WE WERE HEADING out again, this time to the base camp of Mt Makalu in eastern Nepal. My partner Daniel and I had taken to trekking in earnest after my brother died at age 49 and I began to spend more time “back home” in Kathmandu to be near my grieving parents. Then my sister died at age 52, leaving me, at 50, the last of three siblings. I began to go back for months at a time. Even before I’d left Kathmandu to set up in Toronto with Daniel, I took every chance to travel through Nepal’s countryside. I’d never, though, been on organised treks of the kind we now took.

A British friend, Roland, had joined us this time. We had engaged an agency whose guide, Dambar Khapangi, had led Daniel and me on our first-ever organised trek. This was to Langtang, in the mountains north of the Kathmandu Valley, only six months before the 2015 earthquake levelled entire villages throughout Nepal. After trekking resumed a few distraught years later, Daniel and I trekked together to Gokyo in the Everest region and to Nubri and Tsum in northern Gorkha, and we went on shorter treks on our own. Neither he nor I enjoyed the way organised treks positioned us commercially as clients rather than mere travellers – but they offered a quick escape from the calamities of life, to the land.

Three days into our trek, we were already under the spell of that land. I realised as much when our group’s porter, Dawa Norbu Sherpa, plucked three wrinkled black cardamom pods from a drying mat by the trail and held them out to us to taste.

“Wouldn’t this amount to stealing?” I hesitated.

“No, no,” he said. “They’re ours.”

Now I was impressed. “They’re from your fields?”

“My uncle’s, my nephew’s.” He smiled. “Ours.”

Inside the coarse husk, the seeds were still moist, slippery on the tongue and tingly and fragrant, even ambrosial. So intense was the pleasure that my thoughts from elsewhere receded. There was only this moment: us here in this land.

I’d been similarly startled on the previous day as well, after a 750-metre descent out of the trailhead at Num. Locals – entire families, men weighed down with loads, lone women – had skipped by as I trudged down, leaning heavily on two trekking poles. My legs were quivering with exertion by the time I reached the Arun River.

I stopped there awhile to remember my brother. As a student he had conducted risk-assessment studies in the Arun Valley before settling down as a geotechnical engineer in California. He used to talk with great passion about this river. By the riverbank, I breathed mindfully the way he, a Zen practitioner, might have – and in the swell of the breath in my body, in the breeze rustling through the bamboo leaves, in the blue water crashing wildly in front of me, I felt the world in motion. The impermanence of phenomena, the essential emptiness of form, struck me forcefully as true, and I thought: my brother had always been a play of energy and matter. He had always actually been formless, even when he was alive. He was still in the elements of the universe now. But he was free.

LATER, I WONDERED what it meant to arrive at that final, deeply irrational, conviction. Perhaps I’d recovered from my brother’s death. From the loss of a lifelong relationship that I, the youngest sibling, had defined myself by. From the pragmatic rearrangements and emotional readjustments which had only intensified after my sister’s death. From the hard loneliness of being the only one left. Since then, I’d often mused that should I outlive my parents, their deaths would sadden me of course, but not harrow me the way these “sideways” deaths had. If, in my fifties, I was now acutely conscious of life’s fragility yet able to launch into it headlong, perhaps this was recovery. Perhaps I was free from grief.

These are the opportunities for which we trek, I think. To fossick around our murky depths as we walk and, with luck, discover what’s hidden from view.

We also trek to encounter the external world.

Dawa Norbu and our group’s other porter, Dawa Sherpa, had both got their names from being born on Mondays. They were from a village on the trail and knew the area inside out. In his thirties, Dawa Norbu took any job that paid: labouring in public-works projects, carrying loads. He’d chop firewood or whittle cane into strips or plant potatoes to supplement his income after we stopped walking for the day. With his earnings he educated his daughter in Kathmandu.

The younger Dawa said he was 17 but looked younger in the way of the rural undernourished. Earlier in the year he had crossed the notorious 6155-metre pass at Sherpani Col as a climbing porter. He showed us videos on his phone of himself roped up, dangling halfway up a snowy cliff.

“It was freezing there!”

He wanted to train as a climbing guide.

Other than the two Dawas, the only locals we ran across were lodge owners, who were too busy to talk to clients.

Nevertheless I tried, complimenting the lodge owner at Seduwa: “This is such a nice hotel.”

“That’s what we tried for when we built it,” she quipped.

