So many different people in the same DEV-ICE

So I have done a lot of thinking about what I would name my climbing routes if I ever did a new line that required naming. My best idea so far came up when we saw a giant dark colored dike that ascended the east face of the middle Teton. We thought about it, and decided that we’d call it “who’s done the big black dyke?” but we didn’t have the balls to do the route.

Before I ever began climbing water ice near this particular obscure river gorge of the Thame valley, I thought about a name. I wanted to call my new route DEV-ICE after our faithful porter, whose name is Dev Kumar, or just “Dev.” After all, he hauled our gear up there.

The route was three pitches of pretty nondescript water ice (about WI4 in difficulty) and we were stoked to get to name a route upon reaching the top—but wait—what’s this? It looks like tracks in the snow at the top! Dammit!

I thought for sure that we were the first to go up there just because the route was so far off the beaten track, 2 valleys west of the Everest trail. Seeing tracks near the top of my climb just made me heart sink. To reassure myself that I am not a loser who only conceives of ideas after others have already pioneered them, I took a very careful look at the tracks and then began the (to me) well-known process of fictionalization. These aren’t human tracks! They are clearly the tracks of a sub human primate with huge feet—like the Yeti!

Messner and many others (when they were not hallucinating due to oxygen deprivation) photographed Yeti tracks like this when they were unhappy about the fact that they were not the first to be in a certain place. So now if you want to be the next human to ascend DEV-ICE and follow in the footsteps (pun intended) of the mythical Yeti, who apparently is a better ice climber than I am, all you have to do is fly to Kathmandu, fly to Lukla, walk 4 days to Thame in the dead of winter with all of your ice climbing gear, ascend a frozen and treacherous river valley, and then “enjoy”(insofar as this is possible) the miracles of water ice.

Pointless in the Khumbu

The rented ice tools I have in my hand are completely pointless.

According to Dr. Abraham Maslow, we all struggle with various needs, one of them being the need for "self actualization." A painter must paint. A climber must climb.

So on this trip to the Mt. Everest Region, my lack of purpose is much akin to the pointless ice tools.

I began enough in earnest. This trek to Everest base camp and to climb Gokyo Ri was to benefit colon cancer and make everyone more "aware." I aimed to accomplish this by wearing my "rectum?!!! damn near killed 'em!" t-shirt, but the other members of the expedition did not share my enthusiasm and would not wear their t-shirts on the trail. As a group, we suffered this lack of purpose silently, only broaching the subject every few minutes as one of us would say "what are we doing with our lives?"

"We're spreading colon cancer awareness" I would reply.

As leader of the expedition, I have realized like Jack Handey once pointed out that "there's only one thing more important than the success of the mission itself and that is the respect of the men, so if you're not sure what the purpose of the mission is, you may not want to tell the men, because you might lose their respect." So when we came to Namche, and it was too cold to wear my "rectum! damn near killed em!" t-shirt, the purpose of the mission changed from spreading awareness of colon cancer to searching for the Yeti.

We started in a Sherpa village monastery where they reputedly have a Yeti skull locked up in a vault. We journeyed there, through many exhausting hours in the snow to bribe a monk into opening the vault. There it stood, the Yeti skull, proof positive that bones from other animals can creatively glued together to provide tourist income from which monks can derive some material security.

Later that night I was certain I smelled the Yeti, but it turned out to be Abe.

Our quest fort the Yeti not yielding anything more conclusive than a mono-browed German woman (human, it turned out) I decided to declare that it was time for ice climbing. Now I sit in Namche with a file and my crampons, sharpening, sharpening, making my life into something not so pointless.

lost client-- REWARD! If found please contact aspiring mountain guide.

I have not done much guiding work. It usually doesn't work out for me. I have a tendency to get lost, I'm a bit reckless, and inappropriate things tend to come out of my mouth occasionally, making me a poor liaison to the foreign cultures I encounter. But sometimes the best work is the only work, and vice versa.

