Ele-phant shoes

She was an artist, and I liked to pretend I was an artist and we both had little else going on love-wise, so it seemed an acceptable level of risk to declare ourselves married on facebook as an artistic statement, the proposal having stemmed from an offer to be models in a bridal show for a Taiwanese wedding planner. The Mandarin word for “model” sounds like “mah-tuh.”

She told me that a trick she would play on her students when she was trying to get them to quiet down was to ask them to read her lips. “But we don't know how to read lips!” they replied.

“Here, I'll teach you.” (mouths silently the word “hello”).

“Oh! I know! You said 'hello!'”

“Yes, that's right. Now what am I saying?” (mouths silently the words “my name is Melissa”).

“Oh, oh! You said 'my name is Melissa!'”

“Yes, now what am I saying?” (mouths slowly and deliberately the phrase “I love you” taking care to feel each morsel-syllable as it moves across the quiet tongue silently forward to the lips).

(every student goes crazy) “I love you!”

“Noooo Silly! El-e-phant shoe!” (laughter). Not withstanding the fact that elephants don't wear shoes and that it makes no sense to say “elephant shoe” to someone, I wondered if whether I would have the strength and conviction to say “I do” when the time came, if it ever came. Maybe I would just say nothing with “lips [that] began to move, forming soundless words” to quote Salinger out of context.

The Taiwanese wedding planner told me that in a tuxedo I looked like Jude Law. He pronounced it “jew-duh luh.” The cameras flashed and people spoke words we didn't understand, while we spoke words which they probably didn't understand.

I thought of how funny it would be as performance art to declare my marriage on facebook, complete with photographic evidence of bride and wedding gown. But somehow picturing the comments from ex-girlfriends and my mother dissuaded me a little from the committing the hoax, though the message I would convey would be nonetheless important. We always hurt the ones we love.

As a kid I was told repeatedly the story of the boy who cried “wolf.” But somehow I never grasped the moral, thinking that if I cried “wolf” loud enough, that it would have the power of incantation, that it would become true. With lips that continued to move.

Probably he would suffer the loudest would be my father whose amusement at repeating such aphorisms as Mencken's “marriage is an institution. But I'm not ready for an institution” or Oscar Wilde's “the proper basis for a marriage is a mutual misunderstanding” has always been akin to that of a child playing with a favorite toy. By getting married, to my brother I would have effectively died.

We filed languidly between rows of enamored onlookers to the melody of “Ave Maria” or something, and I was convinced momentarily, and the spell lasted throughout the photo shoot that ensued. All because of a song.

I thought of a conversation I had with my mother. She said “so I spent the day with David and Shannon.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Well, they're my adopted Grand-kids, since I know that I'll never have any of my own!” She laughed, but it was a laugh that betrayed a certain earnest longing, which she has been enthusiastically expressing since I hit puberty. I wondered whether I could fake this on facebook too.

It's a funny thing, the way we know each other but don't know each other. This postmodern paradox that we are continually “in touch” with pictures and newsfeeds available at the push of a button, but authentic living has gone to seed on the sacrificial altar of personal advertisement, the facebook page that proclaims what Freud described as the separate “selves” of who we are versus who we want others to think we are.

In a departure from Freudian psychology, Jacques Lacan theorized that our “unconscious” is structured like a language, and that the self of “who am I?” versus the self of “who do I want others to think I am?” could be perceived as the difference between “I love you” and “elephant shoes.”

The Taiwanese wedding planner was proud of how the show went, and was effusive with his praise of his “mah-tuh(s).” He even shared a rather personal tale, telling us that his father had withheld words of praise almost his entire life, but on that night had told his son that he was proud of him. To over-praise an underling, in Taiwanese society, constitutes a loss of face, albeit a useful one.

In looking at the images from that day alone in my bachelor's den, a month after my performance art marriage, I lingered on a few images, momentarily convinced of the magic incantation. I closed the computer's screen on itself and sat down with a book in a dimly lit corner. I felt the apartment start to shake--just a tiny earthquake, one of many.

