Flying Hobo Girl

It’s cherry time in California. I have crossed the state and everywhere pickers lean against old farm trucks, tailgates stacked with brimming boxes of Bings and White Rainers. I bought a bag for $1.00 and chewed their sweet flesh as I drove the Central Valley , placing seed and stem in my morning coffee cup.

I was returning from Yosemite. It was Memorial Day Weekend and my first visit to the park. I never imagined that in “the wilds” there could be so many miles of pavement, so many strollers, tents,RVs, bicycles and cars. Kids fed tame deer Pop Tarts at the campground. A woman pointed a finger into the early evening sky, enamored by a tic-tac-toe of pink contrails. Tourists from every place on the planet scampered in the raging mist of Yosemite Falls, risking it all on wet rock.

The park was brimming with humans and there were lines for everything: lines to get in, lines to get out, rush hour traffic polluting every hour. There were all the amenities of the city too—restaurants, movie theaters. An espresso stand served Irish Crème lattes–though I just bought a plain coffee. At the cream counter I opened two sugar packets and was dismayed to see a bin of tiny plastic creamers. I emptied eight into my cup, carrying in both hands a small rubbish heap to the garbage can. Yosemite Valley still has a long way to go in terms of sustainability. “A sacrifice zone,” my friend grumbled.

But the Ansel-Adams granduer radiated nonetheless: waterfalls thundered in the valley and sunsets turned El Capitan from gray, to blue, to pink, and finally to scarlet. Indian Paintbrush smoldered red-orange in the meadows and one evening, a bear trampled rushes and sedges in a distant clearing.

My companion Jeff and I took a hike and saw no one. Miles into the forest sat on a granite outcrop and split an upscale snack of sliced tomato, basil, and mozzarella and took in our own personal view of Half Dome. I unwrapped a beer from the fleece jacket taken from the bottom of my pack. It was still cool when we opened it.

In San Francisco now the weather is hot, but hands of fog feel their way through the city, offering intermittent cooling and then moving on. Today I accompanied an actor friend to drop a headshot at the office of his talent agent.

We took the BART to the Embarcadero station. A walk up Geary Street led us to the building of JP-Talent. His agent greeted him and said that though he’d made the final cut for a cowboy role, he didn’t get the job. Robert was disappointed but not surprised. Work these days is scarce–especially in California.

We stopped at Swan’s Seafood for lunch. The diner has been in the same location since 1912, its same long marble counter a sturdy edifice that stretches the length of the narrow restaurant. Customers sat shoulder to shoulder and we wedged ourselves among them, assuming our place on round stools. Containers of horseradish lined the counter, along with bowls of tarter, jars of capers, and plates of bright lemons that sat like sliced suns. Behind the counter, the workers moved fast and happily, hammering pink lobsters shells, tossing half-halibuts across the kitchen and sloshing buckets of soap water into deep sinks, rinsing away the lunchtime fallout of skin, bone, and rind. Robert and I shared a salad: crisp iceburg, piecey crab, and curls of shrimp. Robert polished off two raw oysters -on-the-half shell that glistened like something forbidden.

We went to an art gallery and looked Salvador Dali’s block print depiction of the Divine Comedy. We sipped coffee among ipod clad hipsters. Finally, we found a bakery and I finished off this May in California with two sprinkled cookies.

In high school, I hated my Spanish class and resisted learning the language every step of the way.

“Why should I?” I wondered. Afterall, the guy at my favorite  drive-thru taco stand already spoke English.  So, during class I passed notes, stared out the window, and generally didn’t participate unless called on. Senor Steel tried his best to pry my attention with references to The Grateful Dead–my only subject of real interest at the time.

“Jerry Garcia es muy bien no?” or “Donde esta el proximo concerto de Grateful Dead?”

But these days, as I find myself taking paragliding trips to Mexico, learning Spanish has suddenly become fascinating. Not only is it pragmatically useful for getting around, but it also serves to legitimize overly-long flying trips to Mexico. “To learn Spanish,” I explain studiously.

I always knew there was merit in learning another language. It’s a way to become more multi-cultural, less Anglo-centric, and probably prevent Alzheimer’s. What I didn’t know is that adopting a new language would reformat my thinking.

During my two months in Mexico, I occupied a totally different brain, a more creative brain. My whole adjective-noun-verb worldview shifted and I broke from the bounds of English cliché. There I found a wide open space of expression.

With a limited vocabulary, I was forced into new and sometimes absurd ways of saying things. “Is the machine sleeping?” I asked a bartender when I discovered that the jukebox wasn’t working. Instead of “the sun is setting,” I’d say “the sun says goodbye.” When my Spanish-speaking friend Javier stood on the pier looking out at the ocean, he looked so content, peaceful, and noble that I became a babbling Neruda: “You are like art!” “You are like a light!”  I took another stab at it: “Eres un pelicano!”

