Of Boulders and Mountains

I

Sunlight filters through the pines.  It comes through in golden shafts illuminating the pollens and dust hanging, floating in the stillness of HimalayaShiva summer sunlight, high in the mountains.  Up here at the source of the streams in sunny, steep Himachal Pradesh.  Soft glacial trickles drip, ooze, sink, pulled down, down past boulders and seeps in the bowels of mountains down, down to the mountain town of Kasol, where I started this journey.  Three days of climbing up out of the Parvati Valley got me to this lofty point—four days of soggy weather and miles upon miles of zigzagging herd paths that crossed streams over rickety, moss-covered bridges and angled up precipitous mountainsides.  These paths were made by the mountain folk and lead to countless pastures and domains, but I chose to follow the Kullu River to one of its many sources.  

On the way up I crossed paths with only a handful of herders, and none of them spoke English.  Down in the lower elevations I saw two shepherds with their flocks.  They were both distinctly Kinnauri with their gray and brown woolen vests and puck-shaped hats.  One was cooking breakfast over an open fire with his throng of sheep still sleeping in one big, fuzzy mass at his side.  The other was heading back down the trail and spoke French, of all languages, and I mustered up a friendly “bonjour!” as we paused for a moment to say hello.  

As I went up the rain fell down, feeding the streams and creating little rivulets on the trail.  Further up I stopped to cook lunch under the shelter of an enormous hemlock tree in the midst of a downpour and startled a mother and her daughter as they rounded the tree from the opposite side.  I asked them if they spoke English, and they both looked dubiously at each other and then at me.  They knelt down and watched me with a look of bewilderment as I ate the rest of my food and packed up.  I motioned to them that I was heading up the trail, and they both laughed as if I were crazy.  I nodded and smiled goodbye, and they stood and watched me, utterly perplexed, as I continued up the trail in the pouring rain.  

    My goal had been the mountain pass, and after three days I am nearly there.  A light breeze tickles the treetops and the sunlight sparkles.  It glitters in gilded patterns, illuminating my smile hundreds of miles away from the sweltering trenches of Delhi…the millions in the plains…Gorakhpur…Mumbai…Chandigarh…..My face warms in patches, gently kissed by the Mother’s rays, soft to the touch.  Delicate energy powerful in its purpose.  Rhododendron with red blood flowers, pulsing.  Hemlock forest in a shady stream mountain ravine daydream.  

I awoke to all this in the crisp misty morning.  Two dogs greeted me while I made breakfast on my little cook stove.  They suddenly bounded up through the boles of the hemlocks to meet me on the narrow ridge; they radiated, smiled at me, tails wagging.  One mutt with black and white splotches, the other a shiny ebony with a sweet face, both quite fuzzy and friendly.  

    So now I stand in the company of two mutts under the trees.  It feels like I am back home in Pennsylvania with my boys, though a quick glance up, up makes it clear where I am.  Jagged, frigid peaks with snowy glinting summits tower above me and behind me.  I feel like I am caught in the jaws of the gods.  Way up here near the mountain pass, the origin of the streams and rivers.  The roof of the world and here I am in its arboreal attic with smiling flushed cheeks in sunshine kiss stillness.  

    I can feel the land breathe.  Leafy green exhalations through dilated stomates.  “The infinite commerce with earth and air,” as Martin Buber describes (p. 57).  Oxygen freshly released from the trees enters my lungs, locking me into the flow, not knowing where my self ends and the “other” begins.  Slowly becoming conscious of the interconnection of all living things.  A cosmic look reveals a blue-green spinning world with wispy, white clouds; there is no separation between my self and the trees from that vantage.

    Walking now on a shepherd’s path with dogs in the lead.  All cells functioning at full capacity today.  Up, up…hup, hup!  Up to the mountain pass at about 14,000 feet.  Even after three days of steep hiking, the mountains still stand another 4,000 feet above us.  We edge through the splintered sunlight out into a field.  Small yellow and white wildflowers spread out like stars.  Constellations of flowers.  Who was it that said “one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star?”  A boulder lies in the middle of all of it, amidst the flowers and the mountain-gods.  Black Dog and I take a perch on the rock and soak it all in.  We sit back to back in pensive silence.  The birds are out today enjoying the scene.  Otherwise, it’s just pure blue sky, the mountains, the trees, the flowers, this rock, us.  

    How did I get here?

    During my whole trip I had been searching.  Searching for some mystical experience…some enlightenment.    Yoga and meditation brought me peace but no profound message.  I had even climbed one of the most sacred mountains in India, Arunachala Mountain, by myself in hopes of something sacred passing from the rock to my soul.  Friends I had met in Auroville spoke of strange occurrences there, and indeed every year thousands of people climb the mountain for a three-day ceremony during which people have visions and strange fires and smoke emanate from the rocks.  I spent the night near the summit, but all I awoke to was a mist that enshrouded both the mountain and my search for a profound vision.  I was looking too hard.  

