A Path Just as Fair

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less traveled by

And that has made all the difference.”

-Robert Frost

May, 2014

Nestled in the Sierras, 80 miles and a three-hour drive outside of Fresno, at 8000 feet I sit, having moved into a rustic yet quaint trailer for the next four months. I will see spring turn into summer, and summer into fall.  A few months ago I couldn’t have imagined this is where I’d be. It’s been a confusing six months. Like loosing one’s sense of smell, I had lost my sense of place. And time.  But I’m reorienting myself.  

I remember being young and constantly pondering where life would take me. How vast the unknown-ness was. When my parents told me stories from their own pasts I tried to think of what tales I was going to be able to share with my children. I was at that age when my imagination had stagnated; it was going through puberty. It had taken on an edge. A sharpness. Its soft, blurry expansiveness had begun to dwindle. When what I believed was possible in my life was transitioning from fantasy to reality. I don’t remember there being much middle ground. Only what existed around me seemed like anything I could conceive of. Past the innocence of a young imagination that takes your dreams to other universes, mine had become practical.  I still thought about how amazing that would be. But I started to think of it as silly, as no longer something I could will to be true. The recognition that it was nothing more than fantasy had taken hold.

My ability to imagine my future self became confined by my young knowledge of the world, the real world, and my understanding of what that was. I could write myself into the stories of my dreams, but I knew I couldn’t live them.  So I thought about my dream profession, my dream house, how many kids I would have. I thought I would travel some but I could barely picture it. Everything was limited to the conventions of “normal” life. Everything was limited to the narrow view of the experiences and things I had been exposed to in my short life. 

I still cannot imagine my future self.  I rarely even try at this point. Actually, that is not true. I do try, constantly as a matter of fact, but being my present self takes up a substantial amount of my energy as it is. It is a struggle to come to terms with so much unknowing. A battle with my neuroses, my fears. Nevertheless, I have somehow chosen, despite myself, a life that seems to have a predictability factor of less than zero.

While it is antithetical to the type of person I have always thought myself to be, there are so many experiences, adventures, and challenges that I have exposed myself to that I wouldn’t want to change for anything. In many ways I guess I am not the type of person I have always defined myself as. I do more things than I would have thought my mental constitution could handle.

At the very least the next few months should be interesting. Yet another unknown I am stepping into with my breath drawn, my heart palpitating, but with my eyes as open I can stretch them.

September, 2014 

The summer is over now. Our time in the Sierra has come to an end, for this year at least. I broke my face, let a cowboy re-break my nose, bet on Nascar and won $60, rode on the back of quads, went treasure hunting in an empty lake bed, met hundreds of interesting people, hiked to some beautiful places, was circled by Osprey and heckled by ravens. I lived in a trailer, ate a lot of pasta, and went hunting for the first time. We are back in Portland now for a few weeks before taking off yet again. Continuing our transience.

Tis the season... for catching deer

There are a number of men who have been coming to VVR for many, many years. They have been there through the changing of owners and times. They are a fundamental part of the foundation of the place, and are invaluable to its sustainability. At some point this summer I was given the opportunity to experience the area with a few of these “old timers.” It was this that made my summer particularly special.

My birthday came as the season was coming to an end. The weather was changing. The squirrels and chipmunks were scurrying about collecting pinecones for the chilly days ahead. Everything was foraging. I too struggled with finding much to do beyond foraging through the remnants of what the year’s hikers had cast off. Having tired of trail mix in all its forms and with my interest in dry shampoo and ½ used bottles of sunscreen waning I was starting to feel a little down. When not working my mind was overly preoccupied with impending life phase 479 or waiting for the meal bell to ring. A sound I worry will forever trigger a Pavlovian response in me of a need to eat. In any case, my point here being that I didn’t have much going on and with an expectation of another birthday spent doing nothing.

So there I was, slinging bait, beer, and moleskin in the store one afternoon when one of the VVR old timers, Dave, came in to say hello. It was the first weekend of deer hunting season and he was planning on going out the following morning for a few days. On what I’m sure was an ill thought out whim he invited me along. The goal was to get a deer for another of the regulars - a one-legged Vietnam vet who served time in a Moroccan prison - so that he and his 12 year old granddaughter, we’ll call her Gravy, would have something to eat for the winter.  While I’d never been hunting, or even touched a gun for that matter, the cause seemed worthy, and it gave me something automatically memorable to do on my birthday.

Since I can’t do anything spontaneous without overly thinking it through first, it took me a few hours to come to the conclusion that I could not turn down this opportunity. I made sure that Dave was really ok with me joining him, and, once relatively satisfied that he was, we made plans to meet early the next morning.

