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Dispatch: Like the Weathered Landscape Interim Base Camp, China - Monday, June 19, 2000
Up, again. Another load to ABC, this time a mix of personal and group gear: my cough drops and film, the three-meter dome communications tent for our Mountain Zone technology, toilet paper, and ultimate drink mixes. Only 55 pounds — modest compared to the loads Paul Teare and the porters have been hauling — but I can still feel the bones in my feet and my hips aching from the 90-pound load I carried three days ago. I scramble up a hill, grabbing onto a precariously perched rock the size of a VW Beetle. It is a huge chunk of milky quartz, covered with flashing bronze-colored crystals. A meteorite? No, just a bit of this beautiful crumbling planet — things fall apart. Underneath my feet, loose rocks slip on the icy surface of the glacier. If I carry these loads long enough, will the pack on my back turn into a hunk of granite? Will my hair hang straight down my back like an icicle? Will my feet sink into the mud at the bottom of a green glacial lake until I am rooted in place? I reach the top of the hill, and take in the vista on the other side. A roaring river, each drop racing to the ocean. Fins of ice, shearing the glacier in half with precision and impunity. A black bird, viewing the world at a distance with a cocked head and a single eye. One of the Balti porters working for the Japanese team is coming down from ABC. We exchange greetings, and I find myself studying the contours of his face like a landscape — every twist, every wrinkle. It is a face that has led a life shaped by wind and snow and sand, roughened into a texture made more beautiful by strife. How do we choose what to lose? How do we decide to give up the security of our homes, to live on the edge, where the instruments of time test our strength? This porter is working to support his family. He was carried here, to this part of the world, by invisible forces that sweep his life along like a grain of sand in the river. Maybe he didn't choose to endure this hardship; maybe it simply happened. Our choices, small microcosms of our lives, are sometimes shaped by the events around us. Events wither and weather and sometimes forever change us, but we survive. As I look at the Balti man perched on a rock in front of me, I realize that I, too, have been shaped by the forces of life. To attempt to ignore the events in my past is as futile as to attempt to keep living through them. They simply are part of me, part of each one of us, a part of ourselves that we can't choose to lose. A part of ourselves that, like the landscape around us, slowly disintegrates over time. All I can do is take each new challenge, each difficult day, and hope I weather it as gracefully as the landscape and the faces around me. — Heidi Howkins, MountainZone.com Correspondent |
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