[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 65 (Monday, May 23, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 23, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                                 NEPAL

 Mr. DURENBERGER. Mr. President, a couple of weeks ago, the 
Minneapolis Star Tribune published a series of articles by Jim 
Klobuchar based on a recent trek through the Himalayas which he made 
accompanied by a number of other Minnesotans. Although he does not 
directly address the political situation, Jim's series does provide a 
glimpse of life in the shadow of Mount Everest.
  The same week that the series appeared in the Star Tribune, the Prime 
Minister of Nepal, Mr. G.P. Koirala was in Washington for medical care. 
I was fortunate enough to be able to spend some time with the Prime 
Minister one evening and discuss the situation in his country with him.
  I visited Nepal a number of years ago, prior to the adoption of the 
present democratic Constitution. Largely because of that visit, I have 
maintained a strong interest in Nepal, and have followed developments 
there closely.
  Since my visit in 1989, a number of significant changes have taken 
place in that country, which have led to a number of challenges for its 
people and its leadership.
  In May 1991, Nepal had its first free and open election in 32 years. 
The Nepali Congress won 110 of 205 seats in the House of 
Representatives. The Communist Party of Nepal [UML] won 69 seats, with 
the remainder of the seats distributed among a number of parties.
  The challenge that now faces Nepal is similar to that faced by 
several other nations in the region--the strengthening of democratic 
institutions and developing a sound economy.
  This challenge is made especially difficult amid speculation that the 
ruling Nepali Congress party will be divided by internal conflicts. 
Should the present conflicts lead to a permanent division within the 
Nepali Congress, the opposition, dominated by the Communist Party of 
Nepali, would be in a position to overthrow the present Government, or 
at the least create an unstable situation.
  This prospect aside, for a country with more than 20 languages and a 
number of ethnic groups, Nepal has been uncommonly successful at 
building a democracy with parties that are not based on language, 
ethnicity, or region.
  Economically, the Government faces the difficult task of meeting the 
public's high expectations for development and prosperity. Although the 
Government has attempted to encourage foreign investment by eliminating 
licenses and registration requirements, and has been cutting public 
expenditures by reducing subsidies and privatizing state industries, 
Nepal remains one of the poorest and least developed countries in Asia.
  Nepal is a small country in a remote region, and not very significant 
strategically, but it should not be ignored. The situation in Nepal is 
fragile, and I encouraged my colleagues to pay close attention to 
developments there.
  Mr. President, the final part of Jim's series tells the story of a 
Tibetan who fled Chinese-ruled Tibet through the Himalayas for Nepal, 
drawing attention to the plight of Tibetan refugees. I have been 
pleased to see this matter raised by a higher level of public awareness 
by popular actor Richard Gere. I commend Mr. Gere for his commitment to 
this issue and his efforts on behalf of the people of Tibet. The issue 
by itself is not very glamorous, and his advocacy is an important 
contribution.
  Let me conclude by paying tribute to Jim Klobuchar, my favorite 
adventurer. He has indeed written a splendid chronicle of life and 
travel in the Himalayas. I also would like to mention the magnificent 
photography in the series by Stormi Greener, who makes pictures that 
come to life before your eyes. I wish it was possible to insert 
pictures in the Record so my colleagues could enjoy this incredible 
artistry.
  Mr. President, I ask that the entire four-part series by Jim 
Klobuchar in the Star Tribune be printed in the Record immediately 
following my remarks, and I encourage my colleagues to read it fully.
  The series follows:

        [From the Minneapolis (MN) Star Tribune, Apr. 25, 1994]

                         To the Edge of Everest

                           (By Jim Klobuchar)


     A mix of east, west, rich and poor at the summit of the world

       In their casements of ice, the mountains give no testimony 
     to the crosscurrents of human passions that have colored 
     their snowy slopes with blood
       There is a murder at high altitude here. There is 
     sacrifice, folly and bravery, and the sight of children 
     laboring over marathon distances each day to learn. Much of 
     the drama is invisible to the rest of the world.
       Some of it we saw firsthand on our trek toward Mount 
     Everest. It was an odd and unsettling mixture--the hunger of 
     free air of Tibetan refugees crossing 18,000-foot passes by 
     night juxtaposed against wealthy mountaineers' hunger for 
     trophies.
       The luminous summits and the accounts of dramatic mountain 
     climbs blind the world to some of its rawest inequities of 
     life and fortune, here in the highest of mountains.
       The Himalayas are a mountain world idealized as a 
     wellspring of ancient wisdom and peace. But here the human 
     drives of ego and self-preservation collide. The yearning of 
     children of poverty to create better lives for themselves 
     collides with the pursuit of glory by western sportsmen. The 
     yearning of Buddhist Tebetans to be reunited with the Dalai 
     Lama collides with the strong-arm ideology and the rifles of 
     their Chinese Communist captors.