    After three weeks spent in an ecovillage in southeast India called Auroville, which is a large grouping of small communities with an intention of sustainable living, I felt I had to move on.  I had fallen in love with the community I stayed in known as Fertile, but I realized that in order to truly experience Auroville I had to stay for at least a few months.  My time in India was running out, and I had a lot of ground to cover.  

    My next destination was Hampi.  The students in the Living Routes study abroad program, including some of my close friends from UVM, had recently gone there for a retreat; and they spoke quite highly of the place.  There was talk amongst the students of magic in the ancient rocks that littered the region, and I had to go see them for myself.  

    I took a bus north from Auroville to Madras and caught a night train to a place called Bellary.  It took me a while to figure out the train system in India.  Basically, in order to secure a seat in first or second class, which are both sleeper cars, you have to reserve a ticket at least a week in advance.  Since I had no set schedule, it was almost impossible to reserve a seat.  However, I could always get on in “third class,” which is really a polite term for “human zoo.”  

I learned a lot about Darwin’s theory of evolution on the trains in India.  As soon as the train stops at the station, people start pushing their way through the mob that is trying to get off the train.  Old women get elbowed and pushed into walls, children nearly get trampled, and everyone gets pissed off.  If you’re lucky, you get a seat in third class and guard it with your life or you sneak into second class and take someone’s reserved seat until they get on the train at a later stop.  There were a few nights when I was forced to sleep on the floor or stay awake all night drinking chai while talking to the food vendors in the storage car.  These were actually some of my favorite nights on the train because I didn’t feel like a spoiled Westerner—I felt like a traveler.    

I had beginners luck on my first train, however, and found my bed in a near vacant car.  I got situated, the wheels started rolling, and I fell asleep with a smile on my face.  There is something romantic about traveling alone in a foreign country, especially by train.  This was my first taste of the traveler’s high, and I fell asleep inebriated with satisfaction.

I awoke the next morning to a dirty teenage boy dressed in rags sweeping trash out from under my bed and begging for money.  My rupees were not handy, for I had stashed them in my pack the night before.  I told him I was sorry and he got down on his knees and pulled on my legs, begging me for money.  He started kissing my feet, so I fumbled quickly with my pack and found my millet biscuits from Fertile.  I gave him two, he bowed to me with hands in prayer, and he lurched away.  

My experiences with beggars always raised emotional questions in my mind.  As an affluent white boy  it is nothing for me to give a few rupees or food to someone, but there are so many people in need.  Is it my responsibility to feed every beggar I see?  On a spiritual quest like my own, one has to give in order to receive—especially in a place where people truly believe in karma—but how could I possibly help out every beggar I saw?  Yet how could I turn away those sad eyes that were so deep and penetrating?  

It ended up that I just went with my gut feeling.  The average beggar I would not tend to help, but if someone performed a service like sweeping the floor of the trains or saying a prayer I would give them money or food.  I also gave food to children who looked hungry and rupees to holy men who were traveling ascetics that relied on offerings.  Without a doubt, though, I always gave money to musicians, for they gave me a piece of their soul, which is something more valuable than any currency in the world.

When the train stopped at Bellary, I had to get off and switch trains.  While sitting at a bench I was approached by a group of six eighteen-year-old boys who were on their way to shores of Goa for a short vacation.  Like most of the Indians I met in my travels they were extremely nice and inquisitive.  They were sincerely interested in what I was doing there and my life in the United States.  Often while I was on the trains I would have these question and answer sessions with a group of about twenty people around me.  I was always the only white person around, which made me somewhat of a celebrity.

The boys explained that they were all students at a technical school in Madras and were getting away for a weekend to relax.  They were the first to show me true hospitality.  Without asking they bought me lunch, and when the train finally came, they jumped in through the windows and saved a single seat for me by the window, which is by far the best seat in zoo class Indian trains.  I thanked them repeatedly and tried to buy them food, but they declined.

“You are an esteemed guest in our country, and it is our duty to make you welcome,” declared Afzel, the most outspoken of their group.  

I heard this phrase often in the coming months, and I realized that hospitality is an Indian way of life.  In all of the train and bus rides I took in India, I only bought food for myself perhaps three or four times.  My way of giving back was entertaining all types of questions, telling stories, and playing my guitar.  Someone would always notice that I was a musician and ask me to play some songs, which always resulted in a full-car mini festival with people singing, dancing, stomping, clapping, and drumming on any available surface.  

