Working the Fields, Sahku, Nepal

Near Thali, on the Road to Sakhu, Nepal

The familiar taste of lychee

Lychee season in Kathmandu is short—"They only last three weeks!" a Canadian friend had told me in between barked haggling with a vendor late on a Friday night—and now, after perhaps 15 days, only the dregs are left. Here you find lychees not so much at the supermarket but in the hands of the dark-skinned fruit pedallers, long branches with dusky green pinnate leaves at one end, a fist in the middle, and at the bottom, now, rough-skinned fruit, either refrigerated brown or bright, tropical, underripe green; or, most commonly, both. By reputation the lychees come either from the Indian state of Bihar or from Bangladesh, but since like many goods in Nepal lychees pass through a minimum of two wholesalers, and because 62 of Nepal's 75 districts claim¹ production, figuring their provenance is an uncertain proposition at best.

Biologically lychees are drupes, meaning that they have an exocarp, a skin; a mesocarp, a flesh under the exocarp; and a hard endocarp around the seeds. That is, they are similar to mangos, apricots, cherries, coffee (a fruit in which we discard the exocarp and mesocarp and consume the endocarp), peaches, nectarines, and pistachios. Among Nepali lychees, the rind—which should be a gaudy-lipstick red—is the exocarp, the fruit the mesocarp, and the nut-brown pit the endocarp. When the seeds germinate, they look vaguely reminiscent of an acorn on a small yellow string, though lacking the acorn's ceremonial bunting at top.

I was first introduced to the taste of lychee through friends of mine in high school, who would occasionally bring out small plastic cups of lychee jelly, the fruit surrounding a tiny asymmetrical chunk of coconut and a few drop of separated lychee juice at the top, now banned as a choking hazard²—this wasn't so long ago at all—but then, as now, a treat. Later I dated a woman from a Taiwanese family, and gorged myself: the fruit, even as a candy in an uncomfortable superfluity of packaging, was delicious.

Nevertheless, the familiar taste of lychee was never all that familiar: While I have eaten many lychee jellies since, and lychee ice cream, lychee custard, flan-like, lychee smoothies and lassis, and dried lychee rolled up in egg roll wrappers, to my remembrance I had never eaten fresh lychee before coming to Nepal. (And if I don't recall, and no one else does, did it happen? But I digress.) Consequently I have no base of experience to refer to savoring of each individual lychee to; the subtleties that separate the best from the very good—subtleties learned from a long chain of memories and their intersection with, their partial creation of, expectation.

So when I say, as I say now, that the best lychees here have the faint, familiar taste of citrus, just as the best wheels of pecorino sardo and parmigiano reggiano do, you'll understand that by “best” I mean “my favorite.” That neither the gelatinous, grape-like texture nor the first taste, the fore-taste, that rises high from the front of the tongue to the soft palette, change much between fresh lychee squeezed out of its skin and preserved lychee squeezed out hemispherical plastic containers with “this product is unbelievably delicious” written on them. As long as the lychee are juicy, as long as you are in danger of losing the best, most refreshing drops of their juice when you tear the unexpectedly brittle rind with a close-cut fingernail, they are wonderful.

But you may think or—stronger—may know that the lychees I am currently enamored with, the ones that shortly will again disappear, are inadequate, sub-par. Not just in a de gustibus not est disputandum way either, but in a way that even I may agree with.

When I lived in Rome, for instance, I had a rollicking dinner in a little trattoria near Hadrian's Mausoleum³ that was recommended, as I recall, in the City Secrets: Rome guidebook. With the meal, we had a bottle, perhaps two, of cheap Orvieto, the semi-famous white wine from the nearby town of the same name. It's this wine, and the cheer, that I remembered best afterwards; and I went to the GS supermarket a few days later and found the same bottle, delightedly. But rather than brightly acidic and balanced, and slightly carbonated, the wine was flat and boring, mouth-drying to the point of nearly being puckering. Nor was it corked, for the cork was made of plastic which, at that time and in that country, was a very telling sign.

This is a common sort of story among oenophiles, who see tend to see it as a reminder that context matters, and this is very true. But so too experience. That we had never had Orvieto before, and indeed had drank too little wine, however sensitive or not our palettes, to render an opinion that later would not seem either embarrassing or fitfully naïve to us is not the result of context but the result of the confluence of context and experience.