       Here is a boy wearing torn old tennis shoes, a wool cap and 
     a trekker's abandoned pants and sweater. All of his clothes 
     are smeared with the smoky grit of his chimneyless house. He 
     is a Nepalese kid. Pasang, walking alone in the dark from his 
     village of Thame to his school in the Himalayas.
       He set out before the sun lit the mountains to their 
     morning incandescence. He started early because he had 3\1/2\ 
     hours to walk to reach his classroom in Khumjung at 12,000 
     feet.
       Imagine a child walking 3\1/2\ hours to school, and being 
     grateful.
       The trail between Thame and Khumjung is steep and clotted 
     with rocks. It climbs 1,500 feet. Schoolchildren who walk it 
     before dawn are not absorbed with notions about irony and the 
     disparities of life. Getting there is enough. Entering the 
     dirt schoolyard through a break in its boulder fence, the kid 
     from Thame had no knowledge of a scene 10 miles away in the 
     village of Pheriche.
       There, a Minnesota-trained voluntary physician, Dan 
     O'Connell, and his partner worked to save the life of a rich 
     Japanese doctor wearing expensive trekking gear. He collapsed 
     from acute mountain sickness on another trail after rushing 
     recklessly into the thin air, higher and higher, before his 
     lungs had a chance to match his bravado.
       At the same hour, western tourists paid hundreds of dollars 
     to charter a helicopter from Kathmandu for a closer look at 
     Mount Everest from the sun terrace and bar to the Everest 
     View Hotel.
       The hotel reflects a ghostly, selfmocking regalness. Dozens 
     of tables are set immaculately in the dining room. The chairs 
     are empty. There are no overnight guests. Except for random 
     drop-ins for tea or Scotch, the hotel never worked out. The 
     Japanese built it 15 years ago. It stands now as a misguided 
     memorial to 20th century opulence, built in a place of Stone 
     Age technology.
       At the same hour, Tshing Futi carefully maneuvered two 
     discs of dried yak dung and three small pieces of birch wood 
     to keep an even flame under the omelettes she was cooking for 
     some Canadians in Pheriche. The dung burned with small blue 
     flare-ups that were unpromising but game.
       Satisfied, Tshing Futi shuffled a few feet in her battered 
     athletic shoes, one hand pouring milk for four of her guests 
     and the other baling some fresh water out of a barrel left in 
     Pheriche by a Yugoslavian Everest expedition of unknown 
     vintage. Tshing Futi was in constant movement, slow but 
     genuinely graceful, her dusty robes scuttling along the dirt 
     floor.
       She is the proprietor and sole employee of a shack of 
     hardwood cots called the Ama Dablam Hotel, She got divorced 
     years ago, shortly before her ex-husband, an expedition 
     porter, was killed by an avalanche on Dhaulagiri.
       In the hour when Tshing Futi worked her dung oven, an 
     American enterpriser and professional mountaineer prepared 
     Everest's base camp for the arrival of millionaire climbers 
     who will spend boxcar sums to reach the summit.
       And at the same hour and at about the same altitude of more 
     than 18,000 feet, a few miles away, a Tibetan refugee names 
     Sonam Zylsto scrabbled through the snow of the Nangpa La pass 
     between Tibet and Nepal to escape the Chinese Reds. His feet 
     were numb, frostbitten. He almost died, as others did before 
     him, from exposure of gunshot. Companions dragged him into 
     the Edmund Hillary Hospital at Khunde, from where penniless 
     patients can glimpse the vacant splendor of the Everest View 
     Hotel.
       Right about that hour, seven of us trudged the 500-year-old 
     trails that we hoped would take us to the edge of Everest. 
     There was nothing heroic about our agenda, nothing dangerous 
     if you except the chance of being sandbagged by the always-
     lurking Kathmandu Krud.
       No traveler, regardless of the whims of luck or the size of 
     his bank balance, has to blush with guilt for being drawn to 
     the idea of finding faraway places. Of these, Everest may be 
     the most symbolic there is. You can argue about motives and 
     elitism in climbing Everest, especially now when it's 
     increasingly restricted to tycoons with muscles and manias.
       Our goal was quieter. We numbered five women in their 40s, 
     one man just turned 40 and another blessed with even riper 
     maturity (me). We though a reasonable destination would be a 
     close-up of Everest from a height called Kala Pattar at 
     18,500 feet. After that, we added Everest's base camp as a 
     potential bonus.
