Adventure Travel Silver Winner: The Power of a Single Note on the Breeze
by Stephan Morrow
There was a time not so long ago, when the South Street Seaport Pier was just an abandoned piece of cement and the glare of the sun off the water with the wind pulling at your eyes as you sat at its edge so far out on the river that it felt like you were on a raft - well, it’s not such a large exaggeration to say that you knew what the early mariners had felt like going up against the elements - even though you were right in the middle of the isle of Manahatta and down the block from the heart of the financial world. Living a life of nature, guerilla style in the middle of the city - unbelievable. Maybe that was the reason that Allen Ginsberg chose to read on that very spot when he held forth one day, reading Walt Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ against the backdrop of the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge. As you would expect, there was nothing pretentious about him, and he took me by the hand as a fellow India traveler and introduced me to Peter Orlovsky and we all chatted about traveling up in the Himachal Pradesh for a bit. A real peak experience for me, to meet the man who had written so many of the anthems of my adolescence.
But this last time when I had returned to the pier, some twenty five years later, I knew it had changed, but I had no idea that it had become an absolute mecca for tourists in N.Y. - Disneyland on the pier. Imagine Daniel Boone trekking along the Boone Road in the Appalachian wilderness, turning a bend and walking smack into colonial Philadelphia. Something like that. The empty pier had been turned into a tourist’s paradise with excursion boats docking, letting thousands of day trippers off for lunch, shops selling tons of trinkets, three full tiers of restaurants. It was far beyond my wildest nightmare - a mega-amusement park replete with sleek young vixens strutting their stuff and bulging out of their fluorescent halters in the breezy sun.
But to put just a slightly rosy-fingered hue on all this, as I fled the pink and blue umbrellas that topped the gazebos of the eateries, I followed mostly Chinese walkers up along the path right by the river and stopped just under the green tinged, beige blocks of The Brooklyn Bridge, mesmerized by the brown skin of the rock pillars holding up the structure of the bridge looking like nothing less than the haunches of a titanic dinosaur crossing the river - frozen in time. As I sat there on that anonymous bench thinking that I was again appreciating a bit of invisible beauty right in the middle of the city - ode to my guerilla days of celebrating ignored urban beauty out on the abandoned South St. Pier I breathed in deeply. Ahh, my old friend, still there, still magnificent. The blocks’ carved beauty and the majesty of the stone structure of the bridge was still capable of awing me, married as it was to an afternoon breeze off the water. The space actually had an echo, arching as it did perpendicularly to the FDR Drive and there was a constant wash of sound from the cars breezing by overhead. A large gull looking like it had been dipped in oil was worrying a dead sardine on a tiny beach as a cohort of his watched to see if there would be any spare morsels he might also receive. Alas, none were to be shared and the smaller bird took off. Small wavelets licked at the concrete slabs green with seaweed - all of it brought me back to the sensuous joys of the old days on the pier. A salty breeze right off the water is so lulling. I sat there just sucked along by the wake of the boats and the steady gush of air running over me. And it got better: a flock of geese suddenly appeared out of nowhere, dirty brown from their travels, and worked over this little beach pecking at the seaweed and sand for a morsel or two. Then a high thin droning note sailed by my ears. I focused on it and lo, it was coming from a bagpiper apparently practicing in a pocket sized parking lot across the wide roadway under the elevated highway. I could never resist the atavistic power of the keening of pipes and I settled back and let the sounds carry me away. The high pitched strains faded in and out, and as they were buffeted by the wash of sound from the cars above, they morphed into the strains of an Indian flute traveling through the trees up in the foothills of the Himalayas outside a tiny village called Manali above Simla, where the Brits would move the seat of government every summer to escape the 130 degree heat in Delhi. It was in Simla that they and their families would spend cool summer vacations comfortably amidst the tree canopied thoroughfares and green mountains.