Currently I am working as a mountain guide. My job started 2 days ago when my client, a 22 year old from Utah named Abe, telephoned me to say he was at the airport in Delhi, but with a beer in one hand and a hookah in the other, I was unable to answer the phone and I missed the call, forcing my one and only client to get a hotel in the tourist ghetto and wait until tomorrow to call me from among the loud car-horns, scam artists and garbage munching cows of Pahar Ganj, a place where friends don't let friends stay. I went so far as to purchase a train ticket for him, and I made it pretty clear in an email how he was to use it. I thought for sure he would figure it out, but I had forgotten that people who hire guides often do so for a reason.

The next morning, I had one desire and one responsibility, and I had to yet again balance these conflicting forces, in a day that would unfold as metaphor and microcosm for the eternal struggle in my brain. My responsibility was to get Abe on the train, and my desire was to meet a girl. As soon as I woke up, all hung over from the previous nights "double fisting" the sense of responsibility crept in like the headache which had seemed so distant mere hours earlier in the consequence-free environment of perfect inebriation. Responsibility is a sort of hangover I suppose. I realized I probably didn't have enough time to meet the girl. But desire doesn't accept defeat that easily.

I called her and we made plans and as any girl would, she showed up later than she promised only to find me hectic, my sense of responsibility driving me into temporary insanity, which looked like pacing back and forth, thumb tapping on any hard surface, and a look of being elsewhere. I was so powerfully enamored of the girl though that I soon forgot this and we piled into a rickshaw to drive several miles in the opposite direction of the train station, an act which my sense of responsibility found irksome, at this point taking the form of that annoying little angel on my right shoulder. I didn't have an accompanying little devil figure. I don't need one.

Disembarking our rickshaw, the girl and I walked and talked and I found her to be agreeable in a way which caused me to separate myself from her at the last possible moment, giving myself just enough time to fight traffic to North Delhi and meet Abe at the train. My sense of responsibility was especially nagging here, as we were very uncertain as to whether we would get to the station before the train departed. We got there with 7 minutes to spare and made our way to the platform as the train was pulling away. Abe wasn't there.

Assume what you may about my character based on certain irresponsible actions you may have observed me doing, but know one thing-- when something goes wrong my sense of responsibility can take over, almost to the point of becoming obsessive. On the train I was frantic. Where the fuck is Abe? Why couldn't he get on the train? I bought him a ticket! Why didn't he call? Is he dead in a ditch, did he fall victim to a hijra scam, did he get bit by a cobra, why can't I calm down, could he be elsewhere on this train, what does he even look like, and is he going to pay me back for the ticket? I raced through the cars on the train tripping over old ladies haggishly begging in the aisle, the dirty dust reshuffling char-boy, the circus acrobat contortionist, the men shoveling trash out the open window of the train, the rank latrines which spill their waste out onto the tracks, all the time calling Äbe! Abe!" over the louder voices of the vendors selling Chai. He wasn't there. I used my ipod to help me calm down and talked with my friend Nate Meyer (Nate Meyer!)the temporary victim of my obsessive personality, and slowly soothed myself into a fitful sleep.

The following morning I read this in my inbox.

Hey John, I fucked up. I came to the train station and my naive american dumb fucked brain fell for a scam. I was told by a young indian man the train was delayed by 9 hours, tooken to a government indian travel agency, and took a private ride down to Agra, where I am now, and will be taking a train to Veranasi from Agra tomorrow at 9pm. I shelled out $200 dollars, plus bought some cool crafty shit that the driver led me to. Anyways I will be in Veranasi at around 9am on mar 5. A thousand apologies for the anxiety and worries i caused you, I realized I should have waited and meet you at the indian tourist beaureu at the train station, but I fucked up. So I hope your train ride goes well and I will meet you on the 5th. I'll check my mail tomorrow to see how everything went for you. Oh, and I will reimburse you for the ticket money that I lost. First day in India...yea fuck it. I'll see you in Shiva land.

