Excerpts from
Tierra Incognita
It was January. They tell me that rain was falling in the Himalayan foothills; pervasive, almost indistinguishable from fog. A bus was on its way to Ghorka, the town at the base of Annapurna. A second bus barreled down the road from the opposite direction. The driver of the Ghorka bus went into a panic. Fearing a collision, he cranked open the accordion doors and threw himself onto the pavement. By doing this, he ensured that the buses would crash. They collided, violently, and the bus bound for Ghorka skidded off the road. The Ghorka bus flipped over, probably more than once – I imagine this happening with remarkable slowness, the bus heavy, resisting gravity, a large and restless man muttering in his sleep, torsioning against the sheets – until the bus landed hundreds of feet down on the bank of the Daraudi River. In newspaper photos, the bus is upside down. The roof is angled like a ramp for a motorcycle stunt, its back end smashed flat against the carriage. My brother Adam was killed that day. His wife Karen died with him. In all, thirty-five people died, all Nepali except Adam, Karen, and a lone Australian. Like Adam and Karen, the Australian must have been on his way to trek Annapurna. The 26,545-foot mountain, considered one of the most dangerous climbs in the world, is called Annapurna after the Sanskrit name for the goddess of harvests. For Hindus, Annapurna is the mother who feeds her children. Without her care, there is starvation. More than ten years later, it occurred to me to fix the event with the kind of details that were my stock in trade as a journalist. I picked up a Lonely Planet guidebook for Nepal at a used bookstore. I am not a spiritual person. The crinkled tinfoil snow of the Himalayan massif did not evoke a higher plane of existence, accompanied by the tinkling of temple bells. The mountain’s bright, flat Cubist planes reminded me of the parallel world of Bizarro in the old Superman comics that my brother loved. In Bizarro's world everything is fractured. Bizarro’s face is Superman’s face, only reflected in a broken mirror. Metropolis is a city of irrational shadows; not the white of snow but the flat black of fractured basalt. When we were children my brother and I pronounced the name of Superman’s city Metro-POLE-us because we had never heard the word said aloud by an adult. We spoke our own language, a patois of jokes and allusions and deliberate malapropisms (that’s a pigment of your imagination!). The two of us lived like wild children in a Manhattan apartment facing an oily river that moved so slowly it might have been rain-soaked granite. Adam's death affected me physically, in ways I was not prepared for. We might have been Siamese twins and with his death, half my vital organs were torn away. We looked alike, and although we became different in many ways, in childhood we grew together the way strangler fig trees reach their tendrils around the stones of the temple at Angkor Wat. After enough time passed, if the branches are pried apart, the temple will collapse. The irony is that the temple will be destroyed no matter what. The fig trees are slowly strangling Angkor Wat, cracking the stones as they thicken and grow. Each knotted tendril is both ugly and beautiful, like a ballerina’s deformed foot. A few weeks after Adam died, I drove to a shopping mall in the southern end of San Francisco. The neighborhood was unlike the rest of the city: suburban, houses like the proverbial little boxes, it could have been anywhere. At the mall I bought a thick velour bathrobe and a set of expensive knives. These objects did not reveal intent. I wasn’t planning to kill myself, or anyone else. But impulses conflicted. I wanted to be safe, muffled inside the adult equivalent of a crib blanket. At the same time, I felt compelled to hold something sharp and dangerous. These purchases reflected my new sense of reality, life stripped to the elemental. I am embarrassed to admit I also bought a book on meditation. This was the proper way to deal with death, I’d been told. I laughed later, when I found out the author had been a heroin addict before he found out that he could get high from meditating. At the time, I was willing to try anything. I probably looked like a heroin addict myself, wandering around my flat wearing my thick bathrobe for days on end, forgetting to eat or bathe. But I had not lost the middle-class American’s relentless drive for self-improvement. Every morning I parked myself on a rattan chaise lounge to meditate. Shutting my eyes, I conjured the view from a hill at my old summer camp in Vermont. Green mountains