My experience in Simla was a little bit different. It was indeed cool under the canopy of trees covering the main trunk road that went North, and my traveling buddy at the time, Matty Alou, a Finninsh lad, and I had dumped our knapsacks for a rest before hiking on. Mine was an old khaki, surplus-variety from World War II, with several outside pockets which I found really handy. It weighed between 30 or 40 kilos. That’s when we heard the flute music. Its melody was poignant and perfect for the green tree lined path of this Northern Hill town, but there was something about it that sounded hauntingly familiar. It was Matti who cannily came up with why. ‘Duncan’, the Paul Simon song - has Peruvian flutes playing the refrain”, he said. Apparently Simon was big even in Finland. I didn’t say anything but I was really taken aback by this revelation. A feeling came over me that was like ‘What’s wrong with this picture.’ Here we were as far removed from modern culture as you could get, the mountains of India - and even here in the middle of that ancient country - it had reached even here. I think it’s impossible to express how far from the familiar those mountains are. We might as well have been Connecticut Yankees in King Arthur’s Court or Saladdin’s. Somewhere in the twelfth century - with a black bullock cart passing up the road as the main means of transport. Black rubber tires were the modern version of a cart - in the old days the wheels were wooden. Some still were. Dark wood shacks or the more luxurious stone dwellings built into the side of a hill, made up the mountain villages that we hiked through, but there wasn’t much to distinguish it from the middle ages really. Even the clothing was the same. The food. It was rare to come across even a radio up on the mountain roads. The real reminder of the modern age was the almighty bus that would come through once a day, dust cloud surrounding it as it kicked up a fury of powder from the road. In fact, that’s what we were headed for, the bus depot, further up the mountain road.
In any case, the beautiful melody of the flute drew us like moths to a flame and we followed it to a large tree where a figure was sitting wearing a turban, but instead of finding a grizzled Indian saddhu, when he turned around, there was a young European and fellow traveler who was the flutist. Before long a conversation sprang up and he became the ebullient tourist guide of the area: where to get cheap food, what the road was like up ahead to Manali, our destination, where the cheap ‘guest-houses’ were ( we wanted to camp out), and without missing a beat, shifted to describing sites for tents, and so on. He was dressed in white baggy linen trousers, the uniform of the locals, except his were really dirty and ragged, even for India. And the aforesaid turban, also grimy in the extreme. He was an old hand and as his story slowly unraveled the way his turban had, it emerged he was not there altogether by choice.
I should explain that when you travel your passport is your lifeline in and out of the country. And people in that country crave to have a foreign national’s passport. It was your most valuable possession aside from hard currency. The locals would like nothing better than to buy it if you were selling, or indeed steal it if that opportunity presented itself. It was also known clandestinely that travelers who were desperate would sell their passports to raise cash and then try to get another from the embassy, claiming to have lost it. Obviously you couldn’t do that on a regular basis, once or twice and that scam was shot. I had mine in a thick brown cowhide flat pocketbook, hung around my neck by a thick tong made from the same cowhide. This was a tradition among travelers and actually went as far back as Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and I had carried it that way from the time I had bought it in Herat from a village vendor. It was a second hand wallet and the man who I had bought it from had a whole selection of things that he was selling displayed on the rug - from shoe laces to pots and pans to antique rifles. At the time the idea of just setting things out to sell like this was another piece of the picture that showed we were in t he middle ages somewhere. A supermarket was light years away from this basic marketplace model. And years later in the eighties it was with much irony that I remarked to a friend as we walked past Astor Place where there were spreads like this on the sidewalk with young Bohemian folk setting their wares out. That I had seen the original and it was in Afghanistan and now the lower East side had caught up to it.