Experience, too, does not just solely the literal experience of one body over time, but also the absorbed and understood cultural context that judgments of taste exist in. It is this context that I feel my life lacks, that it misses, here in Nepal. I cannot ask about the subtle gradations of the taste of lychee because I lack the language skills to understand the answer, even should I research the vocabulary. Further, I am not sure that a Nepali gustatory literacy exists: Gourmandism is a outgrowth of affluence, after all, and Nepal is not an affluent country. Even those parts that are affluent, too, tend to take more to Western ideas and ideals than to those indigenous to Nepal.

Does this matter? I am not sure, but like a tickle of evaporation from the nape of the neck I can feel the lack.

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¹The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has a mildly interesting report on lychee cultivation in Nepal, but like all reports here any factoid should be taken with a large dose of skepticism. For instance, the government announced a 2007 (or perhaps 2064--the past Nepali year) per capita income of $450, about 10% higher than the year before, even though no census has been conducted since (I believe) the 1980s and (I'm certain) no one has any idea how many Nepalis there actually are, even within a margin of error of 30%.

² Still available—and recommended!—at the 99 Ranch chain of Taiwanese supermarkets-cum-office-malls—a chain that pretty much everyone I know calls “Ranch 99” because of unclear signage in Albany, California.

³ More commonly known as Castel Sant'Angelo, the Mausoleum is a towering structure just on the west side of the Tiber river. It also has a major road directly in front of it, so pictures of it tend to show not just red-brown brick but Smart Cars and Vespas, as well as smoking Italians, African-Italian immigrants, and tourists looking at faux-designer handbags.

Icons, Gokarna Mahadev Temple, Gokarna

Gokarna Mahadev Temple, Gokarna, Nepal

Chabahil, Kathmandu

Chabahil Stupa, Chabahil, Kathmandu

A few hours of water in Kathmandu

Though the Monsoon is upon us here in Kathmandu, or nearly so, water is still scarce. The last two days have brought hard, heavy bullets of rain, droplets so big that they only sting when the rain begins to let up, and yet opening the taps in the morning sets free only a series of gasps and sighs as air rushes in where by rights water should flow out. When I ask Sampana, the younger son of the family upstairs, when our water will come back on, he says, “It's supposed to be today. So maybe today.”

The water officially comes twice a week, for a few hours at a time. When it does, it goes on for the entire neighborhood at once, and while I'm uncertain of the reach of the area that gets water with us, the water pressure in the pipes is so low that extraction of more than 10 or so liters in a few hours requires a jackhammering electric pump to suck and suckle enough water for the basic needs of the building.

The pump has two plastic hoses attached to it: one goes as deep into the single pipe as we can shove it, once the valve at the end has been opened; the other curves and loops to a large metal tank in the yard, a rectangular brushed-metal box reinforced with gussets and rivets. When the water goes off—and it never stays on long enough to fill the box, which must be around 1000 liters—the pump is disengaged from the pipe, the pipe's valve closed, and another tube run up to the roof, to a cylindrical tank made of black PVC and stamped “1000 LTRS.” in big, white, Roman letters. The pump is moved, and when the electricity is on fully—in addition to load-shedding, at times the voltage or amperage tapers, or it gushes and wanes—it pumps the water from this ground level tank to the roof tank, which supplies the drinking, cooking, and washing water for the house¹.

The yard behind my kitchen door is a tangle of hoses, wires, and pumps: In addition to the three hoses for the blue drinking water pump, there are separate hoses to each apartment and into a concrete-shielded well for the groundwater pump, which we use to fill 15-liter buckets that we flush the toilets with—the house, in true bikas² style, having Western toilets. This water is murky and, as it sits, separates into continents of oily residue, mostly clear water, and a sludge of particulates at the bottom. By reputation, this water isn't even worth filtering—the oil scum with clog irreparably any filter you send the water through.

The consequences of severely limited water stretch very, very wide. Indeed, it's my feeling that lack of moderately clean water more entrenches poverty and the cycle of poverty than lack of electricity.

First, and perhaps most obvious, lack of water effects a “deficiency” of hygiene, in the sense that personal and social hygienic practices are greatly disrupted. With no water, I wash less often, and when there's been no water for four or five days my home handwashing becomes restricted to the soapy water in a small blue bucket where I've scrubbed my hands many times before. I wash dishes less often, usually only after I've cooked a big dinner, rather than after I've used them, and this means there are more crumbs lying about and sticky residues on tables and counters for ants, salamanders, flies, and cockroaches to eat—all carriers of disease, and populations that wouldn't be sustained with enough water to wash dishes, to wipe of a table, to mop the floor. Sickness begets poverty, though as a temporary resident and a Westerner I am spared the worst of this.

