Beyond the Summit (3 page)

Just under 17,000 feet at Gorak Shep, Dorje, ten porters, a cook, and two kitchen boys slept huddled together on the dirt floor of a yak herder’s hut. A mixture of yak dung and mud plastered the dry-set stones of the one-story building. With only loose fitting, wooden shutters covering the windows, the wind flicked its icy tongue between the slates and around rough-hewn edges. Shivering, Dorje tugged the wool blanket over his head and reminded himself that he’d survived this cold before. Barefoot and inexperienced, poor Ang Lahkpa snored loudly enough beside him to bring down an avalanche. These m
ikarus,
the white eyes sleeping in their warm tents with foam pads and down bags, treated the Sherpas better than most foreigners Dorje had worked for.

As a biting cold cut through him, he remembered his first porter job four years earlier in the year of the dragon, what the
mikarus
called 1964. Having just returned home at age sixteen after ten years in the warm Solu further south, Dorje had awakened to his first snowfall since a young boy. Excited, he ran barefoot outside and stood watching each flake, a silent and glorious thing of beauty, settle loosely on the ground. Half an hour later he ran back inside, his feet red and numb, determined his father must buy shoes for him and his younger brother, Nima. When their mother left with another man ten years earlier and took her boys with them, their father had promised he would come often, but he never did. Unable to forgive him, Dorje wanted to demand warm shoes, but his father’s presence as he strode across the room in a blood red, heavy woolen robe intimidated him. The sleeves hanging loosely off the shoulders allowed Mingma to free one arm and adjust body temperature. The high leather boots moved in a whisper but Mingma’s square features with high cheekbones and dark, glinting eyes commanded all those who came near. Tall for a Sherpa and strikingly handsome, he wore his long, black hair plaited and tied with a red ribbon, resembling the Tibetans with whom he traded crossbreeds.

Dorje had hoped for stronger footing before he stood up to him, but this couldn’t wait. Cramming the words to the roof of his mouth, he shoved them out hard and fast with no chance for retreat. “You must buy us shoes and do it right now!” he said, astounding even himself with his brashness.

Anger slowly rose through Mingma’s body and settled into his shoulders. “I can’t afford them. In winter, farmers don’t need dung for their fields or to plaster their walls and my animals aren’t producing.” In a voice that offered no allowance for further discussion, he added, “When they calve in the spring, I will sell butter, milk, and cheese to buy shoes.”

Teetering on the precipice of the rift separating them, Dorje plunged right in. “We won’t have feet left by then. You haven’t helped us in ten years and I don’t need you now. I’ll make my own money.”

“Doing what? Carrying bags for people who don’t belong here? These
mikarus
invade our land, soil our temples with their muddy boots, leave their garbage and toilet paper along our trails, and anger our gods. No son of mine will work for them. As long as you live in my house, you will do as I say and tend the yaks with your brother.”

Dorje’s confidence faltered. After ten years of waiting and yearning for his father, he wanted to feel like a six year old again. In his head, love, resentment, and fear bickered over who was right and refused to form a single emotion he could grasp. So he banished them to their separate corners. Unable to find words to fill the vast empty space between him and his father, Dorje had no choice but to exit the room in silence.

Frustrated, he turned to the only person he remembered from his early childhood—his father’s best friend, Pemba, who had accompanied him on trading expeditions to the north. Standing outside the man’s door, Dorje stared at images unlike the lettering in Mingma’s Tibetan scriptures. He then entered the lower level reserved for animals at night and climbed a narrow, dark stairway to the large, open room on the second floor used as a living area. As in all Sherpa homes, a bench seat and low tables stood under the front windows opposite a wall of shelves displaying the family’s wealth in an assortment of brass pots and water containers. Family life centered around a floor hearth near the door in a room otherwise devoid of furniture.

Small in stature with ears much too large for his face, Pemba stood straight backed and explained that Edmund Hillary had just built an airstrip at Lukla to bring in supplies for an intended hospital. Tourists could now fly into the Khumbu in forty-five minutes rather than hiking two weeks from Kathmandu. “It’s easy money. I opened the first teahouse in Namche with an English sign that says SHERPA LODGE GOOD FOOD, GOOD BED and they come to me.”

“How do I get some of that money?”

Pemba motioned toward a man and woman on the bench seat nearest the hearth that was traditionally reserved for the senior-most male member of the household. “Those two want to see the monastery at Tengboche. Only the Japanese are foolish enough to come in winter. The porter they hired in Lukla refuses to go higher in the snow without extra pay and demands four times as much. With a schedule to keep, they need to go up tomorrow but refuse to give in to him.”

“I’ll take them.”

His eyes nervously flitting from one object to the next like a songbird, Pemba lifted himself taller on the bench. “Don’t tell your father I had a hand in this. He blames me enough already.”

“Blames you for what? I remember you two laughing and sharing
chang
.”

“Another time,” Pemba answered with a pinched quality to his voice. “Another time.”

To avoid confrontation with his father, Dorje spent the night and rose early to stuff three cumbersome duffels into a bamboo basket. To put the
doko
on, he had to sit on the floor, slip his arms through the leather side straps, and tip his head back to fit the tumpline snugly over the top. Pemba helped him to his feet and steadied him while Dorje eyed the strangers. Their hair was thick and black like his, but their round faces lacked the distinctive, high cheekbones inherited from his father. They wore matching brightly colored pants, jackets, hats, boots, and gloves. Never had Dorje seen so many clothes on one person at one time.