When the train rolled into Hospet, I said goodbye to the boys and stepped into the heat of southcentral India.  I hired an autorickshaw, a small, three-wheeled clown car—I call it that because I saw as many as eight men come out of one—and rode fifteen kilometers over to Hampi.  The driver, a nice man of about thirty with a typical Indian mustache, rambled about the history of Hampi, and I gathered that the ruins were discovered only seventy years ago and are about 600 years old.  Pictures of Sri Sai Baba, a real life miracle worker of sorts, lined the roadside, and there, looming far in the distance, I caught the first sight of them…the boulders of Hampi.               

II

Hampi is situated along a lazy river in one of the oldest pockets of rock in the world.  Some four billion years old these rocks are.  They lie there piled in mounds, rounded from billions of years of river sculpting.  The sun beats down heavily on the dry, beige landscape.  Temperatures get as high as 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and the place is a desert aside from the narrow margin of the riverbank lined with reeds and tall grasses.  While I bathe in the river, curious fishes suck at my toes.  They swarm and stare, one of them occasionally making a dash for my appendages.  Men and their children float by in round boats equipped with fishing nets, trying to catch my aquatic friends.  The men wear nothing but a loongi, the traditional clothing of Indian men that is essentially a skirt, showing their dark complexion and thin, muscular build.  Their children wear pastel-colored shorts and t-shirts, reminding me of the decade in which I was born.  

    Ruins of an ancient civilization sit lonely on the banks.  Broken sculptures speak of change.  Human figures in lithic stillness peek out from under water—toppled tomes of a time long past.  

    The expanses of the boulder mounds call me and I respond.  I walk through the small town that defines Hampi, past dhabas (little Indian rice meal shacks), the central temple, and some heady tourist shops featuring fisherman pants, linens, crystals, and jewelry.  At the western edge of town a dirt road follows the river and then cuts away through coconut, mango, and banana orchards.  I pass smiling Indians with bunches of bananas.  Thump!  A man brandishing a machete looses a coconut high up.  The trail makes its way back to the river where I see a woman herding some goats.  Her yellow and purple sari waves in the wind, and two black goats follow me with their eyes as I walk by.  Tiny waterfalls splash across the ancient rocks.

    “Namaste!” I shout with a smile.

    The woman looks up—her eyes beaming, so brightly contrasted against her dark face—and returns my salutation.  “Namaste!”

    Crossing the stream, I head out onto a sandy expanse.  My pack, loaded with water, food, equipment, and a guitar weighs heavy in the dry 110-degree heat.  Two teenage boys spot me and come my direction.  Their tattered t-shirts hang loosely on their frames, and as they come closer I notice that one of them is a Nascar shirt.  

    “Hey!  Ten rupees to cross our land!” they shout with their palms outstretched.  

    “I’ll give you some water…”  My rupees were stashed deep down in my pack.

    They chug the water and harass me a bit, grabbing my arms and pleading for more water.  I give them some more and they finally release me.

    “Thank you, baba!” I hear them say as they trail away.  

    Back in the rocks I come to a fork in the river.  Boulders are stacked 20 meters high and I descend into them.  The stone here is almost black and looks volcanic.  Brown, splotchy lizards scurry from my path.  Frogs splash into hidden pools.  Dusty spider webs hang with their masters unseen.  Dank basement funk smell here and there.  Eventually I cross the river again and slip into what becomes my boulder apartment.  Hundreds of massive boulders lying on top of one another create huge spaces below them.  

    On the sandy bottom floor of my boulder abode I set up my tent in a room enclosed on four sides by the rocks.  I can jump into my bedroom from the “living room” above on the second floor or shuffle through a small cleft in the rocks below.  I designate a kitchen, a bathroom, and a yoga/meditation room.  

    The tremendous heat outside keeps me inside in the afternoon, for it is much cooler in the shade of the boulders.  My pulse slows, I lounge on the rocks, and my skin dries into scales.  I become reptilian.  I sit in lizard stillness meditation.  Eyes closed, the enclosed space is not so close…it expands, or rather my consciousness grows, and I am in a large, dark space.  I feel like I am bounded by invisible walls, and on the other side is infinite space.  The walls signify my limited perception, but they are imaginary and invisible.  I can sense them, but my enclosure is a false one…

    Eyes open, back in the boulders.  Water chug, gulp, slosh, ahhhhhh…I feel like I haven’t taken a leak in days.  I have been peeing out my pores.  