We’d chosen this trek on the advice of Sam Cowan, a former Gurkha commander, who had mentioned that we’d be walking through the homelands of the indigenous Rai communities. “Is this a Yamphu Rai village?” I asked.

“The Yamphu Rai live on that side.” She pointed across the hill. “We’re all Sherpa here, and two or three Chhetri families.” She gave me a look-over. “You’re Nepali?”

“From Kathmandu.”

“Newar or Tamang?” she asked, naming the indigenous communities of the Kathmandu Valley. Before I could say “Neither,” she swooped in to examine me from inches away. “What kind of jewellery are you wearing?”

She was looking at the lanyard around my neck, made of glass beads. “It’s just – a string,” I explained. “So I won’t lose my eyeglasses.”

“Eh.” She turned away to her chores.

ON ORGANISED TREKS, you mainly end up talking to other trekkers. The vast majority this time were Nepali. We’d met only three foreign groups so far: a Canadian couple with their 18-month-old son, a solo American climber, and four middle-aged Catalans. By contrast, we’d run across scores of Nepali groups, large and small, among them students, scientists, entrepreneurs, schoolteachers, homemakers, and non-profit and government employees. All of them looked enthused to be exploring the countryside. Some, in their zeal, even brandished national flags.

I avoided the flag-wavers and tried not to get drawn into long conversations in Nepali. I’d done so on the first day and had felt intensely claustrophobic for it. This after falling in with a man hobbling along on a sprained, swollen ankle. “Finally, someone walking at my pace!” I joked.

As we walked on, Dambar introduced me formally.

“I know your name!” the man said. “Didn’t you use to write about politics? Aren’t you the daughter of – . Yes. I know him. Not personally, but…”

Then he began to discuss the news from Kathmandu.

A brouhaha had erupted when some non-resident Nepalis – or NRNs, as Nepalis like me, who are citizens of countries outside of Southasia, are called – decried a new law allowing dual citizenship. They wanted voting rights in Nepal. A video of a woman politician went viral on social media after she raged at NRNs, calling them – us – out for ingratitude.

“Did you watch the video? You’re an NRN, what did you think?” the man asked, then answered his own question. “The way she spoke, that was too much, she shouldn’t have lost her temper. But she was right, don’t you agree? NRNs get to vote in the countries they live in, why should they be allowed to vote here too? Isn’t that so?”

I tried to laugh it off. “It’s a relief not to have to vote here anymore.”

“She scolded them like schoolchildren, and that wasn’t right. She should have maintained her dignity, but I agreed with what she said. Didn’t you?”

I hadn’t come all this way to discuss what was happening in Kathmandu, I thought, feeling churlish, because he seemed like a perfectly nice man.

“It had to be said,” he went on, “and she had the courage to say it. That’s what I think. Don’t you agree?”

When he stopped to rest his ankle, I walked on in guilty relief.

LATER, AT THE OFFICE of the Makalu Barun National Park, the man’s friends asked if we’d seen him.

Dambar told them we’d seen him in the morning. “But he didn’t catch up at lunchtime, and that was an hour’s stop.”

One of the men had to go back down on a search mission.

“Take a flashlight with you,” Dambar called out after him.

At the park office, the young officer flipped through my Canadian passport and said, “But the name is Nepali.”

“Ma’am used to be like us, but then she became like them,” was how Dambar explained it.

We all laughed about my having to pay to trek in the country of my birth, where I’d lived half my life.

Perhaps I needn’t have obtained a trekking permit. There was no clarity on government policy regarding NRNs. I chose to be cautious, even though I couldn’t imagine that most NRNs, those from indigenous communities especially, would pay to visit their ancestral lands. Then again, I wasn’t indigenous, and I wasn’t given to making sentimental claims on Nepal. I’d disengaged from the country after the promulgation of a “fast-track” constitution following the 2015 earthquake, the hurried, slapdash end to a drawn-out quest for a new charter after Nepal’s civil war. My final protest as a Nepali citizen was to publicly burn the provisions that denied equal citizenship rights to women. I’d had enough misogyny for a lifetime.

Since becoming a Canadian citizen – Nepali in origin but not by law – I’d observed goings-on here from a distance, disheartened by the rising nationalism. It seemed obvious to me that, as elsewhere, the political class here deployed patriotism cynically, to mask their own corruption. Yet the young – the social-media generation – fell obediently in line.

I saw this in the flag-waving and overheard it in stray conversations. Two days on from Seduwa, in Dhara Kharka, a young man on his way back from Makalu Base Camp advised two other young men heading up: “Just keep walking, you’ll get there.”

