Among Flowers (13 page)

No sooner had we set up camp than the Maoists appeared. At this point, setting up camp involved taking out all the seeds that had been collected, five hundred packets so far, and laying them out in the sun to dry. Some of them needed further cleaning, more washing, more separating from the chaff. Perhaps that moment is one of many that holds in it a metaphor of the very idea of the garden itself: we had in our possession seeds that, if properly germinated, would produce some of the most beautiful and desirable flowering plants to appear in a garden situated in the temperate zone; at the very same time we were in danger of being killed and our dream of the garden in the temperate zone, the place in which we lived, would die with us also. At the very moment we were projecting ourselves into an ideal idyll we were in between life and death. The Maoists appeared in a way we had never seen them before, belligerent, loud, and serious about the Maoist business. A few of them looked like people from Tibet but most of them looked like people from India. They wore badges of the red star on the lapels of their jackets or shirts. They wanted all of us to sit down and listen to them but succeeded in only Sunam and Thile and Mingma and some of the other Nepalese doing so. We—Dan, Bleddyn, Sue, and I—couldn't understand anything they said, for they were speaking in Nepali, and so kept drifting off to take care of the seeds. Cook had to take care of dinner. Sunam, perhaps knowing of what we would encounter later, had bought three chickens at the place where we had lunch and Cook was busy murdering them and cleaning them and making them into a meal. The Maoist lecture lasted all through the afternoon into the setting sun. They mentioned over and over again the indignity of being called mere terrorists by President Powell of the United States, and then they left. Their departure did not lessen the tension in our camp. Sunam, trying to make us less tense I suppose, went off and found us some chang. It was forbidden in Maoist-controlled areas, so acquiring it was very secretive and yet drinking it was so elaborate. For it it had to be drunk from large wooden containers, the size of jugs, made from bamboo, through a straw made from bamboo also. It tasted terrible but I must have drunk enough of it because I got drunk. After staggering back to our tent, and lying in my sleeping bag, I could hear the rest of them—Dan, Bleddyn, Sue, and the rest of our party—for a long time afterward. Later than that, I heard great loud booming sounds and thought they were landslides; but Sunam told us that the sounds we heard were the Maoists perfecting their bombs. In the middle of the night, when I staggered out of my tent to go take a pee, I was afraid I would be killed by the Maoists, but I could also see that the night sky was clear and full of stars and perfectly innocent of whom I might wish to harm and who might wish to harm me.

We walked away from the experience of spending the night with seeds of flowers we loved while all the time vulnerable to people who might not like us and decide to do something about it. We walked through a village that was one of their headquarters, down to the Mewa Khola, and crossed it happily under the illusion that we were free of them. I saw a begonia, something that looked like a houseplant growing on the side of the Mewa Khola. That shocked me. We passed a little building, a house of worship in the middle of this thickly forested area on this river's banks. We walked, knowing the area of real seedworthy collectibles was behind us. We had lunch in an unexpected grand place. We came upon a lone dwelling, prosperous with animals, pigs, and cows, an abundance of areas carefully cultivated in which were growing grains and vegetables. The dwelling place itself was carefully painted: newly painted-on whitewash, and brown diamond-shaped stencil patterns ornamenting the area just beneath the roof. We were on the banks of the Mewa Khola and we could hear it roaring toward its final destination. Sunam pointed out to us the path he had originally wanted us to take. To say it was a mile above is not an exaggeration. We had to crane our heads back quite a ways to see the path he had thought for us to walk. We then walked on that afternoon through areas that had become forested with poinsettia and
Datura
, plants that are native to Mexico. They were in bloom, both of them with trunks as thick as maple trees in Vermont. We crossed roaring streams that made a false step positively dangerous. We descended mostly, crossing fields of millet and then finally landed in the village, Phapung, that had a banner with the red star running across it. It had in it four little shops, each of them selling the same things, and for some reason that made it seem safe. How to explain it? Four little shops, each of them filled with exactly the same amount of dirt and disorder or dirt and order, the same little bars of soap for sale that are a staple in motels in North America. All the men wore the same little hats, the shape of a carefully molded sharp-sided pudding, on their heads. Some of them seemed pleased to see us (and that made us suspicious), some of them seemed angry at us (and that made us uneasy), some of them seemed indifferent to us (and that made us suspicious), in other words, we were not feeling comfortable being there.

