Among Flowers (10 page)

It was in the afternoon that we really started to go up and would not go down below six thousand feet for days again. Sometimes, I had to get down on my hands and knees to crawl across a part of the path that the porters, carrying our luggage, not to mention our dining table and four chairs, had nimbly maneuvered. It was that afternoon that I saw rhododendrons that were not shrubs but trees thirty feet tall. And it was then I saw the one with the cinnamon bark and it was a revelation. The rhododendron in general is perhaps the most misused flowering shrub in an American garden. It is planted near a house, often to hide the hideous but appropriate material that is the foundation for a building. They come in perfect colors—purple, pink, violet—and they bloom with generosity, in thrusts. But these qualities, the abundance in color and bloom, plus the ease with which they often can be grown, make them taken for granted to the point of abuse. To see them now, then, to see a rhododendron, with a trunk as thick as a pine and thirty feet tall, and with leaves almost as long as my lower arm, was as magical as seeing the mountain Makalu from a distance. I walked along in a state of complete wonder for I was in a forest made up of these plants—rhododendron with peeling bark, and maple and bamboo. At around nine thousand feet we came upon a stupa and some prayer flags and rested. Then we made a turn going decidedly away from where we had just come and started going down, losing a thousand feet in altitude, going toward Thudam.

We passed no one other than people in our own party. Above us were huge boulders, and I couldn't help but wonder what kept them in place. Ordinarily, I never question the ground I am on but in this place of determined verticals, everything seemed delicately perched, waiting for the day when it would come tumbling down. What if that day happened to be the moment when I was just passing by?

Toward Thudam we walked, and Sunam said it was just down there, and whenever we got just down there, Thudam was beyond that. Beneath were narrow rock-strewn valleys that would then become open and vast. We walked along open, exposed ledges and then suddenly it was dark and cold and we were in a forest, and so Sunam said we would spend the night there. We camped in a forest of
Rhododendron hodgsonii,
surrounded by them, towering above us, right next to a waterfall that was really a point of relief for a more powerful waterfall that was nearby. But the smaller outlet had a roar all its own and it dominated the realm of sleep to such a degree that we all agreed we had never slept better. We left camp the next morning at half past seven. It was forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit and we were at an altitude of 9,930 feet. It was dark when we had made camp the night before, and we had not realized we were in the middle of the path, the middle of the road as it was. Suddenly, a herd of cows and their herder were coming our way. I recognized the herder as the same one we had seen days ago just at the time of the leech field when we were trying to avoid the Maoists. And this made me understand that while each day had seemed new and separate not continuous with the day before, for some people, for the people living there, life, each day, was connected into one whole. And I say this as if it were new and I say this with complete familiarity.

To Thudam then, it would be on this day. We walked on and then by ten o'clock that morning we were in Thudam. We could see it from a distance. It was a collection of small brown flat-roofed houses made of wood, perhaps even wood from some of the forests we had just walked through. It was the very opposite of a market town or of bustling anything. From it, a trail went straight up toward Tibet and a pass called Umbak Bhanjyang. I saw a man carrying a large load of something on his back and going up that way. When we got to the village we saw no one outside. Inside the main building, Sunam bought a large quantity of rice. We wondered if there was anything we might purchase, just as mementos, so that long after all this was hard to believe, we would have some little thing to reassure us that yes, one day, we had been in Thudam, a little village in northeast Nepal, up near the Tibetan border. Dan bought some aprons, worn by women there as part of their daily dress, and some yak herd bells. There was nothing else for sale. Disappointed at the absence of a Thudam metropolis, we crossed the river that separated it from the rest of our journey. And that river! It was a confluence of water rushing down from many places above us. Its color was an unfiltered blue, and I guessed that it was glacial in origin, the cold melt of something that had been frozen for an eternity. We crossed it, me haphazardly; the bridge was made up of some logs tied together with a thick twine. I fell off it into the water once. The water was cold, but not unbearably so.