The two had got caught in a rainstorm and were shivering in damp clothes. “Do you really think we can make it all the way?” one asked.

“There’s no question,” the other man said. Then he became grandiloquent. “You’re sons, aren’t you? On top of that, you’re Nepali. How could you not get to Base Camp, being Nepali sons?”

“We heard it’s really cold there.”

“You’re Nepali sons,” the man said. “You’ll get there – easily.”

“THE PROBLEM WITH Nepali trekkers,” said the guide to the Catalan group as we set out the following morning, “is that for years they never trekked, and it’s good that they’re trekking now, but they go about it badly.”

I’d been intrigued by the phenomenon of “trekking while Nepali,” and had initiated the conversation.

“They don’t call ahead to book a room,” Dambar said. “Then they have to sleep on the floor – like last night.”

We, the Catalans, and a four-person Australian group had booked up all the rooms in the lodge. Hearing this, a few Nepali trekkers had soldiered on, but the two rain-soaked men took shelter, and the park officer also showed up with a friend: “We’re out shooting drone footage for an official video.” Then another group of seven arrived at dusk, the grandiloquent man among them. All the Nepali trekkers had had to sleep, dormitory style, in the dining room.

“Also, there’s too little preparation,” Dambar said. “They don’t pack warm jackets or sleeping bags. Some don’t even carry water bottles or flashlights – the basics.”

The park officer, who was also with us, mentioned a YouTube influencer who had popularised this trail after visiting Shiva Dhara, a cave sacred to Hindus and Buddhists alike. Some Nepali trekkers went on to Base Camp, but for most the journey was primarily a pilgrimage.

Whether secular or sacred in their motivation, Nepalis were trekking in unprecedented numbers. We’d seen this not just here but on all our treks following the pandemic. During that period, with international tourism moribund, domestic tourism had picked up the slack.

It seemed to me that Nepal had launched on a new era for its tourism. In Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal, the anthropologist Mark Liechty notes that in the early 1970s the country began to attract more “time poor, cash rich” adventure seekers than the “time rich, cash poor” spiritual seekers from earlier on. Wildlife safaris, river-rafting excursions and other forms of adventure tourism – including, lately, rock-climbing, hang-gliding, bungee jumping and zip-lining – took off. But trekking remained the most popular form of tourism by far. The oldest trails in the Everest and Annapurna regions were already overcrowded before the pandemic. Now, with Nepalis trekking en masse, the infrastructure was at a breaking point. In peak season, even organised trekking groups had difficulty booking rooms.

“Though one thing that’s changed,” Dambar said, “is lodge owners don’t turn Nepalis away the way they used to. They saw, during the pandemic, that Nepalis also spend money.”

“Yes, that’s changed,” the other guide agreed. “And that’s good.”

“And they’ll figure out how to trek properly.”

“Not in our lifetime, though.”

TO ME, it was the furious pace of Nepali trekkers that most alarmed. We had given ourselves a leisurely 18 days to walk to Base Camp and helicopter out. By contrast, two Nepali acquaintances we’d run into in Num had walked up and back in seven days flat. Most Nepalis started walking at dawn and didn’t stop for the day, as we did, at teatime. They didn’t schedule in rest days for acclimatisation. (Neither did they medicate against altitude sickness with acetazolamide, as was our practice above 3000 metres). They were generally more fit than us, perhaps. But, mostly, they were extremely time poor, entangled in the unyielding professional, familial and social obligations of Nepali life. In this, the autumn season, they had only a few days off between the Dashain and Tihar festivals. Also, trekking was expensive. Though most Nepali trekkers were decidedly middle-class, buying proper gear, paying for rooms and meals, and hiring a guide or a porter could add up. And a helicopter ride was a wild extravagance.

Only when we reached Khongma, where we took an extra day to acclimatise, could I mull over any of this. Our lodge was perched on a 3500-metre hill looking down at the lower hills we’d climbed to get here. I spent the day journaling, an act which alone underscored my privilege.

Counting back over the days, I realised that Tashigaon, our second night’s stop, was the last village on the trail. The family that ran our lodge there also ran the lodge here, and all our lodges on the way up from here on.

Daniel had injured his leg in Tashigaon with a misstep in the dark. Only after the trek did we learn that he’d severed his Achilles tendon. He’d been able to walk on, if slowly, cautiously. It helped that, in a public-works project of epic proportions, the entire trail had been paved with flat-cut stones, as though it were a never-ending stairway to the sky.