    The sun peers through an opening above, and I can see it is mid-afternoon.  Clambering, climbing, stumbling I emerge and notice a large blue-green pool with rocks jutting into the middle of it.  I return with laundry and scrub at the water’s edge, some fish suckling my toes.  I take a dip, but quickly retreat after a larger fish dares to go for a nipple.  

    Dinnertime approaches and I sit down to make some varagu, a millet, with peanut sauce and veggies.  In the middle of dicing some ginger, the first tenant of my boulder abode appears.  Climbing up the boulder slanting over my head is a dinosaur-looking reptile with a spiked back and a wide mouth, grayish in color.  He takes a look at me and I him, and…..Splop!  He takes a shit right on my ginger and then retreats.  Little bastard!  Apparently he wasn’t thrilled with having a guest in his home.

    The dark creeps in with reptilian sluggishness, and with it comes the mosquitoes.  They move in like a cloud, forcing me into my tent.  One of the suckers gets stuck in the tent, and he is so elusive that he wakes me up all night whining in my ear.  Other things keep me up during the dreaming hours.  Aqueous slitherings and sloshings emanate from the various pools of the depths.  Claws scrape on rocks and dig in the sand.  A dull hum from the mosquitoes outside my tent persists for a while and then recedes.  No luck for the bloodsuckers, so they pack it up for the night.  A curious rock against rock noise frightens me for a time and then stops.  I sleep with my kutty, a small, shaped Indian blade with a hook on its end, by my side in case of any dire encounters with the creatures of the dark.

    The night rustlings keep me awake, so I decide to light a candle and read a book.  I place the white candle I bought for 2 rupees outside the tent, and it gleams a soft yellow through the netting of my doorway.  I get out Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and begin my philosophical digestion for the evening.  About three pages into it I notice my light source move and flicker.  I roll over, look out, and realize the source of some of the aquatic thrashings.  A little green frog with dark spots stares at me from outside the tent.  He (or was it a she?) had accidentally…or intentionally…nudged my candle, bringing my attention outside the tent.  We look at each other for a few moments, and he turns and hops off.  

    Even in the middle of the night I sweat profusely, so I get out my map of India and start fanning myself.  Eventually the temperature cools a bit and I lapse into dreams of ice caves, negative seventy-degree summits, and Nalgene slushies.  

The heat and some shuffling noises awaken me in the morning.  I peel myself from my sleeping pad and poke my head out of the tent.  Two reddish eyes stare back at me from higher up, and I understand another source of the clatter.  Two monkeys have been pawing around looking for bits of food, and I catch them in the middle of their rummagings.  

    “Ack!” one of them says as they jump away.

    Out on the sandy floor now, I begin my morning yoga and quietly slip into meditation.  In the back of my mind a thought grows a bit and comes into consciousness.  I have been expecting something…some kind of mystical message from the stones of creation brought forth from spiritual practices.  I become aware that I have unconsciously been looking for something, and I know better than this.  When one goes looking for something, rarely is anything found.  Magic and messages exist only to those who are open and unassuming.  I had been projecting my own desires on the environment around me rather than letting the land tell me its tale itself.  

    I hole myself up in the boulders for a few days fruitlessly searching for some ancient voice—some figment of my imagination that I expect to be there.  At the very least it feels good to be alone after three months of traveling with Kate in Thailand and part of India.  It is wonderful to have companionship in a distant country, but when you get to the point where you and your friend know the state of each other’s bowels, there is not much leeway for privacy and independence.  This solitary experience in the boulders is giving me some much-needed personal time and a chance to catch up on reading and postcard writing.  

On the third day I get bored and decide to hike to the ruins east of Hampi.  On the way I make a stop in town for a masala soda, which is essentially seltzer water with spices and lemon.  The old man that serves me has white hair that is so stark against his dark, wrinkly complexion.  We share some kind words and laugh at the children playing outside the temple.

    At the edge of town I pass through some trees and come upon a stone pathway cut out of the side of a hill that edges the river.  A sadhu sits in a nook in the wall on my right, his orange turban and loongi glowing against the brownish rock.  Prayer beads hang purposefully from his slender neck over his bare chest.  He looks emaciated from years of fasts and barefoot wanderings, yet his eyes radiate peace.  His soft glance catches mine, and for a moment our souls reach out from our sockets and embrace.  I bring my hands to prayer and touch my forehead and my chest and smile.  He brings his right hand between his eyes, which never leave mine, and touches his third eye with his thumb.  His lips and eyes smile.  

I go forth and pass a man herding his cattle, watching my step for fresh droppings.  

I follow the cow pies like breadcrumbs and pass a temple perched on the hill to my right.  People in saris and loongis hold offerings in their hands as the temple bell rings.  

