Kingdoms in the Air
KINGDOMS
IN THE AIR
ALSO BY BOB SHACOCHIS
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul
The Immaculate Invasion
Swimming in the Volcano
Easy in the Islands
The Next New World
Domesticity
KINGDOMS
IN THE AIR
Dispatches from the Far Away
BOB SHACOCHIS
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2016 by Bob Shacochis
Versions of the long-form essays collected here were originally published in Outside, Harper’s, Men’s Journal, and Byliner
Jacket photograph © Christian Kober/Getty Images
Author photograph © Noel Pollack
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
First published by Grove Atlantic, June 2016
ISBN 978-0-8021-2476-0
eISBN 978-0-8021-9022-2
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
For Jonah, and those who gave their hearts to Petey
CONTENTS
Kingdoms in the Air
Something Wild in the Blood
Here the Bear and the Mafia Roam
Huevos Fritos
Greetings from the Big Pineapple
In Deepest Gringolandia
The Life I Didn’t Get
Mount Ararat
Dorado
Gorongosa
What I Did with the Gold
Wartime Interlude
Leave
KINGDOMS
IN THE AIR
Kingdoms in the Air
PART ONE
Journey to the Land of Lo
(2001–2002)
I could now prove what had long been disbelieved, that beyond the snows of the Himalayas, hidden from the world, there truly existed a lost kingdom.
—Michel Peissel, 1964
Then and Now and Then
Kathmandu, in the spring of 2001, lay dazed in its green bowl of mountains, suffering from an unusually fierce heat wave and a host of maladies of its own making, the city’s pre-monsoon lethargy spiked with foreboding. Any day you expected the government to collapse under the weight of its own corruption, or the Maoists to march into the valley, or something more wicked and inconceivable to occur. Tourism was down, body counts up; a first wave of expatriates had begun to arrange its exodus. The capital’s sense of dread pulsed with a surreal intensity, seemingly disconnected from the clear facts of the matter: gun battles erupting throughout the countryside, the beloved king’s reluctance to deploy his army against the guerrillas, a venal ruling class of Brahmans who deserved tar and feathers, an infant democracy withering in its cradle. Like Kathmandu’s legendary pollution, the dread simply hung in the air; you breathed in its thick, sour pungency and exhaled one thought—Something so bad is about to happen, don’t even think about it—and the city forged ahead on fatalism and denial, at least for a few more weeks. Then all hell exploded and has exploded without mercy ever since.
By spring 2002, after a season of bombings and midnight arrests and assassinations, Kathmandu was still reeling from the battlefront news of what had become internationally known as “the killing terraces,” Nepal’s six-year-old civil war between time-warp Maoists and the constitutional monarchy. It was an expanding catastrophe that had claimed almost four thousand lives, more than half of them since the end of last November’s truce, when King Gyanendra, assuming the throne after the massacre of his brother King Birendra and the rest of the royal family by Crown Prince Dipendra on June 1, 2001, unleashed the Royal Nepal Army on the rebels. By summer, Gyanendra and his prime minister had dissolved parliament, the nation’s chief industry—tourism—was crippled, and the Bush administration had braided Nepal’s tragedy into its all-consuming preoccupation, America’s war on terrorism, throwing money (twenty million in military aid) and personnel (Special Forces advisers) into the cauldron. By 2003, the body count had again doubled upward toward eight thousand miserable souls.
Suddenly all the arguments I have ever had or heard about the deleterious effects of trekkers on traditional cultures seemed quaint and luxurious, if not utterly frivolous. In early May 2001, I was having just such an argument with myself as I headed up to the formerly off-limits kingdom of Mustang, a semiautonomous region of Nepal, with the photographer and author Tom Laird, our wives, and three friends, to see what ten years of open doors does to an insular culture. With the jackals of war ripping Nepal apart, it’s tempting to look back now on that journey as a more innocent time and to think that the lessons of the journey no longer matter. But that too would be an illusion, and within the illusion, danger, and within the danger, who we are in the world.
We left Kathmandu for Pokhara on May 14, crossing paths with the Chinese prime minister at the airport, who had come to dispel any notion that China supported the Maoist insurrection in Nepal, a policy contingent upon Kathmandu’s reassurance that it would crack down on the country’s tenacious Free Tibet movement not just in the city but in the northern borderlands. That evening in the middle hills, strolling Pokhara’s lakeside strip of shops, I chatted with the vendors and entrepreneurs and was alarmed by how thorough and deep ran the popular disgust for the current situation. Restore the old monarchy, give the Maoists a chance—anything but the unruly, greed-stricken child-beast of democracy sounded good to the Nepalese.