I woke to a crisp morning, threw on everything I planned on wearing for the next two days, and grabbed the backpack I had carefully packed with very little (a knife, a few energy bars, an extra pair of socks, my sleeping bag, headlamp, books, and camera with all its accouterments). If we were to “catch” a deer I imagined that the knife might come in handy for the skinning and quartering I assumed would take place. I chose to ignore the fact that I had never participated in such an activity and took it for granted there likely wasn’t an instinct that would automatically kick in that would give me the knowledge to portion out a deer.

At 6am we drove down the road to the pack station to sign papers absolving them of responsibility for any loss of life or limb that might occur on our ride up to camp. By 8am I sat atop Big Spot as we rode up Bear Ridge. A few hours later Dave and I were dropped off, our gear unloaded from the pack horse, and we bid farewell to the rest of the caravan.

After deciding on a nice flat spot we set up camp and set off to track some deer.  I could tell that Dave was a bit nervous about whether I was going to be the laid back/go-with-the-flow/minimalist camper that I had assured him I was. For this reason I decided not to tell him that a good third of my knowledge of deer up to this point came from watching The Sound of Music. Within an hour what I knew about deer had expanded to what could fill a (incredibly tiny) book.  Dave pointed out what deer beds looked like as we slowly and ever so quietly made our way to the various spots likely to be visited by our cloven hoofed pray.  I wanted to ask him how bright orange vests don’t counteract camouflage but I restrained myself.

My experience on our tracking excursions over the next two days was colored by an odd amalgamation of having just finished a Steinbeck book a few days before, and being an avid enthusiast of survival shows. The narration in my head was a mash up of elegant yet rugged early 20^th century prose and Man, Woman, Wild (or my most recent discovery, Naked and Afraid). Every now and then I would lean down to check a low lying branch to see if it was snapped… because one thing I’ve learned from all shows in which something must be tracked is that everything that has ever been tracked in the history of tracking has snapped a branch.

That night we ate tacos and went to bed, Dave under a tarp set against a fallen tree and me in his tent, that he so generously insisted that I use. The next day was the official first day of the season and we were now tracking with the explicit purpose of hunting down a deer. Despite Dave's expertise and my penchant to please those I admire through blind and diligent rule following, we didn’t even manage to see a deer. In the end this was probably good, since it allows me to believe that I would have handled a successful hunting trip sans any sort of freak out.

Dave's gentlemanliness the first night sleeping under a tarp had left him damp and cold the following morning. I insisted that there was plenty of room in the tent for the two of us and he agreed that it would probably be best to for us to share. It was a wise choice since we were bombarded that night by heavy rain, wind, and hail. We ate an early dinner right before the storm blew in and we hunkered down in the tent.  I leant him one of the two books I had brought with me, and Dave read about the liberal history of Amsterdam until he fell asleep around 6:30. It was a restless night, and there were an odd number of complete and lucid bouts of conversation at different times throughout.

We hunted our way back to VVR the next day. Another heavy storm was imminent and although we tried there was no way we could beat it. We scrambled down large rocky cliffs. It was the only time I was allowed to handle the rifle, when Dave needed both hands to maneuver down a particularly precarious spot. By the time we made it back to the truck we were soaking wet. We never saw a deer. It was a great day.

October, 2014

(No) More Cowbell

Here I sit in Portland, in a windowless basement room in the house of an eccentric acquaintance of my mother’s. This gentleman was kind enough to invite us to stay in his home for the 4 days we had nowhere to go between a three-week rental and a one-week cat sitting gig.  Overall the place is perfectly lovely, and he truly saved us from having nowhere to go.

That said, yesterday afternoon there was a knock on our door and our host (along with a motely crew) were standing there. They were going to be playing some music and needed to get the amp out of our room. A man in a trench coat introduced himself to us as “Black Bob.” There was a street hardened couple whose names I didn’t catch.

One of my least favorite word combinations is “jam session” and “here.” It is a phrase that has a tendency to lead me down the rabbit hole of questioning my life choices. But given our current situation I am not really in any kind of position to complain.

Someone played the Conga. Another, a harmonica. The electric guitar arrived late. There was a cowbell. There is always a cowbell. Skipper, the playful sweet, thrice-abandoned dog (taken to the pound the last time for a suspicious incident that left the previous family’s cat dead/eaten) contributed to the music with occasional bursts of howling.  To get out of the house to go to dinner we had to squeeze past a shopping cart piled high with cans, bottles, and blankets that was parked in the garage. Such is my life.

In a week we’ll be in New York. In three, Europe and then North Africa.  We’ll return to the east coast again for a few more weeks before returning to Nepal for another constitutional deadline. We will need to find a place to live. We will live out of backpacks. We will meet all sorts of new people and experience an array of new things. I will be physically and emotionally exhausted, my body confused. I will think of what could be. I’ll be happy. These are the things my new dreams are made of.