The soft effects of the (semi-)permanent water shortage are legion as well. I go out to eat more often, because my pots and pans are dirty and I have no water to clean them, because I want to use a proper toilet that flushes and wash my hands, because I've run out of water to even cook with. This in turn gives more economic power to the businesses that already buy their way out of shortages—in effect, it perpetuates inequality, since it's the business owners in Nepal who are typically already rich, especially those who run Western- or “bikas” Nepali-oriented places.

Not everyone stands content with the municipal supply, or lack thereof, however. Through Kathmandu and especially in the outlying towns where the trickles of streams down the mountainsides supply more water than the residents use for their terraced subsistence gardens, you find a mechanical army of tankers that truck water from where it is to where it isn't. Add to this the pickups full of 20 liter plastic jugs of UV-irradiated and ozonated water—the same type of jug you use for the office water cooler in the developed world—and one can literally buy a way out of shortages. This means that the effects of shortages fall hardest on those who are unable to buy their way out. the water shortage commodifies a basic human requirement for life, and further lodges Nepal's already enormous social stratification.

And the costs continue to radiated outward and multiply each others effects. There's a maxim in road engineering—the science of how to pave which road—that says that one overloaded truck axle is equal to 20,000 cars. The roads of Kathmandu, already in terrible condition, are filled with overfull trucks, and so the roads require repaving more often than usual, and parts break and wear out in much shorter lifespans for bicycles, rickshaw, motorcycles and cars. The tankers, carrying water better delivered in pipes already laid, spew black smoke into the air, often so forcefully that a cartoonish black cloud follows behind them. The air pollution here can get so bad that expats have tend to get the “Kathmandu hack” and regular respiratory infections, and one presumes that lifelong Kathmandu residents would be in worse condition.

Even in relatively wealthy neighborhoods, as mine is, evinces bad feelings and poor decisions brought by shortages. This morning one neighbor on my street had put buckets underneath the sporadic waterfall of ornamental-plant runoff from another's roof, which became the incitement for a rehash of prior grievances. When I came back from Langtang, I ran into my landlords just as I was returning and though the water was on when I returned, as I washed my hands in the kitchen sink and the water falling off them, the water beating on the basin, slowed, to a stream, to a trickle, to a dribble, to a few drops, and then to nothing. This was perhaps the third time something similar had happened, and I became suspicious that my landlords were cutting water to our apartment downstairs, to save it for their own.

I took a walk to clear my head, and right about the spot I took my picture of the banyan tree atop the temple at Hadigaon chowk, from a pried open manhole cover in the road, a plastic hose led to a pump, bouncing itself off the asphalt and noisily hammering away, the dirty water moving via another hose to a second-story apartment. Presumably the water was going to be filtered and used for washing or the toilet; someone was so desperate for water that they were pumping the sewer.

¹ I don't drink it, but it is meant to be safe to drink, and the family upstairs certainly do. I waver on whether to cook with it unfiltered (I have more often than not), but I certainly wash with it.

² Bikas is the Nepali word for “developed,” the opposite of abikas (“backward”), and in dominant Nepali culture is the summation of a successful life.

The idea of Development is at the fore of Nepali consciousness (as much as any foreigner can make such a generalization). When I was last at Pashupati, I was sitting on a bench and suddenly surrounded by a group of four Nepali young men from Bhaktapur—who proceeded to interrogate me about how far, in years, Nepal's Development is behind that of the US.

Thimi, Nepal

More Mountains, Langtang NP

Mountains, Langtang NP

Slopes, Langtang NP, Nepal

Development and Intervention

On both CNN channels in Kathmandu, you will see repeatedly the same promo, the same bit of self-deception: To understand the story, it says, you have to understand the people—and not only does CNN, but it can also communicate this understanding to you, with analysis.

Nevertheless, as the earthquake in China, still unnamed, and the lingering, ineluctable devastation in Burma of Cyclone Nargis continue to dominate the news here, CNN continues to display a American-centric view of China that, one presumes, both reinforces the extent of the devastation and the dominance of our national and nationalistic conceptions to their viewers. The reporting on Burma is scarce, usually a bare-bones reading of factoids and changes in the situation, the anchor staring straight into the camera, solemnly, making unidirectional eye contact with thousands and perhaps millions of people: a plane has arrived, a ship has left, there are now some-thousands confirmed dead.