When we departed from Thudam, I was almost in a state of disbelief. I kept looking back to make sure I had really been in such a place, that the place called Thudam did exist. I had been there. I had tried to buy some little knickknack, some little souvenir that I would later look at to provide me with certainty that I had been to Thudam. But there wasn't anything to buy. I did have for a meal some of the rice Sunam bought there. A bend in the path and I could no longer even see it, the collection of brown flat-roofed houses among boulders the size of the houses themselves. It was when looking back that I saw a small specter heading toward the road to Tibet. It was Bleddyn, and he had taken a wrong turn. In that vast landscape, destinations are few but the opportunities to make a wrong turn are many. We called to him but he could not hear us and eventually a porter ran back all that way, a mile or so, to fetch him. A mile or two at ten thousand feet altitude is no ordinary mile.

Remote outpost of Thudam, on the Tibetan border

We sat in the shade after that and had lunch at about half past eleven. Without meaning to, I sat on some precious
Aconitum,
but since it was not in flower, I did not care. While eating, Dan and Bleddyn cleaned seeds, labeled and numbered the collections. It was seventy-three degrees Fahrenheit and we were at an altitude of 11,670 feet. None of us felt the effects of the high altitude, except that we never felt like eating. The sky was free of clouds, the air not hot, just brilliantly clear. Then suddenly, a wind came up, the sun vanished, and we could tell that we mustn't linger. We set off again. I began to see, for the first time and in abundance, the species of
Meconopsis grandis
and it had seed. I, of course, had never seen it in flower, but I began to recognize the leaves, narrow, hairy, and long, growing straight up, with the dried scapes sticking out. We were now walking along the stony banks of a fierce glass-bottom blue river. It came rushing from somewhere deep in the mountains toward which we were heading. The bank on the other side was thick with rhododendrons, shorter ones, which Bleddyn said were
R. campanulatum
. They were like rhododendrons I was used to seeing, their leaves, a normal leaf shape, not big and broad and reminding me of something else. They were in full sun and grew thickly, as if to make a deep hedge. I could only imagine how amazing they would be in springtime, all in bloom.

The path opened up now, but it was not really a path, not a path as I knew it. Nothing was as I knew it to be, this was true. The path became a wide open pasture of boulders perched on top of each other and we were just stepping from one to the other. Each step was a balancing act, each step called for a different kind of concentration than the kind required when we were walking in file in the forest. We were in an Alpine landscape, not a meadow, not a scree, just a great big expanse of rocks with low-growing juniper growing around them and some low-growing rhododendron spreading out forever and ever like an eternal carpet, berberis and then more rhododendron, taller than the carpet-growing one, but lots of that also, the
Meconopsis grandis
and
paniculata,
and some woody
Potentilla
. The wind grew harder and then it began to rain and sleet, and then finally snow. I suddenly found myself all alone in a boulder-strewn valley and I couldn't quite tell how the terrain went from being a river valley to a series of streams, each of them leading to some new direction. Every step I took seemed to lead me to some new vista, some new path, and when I looked backward to see where I had come from, I did not recognize what I saw. Above me were huge boulders, all of them again seemed delicately perched, ready to come down on me. The path I followed crossed a gully, then traversed a series of streams then followed along a larger stream. Everywhere were rocks, large boulders, streams, the air streaked with sleet and snow, and it was growing darker. I was afraid I was lost. I called Sunam but when I realized that I could hardly hear my own voice, I stopped doing that. Without knowing anything else to do, I persisted along the banks of the largest of the thick blue streams. I came upon our camp and I realized just how frightened I had been. I would not ever have been lost, Sunam would not have allowed that to happen. That night Sunam had Cook make for us a dish from his region of Nepal, a nice thick stew with dumplings, potatoes, carrots, turnips, and peas. It was delicious but I could not eat it. I drank some tea and went to bed. It was cold but I had the brilliant idea of filling up our drinking-water bottles, the ones we carried with us during the day, with hot water and placing them in my sleeping bag next to me. I slept until midnight when, on going outside for a pee, I met a beautiful, cold, clear starry night and a good six inches of snow on the ground. In the morning we had noodle soup for breakfast, another specialty from Sunam's region, and then we headed up to the pass of Jangla Bhanjyang, and over to the even more mythical and magical Topke Gola. It is among the places in the world plantsmen live for.