       Of the women, Chris Wolohan of Wayzata, the nursing 
     director of Hennepin County Medical Center, had traveled in 
     the Himalayas once before. It was a first for Barbara Schmitt 
     of Minnetonka, the telecommunications director at Josten's 
     Inc.; Susan Graca of Wayzata, an occupational nurse at 
     Medtronic; Stormi Greener of Mahtomedi, the prominent Star 
     Tribune photographer, Lee Perenic of suburban Detroit, and 
     Tom Gray of south Minneapolis, computer consultant.
       I was more or less responsible for gathering this uncommon 
     group in Kathmandu in mid-March for the 16-day trek on the 
     road to Everest. The visit to the Himalayas was my eighth. I 
     never tire of it. It is a reunion with one of the world's 
     extraordinary and mysterious places. It is not just the 
     mountains reaching toward the stratosphere, while summits 
     rising beyond their fluted precipices. It is the brown and 
     familiar faces of the Sherpas and Nepalese who live beneath 
     the heights. It is the circular power of their great 
     religions, filled not only with gods and demons but also with 
     some fundamental common sense and comfort for a people of 
     smothering poverty.
       It is myth and mantra, nature at its most glorious and 
     cruelest. It is Ang Nima of Khunde, the Sherpa leader of our 
     odyssey, and old friend. He met us at the Lukla airstrip at 
     9,000 feet, where our Twin Otter landed straight into the 
     mountains after a 45-minute flight from Kathmandu, propellers 
     spraying rock and dirt.
       The airstrip at Lukla is not simply a construction marvel. 
     It is a penance for genetic wanderlust. It is the world's 
     only airstrip where the force of gravity is more important 
     than brakes or flaps. It runs at a 15-degree grade up the 
     mountain and if gravity won't stop the plane, a wall of 
     boulders six feet high will.
       Ang Nima was there with his clipped mustache, sucking on 
     his shirt collar while he mulled his limited English for 
     words of courtesy. Six of his Sherpa chums were with him, our 
     housekeeper for the 75 miles that we planned to hike.
       The Sherpas' chronic cheerfulness and high-altitude 
     competence are now practically legend. Electricity is coming 
     to their valleys--for which thank God--but they haven't 
     changed much since they became famous. They aren't immune, 
     though, to the risks of celebrity.
       Ang Nima told about one of the Sherpas who climbed Everest 
     five times. The more he climbed, the wider his fame grew in 
     the Solo Khumbu valleys, where the 10,000 Sherpas live. He 
     climbed and partied, got restless and confused, and sometimes 
     longed for simpler times.
       He also became an alcoholic. One day in the midst of his 
     bewilderment, he leaped into the waters of the Imja Khola, a 
     cascading river that rises from the glacial ice of the 
     mountain that made him famous. He died in it.
       There are no therapy support groups in the high Himalayas.
       The Sherpas loaded our duffel on the back of the hybrid 
     yak-oxen the locals call zupchocks, and we headed upward. In 
     two days, we were walking in the child's land of Oz. We 
     walked thousands of feet above floating eagles in their 
     colors of cream and silver. We passed prayer wheels driven by 
     river water. We dipped and pitched on suspension bridges 
     above the thundering streams. When we got to the village of 
     Pheriche, we ran into two mild shocks: a sudden snowstorm and 
     a resident in boots and parka, a woman from--of all places--
     Montevideo, Minn.
                                  ____



Clinic on the range--From the prairie flatlands to doctoring at the top 
                              of the world

       Pheriche, Nepal.--They met in Montevideo, Minn., at what 
     Dee O'Connell generously remembers as a warm-blooded wedding 
     dance. Doc O'Connell, her husband, talks more creatively. He 
     said it was fundamentally a brawl.
       No such impulses have infected the Dan O'Connells in 34 
     years of a marriage that has transported them from the 
     prairies of Minnesota and South Dakota to the blizzards of 
     Alaska and now to the bouldered yak pastures of the high 
     Himalayas.
       We met her on our trek toward Everest. She was scrubbing 
     the family laundry in the yard of the Himalaya Rescue 
     Association clinic. The clinic is flatteringly named. It is a 
     board shed with a dirt floor for a waiting froom and an entry 
     walk dappled with frozen yak turds.
       The wind blew hard and cold from the mouth of the Khumbu 
     glacier 2,000 feet above the scrub junipers and tundra of the 
     Pheriche valley at 14,000 feet. There's no corner laundromat 
     in Pheriche. Dee O'Connell made suds with a washboard and a 
     bucket. Her insulated boots overwhelmed her ankles and a hood 
     kept her hair from flying south.
       This is fashionable dress for Pheriche.
       Some time before, a member of a Sherpa family from miles 
     away appeared at the O'Connell home and said one of their 
     women was dying. She had given birth, but something went 
     wrong with the placenta. O'Connell put his medical equipment 
     in a backpack and went to the scene. ``She was lying in a 
     mound of straw. People were standing around. The baby was 
     healthy and crying and it seemed in tune with a mooing cow 
     and the whole picture was right out of the birth in a manger. 