Of course, I made mistakes constantly. Giving directions to my hotel, I said “Go tres cuadernos alli!” or “Three notebooks that way!” Instead of asking for a  “cuchillo”–a knife–I asked for a “cucaracha”. Purchasing aspirin for my headache, I explained to the pharmacist: “Hay una a dolor en mi calabaza” (There is a pain in my pumpkin). And I constantly confused the llenar-llevar-llamar-llegar verbs.

Now in the U.S. I’ve slipped back into familiar English, and have become my regular self again–hemmed in by platitudes and worn-out idioms. I miss the sensual feel of “ias” and “ios” and “ientes” filling my mouth. But mostly I miss my Spanish-self—that quirky, childlike, and unpredictable person I was for a while.

Indeed, to learn a new language is to make your mind new again.  That is my point. This story is going to sleep now, the words are leaving, and my pumpkin is empty.

There’s nothing quite like wrestling your demons in a spectacular setting. For me, it took the form of a showdown with my darker emotions in front of a UNESCO World Heritage Site: Guanajuato.

My first day in the beloved Mexican city, I wandered the streets like La Llorona, the “weeping woman”—a ghost who according to local legend roams eternally with regret. To describe what I felt as “homesickness” sounds too cute—like calling typhoid the sniffles. What I felt was something more existential: total disconnection.

Granted, I was groggy after a red-eye from San Francisco. Listless and unopinionated, I allowed the cab driver take me to a hotel of his choice. It was bleak, dingy, and overpriced. I unloaded my bags, hauled them up the steps, and collapsed on the bed of Room 22. There I lay afflicted with a combination of discontents, the worst that solo travel has to offer: I was hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and inexpressibly lonely.

A montage of sounds wafted through the tiny window from the market below: the fast rhyming cadences of Spanish, the creak and clatter of vegetable carts on uneven cobblestone, and the inebriated melody of “De Colores.”  The streets were alive, interactive, flowing with life. I crouched in the darkness of my room, a soul afraid to swim.

“Don’t buy into this,” I reminded myself.

I’ve had this same sensation so many times—from my first experience at horse camp at age 12 to leaving for college. The feeling that I’ve made some grave mistake is overwhelming. It’s a demoralizing sensation, a loss of faith, and a complete undoing of everything I aspire to be: bold, adventurous, open to life.

I even start to think: maybe it’s time to settle down into a quiet predictable life.

I have yet to learn the art of arrival.

I peeled myself off the bed and went outside, wandering along the weathered cobblestone in search of food. With its curving narrow ways and baroque and neo-classical architecture, Guanajuato is as beautiful as Venice or Lucca. And like Venice, the town has had to contend with the problem of water. Until recently, torrential rains caused surrounding rivers to crest and flow into the streets. Rather than relocating to drier land, the inhabitants adapted by constructing dams and redesigning parts of the city.  Some of the building foundations sit four and five meters over the street.

The city is famous for many things, not the least of which is being ground zero for the Mexican War for independence. Here Miguel Hidalgo launched the first major insurgency against the local Spanish government in 1810.

It’s also a mining town and in the 18th century became the world’s leading center of silver extraction.  Shafts tunnel through the surrounding hills, the deepest being Boca del Infierno (“mouth of hell”) which plunges a sinister 600 meters into the earth.

Armed with mining wealth, the Guanajuatons possess the leisure and funds to cultivate sophisticated tastes. As a result, a strong sense of aesthetics defines the city. Most everything in Guanajuato—from the bronze statues and towering Basilica to a simple door knob or the neat arrangement of bell peppers at a street stall–seems touched by an artist’s hand.

I went into the first restaurant I could find–a casual place with vinyl seats, fluorescent lights, and sizzling chickens on a spit.  I was alone only a moment when a Mexican balladeer approached my lonely table with a serenade. It was a pathetic tableaux—a scene straight out of “Eat, Pray, Love.”

This was my breaking point. It was time to seize control of my own narrative.

I spied a woman my age sitting alone at a table across the restaurant.

In Jeff Greenwald’s one-man show, “Strange Travel Suggestions” he asks this question:  “Who are we when we travel, at our best?” In answer, he pulls out a giant Tarot card of The Fool: the happy wanderer, obliviously stepping of a cliff and into the unknown. There’s a feather of optimism in his hat, and a dog bounding along at his heels.

The Fool, Jeff points out, doesn’t passively surrender to fate; he turns to greet it. Whether or not he flies when he steps off that cliff is determined by moment-to-moment decisions: whether to sit alone in a cafe or to strike up a conversation; whether to spend the day lounging alone, or learning the local language and seeking out community. I think often of this travel wisdom, which has guided me on so many adventures. The philosophy is simple: believe in chance meetings, take strange suggestions seriously, and roam unnamed alleyways.

After devouring a couple of enchiladas, I decided to approach the other lone gal in the restaurant.

“Mind if I interrupt?”

She set down her pen, smiling and receptive. She was from Telluride and was also studying Spanish here.

After introductions, Rachel scribbled some hints for me on the edge of my Guanajuato map: the best budget hotel, internet cafes, and a good language school.

