For the first time, I was alone in the mountains. It was a strange and suddenly very lonely feeling. I became friends with Dhananjaya, the WFP guy. We’d had dinner with him the night before. He told me the drought had gone on for the last three years; the Humli people needed much more assistance in order to survive. But WFP had dropped all the rice they had. It would last through the winter, and the program would continue in three months. Dhananjaya would be back then.
I hiked up to the makeshift helicopter landing area at the crest of the mountain, an area flattened by the hands of the villagers by chipping away the rock. The helipad was a twenty-minute walk up from the village. At the top, I dropped my backpack and leaned against it. I pulled out my well-worn book, Carter Beats the Devil. I was on my third time through it since first arriving in Humla; I practically had it memorized. The helicopter would arrive within the hour. I put down my book. There would be endless time to read when I was on the flight home, in the airport, back in Kathmandu.
For almost three weeks I had been so focused on finding families, on wondering what the weather would be like that day, wondering how I would get out of Humla, that I had spent little time just sitting and enjoying the landscape in this remote corner of the world. The view, now, was spectacular, with the river far below and the dramatic snow-covered Himalaya in the distance. I hoped that I would make it back to Humla one day, not for such an intense journey, but instead to visit the children who might one day be able to go back to their own families. Staring out at that panorama, I realized this was a fitting place to say good-bye to Humla, a place that had brought such difficulty and pain, but also such joy in meeting the children’s parents. I leaned back against my bag and watched the sky for the helicopter.
An hour passed, then two.
Ten hours later, I was still at the helipad. The helicopter had not come. For the last four hours I had stared at the horizon, too distracted to read. It was a mind-numbingly boring day, blistering hot in the sun and freezing in the shade. I hiked the short distance back down to the village. Dhananjaya, who was waiting in the village, knowing the helicopter would not leave without him, was frustrated and apologetic. He offered to let me stay the night in the house where he was staying. In the storage area beneath the house sat two hundred and fifty tons of rice from the World Food Programme, ready to be delivered to impoverished local villagers. I accepted his offer and crashed early.
Just after dawn the next morning, I returned to the landing area. I was frustrated to be delayed. Now I would arrive on the same day as my friends, unable to meet them at the airport after they had traveled halfway around the world to visit me. I apologized silently to them. It was frustrating, knowing I could not tell them why I was late. I was grateful that I had at least been able to warn them that I might be a day late if I was somehow delayed getting a flight home. But it was still extremely irritating, being so close, and having to wait another few hours to leave. I recognized how trivial it all was in the grand scheme of things; I had spent almost three weeks wandering through this desperate country, meeting villagers who had virtually nothing to their name, who had lived through ten years of war, and here I was moaning about having been held up a single day. I tried to put it in perspective, but I failed. This helicopter better be on its way here, at this moment, I recall thinking. I’m going to close my eyes, count to ten, and I better hear the helicopter coming. I began counting as slowly as I could, waiting whole minutes between each number. I opened my eyes. Nothing. I sighed, and closed my eyes again. Okay, this time I’ll count to twenty, I decided.
The helicopter did not come that day. Nor did it come the next day, or the day after that.
For five days, I waited on the mountain, on the rocky surface, in the sun and in the shade. The helicopter did not come. By the end of the fifth day, I was near despair. It was torturous to sit for hours on end watching the sky, willing a helicopter to appear. There was nothing but mountains, waves of them as far as the horizon. The landing pad started to feel like a raft in the open sea. I was as far away from civilization as I had ever been in my life, and I had no idea how I would get back.
In my days there, I got to know the children of Shreenagar. They would come up to the landing spot and watch the sky with me. The same six children always visited me. By the third day, they were up at the coarse-graveled helipad by 7:00 A.M., waiting for me to arrive. We couldn’t communicate, but it was nice to have company. I would pace back and forth, and they would pace twenty feet behind me. I would sit on a rock, and they would find a couple of rocks fifteen feet away and squeeze onto them, the older boys claiming the best perches. A few hours later I would be throwing small stones off the side of the mountain; just a few feet away, they would be throwing stones, aiming at the small, isolated trees and shrubs clinging to the slope among the low, winter-browned grass. When I went for another lap of the flattened area and saw them huddling, I knew they were planning how to approach me. They waited until I drew closer, then the eldest stepped out from the tight circle and into my path.
“You . . . daal bhat—” he began, pointing at me, then his mouth. “Hellycota.” He pointed to the sky—helicopter, he was saying—then back at himself, then at me again. “Running . . . me . . . you,” he said. From the eager pantomiming of the boys behind him, I understood that he meant that I should go down to the village to have daal bhat for lunch, and if the helicopter came, he would come running down to get me.
I looked around at the boys, and they stared at me, waiting for my response. I couldn’t resist; I said “Ke?” which is kind of like “Huh?” because I knew that they would erupt back into this grand charade to help me understand, and frankly, it was the only entertainment I’d had in a couple of very boring days. I made them do it two more times until they caught on that I was messing with them. Then I took them up on their offer. Anything to break the terrible monotony of the day and that empty sky.