Worst Case Scenario: Nepal Edition

There is a game I like to play when traveling where I try to think of the worst-case scenario I might face in any situation. When it comes to Nepal, the impossibility of predictability means that I have never come close to winning. It’s still fun to try to imagine what could go wrong and always be surprised by the sheer endlessness and creativity of the reality I end up facing. For example, I never could have foreseen that we would have lost five traditional Nepali drummers to the streets of Kathmandu when going to a Tharu wedding.  Or taking the 12 hour bus ride to Kathmandu from Tulsipur for what was supposed to be a two day trip to renew our visas only to find the entire country shut down and be forced to spend our last three weeks in Nepal holed up our hotel or hiding in a restaurant as the metal shutters were dropped to protect against protesters enforcing a bhanda. In Ecuador I never would have imagined the crippling pain of needing to pee so badly on a bus ride, and the unheeded pleas to the driver to pull over, that left me with trying to decide if it was better to have my friends hold me out the window or attempting to use a Coke bottle. Despite the overcrowded bus that ensured no privacy, on what could only generously be called a road, I opted for the Coke bottle. It didn’t work out as I would have hoped.

About a month before Scott and I were planning on leaving Nepal this last time, we woke one morning to a deep, penetrating, utterly invasive ruckus above, below, and all around us. The noise was one so pervasive we couldn’t tell what direction it was coming from. We grumbled, bickered in that no sleep irrational way that people do, and stumbled our way through the workday. Upon arriving home that evening we found the whole place covered in a fine dust of white powder. Our landlord, having disappeared on some vacation, had decided that it was the perfect time to have the marble sanded.

The next morning/middle of the night we were again woken up by what our instincts clearly identified as the sound of hammering. Being 4am, our brains had a little harder time believing that someone could possibly be doing any kind of construction work at such an hour. But this was Nepal, where nothing is too absurd to be true. Ever.

 We were to learn that our instincts were in fact correct, and over the next few days, we were able to piece together what was happening.  Up until this point the bakery below us had just been a retail space. They had now decided to turn it into their main production facility and were therefore doing a redesign on the place.  To protect our sanity -- and our lungs from the ever-encroaching marble dust -- we decided to stay in an extremely low-budget “hotel” in Thamel for the weekend. The room had that musty permanence that seems to be a built in design feature of such abodes. The water was hard. As were the beds. No mind. At least it was quiet. At first.

Our room was in the back and faced into a courtyard shared by a few other hotels and bars. As it turned out one of those bars hosted a weekend jam session at night. The band played by a window opening up to the courtyard. There was no pane in the window. Courtyards echo. Marley, Springfield, Nirvana, Pink Floyd. Covers upon covers. Constant dripping from the bathroom. Needless-to-say we did not achieve the peace and tranquility we were seeking that weekend. Nor were we particularly surprised.  It was almost as if this were the only way it could have been. At least it was Tihar and there was the entertainment of kids yell-singing the Tihar song in exchange for money. A brilliant holiday that I wish I could have partaken in as a child. Or as an adult for that matter. It’s like trick-or-treating, except you get cash and goodies. And you don’t have to wear a costume. Brilliant.

The early morning construction also signified that bakers would now be starting work in the predawn hours. It was clear that sleep would become completely illusive to us.  For two people for whom sleep is already stressful and not a sure thing, such a situation did not bode well for our ability to cope with what can already be a trying existence in Kathmandu. One needs to be able to laugh off the daily trials of living in such a city, but without sleep those laughs can easily turn into tears. Or screams.

We decided to go farther the next weekend. To Dulakhil, in the hills that make Kathmandu a valley.  We read reviews on Tripadvisor, and found a place that was affordable yet highly loved. When we arrived it was farther from town than we might have hoped, but the grounds were nice and the views of the Himalayas picturesque. Despite being the high season of October there were no other guests. This struck us as odd, but it wasn’t the first time we had been the only guests in a hotel in Nepal, so we didn’t give it too much thought. We quickly discovered that we had no running water. Not the end of the world. A few hours later, and with no options for an out, we were informed that they host a dance party every Friday night. Why we were surprised by this I’ll never know. We were invited if we wanted to join the 50 or so people they were expecting (mostly young men). Strange that NO ONE had mentioned this in the reviews or in the emails we exchanged during the reservation process. The place began to fill up around six and we maintained a twinge of hope that like most things in Nepal, this would end by 10pm. Not so.  It was a rowdy crowd with people rocking out and drinking late into the night. I stepped outside our door just in time to catch a glimpse of someone puking off the top balcony onto the floor below.