    The path leads past the temple and becomes a dirt path.  Still following the river, I come out onto a long slab of stone.  Ancient pillared temples and edifices sit back from the water, hugging the edge of the stone slab and a boulder mound to the right.  Across the water I can see more ruins tucked into a stacked-rock mountain.  The river has curved away from town here, and there is nobody around.  Silence.  A breeze picks up.  Then a falcon cries above as the afternoon sun angles across the reddish landscape from the other side of the river.  The wind translates itself onto the surface of the water in ripples, causing it to gently lap the shores.  I sit down in the shade of an empty temple.  Bushy plants stick out of cracks in the rock and stand triumphantly in the shade.  

    “Damn it’s hot,” I mutter to myself while I take my hat off.  

    I lean back and take a general gaze at the boulders.  The heat wraps itself around me like a blanket and the sun smiles at me from the other side of the river.  Suddenly a question starts to form in my brain.  I wonder what the rocks would say if they could speak.  What would they say about all of the ages past?  Certainly these rocks know some great secret of life on planet Earth, these silent observers who have lain in the bosom of the Great Mother since the days of Earth’s formation.  

    Slowly an answer comes to me from across the water.  The wind picks up and dances over the boulders, stirring some dust here and there.  Then it swoops over the water, its progress marked by ripples, and gently wafts into my consciousness.  It is the voice of the stones whispering to me.  

    “We have been here since the beginning.  We have been here since the Mother forged us in her great furnace.  We have seen the long, slow ages of change across the face of this world.  Yet one thing remains constant.  It has always been this day; today.  We have always been here.  We have seen countless rains, sunshines, and starshines.  Creatures have come and gone, plants have flourished and withered, but one truth remains.  It has always been this day—this endless day.  You are as old as we, but you are a changeling.  You are a momentary form of all the ages past.  In you are minerals of mountains, salts of seas, bits and pieces of all that has roamed this planet and breathed and sung and lived.  But it is always now, and today is all that matters; for there is no other time.  The past and the future lie buried within your self and your bones.  Blessed be you that can walk and think and love and see, while we, the rocks, lie here huddled together throughout the ages.  We know of slow change, but you know of dynamic change.  Be happy for you are free on this day.”

III

The experience in the boulders propels me onward to the great Himalayan Mountains, which have been looming in the back of my mind ever since I saw pictures of them in seventh grade geography class.  I am tired of the heat and the plains, and my soul yearns for giant snowy peaks reaching for the heavens.  My plan is to spend some more time by myself in the mountains and continue meditation on my existence.  I can think of no better place to be present than the largest mountains on the planet.  After saying goodbye to my boulder abode and its elusive residents, I hike back to Hampi and catch a bus to Hospet.  

The message from the boulders has opened my eyes, and I feel like I am Emerson’s notion of a “transparent eyeball.”  My mind is no longer projecting but receiving, and I become more aware of my surroundings.     

Walking to the train now, what I see is upsetting.  Trash in hordes like I have never seen litters the streets.  Odors of rot, sweat, feces, and various filths fill my nostrils.  I see a man squatting down by the river to defecate.  Stray dogs pick at discarded scraps and peels, their scabs and mange exuding pus that glistens in the Indian sun.  A man kicks a dog for no apparent reason and laughs.  As I pass, dogs look at me timidly, and I utter friendly words and offer peaceful smiles even though a part of me cries.  Babies in dirty clothes look up to me with outstretched hands, too young to utter any discernable words.  

At the train station I meet a gypsy named Gitanjali.  While talking to her, the most beautiful little Indian girl walks up to us with a radiant smile on her face.  She looks to be about 10 years old, and she is dressed in a purple shirt and pants with a yellow backpack.  Her black hair is braided in the back with red ribbons.  She kisses my cheek and then Gitanjali’s and introduces herself as Blessina.  Her smile and laughter twinkles like stars against the drab void of the station.  

“I saw you two from over there,” she says as she motions to her mother about 10 yards away, who looks on with the same smile.  “I thought you two were soooo beautiful that I had to come over and say ‘I love you.’”

Then she wraps her arms around me, a complete stranger to her, kisses me on the cheek again, and says, “I love you.”  She feels like the sun does on cold days and gives me warmth.  

“I love you too,” I say, and she goes to hug Gitanjali.  

She waves goodbye, but just before we hop on the train she comes back once more with a hug and a kiss.  Gitanjali and I giggle at each other in disbelief.  Now I know why people believe in angels.  I tell myself that whenever I feel sad I will think of Blessina, the embodiment of light and love.  