There is little actual analysis, but then the television has never been a real form for analysis; like a speech or the theater, it is a form for performance, for inspiration to action. The level of evil that necessitates action, that necessitates Intervention, is the most present issue that arises from both Nargis and the Burmese government (and, in CNN's intimations, from the earthquake as well)—but like many historical events, the failure of all of us to intervene will be both tacitly recognized and tacitly buried, marked but forgotten.

The issues in Intervention are much the same as the issues in Development: self-determination and agency; imperialism; power and hegemony; issues of world view and culturally-enforced ethos, of cultural relativism and cultural absolutism; exploitation and cultural appropriation; exoticism and exoticzation; and presentism, the belief that what is now is both all there is and all there could be. And just as the major actors in Development are confined and constrained by the narrow world view of a certain, small segment of the developed world, the major actors of Intervention—nations and those that hold power in national governments—are bound by a view of politics that lies similarly unexamined and unchallenged, but is similarly partial and fractional.

Perhaps the best way to understand this is via the New York Times Magazine article this week, written by David Rieff. He writes of an idea "enshrined in a United Nations-approved covenant as the 'responsibility to protect'—the idea being that a state that engages in criminal behavior toward its own people has forfeited not just its moral but also its legal right to sovereignty."

Later, Rieff writes, entirely earnestly:

The harsh truth is that it is one thing for people of conscience to call for wrongs to be righted but it is quite another to fathom the consequences of such actions. Good will is not enough; nor is political will. That is because, as Iraq has taught us so painfully, the law of unintended consequences may be one of the few iron laws of international politics.

First, it should be noted that Rieff is taking something of an intellectual risk by talking about intervention at all—as he notes, even though the coalition concerned about Darfur is exceptionally broad in its politics, mainstream American culture fails to consider Intervention as anything but a fantastic option, neither feasible nor plausible. But unfortunately the article's conception of what Invention is and what it means is constrained by the limits of American political discourse, constrained by the limits of mainstream American imagination and memory.

I don't mean to be particularly critical of Rieff alone here—I certainly have little expertise, whether credentialed or autodidactic, on the complex interplay of power relations between governments—for his article is not so much an apology for certain values as it is a reflection of them. So that I take exception to his conception of politics, his conception of agency, his conception of morality as our moral duties stretch across borders, is more an offense that comes from the limits of my own culture. This view is hierarchical and oddly non-judgmental, as if acknowledging difficulty, perhaps extreme difficulty, is sufficient justification for inaction. It's a view in which we, as more or less non-empowered citizens, bear neither responsibility for our governments inaction nor responsibility for the results of that inaction; a view that is informed by an unfortunate conception of propriety and agency.

The paragraph I've quoted—the penultimate paragraph, by the way—is entirely specious and is ergo both easy pickings and a good place to begin. The point he makes—that we can have good intentions but not understand the consequences of our actions—is true of literally every decision we make in life. I may order a mojito at a bar that takes the bartender far longer to make than a normal drink and puts him in a surly mood, even though my intention was not to do so. I may choose to take a bus for environmental reasons and unwittingly step on someone's foot as I climb on or off, or as I shift on the rubber mat in the middle to make more room.

We can expand this idea to bigger areas as well, were the stakes begin to become a microcosm of those involved in international politics, where part of the responsibility lies with our own, chosen¹ ignorance. If I'm a new, experimenting college student at UCLA and buy (or even smoke) marijuana in a cinder-block dorm room with Sovietistic furnishings, I bear partial responsibility for the perpetuation of system that makes the foggy, hidden hills of Humboldt County dangerous places, though of course the agents of the US's drug war bear much, much more, even as most of them are less directly involved.

Likewise, if I am a parent and buy Chiquita bananas because they are a good source of potassium for my kids, I've unwittingly bought into a system of exploitation economics—pick fruit for solely subsistence pesos or get shot—in Central and South America.²

That we come in with our best intentions, and that we strive to do right continuously, that we are aware and awake and adaptive enough to change our actions when life elucidates the unintended consequences—and when, as sometimes happens, our best intentions do more harm than good—is in fact the best we can do as people constrained by bodies and brains and the very real limits of what we can possibly know.