The Afghani merchant and I had bartered about the price and he had asked for much more than I was willing to pay, but in the end he threw up his hands and dismissed the wallet and said ‘Here, take it. I’m not doing this for money. I don’t need it.’ and accepted either the $.40 or $.50 for it that I had offered. He was a proud man and I think he was being sincere. I’m a little embarrassed now when I think about the deal we struck. He probably could have gotten more from a wealthier traveler, but when you’re that far away from the known universe with a couple of hundred dollars in your backpack and no prospects for more funds, you get very Darwinian. But that’s when he invited me to sit down and have some tea and I sat down on his Persian rug and had a long conversation with him. It was the first time I was offered a piece of candy to place under the tongue, which was the local way of sweetening tea. And I could tell he was really curious about who I might be and what was on my mind. His English was broken but pretty good for asking basic things. How much he understood was not too clear but we went back and forth for quite awhile. It was clear that he really did want to interact with me as a young representative of the west and saw himself as a progressive sort of Afghani. His bronzed skin against the sheepskin jacket and embroidered vest was striking and I couldn’t help but marvel at something absolutely biblical in his face. The large aquiline nose, the beard, the Caucasian eyes, all of it went back to faces from the land of Canaan. It was the Bible coming to life. Absolutely. I can’t say it was a particularly brilliant conversation, I remember that. Either I wasn’t that trusting after our haggling over the price of the wallet or I had difficulty bridging the divide between us, but I sat there for quite awhile passing the time of day, if nothing else. Bartering is a custom that was foreign to an American and something you had to adjust to: it’s adversarial stance. Buyer vs. seller wasn’t exactly my idea of utopian brotherhood. But you got used to it and tried to be as humane with it as a device as you could. ‘I can’t pay that but would you take this ‘, was the answer to the first price. And then, ‘No thank you.’. Turn to leave and throw over your shoulder ‘Too much.’. Merchant would drag you back either by word or yanking on your arm. Then the final agreed price. After awhile you got used to it and by the time I returned it was a jolt to see prices posted that were non negotiable. An addendum to this is that one of the first phrases you learned in any country you landed in, was ‘How much ‘. Greek, Turkish, Pharsi, Hindi, Thai, Mandarin, and on and on. After that was how many parts of the local denominations equaled a U.S. dollar. Crucial to know this for survival. I have to also note that another phrase that lived on the tip of my tongue was when I was in India. ‘Namaste’ - ‘peace’, and it seemed to come up after every other sentence.
Anyway, my Afghani friend, asked ‘Where are you from ‘. ‘New York’. ‘You must be rich to come here.’ ‘No, I have little money’. ‘But why do you come here, business ‘. ‘No it is old. Old. Beautiful.’ ‘Ah’, he answered, ‘Tourist’ ‘No’, I tried to explain the difference between travelers and tourists but that was more difficult as a concept to communicate. Not to mention that fact that just five minutes before we were haggling vehemently. Now to try to explain universal brotherhood was more hypocrisy than I could justify to myself so I pointed to the mud buildings around us and said ‘Look. Beautiful walls. That door.’ pointing to a mud structure with an ancient and gnarled wood door. ‘Bible. Same. Very very old.’ Embarrassed by this he lowered his head and said, ‘Yes, yes. Old. Very old. New York. New. Modern. Beautiful’. I could tell he had an image in his mind of the sparkling towers of Oz so I pointed to the mountains in the distance. ‘Look . Beauty. God. Beauty of God,” spreading my hands wide. He looked at me curiously then and I shut up. I can’t say what he was thinking and I often wonder what these Afghani folks felt when encountering the young vagabonds that had taken to the road with their tendencies toward non-materialism and who were certainly not interested in brandishing a modern lifestyle, or the wealth of the West. Did we inadvertently encourage the Taliban with its own rejection of the modern By young pilgrims visiting their countries and relishing the old ways, did we support their own suspicion that traditional ways made for a better life We had rejected the modern and so did they, though as it turned out, through Moslem fundamentalism, in a Frankenstein kind of way. Or worse, did we show that the West was weakening and that the warriors of a new Caliphate would succeed in a war against it If we were examples of the best and the brightest of the West’s offspring, than it had decayed and was being rejected by its own progeny who were no more than wandering street wraiths, lost unbelieving souls and with no stomach for the fortitude of a warrior. Frightening to think of that. I prefer to think of us as ambassadors of good will, and by being a little more compassionate and understanding of local habitats and customs of eating and sharing these things with local folk, something of a sense of comradeship was spread from these encounters. In the end, who knows what the effect of this underground culture had on the countries it extended into. It always makes me wonder. Lately, when I see the young special forces soldiers over in Afghanistan and Iraq, I have a strange sense of irony creep over me. Because of the sense of idealism they seem to hold - believing in the sanctity of their mission and the sacrifices they make and the distance they feel from mainstream culture based on their experiences living and fighting in small villages that exist somewhere in the middle ages. Well, the question that begs to be asked is whether they’re so different from what I did. Living with indigenous people and immersing ourselves in local cultures. The only difference was that in the dangerous world of today, these young men and women are part of a military campaign. The irony of that is a cruel one, but undeniable. But the idealism they have may not be that different from what we had. We all carried knapsacks. Lived close to the land. Hiked all over it. Everything similar except for the weaponry. The question that lingers with me, is there that much difference A young idealistic body of underground elite cadre changing the world for the better either peacefully or by dint of arms. So the young idealistic Afghanis became the Taliban and we became committed special forces groups. Finally, the only conclusion that I can bring out of this is that the world turns and we turn with it. Things change.