The next morning, with a forced determination, we set off to take the famous hike/pilgrimage the area was known for.  Up to an ornate Buddhist monastery that was built on the site where the Lord Buddha himself, back in the day when he was still a lowly prince – before attaining enlightenment under a boddha tree – had offered up his own flesh for a starving tiger and her cubs. Hard to feel sorry for your “struggles” when you have that story to compare yourself to. We were skeptically picked up by a bus driver on the way into Dulakhil proper. It took us awhile to find the trail but we eventually were on our way. We climbed hundreds and hundreds of stairs. The first or last steps on any true pilgrimage.

After making our way about half way up we found ourselves at a crossroad. We could go up or down. Up seemed logical, but we were at the point where we could have easily justified down as the right direction. Luckily a young Nepali lad showed up at just that moment. He was on his way home from school. His house happened to be right on the trail we were going.  He pointed us in the direction we needed to go and then, since he too was headed in the same direction, we struck up a conversation with him about life and politics in his neck of the woods. He told us about school and the challenges he faced in being able to attend. He told us that his father had died about a year before and his brother had recently been in a motorcycle accident. As we approached his house he invited us in. His was a family of farmers and he outlined their property for us and what crops were being grown. Corn was drying in the sun outside the front door. Recently picked beans and cauliflower piled on the right.

He was clearly proud of his home and gave us the tour. We climbed a ladder to see upstairs where the rice and potatoes were being stored, and his room. When we came back down we were ushered into another bedroom, where his mother brought us tea. We talked politics. He translated for his mother. They were royalists and proudly hung a picture of the deposed king next to what must have been portraits of his parents taken around the time they were wed.  It was interesting to hear him describe how much better off they felt they were under the king. There is such a diversity of interpretations about the political system in Nepal, even among people one might suspect would be similarly politically inclined. Everyone has an opinion though. Even kids have their own ideas that don’t necessarily reflect those of their parents.

Upon finishing our tea our new young friend offered to act as our guide up to the monastery. We happily accepted. Being from the area, and having made this trip on countless occasions he knew all the shortcuts. I’ve never met a shortcut in Nepal that didn’t include a nearly vertical climb, and this was no exception. The hike was beautiful though. Layers and layers of terraced crops. Some lay fallow after the rice harvest.  The brown earth of the rice fields contrasted with the bright yellow mustard crops. The trail was littered with the over-ripened castoffs of the persimmon and orange trees that shaded the path. The Himalayas peaked up out of pine forests around the bends. We passed squash blossoms and medicinal plants whose names I no longer recall. Around one corner we came across a woman squatting on her front porch grinding corn. Back and forth, back and forth. Without stopping her task she pointed to her persimmon tree and encouraged us to climb up for some fruit.  We partook. The ceaseless hospitality I’ve encountered in Nepal can be overwhelming in the best of ways. Not like anything I have experienced elsewhere.  

We finally made it to the base of the monastery. A large stone marked where the monks are cremated. Their ashes picked up and spread by the thousands of prayer flags that surround.  Busloads of Nepali families sat around enjoying picnics and dance music.  I’ve learned a picnic is not a quiet affair in Nepal.

Unable to find a bus that wasn’t already tipping over with passengers on the roofs, we ended up hiking down much of the trail on our way back. We bid farewell to our friend when we passed his house and continued on to a junction where we could catch a bus down to Dulakhil. The day had turned out to be more special and perfect than we could have imagined.

Two buses later (with one very confused driver who was unconvinced we knew where we were going, and struggled with understanding why two foreigners were on the local bus) we made it back to our hotel. There was no party that night, and we ate a delicious meal of the local chicken thali plate.

At that point we would have stayed an extra day, but an impending bandha forced us to head home on Sunday. Confused by our experience with our hotel and the rave reviews we had read, we decided to recheck Tripadvisor. It suddenly became clear to us that the reviews we had read were written by the hotel and not an impartial third party. Screen name “This-Dulakhil-Hotel-Rocks” was just a tad too enthusiastic. Other reviews were from foreigners who had the odd grammatical particularities of a Nepali not fluent in English.  In addition, none of the reviewers had written any others.

While trying not to sound hyperbolic, it is hard to truly describe the depth of physical and emotional pain we had been going through as a result of our living situation in Kathmandu. Especially difficult was trying to understand how someplace we had loved to dearly as a home had turned into a loathsome construction site that was no longer a comfortable place to call home.  In any case, despite the false hotel advertisements, and the circumstances that led us to flee the valley, the experience was one I will long treasure. It never ceases to amaze me how a situation that can lead one to the brink of insanity and meltdown can be a prelude and precursor to an unforeseeable perfect  memory.