On the third day, Dhananjaya asked if I would like to help with some of the distribution of the rice. I was happy to assist, having lived freely off the Humli people for the past three weeks. More important, I wanted something to do, a task to keep my mind occupied. We helped villagers load up their allotted twenty kilos of rice into panniers strapped to their goats—the same kind of crazed goats that almost took me off the cliff wall early in my journey. We watched the men drive their trains of goats out of the village and eastward, over the mountain pass, sometimes walking up to two days straight, back to their own villages.
Late in the day we had an unexpected visitor to the food distribution site. He walked slowly toward the villagers loading their sacks. They stopped what they were doing and moved away. I was in the house at the time, taking a break in the shade, but I could see it happening through the open door. The man wore fatigues, a local leader of what should have been the defunct Maoist army. I stayed inside, out of the way. I no longer had my document of protection from Humla’s Maoist district secretary—D.B. had taken it with him when he left—and I was far from Simikot.
I heard them talking outside. The Maoist’s voice was agitated, incensed. Dhananjaya’s was calm and reasonable. Their conversation couldn’t have lasted more than half an hour, but when Dhananjaya came in he looked worn out. He collapsed onto the bed, took a few deep breaths, and told me what had happened.
“He demanded five hundred kilos of rice,” Dhananjaya said. “I looked to see if he saw you—I am very glad you were inside. It would have made things much more difficult if he had seen you. He just wanted the rice. For his men, he said. I did not ask him what men. I knew what men. I told him no, it was not possible, the rice was for the villagers. I was very nice with him. He did not accept this answer. His men needed to eat as well, he told me. He could not deny them. This Maoist, he was armed. What could I do?” He paused, expecting an answer.
“What did you do?”
“The only thing I could do. I gave him the key to the storage room. And I said
‘Take as much as you want. Please just do me the favor of telling me how much you will take, since every grain must be accounted for and I must inform the United Nations of how much is missing.’ ”
“Whoa—that’s good,” I told him. It was good. The Maoist would know that stealing food would be a violation of the ceasefire. And that he would undoubtedly bring the wrath of his leadership down upon him if he defied the UN, jeopardizing the peace process over a few bags of rice for some men who were no longer part of an official army. “So what did he say?”
“I do not know the words in English. I would not translate them even if I did,” he said, smiling. “But he left. With no rice.”
On day five, there was a change in the sky. For the first time in weeks, I saw planes far overhead. They were heading north. That could only mean one thing: The airfield at Simikot had reopened. It had not snowed since that night in Ripa. In three weeks, the men of Simikot must have managed to clear the runway by hand.
We had a difficult choice to make, Dhananjaya and I. We could wait for a helicopter that might or might not come, or we could try to walk out, back to Simikot. We estimated in our condition it would likely be a four- or five-day journey if we went directly north. I counted the days on the calendar. It was December 20. Liz would arrive on the 23rd and leave the morning of the 25th. Even in the best-case scenario, I was all but certain to miss her visit.
Moreover, getting back to Kathmandu in five days was the good scenario. There was an additional risk to consider. If it snowed during our trek, the airfield would be snowed in again. That meant we would not only be trapped in Humla, we would have spent days walking north when the only way out of the region was due south. It would add at least a week to our journey.
Over tea, Dhananjaya and I made our decision. We would risk the trek to Simikot, gambling that it would not snow in the next five days. In truth, we felt we had little choice—it seemed the helicopter would never come. Dhananjaya was also injured, suffering from a bad back, so it would be a slow trek for both of us. As Dhananjaya asked our host to find us a porter in the village, I packed my bag. If I had left with Rinjin, I would be in Simikot right now, maybe even on a plane back to Kathmandu that day. I tested the weight of my bag, bouncing it a couple of times before dropping it on the ground. Then I went to find Dhananjaya.
Five hours after setting off down the mountain, walking north for the first time, Dhananjaya, our porter, and I arrived at the village where we would spend the night. We had not planned on walking so far, but three hours into our journey, when we were about to stop, we met a man on the path who changed our minds. It was a man Dhananjaya knew through the WFP. He was coming from the north, and he had news of the helicopter. He told us that the pilot had received orders to change his drop schedule. The pilot was distraught: he knew Dhananjaya was waiting for him, but Dhananjaya had no radio. There would be no more drops to Shreenagar for three months. I breathed a sigh of relief. At least we hadn’t waited.
“But the helicopter has one more drop, Conor,” Dhananjaya told me, translating what he had just heard. “It will be tomorrow, this man says. In Sarkegad.”
“Sarkegad? That’s still a day from here—what time will it land?” I asked.
“He does not know. It could be any time. But I think we must try for it. We can continue past this village, I know of another two hours away. We should get there before nightfall. Then tomorrow morning, we leave early.” He smiled. “We may get our helicopter after all, Conor.”
After an abbreviated night of sleep, we left at first light. Despite our hurry, it was too dangerous to walk the difficult trail at night. We hiked as fast as we could toward Sarkegad. We did not stop because we could not; Dhananjaya told me we had only a twenty-minute window from the time the helicopter set down to unload the rice before it would take off again. We had no idea when it would come. We were racing a clock, but with no idea of our deadline.
