DISPATCHES

Howkins

	click for dispatch photos

Today is a welcome rest day for me, a brief respite from the arduous task of ferrying loads from the mid-way point up to ABC. I have washed my hair, my socks, and my et cetera, the first warm water bathing session I've had since we left Yecheng some two eons ago.

It is another sky-blue summit day, and I can't resist sitting up on the moraine above camp after my bath, ogling at all of the peaks that line the glacier. There is one with a pure snow dome, a silky line of white etched against the dusty blue sky. Another with striated black-and white summit ridge, folds of granite thrust through the crust of the Earth before the dawn of vision. A third with a double-tooth fang, twin rock pyramids that cap a sheer black face.

"6022, 6014, 6302," the Chinese map says. Altitudes (in meters) only. No names. Why name a point on the map if you never go there, if no one has ever been there before? Names are a means of possession, of making things a part of our personal realities.

It reminds me of a cartographer I met in the drainage of the Braldu river, on the other side of K2, several years ago. In places of no names, names of places can change, depending on your point of view. "The place where you find water" may be the same as "the place where the ibex come to drink", or "the camp site by the river". The cartographer was frustrated with his Pakistani guides, who were giving him different answers for the same point on the map. "Look at this," he told me, handing me his notebook with visible agitation, "I have recorded four possible spellings for the name Urdukas, all phonetically incompatible. And they say there are three peaks over here," he jabbed a pencil at the map, "that all go by the name of Mount Pata Nahi."

"Mujea pata nahi," I later learned, means "I don't know", in Urdu.

Perhaps we should be slightly more tolerant of those climbers two generations ago who chose to simply assign their own names, and their own meanings, to points on the globe.

Points like Everest, and K2.

Meaning, after all, is a matter of perspective, a constantly shifting, changing thing. Take the search for the Yeti. Called "Alma" by the Northern peoples and "Yeti" by the Southern peoples, these creatures are reputed to average five feet in height, have a repugnant scent, and be covered from head to toe by coarse silver or black hair. They are seen very rarely, and the primary evidence for their existence is hair samples, footprints, and undocumentable sightings. Some Yeti scholars believe that they are visitors from another planet, but until a specimen is caught, final proof is missing.

Yet for many Himalayan peoples, the Yeti does exist, beyond any shadow of a doubt. They protect their children and animals from it, and offer advice on how to survive a chance encounter. It exists, because their fears are real. Real enough to give it a name. Like the climber who gazes for hours at an avalanche-prone slope, they realize that there is a fine line between visions of the possible, and tangible realities.

With our Western obsession for exploring and naming the external world, we tend to forget that there are other dimensions of reality, realms of fear and passages in the labyrinth of the mind that can also be charted, named, and explored. That our perception of the world, however scientific, offers only a crude and temporary approximation of the truth.

— Heidi Howkins, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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