A blur of Nepali trekkers went up or down that stairway as we idled. The Catalans also had a rest day at Khongma, three of them playing cards and one reading a book titled Lenin. The Australians were on a 23-day itinerary that gave them three nights here. A Danish couple on the way up stopped for the night, as did a French group heading down. All of us huddled around a crackling wood stove in the sub-zero night.

I was grateful for the rest. We’d be crossing three 4000-metre passes the next day. And Khongma was the last place where we could catch a cellphone signal. I posted pictures on social media and sent messages to family.

I’ll be out of range for ten days, I wrote several times to my parents. If you don’t hear from me, that means everything’s alright. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can. I was trying to allay dread – in them, in me – about worst-case scenarios of the kind we’d already lived through and had, so far, survived.

SETTING OUT the next morning, I noticed that the land kept transforming with each new day.

Early on in the trek, we’d passed clusters of wood-and-clay houses, some thatched, others tin-roofed, decorated by marigold planted in beds or canna lily and Pink Queen shrubs growing wild. The terraced fields nearby were ripe with millet. The subtropical forests were teeming. The houses gave off an air of sufficiency, with corn, green beans, taro and gourd drying in the courtyards near tidy bundles of firewood, bamboo and cane. The land felt generous there.

Further along, in the national park, the forests were taller and darker, with dense rhododendron trees tangled with vines. The air was cool and moist. There were towering ferns and the occasional peacock orchid, but few other wildflowers.

Near Khongma the land became rockier and the vegetation more scrubby. We saw yaks grazing on thin pasturelands. And now, arriving at a rickety view tower at the first pass, we looked onto a panorama of saw-toothed snow peaks, blindingly white in the sunlight. Our destination lay in the valley beyond.

For a while the sun warmed us, but an east wind whipped up clouds that engulfed us in mist. The air temperature plummeted. By the time we neared the second pass, Shipton-la, the trail was covered with snow.

At Shipton-la we shivered, buffeted by fierce winds in the exposed tundra. The lodge owner confirmed that it was always cold up here. “Only two more weeks and we can go home.” After the lodges at Base Camp closed for the season, he would also shut to winter lower down the trail.

Snow drifted down as we left Shipton-la in a swirl of weather. Near a saddle with a jet-black pond we met a frizzy-haired Nepali trekker on his way back from Shiva Dhara. “Are you going there too?” His face glistened with sweat and elation. “A waterfall coming out of a cave! There was a real energy there – I felt it!” He thumped his chest. Then he exhorted Dambar: “You must tell everyone about Shiva Dhara and bring them here. And not just foreigners, Nepalis too!”

Then two Nepali women appeared out of the swirl. They were from the eastern hill town of Dharan, they said, and the man was from Ilam, in the plains.

The reflected saw-toothed peaks gleamed on the black pond like phantom mountains. From there our ascent to Keke-la, the third pass, was necessarily slow, necessarily mindful. Trekking often amounts to walking meditation. The crunch of our footsteps on the snow was accompanied by the sound of the wind and our breath, in and out. At the top, a chorten marked our passage onto a sheltered slope. And I experienced an expansive serenity.

Twilight fell as we reached a lodge nestled amid rhododendron shrubs at Dobatak. The clouds burned away and the stars came out, large and liquid in the crystalline night. This beauty – this was why we trek, I thought, looking up at the sky. To receive this wonder with an open, uncluttered mind.

THE SERENITY of meditation does not, of course, last. The next morning, on a vertiginous descent to the Barun River, we ran into the friends of the man who had sprained his ankle early on. They were on the way back from Shiva Dhara, having overtaken us at some point.

How was their friend, we asked. Had he made it all the way?

“No, no. We ordered a car. He had to go home,” one man said. Then he added, “He told us. You’re a writer. He told us.”

Deflecting, I asked whether Shiva Dhara was as magical as we’d heard.

It was, he said. “But really hard to reach! There’s just a chain to hold onto on that last cliff!” He grew solemn. Someone in their group had been evacuated, he said. “He went to the cave and seemed alright at night, but didn’t wake up in the morning. We had to order a rescue helicopter.” His friend had revived under medical care in Lukla, a bustling town lower down on the Everest trail. “The day before, another trekker was also evacuated, but – .” His voice lowered. “She died.”