Much had changed for the worse, little for the better in the decade since King Birendra had unlocked the doors of democratic reform in Nepal, and with them the gates of the once forbidden kingdom of Mustang. The kingdom had been loosely aligned with Nepal since the eighteenth century and formally annexed in 1946. The first outsiders had arrived only in the 1950s, Tibetan refugees with goats and yaks, and Khampa resistance fighters from eastern Tibet plotting their doomed, CIA-sponsored war against the Chinese occupation. For the next two decades, Mustang was entirely closed to foreigners, Shangri-la shuttered up tight, and only a handful of scholars eluded the ban. In 1972, the southern third of the kingdom was opened once more, and Nepal’s 1990 revolution pried open the rest. Upper Mustang officially opened in December 1991, and although tourist numbers were and still are restricted, close to 500 foreigners had come through by the end of 1992, a number that peaked at 1,066 in 1998. (Compare this rate with the number of trekkers visiting the nearby Annapurna Sanctuary that same year—61,292.) Not surprisingly, given Nepal’s tourism slowdown, only 222 trekkers had registered to enter Upper Mustang by the time we arrived in 2001. If one thing terrified the Kathmandu government more than the Maoists, it was the decline of tourism, the backbone
of Nepal’s gross national product and the only modern economic force in the feudal-like agrarian society that came close to being egalitarian. Even the Maoists knew better than to bite the hand that fed Nepal, and they enforced among themselves a strict, hearts-and-minds no-whack policy toward foreigners. French tourists wandered out of the Maoist-controlled Dolpo, in direly impoverished western Nepal, starry-eyed with tales of the “wonderful guerrillas.” In the government’s desperation to keep hotel rooms occupied and trekking agencies booked, and to pacify its far-flung districts, which had seen their cut of the permit fee revenues, meant to be a never-initiated 60 percent, dwindle from 35 percent to 28 to 18 to 3 to nothing, the minister of tourism had recently announced the abolishment of all restricted areas but two—Dolpo and Upper Mustang—within twelve months.
Had ten years of exposure to the modern world—white people from the West, Chinese goods from the East—contorted Mustang with growing pains? we wondered, sitting for dinner on the patio of our hotel, surrounded by Pokhara’s rice paddies, the water buffaloes being led to their pens for the night. We’d heard the rumors in Kathmandu: Mustang’s traditional center of gravity was shifting to the Chinese, the Free Tibet movement, to art thieves and smugglers; shifting to mass tourism; to the charitable American Himalayan Foundation; to local nongovernmental organizations and the Nepalese themselves, in a deliberate campaign of assimilation.
Perhaps all of this was true, perhaps none of it, but one thing we knew for certain: Mustang’s mysteries were no longer inaccessible, though perhaps no less elusive to our understanding. For Laird the questions and speculation were personal. Extremely personal, I should say, as most issues were for the impassioned Laird, who had spent the past thirty years—all of his adult life—in Nepal, documenting its marvels, absorbing its multilayered conflicts and pettiness. His association with the people of Mustang and their ménage of patrons would reveal itself to be more complicated than even he knew or dared imagine.
High above us, above the gathering clouds, higher than most airplanes fly, into the violet-blue of outer space towered the summits of Makalu and Machhapuchchhre, Annapurna and Dhaulagiri, their snowfields bloodred in the sunset. Behind these peaks, which had sheltered Mustang from the outside world for millennia, we would have our answers, and could only hope they would be free of the anger, betrayal, and confusion that had infected fabled Nepal.
PART TWO
The Roof of the World
(1997)
And the wildest dreams of Kew are but the facts of Kathmandu.
—Rudyard Kipling
The Profane
It’s late for Kathmandu, already almost midnight, and I cling to the shoulders of photojournalist Tom Laird as we lurch down deserted, shuttered alleys on his motor scooter, cruising Sherpa pubs, two queris on the chhang trail of the Snow Leopard. Queri is Nepali slang for Westerners; it means “white eyes,” a coy play on the word quero, meaning “cloud.” Queri ayo, villagers might say mischievously, spotting a group of trekkers: The clouds have come.
Chhang is Tibetan-style homemade barley beer, and Laird, a veteran of the Rock and Roll Raj, lingers in the doorway of each dim establishment we visit, vacuuming up the sweet, fermenty harvest-fragrance of the brew, barking at me to Smell it! Smell it!, not hearing my recommendation to Drink it! Drink it! But the sad fact is that each chhang bar we come to, the Snow Leopard has already been there before us and closed it down with his prodigious thirst. Wobbly proprietors open their doors to wash us in the after-aroma of Sherpa revelry and tell us, “He was just here drinking, he just left,” and then recede into their own fog.
I guess you could call Laird a Sherpaphile—who isn’t in this town, the world capital of adventure, the Rome of the hip universe, where the Grand Tour in the sixties and seventies traveled east to become the Great Trek and the Great Pilgrimage, where 335 outfitters and agencies compete with the city’s thousands of shrines, icons, and strange objects of veneration, squares and courtyards to rival the Piazza Navona, and enough public art to choke a Vatican curator with envy, or an art thief with greed.
Laird lived for several years up in the Khumbu region below Everest, home ground of the Sherpas, recording the community’s traditional songs and folklore, chumming around with high-altitude heroes like the legendary Snow Leopard. The Snow Leopard is the nom de guerre of Ang Rita, the man who’s summited Sagarmatha, the Nepali name for Mount Everest, more times than anybody else, alive or dead—ten times all together—and last week, on the north face with a team of Russians, Ang Rita turned back a couple of hundred meters short of his eleventh triumph, leaving behind a pair of queri corpses from another expedition.