Why learning the language is an excellent idea

Last night in Bangkok I was lingering uncertainly in the hotel lobby waiting for a flight when it dawned on me that the employees of the hotel where I had been uncertainly lingering were having a laugh at my expense. People in a place like Thailand can expect, reasonably I think, that most foreigners they see will not speak Thai. Most Americans have a strong aversion to learning another country's language, as if doing so would be a traitorous action, an affront to those who "talk 'merican" making sure to always buy inferior products supposedly manufactured within the perpetually fractured union. We have a reluctance to learn the history of other countries as well, I thought, reflecting on Charles Dickens' "classic" A Tale of Two Cities, and realizing that I had no idea what he was talking about. This thought was interrupted of course by the three Thai ladies who were making fun of me, quite loudly I might add, making reading this Dickensian crap impossible.

We Americans dismiss the idea that we are a bunch of ignorant, arrogant, provincial selfish hicks by listening to songs with lyrics like "Don't know much about history/Don't know much biology/Don't know much about a science book/Don't know much about the french I took/But I do know that I love you/ And I know that if you love me too/What a wonderful world this would be." Well, it takes more than love to make a wonderful world. It takes diplomacy and a little knowledge of history and world affairs. It takes the ability to stomach a little bit of sushi without puking in the Japanese ambassador's lap (Senior Bush) or without claiming that "Africa is a country with many problems" (Junior Bush). It takes a strong command of language, which I am afraid to say, Americans just don't possess. In full awareness of the logical fallacy I am comitting here, I am using the same song as evidence for another point--"La ta ta ta ta ta ta/(History)/Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh(Biology)/La ta ta ta ta ta ta/(Science book)/Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh/(French I took)." Those aren't even words! How can we entrust the creation of this "wonderful world" to a nation of people who speak like cave beasts? When you ask the average American a question with a yes or no answer, he will often insist on using a series of grunts "uh-huh" for yes and "uh-uh" for no. If confused, he will say "huh?"

The Thais know this. They know we don't speak any other language and we arrogantly assume someone of a different nationality to be a dolt when he speaks English with an accent. "O My gawd! Where's that guy from? Like, check-lo-slovenia?" "I know, huh." So it comes as no surprise to a traveller like myself when he realizes someone is making fun of him in another language, assuming correctly, that he won't understand.

It came to a head when they started taking pictures of me with their cell phones and pantomiming my gestures, so I used the tactic of the grinning idiot. This just egged them on.

In my rant on American language (speak 'merican, dammit) I used, in the last paragraph alone, no less than two nonsensical idioms, which adds to my point. Not only can we not understand anyone who speaks another language, but foreigners attempting to learn to speak American will doubtlessly fall upon several "stumbling blocks." If you used the expression to "egg someone on" in school for instance, teaching ESL, you would be met with confused stares, as I have. Looking it up on the internet reveals nothing in the way of etymology. We learn that a synonym for "egg on" is to "goose." Oh sure-- now I get it. People, neither geese nor eggs can "incite." Diligent Chinese students attempting to learn English will be laughed at as soon as they apply their precise diction in a business meeting with stupid Texans. It will only be later, when they are all drunk when these Texans will throw the guy the bone of respect and say perhaps "you're all right, shorty." We can neither understand other cultures nor can we make ourselves understood. God help those Chinese students if they look up the idiom "come to a head" on the porn-laden internet.

Which brings me back to the Thai ladies in question. After I had noticed that they were taking pictures of me and laughing I then participated in their game by making faces and speaking in English for a few words at a time. Pidgin English is a technique all foreigners use to communicate when in parts unknown. That and we speak more slowly and raise our voices when someone doesn't understand English. "yeah, funny! Me! So funny! Ha ha!" I said. It was all in good fun.