The train heads west, and I say goodbye to Gitanjali in Goa.  I have to wait around all afternoon for the night train to Mumbai (Bombay), so I head into a nearby dhaba to order a thali and a few Kingfisher beers.  I spend the afternoon journaling and reading, and with a slight buzz I step on the train.  Weary from travel, the heat, and the beer, I find a corner of the train and pass out leaning on my backpack.  Later a ticket taker wakes me up and informs me that a bunk is open in second class, so I spend the rest of the night curled up with my guitar—so the sweepers don’t snag it—and dream of a sunbeam that came down from the stars to kiss me on the face.        

    At six AM the train squeals to a stop, and I sleepily step out into Mubai sunrise.  I catch a commuter train across the city to get to the northbound trains.  Never a morning person, I gaze through crusty eyes at scenes that seem dreamlike to my morning mind.  I peer out the open doorway at trash dump colonies.  Large expanses of trash, one after another, are bordered in the distance by decrepit apartments.  Paint flakes and stains colour their facades.  A small child looking up at the sky sits alone outside a crumbling, blue dormitory.  A man ladles food from a giant pot into the bowls of the homeless lined up across the middle of a trash field.  The barrel he cooked the food over smolders next to him.  

Click clack down the track…..To my left I gaze out towards the Indian Ocean across Mumbai.  Skyscrapers and wealthy apartments obstruct my view of the water.  Birds flap in the orange dawn above the city.  The occupants of the train stare at me with my sweat stained clothes, my backpack, and my guitar.  Their stares are not malevolent or even inquisitive.  They just stare with dark eyes at the weary traveler.  

    No women on this train; only men in suits with suitcases and boys with slicked back hair, tucked-in button-down shirts, comb-in-back-pocket tight jeans, and a number of pink cellphones clipped on belts.  

    The division of wealth is staggering.  My spirit uplifts at the train station when I hear the sound of a songbird behind me.  I turn to look and see a blind man in a plaid shirt and blue loongi being led by a woman in a yellow sari.  The man is playing a small flute, and he smiles as he plays.  I can hear his smile in the notes.  As they pass by, I drop ten rupees into a can held by the woman.  She walks on expressionless.  

    The train heads north through some grasslands that gradually turn to desert.  I sit by the window across from a man who runs a travel agency.  I tell him I study environmental studies, and he alerts me to a few things.  We pass over a wide river that literally glows orange.  He explains that industries upriver dump their toxic waste into the water because no one stops them from doing so.  

    “Tell your professors about what you have seen here,” he says sternly.  “The Western world needs to know that our government has no environmental ethic.”

    I gaze about the train and see people throwing their trash out the windows.  I overhear a young girl in a tour group ask, “Where do I throw my trash?”  The response comes from a boy who smiles and spreads his arms over his head.  

    “This is India!  You can throw your trash anywhere!”

    The sad thing is that he is right.  There is trash everywhere, and rarely did I ever see a trashcan.  The best thing I could do was wait for a stop and throw my garbage into a pile that would eventually get burned.  Men would laugh at me when they noticed I was holding onto my trash.    

    “Just throw it out the window!” they would smile and say.

    The train creeps northward and I can feel the mountains coming.  After three straight days of train-riding I am ready to rest in a mountain town.  A warm, late-afternoon breeze lulls me to sleep, and when I awake I am in Kalka at the end of the line.  

    Outside the train station I say goodbye to some nice families I met and gaze up at the foothills of the Himalayas.  A glance south reveals nothing but plains, but directly north the mountains shoot vertically up out of nowhere a few thousand feet.  

    I catch a bus to Shimla on a windy, narrow road and spend the night there.  The city is laid out on the side of a steep mountainside, which makes going up and downtown a serious mountain trek.  I pass out exhausted and relieved to be finally in the mountains.

    In the morning I visit a bookstore to page through a Lonely Planet guide to India and decide to travel north to a little traveler town called Kasol in the Parvati Valley.  On my way out I notice Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha on the bookshelf and decide to buy it.  Knees straining under the weight of my backpack, I edge steeply down to the bus stop and catch a bus north.  I open Siddhartha and begin to read, but my eyes keep sneaking glances out the window to see the gorgeous, sunlit mountains.  A warm breeze comes through the window, and I grin, breathing deep.  Outside the window the fir trees shake in the wind, and some yellow wildflowers smile in the sun.  

    ‘There is life in every pine needle, every petal, every breath, everywhere,’ I thought.  ‘What could I have ever been searching for when everything I need is all around me?’  

    The bus winds up and up through small villages on narrow roads cut along mountainsides.  Down below the land is terraced for farming, and it looks like a Dr. Seuss landscape.  “Oh, the places you’ll go and the things you’ll see!”  The trees become more sparse as we head into the Parvati Valley, and I can see farther up ahead.  The bus angles around a bend, and I gasp.  