I soon moved into a new room, and enrolled in Spanish school. Later, I got an email from Rachel inviting me to go out.

Not bad for a first day: I had a school, a place, a friend, and plans for the following night. All the ingredients for happiness were in place.

The next day Rachel and I went for a long walk in the sun above town with Paul, another student from the Spanish language school. Rocks flanked the trail, red as Canyonland. Cactus and agave grew from the hillside. Rachel and Paul turned out to be great company, open-hearted lovers of travel.

Late afternoon I walked around town, waking at last to its beauty. In shop windows, I saw small statues of the Virgin de Guadalupe, Dia de los Muertos figurines, and stacks of sugary treats. I noticed how the buildings were a procession of colors—purple, orange, blue, green. Between them on the alley walls I saw spray painted skeletons — the bare-bone imagery of death was combined with flowers and regalia, adding up to a bright-bleak Frieda Kahlo aesthetic. These are the designs of a people unafraid to dance with their demons.

That night Rachel and I went to a nightclub in the Jardin, the town’s main square. There we met Andrew, a 25-year old midway through a two-year bike ride from Canada to Tierra del Fuego. His travel stories had me laughing, and as I laughed a life force began to percolate back through my veins.

Deeper into the night, a cellist played solo — and each slow pull of his bow filled the high-ceilinged Zilch Bar with haunting and sublime snarls. Come midnight we were moving from place to place. Hours slid by as Rachel and I salsa’d with men wearing shiny shoes and Cuban hats. We ended the night eating street tacos with roasted pineapple at 3:30 a.m.

I strolled down Guanajuato’s dark streets, noting landmarks to guide me home—left at the Basilica, a sharp right at the Cervantes Museum, past the bronze rendering of Don Quioxte.  I arrived in my room at 4 a.m. carrying two bouquets of flowers: roses and lilies from my dance partners.

I dropped the flowers on the table and fell into bed, feeling ‘in place’ among the old chip-paint buildings, in the valley of the Sierra Madre Mountains, and above the strange layers that make Guanajuato: the ghosts of rivers that once coursed through this valley, the network of silver mines dug on faith. My vibrating bones surrendered to the matress. Somewhere, La Llorena roamed restlessly. But I fell into a deep and contended sleep, the scent of roses and lilies at the foot of my bed.

I don’t know why, but I’ve become recently afflicted with a severe case of  inarticulate-ness, an experience of total grammatical-breakdown and incoherence which is making itself evident in this very sentence as I write it.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been studying too much Spanish in the last few days, obsessively trying to translate Pablo Neruda poems into English. Or maybe it’s because right now I’m getting distracted by the Brazilian couple who audaciously make out in the middle of this beachfront cafe. I don’t know. But, for now, as the very structure of the English language crumbles around me and I wallow in subject-confusion and intimacy-envy, I refer you to the wonderful and inspiring holiday blog of one of the more articulate people I know …

http://www.jeffgreenwald.com/category/blog/

Before leaving Kathmandu, I went to Boudhnath to walk a couple of clockwise  koras around the stupa. A Buddhist mecca and all around inspiring place, a visit to Boudha is often the perfect way to begin or end a journey. More than one mountaineer has spun prayer wheels here, believing the gesture is an auspicious start to a Himalayan expedition.

My morning at Boudha was a lovely one. The dome was lit like a half-moon in the early sunlight.  Tibetans were already out in force, shuffling around the monument with prayer beads swaying from their fingertips.  Some offered marigolds and tika powder to Buddha statues; others crawled on hands and knees, an act of both reverence and self-renunciation. All around the stupa, prayer flags hung illuminated, rows of oil candles switched and burned, travelers composed photographs, and clusters of birds pecked breakfast from walkway cracks. Everyone seemed possessed by a private mission, with a personal prayer, their own reason for being there.

Including me. At noon I had an appointment to meet a new friend at the Boudha entrance. James Hopkins is an American now living in Nepal. He’s carved a full life for himself, undertaking seriously Buddhist studies under a respected Rinpoche. He has other reasons to be there as well, having lately grown attached to a particular community near the stupa: A  village of beggars and among the poorest people in already-impoverished Nepal. They live on very little, calling canvass tents “home”  and procuring whatever food they can by shining shoes and extending their empty hands on the streets.

Frankly, the place sounded depressing. But James lit up when he talked about the village and was eager to introduce me to the community before I left Nepal.

After leading me down a side street, he took a sharp turn into a cloaked alley. The trash-strewn passage soon opened up to a field. In the field were rows of tents–a whole neighborhood cobbled together with tarps, fraying string, and knobby wood poles. When we entered the “house” of his good friend Bhimla, we were greeted with sparkling eyes and love. It wasn’t long before we were sitting among the family with biscuits and tea.

