AFTERWORD

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April 15 to May 6, 2010

Kingdom of Nepal

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by things you didn’t do than by things you did.” —Mark Twain

OK, I stand corrected. In fact, let me be clear: there are places in Lobuche, Nepal that really suck. You see, I had never actually stayed in town there. Twice I had camped for days in the yak pasture hinterlands. Many times, I had admired the meandering stream and cute ponies as I huffed and puffed my way to or from Base Camp. My eighteen-year-old son Kurt and I both knew we were in trouble as soon as Suchille Sherpa led us through the rudimentary front door of a nameless windblown teahouse in April 2010.

The air was poisoned by a leaky kerosene stove. The floor was poorly laid stone covered by threadbare pink wall-to-wall. The furniture wobbled apart with the slightest movement, and the rafters were suspended over very questionable, bowed two-by-threes. Except for the spectacularly unsanitary bathroom and the miniscule sleeping rooms, the kitchen, storage and eating area occupied one forty-foot square room arranged around a yak-dung pot belly stove. The entire house felt as if it would pitch over the embankment if someone sneezed. While I was eating a lunch of spaghetti and red sauce—every bite of which tasted as if dribbled with gasoline—a member of an Indian team with altitude sickness heaved his guts out into the sink for a full five minutes. A skanky pony with an alarming skin infection slunk around the front door and was fed with a bucket that was returned to its rightful place, our kitchen.

It was April 28, 2010, at 16,000 feet, and my son Kurt and I were two days from completing a goal that we had set seven years before. Our years-long plan was to have an adventure, anywhere in the world, in celebration of Kurt’s high school graduation. After arriving home from the Everest summit in 2008, I pitched Nepal and a Base Camp trek. “That’s baller, dawg!” he replied. Rough translation: “Sounds good to me, oh wonderful Dad-of-the-Century.”

Though well-travelled for a kid, Kurt had never been to the developing world. I wanted him to rub shoulders with fascinating people and lands, made all the more dramatic by the backdrop of the Himalaya, the biggest mountains on earth. I will not deny that I also wanted to go back to the mountains for the first time as a non-climber.

I had fallen out of shape in the months after achieving my years-long goal of summiting Everest. For the first time in many years I had no big goal, mountain-oriented or otherwise, on the horizon. In fact, I had decided to retire from high-altitude mountaineering. I relished the chance to embark on a Base Camp hike with Kurt as an adventurous but safe month together before he left for college and the rest his life. I also hoped it would put a burr under my saddle to get back in shape and, more importantly, to find some direction for my suddenly rudderless future. I needed a “next.”

We had had an adventure just getting out of Dodge. An Icelandic volcano had decided to blow its lid the day of our departure from Boston, cancelling all flights to and from Europe. We were scheduled to fly from Boston, to London, to Bahrain, to Kathmandu. Luckily, several blood-pressure-raising phone calls, some frantic driving, and a few arguments later, we were re-routed to New York City and Doha, Qatar, and actually arrived in Nepal several hours earlier than we would have via our original itinerary.

It was fascinating for me to see the developing world, this time through Kurt’s eyes. After arriving in Kathmandu, and surviving the demonic sacred cow-dodging cab drive to the Hotel Tibet, we walked to Thamel. This touristy area of shops and restaurants was ringed by the palace formerly occupied by the two-hundred-forty-year monarchy on one side, and on the other sides by slum. Near the palace, we passed eighty-foot pines, the daytime homes to humongous two- to three-foot hanging bats. A ten-minute walk later, we arrived at the sidewalk where the professional pan-handlers plied their trade. This year the new hook for tourist dollars was to leave an eight-month-old infant on the sidewalk alone, in ninety-degree heat, so passers-by would drop ten-rupee bills into a can. Kurt was horrified at this spectacle and throughout our three-week-trip would ask me if I thought the baby was still alive.

Fifty feet along was the street corner where the “huffers” lived—a bunch of seven- to twelve-year-old boys who were addicted to sniffing glue. Their life expectancy was no more than twelve because they habitually fell into the street and were run over by cabs. These urchins were deeply stained with dirt and filth and clothed in nothing but frayed loincloths. They lived out their ephemeral existence in stark contrast to the meticulous cleanliness and natty get-up of the typical Kathmandu inhabitant. Kurt took it all in with stunned silence.

I lay awake listening to the calming city sounds of the Kathmandu night while Kurt sawed logs, contemplating our reasons for being there. In addition to adventuring with me, Kurt’s goal included finishing his senior project (raising funds for a Nepali school started by my Everest teammate, Val Hovland, in conjunction with the organization Room To Read (www.roomtoread.com). Kurt had researched and presented lectures and slideshows to meet his fundraising goal of $1,000. Besides the planned fandango, my other mission involved the delivery of a white cowboy hat requested by my climbing partner Phinjo Sherpa. (Apparently, white cowboy hats are worn at weddings and other important events by happenin’ Sherpa males.)

