DISPATCHES

Howkins

"That water comes from K2," Fred commented yesterday, pointing to the river that is gushing from the snout of the glacier.

"D'ya think this rock came from it, too?" Jeff Rhoads asked, flipping a particularly unattractive, non-descript hunk of granite into his hand. After three weeks of traveling halfway around the globe, we were all feeling slightly dejected that the mountain wouldn't even acknowledge our presence.

And then, at 6:10pm Xinjiang time this evening, the veil suddenly lifted. The clouds obscuring the horizon of the glacier dissipated, and there it was — the upper third of K2, Qogori, Ch'ogori, the Great Mountain, cold and beautiful and uncompromising, floating above the horizon. With turbulent, wind-blown mists shrouding the lower part of the vision, it had an aura of surreal uncertainty, and after the initial shouts of surprise, we all simply stood and stared, muttering completely inadequate expressions of awe.

There are moments when all the experiences of a lifetime are compressed into a few minutes of awareness, when you know that your reality is finally merging with your destiny — when you realize that nothing is an accident, that your life is intertwined with the multiple worlds that diverge and coalesce around you for a reason. This was one of those moments for me, and I found my mind slipping into that eerie realm of knowledge that is best approached through dreams or prayer.

Later in the evening, I noticed a gorak, the Himalayan bird of prey, rising up into the vaporous sky, circling on some invisible thermal. There was some thing so raw and elegant about the movement that I stopped to stare again, awe struck.

Under the bird, our own movements are so frenzied, so precarious. From the gorak's perspective, we are ants, crawling across the folds of the Earth, in a silent race against time, against the steady motion of the currents and seasons, shifting from sun to storm, rock to snow, summer to monsoon.

But of course the gorak's movements, too, are confined by the currents in the atmosphere, the cycles of the Earth. The gorak, too, suffers the same restless life energy, the same perpetual motion, the same hapless glee.

Somehow, pausing in the midst of my own restless movement, I realized again that our movements are part of a larger, more fluid reality. A reality in which nothing is untimely, and no end is unnatural. A reality in which risk is a tool and fear is superfluous.

A reality in which climbing, like all movement, is a reflex.

— Heidi Howkins, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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