There is no doubt that James is a friend of the tent-village. Among other things, he’s helped them start a small industry. Using scraps of old saris and salvage fabrics, they hand-stitch quilts of the most spectacular colors. James sells these $140.00 a-piece–the exact amount of money needed to send one of the village children to school for one year. His hope is to leverage them from a life of begging by putting their inherent skills and creativity to use.

What struck me about James’ interaction with the villagers is that he obviously doesn’t feel sorry for them. And he shouldn’t. To my surprise, the village is truly a happy place, full of laughter and fun. And against what would otherwise be a backdrop of bleak brown and army green tarps,  the half-made quilts and bolts of fabric offer streaks of jubilant color and hope.

I will post contact info for the project very soon. I encourage everyone to consider buying a quilt as a Christmas gift!

It seems silly  to complain about the misery of airline travel–even with the lack of leg room, the sterile air, and the bad food; One hundred years ago the same journey around the world would have taken much longer and been fraught with danger. Still, I found my 40-hour commute from Kathmandu to San Francisco to be punishing: like tossing two days, four countries, six meals, and twelve time zones in a blender and punching the grind button.  My circadian rhythms collapsed, digestion ceased, and brain short-circuited.

The reprieve, though, was an 8-hour layover in Frankfurt, Germany. At the airport, I approached a ticket attendant for a good, easy-to-get-to cafe recommendation. He scribbled on a piece of paper: Cafe Karin, Hauptwache Station.

Driven by dreams of gourmet rolls and good cheese, I managed in my delirious state to purchase a subway ticket to the center of town. Even if I got hopelessly lost on the rails of Frankfurt and never found Cafe Karin, anything would be better than sitting in the departure lounge eating mentos and reading O Magazine.

After pulling out of the airport station, the train entered a stretch of woodlands. It felt nice to travel across solid ground again, to touch the earth. I pressed my face up against the cold window glass and stared out into the bare-branched scenery: the sky was deep gray and tree after tree passed as the train coursed toward the low sun.

So this was Germany.

Something in me stirred: Looking out into the snow, I realized that I hadn’t had a winter in so long. There was a moving bleakness to the equinoctial landscape–a sublimity that only comes with some touch of decay. It was a feeling that I’d long forgotten about, having dodged Decembers with margaritas on Mexican beaches, and spent summers eating August tomatoes on the hot Ashland farm. The life I had lately crafted for myself was one of eternal sunshine.

I slumped back in my seat, surrendering to a visceral awareness of being awake too any hours. Other passengers climbed on the train, Germans mostly, in long coats, snug scarves. As they talked among themselves, their voices to me sounded like breaking icicles. I felt invisible among them–a person with no name, no family. A presence suspended: between homes, between places.

I jumped off at the next station. On the platform I asked a woman for directions. A man overheard me asking about Cafe Karin. He knew it well–it was next door to his dentist’s office. His name was Dierk and he would be happy to take me there, even buy me breakfast.

He was quick to assure me that he was a decent man.

“Now mind you I have a wife and kids, a grandchild on the way,” he explained as we climbed the steps from the subway platform. The skyscrapers of downtown Frankfurt towered above us as we walked.

Cafe Karin was bright, simple, clean, and so novel after two months of Nepal’s dingy teahouses.  In German, Dierk placed our order and we settled in. He gave me a brief rundown of his life: that he worked for Lufthansa Airlines and had traveled much. In retirement now, he carried a lighter workload, schooling flight attendants in the intricacies of wine.

The waiter brought us coffee in big decadent mugs. To my utter delight, a basket of rolls arrived: I never knew croissants could sparkle. Fresh fruit came next, followed by a plate of cheese that–after interminable days of rice and potatoes–seemed an apparition. But there it was: rich brie, flavorful vegetable cream cheese, Gouda.

After breakfast, Dierk led me around the corner to Goethe’s house-turned-museum.

“You know Goethe, don’t you?”

“Yes!” I recited the classic Goethe line: “Whatever you can dream, begin it …”

“Okay smile!” he pulled out a camera and snapped my picture.

Dierk herded me toward the door. We only had an hour and much to see. In the gift shop, he bought a few interpretive pamphlets, handed them to me, then rushed me out.

“Follow me.”

I chased behind him for a couple blocks while he rattled off facts:

“Furt,” he explained, “means ‘river-crossing’–the Franks were the early tribe here, thus ‘Frank-Furt’ means the-Franks’-river-crossing.”

Soon, we were in a square. He placed his hands on my head and directed my gaze toward a large building. “That,” he explained “is the site of the world’s largest book fair: Frankfurter Buchmesse.” He snapped my picture. We went inside and looked at a few hanging photographs of old Frankfurt, the scores of old elegant buildings before they were destroyed by World War II bombings. Before I knew it, he was dragging me toward the door of a cathedral.

“This is the Frankfurt Cathedral. Are you Catholic?”

We entered and walked along the perimeters. Looking at the gory crucifixion statues and ghostly stone renderings of the virgin Mary, I realized that as strange as the elephant-headed idols of Nepal’s Hindu temples seemed, this –though more familiar– was pretty strange, too.

