingers of Eil Malk and which were rock islands.
As I started down what I hoped was the mile-long inlet to the Jellyfish Lake dock, the sun began to set. I hadn't planned on paddling in the dark. I don't like paddling after dark, not even on my own White River back home in Indiana. The moon had been full the last few nights, but that night, clouds blotted out the moonlight. I paddled for an hour and the land on my left disappeared in the darkness. Not because of the darkness, but because it was a long rock island I had mistaken for the outer finger of Eil Malk. I could hear the surf breaking on the outer reef as the vast grayness of the Pacific and the darkness of the sky enveloped everything to my left. The lights of a freighter moving slowly toward Koror blinked through the darkness miles away.
I could make out the tree line on my right and could clearly hear the slap of waves against the limestone wall of the Pacific side of Eil Malk. I cradled the paddle on my knees, opened a dry bag, and got out a headlamp. I scanned the shore for a place to beach the kayak, but there wasn't any. The Pacific side of Eil Malk was a sheer limestone wall. Dense mangrove jungle covered what little of the island I could see above and beyond the six-foot rock wall. I paddled onward, desperate to find a place I could beach the kayak and rest.
After paddling for two more hours, I glimpsed a white spot in the dimness ahead and paddled toward it. The white spot took the shape of a thirty-foot fishing boat half sunk on its port side with waves slapping against its hull. A small beach was visible just beyond the sunken hulk. Happily, I steered past the white hull and rode the waves onto the beach.
As I pulled the kayak onto the sand, my joy quickly dissolved. There was less than twenty feet of sand between the water line and impenetrably dense vegetation. It was past seven in the evening, but high tide wouldn't crest until about nine. Within an hour, there wouldn't be any beach left. It would be underwater before high tide peaked.
I considered tying the kayak to the trunk of a palm tree, and riding out the high tide in the kayak. But I was afraid the wave action would roll the kayak and tumble my gear and me into the surf. Louder than the slap of waves on sand was an eerie groaning noise coming from the half-sunken boat. It sounded like the wheezing of an ancient bellows or the death rattle of some giant monster. The mournful groaning of the white hulk was too much; I retied gear onto the kayak. Although I felt weak in the knees, I pushed the loaded kayak back into the surf. All I could think to do was to try to paddle back to where I missed the turn for Jellyfish Lake.
Heading north, I could hear the surf breaking on the outer reef fifty or sixty yards to my right. I could see a dim outline of trees and could hear the slap of waves on the rock wall of Eil Malk on my left. I had to steer a course between the surf breaking on the outer reef and the waves smacking the wall at the base of the island. I was scared and crying and cursing myself for my navigational stupidity and the perversity that would take me from hearth and home to be paddling a kayak by myself in the Pacific Ocean at night! Worst of all, I was now totally exhausted.
I simply did not have the physical reserves required to make the hard two hours of paddling back to the turn I had missed and another mile down the inlet to the safety of Jellyfish Lake dock. Suddenly, I felt something bump the bottom of the kayak, and shark terror entered the mix of roiling emotion, recrimination, and exhaustion. My arms were trembling from the exertion of pulling through three-foot waves against a head wind. My chest was heaving as my lungs tried to replenish my spent muscles with oxygen. My heart was pounding with fear—fear that I could not continue paddling for two hours and fear that the kayak would tip and I would be in the dark water alone, like Jonah, with the monster that bumped the bottom of the boat.
I stopped paddling, rested the paddle on my lap, and tried to control my breathing and calm myself. The kayak rose and fell with the rolling waves. I started singing two hymns I had sung in church every Sunday when I was a small child pressed warmly against the side of my great-grandmother in the hard wooden pews of our little church in Goshen, Indiana: Gloria Patri and “The Doxology.”
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,
World without end; A-men, A–men
Praise God from whom all blessings flow;
Praise God, all creatures here below;
Praise God above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
I had learned to chant Buddhist mantras on mountaineering expeditions in the Himalayas. Chanting a mantra frees the mind of nervous energy, allows the body to move spontaneously, and takes one out of time to reduce the drudgery of a long trek or climb. On the ocean alone that night, I applied what I'd learned in the mountains, but used the Christian mantras of my childhood. The panicky buzzing in my mind began to ebb, the tightness in my muscles relaxed, and I let go of the abuse I'd heaped on myself. My troubled spirit calmed and a renewed strength energized my muscles. I felt like I could paddle all night long.
Ninety minutes later, as I rounded the point I'd earlier missed, the clouds opened like a theater curtain being drawn back. The moon made its first appearance of the evening, lighting up mangrove roots overhanging the limestone edge of the island, and shimmering on the surface of the rippling water. As I entered the inlet to Jellyfish Lake, it felt like two arms of Eil Malk embraced me. The water in the inlet was as calm as a pond in Indiana. I was lost and, by what seemed like an amazing grace, I was safe. I straddled the kayak with my legs and let my feet dangle over the sides in the water, while I slowly paddled the last half-mile to the dock below Jellyfish Lake.
I told the others the story of the amazing grace I experienced on the ocean in Palau because that experience was the closest parallel I had to what we had experienced in Basa. There had been great physical challenge beyond the expected, stress, and fear, but a singular and unforgettable experience as the ultimate reward. On the ocean, I had been alone. The experience of Basa was shared with companions and given to us by an entire community.
There was magnetism in both places. I returned to Palau two more times in the next three years and solo-paddled to Jellyfish Lake again and farther throughout the Rock Islands. That place has a mystical hold on me and I will go back again. I told Karen and Carl that the pull of Basa that Karen felt so strongly hiking up Ratnagi Danda was not done with us. We would have to go back.
After whiling away several hours by the airstrip, we finally heard the distant buzz that became a roar as the prop plane approached the landing strip. It was time for us to board and fly back to Katmandu.
It was especially difficult for Karen to let go of Arjun. We gave him a group hug and then left the two of them for a private moment before we had to run up the steps and choose seats in the plane.
The flight attendant handed out cotton balls to stuff into our ears and hard candy to chew to help our ears adjust to the diminishing pressure as we gained altitude, as is customary on domestic flights in Nepal. Nepalese of varying tribes and castes joined us in the twenty-seat Twin Otter. We watched as the ground crew tossed boxes, barrels, suitcases, and our duffels into the storage compartments in the underbelly and back of the plane. Several boxes of fresh eggs and two chickens in a little wooden crate occupied seats in the back. Then we were airborne and winging our way back to Katmandu.
We could see the great white caps of the High Himalayas just outside the windows on the right side of the plane. I told Carl and Karen to sit on that side to enjoy the views. Sanga and I sat on the left. The plane took us farther and farther away from Basa. In less than an hour, the green terraces of the Katmandu Valley came into view.
We had left Katmandu just eight days before. This trek gave me no more days and nights in the Himalayas than the introductory trek I had done in 1995, my first visit to Nepal. That first trek had changed my life. It was the beginning of my love for the mountains and the mountain people, the beginning of my journey toward making a commitment to create constructive engagement with Himalayan villages. In a sense, the Basa trek was the fulfillment of my pledge. At least two more Americans had fallen in love with Nepal and were transformed by their encounter with the Himalayas. The Basa School Project would be a success. The lives of the schoolchildren, and the entire village, I hoped, would be improved as a result.
But the Basa trek was also the beginning of a new chapter. I would have to go back. There was more to give, and more to receive.