An extraordinary achievement, but the excitable photographer doesn’t really approve, single-mindedly disgusted by the Sherpa rate of attrition up on the summits. “Those peaks are sacred!” Laird rants over the whine of the scooter. “The white guys came in and bent the Sherpa worldview from mountain as god to mountain as goal. The Tengboche lama says he never gave anyone permission to climb Everest. He says it’s a sin and always will be. The Sherpas know they’re not supposed to be up there, but how can they say no to the money?”
We pull up to the entrance of a courtyard flanked on one side by a shabby concrete apartment building. Laird’s eyes narrow behind his wire-rimmed glasses and he whips off his helmet, swinging it in a wide arc to emphasize his point. Even with the engine turned off, Laird is loud. I sort of like it when he yells; I like the passionate investment in the issues, the unedited emotion, the suddenly inflated meaning of everything.
“I’ll hire Sherpas to haul my ass up Everest,” he says, “when people start killing their caddies to play golf.”
I don’t know where we are exactly—some centuries-old neighborhood on the edge of Kathmandu, the low skyline broken by the fabulous tiered roofs of pagodas. We’ve been getting closer and closer throughout the night, and now we’ve come to the end of the trail, a clean, brightly lit, two-table restaurant with silk khatas draped along its walls and around the necks of its sunburned, wind-raked clientele. They just poured him into bed, Ang Rita’s bunkmate tells us, pointing to a dark window across the courtyard. The Snow Leopard’s plastered, wasting no time on his first day down from the upside. “The queris are leaving tomorrow, and he’s got nothing to do,” explains another Sherpa guide; they each have raccoon eyes from wearing snow goggles. Here at the end of May, with Ang Rita safely back in his bed in Kathmandu, the heavyweight climbing season is over for another year, and it’s time to binge on glory.
Despite the mountain caddies turned into blocks of ice in the service of other people’s obsessions, and even though Laird insists that just because the Sherpas have played along with our goals doesn’t mean they have accepted them as their own, one thing’s for certain: The queris have been very, very good for the Sherpas. In the thirty years that travelers have been storming Nepal, barrels of hard cash have rolled into the Khumbu region, and the Sherpas have used it to strengthen their community and fortify their culture, sinking money back into their shrines and monasteries. They’ve made an entrepreneurial assault on the adventure business too, starting their own trekking agencies, running teahouses and lodges, leasing Russian Mi-17 helicopters from Tatarstan for $1,000 an hour (with crew) and charging twice that to whisk climbers and hikers up to altitude. And of course there’s the psychological payoff. Working for the queris, the Sherpas have earned a reputation as the world’s most agreeable but tenacious studs, so much so that the word Sherpa itself, Laird reminds me, has entered the English language as an adjective to describe anyone with particular skill and prowess who prepares the way for others. Not the worst of all possible fates for an isolated Central Asian mountain tribe living in one of the planet’s most impoverished countries.
Another round of chhang for my men and horses.
I’m not sure what we wanted from the Snow Leopard anyway, except perhaps a blessing, some gesture of grace from a man
who has sinned his way ever upward toward the very heavens.
Our feet scuff a free-market strewing of happy-hour handbills as we walk through Thamel—ground zero in Kathmandu’s tourist boom—headed for the Maya Pub, the only place that seems to be open, clomping up a steep, narrow flight of stairs to the funky bar. “Don’t you just love the smell of shit and incense?” Laird says happily. Hepatitis has kept him away from Thamel drinking establishments for ages, and he squints through the murk, mildly shocked by the presence of three young Nepali women, their red-tipped fingers gliding over half-full bottles of San Miguel beer. You wouldn’t have seen Nepali girls in a bar ten years ago, but since Laird has been teetotaling, Kathmandu’s changed, become more cosmopolitan. Women have stepped a bit closer to the forefront of society, although it’s questionable whether the first Miss Nepal contest, held in 1995, is evidence for or against this trend.
As recently as 1947, Nepal was the largest inhabited country on earth yet to be explored by Europeans, and the life expectancy was a prehistoric twenty-four years. When you enter the second half of the twentieth century as a medieval and in many ways prefeudal kingdom sandwiched between a newly independent India and a newly Communist China, and make a conscious decision to modernize, you probably ought to expect some whiplash. In rush the not-always-farsighted do-gooders, outfits like the World Health Organization, to take one example. They set up clinics, eradicate disease, train people to take better care of themselves, make a dent in the infant mortality rate, accomplish noble, generous objectives, but my goodness, someone forgot the birth control pills, the population triples, and here comes a housing shortage, accelerated environmental degradation, unemployment, and a bloated bureaucracy slurping on the platinum teats of the Lords of Poverty: competing donor nations, international developmental aid organizations such as the World Bank, self-righteous NGOs and vanity charities, carelessly recycling Big Money through the Third World. And Big Money, friends, leaves Big Footprints.