Dierk rushed us into the gift shop, grabbed few more informational pamphlets, and shoved them into my hand.

Next we dashed toward a market, passing along the way the old ruins of a bathhouse, leftover from the days that Germany was part of the Holy Roman Empire. We ran through the market, taking in a visial blur of color: stacked peppers, bouqets of herbs, baskets of mushrooms, shelves of wine, fans of fresh cod, shrimp over ice.

“Smile,” he said, and snapped my picture.

And, then, that was it: it was time to go.

My whirlwind tour was over: we’d covered a thousand years of history in two hours.  Dierk hurried me back to the station, gave me a hug and I climbed back on the subway to continue my strange passage. Only now I felt visible, real again:  A person with a name, and a friend.

If I hadn’t just done it, I wouldn’t have believed it was possible. Flying alongside trained raptors seems like the stuff of dreams or the fantastical storybooks of my childhood. But today, as I followed an Egyptian Vulture named Kevin from thermal to thermal, watched him dive in front of my paraglider, swoop under my feet, and then land on my hand, I’ve never felt more awake in my life.

My first “parahawking” experience was a tandem flight with pilot Scott Mason. A long time falconer, Scott invented the sport here in Pokhara, Nepal after learning how to fly a paraglider from local pilot Adam Hill. He combined the two sports and now pursues parahawking with a single-point focus.

While other pilots enjoy post-flight beers in this flying mecca, Scott runs around in a leather-glove, weighing his eight birds four times a day, and refining his training techniques. Since all of his birds were rescued from dire situations–from destroyed nests or cages– there is sort of a philanthropic streak to his efforts. Still, tossing chunks of meat at birds while flying a paraglider is an undeniably eccentric pursuit and Scott’s obsession would easily qualify him for a Werner Herzog film.

With all of his investment, it’s understandable that Scott wanted to ensure I was prepared before I parahawked solo. So, during our tandem flight, he taught me the techniques: how to follow the bird, how to call him in, how to feed him in mid-air.

It’s more complicated than it looks. While steering the glider with one hand to veer away from terrain and other pilots, you must fumble to get food out of a pouch with the other. After blowing a whistle, you firmly extend your left arm, and the bird swoops and lands on it from behind. This can only be done while turning right. Left-banking turns risk tangling the bird in the glider lines.

If this weren’t enough to think about, the pilot must remain ever-vigilant of the wild birds. Midway through our flight, an eagle began to dive attack Kevin. The remainder of our airtime became an urgent rescue mission. Scott abandoned thermaling and focused on scaring the eagle off. As he shouted over his shoulder, we began to head uncomfortably close to a ridge. I wondered just how much he was willing to sacrifice for his precious birds.

My next flight was solo. As my feet left launch, Scott released Kevin and the raptor flew immediately in front of my glider, flashing his incredible wingspan. Fewa Lake glimmered below us and the elegant white pinnacles of Himalayan peaks –Machapuchare and Annapurna–sat on the horizon. Kevin soared above me, guiding me to the rising air and then, as a reward, I extended my arm and called him in. He landed on my glove, snatched the treat, and hitched a ride for a few seconds. After he flew away I lost track of him until a minute later when I felt a racket of talons and feathers shuffling across my helmet. He had landed on my head.

I always thought that the mere fact of flying was miracle enough, but flying with trained birds is a new level of ecstacy, a double-pleasure, possibly akin to eating a chocolate bar while getting a massage, only a million times better than that.

As I continue to fly with him, my only complaint is that Kevin isn’t more cuddly. An animal-lover, I had somehow imagined that we would become close friends, buddies in the sky. But birds-of-prey resist anthropomorphisizing. Looking into his cold eyes, at his bald wrinkled head, I keep wanting to ask Kevin: “What are you thinking?”

But it would be futile; this scavenger is on a different page altogether. To pursue it further would be like trying to forge a relationship with a guy that doesn’t express his feelings.

Birds-of-prey may not be for cuddling, but they can show us the sublime.

(For a warmer experience, I’ll turn to other animals–like the baby yak I met in the Khumbu region. With his matted and mud-splattered coat, he was a rather pathetic character. And, tied to a post, he could probably not guide me anywhere, much less to a thermal. But he knew how to communicate with a needy human being and within moments of our meeting, wiggled his way fast into my heart.)

For more Pokhara pics, go to:

http://picasaweb.google.com/flyinghobogirl/NepalParagliding#

For more photos of Nepal, go to:

http://picasaweb.google.com/flyinghobogirl/Nepal2008#

It’s hard not to lapse into cliché after returning from one of the world’s most spectacular landscapes. I’m inclined to say “It was amazing!” or “Words can’t describe it!” Fortunately, I wasn’t the designated wordsmith on this October trek to foot of Mt. Everest.