We walked down a bank littered with feces, human and animal, to the river and washed ourselves, knowing full well that it brought with it whatever the people above us had deposited in it. But we were desperate to renew ourselves and water always offers the illusion of that, renewal. And so we walked through the stench and tried to clean ourselves. We were not clean and we felt it. We ate a supper of noodles, the exact concoction that my son, Harold, likes to eat all the time, ramen noodles, only it was made by some company in India, not Japan, the way his is. Strangely, this Maoist-controlled village was not at all frightening. Beer and cigarettes were forbidden here, and perhaps that was what reassured us. All the passions were under control. Right then, calm strangers were a blessing to me.

In the morning, after the usual rituals, we set off and by that time our journey, which was at its end, began to resemble its beginning. We walked and walked, only this time going down, and we passed by many people going toward where we had just come and many more than that passed us going toward where we were heading. We saw the same, unidentifiable to me, birds flitting by and heard the same screeching sound of a mill grinding grain. We could feel we were getting closer to the end of the adventure. Suddenly the path was teeming with people, most of them looking more like people who come from India than like people who come from Tibet. Our presence, mine especially, drew less stares, less curiosity. It was in the middle of the day, when we were exhausted finally from the walk and the heat of the sun, and upset at the amount of rubbish everywhere, that we looked and saw there was a half-dressed Englishman making his way toward us and carrying an umbrella. He was as astonished to see us as we to see him. He had heard of Dan and Sue and Bleddyn, though they had never heard of him. He was making his way up the valley, through the very paths we had just come down, and looking for the seeds of plants also. He was going up to Topke Gola and then over to Thudam, for he was interested in finding the seeds of rhododendrons. Months later, Dan told me that this man had met some Maoists in Thudam and that they had robbed him of everything, even his clothes, and treated him badly altogether, and that he was lucky not to have been killed by them. But at the time we saw him, we were filled with envy that he was going back to where we had been and perhaps would find things that we had missed, especially on that awful day when we made the rapid descent from Topke Gola to the night spent in the gorge among the
Edgeworthia.

We spent the afternoon walking on cliffs high above the Mewa Khola, which by then was a furious mass of water, crossing it as it joined up with the Tamur River. We meant to spend the night in the school yard of the village of Handrung but the entire school of children, none them seeming more than twelve years old, boys and girls, poured out of their classroom and surrounded us as if we were living examples in a number of school subjects combined. They came closer and closer, until we could see spending the night among them would be a nightmare. Sunam then took us across the Tamur, above where it met the Mewa Khola, and we made a camp on its banks. On the way to that campsite, we found a restaurant and store and they sold beer, and we bought many bottles and sat in the river naked and drank it. With the exception of that frightening night when the Maoists came and Sunam, to calm us, found us some chang, we had not tasted alcohol since leaving Num. Sitting on the banks of the Tamur, a river so sure of itself, it did not need to rage to look dangerous, just flowing along, with an abundance of little wavelets peaking here and there, but the wide span of it made me take it seriously. We all clung to its sandy banks, no one making bold gestures to swim into the powerful moving flow.

And here is something I shall never forget. I left my fellow travelers and went off to find a place to pee. I went off some ways, alone, away from the porters and the Sherpas, somewhere I thought it would be impossible for me to be seen. I was wearing only my hiking bra and underpants and so I felt exposed enough. In what I thought was a private moment, I proceeded to pee. Before I squatted down, I saw a mass of deep blue and light blue, but it was so far away on the opposite bank of the river, I couldn't make anything of it. And so while squatting and peeing, I decided, just out of my own curiosity, to wave to that mass of deep and light blue. When I did so, it not only waved back to me, it let up a cheer. I continued to pee and they continued to stand there looking at me.