Ok. I'm relieved and quite entertained. My skills as an English major have endowed me with the power of close reading-- just as the body language expert is able to tell you the seemingly obvious fact that crossed arms mean closed mind or anger or something, so also am I able to tell you that Abe might be needing a guide based on the fact that he used the word "tooken." But I also know I'm going to like this guy. He also said "fuck it." Abe, we're going to get along just fine. Just call me "Mr. Responsibility." And say it respectfully.

When I arrived in Auroville, I didn't know I was there. I caught a bus from Madras to Pondicherry, thinking that some time on the beach would be good for me after the recent encounter I had with a pair of X chromosomes (as Yoav put it) who ruined me in typical style. I wanted to surf and I was thinking that maybe the full moon would help the waves a little. I arrived at night and strolled down the beach until I saw a light in the doorway near some new-agers doing Yoga in the sand by moonlight. I asked if there were any vacant beachside huts where I could spend the night, and the man at the door answered "hashish?" That's when I knew I was close to the largest hippy communal living experiment on earth.

I had heard that Auroville, a community which began with the best intentions had long since deteriorated into a bunch of hippies smoking weed and playing "redemption song" on the guitar. The community began in the sixties (I think) when westerners were increasingly drawn to the strange spiritual allure of India, not yet recognizing yet another form of dogmatic persuasion and what inevitably just amounts to a power grab by people who claim to know what God is doing or "fools" as Kurt Vonnegut said. Foolishness aside, I was drawn to this place by the fact that I was once an idealist, the intellectual curiosity I have worked to cultivate as a replacement for my apathy, to gain direction and insight, to "train" for the exhausting task of hanging out with hippies all summer with Outward Bound, and because there might be chicks there.

After spending an over-priced night in a hut on the beach, I rented a motorcycle to get me into Auroville, which isn't as easy as one might think. To even skim the surface of this community, one needs to agree to a set of values and complete a series of steps. The first is to be invited in. I was. Next, one has to commit to two weeks of living in one of the communities and working on the organic farm, following the myriad rules which include no outside money, no chemicals of any kind, and a 100 percent Vegan diet. I could do that. No beer, no drugs. I was looking to de-tox anyway, or perhaps just "pre-tox" which is where you get healthy before you go binge drinking. You also have to have read the community charter which sates that "Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness." Not sure about that one.

My brother's revenge

Growing up,when I was cruel to my brother, which was often, I was warned by the people in my life that some day things would be different-- some day he would have the upper hand. I always interpreted these warnings in the narrow light of youth, thinking that it meant that someday he would grow taller and larger physically and would be able to return my physical abuse with physical abuse of his own. I dismissed all such predictions as absurd in the manner of an incredulous 9 year old who has just been told that "there is more to life than video games."

"As if!" I would say, borrowing the quaint response from Alicia Silverstone from "Clueless."

I used to torture my younger genetic counter-part with taunts about how only wussies played soccer. I thought of soccer as a baby's game where the players would express their skill through fancy footwork and trickery, to me reminiscent of the trickery of a little brother yelling "Mom, John's hitting me!" as soon as I entered the room. Soccer players would feign injury to get sympathy from the referee even though they weren't even bleeding. They were more actors than anything, I always thought, and this was something I availed myself of every possible opportunity to remind him.

When my friends in Chennai asked me if I wanted to go play football for the afternoon over in a park in the city, I immediately said yes asking if it was contact football or touch football. They gave me the quizzical look of someone who has just identified the silent farter at the tea party, and then one of them said "soccer, mate."

"Oh, soccer."

It had been days since I had any significant amount of exercise other than walking around the city, so I had to take them up on their offer and borrow some acceptable shoes.