I did grow very fond of that wallet and it served its purpose well - which was to safeguard my passport and funds. And I got to love its rough hide finish and its musk, mostly a combination of leather and my own sweat. It held the smell of the life process. After all it stayed around my neck almost continuously for another fourteen months.
But back to my comrade up in Simla. For his part, he had a faded cloth bag on a sash around his shoulder and whipped out the most battered, moth-eaten passport in the last stages of disintegration - which might have been the point - from Australia. And while at the beginning of our encounter he had been expansive and led us through the ins and outs of the local landscape, by now he was gasping with angst, he was so desperate to get out of India. That was his version of hell - permanent residence in the Himachal Pradesh. As he brandished said passport with a photograph that was clearly newer than the book it was glued into, he pointed out that as ersatz as it looked - ‘I know, I know, it does not look good. Not pretty. But look. Look at that quality. Good no …’ He was trying to show that the seal impressed into the photo was very well done, totally convincing - and didn’t we agree Not wanting to discourage him in his now obviously pathetic wretchedness we nodded in agreement. I could only hope that he would run into a series of blind officials at the border - though I had never heard of any. Also, it should be noted that his accent was well, French. After sharing some of the victuals we had in our sacks with him - we could at least do that - slowly, with as much revulsion as compassion at this bad movie happening in front of us, we moved on. It was sad and I never forgot that guy. The ins and outs of his story were so many and the solutions so few that the cloud of darkness that surrounded him is etched permanently in my brain. Helping him was so beyond our scope that we wished him the best and left him there exiled in Simla broke and without a passport. He went back to playing the same melody, Duncan, on his flute - small solace that it was, and the music was now even more poignant than when we first heard it. That haunting melody, anthem that it was, that sang of the smallness of man that the Andes revealed.
This did happen sometimes. With all the stories of the masses starving in South Asia, what really broke your heart was a foreign traveler who was at the end of his rope, far, far from home. He wasn’t the only lost soul like that we encountered. In fact, the place was sprinkled with young Europeans who had hit the end of their road. And our erstwhile comrade up in Simla must have been a cousin to some other young Frenchmen we came across later and that we sat with under a huge shade tree. Idyllic, the beauty of the tree’s leaves and the serpentine roots spreading out in all directions, it was the kind of scene one fantasized about of what the East was like before you reached it. It had started congenially enough with a conversation with an old bearded Saddhu-like character who turned out to be an Englishmen and who claimed an intimacy with none other than R.D. Laing. My knowledge of Laing’s book ‘Knots’ brought us together instantly and he led us in a discussion of the deeper intricacies of Laing’s work. Now he was in his element, holding forth to these newly acquired acolytes and we were all ears. This was the dream, India: sitting under a Banyan tree discussing truth. The shade of the tree seemed to draw a multi-national set of wanderers because besides Laing’s colleague there were some young Frenchmen also lounging around it, quite a group. Seemed like they all knew each other. So it was quite a congregation under that tree, except that it would be more accurate for it to be called needle park. Because these young Frenchmen were all morphine addicts. They let on that morphine ‘was cheap, bro’ so cheap here. All you haf to do is walk into ze drugstore and buy zome. By ze way, could you spare some change ‘ Lots of banter and everyone was in their glory until one of the French addicts started cleaning out his syringe. A stream of water pissed on his neighbor junkie and that one threw a hissy fit from getting wet. Since they were both lying prone the kicking and slapping and screaming that ensued was not particularly vicious, more along the lines of a French sort of vehemence, but it was enough to encourage us to move on and we gently extricated ourselves from the congregation. Well, the universe takes care of its own. Namaste.
