Stony Rivers and Thirsty Horses By Jackie Lungmus

I was at the base of a mountain that straddled the border between Nepal and Chinese occupied Tibet. I had been in country a month, and a week of it had been spent trekking to the little Himalayan valley of Tsum. It seemed that for every quarter mile we had managed to climb, the Earth had taken away ten degrees, as if to dissuade us from further exploring one of her remaining untouched corners. I was awake and restless; I needed to break free from the shackles of my sleeping bag. I threw on my Lowas, not bothering to lace them up, and I practically fell out of the tent. The first thing I noticed was the smell. The air was icy and dry, it was pure, and it was one-dimensional, as if it had nothing to hide. It was old, and it was innocent. There are shockingly few places on Earth were the impact of humans is actually difficult to see. This breeze was one of them. It carried from the south, up the tunnel of peaks and over the hood of my midweight. It carried onward, blessedly indifferent to my existence, deeper into Shangri-la. The short dry grasses made a gentle and hypnotic sound as I watched concentric sections of it do the rolling wave characteristic of fans in a Chicago Bears stadium. The immensity of this place wears off on the way it feels and defies a simple explanation. Your logic reminds you that these vast ranges carry on in every direction for a mind-numbing amount of miles, but your small ape brain has trouble truly comprehending. These are nowhere near the tallest Himals, but youve never seen

anything this giant. Ganesh Himal is to Everest, what Adams is to McKinely. I was so far from home, and these structures and their spirit were strangers to me. My eyes adjusted to the light, and did not like what was happening. There were speckles in my eyes and my mind instantly felt disoriented. I waved my hands in front of my face and then rubbed my eyes. I opened them again, confused at the persistence of these small dots directly in my line of sight. Then it hit me. I was looking at stars. I was so high up, and the planet Earth fell away from me at such an alarmingly rapid rate, that I was able to look down and see stars. It is impossible to understate the way that this situation destroys your minds orientation and perspective on reality. Imagine my disorientation, turned confusion, turned astonishment, turned joy, at observing my winking cosmic friends below my feet. It was then that the back of my mind dared me. Look up, it toyed. Continuing infinitely behind the mountains but finally bursting forth in the open sky was the Milky Way Belt. For the first time in my life, she revealed herself to me. I am a scientist; I revel in the laws of the natural world. They are the lens through with I choose to appreciate, explore, question, and define the entirety of space and time. The final frontier has been an integral part of my life since before I can even remember, the universe outside of the pale blue dot I call home has been my most constant companion, my most enriching mentor, and my first love. And yet, as a 20 year old, I had never laid eyes on the belt. A streak of cream was splashed across the sky as the void battled hopelessly to assert its dominance over the distant and infinite suns. There was a density to the sky that I had never observed before. I looked for Ursus, for Orion, for the North Star, but it was

in vain. They were lost in the mess, and I like to believe they were enjoying their temporary anonymity. It was noisy in its vast silence, and even though I had finally gained enough control over my senses to understand what I was looking at, I couldnt shake the quiet disorientation of seeing something familiar in such an unfamiliar way. The Himalayas are old, but they are actually growing, and this lends them a sharpness and vitality that is distinctly absent from other mountain ranges. The long marching progression of glaciers pushes downward on a mantle that is fighting its way to the surface, and they are eternally locked in a battle that has no winners. The cliffs rise steeply and climb over each other. Boulders and pebbles and everything in between helplessly cascade down the sides, unable to hold on to the sheer cliffs, helpless collateral damage in their larger cousins rivalry. To the locals these snow tipped mountains are the birth and resting places of their holiest icons. To a foreigner in a blue puffy coat standing against the wind in the middle of the night, they are the birth and resting places of a unique and inexplicable portion of her psyche. Only after the old and innocent wind had blown through to my bones did a timer go off in my subconscious and snap me back to my feeble reality. I squirmed back into my synthetic Himalayan cave, and felt completely and utterly at home. I felt connected to this new place, happy to be allowed the opportunity to explore an alien landscape, and feeling like there was nowhere on Earth Id rather be.

