It took us five days to trek up the side of the mountain. In that time, I got to know our tour guide--a rough-looking gentleman--goes by the name "Carl." He's what they call a Sherpa--real "native"-looking fellow. Like someone you'd see in one of those picture essays about emaciated third-world villagers done up by some fresh-faced, do-gooder right out of college, with a double major in photography and whatever else it is that entitles you to capture the "reality" of third world countries.
This guy Carl turns to me about halfway up this goddam behemoth of a mountain and he says: "USA Man, I do not wish to continue. But I do for you. And for your country. I wish to show you what you can not see in a place of big cars and lots of monies. I wish to humble you, USA Man." He says this in broken English with no hint of irony or condescension. "Other USA Man come and they say: My God, it is beautiful--this mountain. Like they've never seen mountain before."
"Oh?" I say, not understanding what this poor fellow, dressed in rags, is getting at--if anything at all.
"Yes, USA Man," he says. "They come and you can see--in how they see mountain--something change. There is light in their eyes. For the first time, they see."
At this point, I am famished. I haven't had an honest-to-God decent meal in weeks. I've survived solely on plants. Rabbit food, basically. I turn to Carl and I say, "And what does that mean, exactly? "'For the first time, they see'?" I am a bit testy when I say this, but I give Carl the benefit of the doubt, figuring maybe his crudeness can be attributed to rusty English and/or the very obvious culture barrier.
"Oh, USA Man," he says, practically apologizing. "I do not wish to offend. It is just that--I can tell you're upset. I can read people like that. Like I can read other USA Man and see the light in their eyes for the first time."
"You're out of your gourd," I tell Carl and I try to explain this whole "light-for-the-first-time" nonsense to him by way of analogy. "You ever stop to think, Carl," I say, "that maybe these other 'USA Man' are so mesmerized by the mountain because they're in a new country, experiencing this mountain for the first time? Don't be such a mystic about it," I say to him, tilting my neck back and draining the few remaining drops of sun-warm water onto my tongue, where it is absorbed before it reaches my throat. "I know, being one of these Sherpa characters it's your job to say weird shit, but let's face the facts, here. You go to America and you see the big, shiny cars and the "lots of monies" and the skimpy-skirted bimbos and the rest of it and you're going to look pretty goddam lit up, too, my friend."
Carl looks at me, his eyes wide and not comprehending. He turns away, scans the scene he's seen one million times before--his eyes squinted, trying to keep out the sun and the flies. "USA Man, I have no idea what you say."
"Forget it," I say, and pick up my pack, ready to hit the trail again.
***
It was maybe an hour after the sun set when our guide--Carl's rich, white, non-native employer--took us to a ledge overlooking a vast albeit limited range of the dusty earth below. The moon smiled arrogantly over everything, turning the once sharp-edged trees into non-threatening black-blobbed versions of themselves. This is where we set up camp.
The other men unfurled their expensive department store tents. They blew up their air mattresses and took their final piss of the night before settling down inside their tents.
My tent was about as basic and shoddy as a tent could be. It was something I found in the attic above the garage. I don't remember buying it, so my guess is that I inadvertently inherited it when the wife left for good.
A lot of the men had tents that came with an extra padded layer they could lay down underneath the tent to avoid sleeping on rocky or uneven surfaces. My tent didn't have this extra layer. The bottom of my tent was just as thin as any of the sides. So laying down on especially jagged surfaces--as was the case that night--felt like laying down on an ancient, dried-up sheet of dinosaur vomit with only a windbreaker-thin division between your back and the clumps of earth and rock made sharp by millions of years of wind and erosion.
Since comfort was out of the question, I lay awake most of the night, plotting out what I could see in front of me onto a map in my head. I started from the very specific. Specific trees. First: the ones obstructed by shadows and night. Then: the lighter ones. I did this with every visible and non-visible patch of darkness I could see, until I made the map so crude a fancy-pants art critic would think I was some kind of Rothko genius, able to oversimplify the world--or at least the supposedly inspired (from what they rave about in those damned travel brochures) world in front of me that night--into strangely-shaped blocks of black and white.