T
hat night in the cold dark and snow when I had stumbled into camp, what I had missed seeing growing spectacularly among the boulders hovering above me was the great
Rheum nobile,
growing solitary, erect, aloof, and stiff like little sentinels. It was fall and they had long passed their bloom beauty, and so even now I would never see them in their true blooming glory. And why was I so awestruck to see it? I had never before seen it growing anyway. As far as I know, it cannot be found in any garden, certainly not in the garden of anyone I would know. In my life as a gardener, there have been a number of plants I have wanted to see, for the sheer unbelievableness of them: the blue poppy (
Meconopsis benticifolia
),
Gunnera manticata
(for its, literally, giant-sized leaves), just to name two of them. The
Rheum nobile
has been among them. I first saw the blue poppy many years ago growing in a display at the Chelsea Flower Show in England. My true delight and surprise proved very embarrassing to the people observing me; and I could not tell whether it was my ignorance or my enthusiasm. The
Gunnera
I saw in a garden out in the Pacific Northwest. That time, no one witnessed my delight and surprise. The
Rheum nobile
will only be found in books written by plant hunters and only ones who have been to certain areas of the Himalaya. There is a picture of it in flower to be found in
Flowers of the Himalaya
by Oleg Polunin and Adam Stainton. It is, as usual, solitary, growing in stark, rocky mountainsides, way above the tree line and surrounded by
Meconopsis
and some kinds of
Primula
. Its true flowers are hidden beneath large creamy yellow bracts—that are almost as big as its large leaves—and it stands around three feet high. What I was looking at then was its dried-up self full of seed. But neither Bleddyn nor Dan wanted to collect them because the conditions under which it will agree to bloom do not exist in an American or English garden. Bleddyn said that he had never even heard of anyone being able to make seeds of it germinate. It was while looking at the brown, dried sentinel, standing all alone among rocks, that I thought of the description Joseph Hooker made about this
Rheum
: “On the black rocks the gigantic rhubarb forms pale pyramidal towers a yard high, of inflated reflexed bracts, that conceal the flowers, and overlapping one another like tiles, protect them from wind and rain: a whorl of broad green leaves edged with red spreads on the ground at the base of the plant, contrasting in color with the transparent bracts, which are yellow, margined with pink. This is the handsomest herbaceous plant in Sikkim.” He was describing it in bloom. At first I saw only one dried sentinel and then as my eyes grew accustomed to the landscape, they appeared frequently enough but always somewhat far apart from each other.

The wonderful sighting of the
R. nobile
soon gave way to other things. It was near twenty degrees Fahrenheit when we left camp and crossed the blue, cold river along which banks we had spent the night. We were now heading to Topke Gola. We were in a rocky valley and going up. As usual, what seemed from a distance to be a point of termination, that is, the end of the road, was just another opening on to another vista. The boulders got bigger as we went up and the valley opened up wider too. We were now in the middle also of many rivulets, streams, tricklings of water burbling up and coming down. There were no trees here, just shrubby potentillas and junipers. The
R. nobile
was everywhere and so was another uncollectible, a plant called
Saussurea
. I had seen pictures of it, but before this, it held no interest to me. And now I understood why. The one I saw (and there are many others) was a white hairy mound, sprawled among the brown rocks and against a background of a very high snowcapped peak. So too we found other species of
Meconopsis
(
discigera
and
bella
) and primrose
(stuartii), Rhodiola
,
Saxifraga
(
parnassifolia), Pleurospermum,
lily (
nanum
),
Geranium (nakonianum).

Author and Thile Sherpa beside a Tibetan Rhubarb plant,
Rheum nobile

Left to ourselves, we would have been lost in this sea of rocks and boulders, for this landscape was as familiar to me as the one on Mars. Every obvious way to the pass that would then lead us to Topke Gola was the wrong path, and it was only thanks to Sunam, who whenever the going was difficult always brought up the rear, and the rear was Sue and especially me and my difficulties. And my difficulties were these: I found each plant, each new turn in the road, each new turn in the weather, from cold to hot and then back again, each new set of boulders so absorbing, so new, and the newness so absorbing, and I was so in need of an explanation for each thing, that I was often in tears, troubling myself with questions, such as what am I and what is the thing in front of me.