It was hard, after that, not to dwell on the risks involved in trekking in general, and this trail in particular. From here on we’d be following the Barun River valley all the way to Base Camp. Should altitude sickness strike, there was no quick descent. We were medicating ourselves, yes. As a precaution, we had also borrowed pills from a trusted doctor in Kathmandu to treat cerebral and pulmonary edema. But medication could keep you only so safe.

All of Nepal was prone to natural disasters. Earthquakes were an ever-present possibility, as were landslides, floods. Even small problems – a storm – could escalate into a crisis in this remoteness. And Daniel’s leg was still hurting. Down by the shore of the Barun River, where the stone-paved trail had been washed away by landslides, he had to tread with extreme caution along the rubble and scree. Every now and then he’d flex his leg by accident and yelp in pain.

EVERYONE AT THE LODGE in Yangle Kharka agreed: this was the coldest trek they’d ever been on. The sun had once again disappeared by midday, and we’d narrowly escaped a rain shower. Two elderly Swiss men, who had trekked all over Nepal, said this might be their last trek: age was making it too difficult to put up with the hardship. The Danish husband-and-wife team asked what a helicopter out would cost, wondering whether they should order one or simply turn back from here. For the sake of safety, a solo traveller from Darjeeling decided to team up with three Nepali college students. “Though you have to keep pace with me.” He had to be home for the coming festival. “We celebrate Tihar in a bigger way there than you do here.”

There were other Nepali trekkers in the lodge too, but they stayed in their rooms, wrapped up in blankets, because it was absolutely freezing. The rest of us loitered as long as possible by the dung-fire stove in the dining room. That night, a mean wind swept through our room from the crack under the door, and I lay awake in my sleeping bag, cursing.

But in the morning the sun poured lavishly over the broad pastureland, melting away the frost. A herd of yaks came out to graze. Mesmerised by the otherworldly sight of a field of red algae-covered boulders, we walked steadily up the valley.

Somewhere along the way we had entered a beyul, a mythical hidden valley in the Nyingma Buddhist tradition. I learnt this only after the trek, after piecing together the morsels of information that Dambar had picked up from lodge owners. But even then, I was taken aback by the exceptional serenity here.

Dawa Norbu and Dawa both liked this stretch of the trail the best. They pointed out the curved opening to Shiva Dhara – up a 700-metre cliff that we had no desire to climb. According to local lore, Guru Rinpoche, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, meditated here. Buddhists called this cave Shengi Duka, and another one beside it Shenchi Duka. Hindus dedicated the second cave to the goddess Parvati, Shiva’s consort and the daughter of Himalaya. Pilgrims of both faiths gathered here for a festival in the monsoon.

“Everyone has to camp outdoors, all the lodges are packed then,” Dawa Norbu said. “And look over there.”

Beyond the caves was a cliff shaped like the belly of a pregnant woman. Dambar had told me the locals called this Aama-Fujung: mother and son.

The valley narrowed to a fir-covered canyon, and, in what was becoming an established pattern, an eastern wind raised up clouds by midday. There was snow on the ground again, and soon snow drifted down from the sky too, covering the canyon in a dreamlike hush.

We gave up on walking in whiteout conditions in Tadosa. Over lunch we caught up with the Canadian couple with their 18-month-old son. They had not only gotten to Base Camp but also above it, to a 5600-metre viewpoint from where they had seen a sliver of Mt Everest. An Italian group and a solo American trekker were also on the way back, as were two young Nepali men who showed us their videos of Shiva Dhara, with soaring views over the valley.

It really did look spectacular.

“You’re not going?” one of them asked, feeling sorry for me. “Though the path is really steep. Maybe you can try next time.”

“Yes, maybe.”

That evening our group chatted with the Nepali college students and the man from Darjeeling, who had made it to Shiva Dhara before snowfall. One student kept asking Daniel and Roland if they liked his favourite bands: “Pink Floyd? Guns N’ Roses? Nirvana?” Another’s wife had gone to Brampton, near Toronto, to study nursing. The third was the only one with a job. “He works in his father’s auto workshop,” his friends boasted on his behalf.

Perhaps it was the snow: Tadosa felt cosy. The lodge’s tin walls were padded with foam, and the woodfire stove smelled richly of fir.

We saw the next morning that the lodge was nestled between high cliffs, one with a waterfall gushing dramatically out of the rockface.

“Guru Rinpoche meditated there,” Dawa Norbu told me.

“There? Or in the cave?” I asked.