The exercise kept me up most of the night, even when I was able to convince myself that it was helping me fall asleep. The rest of my group--all dorky dads from nowhere-ville suburbs State-side--slept soundly, muttering under their moustaches dream nonsense. I looked over at one guy--this guy had the kind of face that drives you to anger for no intelligent reason. He was laying on his back, with his arms folded under his head. The flap of his tent was open, rustled gently by the midnight breeze of the mountain. I could tell that he did this intentionally--and I had more than a sneaking suspicion he did this so, later, he could tell his boy-scout son all about how he fell asleep watching the stars and how the stars looked different at such a height--like you could almost reach out and touch them. Give me a break, I thought. I wanted to gag.
When I couldn't take it any longer--thinking about all the horseshit this guy would tell the wife and kid back home--I got up and relieved myself in his canteen. Just a splash, though. I didn't want him to know that he was drinking pee. It was enough for me to see his face quirked up the next morning, trying to detect the strange and bitter hint of something in his water. "Tastes off," he'd say. "The water around here sure ain't like it is in the States." The whole group would then laugh and cackle horrendously, like it was some kind of terribly funny inside joke: the superiority of American water vs. the water in this third-world shithole. Meanwhile, Carl and I would exchange the same blank-faced stare--because, despite coming from different regions of the world, we both know when a joke is not funny.
***
The next morning, I woke after maybe fifteen minutes of the heaviest sleep in my life--which made the waking up part all the more terrible. I walked out of my tent and was immediately greeted by the sight of all these dads, standing around telling terrible jokes and frying up a high-protein breakfast of eggs, beans and bacon. Even the way they cooked annoyed me. They cooked like dads. Not like men. There was no disorder to it. No fuck-it-I'm-a-bachelor mess and carelessness to it. Everything was arranged neatly. Strips of pink bacon laid out in neat lines. Eggs scrambled just right. And nothing over-cooked or burnt. These men were men made tame. And you could see it in the lack of savageness in their cooking. The fact that they ate breakfast at breakfast time--that breakfast was even a concept to them--a rule they followed regimentally vs. eating when they felt like it.
One of the dads told me to "grab a plate. This bacon ain't gonna eat itself."
"You'd be surprised what bacon will do," I said, not looking at the guy.
As I was walking over to Carl, I passed Dave--whose canteen I had pissed in the night before. He took little, rat-like sips from the canteen, swishing it around in the front part of his mouth. But he did not make a funny face or comment on the piss-tinged water, which was disappointing. He must not have detected the piss.
Carl was standing under a tree, looking on with something resembling disapproval or the look of someone studying a lesser species and making notes in his head. As I approached him, his blue eyes--the color of alien crystals in cheap sci-fi movies--looked right through me. I could feel him maternally wagging his finger at my uncaring conscience.
"I saw what you did last night, USA Man. I saw what you did when you believed everyone was sleeping but you."
"Oh?" I replied, lighting a thin cigar.
"You made water in the canteen of Dave."
I laughed. "'Made water'?" I said. "I pissed in the goddam canteen of Dave, is what I did."
"Yes," Carl said, not finding this nearly as comical as I did. "You made piss."
Carl stared off into the sun, cracking like an egg over the landscape. His arms were folded, like a disapproving girlfriend and his head was turned away from me. "Come on, Carl," I said. "Lighten up. It was a prank. A practical joke. Don't tell me you don't have practical jokes over here."
After some time, Carl unfolded his arms and looked at me dead in the eyes. "Yes. It is joke. But you're the only one laughing. These other men make joke and we don't laugh. But they do. They laugh together. That is joke."
"Dammit, Carl. I have had about enough of your Zen mystic bullshit. You want to try to say something profound, say it. Tell me something, do you dream in riddles, too?"
Carl walked away, practically huffing. He's a child like that. "He'll get over it," I thought. "And if he doesn't--fuck him. What do I need the tenuous society of a third-world Sherpa for? I'll be leaving here next week. I'll probably never see him again."
***
Except for a thin streak of fog that looked like pulled cotton shreds floating above the rocky peak, we could see pretty clearly that our goal was within reach. By noon, probably--maybe a little after--we'd reach the top of the mountain.