We drank on through the evening, staying up later than we had ever done since we left Kathmandu. I stood outside and saw bats, the size of pigeons, swooping around me, hunting for insects that I could not see. That night was clear and bright, as usual, and if my dense brain had ever been able to understand the arrangement of the bright lights in the sky, I would have had even more enjoyment. I went to bed. We were drunk but I more so than the others, and the next day, walking up to Taplejung, the town that formally signified the end of adventure, as Tumlingtar had signified its beginning, I had a hangover that made me feel I was dying. At no other time in this period of walking in altitudes that must have surprised not just my body but my very being itself, did I feel so demoralized and ill.

I
had been told over and over again that to get to Taplejung, we would descend to the Tamur River, which was just under three thousand feet, and then walk up to Taplejung, which was at about six thousand feet. That morning when we started out for Taplejung, I found it hard to believe that the walk would be as difficult as it was described. I had covered a few thousand feet in a day on this trip and by now was used to long, tedious ascents. Of course, I had not done it with a hangover. We started out in that village above the Tamur River, a village beautifully kept, with many terraced gardens, full of vegetables, squash, beans, corn, and ornamentals, mostly plants, such as marigold and
Datura
and poinsettia. Along the way, from time to time, we would find a place for resting, a bench placed beneath a canopy of the
Ficus
love trees.

I walked up to Taplejung, passing through beautifully carved-out terraces, on which were growing food that I, a person who grew up on an island not far from the Equator, was familiar with. All around me was that lush growth of the tropical zone: corn, a plant native to the southern region of the Americas; potatoes, originating from that area also and hard-shell beans; and then nothing that I recognized for eating, just woodland, and the
Ficus
trees decorating the roadside at a place where it was comfortable to stop. There were many well-dressed people, men in suits for instance and women in dressy dresses, all wearing flip-flops and all walking with more confidence and speed than we, in our expensive hiking boots. Along the way the clouds hid Kanchenjunga, which was just an arm's-reach away, or so the distance made you think and feel. We looked and looked, hoping for that predictable unpredictableness, the weather changing when it seemed that it would never do so. But the clouds remained in front of Kanchenjunga, keeping it out of our view; and the sun shone on above us, pelting us with its rays without any letup. I struggled on, feeling sick, really sick for the first time, lagging behind everyone, with nothing to console me, certainly not the thought of some wonderful thing to be found that would be a supreme pleasure in my garden in Vermont. We passed by an army outpost, and that was frightening, for everything associated with the government was a potential target of the Maoists. We finally got to Taplejung and it made me sad to think of civilization. It was a crowded maze and a mess. Every fruit I knew of, apple, orange, pineapple, could be found as juice pressed into a bottle there. Every animal I knew, pig, cattle, chicken, its flesh free of bones, could be found in a tin there; fish too, there were tins of salmon and tuna and mackerel.

I bought a tin of corned beef and asked Cook to prepare it for lunch. Sunam somehow arranged for Cook to make us lunch in a restaurant. The view, right up to the cloud-shielded Kanchenjunga, was incredibly beautiful. While we waited for lunch we sat on a lawn, and on benches at that. The lawn was to be the place where our tents would be cast and we would spend the night. But the idea of spending the night in a city, hot and noisy with people going on with their lives, made us unhappy. It was hard to imagine that just a few nights ago, we were resting with the quiet and isolation of Topke Gola, that when I stepped out of my tent, I walked on stands of
Meconopsis
and
Primula
and tried to avoid, as I walked about, getting entangled in
Berberis
and juniper and small-leaved rhododendrons. Even the sky now was open in an ordinary way, no longer domed, suggesting the reality of the earth's shape and that we were magically, tenuously, hanging on to its surface.