We rode the train downtown and I watched out the window as scenes of India flew past the open doors as it conveyed us on electricity over the slippery tracks on an elevated platform--ka-chuck ka-chuck ka-chuck. We looked down at cows eating garbage by the oily roadside gutter ka-chuck, kids pushing tires with sticks through the crowded streets laughing ka-chuck, colorful laundry hung on rooftops to dry in the sunlight ka-chuck, peremptory palms protruding from cracked city sidewalks ka-chuck, arriving in a dizzy haze at a college campus in what looked from the fancy design elements and modern facade to be Los Angeles.

As we signed in at the gate and paid the 100 rupees each for use of the field, I was transported to another reality, as is so often seen in India. There is the life of the people on the street and then there is the insular and privileged life of the elite who might as well be living somewhere else entirely with the degree to which they hide in their mansions and chauffeured petrol-guzzling foreign automobiles and private schools. We walk through the campus over to the field where we greet a crowd watching a soccer match already in progress. Many of the onlookers have brown skin, but speak with impeccable British accents, clearly the new elite. I tie my shoes and sub in as a member of the white team, temporarily assigned the role of forward. This should be easy. They're all a bunch of foppish British talking Indians.

The ball sails past my head and I duck. Whoa, that was close, but then I remember that hitting the ball with your face in this game is a good thing. Oops. I quickly learn that my role is to get in the way, since my first effort to kick the ball in the right direction goes horribly awry. I try the "interfere with the other guy" strategy and I get in a kicking match with one of the red guys which ends with both of us on the ground and him whining like a baby and looking up at me astounded like I just licked his sister's face. He has a "how could you?" look and I apologize, thinking he must be really hurt. I'm about to run for the sideline and call 911, when he suddenly picks himself up and sprints down the field, proving that soccer players are more actors than anything, however fit and good with the feet they might seem. I start to think of it like ballet.

I run back and forth. I chase the ball. The ball goes over there. Somebody kicks it. I run over there. I get tired and jog toward the ball. The ball goes somewhere else. I lose my concern about where the ball is. A more pressing question is "why can't I breathe?" I stay where I am. Suddenly the ball comes to me. Think! React! Because of my laziness in chasing the ball, I'm now in a position to score. I kick the ball over to another guy and he kicks it in! Yes! I have earned the respect of the soccer players. I run with my hands up screaming "goooooooaaaaallllllll!" If respect is hard to earn it is easy to lose.

We run some more and kick the ball over there then back and then over there again. Somebody kicks it out of bounds, and sensing an opportunity, I rush over to the sideline to throw the ball in at the guy who's open and in a position to score. I grab it out of a tangle of net that is on the sideline and throw it in with a running start, but my foot catches in the net and I fall on my face. The few who see this laugh.

As the sun fades and people start to get tired, we wrap it up, and tally the goals and such, but it is unclear who won. We congratulate each other on the sideline and one Indian guy actually says to me "good show, old chap." My brother has had his revenge as was once prophesied. I have been defeated by a bunch of soccer playing wussies and thoroughly embarrassed, and they say "good show" at the end.

"Glad I could put on a show for you" I say and we make our way off the brilliantly green field rimmed by palm trees, benches and manicured gardens out to the foyer of the private school or university or whatever where we drink purified water out of the tap. We walk into the street in the darkness and are soon assaulted again by the open sewers, predatory packs of dogs fighting in the street, and the smoke plume from a pile of burning garbage that wafts into the air and disappears like the hopes of Gandhi for an India where the poor were no longer ruled by an elite whose lives they can no more comprehend than the whims of their Gods, one part kind, one part cruel, but united in their indifference.

To tour the ruins or ruin the tours? Hampi, India

Hampi is a boulder strewn moonscape of ancient ruins amid palm trees and banana plantations. It is bisected by a river which over the eons carved the granite bedrock into formations which cause endless speculation by climbers like me and the dreadlocked Israeli hippies alike, who flock here to achieve enlightenment via a gigantic spliff. Hampi is fascinating in it's sprawl of ruined statues and temples which defy time itself, but for some reason it just reminds me of the song "my humps." I can't get it out of my head. "My humps, my humps! My lovely lady lumps!"