    Up ahead in the distance is the biggest mountain I have ever seen.  Its piercing ridges cut the sky, and the snow on its peaks sparkles in the sun.  I had waited years for this mountain, this first glimpse of the Mountain Gods; and here it is, the master of the valley looking so powerful yet elegant…so beautiful, so humbling…so…..

    Tears stream from my eyes, and I feel my ancestors within me.  They see through my eyes one of the most immaculate sights on earth.  I can feel the anticipation of generations of longing for the day when one of us would see something like this.  

    “Take an extra glance at those mountains for me,” my grandmother had asked me before I left.  “I have always wanted to see them.”

    So I take a glance and then another for her and my family.  For the first time in my life I feel like I am coming home to a place I have never been.  I think of my hiking buddies and wish they were here to see this.  

    I give a teary smile and a nod to the Keeper of the Valley.

    “Welcome home,” she smiles back.

    IV

    By moonlight and firelight I write.  Sitting here high in Himalaya cross-legged in front of my fire with the moonlit mountain peeking through the balsam firs to my left and the near-full moon to my right.  A trinity with me and my fire at the apex.  Or isn’t every corner of the triangle the apex?  My tent, a little further to the left, glows a pale yellow in the silver moonscape.  I had to set it up with ropes strung from trees because I forgot to retrieve my poles from my traveling buddy Kate’s backpack.  She had headed back on the first day of the trek because she felt sick and took the poles with her.  Three days later here I am thousands of feet up on the side of a ridge in a valley adjacent to the Parvati.  

    Just made some hot chocolate with some caramelized sugar the Indians call jaggery.  A varagu dinner sits nicely in my tummy.  Perfectly content, I just truly realized how alone I am in the Himalayan wilderness.  Feels good to be here.  Nothing more raw and beautiful.

    Sitting here thinking about the day.  It was one of the best afternoons of my life.  A family of macaques woke me in the morning, and I studied them for a while from my tent.  They watched me as well and seemed just as interested as I.  They looked warm with their built-in snowy gray parkas.  Eventually they moved on, and I had a breakfast of ragi porridge, which is made from millet.  Afterwards I left base camp with my daypack, hiked to the top of the ridge, and burst out of the trees into a Montana-esque scene.  Huge, open flower meadows spread out before me on the rolling shoulders of white-capped mountains.  I walked joyfully under a cloudless sky and followed a trail that traversed the hillside to a glacial stream.  Yellow flowers in pockets grew along the stumbling creek.  I spotted a nice patch and sat down by them on a rock to pump water for the day.  I lounged on the rock for a while and felt so content—so naturally high.  No worries.  No goals.  Just had to breathe and step.  

Sunlight warmed my face while the cool mountain air chilled me into perfect homeostatic balance.  A little puff of cloud hung above a toothy peak.  I wasn’t hungry or thirsty or in need of anything.  I was drunk from the creek with no thoughts to cloud the scene.  Just ohm, sunshine, and mountains, streams, trees, birds, and breeze.  About me were clusters of Lamb’s Ear and purple, yellow flowers, some four-petaled blues, and some whites.  I noticed some blue-yellow flowers that reminded me of a day in high school when I skipped seventh period study hall to go lounge in the sun on a grassy knoll near my house.  Blue-yellow flowers kept me company on that early spring day.  I always had to chuckle imagining all those poor kids trapped in the meat factory while I was out with Wentz tromping around central Pennsylvania seeking the unknown, climbing trees and rocks, looking under stones, crossing creeks barefoot, delving into caves, and seeking high places.  

“I always know where to find you,” Wentz, my hiking buddy, would say of my fetish for lofty perches as he came out of a crack in a boulder somewhere.  

Nostalgia and thoughts of my life on the other side of the world gripped me there by the mountain stream.  I thought of Mu sleeping upside down to me somewhere down there beneath my feet all snuggled up with my parents and their dawgs.  

Further up the mountain I heard a rockslide.  The mountain was calling me, and I took heed.  The trail, which was no more than a herd path, zig-zagged up and up through an open meadow.  Occasionally I would take a cut straight up the hillside Adirondack-style, but at an elevation of 15,000 feet that kind of hiking gets to be quite tiring.  After a good stretch the top of the ridge came into view and the anticipation of an astounding panorama sent me charging the rest of the way.  At last the ground leveled off and I was surrounded suddenly on all sides by the most magnificent mountains I have ever seen.  Immense snow fields capped the jagged peaks, out of which came near-vertical streams and waterfalls that fell exquisitely to the valley far below.  The vertical relief of those mountains is immense; it took me three days of climbing to get to my vantage point, and the snow fields still loomed thousands of feet above me.  My eyes traced the outlines of the serrated, knife-edge summits.  Nobody could master their summits, I thought.  These mountains truly are the gods.  