Author packing up for the trip home

Dan then had a talk with Sunam and they began to make plans for us to walk to the airport, to Suketar, a place where there was no residing, just the place from which planes came and went. We were told it was five miles above us, but at the time, it seemed five hundred miles. Perhaps it was the end of the journey, perhaps knowing at reaching Suketar, there would be no garden, by which I mean no fruit-bearing plants that would yield seeds for me to collect and imagine comfortably flowering in the garden I have made in Vermont. Bleddyn found some
Codonopsis
in fruit and a few seeds on the way there, but they did not seem to be specimens new to us, we had encountered them earlier, and we all walked on with indifference. Suddenly, leaving our surroundings became paramount, just as at the beginning, leaving Kathmandu, arriving at Tumlingtar and all that it entailed, was paramount. So too leaving at the end had about it a desperation and cravenness. We wanted to leave and our destination was beyond Kathmandu, our destination was home and the comfort and beauty of our gardens. On the way up to Suketar, we saw many people walking down from that direction. They paid no mind to us, we were not worthy of attention in any way, we were not new to them. The airport at Suketar is a trailhead for Kanchenjunga. We reached the airport and found it filled with Nepalese soldiers armed in the usual way of soldiers and that the airport had a tightly enforced curfew. All lights had to be out at exactly eight o'clock and they would shoot with the intention to kill, without question, at anything to be seen moving after that.

A gloominess set in. We were at a trailhead for Kanchenjunga. There are a few ways to get to Kanchenjunga and where we were was one of them. A group of Italians who had just returned from base camp there was camped nearby. There was also a group of Germans. As Americans and British people, we felt free to make fun of the Italians but in a kind way. As Americans and British people we not only made fun of the Germans, we also hated them. For one thing, they had the best spot for camping at the airport. Places like the airport were common targets for the Maoists to attack, and the Germans, because they got to the airport before we did, had camped in a relatively protected area away from the potential line of fire. When we got there, the only place left to camp was the most vulnerable spot to be in: directly between the army and the Maoists. We had a dinner of noodles from a package with its accompanying flavorings at a restaurant that was owned by a beautiful woman who looked Tibetan and who told us that her husband was an officer in the Royal Nepalese Army. Dan and I couldn't quite decide whether that, her husband being on the government's side, was a good thing or not from the point of view of our eating in her restaurant. What if Maoists hated her in particular because of her husband's work? The next two nights we ate at other establishments. Certainly by eight o'clock each night we were all in our tents in our sleeping bags and the entire area became dark and quiet. We heard nothing from one side (the Maoists) or the other (the people defending the airport from the Maoists) and were so glad when the morning came without event.

By that time I became sick, really so, feeling unable to get out of our tent, could not even eat breakfast or any other meal, only drank water and went to the little tent that had been set up as an outhouse for us to expel matter that I had not even expected I had in me. For three days I lay in my tent waiting for an airplane to come and pick us up. Those days were bright and hot but the landscape in the distance, which held Kanchenjunga on one side, Makalu on one side, and Everest in the distance beyond that, remained veiled; and regarding all of it, I felt as if I was in the middle of a fable, a live one. For without doubt, those magnificent and legendary landmarks of the Himalayan landscape were all there but they were mostly hidden from me all the time I lay within sight of them. One day, through the mist and much cloud, Sunam pointed out some white piffle far away and said it was Makalu, and then I couldn't remember if he said it was Kanchenjunga. Now, I do not care, for Dan and I have decided that we would like to walk around the baseline of that mountain and so, even then, in the middle of not knowing if we would survive our time at the airport and the tension between the Maoists and the people defending the airport, we were thinking of ways to get back here, ways to look at the landscape and find plants that would grow in our gardens.

Those days at the airport, lying inside the tent in my sleeping bag naked, because I felt so sick that I thought I was dying, and dying then felt like a reasonable alternative. It wasn't the unexpected last-minute decision to walk up from the airport that did me in. It wasn't the hangover from drinking the equivalent of a bottle and a half of beer the night before when we were resting on the banks of the Tamur River that made me feel my own death was nearby. Certainly not being afraid of the Maoists starting an attack on the airport where we camped just as we were camping there. It seemed to me that I wilted from the cumulative effort of walking over and passing through the Himalayan terrain. The experience of having the day ahead of me teeming with an unfamiliarity that was a dramatic departure from any unfamiliarity I had been used to; the experience of having the day just passed seeming like something I had dreamt and yet its reality clung to me: I had collected some seeds within this dream, and as I was lying inside the tent all day sick, Dan and Bleddyn and Sue were cleaning and drying and labeling and numbering the bounty outside. The days were clear, the sky without clouds, the sun beaming down, and yet it was chilly. In the distance, in one direction lay Kanchenjunga; in the distance in the other direction, looking west, lay Makalu; but even the distance itself was all hidden in a shroud of clouds.