Standing in the same mountain valley, hiking along a river that leads from glaciers down to the terai, I am suddenly asked from behind me, In the metaphor of a fast river full of rocks, are you the river flowing quickly over the rocks, or are you the

rocks with the river flowing over them? Someone named Caroline stared at me through her trendy cream glasses, bandana wrapped to keep her thick hair from touching her face. I paused, but only briefly, for while I had never heard the question before, in my gut I knew the answer, Im the rock. I am too She quickly responded. So why do you thing youre a rock? I inquired if only out of politeness. I am definitely the stability in a lot of my friends lives She stated so matter-offactly youd swear shed given this speech to an auditorium full of people. I am the rock while all of the crazy watery people are rushing over me. She coughed and laughed at herself. Ya, I just feel like I identify more with the rock. It was an interesting explanation, and separate from my own. Her identity as a rock seemed contingent upon her relationships with other human beings. I was a rock in a different way. I was a rock that sat exposed to the water but willfully resistant. Push and pull, I shall not be moved. I am a fixed point. I was I Nepal on a mission, and still functioning under a youthful optimism that I would somehow be able to figure it all out. These feelings, and my intended biological research project, would all fall perfectly into place. I had nothing but time, and countless people in Seattle to impress. I would return home in January triumphant. Rivers and rapids be damned.

I woke a few mornings later with my deep seeded need for solitude knocking and a desire to get away from people. The camp was overrun with porters and students and Tibetan translators. We hiked up a few miles and managed to more than double the population of a village. I pulled on my coat, grabbed my journal, and headed north. I

quickly found a lovely spot in the sun, leaning again an old stone chorten. I wrote of how romantically beautiful this part of the world is. My pen flew across the page and I took down details on grass and yaks and smells and sights. BLAH!!! My heart stopped beating and I tumbled off of the chorten as I spun towards the deafening noise. My wide and frightened eyes looked up at two smiling women, howling with laugher. I scrambled to regain my senses and my sitting position as they moved in closer and looked at the journal in my hands. As they whispered and pointed at the pages, I sat there frozen, like any sudden movement would scare them and result in another borderline assault on myself. They stood up to continue with their lives, but before their final departure I got a healthy punch on the arm from one of them. A universally understood Lighten up! gesture that nearly knocked me over again. I watched them saunter off, baskets full of firewood hanging from their backs. I resettled and continued my reflection. Two sentences in and another interruption. Giggles, smiles, slobbery noses, and greasy fingers made their way around the chorten and nearly into my lap. Three children, all probably under the age of 6 had decided that I was to be their morning entertainment. They hung off of me while I wrote, staring contentedly at the scribbled English letters. I smiled at the realization that these letters look to them how Tibetan looks to me. Nonsense, to be exact. I tried to keep writing, but their small voices and clingy hands kept pulling me away. Watching them throw rocks at each other and tumble in circles, I resigned myself to my fate and laid my journal on my lap while breathing in the clean cold air. The littlest one just stood there,

sucking on his hand and staring at me. There were no words spoken between us. I smiled. He smiled. One of the older boys ran over and hung his arms around my shoulder, looking down into the journal. -E he said aloud, pointing to a letter on the page. The first communication we had managed. I laughed and he smiled wide, obviously proud. Here I was in his remote village with a complete inability to communicate with the humans around me, but so much of his future was contingent on his ability to learn my language. Flight from these mountains, from this country, and from its poverty is impossible without a grasp on a random language. My random language, to be exact.

Time dragged endlessly on. At least a month later, now around 60 days in, while sitting on a Buddhist World Heritage Site, in a Nepalese city, eating Japanese candy, Caroline and I talked about boys. Heading into my third month in this city, the gears of my life had become well enough oiled to produce an appearance of comfort and complacency with my existence in Nepal. I stared down to the street from the tier that I was resting on and watched humanity circumambulate in a uninterrupted flow that took place all hours of the day light. No one ever bothered to look upward at the people resting on the tiers, and in many ways this was the closest thing to privacy and anonymity possible in this country. Im going on another date with Sonam Caroline started. Oh? I volunteered, without separating my eyes from the human river. He wants me to come over to his house and meet his mom.