in one direction, a valley in another. Inside the fence, a revolting misshapen cow. A city kid, I had always given it the widest possible berth. My last stop was a clump of trees. Dense and dark, they reminded me of the trees in The Wizard of Oz, the trees that berated Dorothy before hurling their apples at her. The more I concentrated, the more sinister the trees looked. Is it time yet? I asked myself grimly. I cracked open my eyes to scan my watch. Five minutes. I always seemed to have five minutes to go. Breathe, I told myself. Fucking breathe. God, I hated meditating. Adam and Karen died on January 19. I tried to confront their deaths. In retrospect, I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. My father, whom I adored, had died when I was twenty. My mother was a good-looking woman with an alcohol problem and a narcissistic personality disorder that threatened to overwhelm me for the first half of my life. My lover, who had been my professor at college, was facing the realities of a drawn-out divorce, and after ardently pursuing me, announced he was incapable of love. He was probably right. I had no one. When the news came of my brother and his wife’s deaths, I was negotiating a contract for my first book. When spring came, I went to work. I traveled to the Sonoran Desert where cactus shaped like anemones and sea cucumbers gave you a sense of being underwater yet mysteriously able to breathe. 1995 or 1996 Blood streaked my hands like veins. I didn’t notice the blood until after I climbed out of the cave. My lungs felt hollow from my recent bout of panic, but I was exhilarated. I had entered another world. We were traveling in a field of volcanoes, a dreamlike place where cinder cones rise like apparitions in a blue desert. Enormous craters hide themselves in a distraction of cactus and rock, until, with no warning, the ground gave way beneath your feet. A geologist named Dan Lynch had given me permission to tag along with a group of graduate students and scientists who wanted to see the Pinacate Desert in northern Mexico, a few miles over the border from Arizona. The Pinacate is the largest and most complex lava field in North America, and it had attracted, over a period of about fifty years, a small cult of people who considered it their personal turf. There were no signs in the Pinacate in those days, and the only accurate map was hand-drawn and passed along only if you knew who to ask, and asked nicely. The scientists in our group, who included an ethnobotanist and his girlfriend, the daughter of a famous conservationist in the desert Southwest, had a particular goal in mind: I’itoi’s Cave. Hidden in a labyrinth of pahoehoe, ropy Medusa-like lava, the cave was a hollow lava flow, indistinguishable from the thousands of flows flung across the desert sands like the octopus arms. The cave was created when a lava flow moved so fast that it outraced itself. Air cooled the outer skin of the flow, but inside the lava kept moving, leaving behind a hollow tube. Wind and weather thinned the top until it collapsed, leaving a twenty-foot hole: a jagged, empty swimming pool. As we approached the cave, the lava flows seemed to grow increasingly frenetic, a welter of harsh and jagged arms that guarded the cave. By then we were accustomed to walking, almost dancing, on the cracked reddish black lavas that shifted under our feet like broken crockery. Looking at your feet hurt more than it helped: at noon in the desert, the sun was blinding. Dan pointed to a twisted outcropping of lava that was like a cairn marking the cave’s black mouth. “An owl!” someone shouted. I looked up too slowly. All I saw was a moving shadow, a cinder flying up into the blinding blue sky. “That’s impossible,” argued one of the women. “Owls are nocturnal. Aren’t they?” Nobody answered. “I’ll stay up here,” the botanist said. I looked up at him. His curly dark hair and hyperthyroidic eyes reminded me of a Byzantine icon and he carried himself with a seriousness that suited his looks. Because he was an ethnobotanist, he had studied the culture of the local Indians, the Hia C’ed O’odham. He knew that owls are considered a sign of death. In many cultures, from the ancient Greeks to the Navajo, owls are seen as envoys between worlds: civilization and wilderness, the conscious and the unconscious, the world of the living and the world of the dead. I thought he was being pretentious. But I also sensed that the owl had drawn an invisible line around the cave. The botanist and his girlfriend wandered off. The rest of us massed uncertainly at the cave’s edge. I’toi’s Cave didn’t look like an educational