“There’s also a waterfall in Shiva Dhara.”

After the trek, embarrassed at having skittered ignorantly along the surface of a deep culture, I put out a call on social media asking about the caves. I heard from Ram Chandra Sedai, the CEO of the Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal, who had worked as a ranger at the national park before going on to obtain a master’s degree in Buddhism. Beyul “Mkhan-pa-lung,” he said, extended from Dobatak to Tso Karpo or White Lake, known today as Barun Lake, with the area of the Shengi Duka and Shenchi Duka caves at the epicentre. Following that lead, I found a 1978 article by Johan Reinhard in the journal Kailash that cast doubt over whether the area with the caves, or two others nearby, or all three including Shiva Dhara, was the site of the “Khembalung” beyul. In an anthropological study in 1992, Hildegard Diemberger mapped the beyul’s mandala-shaped boundaries and highlighted its special significance to Seduwa village. And Giacomella Orofino wrote about this and other beyuls in a 1991 article which was forwarded to me by a family friend, Daniel Taylor, who had a long environmental, as well as personal and spiritual, involvement in this area.

Knowledge about beyuls is closely guarded by those in the know. What little I found out later was well beyond me during the trek. Yet passing by sleepy Nghe Kharka, I understood the impulse to imbue the area’s fantastical geological formations with the mystic, the divine.

Prayer flags fluttered along the cliff, marking a walled-off meditation retreat. We crossed and recrossed the Barun River as the path zigzagged on, leading up to a field littered with boulders, some the size of houses. “People call this Yak Kharka but its actual name is Jak Kharka,” Dawa Norbu said, explaining no further. The only lodge there had been levelled after the walls of a glacial lake had collapsed upstream.

We walked up and up through the boulder field, flanked to the south by a craggy mountain range. The lodge owner at Tadosa had told Dambar that her ancestors used to play dice with the gods of this range. When the gods won the yaks grazed on the mountainside, and when her ancestors won on the pasturelands.

Hearing this, I was struck by how we animate the land, and stake our personal histories in it, through stories; and this filled me with humility. Born to a family of the Chhetri caste in Nepal’s sub-Himalayan hills, I was one of the millions whose families had drifted to Kathmandu in pursuit of betterment. I had never felt a birthright to, or ownership of, Kathmandu – or, for that matter, anywhere else I’d lived. This tale made me appreciate how enriching it must be to feel embedded in the land, to be indigenous.

By late afternoon the mist grew so thick that we could barely make out the lodge at Langmale. We warmed ourselves by a dung-fire stove in the company of the Australians, a German man out to cross Sherpani Col, an American man camping through Southasia, and three Latvians swilling homemade Latvian brandy. We were at an altitude of 4400 metres. The air was thin. The night was long. Everyone chatted as a group.

At one point, one of the Latvians remarked: “There are two types of fun in the world.” Type One Fun, she said gaily, was when one enjoys an experience while it’s happening. “With Type Two, you enjoy it only afterwards, when you remember it later. This trek is Type Two Fun.”

The German described a far worse trek he’d been on, freezing all the way through. “I enjoyed that trek only ten years later,” he said. “So that must be Type Three Fun.”

Everyone laughed, aware, as we were enjoying ourselves, that we were enjoying ourselves.

BY THEN WE HAD slipped into another world, the world of mountaineering, though I realised this only at Base Camp.

Above Langmale, past a glacial lake and over another expansive boulder field, we lunched at a stone shack at Shersong and careened on, giddy with the altitude, along the rising path. While it was sunny, a helicopter clattered by overhead. Then the clouds rose again from the east. We rushed on to see Mt Makalu before it got socked in, pausing only briefly to chat with the Danish husband-and-wife team, who were heading back triumphant having reached Base Camp despite their doubts.

Further along we met the guide to the two elderly Swiss men. He was walking back alone, his clients having helicoptered out: “The pilot said he’d come to pick me up, but I waited and waited and he never came.”

An hour or so from Base Camp, the stone paving on the path ended abruptly, forcing us onto a narrow goat trail. Around a high corner we finally caught a view of Mt Makalu, a massif jutting up more than three kilometres from a broad base where its meltwater, and the meltwater from nearby Mt Baruntse, trickled into the small, silty – and holy – Barun Lake.