     I did what I had to do, the woman snapped back and we all ate 
     and sang when it was over.''
       Doctoring in the Himalayas. Dee, the former Delores Nordby 
     of Montevideo, who had envisioned the orderly life of a 
     secretary and then maybe a nice secure marriage with kids and 
     a farmyard and a drive into Dayton's once a month for a 
     buying binge--all of this in cornbelt moderation.
       And then she and Dan O'Connell found each other. O'Connell 
     was going to be a prairie doctor in a town like Madison, 
     S.D., and it was no particular coincidence that he grew up in 
     Madison, S.D.
       ``One day during my medical studies at Creighton University 
     a man came down from the Red Lake Indian Reservation in 
     Minnesota,'' he said. ``He talked about the meager health 
     care there. It turned something in my head.''
       What turned, out and off, was his picture of a comfortable 
     rural practice as the doctor-social lion of the farm fields, 
     spruced up with membership in the country club. Instead, the 
     O'Connells went north after his internship at the then-Ancher 
     Hospital in St. Paul, now the St. Paul-Ramsey Medical Center.
       North was Alaska. It was not only Alaska, it was end-of-
     the-world, boondocks Alaska, where medicine was often a wish 
     more than a health service. O'Connell joined the Indian 
     Health Services of the U.S. Public Health Service and 
     abandoned all illusions of the country club perk.
       ``Neither one of us should have been surprised,'' the 
     doctor said. ``The more we learned about each other, the more 
     we realized we were both what you'd call contrarians.''
       He flew hundreds of miles to treat an eskimo with a 
     collapsed lung. He was a doctor of the Bering Sea Coast. He 
     worked places like Bethel and Kotzebue. Sometimes the 
     propeller on his small chartered plane stopped spinning above 
     wilderness where no one lived but wolves and caribou.
       ``It wasn't very risky,'' he said. ``The pilots there, they 
     know how to drive.''
       After 25 years, with their three children grown, the 
     O'Connells retired to help one of their sons run a fishing 
     business in Dillingham, Alaska. But two years ago somebody 
     said, ``They need volunteer doctors in some godforsaken place 
     in the middle of the Himalayas.''
       Having long ago adopted godforsaken places, the O'Connells 
     moved up in society, about 14,000 feet to be exact. They also 
     moved backward in time, about 200 years worth. It astounded 
     none of their friends or colleagues.
       The man is a healer. He took the medical school oath 
     seriously. For two months this spring, he and another 
     Alaskan, Tom Dietz, are the doctors on call in the plank-and-
     tin clinic on the road to Everest. A trekker who drops in 
     with pneumonia may have to pay $3 for the office call. A 
     Sherpa porter pays a few cents. None of it goes to O'Connell 
     or Dietz. To keep the rescue association going, they charm 
     and beguile the passing trekkers, convincing them that heaven 
     will remember them for buying a clinic T-shirt.
       ``We didn't come here to make money personally,'' O'Connell 
     said. ``What for? We get our recreation here for nothing and 
     we get free entertainment from the Sherpas. They start 
     singing when they get serious about drinking change (the 
     native brew) at 2 o'clock in the morning. Dee and I just 
     happen to go another way from most folks. We thought 
     yesterday, for example, that we might want to take a walk in 
     the mountains.'' They did. The hike went up more than a half-
     mile vertically to two herdsmen's sheds at 18,000 feet above 
     Pheriche.
       Most of their neighbors are yaks. But the life invigorates 
     Dee O'Connell, the onetime farm girl from Montevideo. Never 
     mind the absence of a heating stove in the house. To keep 
     warm they wear three layers of whatever works. Life in the 
     Himalayas also stirs Dee's contemplative juices.
       ``The solitude is no drag for me,'' she said. ``The life 
     away from machines appeals to me. TV, cars and electronic 
     gadgets are great. But you can get hung up on them. There are 
     things to think about. I like being alone with my thoughts 
     here in these big mountains.''
       She tends toward reserve and a relaxed comfort within 
     herself. Her husband is animated, lanky and tidily mustached. 
     For their two months' stewardship, he and Dietz will deal 
     primarily with the victims of altitude sickness here at a 
     crossroads of altitude zones, where the impetuous hikers 
     sometimes outrun their body's acclimating powers. When that 
     happens, they can be saved only by going down, being carried 
     down or by the Gamov bag in the rescue clinic shack.
       The bag is simple, ingenious and generally wonderful. It 
     was developed by a Russian scientist who moved to Colorado. 
     The Japanese trekking doctor who was dragged in comatose a 
     few days ago was zipped into the orange canvas bag a minute 
     after he arrived. It was pumped up with compressed air in an 
     operation no different than inflating a Zodiac sea raft.