More than a few people have gone beyond the boundaries of the earth's atmosphere and on returning, participate in parades and festivals and ceremonies with joy and enthusiasm. They have made the unknown normal-seeming immediately. It is just as well that none of these people were me. Had I been the first person to walk on the surface of the moon, I don't think I would be able to speak for one hundred years afterward. As it is, I just went to Nepal on a plant-hunting, seed-collecting trek and the landscape at the foothills of the Himalayan mountains have left my tongue somewhat stilled, perhaps permanently so.

If someone had not shown me the correct path to go over the pass, I would not have found it by myself. I started up and it seemed friendly enough. I could still make out some growing things, the
Saussurea
was there, some gentian, and then much snow. I was now in that far distance that I could see from Num (at least the snow-covered peaks). I walked up and the snow got deep and icy and slippery. Of course, the top to the pass was farther than I thought, and the snow got deeper as I went up. The sun shone brightly and the light from the reflection was practically blinding. Halfway up, I could hear the sound of bells, and then soon a herd of yaks and their herder came into view. I had to make way for them, stepping out of the path, while at the same time making sure not to fall off into some bottomless depth that seemed ever nearby. I stood still, on the side as they passed, and then regained the path, only to hear the same sound of a caravan of yaks coming toward me again. This happened two more times and in a way they were a marvelous distraction. The herds were about seven yaks each, and each yak was decorated with bells and strings of wool dyed red, or white. The herders accompanying the yaks seemed not to notice us, or to pay any special attention to us. They did not look like any of the people I had seen before. They did not look like anyone we had met below the altitude of Thudam. From speaking to them, Sunam learned that they were carrying corn to Tibet and would return with rice and salt.

At the very top of the pass I stopped for a rest. It had taken us two hours to walk up to the pass and it had been a struggle for me. We were at an altitude of 15,600 feet. I felt exhausted, physically of course, but that I could handle. It was just that I felt emotionally so. I rested at the stupa, for there was one; and there were prayer flags too. There is the proper way to go around one, it is to the right; but I long ago could not understand what was the right way or the wrong way and I only hoped that the god of this place would look kindly on my ignorance, which only came from exhaustion. Sunam pointed out to me where I had just walked up and then he showed me something, a lake, a hidden lake that could only be seen from the pass. It was so unexpected, so pristine, so real and yet not so, that I felt as if I would dissolve. I did not. I made Dan take a picture of me with it in the background, and I do not know whether it was in consolation or confirmation that he told me the water in the lake eventually found its way to the Ganges.

Leaving the pass was like leaving a great book, which had yielded every kind of satisfaction that is to be found in a great book, except that with such a book you can immediately begin on page one again and create the feeling of not having read it before, even though the reality is you have read it before. How I wanted reaching the pass, going up to it and then leaving it behind, to be something like that, the reading of a great book, the texture of it, the rocks moving under my feet, the flowers that I could never cultivate all full of collectible seed, the precariously standing boulders, each one looking as if it was just about to roll down on top of me and only me; the six-inch deep snow, the slipping around in it and falling down at least once, the clearest of blue skies above me, the sun hot even though I was in the midst of cold and snow, the herd of yaks, the hidden lake, seen by so very few human eyes for all of its millions of years' existence, its contents eventually joining up with the great Ganges. To make the experience like a book, here it is in a book I am writing now for myself. But it is very hard to do this, for each word I put in the book is a word I have had to part with, each experience I portray in this book is one I had to part with. I have not wanted to part with anything, word or experience, I have had while walking around the foothills of the Himalaya in Nepal among its flowers. The book I am writing and so therefore reading will soon be taken away from me. The chances of me going over that pass and seeing that lake hidden just below it again are practically nil. I shall go looking for seeds again and I shall go somewhere else.