During the two weeks I spent in the Solu Khumbu region of Nepal, my only job was to wander, sip chia, and snack on potato momos in view of Ama Dablam, Nuptse, and other famed peaks. My travel companion Jeff, however, was hard at work. On-assignment for a glitzy outdoor magazine, his charge was to follow adventure legend Leo LeBon as he returned to Everest to celebrate the 40^thanniversary of his company Mountain Travel. LeBon was instrumental in opening the Everest region to trekking back in the 1960s. Jeff was to tell the story of Leo’s return and write about the changes that have taken place in the trekking industry over the past decades.

Aside from the thrill of venturing to the world’s highest mountain, I was curious to watch Jeff at work, to see the much romanticized profession of travel writing in-action. What was it like to be sent on exotic journeys and then try and shape a story? Was it as great as it all seemed?

The adventure began well enough. At a cocktail-infused get-together in the lobby of the Malla Hotel in Kathmandu, we got acquainted with our trekking group: a combination of clients along with Le Bon’s family, friends, and his upbeat assistant Anthony. Jeff was pleased to get on well with Brian Sokol, the simultaneously dashing and goofy New York Times photographer who was assigned to snap pictures for the story.

Twenty-four hours later the group was on a plane headed to the mountain village of Lukla. Our landing marked the beginning of a nonstop binge on natural spectacles: lushy “lowland” swaths of farms rife with twining pea-vines, verdant spinach, and agrarian nostalgia; the Dhud Kosi river churning below like a endless ribbon of class 5 rapids; then eventually the icy peaks of Thamserku and even Everest glimmering in the high distance, releasing a magic bound to dreams. In the book I brought–Hermit in the Himalaya– Paul Brunton says it all: “The gods that made these mountains must have been beauty-drunk.”

The group chatted easily along the trail, staggering together over swinging bridges, yielding to lines of yaks, and sharing good natured grumbles about the unrelenting swichbacks. At night Jeff and Brian forged their working relationship, holding post dinner powwows to troll for story angles. Brian needed to get shots that would satisfy the magazine’s luxury niche reader. He was to show how the rustic pursuit of mountain trekking can be done in high style. Jeff would capture the morphing emotions and reminisces of LeBon as he reexplored the old pathways of his youth and reacquainted with old Sherpa friends.

It sounded straightforward,but it wasn’t long before cracks began to shoot through the storyline. As we passed village after village, Brian struggled to work within the magazine’s suffocating parameters: he was not to photograph any rustic cookware or “crusty-faced kids.” He was to portray LeBon as rugged but fashionable; the magazine even sent along clothes for Leo to wear in the photographs. Being the self-made individual that he is, Leo promptly threw them away.

It wasn’t long before it began to dawn on Brian that he might not produce the photos the magazine needed. Afterall, “luxury” in the Himalayas is a relative term and no amount of skill could make our dark lodges or tuna fish lunches photogenic. He got increasingly desperate, bottom-feeding on staged scenarios of LeBon and his wife drinking wine, taking shots of well-made apple pies, and doing whatever he could to cut out the din and grunge that is endemic to nearly every Himalayan tea house.

Finally, at one of his post-dinner meetings with Jeff, he threw his hands up. “Luxury shots? There are none.”

Jeff was also at a loss. The magazine expected a story about Leo, but within the context of a high class trek. Could he “write around” the filthy toilets, the cold showers?

It came to a head at lunch on day four.

Sipping a spoonful of watery broth, Leo shook his head in surprise:

“Who ever said this was an ultra-luxury trek? This is a third world country.”

Jeff strained to recollect the queries and emails that proceeded the trip. “Was this just something I invented?” he asked. “Was it all based on my misinterpretation?”

Leo, Jeff, and Brian spent the next twenty minutes trying fruitlessly to unravel the series of misunderstandings and assumptions that led to the assignment. Then the group set about trying to solve the problem. Could they put Leo on a horse with a fancy blanket? Maybe a few shots of him recieving blessings from a high lama?

“You said you threw away the clothes that the magazine sent?,” Brian asked.

“They didn’t even ask him his size” defended his wife.

“How many words does the story have to be?” Brandon asked, turning to Jeff. He was a friend of LeBon’s son Alex.

“Three-thousand. About seven single spaced pages.”

“Whoa. That’s gonna be a lot of bullshit.”

But if the story seemed compromised then, these problems seemed minor in light of LeBon’s declining health. On the 5^thnight LeBon sat quietly through dinner and later complained of breathlessness. Even many young and fit trekkers struggle with altitude on the Everest trek. LeBon–strong and determined though he was–was 74 years old. When in the morning his condition remained grim, he was forced to leave the village of Dingboche on horseback, and descend to the nearby clinic in Pheriche. He was flanked by his wife and son and trailed by Jeff, who would lend moral support and record Leo’s reflections as he left his beloved Himalaya for probably his last time. The rest of group trekked onward without their leader, counting now on LeBon’s assistant Anthony.

While Jeff descended, I continued to the next village Dukla to await his return. The rest of the group would stay the night at a slightly higher village.

At Dukla, our remaining leader Anthony stopped with me for lunch and feeling fatigued checked into a room, disappearing for the entire afternoon. I found him later in spandex and tennis shoes, staring at the hallway wall.