French cave where Neolithics painted on the walls and one could muse about the beginnings of language, art, perhaps civilization itself. It looked like a bomb crater. “We’ll go in pairs,” Dan said. “Take turns. Who wants to go first?” No one said anything. The botanist had made us feel immoral. “I’ll go,” I said. “Is anyone else ready?” “I am,” said a stocky young woman. “Have you done any rock climbing?” I asked. “Yeah, some.” “Good,” I said. “You go first.” She laughed. I watched her, and followed her handholds down the broken walls of lava. Ten feet, twelve feet. There. Sand had pooled on the floor of the cave. As I landed, I crow-hopped to avoid an animal track. The track was faint, almost fossil-like. “Do you know what it is?” I asked. “A pronghorn,” she said. “Look, he’s so tiny.” We marveled at the delicacy of the hoofprint in the sand. They call the Colorado the Red River for the way the sediment tints the water, but when the sand dried, it turned light, a flight of golden silk carried a hundred miles on the wind. The pronghorn seemed equally ephemeral. I couldn’t imagine how the small, deer-like creature lived on the punishing white of the surrounding playa. The playa stretched horizon to horizon, ground down mercilessly by sun and weather until it was hard as tusk ivory. I stared at the track longer than I needed to. I’d always been claustrophobic. I was putting off the time when I would follow the geologist into the shadowed overhang of the cave. “Ready?” she asked. I nodded, swallowing. Soon we couldn’t see any light apart from the yellow cones of our headlamps. “Let’s turn off our lights,” she said. “OK,” I said. “One,” she counted. “Two….three,” we chimed together. I felt the darkness. A black wind was everywhere, and nowhere. The rocks lurched, coming towards me but not touching. Dense gravity strained my lungs. I pulled air against the tight drumhead inside my chest, pressing against it. Trying to hold out. I didn’t make it very long. “Sorry,” I said in a small voice, struggling to keep from sounding hysterical. “Can we turn them back on?” “Of course,” she said, but I had already switched on my light. Facets reasserted themselves. Planes of rock. Her plain face. “Have you been in caves before?” she asked. “Not like this.” She laughed, and although I was mildly embarrassed by my cowardice, I was relieved that I could make her laugh, thinking this might compensate for cheating her of a longer descent into the darkness. Under her brown cap of hair, she looked excited, like an athlete. “Look,” she said, pointing up to the ceiling of the cave, which was low at the point where we were standing, practically touching our heads. “Water sign.” A dusting of hard white speckles. “Calcite,” she said. I shook my head. I’d never heard of it. “It rained here, and the water seeped in through the stone. The chemicals separated, and the calcium carbonate hung on. It’s like limestone, or chalk.” “Stalagmites and stalagcites?” “Stalactites,” she corrected me. “Hard to imagine water here, isn’t it?” “Impossible.” She touched the rock again, softly. We took the measure of the cave with our eyes, following the light of our headlamps. “Let’s turn them off again,” I said. The geologist looked at me, a question on her face. She looked as if she wanted to protect me. “Are you sure?” she asked. “I want to know how it feels,” I said. “OK,” she said. “One, two…” Lava clasped me to its memory of fire. I inhaled it, choking as if the Colorado River sand was piling up in my lungs. The red river. (I want to see the body, my mother kept saying.) The volcano's blankness came into me. HOUDINI In the southern California desert where Charlie Manson chewed gum and dreamed of dismemberment, there is a red-headed Irish lawyer with skin that’s like water with a scrim of undissolved powdered milk floating on its surface. He is the last person who should live in a place where the sun rarely loosens its grip. But he lived there anyway. “Why is it that certain people love the desert?” I asked him. “For example, why are you here? “Claustrophobia,” he answered without missing a beat. Laughing, I couldn’t imagine why I had never thought of this before. I come from a family of urban-bred claustrophobes. My mother, for instance. She refused to live anywhere but on the East River, where Manhattan Island shears off as cleanly and precisely as a layer of sand collapsing from a dune. Perhaps gazing across the river made her believe she could escape. Or that she was protected from invaders. Either way, my mother always liked coming right up to the edge. |
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