Author and Dan Hinkley on the high pass between Thudam and Topke Gola

I walked down on the other side of the pass and it seemed to me not a mirror image of what I had just come up. But perhaps this experience was determined by my knees. Going up is hard on the lungs, going down is hard on the knees. I saw nothing growing on the way down for some time. The fact that the caravan of herders and yaks had an hour or so before been on the very path I was now on seemed unreal to me. There was no evidence of them. The mixed rock-strewn and boulder landscape appeared to me undomesticated, untouched even by human imagination. I do not say this with certainty. I state this with plain and unmodified ignorance. We walked away from the pass with desperation, and that does not seem to me now, as I write this, abnormal. Everything I have ever read about people going to passes, it appears that they go through them with some desperation.

As we walked down I began to see the isolated patches of gentians, so minute in the vast landscape that they seemed like colorful pebbles. And so too were the little croppings of
Delphinium,
six inches high at most, pale and hairy hoods of whitish, grayish blooms. They were in bloom and we were in the month of October. Where could we find seeds? But this is a plant so particular, it needs a certain amount of time covered with snow and then a certain altitude on top of that. It was another wonder to see, and it made me think of the great Alpine gardener who lives not too far away from me, Geoffrey Charlesworth, but I only thought of him, I do not know him. It also made me think of once going to a part of Glacier National Park, with my friend Ian Frazier, and walking in an Alpine meadow and seeing the plants that will grow on rocky soil, exposed to the harsh elements of sun and wind, thrive with abandon. The walk down was treacherous, each step seemed a passport to doom, a mix of rocks and boulders, as usual, but in this part of the world, the usual was always new. And then I noticed, there, something new: the rocks and boulders had darkened; the very openness of the sky had taken on a darker tinge, as if another dominance reigned.

We stopped for lunch in a sheltered part of the valley and the sun was hot, and there was no wind at all, and just as we were congratulating ourselves on how well everything was going a host of black clouds appeared on the horizon and they did not go away. They came toward us and we packed up and walked on. They hovered, not so much overhead but in the background, like some evil omen to come. We then walked along the edge of a landslide; that is to say, what might have been an easy path to walk on had fallen down, and for a short while I understood what was meant by a knife's edge in the context of people walking on mountains. We walked to Topke Gola and again were in acres and acres of rhododendrons, all low growing, shrubby, and small leaved; and juniper,
Salix,
and of course
Meconopsis
(we were seeing it in abundance, the full-of-seed capsules of
paniculata
), and
Arisaema jacquemontii
(a plant in seed I found, but Dan had to tell me its exact identification). We walked through such a vast area filled with masses of small-leaved rhododendron that I was sure for a short time that there was no such place as Topke Gola. In this vast area covered with the small-leaved rhododendrons, there were some remains of camping sites, of campfires, and sleeping or outdoor habitation. And I then understood the herds of yaks that I had made way for coming over the pass. I was in the middle of a vast pasture. Everything that was a treasure to us in our gardens in Wales or North America was fodder in the life of yaks and the people who took care of and depended on them for sustenance. We walked through this wide and high valley, the mountains in the near distance (for by now everything far away was nearby and everything nearby was far away) and exhausted as if for the first time, without remembering that we had been exhausted before, and after a while we saw the hamlet of Topke Gola way in the distant. After the two nights spent in the forest, seeing a village with houses, and so therefore people and domesticity, seemed like a gift. And like a gift it held within it surprise, perhaps the essential, wonder, beauty, and mystery. I could see its brown structures, unsullied by paint of any kind, that were the dwelling places, huddled together, as if each one was a part of the other. From above and at thirteen thousand feet, the whole hamlet seemed so nearby, always so nearby, but it took one and a half hours from first seeing it to arriving there, and buildings that from far away seemed so small and insignificant were large and stairs had to be climbed to enter them. Not ever did I get used to this—the deceptive nearness of my destinations—not ever did I become accustomed to the vast difference between my expectation, my perception, and reality; the way things really are.