I remember distinctly another incident in which I was on a flight from Taiwan to Hong Kong. The flight was not full and there were several empty seats. My knowledge of Mandarin was burgeoning slowly so when the flight attendant came up to the man who was sitting next to me and spoke to him in Mandarin Chinese, I was able to discern a few words. I heard the Chinese word for "sit" which I knew very well from telling my younger students to sit the fuckdown, goddammit! I heard what I thought was the word "stinky" learned from ordering a dish known as "stinky tofu" something I only did once, and which I remembered. I most definitely heard the word for "foreigner" which I had by then heard many times and learned to recognize. I cobbled together the pieces of what the flight attendant had said to the man sitting next to me and discerned "are you sure you want to sit next to this stinky foreign devil?" The man got up and changed seats shortly therafter. I can't say I blamed him.

Imagine all the people working in the rice paddies

It was striking to me how quickly and easily the school was turned into a prison. I have experienced a feeling, many times before in my life as a teacher, a feeling that I would liken to being somehow trapped or incarcerated. In this instance, they simply added bars over the windows and mortared some bricks together to make tight cells which would be solitary confinement chambers. The swings and bars upon which the school children would play were converted hastily and cheaply into a water- based torture device through the use of a small amount of rope. The prisoners hung suspended by their feet from rope tied to what used to be a swing set and were lowered head first into large vases filled with stagnant water until they confessed to imagined crimes at which point they were shot at point blank range in the head and buried in mass graves 18 miles outside of the city of Phnom Penh. Toward the end of the war, when bullets were more valuable, they were strangled with plastic bags or beaten to death.

In one hall of the old prison, converted now into a museum, there was a row of pictures of those who had been executed as enemies of the state or counter-revolutionaries. Strangely, on one wall every visage seemed to grin, holding some secret or perhaps unaware of the horrible fate that awaited them. What I took for subversive vitality, grinning at their captors, was actually, I came to learn in later interactions, a body language characteristic of many peoples of Southeast Asia. Grinning or smiling expresses uneasiness, which is one reason vacationing Chinese will seldom smile in pictures in front of monuments or points of interest. They look stolid and unmoved because they are expressing happiness, or emotions not pertaining to discomfort.

The pictures are there because, like most autocratic regimes interested in annihilating all opposition to the revolution, the Khmer Rouge was careful to document the victims before and after they were killed. As legacy to the atypical level of depravity and sadism involved in the genocide, Pol Pot’s men photographed their victims both before and after death, bodies mutilated all in the same fashion, with incisions made across the throat and down the abdomen. The routine bordered on behavior that was compulsive to the point of being almost religious. Next to the room where the grinning faces appear, you can meander through a room which depicts those same faces, very demonstrably dead.

I went there because I wanted to see the depth of human folly that had caused the deaths of one fourth of Cambodia’s population in the late 1970’s. I wanted to understand how this beautiful country, filled with smiling vibrant people could have been ruined by a revolution which to me seemed to make so little sense, and how the American government of Kissinger and Nixon, most definitely culpable in the history of the conflict, could do so little with respect to aiding the innocent. Seeking understanding, I found, as is typical, only more mystery, as in opening Pandora’s Box. By the end of my self guided tour I felt defeated and exhausted--my faith in the goodness of mankind very seriously shaken.

Near the periphery of the prison a sign announced in a dictatorial tone the rules of interrogation that “you must answer accordingly to my questions. Don’t turn them away. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me. Do not be fool for you are chap who dare to thwart the revolution. While getting lashes or electrification, you must not cry at all.” A cryptic sign which stood above a whitewashed doorway displayed a grinning face with a red “X” over it. No laughing.

When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in the spring of 1975, they ordered the population to leave and the teeming former French colonial city became a veritable ghost town in which the party goons were free to conduct whatever mischief they felt would best foment a complete cultural and ideological change. Feeling the cities to be fountainheads of modernity and other inherent sins not directly associated with pastoral living and a strictly agrarian communist society, everyone simply had to abandon their former lives and go to work farming rice out in the countryside. The theory behind leadership like this seems to me to be less “socialist” in nature and more of a nihilist bent, and it was hard for me to wrap my brain around it all. Clearly, impractical ideas like this would have their opponents, and that was presumably the purpose for places like the Tuol Sleng Security Prison number 21, or S-21 as it came to be known.