       Within a few minutes the doctors had brought the air 
     density in the bag down to the air levels of 7,000 feet. It 
     was the same as descending 7,000 feet in a couple of minutes. 
     Inside of 15 minutes, the Japanese trekker regained 
     consciousness. Inside of three hours he was wobbling down the 
     trail toward Pengboche, less bold but at least vertical.
       In a land swarming with designated holy spirits, people 
     like the O'Connells, Dietz, and the St. Paul Dentistry team 
     of Doug and Phyllis Ostergren (who spend a year in the dental 
     clinic at Namche Bazar) get some kind of honorary status in 
     the lodges of the local saints. All of them deny any special 
     nobility. But they have it, nonetheless. Their skills are 
     priceless in the truest sense, since they put no price on 
     them. Like Ed Hillary's, their prints of life-saving and 
     service are all over the Himalayas.
       In another fashion, so were ours. In five days we had 
     gained more than a vertical mile and a half and camped the 
     fifth night on the windcobbled moonscape of Lobuche a few 
     miles from Everest. Ahead of us was one of the loveliest 
     mountains in the Himalayas, the white cone of Pumori.
       We slept in a great amphitheater of snow mountains. The 
     sounds of the Himalayan trek issue from an odd chorale of 
     squawking ravens, the groaning wind, caroling Sherpas and the 
     herders reciting their morning mantras in dozens of 
     repetitions of ``ohm mani padme hun,'' meaning blessings on 
     the jewel that lies in the lotus. It is their rosary. It 
     offers credits in the next life. It is hypnotic and it seems 
     to invoke the soul of the Himalayas.
       The occasional burp in this harmony of the mountains was 
     the repetitive zipping and unzipping of our tent doors at the 
     usual awkward hours in the night. But by now we had 
     established some sort of character to our small caravan. We 
     were mostly healthy and reasonably disciplined.
       No sooner had that been established when Susan Graca, the 
     occupational nurse, had to leave us and hike down the 
     mountain with a Sherpa to meet work schedules back home. We 
     missed her. She was the Sam McGee of our menage. Sam was the 
     Robert Service creature who was phobic about the Alaska cold. 
     He was so fearful of it that he asked to be cremated after he 
     died. Susan never went that far, but she wasn't quite ready 
     for the Himalayan chill. She fought back doggedly, wearing 
     wool mittens on her feet to guard against frostbite, although 
     we slept in the warmest sleeping bags known to man.
       Tom Gray turned out to be a giver of far-out knowledge. 
     Gray is a self-confessed computer geek, a programmer and 
     interfacer, a man of his generation. There was something 
     other-dimensional about this man. It may not have been an 
     accident that he passed the dread landmark of 40 twice in the 
     same day. We crossed the International Dateline on a plane in 
     the middle of his birthday. Gray has been a geologist, 
     restaurant operator, motorcyclist, enlightened housing 
     landlord and now computer whiz. He gave us the names of the 
     rocks we collected on the trail.
       Most of them, he said, were valueless but gneiss,
       We were unaware, at that very moment, of Sonam's life-and-
     death flight a few miles away.
                                  ____



            Tibetan refugees seek a higher truth on Everest

       Lobuche, Nepal.--He waited until darkness before he began 
     his flight toward a pass in the Himalayas nearly 4 miles 
     above the sea. The night was his only ally. It made him less 
     a target for Chinese Communist bullets.
       But he remembered the three Buddhist nuns.
       They were shot and killed by a border patrol shortly after 
     nightfall not long ago, attempting to escape through the snow 
     and cold of the Nangpa La pass separating Chinese-ruled Tibet 
     from Nepal.
       He was a Buddhist and Tibetan, Sonam Zylsto. He needed no 
     other reason to escape. His goal was India, where the Dalai 
     Lama lives. The Dalai Lama is the Buddhists' spiritual 
     refuge, the man who in their belief is the reincarnated 
     presence of their prophets and gods.
       The Communists came and demolished their monasteries, 
     killed resisters by the thousands and began resettling Tibet 
     with their own nationals. The Dalai Lama left to ask the 
     world to reason with the Chinese for the preservation of his 
     people and their traditions.
       Zylsto slogged through waist-high snow in his shredded 
     Chinese tennis shoes. He was exposed under a nearly full moon 
     and losing sensation in his feet. In his shivering 
     desperation, Sonam Zylsto defined the world's response to the 
     Dalai Lama's appeal.
       He and his companions reached the summit of the pass at an 
     altitude of about 18,000 feet after two days of struggle 
     through polar winds, conditions that would demand full 
     equipment of a modern mountaineer. They wore only light 
     clothes, no gloves, no boots.