That roused me. Really? Are you going to? I guess so. Oh, and I havent told you about the ex-pat I met at the bars a while back. Were going to lunch this week. She sounded genuinely excited. I couldnt even find a date in my own country, how had she managed to find 3 boyfriends on two separate continents? Does James know? You know, James, your open relationship boyfriend in Ohio who you like much more than your willing to actually admit to yourself. No. It would just stress him out. Stress. I had moved hostels 3 times in the last month. It was because each successive one was cheaper, I told myself as I restuffed my pack and said awkward goodbyes to hostel owners I had never really even bothered to talk to. Sonam realizes youre leaving right? That youre going to go back to Ohio and to James and to continue your life? I offered. I would think so. What does he think were going to maintain a long distance relationship? She paused. I should make sure he realizes that though. She said mostly to herself. We went for a ride on his motorcycle yesterday. It was pretty wild. I let out a brief laugh. Caroline was my antithesis. She was in Nepal to study modern Asian art. She was radical where I was traditional, dangerous where I was safe, and spontaneous where I was meticulous. But we were both metaphorical rocks, and for me, in this country, that enough for a friendship. I still have no idea what someone so cool actually saw in me, why I was worth her time or why she would entertain the thoughts of someone who saw the world so differently than her.

When was the last time you talked to James? We got in a fight a few days ago actually. How did you find these chocolates? Theyre great. I forced a smile. Seattle has such a large Asian immigrant population, they sell these in all the stores actually. They even sell them on my campus. Do you want to talk about the fight? She started to talk as she ripped open a new bag of chocolates. I returned to people watching, and the battle to balance my distaste of change with my love of anonymity raged onward. But my research was due in a few short weeks, and I had more important things to worry about.

75 days into a 108-day trip, living in the smog, swelter and sprawl of Kathmandu. After months of feeling anxious about my research, self-consciousness about my language skills, and dealing with condescension about my interests, I was in the process of hitting a very aggressive brick wall. I was waiting patiently for a meeting to begin. My legs ached from sitting crossed legged on the floor. No amount of time in this posture was going to undo my knees preference for chairs. The table, a mere coffee table to an American, came to our stomachs, and my steaming tea in a handle-less sea green teacup was position before me like my battlements. I was a wreck. My ability to mask my emotions is one of my most useful and highly prized skills, I have been sharpening and honing it since before I knew what I was doing, but in this moment I was confident that he could tell I was standing on a precipice. I had come to Nepal with a plan on what I was going to study. It was well thought out. It

was well founded. It was the type of research that I wanted to be doing for the rest of my life. It was the type of research that no one in Nepal wanted me to be doing. And so, after nearly four months of fighting back, of arguing, of pleading, of tears and of anger, I had given up. Accordingly, I was sitting across from a cultural anthropologist named Danny discussing the dramatic switch my thesis project had made from a biological and zoological project researching symbiotic relationships between endemic fauna, to looking into the way UNESCOs World Heritage Foundation was used as a pawn and the motivations behind a States decision to ratify the convention. In his eyes I saw pity, and I saw victory. He knew he had won, and I could tell he saw this as his opportunity to convert me to his way of life. But maybe thats just my neuroticism. Maybe that wasnt what he was actually thinking. Was I was just projecting my own frustration and bitterness onto him? I dont know. Im a biologist; I dont answer that type of question. The World Heritage Convention was kind of his pet project he told me excitedly; he had so much insight into the directions I could take it. The problem remained that his insight was not the type of insight I wanted. Further, the directions he wanted were not the directions I wanted. The heart breaking decision to spend my energy looking into policy and international politics may have stolen from me my passion, but it would not steal my perspective. I was, and still am, proud of the way I view and approach the world. That was not going to change. He told me what I needed to do was go to Swayambunath, a massive Hindu and Buddhist holy site that sits triumphantly on the highest point in the Kathmandu valley. More specifically, I needed to interview the locals. In that moment, something inside of