As I rounded the corner up the stairs, I noticed bats hanging from the ceiling and clinging to the walls in the corridor. This harbinger would preface the images of the upper floors in which torture devices sat on the floors of lonely rooms—c-clamps through which iron bars were thrust, forming crude shackles for hands and feet, electric wires and medieval “racks” where prisoners were bound and tortured with water. Interrogation techniques of this nature, inhumane as they might be are successful at producing confessions and extracting information, as the Khmer Rouge learned. However, the information gleaned from torturing in this manner is not reliable, because the victim, guilty or not, will say anything to stop the pain, even if it’s an invented tale of conspiring against the torturers. Of the 17,000 people to have passed through the S-21 Prison, one of many of its kind, only a score survived, having been found “innocent” of their alleged crimes.

There is a poem on the wall of the museum which reads like an extended version of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Unlike Lennon though who describes good times right around that same time period with “ev’rybody had a good time/ ev’rybody had a wet dream/ev’rybody saw the sunshine/ oh yeah” the poem on the wall of this prison describes all of the things the Khmer Rouge outlawed. Entitled “The New Regime” by Sarith Pou, it reads:

“No social gatherings./No chitchatting./No jokes. No laughters./No music. No dancing./No romance. No flirting./No formication. No dating./No wet dreaming./No masturbating./No naked sleepers./No bathers./No nakedness in showers./No love songs. No love letters./No affection./”

John Lennon most certainly would not have approved. Possibly scarier yet—even scarier than a society with no wet dreams—is the fact that the regime may have been successful had they managed to cooperate more effectively with Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and cultivated good relations with their neighbors in Vietnam. Had they remained isolationist, they may have even recieved aid from the United States for controlling their “drug problem” as was the case with the Taliban, initially lauded by Premier Bush for having so completely stopped the flow of opiates. As long as they were calling themselves the “Democratic Republic of People’s Kampuchea” and stanching the flow of drugs into America, it probably would have gone unnoticed that they were systematically murdering their own people.

A German friend once told me of a certain affliction, known to the modern German. The malady known as Weltschmerz, chiefly existential and intellectual, affects those who are often so overwhelmed by the capacity of human beings to be cruel to other human beings that they suffer from frequent bouts of unbearable sadness. The phrase, roughly translated, means “world pain.” I stood alone, having lost my father earlier, and stared through the bars of a cell at the palms and acacia trees outside doing a lazy sway in time with the wind, that rolled through now as it always had. My prison then was one of selfishness and helplessness. What kind of person am I, living the life I do, when things like this are happening at this moment? I thought these things but wondered what exactly, I could do about it, and I decided that the answer was nothing. I stared out through those bars for a long time.

Motion has always had a certain remedy in it, so I moved onward downstairs which was where I found a massive pile of human skulls. Just there. Human skulls in a glass case in various states of disrepair showing blunt force trauma and bullet holes and some which were remarkably intact and piled in neat symmetry so as to give the illusion of collective mass, this enormous pile, this ceaseless senseless human suffering piled there in voiceless testimony to the revolutionary ideals that had caused so much needless, and ultimately ineffectual—insofar as it failed to create the desired change-- destruction.

I was glad then for the presence of my father. In my heart dangerous sentiments had started to build like cumulus clouds prefacing a storm. At the periphery of my thoughts were ideas about human-kind consisting not of the noble-savage, but of some much darker and more sinister thing, something naked and bestial and capable of unimaginable violence. I can’t remember what he said, but he talked me down like he always does and somehow I went back to “normal” if such a word could ever apply to me.

I have a picture which I did not take myself (my camera was stolen later that day when, in my reveries, I failed to guard it properly) but which was taken by my father. The photo is of an artist’s depiction of water torture techniques used at the prison. What interests me about the photo is not what is in the drawing itself, but what is reflected in the glass that covers the art. Reflected there you can see my father, holding out his camera, commemorating what for him was surely something monumental, something that had an impact. This photo conveys the importance of an effort toward reflection. Those inhumane acts, those senseless deaths—they are meaningful when they are reflected upon the living insofar as they illuminate our progress, our cultivation of a more sensible future. Or so I hope.

