Full moon rising.
The light fades as the snow
sparkles amid the shimmering rays of the early evening Yellowstone backwoods sunset.
We put our xc skis on and gently
skate out of the snow-bound Yellowstone Expeditions campsite headed to the darkened serrated edge of the Grand Canyon of the
Yellowstone not far away.
There is a quiet and sense of
meaning for these six solitary men as they glide in a row through in the forest of their
lives.
A return to nature to find the space for a deeper, richer reflection on their nearly six decades of life.
Since the morning, we have been on the move from the commercial world outside to deep within the isolation of this unique national park. Riding modified Yellowstone
Expeditions commuter vans raised on caterpillar tracks wound around the
small, pugnacious wheels with iron ski tips breaking the snow and ice over the
wintry park roads.
We stayed last night in West
Yellowstone, a tourist town on the edge of the Yellowstone National Park. My friends had arranged a few comfortable, heated cabins
with all the amenities that I have long since ceased to expect in the developing country ‘hotels’ where we usually stay in Nepal.
The degrees of differences
between my Nepali and American lives would never cease to amaze me, if I spent
much time thinking about it. But,
in truth, it’s simpler and more convenient to compartmentalize (as the modern distinction is described).
In truth, I’m merely pleased to
feel the warm gust of air when I open the motel room in the below zero temperature
of winter in Wyoming. The room’s
wooden walls, carpeted floor, plush bed, bathtub and air of cleanliness seduce
me as I lay down my tired muscles after my first day skiing in over thirty
years.
Yet I can’t resist smiling to myself remembering my hotel room in Dadeldhura some months ago with the darkened
blood red pan stains on the dingy white-washed walls, the stale, musty fragrance, the
thin blanket, plastic flipflops and idealized Thai country scene
poster on the wall.
But, I remind myself: I’m not in
the hills of Nepal now. Almost a
week away from Kathmandu, I’ve reached the western entrance to Yellowstone
National Park with my Amherst ’76 friends, Gary, Lee, Cush, Dan and Peter, to
join them on their annual adventure in the American wilderness.
I’ve
crossed the globe to attend a more personal ritual of male bonding and
friendship premised on time away from the daily demands of family and
professional lives dispersed across suburban America from New Jersey to
Connecticut, Wisconsin, New Mexico to Alaska.
I’ve traveled ten thousand miles from
Kathmandu to renew these ties of youthful companionship and promise after decades away. When my recent UNDP contract closed at
the end of December, it created an opportunity to loop back to reconnect with the
distant spirit of my younger life.
Through the magic of email, I’d
observed these friends’ annual cross-country ski pilgrimage from afar for a
decade and always felt a tug to join them.
After having lived far away in so
many ways from our shared collegiate experiences forty years ago in a four-story
brick and ivy freshman dormitory in the early 70s in western Massachusetts, I
sought better perspective on our individual paths through those youthful
thickets of hard-earned experience to seek to create caring and meaningful
lives.
From where we had started, where had we come?
From where we had arrived, what did we recall of our youthful ambition?
Had we honored the lives we had been given in ways true to our early hopes?
Since such time opens only occasionally in one’s adult life, I accepted this work interregnum as a message
of mindful awareness and personal reflection.
As I know, once the current of life picks up speed again, it will likely sweep me along the rapids of another decade toward a more
final reckoning of my existence.
Thus I grabbed this opportunity in early
February to join my five fellow Amherst alumni now swaddled in our winter boots and
heavy parkas wading among 6’ banks of snow in rural Wyoming.
But first, as hale and hearty Americans, it was
essential to start the day before entering the Park at a nearby diner for a breakfast of sausage or cheese omelets, pitchers of hot coffee, whole
wheat toast and orange juice. We then proceeded to
the Yellowstone Expeditions office for our ride with all of our personal gear
packed away and the long, bundled ski bags on the roof of the SUVs.
My LL Bean duffle, borrowed from
Joshua, was full of the hi-tech xc ski clothes Lee and Gary had guided me to
purchase over the past two months. Piles of black shimmering undergarments
and silky shirts made of micro-thin, breathable polyprophene and similar polyester
fibers.
Although, after decades sharing life with Shakun and her own beautifully designed, elegant and refined earth tone pashmina clothes,
purchasing these polyester clothes felt like heresy on a clothes hanger.