me broke. I wanted to understand how major international agents and whole nations decide to join UNESCO. What would some nobody Nepali man, with his cigarette addiction and misogynistic glances, have to tell me that was useful in answering my research question? Nothing. But what really got me was that the cultural anthropologist I was sitting across from knew that also. I didnt then, and still do not understand why people decide that what they do is superior to what everybody else does. We are different people. We have different interests. We approach the world from dramatically different perspectives. I know that you think your exploration into the symbolism and existential purpose that Nepali water spirits hold in the indigenous belief system is groundbreaking and is totally going to revolutionize the way that the western public understands Nepali water spirits, but I dont. I think its useless in the exact same way that you think my desire to look into how the culling of keystone species in the Tibetan plateau is dramatically altering the environmental landscape and irreversibly damaging the ecosystem, is useless. Whats the point of research if it isnt on human beings, right? Um, wrong. I wanted to scream at him, Nothing you will ever, or could ever say to me will make me believe what you do is more important than what I do. That being said, I really have genuinely no interest in stopping you from doing your cultural research. But what I will not stand for is you (the ethnographer) criticizing me (the biologist) because you (the social scientist) think that what I (the actual scientist) do is meaningless. If you want to run around like Margaret Mead feeling like these people totally accept you and dont even notice the color of your skin, and spend all day projecting your feelings on to them, thats totally fine by me. I could care less if you

really enjoy the view from your malnourished but very tall horse. But I have somewhere between zero and no patience for you standing in the way of my research. Dont you dare make me put away my ruler. I ground my teeth together and smiled through the aggravation as we finished up our discussion. There are few things in the world more frustrating than interacting with a person who not only truly doesnt understand you, but is also actively working to change the way you are. My tea was cooling off as I blinked away the tears that were finally forcing their way to the surface. What made the situation more helpless was the fact that I felt like I was trying my best, and this man sitting across from me wasnt seeing it. What felt to me like an abandonment of my passions and dreams, felt to him like a victory for the social sciences. While I did end up going to Swayambunath, it was not on Dannys terms. I circumambulated the holy site in silence, using the skills I had practiced and developed as a biologist; to look with my eyes, and to actually see. The scientific method is often thought of as an active process of designing experiments and forcing variables on agents, but that discredits the fundamental role that simply observing the natural world plays in our understanding of how it actually works. I went to the stupa, but I did something a cultural anthropologist would never have been able to do. I witnessed situations and observed cultures from the outside, without what I see as a combative need to break inside.

Standing near a respectably sized river in the Darjeeling province of Northeastern India, something catches my eye. I lean down and take a medium sized stone into the

palm of my hand. A river rock, I muse. It is soft under my fingertips and its surface is free of blemishes or cracks. I smile because I know why; I smile because I revel in this type of knowledge. Water is the most powerful force on Earth. It shaped the very mountains I am standing at the base of. This rock is smooth from eons of river water flowing over it without end, a continuous stream of force and oppression. This rock did not choose its shape, its shape was destined by its unlucky circumstance of being in the way of something as stubborn and close-minded as water.

Thank you, deedee I managed as the teapot was placed in front of me along with a square plate supporting a piece of wheat toast. She smiled at the use of Nepali, and nodded politely as she back away. There is no Nepali word for thank you, so English would have to suffice. I was still having trouble discontinuing the use of western niceties. I stared at my glowing computer, and The Moral Imperative to Preserve stared back at me from the screen. A large document that would no doubt prove useful in my attempts to understand the politics behind world heritage sites. I sighed deep, and started scrolling. I would do this to prove to them that I could. From my booth, I gazed out the window into the blinding light of the day. The painted eyes of the stupa loom over like a parent. It always does, I muse to myself. I wonder if hes seen anything particularly interesting lately. I picked up the toast and started to spread strawberry jam on it. I smirked to myself, Trading authenticity for caf wifi.