My Dad and I went to leave and we heard a distant cry of distress. We followed it to its source and found a kitten, mewing desperately for some kind of savior, from within the confines of a very much locked and sealed jail cell. I thought of Amanda and how for her the human tragedy of the place would doubtless be outweighed by the desperate feline struggle unfolding now. We tried to reach inward but were met with failure. Though I wanted to do something, my arms would not achieve the small space, and the kitten was just out of reach. I tried to tell the staff at the entrance of the “museum” about the kitten, but my entreaties fell on deaf ears, the language barrier impeding any real communication. I try to do something, but there is nothing I can do.

Outside there is a pleasant tropical breeze and the air is redolent of the sweet nectar of some unknown equatorial flower. A slant sunlight falls over the gravestones of 14 corpses found there in 1979, representing the last 14 people to have been killed at the S-21 prison before those responsible fled, changed sides, or found employment with another war somewhere. Yellow and white blossoms litter the concrete floor out in the courtyard, the wind blowing them out of the tall trees overhead. There are almost no sounds save for what was caused by what I think was a group of children playing in the street nearby. I suppose it could have been laughter.

That which will not make me stronger can only kill me

Todd Skinner once warned that "there's nothing more dangerous than an easy mountain." This is presumably because an easy mountain does not demand the full attention and survival resources of the alpinist. From the beginning I knew that Kyazu Ri was within my ability to climb, and within my ability to guide, but this season the mountain gods bedeviled my path with a series of obstacles and portents, the first of which was the measles.

Upon nearing the Kyazu Ri basecamp a week after my first illness subsided, we learned of a Danish expedition which had met with an accident due to rockfall. The Sherpas down valley warned of the danger and expressed their concern for us travelers by relating in Pidgin English the heartbreaking tale of the father-son mountaineering team which had been struck by misfortune somewhere en route. The tale involved a desperate struggle for life and limb culminating in a helicopter rescue and eventually including the didactic moral of the story in it's final conclusion-- "he die. very bad.you very careful." I was picturing Aeneas in his flight from Troy carrying his father on his back as he fled the flames of his great city, wondering if I would have the strength to do the same. Recurring thoughts like this made it all that much more alarming when my father failed to show up at the appointed place when returning from Kyazu Ri basecamp.

I frantically searched for him, retracing the steps I had taken when I ditched him earlier, of course regretting having ditched him earlier. I went from tea house to tea house asking if they had seen this man, quickly pantomiming a beard and glasses, each Sherpa face communicating a concerned "no." Finally, after I had started to sort of hear what I thought were his desperate cries for help, but which was probably someone shouting at a Yak, I attracted the attention of a Sherpani woman who asked me about the situation and where I had last seen him. "Up by the monastery" I panted. "Well" she replied "I suppose we could call them." She then whipped out a cell phone from the folds of her traditional garb and had a 30 second conversation with the devout monks upon the hill who had renounced possessions of any kind except apparently for their cell phones. "Your father is safe" she announced "and he is sleeping soundly. Care for some tea?"

I would not think about the father-son Danish mountaineering team again until Peter, Carter and I made the ascent to the col on Kyazu Ri. Just before an easy 5^th class rock step which one must negotiate to attain the col, the team must travel through a narrow and marginally steep gully choked with boulders. Above the gulley, a hanging glacier threatens to dislodge debris which has rested precariously atop its icy surface for centuries. It is logical then, that at certain times of day when the weather has been warm, that crossing through the gulley could pose a significant rockfall danger. Midway up the gulley, I stopped Carter. “Does that look like a backpack or something up ahead?” He agreed. This was an easy determination to make considering the fact that any contrast in the lifeless landscape would have stood out to even the colorblind among us. We approached and found a pack and some scattered clothing and equipment and what looked to be an unbelievable volume of blood. There was a sleeping bag lying among the boulders near the pack. A paperback was torn into pieces and its pages were scattered to the wind. A used auto-injector, presumably a steroid, was lying next to a small mound of brownish gauze frosted in a thin coating of ice. There was a glove coated in blood and matted with human hair. It was frozen into a contorted claw as if grappling at some invisible form of the Platonic world. My mind usually turns to comedy at a time like this and I was reminded of the place-holder text seen so often in the Onion, “America’s Favorite News Source” when there were too few words to fill a column—“passersby were amazed at the amounts of blood passersby were amazed at the amounts of blood passersby were amazed at the amounts of blood.” It was a thin consolation. I could tell by the looks on the faces of both Peter and Carter that this reminder of mortality was not strengthening their resolve, so I acted in a manner befitting a police officer at the scene of the crime and moved them on. Nothing to see here.