And not too long after leaving Simla we were engaged in our own crisis. It seems de rigeur that when you traveled in other countries drivers seemed to have one foot in the grave and the other on the pedal pushing it through the floor of the vehicle . Clearly the dude in the athletic-wear outfit at the wheel was related to Charon of the River Styx, but we figured he knew what he was doing, it was a regular route, so we just sat back and sucked it up as we careened around the curves. I might add that this time, the bus was painted like a holy elephant, one of the Hindu Gods, and festooned with enormous silver buckles for doorhinges, motor-hood clasps, all made to look like the harness of the elephant. We figured this was pretty good karma for our juggernaut because most other vehicles would be inclined to give the right of way to a marauding elephant. And this had been true for curve after curve. So we had been going for quite awhile with the bus rattling upward around the mountains fast, constantly crunching gravel, gears whining at the top of their RPM’s. The view was stunning anyway, wide vistas of the lower mountains of the Himalayas loomed up ahead out over the edge of the mountain. The general rule of the road was that each time vehicles passed each other, a negotiation - kind of like a dance - would happen. One or the other would pull to the side and the other would keep going. This didn’t seem to apply to this bus however because our driver didn’t give up his right of way and forward motion the whole time and I guessed that maybe buses had the right of way. And indeed, we kept passing vehicle after vehicle, hour after hour, and there was nothing unusual about another large two ton truck approaching from above us on the road except for it’s robin egg blue paint . Until there was a body check with a large whap and thud. A screeching, tortured metal sound hit us. The blue truck had not pulled over, at least far enough anyway. The good news was that even though the truck had veered away and went off the side of the road, it only went into a ditch. The fact that we had just passed a section of road that went straight down into the vortex of eternity - that would have been a couple of thousand feet right off the side of the asphalt - made us feel very religious. But the elephant was slashed and injured and to get the bus fender and side straightened out and the tire repaired was going to take a long time. A passing car was sent to the town up ahead to make a phone call to the bus company back down in Simla for a repair truck. Then we had to wait. We didn’t talk about almost passing through the needle of life into eternity. Just quiet about that as we all sat there on the side of the mountain road, bonded now, there were about thirty of us, newly made comrades. And in a small gesture of cosmic justice, our driver, apparently because of his location up front in the driver’s seat, had bounced off the wall of the bus, and dislocated his shoulder. So his driving for the day was over. Much to our relief we gave secret thanks to Ganesh. Suddenly the brick wall of problems that our friend in Simla was up against seemed to be thinner and more lightweight. Or we had been ushered into a state of being that was not so different from his - but without the balm of flute music. If he had been living on the edge we had been sucked ever so close to going over it.
When we finally reached the village of Manali and got off the bus we were somewhat humbler than when we got on. As we trekked further and further into the woods beyond it, I turned to Matti and taking in the stunning green of the surrounding woods said ” That’s what price we paid…” Matti said “what ” He really wanted to know what I was talking about. “The crash on the bus. That was the price we paid - for this.” Matti took in the woods, swiveled back to me, gestured with his head toward the mountains in the background and said, “Right. God’s country”. I spread my arms out in an embrace of the limitless white vistas and said. “Yes, Matti, this is it. We got here. God’s country.” Huge pine trees and rocks the size of small houses dotted the landscape and the ground was covered with the most brilliant tight-knit grass like a golf green - except it was all natural. From then on that’s what we called it as a kind of running gag out of the euphoria of being there. “Good morning. God’s country, you know.” Matti would smile from ear to ear. “Yes. God’s country”, with his drawling Finnish accent. It was a wonderful feeling, as if we had been rewarded for our pains by being given a special trip to the first step on the stairway to heaven. Wide gray vistas of white massifs that were bigger than seemed possible to exist on the planet, topping lower green and gray expanses. This wasn’t a picture, those monstrous masses were just out there looming in the distance. There was a palpable reality to it all that made the skin crawl with its realness. Even the air had changed. We were in the middle of summer and down in Delhi it had been close to 130 degrees Farenheit, and the fact of life was, that people just didn’t go out from 11AM to 2PM, period. They just stayed in the cool of the shade, indoors or wherever they could find it and simply didn’t move. Stifling, lung scorching, tinder dry, air and sun rays that could fry an egg on the pavement, if there had been a pavement and not just dirt roads. That’s what it was like. I can still recall the first time I saw the canopy