(Of course, the UN document that Rieff refers to has unintended consequences of its own: it confers an idea of legitimacy on the illegitimate; it uses the status, deserved or not, of the UN to begin or continue a checklist of minimum qualifications that somehow define any government as “acceptable”; and in doing so, indeed moves governments like China's and Zimbabwe's towards legitimacy, by placing a threshold that they can argue they have crossed. Even if in the end arguing that somehow a 17-year-old Tibetan from Shigatse has “consented” or is legitimately subject to caprices of a commissioner in Beijing, 2000 miles away, because his grandfather's grandfather was made a vassal and his grandfather's bid for autonomy crushed is plainly foolish, simpleminded, such a document grants other states, like the US, a means to avoidance, to allowing the detention or torture or death of the 17-year-old because of his place of birth, because something entirely fortuitous.)

What Rieff reinforces is essentially a rightist idea of agency, of action: that our actions are not justified unless an authority figure gives us the ok, the go-ahead. In the case of the United Nations, the authority is an undemocratic, unelected, and insular group³ of people who have declared themselves the arbiters of morality. Rieff, like most American center-leftists, considers the UN to indeed be a moral authority; the American right, generally very critical of the UN, has no qualms with this authoritarian model but instead with who is the ultimate authority.

In other words, Intervention belongs at the level of governments, and even they must get permission before intervening. It's this model that I take issue with.

There is another model, however: that of the Spanish Civil War. The Republicans—the democratic government and its allies—were supported by the Soviet Union and little else. That is, except for the International Brigades, more than 30,000 full volunteers who defied their governments and fought and struggled, literally, for their principles, for their own, personal moralities. On the other side Franco's rebels, usually called the Nationalists, were supported by not only Germany, Italy, and Portugal but also tacitly by the Great Britain, France, and the United States—indeed, Texaco provided fuel on credit to Franco's troops, directly abetting massacres at Guernica and elsewhere, and Britain provided the transit for Franco to come out of exile and let him station weapons at Gibraltar.

Since that time—and here I intend no causality—we've become slowly and increasingly suspicious of cultural concepts and constructs like honor and glory, and rightfully so, concepts to which we could heretofore appeal; to say that George Orwell was “honorable” for defying his government and attacking and defending against fascism now invites furrowed brows and scrunched faces appealing for definition, appealing to reason. We as a society have denounced the sort of public shaming, or threat to shaming, that circumscribe ideas of honor and glory; on the left, we have idolized resistance, fetishized it—and this is how we choose to understand the acts of Orwell and others, as resisters.⁴ Indeed, on an international level, one of the things that the current Tibetan uprising has shown is that international pressure and shame—here, on China—have no effect if the target has or chooses to feel no shame.

But the act of shouting No! is itself an accession to power; to decline, to demur, to protest or complain or appeal to other authority are all ways that acknowledge and ultimately accept the power that another holds. Power is never unidirectional.⁵ If I am your boss and I order you to dig a ditch, although I have an economic and structural power, you can still press back with other power: you can go fast or slow, you can do the job haphazardly, you can decline to let me know that the soil is unstable and will collapse overnight, you can get me sent to see the HR manager for speaking to you too harshly. Or you can tell your trainee to do it, and he can reserve all the same mechanisms of power in his relation to you that you reserve in your relation to me. And just because a government or association of governments works to constrain not just individual agency but the possibilities of individual agency does not mean that those possibilities do not exist.

The point is that agency is not reserved for governments alone, nor, because of this, is responsibility. Just as corporations often serve as a mechanism for perpetrating acts that would be gravely immoral when performed by a single individual by dividing and diluting blame among employees and stockholders, governments can perform the same function. To ignore or, worse, fail to conceive of a place for individual agency and individual responsibility is at the same time a way of consolidating power among the enfranchised-and-empowered and also an ethical failure.

In fairness to Rieff, most likely he believes that the United Nations is an effective or at least baseline moral way of building consensus—that is, acting in ways that other peoples with other biases and perspectives, both national and historical, believe is right. But the UN doesn't build consensus—if a bare minimum of votes pass a resolution and no one on the also-anti-democratic security council objects, that's not consensus but a failure thereof.

In the end, as we all recognize, morality is not democratic. I am not bound to your ideas of what's right any more than you are bound to mine. And though essays like Rieff's limit appropriate action by lowly citizens to advocacy and harassment, to calling our representatives and writing letters to the newspaper, there are further possibilities, possibilities for direct action. Just as Development recognizes a place for non-governmental actors, and just as the Spanish revolution held a place for non-Spanish combatants, Intervention has a place for the individual. It's valid to ask Why doesn't the US do something? or Why won't France intervene?, but also valid to say Why don't you intervene?, Why don't you do something?

