BY DAVID GERSHAN
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WE HAD been hiking for about three hours when the altitude sickness hit me. Lightheaded, I stopped to sit on a boulder near the cliffside, the terraced fields and yellow flowers of mustard plants in full view below. It was our first day in Nagarkot, at the edge of the Kathmandu Valley.
The others in our group, evidently unfazed by the thin air, pressed on, their banter scattering across the hills. The chatter grew faint as they veered off to ascend a winding trail, leaving me alone with some goats, one of whom was very pregnant. I watched her as she ignored a butterfly fluttering over her head. A few other goats were grazing on a pile of parched brush, dismissing my clacks to grab their attention. As I took a swig of water three women emerged from a tin-roofed village house. They took seats outside the door, still shaded from the afternoon sun, and began weaving coin pouches on their laps. Their children would sell them to Westerners on the trail.
I stood up and hiked on, picking up my stride. I couldn’t let the group get too far ahead. I knew I’d have hell to pay if they lost the view to the clouds because I made them wait. As I passed by the three women their dog bolted after me, barking wildly. “Oye yeta aija!” one of the women called. The hound stopped and obediently returned to her, at which point I turned back to the mountainside, cussing under my breath as the adrenaline eased, feeling a little dizzy again.
A few members of my group came into sight as the path merged into a narrow switchback, stretching us into single file. Two monks, dressed in red monastic robes and carrying baskets of stones, stepped off the trail to make room for me, and I wondered if it was because it was obvious I was struggling or if they did this for all the hikers.
After about an hour we reached the peak of the foothill. From there we made our way to the Nagarkot View tower. I climbed the ladder to the platform, 2100 metres above sea level. This was when I saw them for the first time: the snow-clad peaks of the Himalayas. Annapurna and Manaslu were to the Northwest, their crags regal and ruthless. Everest was to the East, distended and jagged, cresting above its neighbors and piercing the pale blue sky.
My mind went back to the last time I saw my grandfather, days before pneumonia took him. He sat in the glow of his fireplace, logs hissing and popping, embers floating, firelight revealing his atrophied, liver-spotted arms, his forehead beading with sweat. After he dozed off that evening, I put a quilt and pillow in front of the retreating flame. I closed the iron screen and lay down in fetal position with my aching back to the heat. A thunderstorm rolled in, and I fell asleep to the pelting rain.
I woke up to my grandfather’s coughing. He asked me to bring him some whiskey. I brought it but not before watering it down. As he sipped he told me his greatest regret in life was never travelling overseas, and that if he could have gone anywhere, it would have been to Asia to see the Himalayas. But now he was too old and lacked the endurance to travel such a distance, he explained.
I returned to the present and began my descent down the tower, gripping the cold metallic rungs of the ladder. I remembered the pictures of the frozen bodies on Everest — corpses entombed in lurid mountaineering jackets and gear, strewn across the Death Zone like trash. Once climbers seeking elemental connection, now signposts warning of the dark heart of nature. You weren’t supposed to endure such humiliation after death, I thought, to lay unburied, preserved in an open-air freezer, reduced to a spectacle for the passing climbers.
At least my grandfather was buried, I thought. After returning to the states, I would visit his gravestone and drape my Nepalese Lung ta prayer flag over the granite.
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When not working his day job as a clinical psychologist, David can be found spending time with his wife and son and indulging in creative writing. His fiction has appeared in various literary magazines over the years, including Flash Fiction Magazine, Writers Resist, Remington Review, The Whiskey Blot, 101 Words, and Bright Flash Literary Review. He has also won the Jean L. Jacobson Award for Excellence in Written Literary Analysis and took second place in The New Yorker Caption Contest.