I spent the better part of my last month in Nepal pouring over endless manifestos, convention minutes, and formal communications between UNESCO and the Nepali government. I was able to pull out trends and see patterns that impressed even my cultural anthropology professors. I was complimented on my ability to succinctly present an argument from a stage and in front of a large crowd. Nonetheless, I will never forget the rage I felt, legs aching as I sat cross-legged on an old pillow in a small room across from a woman named Nazneen, one of my professors and a self described cultural anthropologist, at the conclusion of my project. The Pakistani poets black hair was graying all over and her dark eyes were staring me down. She was the quintessential social scientist; nonjudgmental in the most judgmental way imaginable. She forced a smile, and in her thick accent she said, You know Jackie, I just feel like this program was not a very good fit for you. I look back on these interactions, as well as the terrible grade I received on the thesis project, with a cynical humor. I dont think of my time in Nepal as a negative experience. In fact, the majority of it felt more like exploring the Himalayas (awaking a part of my spirit I hadnt know existed), than arguing with ethnographers (about the perceived value of the social sciences). However, I do look back at my experiences in Asia and I feel like I spent an inconceivable amount of time way too far outside my comfort zone. Every day I searched out things that made me feel like I was not tens of thousands of miles away from the place I grew up. I remember having an email conversation with my father about how truly amazed I was at the range of emotions I would experience when I ran into a stray puppy (Nepal has an exceptionally massive feral dog population). He was convinced it had to do with my homesickness; that indescribable

feeling of safety and happiness I would feel when I was petting a stray dog existed because, well, what can be more familiar and safe and universally adorable than a puppy? While, yes, I do love a puppy any day of the week and in any country, these were truly unique occurrences of overwhelming joy that I would experience for a fleeting moment on the streets of Kathmandu. Similarly, I also probably spent way too much time in cafes owned by westerners, made to cater to western palates and western senses of safety and belonging. Flavors, that very loosely French inspired restaurant on the strip of Boudhanath, with fabulous chocolate cake, free wifi, and probably the most respectable pizza in the entire country of Nepal, became my second home. I did all my research, writing, and reading, sitting at cast iron tables with black and white tiled tops. Mentors would look at me over a steaming cup of lemon-ginger-honey tea, and reassure me I just needed to branch out, to meet locals, to pop my head into one of those hole-in-the-wall restaurants that had a curtain instead of a front door and was filled with Tibetan men drinking at 2pm. Then I would feel at home here. That wasnt going to happen. That being said, just because Im lucky enough to have a natural understanding of the boundaries of my comfort zone does not mean I should never wander briefly into the dark forest beyond it. Maybe if I had struck up more conversations with strangers, if I had tried harder to overcome language barriers and to lean into the discomfort that seems to go hand-in-hand with the Indian subcontinent, maybe I wouldnt have been so thrilled as my plane took off from Kathmandu for Paris. Yet, at the same time, I dont feel like I have any idea of what I could have done better. Theres no moment, no axis upon which the trip seems to turn, that I would work to change. At every intersection, I was

attempting to do what I considered to be the best decision for my sanity, my health, and my wallet at the time.

Caroline and I shared a room at a guesthouse for our last week in country. On our penultimate night, we chatted our way to Flavors to treat ourselves to alcohol and western style chocolate cake. Two slices of cake please, and two beers I ordered from over the counter. Which beers? the waitress working the registered politely inquired. Ummmm, which are the cheapest? I blurted out. Caroline and the three women standing behind the counter burst into laughter. We walked away with a liter of San Miguel each, and arrived back at the room only to realize we had no bottle openers. We filmed ourselves on my computer using various instruments to pry open our liquid gold, including but not limited to the key to my biology lab back in Seattle, and the wine opener on my Swiss Army knife. Caroline reassured me, I think that maybe since youre so vocal about your interests in biology, Nazneen just didnt think you had appreciated what youve learned here. Which obviously isnt true. I think what she really wanted was for me to come to her at the end of the quarter and say to her, Oh my goodness, Ive had this life changing experience and Ive rediscovered myself and now I know that I am destined to be a cultural anthropologist and Im going to move to Nepal and do this for the rest of my life I theatrically declared to Caroline, the beer settling in and my stomach full of chocolate.

Caroline jumped in again, Cultural anthropology is such bullshit. We both laughed. Did I tell you I met a cultural anthropologist a while ago. I didnt even bother to stop laughing while she continued her story, No Im serious. I asked her what she did for a living and she actually said she is a cultural anthropologist, and it took all of my being not to just burst into laughter in front of her. You should have responded with, Oh so you dont actually do anything I said through a mouthful of cake. Caroline sighed, Im just so excited to go back to Kenyon and continue with my Judaism studies. Finally. We sat in silence for a moment while I reflected upon my day. I started again, So I mentioned that to Nazneen actually. What I said was I think something so valuable about this experience for so many of us students, including myself, was the way that it helped us realized that whatever it is we are studying or majoring in back in the States, it is definitely what we actually want to be doing. and let me tell you, she did not like that. I got a death stare from Nazneen for that comment. We were triumphant. We howled with laughter, we drank to our success on multiple levels, and we talked late into the evening, reveling in one of the last nights of our unique circumstance.