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¹ Chosen in the sense that one can choose which subjects and fields to remain ignorant of and in, even as moral responsibility is diluted because one must choose fields to remain ignorant of and in.

² I am perpetually amazed that anyone would ever buy a Chiquita banana after the outright evil of United Fruit—the real event that the massacre of 3,000 Macondoans in A Hundred Years of Solitude was based on. That the company still exists at all is a failure of previous generations; and a failure of my own.

Or, to put it another way: In college, I had a classics professor who liked to paraphrase from Aeschylus. Once blood is shed, who can call it back? he would ask.

There is ignorance of evil; there is doubt; and there is complicity.

³ People generally don't conceive of it as such, I think because its bureaucrats tend to be harmless-looking tall men from Germanic Europe, but the UN is deeply undemocratic. Did you vote for your UN representative? Are you as equally represented as a person from China? Or, to perhaps be more fair, as a person from Canada, or from Indonesia, or from Mauritius? Does the UN—the "authority"—act in the interests of people or of its paying members, which are governments?

As for being insular, I'll relate an anecdote: I was sitting in the Imago Dei cafe in Kathmandu on Monday, and in a bid at procrastination I began eavesdropping a conversation between Americans on the black couch by the door. A younger woman—white, dark hair and plastic frame glasses—had just had an interview with the UN and was telling the other woman—older and rounder, skin now just beginning to sag—about the questions they asked, which were more in the form of a test or interrogation than a traditional American job interview.

At the end of her story, the younger woman said that she didn't think she would get it: "He said, 'With your passport, it's going to be very difficult to get a job with the UN.'"

I was incredulous, and as I made sure to type, word for word, and save and save again what she said, the two of them talked about this as if it were normal and acceptable.

⁴ This is of course the idea of honor in a different form, though the discussion that this idea begs is out of my scope.

⁵ Michel Foucault and Raymond Williams come to mind first as excellent exponents on the nature of power, but I'm sure there are many, many more that one could look to for reference.

Three Portraits, Langtang

Mountains in the Langtang Valley, Langtang NP, Nepal

Into the Clouds and Mist, Langtang Area, Nepal

Ascending through the forest, Langtang Area, Nepal

Of lichen and cinquefoils

Imagine, for a moment, life at 15,000 feet, on a hill in the Himalaya called Kyanjing Ri, at the top of which you are 500 feet higher than the highest point in the lower 48 States, 2700 feet higher than the highest point in New Zealand, higher by about 13,000 feet than the highest point in the England. All around you are swirling clouds that rise from the snowmelt creeks below and the great snowbanks of the Himals far off, separated from you by deep glaciated and river-cut valleys, pushed and pushed back by winds inconsistent and unpredictable.

The ridge you stand on, or lie against to catch your breath or to protect yourself from the skin-chapping wind, is a staircase of sandy humps, eroded on the windward side in huge, crescent-shaped washes. The knobs of its rocky spine lie exposed only at points of stress and bend, as if stretching for those craggy and dark Himals just out of grasp, knobs covered just barely by the gray freckles of half-buried loose stones and tufts of a rusty green shrub of the willow family called tukshing in the Sherpa language. At the summit, you find a wooden pole or two or three garlanded with the tattered cloth prayer flags of Tibetan Buddhism, the five colors faded from granite dust, from the constant inner-cloud drizzle, from the unimpeded sunshine of high altitude. And more, that insistent and consistent blow, even stronger here, a blow that breaks small branches and pinches shut incipient flower buds, that makes dropped seeds barren and desertifies the topsoil.

You expect lichens here, of course, black and brown against the white and gray granite and schists like spotting on a cow or a yak or a jopkyo—the cross between the two that is common in the Himalaya—and perhaps a tuft of grass or two, perhaps a wayward baby mountain goat at eye level across the deep unnamed valley in front of you, climbing perhaps the ice falls to cross to the next valley, but little else visible to the eye.