Base Camp consisted of three lodges, one already shuttered for the winter. The young couple who ran the Yak Hotel had a one-year-old developing powerful lungs. The wife was the daughter of the lodge owner at Langmale. The husband used to work as a cook for climbing expeditions. Theirs was the only lodge we’d stayed at that had a menu, with a thrilling selection of pizza, macaroni, cheese balls, spaghetti and soup, as well as an array of local dishes.

I ordered a pizza, and the man promptly cooked it in a momo steamer.

We had given ourselves two nights at Base Camp. The plan was to hike up to the Everest viewpoint on the second day. I chose to rest. Daniel’s leg injury forced him to stay put too, but Roland and Dambar set off after breakfast. The two of us visited Barun Lake twice to see it in the changing light, but mostly we sat in the sun and read.

We’d learnt that we could redirect our helicopter to Langmale instead of walking back to Yangle Kharka for a pickup, as originally planned. We’d already foregone a rest day at Langmale. The possibility of shortening our trek by a second day tantalised. This was our thirteenth day on the trail, and the sixth without family contact. Being out of range always caused me anxiety. And there were things I wanted to do upon return.

I wanted to observe the Tihar festival, first. My sister’s birthday fell on its third day, Laxmi Puja. A softhearted empath who had dedicated herself to hardheaded human-rights law in the Hague, she was the person I’d loved most deeply in the world. I wanted to be with my parents to celebrate her.

And if there was time, I also wanted to apply for dual citizenship. I had been Canadian, and Canadian alone, for seven years now, all the while feeling like a stranger to myself. Under the new law I could regain my lost citizenship and become Nepali too, once again. I could be Nepali-Canadian – not just sentimentally, but also officially. I don’t know why this mattered so much, but it did.

As I mulled this over, three young Nepali men arrived at Base Camp, one carrying an oversize national flag. “Where is it, is this it?” They saw the “WELCOME YOU AT CAMP SITE MAKALU BASE CAMP – 4870 M” signpost that had been stuck on a chorten. “This must be it.” They whipped out their cameras and shot videos of each other walking up to the sign, bowing to it and turning back with a wave of the flag. Presumably this was for posting on social media.

Then they had a quick lunch and hurried back, because they had to get home in time for the festival.

As did I, as did I.

“You know what?” I said to Daniel. “I don’t like spending so many days out of touch with my parents. From now on – not just here, but in Canada too – let’s only go where the phones work.”

He agreed.

“And in Kathmandu,” I said, “let’s get a doctor to examine your leg.”

“It just needs a rest,” he said.

He’d be operated on within days and would spend months recuperating.

The mist rolled in on schedule as Roland and Dambar returned from the viewpoint. We spent the afternoon trying to stay warm in our rooms, and in the evening we gathered, again, by the stove.

The conversation orbited, this time, around mountaineering. We asked the German about the path he’d be taking through Sherpani Col, along glaciers and icefields and high passes that sounded like unremitting misery to me. His guide and porters then began to talk in Nepali about their preparations. They had everything they needed, but it would be extremely cold, they said. “No more warm meals after tonight!”

The man of the lodge mentioned the storms that had plagued the Everest expeditions that spring. Then he described a few hellish expeditions he’d been on as a cook. And soon all the talk – in impassioned Nepali – was of inadequate gear and frozen extremities, logistical challenges and poor working conditions, and grave discomfort as well as outright danger:

“Sometimes you have to beat up your clients to save them!”

“Their judgement gets impaired at altitude, they do stupid things and kill themselves.”

“And they risk our lives too!”

I felt like someone who had never left Earth listening to the exploits of repeat visitors to Mars.

On the wall hung a picture of the lodge owner from Langmale. I now learnt that Pemba Rinjin Sherpa had summitted Everest eleven times and Makalu twice. In Dobatak we’d stayed at the lodge of Sonam Tashi Sherpa, who had summitted Everest two years earlier with Kristin Harila, record-setter for the fastest ascent of all 14 of the world’s eight-thousand-metre peaks. The world of mountaineering was as mystifying to me as the world of beyuls. I understood the financial incentives of mountaineering for the Sherpas, of course, but couldn’t imagine actually enjoying it. Yet in the tales of derring-do that evening, I could hear a swagger, a brag.

Our young porter Dawa listened on keenly from the side.

“WE CAN’T DO IT,” the woman said with a feeble smile. We met her and another young Nepali woman shortly after we left Base Camp. “We’re turning back.”

I told her that if they went around one more corner, they’d see Base Camp. “And a full view of Makalu. It’s fifteen minutes at most.”

