Lost (and Found) in the Himalayas

From the age of 10, I spent June, July and August blissed out at sleepaway summer camp. First it was Camp Miniwanca, the quintessential semi-Christian pseudo-Native American tribal all-girls experience on the shores of Lake Michigan. We sang about Jesus and nature, learned how to make potholders and portage canoes. When I started caring less about winning the coveted camp shield and more about sneaking over to boys’ camp to play spin the bottle, I switched over to Deer Hill Expeditions. There, we spent weeks in the backcountry and did service projects with Native Americans on a reservation in Arizona. My last summer camp adventure before heading off to college was a service-oriented cultural tour of the mountains of Nepal. If that sounds overly privileged to you, it is. I’ll touch on that later.

And so I found myself at age 17 in a remote village in the Himalayas, close to Mount Everest, the rooftop of the world. Our group hiked away from civilization for two weeks to reach the tiny town of Manang, where we would complete a service project and stay with host families in their mud homes that to me resembled the Ewok dwellings in Star Wars. The day we arrived, we were introduced to the intrepid hosts, who spoke very little of the Nepali language we had spent weeks intensively studying. There was a lot of bowing, smiling, gesturing. We dropped our loaded backpacks in the sleeping areas they had carved out of their already very cramped quarters. Some of us went straight to sleep, exhausted from the act of arriving there. Others, like me, went stupidly looking for more adventure.

From the mud home in which I was a guest, I could see that there was another, separate part of the village in the distance. I was told it was called Upper Manang, which made sense: It was higher in elevation, perched on top of steep rice fields. I wanted a closer look. So did some of the boys, my favorites in the group, the ones who listened to punk rock and chain-smoked cigarettes even though it was expressly forbidden, grounds for expulsion from the program.

It was tough ascending the rice fields after weeks of trekking uphill. Your lungs get confused at high altitude, working harder for less oxygen. The boys and another girl and I ordered tea at the one and only “tea house” in Upper Manang, which is code for someone’s living room that has been opened to the public to buy food and drinks that will be prepared extraordinarily slowly. On one occasion, in a different tea house, after we ordered meat dumplings I swear I saw the cook leading away the water buffalo that was destined to be dinner.

This tea came relatively quickly. The boys showed me their plan for the evening: a little block of brown hash the size of a sugar cube. They instructed me to break off a little piece and plunk it into the bottom of my tea, which I did without a second thought, even though I had never ingested hash before. As we chatted and laughed, I poured cup after cup of tea over the pea-sized portion of hash in my cup until it disappeared.

And then the sun was setting and I was starting to feel funny. “We need to go now,” I said, pulling up the girl who had tagged along. She weighed a good bit less than me, and she was already sinking into the floor cushions and giggling. “Oh my goodness,” she said.

We started making our way back to Lower Manang, but the twilit rice fields were even more difficult to navigate downhill. We kept losing the trail and ending up ankle-deep in rice paddies, definitely crushing someone’s precious crop. My eyes were playing tricks on me. Our destination seemed to get farther away with each step until the distance became epic, filmic, like the Cliffs of Insanity in Princess Bride. The girl began to cry. “We’ll never make it!” she wailed. I grabbed her hand and led her briskly forward, just as I had done many years before with a reluctant flower girl in my uncle’s wedding. Don’t think, just walk. By the time we made it to the outskirts of Lower Manang, it was dark, and our chests were heaving from exertion, fear and the effects of the hash. The other girl was edging on hysterical. It seemed to be impossible to catch our breath.

Just then, out of nowhere, a man approached. With each step he took, he said deeply, “Om.” I knew that om was a word that meant oneness, but I had never heard anyone use it this way, in walking meditation. We started pacing our breath to his oms, and our hearts slowed, and we felt ready to continue. He never looked up at us, and we never stopped him to thank him. We followed him into town. When we got there, we realized that neither of us knew how to identify our hosts’ dwellings. Each home attached to the next like mud versions of suburban townhouses. Here my memory becomes very fuzzy.

Next thing I knew, I was in someone’s home, not my host family’s, and I was vomiting. The people of Manang all lived on the upper floor, up ladders, and their livestock lived on the ground floor. I remembered being told that this was because the heat of the livestock rose to warm the people above. Also, sheep and goats cannot easily climb ladders. Anyway, I was throwing up down into the livestock area, which seemed horribly impolite. A woman rubbed a salve on my back and I felt better. I said “dhanyabad,” which sort of means thank you, but is usually reserved for deep, deep thanks like when someone gives you an education or saves your life, not just knows you are stoned and need a bit of tenderness. The woman ordered a teenage boy to help me find my way to my host family, and he did. I snuck up the ladder and curled up on a very hard, very small bed next to a snoring Canadian girl who was so tall that her feet stuck straight out into thin air.

The next day we got to work building a grand stone staircase to welcome tourists into Manang. We hauled stones as big as we could handle from a quarry to the staircase site. The stones I chose were the size of dinner plates. I was still very much stoned from the night before, and I moved slowly, like through water. The people of the village had all gathered to help, and I noticed that toothless grandmothers carrying stones bigger than their backs were passing me, robustly.

I read so many stories about international travelers scammed, trapped, kidnapped, even killed. I am absurdly lucky for many reasons. First, I got the chance to travel so far away from home at such a young age and immerse myself in another culture. Second, the locals were forgiving and accommodating of my utter foolishness. I had all of the advantages and none of the knowledge, and Nepali strangers led me home, to the light. I have become an adult who believes in inherent goodness, in universal kindness. Despite the chaos and horrors of the daily news, I keep on imagining that the people of the world are mostly hospitable.

The Nepali greeting namaste translates roughly to “the divine in me recognizes the divine in you.” You place your palms together and bow your head when you say it. I cannot think of any better way to address someone. Even dumb entitled Western teenagers.