And yet: just down the path from the top of Kyanjing Ri, in a dip behind a necklace of rocky windbreaks, a black and chubby bumblebee rises up to investigate the sweet, novel smell of sweat. A little farther, still on the ridge, at the saddle where the trail diverges west to Kyanjing Ri's north peak or east along a higher set of Ris, where you stand 30 vertical meters below the north peak, a quartet of black-tailed songbirds swoops overhead, moving from valley to valley, each taking graceful cuts and curves and arcs, the white splay of their fanned tails sinking in bobs as they descend between green hillsides, the overtones from their high-pitched chattering lingering, leaving the remnants of echoes to hang in the air.

Underfoot you find not the barrenness of the imagination but instead green- and maroon- and chalk-striped caterpillars that inch and flex across the trail, no bigger than the long joint of the thumb, exposed only when not safely camouflaged among tukshing. A black ant scouts for food, or for an enemy colony, rivals for pollen and larvae and fallen or dropped tukshing berries in autumn. On a rock a beetle suns himself as best he can, his black carapace pockmarked with constellations of divots at the thorax that gleam mineral green, the long channels incised on the wings of his abdomen reflecting black and iridescent red. Twice the faint whiff of a skunk's scent wafts up—an animal not listed in Tej Kumar Shrestha's Mammals of Nepal--but it is gone in a blink.

Flowers appear or reappear 10 meters down from the ridgeline, first bright yellow cinquefoils like buttercups, tiny slips of orange in candleflames where petal meets ovule, the entire flower small as your smallest fingernail. Its color is a shock, and when picked and angled under a chin, like the buttercup, the cinquefoil reflects gold. Just below this the perfect purple globes of primulas—primroses—grow, tiny flowers facing up and down and every which way, rising from a stiff stalk like dandelions and looking just as balanced, just as ready to confetti the ground and air. Every so often the sunny-side-up face of an anemone (a. obtusiloba) shows, a star of cupping white petals surrounding an orange, star-shaped receptacle and nestled against the ground, no longer bothering with any stem to speak of. Nearby, a dwarf or cousin of the purple iris--i. kamaonensis--that grows so happily even 300 meters below, here fragile and timid, a flower's wallflower.

And here also the fingerbone branches of dwarf black junipers crabwalk outwards, the tree growing not up from a trunk but downhill from a root, its berries just beginning to display a checkerboard of straw and faded orange. Nearby its cousin, the dwarfed drooping juniper, with hand-size fronds splayed like sea fans amid cascades of the gray-green succulent saxifraga hemisphaerica that texture the land not just with shadow and light but with rosettes of nested leaves—a plant too small to register with many locals here, even as their fingers trace figures in the soil in search of a lucrative, ginko-like mushroom. Like you, they avoid the spikes and prickles of the morina polyphylla, which clings to skin and clothes and fur like the burrs we find in our socks when we tramp through American fields and meadows.

This area really belongs to the s. hemisphaerica, though, and where it is not, tufts of green and green-yellow and blue-gray grasses bend and curl, tonsure-like. As you near the grass you see it is grazed, is haphazardly mown; and next to it bullet-shaped scat, dense and as yet undisturbed: yaks, and jopkyo too. Today they are farther down, grazing on lusher grass in a warmer and moister gulch below even where the Tamang and Tibetan mushroom hunters inspect the green terraced edges of mountain goat paths and run fingers across the mossy edges of veiny stone. But the yak nimbly amble this high and higher, crossing the Ganja La Pass in late summer when its deep snow has melted and grasses and perhaps irises are available to be eaten, 16,340 feet above sea level and more than 1,000 feet above this saddle. At the trail's divergence, you find a single, cleft footprint of a mountain goat, moving upwards.

And the lichen. They are not just gray and black, scaly and tumor-like on the stone, ugly as parasites, but a jumble of color—gray and black, certainly, but also a continuum of green from deep forest to neon, yellows the colors of those cinquefoils and of mustard, bright white like snowcaps, a pink verging on tika-like red, rusty orange and burnt siena. Far from camouflaging the rocks as yak the lichens highlight them, mark them, give them color and depth.

Lichen are some of the world's most amazing organisms, a symbiosis between an algae that can photosynthesize and a fungus that can eat rock, so hardly that only they and a few fellow crypto-endoliths can survive in inland Antarctica. They're also edible, but know: it takes thousands of years for a lichen the size of your fist to grow. Mostly commonly in the Sierra Nevada of California they appear on the ground as a pale green cargo-net-in-miniature, or as attached to trees with flakes that vaguely resemble the puffed fingers of juniper leaves. Here in the Himalaya, they are more common as splotches on rock faces or mani stones, blooms or Pollockian arcs across an otherwise smooth surface.