       They waited again until nightfall to dodge the perfunctory 
     watch Nepalese soldiers keep on the south side of the pass. 
     From there they walked miles down a glacial valley into the 
     Nepalese village of Thame. His friends dragged Zylsto into 
     the Hillary-Lions-Variety Club clinic in the village of 
     Khunde.
       The next day, Dr. Elizabeth Harding, a volunteer physician 
     from Auckland, New Zealand, removed his four frozen toes.
       He was limping around the next day, grateful for surviving 
     the high altitude horror of Nangpa La. He was grateful for 
     the skilled hands that had saved him from gangrene and death.
       He was also mystified about the future. He didn't talk much 
     politics. But to the Western traveler passing through Khunde 
     on his way to Mount Everest, the young Buddist's frail smile 
     cast the hard light of shame on those American voices who 
     rail about American government demands for more humanity from 
     the Chinese Reds.
       Never mind the humanity, these voices counsel. Watch out 
     for American business interests. Don't unhinge the Chinese 
     murderers in Tibet. The Chinese command a big market for our 
     stuff.
       Profit and greed are more important than Sonam Zylsko, 
     freezing his feet at night at 18,000 feet to revive the 
     broken threads of his life.
       That might be explainable to boards of directors. It is not 
     as easy to explain to stateless Tibetans who cross the Nangpa 
     La at the rate of more than 2,000 a year, and cross in bigger 
     numbers over other routes.
       But they're not flooded with sympathy in Nepal, either. A 
     European service worker explained why.
       ``Nobody wants them. Nepal is one of the poorest countries 
     in the world. All it's got to give the world is the 
     Himalayas. It has some established Tibetan refugee camps, but 
     the Sherpas themselves (who are of Tibetan origin) haven't 
     got anything for the refugees and they don't especially 
     welcome their peddler shrewdness in their valleys.''
       The Sherpas live almost exclusively in the Everest district 
     and represent only a sliver of Nepal's population of nearly 
     20 million. They migrated from Tibet hundreds of years ago, 
     threatened by the Mongols. Much of their livelihood is tied 
     in with Western trekking and climbing expeditions and they 
     tend to maintain a living standard higher than the rest of 
     the Nepalese.
       ``The Nepalese government doesn't want to irritate the 
     monster to the north, China,'' the European said. 
     ``Basically, there's nothing to prevent the Chinese from 
     walking in and taking over Nepal. It doesn't have a whole lot 
     of friends internationally, and it doesn't get any special 
     hugs and kisses from the USA.
       ``When the refugees come to Kathmandu, the capital, the 
     police would just as soon shoot them as look at them. The 
     Kathmandu police don't get much in wages. They make it by 
     taking bribes from people they arrest. If you come over the 
     Nangpa La in rags, the chances are you're not going to have 
     much cash to pay off the police.''
       So some of the refugees are pointed back to the north. But 
     they scatter and return to the Nepalese camps and to 
     relatives who came over before them. And somehow most of them 
     find their way to India.
       And a few find their way to Minnesota.
       ``The USA,'' Zylsto said. ``That would be a dream.''
       It would also be a miracle for most of them, although such 
     miracles are no longer walled in by the ice and granite of 
     the world's highest mountains. The mystique of the 
     Himalayas--the sagas of the Abominable Snowmen, the myth of 
     Shangri-La--usually yield to the reality of a cold gale from 
     the north, and we began getting it when we headed for the 
     last civilized clump of shacks and sod houses before Everest, 
     Gorak Shep.
       Gorak Shep sounds like a squawking crow with laryngitis. In 
     Sherpa, it translates into ``Cemetery of the Ravens.'' It 
     isn't much wonder. The elevation is more than 17,000 feet. To 
     reach it, you walk a glacial moraine for hours, loose gravel 
     and boulders piled into long undulating ridges hundreds of 
     feet high. But ahead of us was the dazzling ice wall of the 
     25,000-foot Nuptse, a mountain that is part of the Everest 
     massif. Everest conceals itself for much of the route, 
     blanked out by some of its huge satellites in the foreground.
       A burst of sunlight forced us to stand and stare. We were 
     immersed in a colossal architecture of ice and rock and snow 
     surging miles above us. The most colossal of them all, 
     Everest, was still to make an appearance behind Nuptse and 
     the others. We were slogging toward an 18,500 foot knoll 
     called Kala Pattar, from where the sky would open and Everest 
     would erupt in view.
       By now, we had evolved some form of rough cadence of the 
     trail and social exchange. Usually a trekking group needs a 
     catalyst to keep it congenial within limits. As the point 
     man, not totally drenched with social graces, I usually leave 
     that to somebody else. Chris Wolohan was the one on the road 
     to Everest.