In the dark, I thought about how we have multiple missions or reasons for being in the well-lived life. I remembered back to my years of climbing. Mountains for me were made of snow, ice, and rock, but to others they could encompass any of life’s ambitions: a big goal, a personal trait that no longer serves, one of life’s myriad difficulties, something within that needs setting free. In his book Beyond the Mountain, Superstar climber Steve House simply states that “each of us has his own unique battle…my ice axe may be your paint brush.” Now that I was done with high-altitude climbing expeditions, I wondered what my next “Everest” was. What was next? Chapter One of this book, if you remember, is entitled “Dream Management,” but the chapter could aptly but clumsily be named, “My Mission, For One Speck of Time.” I hoped to gain some clarity on my future specks of time during the trek with Kurt, and, as I said, see Nepal through his eyes.

Kurt trained hard in advance of this trip. He knew from attending my presentations that the Base Camp trek ain’t for sissies. He pounded the step mill into submission at Core Gym in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. He dropped twenty pounds and went from twenty minutes to ninety minutes on the sport-specific, torturous, never-ending uphill machine. He kept his grades up, maintaining National Honor Society status, and got a tutor for calculus. He had a mission, but realized a mission is worthless without the hard work. “A warrior loves his craft”—now where have I heard that before?

“When you are facing in the right direction (read: mission), keep putting one foot in front of the other (read: work).” —Phinjo Sherpa

In Namche Bazaar, Kurt, our porter Suchille, and I were taking a tour of the Sherpa Museum. In a replica Sherpa house, I smashed my head on a low beam, nearly causing me to lose consciousness. I was dizzy and “off” for several hours. Kurt laughed. I yelled at Kurt. Several days later in Deboche, on an acclimatization day, I ordered a pizza with mushrooms, which were evidently spoiled. I was sick as a dog for four days and experienced the rotten egg breath made famous by my tentmate Chip in 2008. Years ago, I would have allowed those experiences to ruin at least a few days of our trek, but I had learned that both good things and bad make the journey of life memorable and rich. “It’s the journey, not the summit,” some great philosophical genius once said (in Chapter Three of this book, I believe). My point here is that ya gotta love the ups and the downs. When everything is perfect, there is minimal learning, and as my Grandmother Foster often told me, “learning is lifelong.” Therefore, the struggle is lifelong. My mate Rob Scott was fond of saying, “It’s only an adventure if the outcome is unknown.” The many walkabouts I was lucky enough to have made over the years were memorable for the people, weather, fatigue, conditions and the adventure, not merely the summit.

Kurt had quickly gotten used to not having a smartphone surgically attached to his fingertips, and was enjoying the daily ritual of hiking, resting and sightseeing. He breathed a sigh of relief when he was able to snap photos of uniformed Nepali school schoolchildren inside a classroom, a coup-de-grace for his senior presentation. Kurt and I had ups and downs on the trek (we got along swimmingly ninety-five percent of the time), but it added texture to the trip. John Hunt, leader for the 1953 Everest expedition that put Hillary and Tenzing on the summit, said, “If you cannot go back home from an expedition saying that the human experience was enriching, none of it makes any sense.”

We hired Suchille Sherpa to porter our shared duffel from Lukla to Base Camp and back. He was twenty-one years old and single, with a girlfriend in Kathmandu, and came from a village about a two-hour hike from Lukla. His family farmed potatoes, spinach, barley, and cabbage. At each meal and rest break, he bowled us over with helpfulness. He couldn’t do enough for us—including smothering us with condiments at teatime. (We didn’t actually request ketchup with our coffee but we always had it ready, just in case.) He was barely five feet tall, with stubby but powerful legs. He wore blue jeans every day on our fifteen-day trek. In his tiny rucksack he had a toothbrush, one t-shirt, one long-sleeve shirt, and one skimpy down jacket. His footwear choice was a pair of garish yellow and lime green Pumas, sans socks and at least three sizes too big. Oddly enough, one night three days into the trek, someone swiped them. The same teahouse from which Suchille’s peds were swiped housed a classic “ugly American” who loudly proclaimed in front of an international crowd, “That’s why we rule the world, because you can get a burger or a greasy breakfast anytime you freakin’ want.” I silently blamed the ugly American as the sneaker-stealer. Anyway, Suchille used that minimal clothes rotation the entire trek, whether it was twenty-five or eighty-five degrees, and he somehow remained cleaner and better-smelling than did Kurt and I (who had two large backpacks and a super-sized duffel stuffed with REI togs and a full supply of health and beauty aids).