of an English umbrella floating toward me from down a road in the middle of that midday heat. At first it seemed to be a disembodied shimmering black shape floating on the superheated eddies of air. Then I could make out that it was being carried by an old turbaned Indian. This tradition of using a rain umbrella in the sun was because its black dome drew the heat and dissipated it, somehow giving some protection to the carrier as he somnambulated down the yellow dusty inferno of a road. Yet now, a day or so later, at almost 10,000 feet up here in the mountains, there was a chill in the air, enough to wear the wool sweater I carried in my pack. In fact, the Rhotang Pass of The Himalayas was about ten miles further up and still had ten feet of snow even at the height of summer, so there were wild torrents of ice-melt water rushing down from the mountains and there were a couple of ravines around us that had churning white water going through them they were so full. These streams were putting out a symphony of sound - wild rushing water sounds that blanketed everything within earshot. Just a constant gush of crashing, raging water and the result was that it discouraged anything but the most crucial communication. Idle chatter was out. Impossible. You might as well have tried to carry on a conversation next to Niagra Falls, and after we had adjusted to this enforced silence, really began to understand the meaning of being thoughtful. Mindfulness. And how so much of the time people give in to the insecurities they are feeling and chatter like birds. Not discussing anything really substantial, just making whatever sounds that would melt a little of the glacial isolation that surrounded a person. Without having that option of coming out with all the banal things we say just for the sake of bonding to a fellow human falling away, I never felt calmer and more settled inside of myself. Of course, that day after the bus accident we were still living under its influence so it might have been all part of it, but I don’t think it was just that. That rushing sound Sssshhhhhhhhaaaaaahhhhhhh. Rrrrrroooooaaaaaarrrrr - non-stop with no possibility of ending, for me, was transformed into a felt reality of the veil of experience that we all lived on one side of and that I now understood could be rended at any given moment to reveal that darkness just on the other side of it. The sound and its overwhelming power carried me to a place where everything I looked at, the tall pines, the house sized boulders, the mountains in the distance, all became a flat picture that could be pierced by a spear of eternal darkness. That sound created all this. Regardless of how much denial we labored under during our daily preoccupations and obsessions, the picture could be smashed. Maya. Illusion. Near death does that to you. Maybe that’s why Pollock’s painting appealed to me so much.
After we set up our tent we met a couple of Europeans, a guy and a girl, who had been living in these woods for several months. And they were very welcoming, inviting us to join them for freshly baked djapatis. Pine, smoke, and baked wheat, is the most heavenly perfume imaginable. Again, on the reverse side of the coin this time - the conversation was especially warm and rich and engaging and we sat around their campfire cooking djapatis on hot rocks as long as we could until the dusk had begun to glow purple and after a little while longer, the green color of the woods drained away and everything turned gray. It was hard to break away, we were that fragile and being with them was some kind of consolation for what we had been through. This was good chatter. After going through many sincere words of thanks - and acknowledging that this was the kind of encounter that made for peak moments in traveling - we stood up to return to our camp. We bid them good night and turned to retrace our steps to our own campsite, but by the time we had taken a hundred steps in the direction of our tent, it was pitch black. Not just any nightfall, this was as if a curtain had come down and snuffed out any last ray of light. We could have gone back to our new friends’ campsite, and I don’t know if it was pride or not wanting to spoil such a perfect encounter, but we kept slowly picking our way through the woods with Matti following close on my heels. I muttered something about how there was no moon and was greeted with silence. I realized that he wasn’t there. Gone. I called out to him and from a shockingly long distance away, I got a faint answer. How could that have happened He was just behind me a second ago. That’s the kind of thing that can and does happen in pitch black darkness. By calling out and listening to him answer, I was able to slowly track him down, but it wasn’t easy at all. The dread that I had experienced when I was alone in the darkness, the total panic, was the worst that I could imagine - with a bevy of harpies screaming a thousand kinds of disaster bursting into my thoughts. After that, I grabbed him by the hand and held it in an iron grip. There was nothing Hansel and Gretel about it, just two very desperate souls trying to divine their way through impenetrable darkness. A case of the blind leading the blind if there ever was one, but together at least, allied against the foreboding blackness. We continued on again with me leading, putting one foot in front of the other. Slow going but definite, except truth be told, I wasn’t too sure of our direction