I keep revisiting this post and debating why I’m writing it. This morning, reading a new story in Le Monde about the horrendous flooding in Nepal, I imagined so vividly sitting halfway up mountainside drinking tea, looking down at the small houses and cultivated fields spreading below, peaceful and productive. My tea-drinking taking place in a little row of three or four ramshackle structures serving instant coffee with condensed milk, tea or soft drinks and bread; a small quiet group of trekkers sat a few tables over with drinks and brown rolls. The mountain loomed high overhead, a few houses and huts, a goat or dog visible here and there. My mountain did not have the height for steep rock and glacier but others all around did. And I see and hear in my mind’s eyes and ears the roar and crashing and shaking that must have accompanied the breaking mountain, the loosened glacier, forced-on river, lake, earth, small buildings, farmers, cows, trees…  

Am I commenting on the horror of the landslides and floods in Nepal and Tibet and noting here the pitiful U.S. aid response (half a million dollars I read, approximately what Trump and sons bilk the taxpayers of one way or the other in five minutes on any given day) or celebrating the extent of my travels in this post? Celebrate seems like the wrong word to use in these paragraphs about so much death and sadness. A silly party word. But I mean it to express this: Without a whole lot of reading or traveling, how one can feel much of anything about what happens to the planet and its people outside of our own little patch. I also believe that if one is a fair and caring human being in whatever space we occupy that is enough to make each of us worthy of comfort and safety, and that we fortunate readers and travelers owe it to the world to care bigger … and not be the greedy pigs running so much of the planet’s business. So there…. I’m glad to have been out and about enough to feel some feelings when shit happens in other places.

***

To Nepal (and Tibet). Where landslides and floods are scourging the earth. The Guardian and others sources have astounding show&tells on the actions and extent of the devastation, likely caused by a huge chunk of mountain and/or glacier breaking loose in the grand mountain ranges of the Himalayas. Rock, ice, mud, water, and debris pour over fields, homes, trekker camps, villages, with full-throated death roars. The video I’ve watched literally causes me to gasp.

Here’s me sharing (bragging?). I was not far away from that area in 2017. Staying in Kathmandu and being driven out into the mountains and valleys nearby. What I’m saying is this: I was there. Nearby. But who cares anyway!

I care. Curiosity about what I might find to care about is why I wandered out to all of those places, all of those countries. That may not give me greater insight than people who have read as many books but gone to fewer world places and come to know them in depth, whether as explorer, or return visitor. Well maybe it does give me just the smallest amount of greater attachment to the whole damn planet. Maybe not.

Seventy some years ago, my science teacher, Mr. Matta, at Northome High School said I should be a journalist. And yes, I should have done. They’re the people I admire most. Always have since Eric Sevareid was at the CBS News that was … and am admiring to this day Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now. Journalists are the only people who, if they are fortunate enough to work for national or international publications, actually take a good hard look at that ‘whole damn planet’ I will keep mentioning. People who vacation at resorts or on their yachts, I won’t bother to call travelers. Diplomats, soldiers, sex tourists may go far but all are limited in their own, mostly nefarious ways, by their ‘assignments’ to particular spots on earth.

Back to Nepal and why I’m even posting about this when the Guardian, Le Monde, Aljazeera, and others tell the story so well. It’s not really helping Nepal and Tibet is it? But having been there gives me a sense of caring that has a personal component, compelling me to ramble on. The stories jar me with memories of real people I met, sights I saw, awe I experienced when flying by Everest or eating lunch next to a table of trekkers, those crazily brave and adventuresome souls who do stuff I wish to have been brave enough to do myself.

It is my strong belief that however we come to know the world: books, or travel of the curious nature, or maybe lectures, classes, documentaries … that knowledge should be how we earn the right to vote! Oh, come on, you say. You don’t really need to know about the world to vote on a new community center, for example. Hmmm…maybe if you knew something about the whole wide world, you’d want to be sure that people of all beliefs and colors and places of origin, and ways of being, were welcome in that center. Just saying….

When I was in my awestruck seeing-Everest moment, I was hardly thinking about the voting booth. But it is possible I care just the tiniest of bit more about the planet because I was there and can attest to the grandeur and beauty that very-real global warming is and will keep destroying. It confirms my responsibility to help elect people to public office who give a damn about something other than money and power. People who care about the natural world and the humans who depend on it.

Anyway, every now and then, I’m quite proud of my global meanderings, haphazard as they sometimes were. I know the way I did it is not necessarily for real adventurers, or even the more serious of purpose. But it satisfied what in Window Seat I declare to have been the reason behind my obsession: “I want to see for myself / Those faraway places I’ve been readin’ about / In a book that I took from the shelf”.

I’ve never had the desire or energy to get into book promotion, but I really do think you should read Window Seat. It is about the world. (So okay, maybe a little too much about me and my family, but you can pass quickly over those parts and focus on what I saw out there on my global forays.) Here’s the only excerpt from Window Seat about Nepal. I’d apologize for the brevity but, in my defense, I was writing about 114 countries and some involved extensive visiting!

EXCERPT FROM WINDOW SEAT: Nepal was next—Kathmandu, to be exact, and Everest. I flew back to Yangon and on to Kathmandu the long way, through Bangkok overnight. A friendly, smiling passport control official joked with me as he checked me in at the Bangkok airport—when was the last time someone joked with you in a security or passport line? Bangkok even has a special line for monks, the disabled, and people over seventy! And who knew I’d ever get to Nepal? My life astounds me sometimes. Now all I had to do was scale Everest! Or at least fly by. Kathmandu appeared to be a dusty mess, with the streets torn up and full of the most maddening traffic I’d seen so far in my travels (outside of Port-au-Prince). I saw a big part of the Himalayan range flying in, and while I didn’t know which of the mountains was Everest, how awe-inspiring it all was. My new home was the Apsara Boutique Hotel, which was modestly priced, with great service. I loved it. I had spinach soup and fried mushrooms for dinner, accompanied by a Nepalese wine made from grapes grown in the world’s highest vineyards. Most people staying there were trekkers, which gave me elbow-rubbing, eavesdropping time with explorers, who are always among my heroes; it was nice to feel included but not to have to climb high mountains to do so. The people at the next table sprinkled “Uff da” into their conversation, so there was no doubt as to their country of origin—at least not to another Norwegian. I was the hotel manager’s pet guest, and he became my fixer, host, and buddy.

It was soon time for the long-anticipated flight around Everest. I was at the airport at five o’clock in the morning and off at six thirty for the hour’s ride out and back, past the Himalayas. I experienced teary-eyed moments of pure awe while gazing at those mountains. The earth is grand and glorious—and we humans are not, mucking about with our trash and digging, piercing, and exploding tools. Contemplating the garbage left behind on Everest by the climbers is to reach a last exasperated straw in thinking we can ever change our attitudes about who owns geography—and what the geography of Earth represents compared to our puny, careless presence on the planet.

QUOTE FROM JOHN MCPHEE: When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the sea floor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.

For a slightly more in-depth look at Nepal please go to my blog Time and Place at mneset.me and google https://mneset.me/2017/11/13/kathmandu-baby-kathmandu/

https://mneset.me/2017/11/16/hanging-around-in-kathmandu/

https://mneset.me/2017/11/17/and-then-i-had-another-excellent-idea/

Sorry for twice/thrice said things. Having some passion-filled moments!