“Headed out for a jog?” I quipped.

He looked up at me blankly, his eyes unfocused, body slightly swaying.

“I’m coughing up something that looks like red popcorn,” he wheezed.

My heart skipped a beat. I tore through my guidebook, looking up what this meant: advanced stage pulmonary edema. Though the sun was disappearing behind the ridge and a chill was setting in, immediate descent was critical. Jeff had just arrived an hour before. Still emotionally spent from seeing Leo off, he now had to gather Anthony’s things together and arrange two Sherpas to walk him down to the hospital. Twenty minutes later, we stood on the deck of the teahouse and watched Anthony and the Sherpas disappear into the dimming light and said silent prayers.

Both Anthony and Leo would be okay, but that day the story–and the group– crumbled apart like an icefall. Jeff and Brian conferred. Both had a lot at stake: they were counting on their income from this high paying magazine, and had passed up other assignments. Both were growing increasingly despondent: if the story wasn’t published, they would recieve–despite all their work and time–only a fraction of their contracted fee.

But this was no time for depression. With both leaders gone now, the unraveling group needed guidence. Brian and Jeff had the most experience in the Himalayas and so had to abandon their roles as observers and recorders and jump into action as the new trek leaders. Brian rushed ahead to the next village to check on the rest of the group. I sat with Jeff as he caught his breath. Together we looked at the fluted ridges, seracs, colouirs and glaciers.

“Serious mountains,” I observed. “

Jeff sighed. “The most serious.”

The rest of the group straggled on in its scattered state,more or less making it to Kala Patthar, the vantage point at the foot of Everest and ending point of our trek. A day behind the rest of our group, we encountered them one by one on the trail on their return. Cem, a good-natured Turk, ambled toward us breathless. He had never in his life been camping or hiking and how he ended up on the world’s hardest trek would remain a mystery. Though he had made it, the altitude was taking its toll.

“That was worst place on earth,” he said with half a laugh. “You can’t eat, breath, or shit.”He would leave the mountains by helicopter the next day, suffering an ulcer but also just generally worn out in body and mind.

As for Jeff and I, we climbed to the top of Kala Patthar together on a bright sunny afternoon with fast beating hearts. The view of Everest was clear as we could ever hope. Jeff busily strung prayer flags for his father and I clung fast to a rock, in awe but also dizzied by the off-kilter angles and overwelhming scale of things.

We had reached our goal and I was gazing at The Highest Mountain in the World. But I felt strangely subdued. After days of slogging, we had reached the top, the pinnacle, and instead of feeling victorious, I felt annoyed by the other tourists thursting their cameras at me and asking me to snap their photo. Funny how the moments of transcendence don’t come how they should. It was half way down the slope of Kala Patthar that my Everest moment came: Squatting for a rest in front of Nuptse, Lhotse, and Everst, I placed my hands in reverent prayer as my favorite bird, the clever raven, soared in front of me.

Such moments of awe cannot be predicted; they fickly chose themselves. So often I was moved by small, more relatable things: the day we encountered the painter of the Tengboche monestary, standing before his half-finished renderings of dakinis. Or just the regular pleasure of tea steaming my face on clear mornings. Or the afternoon Jeff and I meditated on the cracks and moans of the Khumbu glacier. The surprises thrilled me, too: when we came across an abandoned shack above Jorsalle, treaded lightly over its rotting floor boards, and discovered a wealth of old Tibetan art.

Such moments are rich but they don’t necessarily make for a good magazine stories so, though Jeff would return with plenty to tell, nothing fit the heroic storyline that the magazine could market. I tried to help him shape what happened into something salable: Leo was a worthy character to write about, he reunited with Sherpa friends, spent quality time with his family, and had to confront his own limits. Wasn’t that enough of a story?

But Jeff, wise to the commercial realities of freelancing writing, was busy resigning himself to the fact that his October work may well be nixed; that he may just not have a whole story here: just a collection of shimmering–but broken–pieces.

Still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that in a week I’ll be in Nepal. Soon I’ll be in the Khumbu region of the Himalayas, on a group trip to Everest Base Camp with adventure legend Leo LeBon, the man who helped open the region to trekking 40 years ago. I look forward to the fine camaraderie and also to the simplicity of trail life: the stark mountain aesthetics of rock faces and delicate arêtes, the simple meals of dahl, the earth-scent of sandlewood incense.

In the meantime, I’m in the flurry of preparation, contending with the gale-force stress of my to-do list. Though I grasp about for one big project that will get me on-the-road, the truth is it’s accomplishing an assemblage of little things that will get me out of here: procuring extra passport photos, balling up my wool trekking socks, making sure I pack along toothpaste and sturdy shoe-laces.