Every day tourists flock to Hampi to observe the antiquity of the turbulent world of ancient India. As western tourists, we're the definite minority. Most of the people who come here are Indian in origin, and many of them are on a sort of pilgrimage to the site either out of intellectual interest or genuine spiritual devotion. We are therefore outsiders in so many ways, and we always feel like intruders as a result.

So when it comes time to deny the inevitable offer to join a "tour" we decide instead to remain in ignorance and wander around the ruins in a world of our own-- a world full of catch phrases and remembered lines from television shows and "my humps! my hump, my hump!" which I sing loudly as we walk. We walk through a crowd of Muslim women in Burkas and my friends are momentarily embarrassed as I do the motions which I assume correspond with the lines "don't pull on my hand boy, you ain't my man boy, I'm jus' tryna dance boy, and move my humps. In the back and in the front." I'll never know whether these Muslim women were embarrassed or offended. I can't see the expressions on their faces through their all-cloaking garments designed I'm sure to protect them against my humps.

I am wondering if there are other ways to ruin the tours. Should I go out of my way, or just be myself? Is my mere presence there enough? I feel like I am offending people who journey miles and miles to seek out the 500 year old statue of Ganesha and throw themselves at its feet in supplication, misery and joy all mixed confusedly together like vegetable curry. I non-chalantly take a picture and move on to the next boulder problem.

Bouldering is sort of a spiritual art, I tell myself. One can experience bliss and disappointment in the constant pursuit of perfection. This one doesn't have a good landing. It's too high-ball. Too slopey. Too much over-hang here. Certainly it involves a long journey and confronting new and unframilair things, like any other spiritual quest. I have come all the way to India for this Boulder. What makes the Indians so different from me? My musings are interrupted by Ritik's query.

"Should we go over here to the other temples whose names we can't pronounce?"

"They do have more letters."

Yentrodharaka Anjaneya temple. Yent- ro- dar- ah -ka. An -jah- ney? Whatever. I still feel bad about the women in Burkas and how I offended them. I pretty sure they don't understand my humps. I'm not even sure I understand them. So maybe they didn't know to be offended.

I lieback a small flake and lunge up to the highest hold and hit it. I try to find the right foot-holds before my body creeps earth-ward to the dirt, but my foot slips off the tiny crystal of granite and I fall. Try again. This time focus and don't be thinking about the woman in the Burka or what you're going to do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk.

Move b%$#@! Get out da Way! A lesson in Indian driving

I remember so clearly so many days where I would be flying down the highway, feeling the wind in my hair, watching the malevolent summer sun dip beneath the horizon on a curving road through the mountains, the air chilling my sunburned body, only to see those familiar blue-lights in the background. In my experience, the police officer who pulls me over usually expresses his outright contempt for my reckless disregard for life and threatens some kind of steeper more punishing fee than has been levied, scaring me into compliance with his authoritarian threats. At least India is lawless, I thought one day as I was handed the key to a drastically underpowered motorcycle which I had rented for 10$.

Not "lawless" exactly as it turns out. There are rules, but given India's history of road construction (most of the major roads have been built in the mid-1990's or later)it's lack of infrastructure including law enforcement vehicles, officers and the lack of clear laws render these necessary, these rules are mostly de-facto codes which dictate an informal road etiquette. I speak of simple rules like honking all the time for any reason with no explanation. It's just common courtesy.

Many of the vehicles that we pass on our stint on the Goan roads have signs painted on their bumper which remind us to "Horn ok please" "honk honk when pass" and my favorite-- "horni" which I am sure I am interpreting in the wrong sort of way.