Something that becomes increasingly obvious with time, is that there is a whole additional layer of anxiety wrapped up in this trip for me; one in which I am sick of feeling like I need to justify my complex concoction of feelings about the events that transpired from August to December of 2012. I got to spend almost 5 months living in the

beautiful country of Nepal, exploring the enigmatic cultures tied inexorably to the Himalayan mountain range. Im tired of comparing that experience to those of my friends who spent 7 weeks in Rome or in London or in Amsterdam. As we sit in chairs instead of on the floor, around a dining table instead of a coffee table, drinking black coffee instead of green tea, they speak dreamily of places called Oxford Street and the Champs, and how desperately they miss Harrods and Laudure, and they wait for me to reciprocate. But I cant. Not because I dont have those feelings about Nepal, but because they will never understand how complicated and multi-faceted my relationship with the city of Kathmandu truly is. It is so much easier to compare London to Seattle, to see glimpses of your American home in that only abstractly foreign landscape, and to make those places feel less foreign. I never had that luxury. The unpaved roads in Ballawattar Chowk never became the pot-holed roads of my Northern Chicago hometown. The ancient Temple of Pashupati in South Kathmandu, with trees growing through the bricks and monkeys screaming from the windowsills, never began to look anything like Saint Marks Cathedral in Capital Hill, with its new growth moss and pigeons fluttering around the entry way. The closest I ever got to having anything in Nepal that felt sincerely and profoundly like home, was a friendship with a stray dog. I named him Sam, and over time we built up a loyal and loving relationship. His grubby orange colored fur was long and thick with dust, his spiral tail wagged playfully when we spotted each around the Stupa, and his big brown eyes and dark wet nose were strikingly familiar. Old Tibetan women would laugh and smile in shock while they watched us roll around on the dusty ground next to the single largest Buddhist holy site in the entire world. We would cuddle to the

smell of sandalwood incense and temple gongs, while the troops of stray dogs watched on with jealous eyes. I spent afternoons following him around, taking pictures on my iPhone and training him to respond to his Americanize name. My second to last day in Nepal, I found him sleeping under a large prayer wheel in a local monastery. A woman stood by watching and gave me a warm smile as I approached. She could see it in my eyes, the guilt of those you leave behind. I woke him up and walked him outside onto the main strip of the Stupa. The Buddhas eyes gazed upon all of his sentient beings waking up to another morning in Kathmandu, Nepal. Tears streamed down my face like a river as I watched him waggle off for the last time. I shot out a quick whistle and he turned to look at me. Upon realizing I had no intentions to feed him, he trotted off, no doubt to find some Tibetan woman to feed him momos for breakfast.

What a funny experience, what a funny place, and what a funny series of events. I will always have a fondness and an endless supply of eye rolls for that mess of a country, the quiet resolve and contentedness of its people, and for the person I was while I was there. Danny is still in Nepal as far as I know, but I admit its been a while since Ive checked and its hard to tell for certain when we arent Facebook friends. I should verbalize the same thing for Nazneen, but to say I even care would be a lie Im not sure Im willing to make. I still talk to Caroline almost every week. She now proudly calls James her boyfriend, even while he studies abroad in Athens, and they are well past their one-year anniversary. Pictures of Sam regularly grace the background of my iPhone. The smell of sandalwood soothes me, and I consider walking mindlessly in circles to be a

normal and healthy pastime. I just turned in my application to the University of Chicago to get a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology. Regardless of how alien those months were, my ethos is inescapably bound to that experience, to the tragedy that is Nepal, to the plight of the Tibetans, and to the people who made the mistake of thinking they could lead a horse to water, and make it drink. I roll my eyes every time I realize Id go back in an instant.