       Chris is the nursing administrator at Hennepin County 
     Medical Center. She hikes with two walking sticks in the 
     mountains because of a tumor condition that required knee 
     surgery when she was 7. She is one of those people compatible 
     with almost anybody who chooses to be compatible and 
     forgiving to those who choose to be trail prima donnas or are 
     klutzes by nature. We had only minimal representation in both 
     classes.
       Sometimes a trekking party can be so chewed up by 
     individualism and competing agendas that its opposing clans 
     will cross the street in Kathmandu when the trip is over 
     rather than meet each other one more time. We had no such 
     afflictions. There was one personality conflict that arrived 
     late enough to be unimportant. Otherwise, Chris' relaxed 
     courtesies--not the least of which were her relaxed 
     silences--kept the social tone civilized and breezy. This is 
     not bad for a woman who was hacking around with bronchitis 
     for half the trip. It was also not bad for a woman who opened 
     her shower door in Namche Bazar and found herself invaded by 
     a cow.
       A shower in the Himalayas is fundamentally an act of faith. 
     In some places you actually get water. They try hard, the 
     village innkeepers. They will take a few boards, build a 
     shower booth or shed about the size of an upright casket and 
     pour a bucket of warm water into a sprinkler in the roof.
       In Pheriche, Tom Gray showered standing on a slab of 
     natural ice. I took a shower in the same town in the middle 
     of a snowstorm, half of which got into the shower stall.
       All that while I was being taunted by a yak outside. Chris' 
     scene in Namche amounted to a barnyard insurrection. The cow 
     walked right into a little utility room where she hung her 
     clothes. About the time she was retrieving them, the cow 
     stuck out a long tongue.
       Chivalry prevents me from telling you where the cow made 
     contact.
                                  ____



        the height of mount everest can produce a profound high

       Gorak Shep, Nepal.--High altitude climbers can explain the 
     phenomenon of Barbara Schmitt of Minnatonka.
       She extended her hand to offer me a bite of chocolate at 
     18,400 feet in the Himalayas. I reached back and found 
     nothing but an empty glove.
       This is a woman who normally fizzes with spirit and whim 
     but is no trickster. She actually believed she was holding a 
     Snickers candy bar in her hand. She was also groggy from 
     fatigue and experiencing a moment of slap-happy delirium. It 
     wasn't medically dangerous. She needed rest, an early descent 
     and one long look upward toward the stratosphere.
       And there was the mountain. Everest, expanded and elevated 
     to a gigantic scale that defied instant absorption. Across 
     the frozen cascade of the Khumbu glacier icefall, its black 
     pyramid and mile-long plume of cloud streaming from the 
     summit, Everest filled the sky with a massive symmetry. It 
     wasn't elegant. It didn't invite reveries. It looked 
     enigmatic and prone to malice. It was Everest, so big at 
     29,028 feet it seemed to belong to another dominion of 
     nature.
       It's a view of the world's highest mountain that is seen 
     only by Everest's highest climbers and by those scattered 
     ramblers who push themselves to the top of a Himalayan ridge 
     called Kala Pattar above the glacial wasteland of Gorak Shep. 
     Yet for some in our small, hard-breathing processional, it 
     was a prelude to something more strenuous. With luck, we 
     could hike tomorrow into Everest's base camp at the mouth of 
     the icefall.
       Part of the allure of this was the excitement of the 
     mountain's nearness, the sensation of walking in the 
     invisible footsteps of a Hillary or Tenzing. The idea of 
     thrusting mind and body into a guarded world seldom 
     experienced by others is another part of it. And so is the 
     sound and sight of a Himalayan avalanche at first hand.
       Barbara Schmitt's illusion of a candy bar in her hand was a 
     mild form of thin-air hallucination. The avalanche wasn't. 
     Barbara's chocolate was the invention of a lethargic brain 
     groping for reality in an alien atmosphere. How alien? As a 
     practical matter, Barbara hadn't been much higher than the 
     top of the IDS Center in Minneapolis.
       So now, when it unfolded for her nearly 4 miles above sea 
     level and the symptoms of torpor crept into her body, the 
     high world was transformed into something dreamy and uncanny. 
     In that surreal atmosphere, a person can imagine a 
     conversation with phantom companions. Whole sentences rather 
     than participles dangle. Years ago, I handed a canteen of 
     water to a climbing friend, Rod Wilson, when he asked. It 
     would have been an awkward exchange. Wilson wasn't on the 
     mountain.