The speedometer on my bike doesn't work. But this is just an inconvenience really since I have no idea what the speed limits are or what any of the other rules might be for that matter. Traffic consists of pedestrians, motorcycles, bikes, trucks, cars, rickshaws, cows and other animals including the very traffic savvy inbred Indian dog. Obstacles include all of the above plus potholes, road garbage (occasionally on fire), dead things, sand, and the dreaded Indian "hill" which very few Indians have successfully learned to navigate. Give them some credit-- their country is flat. Indian drivers on hills are like Californian drivers in snow.

My gas gauge doesn't work either. I just watched a guy pour three liters into the tank and the dial is reading very close to empty. I noticed this several minutes ago, but I begin to reevaluate my theories about the malfunctioning dials when my bike starts to lose power and lurches to a grinding halt in the trash speckled sand of the roadside-- right next to a cow eating garbage who looks up at me with an indifferent cud-chewing stare. This isn't the first time this has happened to me in India.

When I first rented a motorcycle we asked the owner deferentially if he had filled it up with gas. He nodded "yes" and we decided that the gas gauge was just another non-functional part of the decorations of the bike, like the big racing stripe down the side of the gas tank. I blame the miscommunication on misinterpreted body-language. In India, the nod means "maybe" and the head bob can mean anything. We've all started doing it. It's really convenient when you're just not sure how to answer. "Do you love me?" she might say, and your head bob will express nothing but get you off the hook. Also, in India it's not acceptable to give an unfavorable answer. Rather than tell you they don't know which way to the bank when you ask them for directions, they'll just motion wildly with their hands in the general direction in which you were already walking. This keeps everyone happy. I was surprised when I ran out of gas the first time, and totally un-shocked when it happened again.

Luckily, everyone keeps gas for such an occasion, and if they don't have it on hand, they'd be happy to siphon it out of their neighbors tractor for you and charge you an exorbitant amount for the spare liters which the neighbor may be paid for, or maybe not. You'll never know. But you're on the road again.

Laurel clings to me as the engine of this beautiful 1950's classic motorcycle rumbles down the pavement, the sensual vibrations of the motor propelling us faster down the winding road, into the future at a blinding pace. Suddenly, a man with a whistle jumps out in front of me confrontationally, and I swerve and slam on the brakes. The foot-brake is on the left side for some reason, and it takes me a second to react. I slow to a stop, nearly missing this lunatic road jumper who blows his whistle loudly in my ear. Is this just typical Indian madness? What is going on here?

He identifies himself as a police officer and asks me "where is your helmet?" sounding like a stern grandmother admonishing reckless youth. I look at him, stupefied. I'm thinking, "since when does India care about this?" and I'm trying to think of how to appropriately bribe him. What do you say "I've got four Mahatmas that say I was wearing a helmet"? I watch a man cruise past with three unhelmeted young children on the back of his bike. "Why didn't you stop him?" says Laurel. "Rules only for driver" says the Indian cop in the classic illogical fashion that characterizes this country and it's laws, or its semblance of laws. I sit there and stew, wondering what he will do to me. Will he beat me and then send me on my way?

Instead he stands out into traffic and pulls over another unhelmeted motorist who slams on his brakes, nearly killing a road-side goat, and comes to an enraged but powerless stop in the middle of the freeway. Seeing as how this officer was now busy with another gentlemen, he simply writes me a ticket for 100 rupees (2 USD) and sends me on my way with a handful of educational literature.

Later while nursing my fragile driver's ego over a few beers, I peruse the educational literature. One pamphlet is shaped like a cell phone and warns "if you steer, don't talk. If you talk, don't steer" and threatens that "while you steer if you talk your driving concentration gets reduced." Another pamphlet tells us that "two wheeler is meant for two and not too many." I wonder if the motorcycle which held a helmetless and nursing mother received a ticket like we did, as the happy father drove recklessly through the palm forest's winding roads.

Two things are certain with regard to Indian driving. The first is that this whole thing is relatively new and therefore they are making an effort not only to form the appropriate laws but also to enforce them in all cases, recklessly stepping in front of every lawbreaker. The other certainty is that I'll be more careful next time officer.