All the dads would stand around slugging each others' arms and smirking with pride. They'd share their smirks with each other, then smirk quietly to themselves, looking down and out and in all directions, beyond the vast emptiness in front of them, trying to think very profound thoughts--like at a museum, looking at a painting they don't understand, waiting for that a-ha! moment to hit--as if summitting a great peak entitled them to it--as if climbing a mountain entitles you to thoughts that others can't think because they haven't also climbed the mountain.
I stopped for a second to catch my breath. Carl stopped with me. "Well, Carl," I said, pulling a Ziploc bag of edamame out of my backpack and munching vigorously, "this is it. Won't be long and this will all be over. We'll get to the top and then it's back down from whence we came." Carl, once again, flashed me his trademark death-stare.
"USA Man," he said. "I do not know why you come on this trip. All you do is make fun."
"I'm not making fun," I said. A chewed-up glob of edamame flew from my mouth and landed just short of Carl's calloused foot. We both looked down at it. "Sorry," I said.
***
By the time we reached the top, I had experienced a resurgence of energy. No sense of accomplishment. Just a general rush of adrenaline--the final push that came with knowing it would all be over soon and that our trek back down was faster than the trek up.
I was ready to go back down, recharged by the thought that that was the only thing left to do before I could get back to my car and back to the airport where I could fly back home, call Steve and tell him all about how much this trip, which he recommended to me, did absolutely nothing for me--how it didn't bring me clarity or make feel any more connected to nature than I already didn't feel before.
Carl must have sensed my inappropriate eagerness to get back down, because on top of the mountain, while everyone else was doing exactly as I predicted--standing around and high-fiving each other and staring contemplatively in front of them, waiting for the profound thoughts to hit--Carl came over to me and said: "Why do you smile, USA Man?" He said this accusingly, like you'd ask someone the same question at a funeral.
"To tell you the truth, Carl. I'm just ready to get back home."
"'Back home'?" Carl said, disgusted. "You climb mountain. This is time to think."
"Think?" I asked. "About what? I can think at any elevation."
"Not true. Up here, you think deep as mountain is high," Carl said.
"You're right. There's less oxygen up here, which is probably why so many people believe their hackneyed thoughts on life are so brilliant at this height."
Carl started to walk away. I felt bad, like not being impressed--with myself and/or the mountain--had somehow hurt him. Maybe it was the gentle gusts of spring-like wind, the world seen from the height of a skyscraper, the fact that I could almost make out my car in the general area of the lodge parking lot below. Something made me feel bad. Something made me not want to disappoint or offend Carl, who, up until now, had banked on me changing my tune once I'd reached the top of this mountain. He acted like a kid--a kid who spends all day drawing a picture that he's sure will bowl you over, but when you see it, it's still a kid's picture.
"Look, Carl," I said. "This is great. You've been a wonderful guide and a good friend. I just don't feel any sense of accomplishment. I'm supposed to, but I don't. If this was Everest, I might feel like I really did something--but this mountain doesn't even rank as one of the highest. Not by a long shot."
"You think this is little potatoes, USA Man. But this is my home and it is big potatoes to me."
"I know, Carl. I'm sorry. This is great. Thanks." Carl looked down at the ground, wounded. He then raised his head and stared off pensively. I didn't know what to say, so I too looked off, trying to think of something.
***
Two days later, when we got back down, everyone made a big deal to exchange numbers and handshakes. It's funny how these guys, even out of the office, whether through training or having worked in an office environment for so long they don't know what else to do, rigidly maintain a sense of corporate etiquette. "Call me State-side," I heard. "Hey, don't be a stranger, Jim."
I stood at the fringes of this strange rain-dance of smiling moustaches and meaty dad-hands firmly shaking other meaty dad-hands. Having gathered all my stuff together--my bag and tent laying at my feet--all I had to do now was wait for these bozos to stop their pow-wow and get on the bus that would then take us to the lodge, where I could finally check out, get in my car and leave this place forever: a memory, neither good nor bad, in a long series of neither good nor bad memories obstructing the scrapbook-pipeline in my mind.
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