       But the avalanche wasn't fabricated by a spent body and 
     mushy mind. It announced itself with a crashing sound 
     overhead, like lightning hitting a power pole. It came the 
     day after our hike to Kala Pattar, when we were in the middle 
     of the jumbled moraine slags of the Khumbu glacier on the way 
     to base camp. Stormi Greener, for one, didn't find it 
     disagreeable. Greener is a Star Tribune photographer who has 
     been around the world three or four times shooting boat 
     people, Kurd tribesmen and a few thousand other intriguing 
     faces. She is one of your photographer zealots, unapologetic 
     about it and essentially unstoppable. For a picture, she will 
     fight cops and boa constrictors. Wearing the credentials of 
     neither of these, I still spent a fair amount of time pulling 
     her off the parapets of swaying suspension bridges.
       ``What's that sound like a train wreck?'' she said.
       I said it was an avalanche on Nuptse.
       ``Will we get killed?''
       Probably not, I said.
       It poured down the Nuptse face, millions of tons of snow, 
     what the European alpinists long ago called ``the white 
     death.'' Avalanches in the Alps and Rockies are impressive. 
     In the Himalayas, they're staggering.
       For thousands of feet the snow fell and the air shook. The 
     sound receded as the slide played out. Now the characteristic 
     white cloud formed at the base of the avalanche, spreading 
     and rising like an atomic mushroom.
       The cloud advanced swiftly across the glacier where we 
     stood. In a moment the first ice chips hit our faces. We 
     turned our backs to the advancing wave. For 30 seconds we 
     stood in a gate of crystalline needles, stinging us. Then it 
     was over.
       ``God,'' Greener said, ``does it get better than this?''
       I said it might not necessarily get better but it could get 
     a lot more hairy. The road to Everest's base camp, though, 
     was not. It was ugly here and electrifying there. For a half-
     hour, we walked past pools of melting ice, lade under the 
     midday sun. The landscape changed. We worked our way beneath 
     colonies of minarets and towers, a Stonehenge of Ice.
       And for the half hour after that we slipped around in loose 
     and lousy scree and tried to dodge the leavings of yak 
     trains. In this crazily mixed environment we reached the 
     glacial rubble where for more than 40 years Everest 
     mountaineers have prepared for their climbs.
       Tents and quonset huts of expeditions from New Zealand, 
     Japan, and the United States were slung in small settlements 
     across the dirty esplanade. We were relieved not to find the 
     widely advertised garbage pile of discarded oxygen tanks and 
     tuna fish tins.
       We did find Peter Athans of Boulder, Colo., the climbing 
     leader of Alpine Ascents International. Today, if you're 
     going to climb Everest, your best chance is to own a national 
     discount house or a stock brokerage.
       The $50,000 it costs to buy a permit from the Nepalese 
     government is still paid by some of the so-called amateur 
     expeditions. But a surer way to get on the mountain is to be 
     rich enough to afford the big checks charged by the agencies 
     that now provide all services--guides, organization, food and 
     equipment--to people who have it all but Everest.
       Athans was tall and browned by sun. His easy talk and 
     manner suggested the controlled confidence of a man who has 
     climbed Everest three times.
       ``We'll have seven people,'' he said. ``Early May is the 
     best weather for Everest climbing, going for the top. If 
     they've climbed with us before, the cost is $50,000 per 
     person on Everest. For others, it's $65,000.''
       Maybe Michael Jordan should apply. If you've nursed the 
     distant hope of climbing Everest, you might resent 
     millionaires being able to do it where the average climber 
     cannot. But why build a grudge? Everybody has obsessions, 
     rich guys as well as average climbers. I once imagined a 
     climb on Everest. I was serious. It was a goal, although 
     loosely held and nothing compulsive. So now evidently it's 
     gone. Why mourn? There've been other mountains. And the 
     icefall, on this day, was mesmeric. So was the prayer chant 
     of the Sherpas.
       It was a good day to roam the Himalayas. Pemba Tschering, 
     the cook, would be in world class form tonight, making 
     Himalayan pizza with yak cheese, tomatoes and Spam. A few 
     days later I sat on a large boulder 40 feet above the trail 
     at our streamside campsite at Phortse. It was where I go 
     acquainted with a kid three years ago. We didn't speak the 
     same language but we both knew the meaning of Namaste: ``I 
     salute the God who dwells within you.'' It's the most 
     beautiful word I know.
       The sun was down except for its waning strokes, which 
     splashed amber on the ice cliffs and summit of Thamserku. It 
     occurred to me that I didn't really come to the Himalayas 
     again for the icefall. I came for a moment like this. The 
     earth was still except for the tumbling of the Dudh Khosi 
     beneath me. The rhododendrons were about to blossom. The 
     river and the forest did not say ``exert,'' or ``look on in 
     wonder.'' They said peace.
       A few minutes later I opened my eyes and saw a boy walking 
     down the path. He was older than the kid three years ago. But 
     he held his hands to his face, fingertips touching, and he 
     said ``Namaste.''
       It was the same boy. I'm sure of it.

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