We moved up through the rock band to the col. Peter remained in the rocks below, having lost a crampon earlier that afternoon, giving up his bid on the summit. Carter and I stood atop the flat col, buffeted by winds, our attempts to communicate blown away in the gale.

“I DON’T THINK WE CAN PITCH A TENT HERE!”

“WHAT?!!!”

We went lower to the rocks a hundred feet beneath the col.

“Do you think we could pitch it there?”

“Over there? No… we’d have to anchor the tent in just to avoid slipping downhill all night.”

“There? Over by those rocks?”

“Too sharp. We would shred the tent. Not to mention not sleeping.”

“At the last belay?”

It would not have occurred to me to pitch a tent there. I slung a boulder for the belay when the rope went taut at the end of 50 meters. The icy platform was barely big enough for the three of us to stand.

“It’ll have to do.”

After 20 minutes of chopping the bullet ice with blunted adzes, the three of us were spent as if we had climbed the mountain twice over, and we had barely succeeded in widening the slope enough for a tent, to say nothing of making it flat enough to sleep. Though the effort was keeping us warm, we were nearing the point of apathy that comes with exhaustion and results often in incompletely chopped tent ledges and a slanted sleep. We anchored the tent with rocks and an ice screw and settled in for the short night which would end for Carter and I at 2 am for the summit push.

I manned the stove and melted chunks of ice into the tiny pot placed gingerly on a rock inside the vestibule. I have always liked the work of manning the stove. Over the years it has become an art—knowing when to add more ice, how much can be added before the pot will overflow or the stove will lose efficiency, keeping the canister warm—these are all exercises which occupy the mind at altitude and distill the world into a safe cocoon of simplicity where the more pressing problems of one’s everyday life fade into the obscurity. I find now that I have difficulty paying bills on time, completing business with the DMV, remembering appointments, filling out paperwork. I discussed this idea once with Fabrizio Zangrilli and he expressed understanding—saying, “if it’s not a serac hanging over your head, it just doesn’t seem to matter.” I pondered this as I struggled for sleep and listened to the stove simmer.

At 9 pm I awoke when Carter sat up with a jolt, as from a skirmish in dreams, breathing heavily. He told us he couldn’t sleep because he couldn’t breathe. We told some stories and tried to relax and thought about how we would someday all laugh about this incident. I told them about my friend Will from Alabama whose stories would invariably begin with the expression “so there I was.” We postulated the beginning of the Kyazu Ri story of that year—“so there I was, stranded in a 2 person tent sandwiched between two climbing partners, trying to breathe, trying to sleep on a tiny platform, on a bed of other men.” Things are funny at altitude which wouldn’t be funny elsewhere.

I have no recollection of sleep, but I do remember sitting upright for much of the night just to be able to breathe. I started the stove and soon I was counting my own footsteps, trudging through the snow of the previous night up past the col in the cold dark of the starry Himalayan night.

We belayed at the first rock step. I pounded a few pins into incipient cracks and gave Carter a brief tutorial on their removal. As I began the belayed climbing, I moved past one of the pins I placed last year, aware that neither Abe nor Philip could remove it. With Arthurian skill, I pounded it a few times and it popped out. I placed it again, maybe even more securely this time, cognizant of the fact that someone who has never cleaned a mixed route will encounter some difficulty. I shouted down to Carter “don’t spend more than 2 minutes on any single piece of gear!” I knew that to keep moving quickly was of the utmost importance on this route.

