A Palimpsest in the Making

"The creature has always been out there, and it's out there still," says Sonam Dorji, 77, sitting on the pockmarked wooden floor of his small farmhouse. It's a cold Himalayan morning, and he warms himself beside a wood stove. The smell of burning pine fills the room. "If you travel the ancient trails, even today, there's a good chance you'll meet him."

Ah....yes....I met the Yeti once.

"Mountaineers brought back many of the stories, telling of strange footprints in the snow, of mysterious animals spotted walking on two legs, of tales their porters told around campfires."

"The great Italian climber Reinhold Messner spent years tracking yeti stories across the Himalayas and even caught a glimpse of it a couple times. But in the end, the truth was obvious to him. "All evidence," he wrote at the end of his travels, "points to a nocturnal species of brown bear.""

"So the yeti hunt was on. In 1954, Britain's Daily Mail newspaper sent out a search party. In 1957, a Texas oilman took up the chase. Three years later, Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hillary searched along the Nepal-Tibet border. In their wake came Soviet expeditions, TV crews, scientists and hucksters."

I cannot remember however....any of the climbers with which I climbed. What some do not realize is this. It isn't the Yeti that is forgotten. It is those who fail in the climb or haven't attempted it that don't see it. We the "partisans" often joke about those types who have not yet found him and say, "Not Yeti! Maybe later!"

The Ascent of a Sherpa


He was common, ordinary so to speak nothing special about him, the usual clothing worn by Sherpawarm, useful.Not thin coated. Engaged as he was in public debate he found it difficult to make a decision,whether to lead or to follow. It came down, in the end, to the need for enough diesel fuel for winter to pour into a certain kind of heater that escapes description universally.Twelve Nepalese were killed in Baghdad today, someone whispers to me. Not that it matters. So he put together some things: bread, cheese, Sherpa Foods, the usual fare and set out to rendezvous with the ten or so moralistically staunch climbers engaging him. Moralistic in that they insisted on the unusual. Very moral. We should say ethical but that is just not physical enough. They met and he collected the agreed upon Sherpa coin. No one knows what it looks like. It might be Chinese or in this case, Ben Franklin-like because of the universality of Empirialistic trade, so it goes in the impoverished world. Doesn't matter to us or to the Sherpa who Ascends. He turned to the leader of the group who had learned Sherpa Language easily enough, certain tough families of words useful to climbing: torch, fire, food, oxygen,death, liquor, book, socks, cold, die-ing (being a progressive form of the former), pain, mother, father, and of course, candy...he said, "I'll have to stay ahead of you all, I'm uncomfortable in the company of others." The leader was puzzled but agreed to this stipulation all the same. It must be some sort of standard in Nepal he thought, some sort of requirement."How will we follow then?"

"I'll leave my footprints in the snow of course." "Oh," the leader said, chastened at his own stupidity. The trek began the next morning which happens pretty early up there, finishes pretty late, with the Sherpa starting off at night, slipping out as fast as he could go, like an angel in the moon's glow, one mustn't dally on a short night.The moralistically inclined group set out, pleased to see the tracks well defined, deep and the weather pleasant, the mountaintopin view, achievable. Very optimistic,if you will. Occasionally they caught sight of the Sherpa, his head bobbing up and downin the distance, disappearing behind rocks, reappearing. The tracks were still quite good. The second day was much the same only the Sherpa was no longer in sight, the tracks slightly obscured by the light snows. Some of the tracks looked a bit altered, a yeti paw here or a goat print there, but that was expected. No one bristled yet. The climber at the end of the rope disappeared yet no one noticed, each of them caught in their own meanings, their own cold. By the third day however, the bristling was looking more like a forest fire, the cold was like a burning heat, the sun was no longer just the sun but an actual star, the sky was no longer so far away, the shells of gas, the rings of Jupiter, all of them somehow related.The tracks had completely disappeared and were replaced by paw prints: first a snow leopard then some kind of bird, a Wolf and finally, a palimpsest. The party finally noticed one after the other,the disappearances of the others until they were all gone and the final moralistic climber was left to himself and felt the Sherpa beside him, pulling him strenuously, dragging him, whipping him with a leather strap, the Sherpa's nails digging into his frozen flesh. He'd been there all along and had dismissed the members one at a time, disguised as a snow leopard, a yeti, a Wolf until he decided which one he could keep company with.

"Here we are." he said, peaceful and not very excited,he'd been to the spot how many times now,"How do you like it?"

"Die-ing," he replaced the form deliberately. The Sherpa deliberately replied, "Death."