In the only shorts and shirt he owned, he started out ahead of them trying not to grimace under the weight compressing his neck. With the Japanese chattering behind him, he plodded upward, one foot after the other over frozen ground. When the Japanese man pointed to a mountain, babbling something, Dorje gave him the Nepali word for
snow-covered mountain
. Excitedly, the man quickly wrote it in a book and pointed to the next one. Chuckling to himself, Dorje gave the Nepali for
another snowy
mountain
. This preoccupation with naming everything made no sense to a Sherpa whose language didn’t even contain a word for summit.

For five hours, they climbed straight up through pine, black juniper, and rhododendron. With every step, Dorje’s legs burned and cramped. When it suddenly began to snow again, each flake was no longer a silent and glorious thing of beauty but a cold, wet, and miserable enemy. Gesturing wildly, the woman ordered him to remove the
doko,
untie the ropes with his frozen fingers, and unload her duffel so she could get out another sweater, heavier jacket, and a wool hat from the bottom. While she bundled up, he sat there in bare feet that had long since lost any feeling and his entire body shaking so hard he thought it would fall apart.

At Tengboche, they went to the house of Pemba’s brother, Changjup. Sitting by the fire in his sopping pants and shirt, his feet searing with the pain of thawing, Dorje watched the Japanese change into dry things. Once the woman was warm, she began jabbering and flailing her arms at the smoke rising from the fire and fanning out along the ceiling. When she opened the shutters and leaned her head out coughing, Changjup shooed her back inside and slammed them shut.

He threw his hands in the air and yelled in Nepali, “What would she do, heat the whole mountainside? Don’t they know how scarce wood is?”

The snow ended during the night, ushering in a crisp, clear sky at dawn as the sun rose over the mountains and bathed the monastery in amber light. The penetrating, unearthly sounds of oboes and eight-foot, telescoping horns announced the beginning of daily prayer. After leading the Japanese up the wide stone steps, Dorje instructed them to remove their shoes and hoped their feet froze. The dimly lit room smelled of butter lamps and juniper incense. Brilliantly colored images of Buddha, various gods, lamas, and mythological scenes decorated the ceiling and walls while
mandalas
and cloth
thankas
hung from intricately carved rafters.

Sitting in two rows facing the center aisle, sixteen monks recited the
sutra
from long folios open on low prayer tables before them. Their hair shorn close, they wore sleeveless burgundy robes with gold cloths draped over one shoulder. They chanted in a low, monotonous intonation to the quiet insistent beating of a drum and the moaning of long horns, punctuated only by the occasional clash of cymbals. When the Japanese crouched only inches from them snapping photos without their consent, Dorje removed the couple from the temple as quickly as possible.

In a meadow outside the monastery, the woman started bouncing and squealing, “Everest, Everest,” as she pointed to a mountain Dorje knew as Chomolungma. Its triangular peak immense and remote with a long, graceful plume of wind-driven snow, it seemed aloof and formidable with its upper pinnacles of jagged rock rising out of steep glaciers and gleaming ice, soaring above all others. Mesmerized, Dorje knew he would someday stand on the summit like the famous Tenzing Norgay did before him.

The Japanese woman pulled him out of his trance by shoving her camera in his face and pointing him towards Everest. Looking through the hole, Dorje watched the mountain move closer. When he used only his eyes again, Everest still loomed in the distance. Curious thing, this black box. She put his index finger on the red button and motioned for him to wait while she stood beside her husband on a rock directly in line with Everest. Thinking how they had left him wet and shivering while they added layers of clothing, Dorje tipped the camera just above the summit of Everest and pressed the button four times, shooting only a brilliant blue sky with not a cloud anywhere.

He carried their duffels
three more days down to the small airfield at Lukla and waited for their twin otter to arrive. When they were prepared to leave, he bowed with his palms together and flashed his most engaging smile. “
Namaste
.”

“
Namaste
,” they replied and then did something that blew apart his angry feelings and scattered them over the mountains like gray ash. The man pulled two sweaters, four pairs of wool socks, a pair of long pants, and a wool hat from his duffel and just handed them over to Dorje. More clothes than he had ever owned at once in his entire lifetime. He stared with incredulous eyes as the man removed the coveted, brightly colored jacket and added it to the pile. Dumbfounded, Dorje flashed another smile and watched as they boarded the plane for a place beyond his comprehension. With the clothes, the agreed-upon six rupees
¹
per day, plus a tip clutched in his fist, he forgot about how exhausted, cold and miserable he’d been, how his head felt as though it had been shoved down his spine, how he feared his feet would never walk straight again. His strength, tenacity, and winning smile had gained him a fortune. He was indomitable.

Having spotted boots in a shop that sold used expedition and hiking gear, Dorje raced in and jumped up on the counter. “I want those,” he said, pointing to a brown pair with red laces.

The man lifted them from the shelf and handed them to him. Running his finger over the hard, black sole, Dorje wondered how his feet would find their way on the path at night or grip a swaying bridge. “How much?” he asked, thinking he could buy a pair for Nima too.

That’s how it is
, Dorje still repeated to himself even now, four years later as he lay in the yak herder’s hut at Gorak Shep. Beside him, Ang Lahkpa suddenly woke with a snort, shivered all the way down his spine to his bare feet, grumbled about the cold, and fell back asleep. Soon the snoring resumed and droned on as it had every night. Dorje tucked his blanket tighter and chanted his personal mantra—the only thing that made returning to this horrible, frigid place bearable
. The mikarus pay many rupees so I will simply smile and endure and take them up the mountain.