We trekked back along the narrow paths dug into cliffs high above the Karnali River. Trains of goats and buffalo cannoned toward us in the other direction, but by then I was instinctively hugging the rock and more sure-footed on the shale, having learned to compensate for my pained knee. The biggest problem was our porter. He was utterly unreliable—the single worst trait a porter could have short of homicidal tendencies. He lagged far behind us, and he had my water bottle. It was stupid to have left it with him, but it was an extra kilo, and I had thought he would be right behind me the whole time. Now we couldn’t wait for him, but neither could I drink, and I was painfully dehydrated.
For seven hours we walked without stopping even to sit down. I was obsessed with the helicopter. I strained to listen to the air around us, trying to detect any sign of the aircraft. I was tired. To keep my pace I repeated a mantra: No helicopter before the village. For hours I repeated this to myself, timing my steps to the quick rhythm of the prayer, parched and hungry and not stopping, keeping a steady distance behind Dhananjaya who walked thirty feet ahead of me.
Coming over a ridge too carelessly, I quickly found myself sliding down the steep path, forced to use my beaten-up walking poles as brakes. I slowed my slide, but the noise of the tumbling shale seemed only to get louder.
I froze and looked up. Dhananjaya had stopped. He was staring up the valley.
Seconds later, the helicopter screamed overhead.
We were an hour from Sarkegad.
I walked ahead to where Dhananjaya had sat down for the first time in several hours. I sat down next to him. In my mind, I replayed the minutes of the last twenty-four hours. I replayed the moments I had lingered when I could have been moving, and the extra minutes we had taken getting packed up that morning, the minutes wasted looking for my misplaced water bottle before we set off from Shreenagar. Those minutes easily added up to an hour. An hour that could have put us in Sarkegad at that very moment, climbing into a helicopter.
Twenty minutes later, the silence was shattered again, and the helicopter raced over our heads, down the valley and out of sight. After weeks of silence, the mechanical roar was otherworldly.
Dhananjaya continued to stare at the horizon. He looked exhausted, beaten.
“We are very unlucky, Conor,” he said flatly, and rose to his feet. We continued on.
We arrived in Sarkegad and collapsed. Dhananjaya could not continue. His back was hurting too much; he needed to stay at least a couple of days to rest. The difficulty of the day’s trek took a lot out of us. I knew exactly how he felt. All I wanted was to lie down in the middle of a field and fall asleep. I had grown up in a culture of automobiles, never giving a thought to the fact that in much of the world distances are still covered on foot. We were still miles away from Simikot, and we were shattered.
“I know you wanted to make it farther, Conor, but we need to rest here. We have come very far today. Your knee is bad, I can see it when you walk. My back is very bad as well,” he said to me. “I know many people here, we can stay with them. We will continue tomorrow, perhaps.”
“I’m not staying,” I said.
I wasn’t sure what I meant by that, really. It just came out. I could not go on without him—I didn’t know the way, it was getting dark, I did not speak the language of my porter, who anyway was completely exhausted and sat with his head slumped down. Yet I said it, and I meant it. I had to keep going. Alone, if necessary.
Dhananjaya tried to talk me out of it. The village elders joined us as well, and they tried hard to dissuade me. I did not understand, they pleaded. You do not walk in Humla at night. Even locals do not walk at night. You will get lost or attacked or slip off the cliffs; it is dangerous terrain even in daylight. You do not know what you are saying.
But I did know. I knew that if I waited, I was going to get snowed in again—it was only a matter of time. If I kept going, if I didn’t stop, if I walked at a fast pace, there was a chance I could make it out. I had been cautious on my knee because ev
en though it was feeling much better, I did not want to reinjure it and risk becoming incapacitated. Now, I didn’t care, I would run if I had to. I just wanted to get out. The panic date was approaching, the date when Farid would alert the authorities and call my family to tell them I was missing. I couldn’t imagine how difficult that would be on them; they were already worried. The only thing I could think about, though, was that I had to meet Liz. If she came to Kathmandu and left without my being there, that was it. We lived nine thousand miles apart. I knew, with absolute certainty, that I was looking at my one and only chance.
I told the elders of Sarkegad that I was continuing, alone and in the dark. I was getting back. There was no other plan, because no other plan included Liz.
Resigned to my decision, Dhananjaya set about helping me prepare to leave within the hour. Because my porter was as exhausted as I was, I hired another porter, a teenager, to join us so that they could share the load. Between the three of us, nobody had to carry more than twenty-five pounds. It was a paltry weight by porter standards, but I wanted to move fast. I said good-bye to Dhananjaya, promising to speak to him when we were both safely back in Kathmandu. And with that, my porters and I set off into the dusk.
Not long after leaving the village, we were walking in pitch black. Not long after that, the old flashlights used by the porters began to flicker. They were following a good distance behind me; when I turned, it was difficult to make out the faint glow of their lights.
My original porter was unsettlingly strange. I didn’t trust him. Earlier that day he had lagged far behind; when I retrieved my pack I saw that he had gone through it. I could not find anything missing, and I definitely could not afford to accuse him in the current situation. I needed him. I heard him whispering to the younger man, about what I had no idea, but it gave me a bad feeling.