Still, life at this altitude and in this place feels especially precarious, especially precious. The taking of it—the picking of a cinquefoil, the trampling of a saxifrage, the eating of a bird's-nest lichen—feels a violation, an injustice, the theft or appropriation of an heirloom worth little but difficult to replace. To pluck a cinquefoil of its petals like a forget-me-not is to be an agent of universal melodrama, is to choose consciously a cynical, anticlimactic ending to the fable of the cinquefoil's life: where it has heretofore survived the brutally indifferent winds and dwarfing airs and the tatatat of hailstones, has outcompeted its fellow flowers in brightness or sweetness, has defied—like all things—comically and cosmologically staggering odds by simply existing at all, its life is ended for nothing, for a distracted whim.

To see this is to place ourselves in a narrative that is not our own, in that we are not its subject; it is to recognize our own in- or consequentiality in someone else's story. It is, implicitly, to understand the dialectic of our lives, that each of our stories intersects with an infinite set of other stories, to understand that those other stories are often as valuable as our own.

The vast majority of these stories, however, is fundamentally unknowable. The history contained within a cinquefoil is incommunicable; we can intuit a story from the unusual kink of its stem, from the aborted bud it still carries, from the faintly green oil on a piece of quartz-marbled granite nearby and a crushed and torn leaf. This story, though, is not the cinquefoil's at all, but our own, double-boiled and filtered through the still of our understanding. Just as the vastness and magnitude of the universe are beyond human-scale modeling, beyond fathoming, are comprehensible only in the abstracts of mathematics and physics, so too are the knottings and weaving of microhistory, the separations and connections, impossibly Gordean. The world is bound by secret knots, as Kircher wrote; but of stories.

The paradox of these stories is that they are constructions—prose is architecture, Hemingway said—both conscious and unconscious. Simply to perceive a cinquefoil's existence as a story is a shortcut, a trick of the human mind. That we can see the world as a tangle of stories, or as tightly wound with them as a ball of yarn, is a benediction, a blessing; but is also the consequence of the confluence of speech and culture, or potentials physiological and pedagogical. To impart a story to a cinquefoil is to misunderstand it, is to perceive its existence over time in a fundamentally human way. That is, to conduct or construct the story as a melodrama is to limit ourselves to an understanding of the story as a human story; to give nature a moral is, in the end, a mistake of attribution.

*

The preciousness of life here, as long-limbed snowflakes fall on my shoulders and melt; as they settle into the crevices of exposed gneiss and do not; is, when properly attributed, a projection of precariousness of my own life in this place, and those of others like me. The cinquefoils, unlike people, abound. Indeed, there are certainly more of them nearby than people, and Polunin and Stainton's Flowers of the Himalaya lists the cinquefoils potentilla cuneata and p. anserina as “quite common” and “common,” respectively.

And yet, I see charisma in this cinquefoil, because it thrives where I cannot, in these dusty soils that as they dry pucker into hundreds and thousands of tiny crabholes like at the beach, though there are no crabs here, because it reminds me of a childhood myth of yellow flowers and chins and warming sun and topiary-like bluegrass, because it brings me a sense of comforting, warming sunshine. I pick a cinquefoil, inspect it, dispose of it; and in my mind I have done something wrong.

Little such charisma exists for lichen, though they are hardier, perhaps because they are less familiar, perhaps because they are easy to see as static and boring, perhaps because their lives and lifespans do not neatly parallel our own, unlike cinquefoils and primroses, elephants and snow leopards. Indeed, they are so culturally marginal that the saying that moss prefers the north side of the tree is not at all true for moss, but instead for lichen. Lichen earn what little value we attribute them when I tell how slow-growing they are; you can understand that to cut a lichen's life short after 100 years is like to cut short your own at 10, or 5.

Again, though, this presumes that our lives are parallel; that they continue like the ties of a railroad track, that even if you cannot see the twin, shined rails around a curve or sinking down a slope hidden by high wheat or alfalfa, you know that so long as the rails continue the ties must as well. With some certainty I can assert information about railroad ties; there is a limit to their possibility. Not so lichen, or rather, not so the intersection or non- of my life and its. In this metaphor we know simply that I am a piece of wood, and so is the lichen; all else is uncertainty, is a wilderness of mirrors propped up by a frame of cedar two-by-fours.