Chasing the Phantom
Stok Kangri The Roof of the World October 2009Of words I am Om, the Word of Eternity. I awoke to pain. I often hurt upon waking, especially after sleeping out of doors on a thin pad as I had just done. Old injuries come to the fore in the early hours, including those of the avalanche I had survived the year before. It had snowed during the night, but now the sky was clear, and a few stars were still visible in the dawn twilight. Lying on my side, I could see the spreading luminescence of the sun, the orb still hidden behind the mountain ranges of Tibet to the east. Sleeping out in the open in the high mountains is always a humbling experience. Opening my eyes up here in the middle of a clear, moonless night is like awaking in outer space. I was at 4300 meters (14,100 ft). At this altitude, more than half the atmosphere, counted as molecules, is below. Here one can see more of creation than can ever be imagined. I always look forward to spending a night in the open over 4000 meters above the ocean of dusty air, cradled in the womb of stars. I put my hands behind my head and contemplated the fading points of brightness in the sky. Inhaling the cold air, I watched my breath condense and swirl above me in the early morning light. The weather would be clear today, and I would see the impossibly blue Himalayan sky. I had missed that sky. A few weeks before, I had been l on the summit of Mt. Rainier in Washington State, and I saw that sky again for the first time in many years. I had lain there on my back in the snow, in the sub-zero sunshine, staring. My eyes had been full of tears. Almost as soon as I returned to the dusty, flat world, I purchased an airline ticket. Twenty-four years ago, during a solo climb near here, I had a moment of letting go. While putting on my crampons, alone, watching the sunrise over Tibet, I was suddenly beyond loneliness, fear, greed, the whole condition of life. I felt subsumed into something much greater than myself. I felt quite prepared to die in the next few hours on this climb amidst such splendor, knowing I was eternally a part of it. But how do you look for something that is everywhere? That is everything? Perhaps you pick something hard to find. And you make that your goal and metaphor – a fleece, a grail, a unicorn, or some other phantom beast. And then you see what you can find along the way. After I had finished my breakfast and was packing up my gear, one of the guides from the trekking party wandered over. He had berated me the evening before for not having a tent or real sleeping bag and seemed to think that I was quite crazy. He seemed amazed now that I was still alive and cheerful. Shan is the Ladakhi word for the snow leopard, the “ghost cat” of the high places that even many locals had never seen in their lifetimes. I met a local guide once who, although he made a living taking trekkers out in the mountains to look for snow leopards, admitted to me that he had never seen one himself. Although the previous evening I had told this Tibetan guide the purpose of my being here, I think that he took me a bit more seriously now, for even though I seemed under-equipped by his standards, or rather the standards of the tourists, he was used to catering to, I was obviously not ready to bolt down to the valley after spending the night out in a snowstorm. Or maybe he thought I was just crazy — as he smiled and walked away. Maybe I was a little of both: experienced and crazy. I had been going to the mountains alone since I was a teenager. In 1985, at age thirty-five, I spent six months wandering and climbing in the Himalayas, much of the time alone. I had started that trip, a one-year journey around the world, in a Japanese Zen monastery and, nearer the end, had landed in an Indian Ashram. I have always been attracted to the concept of withdrawal from the busy world for inner reflection, having experienced my first retreat in a Catholic monastery at age eleven. Even at that age, I had been absorbed by questions regarding life, death, fear, love, and the inexplicable flux of human consciousness. Where was my place in this imponderably vast ocean of infinity? Seldom, I believe, has there been a day in my life when I haven’t, at some moment, been astonished to be alive. |