Though from
my friends’ coaching, I learned that in the sub-zero temperatures of northern Wyoming, wool
or cotton clothes, even pashmina, would steadily absorb sweat and turn bitterly wet and cold during the day.
Whereas these modern synthetic materials
breath and wick more easily, thereby allowing sweat to escape my clothing as I struggled
to traverse kilometers of snow fields on our cross-country skiswith my much more experienced friends.
‘Clothes make the man’, as they say out in the wilds...
So as I pulled on these
polyester linings and inner socks, fleece jacket, acyrylic
neck lining and Sherpa Gear (made in
Nepal) nylon and spandex pants, I felt like I’d not only changed
continents, but identity.
This simply wasn’t me – at least not
the ‘me’ I’d known over the years: certainly not uber-athletic or
outdoor adventurer, or triathalon competitor, or mountain man, or sportive
wunder-kid.
None of the above…
C’est not moi.
But for the joy of lasting friendship,
the desire of shared experience, an opportunity to reflect on time past -- or merely
a winter week in a spectacular environment to challenge the body and soul --
even this, too, was possible.
As the commuter van on steroids
pulled out of the parking lot, sitting next to Gary and Dan, I felt an elation
and affection that obscured the challenges and anxiety of the novitiate
cross-country skier from Nepal come to the American wilderness.
I think it was Dan who noted that
part of the draw of this gathering was the allure of Yellowstone
itself.
These National Parks are the ‘piece de resistence’ of the American
West, nature unbound and protected.
Testaments to the original, unspoiled American wilderness, the pre-Columbian, pre-United States of America, pre-suburban 20th C. worlds of memory: a sacred communion between
G-d as nature and our primordial soul.
In fact, 1872 marked the year Yellowstone became the first
national park established in the world. A wise if desperate last minute 19th C. recognition
by politicians and environmentalists alike that if nothing was done through the
coercive force of legislation and regulation, the grand poetic sweep of these
sublimely rare and unique American landscapes would quickly become another crassly
commercial Niagra Falls absorbed ineluctably by the inevitable advance of modernizing
civilization.
Thus, with a tip of my russet,
woolen, head-hugging Sherpa Gear topi to the wise souls who put boundaries around this immense vista, we drove through the Park entrance into a world of vast natural beauty and
wildlife. The strips of tourist shops, diners
and motels of West Yellowstone held at bay by the map-maker's delineation of the National
Park Service.
'Three million tourists a year come to Yellowstone,' says our guide Tom. Yet the whole country of Nepal hasn't even broken a million in one year!
Yet, a friendly, solitary woman ranger in uniform collecting tickets and passes
was enough to hold a whole society’s baser urges at bay. The authority of the NPS allows Mother Nature
to rule hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness, wildlife and ancient geothermal
activity for generations to come.
In winter, the number of tourists
or guests is certainly reduced. We
passed handfuls of snowmobiles and only a few other winterized tourist caravans
in the Park. Each waved with
the knowledge that we were among the fortunate few to have the Park and its magnificent
open, snow-covered landscape to ourselves.
Well, mostly to ourselves…
For soon in the Park, twenty minutes down the road, we stopped as Lee noticed a bald eagle
sitting majestically on a short limb of a tall, dead pine tree across the
river.
Cush pulled out his Canon spotter
and Peter his amazing array of camera equipment, as we stood by the river’s
bend to observe an ambitious black raven unsuccessfully try to irritate and dislodge the bald
eagle. The view through Cush's 20-60x
spotter was phenomenal. Through
that enhanced lens, the bald eagle’s yellow, fearless cold eye gazed
imperiously on the landscape around.
As we stood in the snow, surrounded by an open world of forested ridges a bevy of golden-eyed ducks and trumpeter swans floated by on the icy stream.
Not another ten minutes
further into the Park, we stopped again to observe a herd of placid dark bison gathered in a nearby field munching peacefully on the stubble grass showing among the distant snowfields.
We stopped to observe in silent joy and a communal pride in their mere continuing existence.
An American pride in the resistance and survival of our foundational lives…
The dark brown hirsute,
hump-backed bison of earlier days, that noble ponderous head that once graced
the US nickel, a memory of our once open, flowing North American plains and the Native Americans who
lived in a more cultural symbiotic spirit with that hoary beast.
Memories that awaken us to
possibilities of life, the power of nature and a primordial past...
And yet burden us with man's willful destruction and the risks of continuing loss that surround us still…
(to be continued...)