“No, my head hurts too much.”

They were from the lowlands of Jhapa. We’d already met two men from their group who, like them, were severely underdressed in light windbreakers and thin-soled shoes. The two men would make it to Base Camp, but most of their group, which included an elderly woman, had refused to budge beyond Shersong, where they had spent the night.

I felt for them. It seemed unlikely that they would make it home for the festival.

And I felt for myself too, because I was suddenly desperate to go home.

We reached Langmale wondering whether we could possibly helicopter out the next morning. The lodge owner – the eleven-time Everest summiteer – told us that his satellite-phone account was low. So Dambar placed a quick call to his trekking company and had them top up the account before conferring with them at length.

The Latvians headed back down the trail that afternoon, two of the three having got to Base Camp. The Australians arrived from below on their unhurried itinerary, and that evening we caught up as though we were friends.

By and by, Dambar announced that the helicopter would pick us up at six in the morning. We celebrated with a tongba, a warm millet beer.

After dinner we said goodbye to Dawa Norbu and Dawa, who would be back in their village in a day and a half.

We slept lightly and woke up before dawn.

Then we waited, and waited, for our ride.

The sun was high in the sky when we heard the whoop of a helicopter. We rushed to a makeshift helipad behind the lodge, but the helicopter carried on, a mere speck, towards Base Camp.

Then nothing.

By midday Langmale was lost in the mist. We sat by the stove reading, writing and trying not to think of worst-case scenarios: Not being able to helicopter out tomorrow – or ever. Having to walk all the way back. Missing the festival. Losing precious time with family. Or worse. There was always the possibility of worse if, like me, despite your best efforts, you easily spiralled into a state of emergency of the mind.

I’m never trekking again, I swore to myself, knowing that I would. I absolutely would trek again.

That evening we spoke to Pemba Rinjin Sherpa about his mountaineering career. At 57 he was retired, with family members in Europe and the United States running their thriving family-owned trekking agency.

Didn’t he want to join them, I asked. Didn’t he want to live in ease?

“Who’ll tend to the yaks then?” He smiled.

After spending all summer here, his yaks – which numbered in the hundreds – had gone to Yangle Kharka for the winter. “No one has to herd them,” he said. “I open the gate and they know where to take themselves.”

He’d close the lodge and go to Tashigaon. “That’s our home,” he said.

I remembered, then, the wizened matriarch of our lodge in Tashigaon. When Dambar mentioned that her family ran every lodge we’d be staying at, the old lady had beamed: “At every lodge – they’re my progeny.”

Then I remembered the tenderest sight I’d seen on this trek. After settling into our room in Tashigaon, I saw the matriarch lying on the lodge’s tin roof next to a mat of drying tubers. A young man – her great-grandson, by the looks of it – was perched beside her, talking. Whatever he was saying commanded the old lady’s full attention. Sometimes she’d ask a question and he’d answer. The sun shifted in the sky. Hours passed. The young man kept talking and the matriarch kept listening. I was struck by how much they enjoyed each other’s company.

THAT IMAGE OF family happiness returned to me the next morning as our helicopter clattered into the valley and over to the helipad. We scrambled on, disoriented by the prospect of being back in Kathmandu, and in touch with our loved ones, within the hour.

Wordlessly, the foreign pilot steered the heaving craft skywards, and soon we were coasting along the mountaintops. Daniel and Roland and Dambar exchanged thumbs-up signs, but I grew cold with fear. I hated flying at the best of times. Looking at the soaring cathedrals of rock and snow and ice below us, I tried not to think of Nepal’s dismal crash statistics. People I knew had been killed in helicopter accidents. Dambar checked his altimeter: we were more than 5000 metres up.

Please let us not crash, I prayed to the gods I didn’t believe in.

The helicopter juddered past Lhotse, Everest, Nuptse. I fought off morbid visions.

Then I saw myself and had to laugh. How deeply attached I was to life – to staying alive.

It was only human, of course. Still, it was funny.

I thought of my brother and sister in the elements of the universe. I’d be in the elements too one day – I already was, at the ultimate level. My present form was ever-changing and essentially empty. I understood that I, like everything, was impermanent. But that was high philosophy.

In the lesser realm of my day-to-day emotions, I didn’t want to die, at least not yet, or – not that this was a choice – ever, really. I laughed. It was as though the lesson of my siblings’ deaths, the lesson of mortality, had been: live. Nothing more ambitious than that. Just – live.

source : himalmag