The Sherpas, who make all expeditions possible—from carrying to cooking, to just being great teammates—are living models of hopeful enjoyment of the daily journey. Unlike support workers in Africa or South America, who sometimes lie and squeeze money from climbers if they can get away with it, Sherpas are genuinely happy and enjoy helping people. They have a way of paying it forward that stems from their belief in reincarnation, a belief that tells them that each well-lived and generous lifetime brings them closer to nirvana. Watching Suchille accept each day’s simple pleasures reinforced my belief that hope is in the helping.

“May travelers upon the road find happiness no matter where they go, and may they gain, without hardship, the goals on which their hearts are set. As long as space exists, as long as beings endure, may I too, abide, to dispel the miseries of the world.” —Shantideva, 7th-Century Indian Scholar

Kurt was so happy and thankful to arrive at Everest Base Camp, at 17,300 feet. He made his goal—one he had worked hard for. Upon arriving, he called his mom on the satellite phone and excitedly proclaimed, “Mom, I actually got my first altitude headache.” On the trek, he kept me in stitches with his dead-on impersonations of Darth Vader and Saruman from The Lord of the Rings. We jabbered nonstop about everything from the hair on his back, to his academic angst, to his stone-faced persona, which had elicited suspicion from airport security guards on three continents. Kurt even deciphered the origin of the Buddhist mantra, “om mani padme hum” (“hail the jewel in the lotus flower”). He explained that the rare and beautiful lotus flower (read: person on the “climb” of life) only grows in the foulest swamps (read: adversity).

We stayed at Base Camp for one night in a tent adjacent to none other than Big Al Hancock, who was making his second, and ultimately successful, attempt on the world’s highest real estate. I presented Phinjo with his cowboy hat, which surprisingly—after being thrown about on planes and ‘binered to the back of my rucksack for two dusty weeks—didn’t have a scratch on it. Phi was thrilled.

Big Al accompanied us to Gorak Shep, where we shared some mo-mos and Fanta before Kurt and I left the glacial landscape and headed for Pheriche. Al went back to Base and continued his expedition. Our intent was to hammer the pace for three days and get the last 10 AM flight from Lukla to Kathmandu. To accomplish this, Kurt and I agreed to some rules: two days of exhausting hiking to Namche, where we would need to hit the trail by 4 AM at the latest, to get to Lukla before the last flight. Kurt was pooped upon arrival at Nuru’s Himalayan Hotel on the first hard day. He was knackered when we finally crawled into Namche on the second day. On the penultimate day, we levered ourselves out of bed at 3 AM and into the night air in Namche at 3:45 AM to await Suchille. I knew it would be touch-and-go for us to hightail it to Lukla in time, but it didn’t help that Suchille was late rousting his carcass out of his sleeping bag. Kurt started out tired, started to drop behind at daybreak, and was suffering in a big hairy way by 7 AM. The only problem was that we had three hours of hard trekking to go. Kurt had a choice: stop, drop, and whine (SDW) or keep putting one foot in front of the other (also known as BGS: bow to the god of suffering). I am proud to say he chose BGS, with only occasional W. I couldn’t help him; no one could. I could only firmly but lovingly remind him to take care of himself by tending to the basics, such as re-application of sunscreen and staying hydrated. He had to come to an agreement with those pained seconds, minutes, and hours. The old saw in Buddhism is “wherever you go, there you are.” It turned out that we missed the plane by an hour, but we didn’t mind. In fact, I saw it as Kurt’s finest hour.

“When the going gets tough, get back on the yak.” —Dr. Tim Warren

We had time to kill in Lukla, so Kurt and I found a good restaurant, wandered into shops, and people-watched.

We flew to Kathmandu, where those pesky fun-loving Maoists forced another citywide strike, forcing us, in turn, to subsist for three days on room service rice, Bollywood movies, and the twenty-four-hour cricket channel. We flew from Kathmandu to Doha, Qatar; then Doha to New York City; and then NYC to Boston. We were home.

Early in my chiropractic practice I was warned of the dangers of “post-goal mortem.” In other words, establishing and striving for a business or personal goal, and once attaining it, feeling empty and unfulfilled. To avoid this condition, it was advisable to set another goal that got the blood boiling. The procedure was not to wait until the previous goal was attained, but rather, just before. I hadn’t done this after summiting Everest, and was foundering as a result. Did I find a new mission that set my blood to boil? Did I find my next “Everest” at Base Camp, in Kurt’s Vader imitations, in bad mushroom pizza or in Suchille’s choice of footwear? You betcha. My next “Everest” was set: it was writing this book.

“We walk in our moccasins upon the earth and beneath the sky as we travel on life’s path of beauty. We will live a good life and reach an old age.” —Navajo Blessing