The dawn sped toward us as Carter inched his way up the second pitch of mixed climbing which begins in a flaring chimney with ice delicately plastered to the narrow constrictions in back. I stemmed up the step ground, finding rests here and there and overcoming short cruxes by hooking my tools on tiny edges and burying them in cracks. I decided to avoid the crux ice section which had slowed the team’s progress the previous season by staying to the right of a steep serac and veering onto moderate ice.

My lungs crackled and I found it painful to breathe with what I recognized as the onset of HAPE and possibly pleurisy, no doubt brought on by my weakened immune system and measles and all familiar from previous high altitude climbing. I knew what the onset felt like and how long and how high I would be able to climb before I started coughing up gobs of viscous goo. Carter was moving quite expediently, but was solicitous as to my condition. He also had the courage to share that he was not feeling well himself, citing fatigue which increased with every pitch we climbed. I was feeling it too. There’s something about summit day which always requires me to dig deep, and I was doing it—I was finding that limit once again.

I swung my tools into the hard ice and knocked dinner plates down toward by stoic climbing partner, the two of us the last of an initial team of 5. Careful to place gear every so often in order to stave off the fatigue that could cause a fall, I used my axes in dagger position and gingerly edged upward on four tiny front-points. It is at this juncture where all thought falls away. Anxiety over the future and guilt over the past are replaced by the beating of my heart and the rhythm of breath like a compass pointing upward. Swing, swing, kick, kick. I am careful to place each belay in a sheltered enclave away from falling ice, following a map of the route I had chosen the previous year. For rhythm sake, and to avoid the temptation to hold still until I could catch my breath, I thought of a drum beat in my head which corresponded roughly with the pounding of my blood through my swelling brain. I added the words of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, as a sort of drum-beat mantra as I stabbed by way up each icy pitch. “No, what my heart will be is a tower,/and I will be right out on its rim:/nothing else will be there, only pain/and what can’t be said, only the world..” And the beat of a drum. Every fiber of my being screamed for me to stop and rest. I told myself that I could rest at the belay. You can rest when you’re dead. Upon reaching the belay though, my drumbeat sound-track had all the energy of a tape player with low batteries, the beats fewer and farther between, the voice a low register death rattle. I coughed and coughed and hyperventilated for the several minutes it took Carter to reach our belay.

“I’m out of gas, man.”

“I think it’s just 2 pitches to the summit. Have a GU and rest for a bit while we make up our mind.”

“I can’t even think.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“Cleaning those pins wore me out.”

“Just sit and rest. Ok, one long running belay and one hard pitch.”

“I’m at the end of what I can do. I don’t know if I could do another hard pitch.”

“Just sit and rest and then we’ll decide.”

As I threaded the 5 mil for a v-thread, I realized I was retreating at the same point as last year. “Abe and I stared at this exact same view when we decided to retreat short of the summit.” I mentioned. Mustering the energy for a symbolic gesture, I took out the necklace I had been carrying with me to place on the summit. I wanted rid of that thing, summit or no.

We rappelled for what seemed like a long time, taking the time to place a v-thread and a backup anchor at each rappel. Upon reaching the col again at 2pm, though my body felt better, the sense of relief was tempered by a vague anti-climax. We reached the tent where Peter coked for us and I napped inside the sun-warmed tent exhausted until Peter roused me and we descended to the better air.

I woke up the next morning at our Advanced Base Camp coughing and rubbing my raw frost-nipped nose. I treated myself to a nalgene filled with hot tea and an extra package of instant oatmeal. We would have a clear day for the hike down. Peter leaned his head inside my tent, smiling. “Happy birthday” he said.

If wishes were flammable

"If wishes were horses" was a favorite expression of my grandmother's. The rest of the equation reads "then beggars would ride." This kind of thinking appeals for obvious reasons to people who worked hard all their lives and were told that nothing is easy and that only through toil and honesty can one achieve one's ultimate desires. No one understands this reasoning better than the hard-working Taiwanese, for whom a "weekend" is a few hours of family time on a Sunday, and one vacation per year, usually during Chinese New Year. All of the wishing is reserved for that time. On the last day of Chinese New Year, it is traditional to write one's wishes on the paper of a large lantern, held together with thin wire and equipped with a small combustible element to fill the paper sack with hot air, and send one's wishes skyward to be read and summarily ignored by the Chinese space gods.