By the end of the third day of staying at the airport and hoping that the Maoists would not attack it, we were able to leave. We said goodbye to the porters and everybody else who had been with us since the beginning. Dan lamented that there had been no proper farewell of dancing and feasts and tears like the time eight years ago when that seed-collecting expedition had come to an end. But better no ceremonial goodbye and safe departure than a ceremonial goodbye followed by disaster. We got on an airplane, the kind that is always pictured in fatal accidents involving people from rich countries in the process of experiencing the world as spectacle. Everything went well. Through the windows of the plane, I saw the whole range of high peaks that are in Nepal. They looked like something on a calendar, permanent and in place day after day, month after month, year after year, a backdrop against which time passing is marked off. Days later, in Kathmandu, we heard that the very airport where we had camped for days, waiting for a plane to come and get us, had been attacked by Maoists and some people had been killed.

We spent three days on the roof of our hotel in Kathmandu, cleaning and drying seeds, labeling them, numbering the packets, getting them ready to be inspected and shipped out, after proper inspection by the proper authorities, to our gardens in Wales (for Bleddyn and Sue), Kingston, Washington (for Dan), and North Bennington, Vermont (for me). The weather was blessedly perfect for this: hot and dry, cloudless skies. As at the beginning, I saw the laundry of the same family hung out to dry on a clothesline on top of their roof. An orange tree, loaded with green fruit three weeks ago, was now equally loaded with ripe fruit and from time to time someone would come along and shake the tree, hoping to get the ripened fruit to fall down. The Himalayan crow, a bird of solid black feathers interrupted by a band of gray, like a necklace around its neck, flew overhead in its familiar unsettling way. When night came, we gathered up the packets of seeds, admired the fruit bats, which filled the night sky in almost the same way the crows had filled the day sky. We ate breakfast, we ate lunch, we ate dinner, all in a restaurant.

Dan, Sue, Bleddyn, and I were sitting on the roof among the seeds that had been gathered when suddenly we heard a loud noise, an explosion. It did not sound like thunder, it sounded like a bomb. We looked out and saw a black tunnel of smoke coming from a building nearby, perhaps one quarter of a mile away. While looking we heard and saw at the same time a loud noise and an impenetrable, black, ball-shaped cloud coming from a structure not far from the first one. We heard a third explosion but could not see where that came from. The Maoists had called a strike. All transportation was to come to a halt. All places of commerce must be closed. We gathered up our seeds and put them away until the next day, when they were shipped out after being inspected and the proper people allowed us to do so. And then we waited to leave this place, Kathmandu, Nepal, which held in it the dreams I have of my own garden. I remembered the carpet of gentians, seen as I was ascending up to the pass on the way to Topke Gola and on the descent from that. And then the isolated but thick patches of a
Delphinium,
six inches high, grayish, bluish, and hairy, abloom in the melting snow. There were the forests of rhododendrons, specimens thirty feet high and with their barks peeling off, an added interest. I never knew rhododendrons, seen packed up against a house, could have an added interest apart from the one packed up against a house. I remembered all that I had seen but especially I remembered all that I had felt. I remembered my fears. I remembered how practically every step I had taken was fraught with the memory of my past, the immediate one of my son, Harold, all alone in Vermont, and my love for him and my fear of losing him. I love the garden, my love for it had brought me to this place, walking in the foothills of the highest mountains on the earth looking for flowering plants, which were not endemic to my part of the gardening world, but would thrive in my garden. As I remembered the beauty of the deep blue starlit sky at night, the days of sunlight brightness and distorted distances, the days of walking among forests of maples and oaks and rhododendrons and bamboo, always at that time I was thinking of my own garden.