any more. It was tantalizing knowing that our tent had to be no more than a couple of hundred meters away and if we just kept going I was sure we would get close enough to find it even in this pitch black night. So we kept pushing on as demons of the night danced around us and continued the excruciatingly slow method of one foot at a time. Then one foot went out and didn’t come down on any ground. Just air. I caught myself and froze for a second in shock, and then yanked my foot back, losing my balance and falling back into Mattie. Like a pair of dominoes, both of us fell into a heap, floundering around in the darkness. After we collected ourselves, I crawled ahead on all fours this time and again tried to find where the ground was, sticking my arm out to feel earth, but there was nothing but air. Just to make sure, I jabbed my arm into the black ether a few more times. It didn’t come up with anything solid at all and after awhile it was clear that we had come to the edge of some large hole. Maybe something else, but it was hopeless to continue on in that kind of darkness, so at that point, I decided we would have to deal with spending the rest of the night out in the open, right where we were. We crawled a few feet, found a tree and leaned up against it. The chill of the night was really settling in now and it penetrated through our clothes like they weren’t there. I could hear Matti’s teeth clicking and as for myself I just couldn’t stop my body from shaking, arms and legs doing a dance like they were disembodied members with their own will. As I sat there doing my St.Vitus’ dance it was almost as if I was seeing my physical self from a distance, from outside myself. Finally, I got an idea that I think was from a Boy Scout survival guide. We carefully lined up our backs, flat, one against the other. Just a little external heat from outside the body helped a little. It was the best we could do. We toughed out the rest of the night just sitting there shivering non-stop and waiting for the eternity that it took to reach dawn. There was nothing more to be done except to listen to chorus after chorus of the hissing stream still roaring somewhere out there in the blackness. After awhile the only thing to do was to wait for a break from the tremors, a brief respite from the body’s shaking when somehow a little surfeit of warmth would build up and there was a quietude. Then the shakes would start up again. Remaining in this state for several endless hours, the thinnest gray light started seeping up from the ground. At least that’s where it seemed to be emanating from. Probably just moon glow reflecting from the leaves. Must have been about 4:30AM. But it was enough to see a whitish mist, and the topography started filling in again. We could make sense of the world again through the mists, though just barely. And sure enough, just a couple of dozen meters away, with its tremulous orange sides blazing away, like some kind of mad day-glo extraterrestrial, was the tent. As the light kept growing where we had been sitting also became clear and we were in fact sitting at the edge of a wide ravine that went down for about fifty feet. I had crawled up a slight hillock to where it looked like an enormous cleaver had just come down and sliced off the end of it. As I stood there and shuddered at what might have happened, I found myself staring at bushy leaves. That meant that we were at treetop height, that trees had grown in this ravine up to the top of the cliff I was standing on, you can calculate how high that was - the thought of plunging down that in pitch blackness was beyond harrowing. My knees got weak and I sank to the moss covered earth, saying over and over, ‘Thank you Thank you Thank you’. Not really to any particular omnipotent and benevolent being, just out to the cosmos really, or to the Spirit of the ravine if it had one. I could see across now and it was a bend in a stream far below so that there were cliffs about a hundred yards across the way. A dark shadowy glen would have been my or I should say our grave. ‘Yes, that is good. Yes, I agree. Very lucky. ‘ Matti behind me, was muttering. Eventually, we gathered ourselves together and carefully, very carefully, even in the brightening light, made the final leg of our journey back to the camp. It was clear that in God’s country there was no safety net against the demons it could harbor, that it could drop you into a tunnel of darkness and pain as easily as onto the soft, moss-covered bowers of its green leafed heaven. If before there was a hushed quality to the words between us, now there was a survivor’s gasping humility.
So ended one of the longest days of my young life and yet it was only another day in the life of a traveler in India. As I look back on it now, the day had been like an enormous set of Chinese boxes, each one opening into the next stage of the day with one adventure leading inexorably to the next. But that’s what life on the road in India was like more often than not, certainly what was so inspiring about it if you can call it that and if you survived. The safety net was made of gossamer thread and could be torn at any moment by the slightest budge, a shift of an inch as it were and as the driver of our bus found out. Much rawer than the vicissitudes of living in the West, no matter what you might feel during rush hour on the subway. Funny where a single note on the wind can carry you sitting on a park bench…..
ANY_CHARACTER_HERE