Himalaya smiled upon me this trip.  She bared all, and I fell hard and fast for her.  Supple mountain meadows gave way to sexy streams that cut cleavage like razors.  She was naked with all of her visible curves and shining skins, deep and bright colors, flashes of bright sunshining eyes, and her lashes batting in butterflies.  She kissed my face with sun rays and soothed me with her songs of winds and water.  

In a gesture of affection and love I did some sun salutations.  After a few days of nonstop hiking my body cracked and stretched in ecstasy.  I stood in mountain pose and I took root, all of my bundas spiraling.  Closing my eyes I became Mountain and I stood in lithic stillness.  The mantra “lokah samasta suki noh bavanthur” exploded from my being, calling for all beings everywhere to be peaceful and free.  I thought of friends that had passed away and felt them there with me on the mountain.  I thought of all of my friends and family out there in the world and sent my love to them.

After some dried mango and a short nap, the stream far below beckoned me back.  I took off over the mountainside bounding, jumping, and sliding down patches of snow.  At the stream I collapsed, drunk with joy.      

I took off my boots and dipped my feet into its cool waters.  A line from an Eiseley essay about water trickled into consciousness: “You have probably never experienced in yourself the meandering roots of a whole watershed or felt your outstretched fingers touching, by some kind of clairvoyant extension, the brooks of snow-line glaciers at the same time that you were flowing toward the Gulf over the eroded debris of worn-down mountains” (1957, 16).  Indeed on this day I finally did experience and truly understand the all-encompassing connectedness of water.  

 As water rushed past my feet, I imagined the never-ending chain of water molecules connecting all of Earth’s waters.  I traced through my imagination a path from where I sat in the stream to my favorite bodies of water.  My soul plunged into the current and crashed down the ravine, tumbling over boulders, pausing for a moment to swirl in an eddy.  Moving on, I fell freely in a waterfall and conversed with the mountain air.  Flowing now in the valley, part of me was lapped up by a herd of sheep while the rest of me tickled the gills of freshwater fish.  Miles down from my glacial origin I began to slow a bit and ran into the murky Kullu River and coughed on silt and pastoral runoff.  Down, down, down I flowed past the foothills and into the plains and merged with the holy Ganga.  I passed over the bodies of holy men and swallowed the souls of people purified on funeral pyres.  I cleansed the bodies of bathers by the ghats.  Two young boys sucked me up and spit me at each other, their eyes deep and dark like the river.  

At last I dropped sediments in the Sundarbhans, the mouths of the Ganga, and lazily made my way across the delta to the Bay of Bengal.  The salt of the seas filled my being and I delved to the deeps to play with giant squids, phosphorescent fish, and the unknown creatures of the abyss.  I journeyed through the Indian and Atlantic Oceans past abyssal plains, lava floes, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, sea caves, and coral cities to the Chesapeake Bay.  I lapped briefly at the clay shores of the Bay where I used to walk and look for shark teeth and other fossils.  I fondled the lithified forms of organisms long past.  Cleansing my soul I flowed against the current into freshwater again and traversed the Hudson River all the way up to the shores of Lake Champlain where I was born.  My aqueous fingers stretched from there to Lake Tear of the Clouds on the shoulder of Tahawus, Hays Brook, where my father took my sister and I as children of the Adirondacks, the Juniata River, where I spent summers floating and fishing with friends, the stream in Bolton Valley, the Mad River in New Hampshire, and other bodies of water that hold special meaning to me.  

It was now clear to me that all of these separate waters are really one body of water—the water of Earth.  Vasudeva the ferryman in Siddharta said that “the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere” (88).  The river is also in us, for we and all living things drink from its waters; and thus it is water that connects all life.  

The voice of the stream snapped me out of my daydream, and I removed my numb feet from the cold water.  Like Siddhartha I had begun to hear voices in the stream.  Perhaps it was just my imagination, but I began to hear many different voices.  I could hear children laughing, people shouting with anger, cries of joy and death, the voices of my friends and loved ones, and even Mu.  I shut my eyes and thought of all the people I have ever met, all that I have learned, everything I have done, and all of the places I have been.  Countless days, moments, and memories swirled in my brain and condensed into one fluid thought.  My mind and my senses went blank and I was left with only the sound of creation: the great Ohm.  My whole being shivered and reverberated to the great sound.  I opened my eyes and finally saw what I had been searching for.  Everything made sense.  I was here, it was now, and all I could think and feel was Ohm.  I was left with only a smile, and that smile was the only thing in the world I ever needed.