In that vein, yesterday I went shopping for a suitcase at Costco. Now that I travel with a 50 lb. paragliding wing on my back, it’s time to concede that I need something with wheels to carry all the other essentials. As I walked down the imposing aisles of 40-pack soap, buckets of vitamins, and dog-food-by-the-ton, I chastised myself for not being a better garage-saler. Had I thought of it earlier, I could have spent my Saturday mornings ferreting out a perfectly good used suitcase with wheels and not supporting this bad American habit of buying everything new.

I vow to take this as a lesson and start garage-saling now: looking for the three-speed fan that I might need next August, the glasses I’ll need at my next margarita party. But where will I store all of it?

After wandering around Costco like a lost child, I came across a good aquamarine Kirkland suitcase. I lifted it off the shelf and rolled it down the aisle, wondering how it is that the Kirkland Corporation manages to make everything from suitcases to fish taco sauce. I arrived to the register filled with despair. A massive line of couples were cued up and holding vigil over carts stacked high with plastic-wrapped bulk crap. Was I being melodramatic, or did we all look depressed? Like a bunch of upright cadavers in an Adbusters nightmare.

I went out to the parking lot, loaded my new suitcase, and fired up my car to continue on with my typical American day of driving around and shopping, checking my cell phone and email along the way. At home now, I sort through my heaps of cute dresses, my shelves of books, and assortment of gadgets, culling only what will fit in my suitcase.

When I get to Nepal, all this stuff will feel far far away.

I won’t miss it.

As a travel writer, Jeff Greenwald has traveled across five continents. He has experienced the world in up-close detail, trekking in remote regions of the Himalayas, hanging out with Tasmanian Devils on the Australian coastline, and shopping for honey at the Medina in Fez. There came a point in his career when he realized that he had seen more of the planet than Marco Polo and Magellan combined. Still, he says no landscape is more beautiful than the American Southwest.

I have not seen that much of the world, but after spending the past week roadtripping around the Four Corners area, I’ll take his word for it.

Allison and I are on a sort of farewell journey before she leaves next month for an extended stay in Munich. Though we are repelled by the interminable track housing and strip malls that blight the west, the natural architecture stuns: when we woke up in Castle Valley outside of Moab, the sunstruck redrock seemed perfect as the Taj Mahal. At Arches National Park, I was convinced that “Landscape Arch” was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. When we practiced asanas in Canyonlands, the Needles Overlook seemed as sacred as the any ashram. Up a Wasatch canyon, the towering granite and running river brought us to life. Now in Telluride, the surrounding peaks silence us like the Sistene Chapel.

Lest I get too romantic, against the backdrop of this unbelievable west, all the clumsy features of a real road trip remain. On the first day, we detoured far into the Alvord desert, coveting fantasies of hotspringing under the stars, only to find a lukewarm tub and hurricane winds. On day two, we plundered into the mud at a Nevada Hotspring, the van hopelessly waylaid. Fortunately, we were pulled out by a couple of miners on their way to work. They refused our money so later we left them a bouquet of roadside flowers and a couple homegrown tomatoes.

In between our rashes of giddy chatter there have been interspersed stretches of silence. At one point I was sure that Allison was purposefully disagreeing with everything I said.

“I think this is the darkest place in the US,” I said of Natural Bridges in Utah.

“Well,” she huffed, “I have a hard time believing that.”

When I wanted to turn right, she insisted on left. When I pointed north, she pointed south. I wanted to take this trail, she wanted that one.

One nigh after finishing a bottle of rose under the stars at Arches, I soliloquized about how awful it would be to get a DUI. That you could end up in jail.

“That’s not true!” she crowed.

I left my story unfinished and went to bed.

Now in Telluride, we get along, but the mixed bag that is travel continues. The other day, I shied from a walk with a near stranger, only to find out later that it was Youssou Ndour, the Grammy Award winning Senagalese singer. We watched him perform last night and I am still kicking myself for not taking that walk. How I would have loved to have him teach me a simple song! All the same, Allison and I have had great food, good hikes, seen friends.

No landscape, no matter how beautiful, can make everything perfect. It’s a cliche, but true: it doesn’t really matter where you are, you take yourself with you. So it is: against the backdrop of the Cretaceous epoch, between the upwellings of basin and range, at the place where the Paleozoic era gives way to the salt flats, our speck-like concerns persist and we fume, fret, get stuck, regret, argue, wonder, laugh, philosophize, and debate. We shuttle through emotions as diverse as the landscape.

. . . Which makes me think of the film I saw last night. In a park, underneath the glow of the big dipper, we watched an outdoor screening of Pirate for the Sea–the story of activist Paul Watson and his ship The Farley Mowat (www.seashepherd.org). While the raw depictions of seal clubbing and illegal whaling had me in one moment despairing, Watson’s direct action approach to combating these problems fired me up. By tangling-up the rudders of whaling ships, slicing their hulls, and otherwise getting in the way, Watson has preserved the lives of hundreds of whales and seals. Though radical, this is a kind of activism that I support. In the end, the movie left me wanting to find my way onto the Farley Mowat, to climb aboard to join the drama unfolding across the beautiful landscapes of this earth.