One place where the lantern festival is particularly widely celebrated is the small mountain village of Pingxi, a hour's train ride north of Taipei, near the north coast of Taiwan. I had no inkling, when I set out to watch the activities of the festival, that the town's proximity to Taipei and its location in a narrow valley would also make this one of the most crowded events I have attended in Asia. Actually, when I left my house in the early morning to ride the train for the nearly 5 hours needed to complete the journey, I had no idea that for the duration of my travel day I would be standing. This is something the traveller must contend with, just as one who casts his wishes to the sky must face the possibility that they will not come true, or the possibility that they will.

I woke up in the morning with the memory of last night's parting with Amanda still fresh in my mind-- her downcast eyes focusing on the bowl of soup steaming from the table in front of her, the awful finality of the no longer needed keys to my apartment pressed into the palm of my hand. Though we would not spend the day together, we ended up meeting on the train anyway, and I tried to ignore her conversation with a friend where they discussed future plans-- plans that no longer included me.

I sat silently and immersed myself in Peter Hessler's "River Town" a firsthand account of two years spent teaching English to Chinese students in Fuling, a Sichuanese town now partially submerged in water due to the flooding of the Yangtze caused by the relatively recent completion of China's Three Gorges Dam-- the largest in the world. Hessler describes his students' theories that "the Chinese were collective minded, which inspired them to help each other through Socialism, while the individualistic Americans followed the selfish road of Capitalism." I had trouble seeing his argument, or theirs, as I was nudged and elbowed every time the train pulled to a stop and more people got on, all headed for Pingxi to cast an "individualistic" wish into the heavens.

After much queuing and clattering and pushing and shoving, we arrived at the station where we walked around and observed families and elderly couples and young teens launching lanterns into the sky. The trees along the steep hillsides were littered with the carcasses of the fallen lanterns, because dreams must eventually come crashing to earth. The air was redolent of gunpowder and fermented tofu (Chou Dofu--literally translated it means "stinky tofu"). I watched one family try to set their dreams in motion. The white lantern had been painted with Chinese characters. The children held the corners and scurried about, excited. Dad ducked under the shroud that his wife and children held aloft so that he could light the oily paper underneath, the source of the heat which would send their wishes skyward. He lit it, but something had gone awry in their wishing. Though their lantern drifted and floated above their heads, it never took off, and eventually through much poking and prodding and demanding, the woman pulled a tissue out of her pocket and lay it gently over a small hole in the top. The lantern shot skyward.

I watched others sending their dreams up into the spiraling cloud of floating lanterns. Occasionally one would burst into flames and plummet to earth. Some would grasp the corners of their dreams until it was so full of hot air that it looked as if it would burst and explode. Finally when released they would rocket straight skyward and disappear, the Chinese characters a mere myth of the mind, the light receding into the sky. Others poked and pleaded until their lantern began a slow diagonal ascent, drifting on the warm breeze fore and aft before climbing slowly into the gloaming.

I myself could not compose words to describe my longings and thought about whether to release a lantern. I thought of my friends as I sat there and how some of their plans had come to nothing, whereas others had seen a turn of events and their dreams had morphed and changed along with the changes in their faces over the years. I know some people who are vaguely dissatisfied, I know others who would not struggle to come up with something to wish for. Most would have been able to pick out a colored lantern that stood for one of the five categories of wishes that could be made-- red for money, blue for marriage, and other colors representing health, good fortune or knowledge. I saw students wishing to do well on their exams, young women wishing for marriage, young men wishing for money so that they could get married. Many of my friends would be able to fit their desires into those boxes. I thought of them and sent my hopes and intentions and wishes spiralling upward into the night sky attached metaphorically to the fragile Chinese voices, until they disappeared into the darkness. I shoved my way onto the train, unable to muster any wish for myself-- content for now in the knowledge that I am here, and that it is beautiful.