When a Place You Love Is Hurting
I first went to Nepal in 2011.
I wasn’t looking for a story.
But I came home carrying something I couldn’t explain.
Fifteen years later, I’m still trying.
There is something about Nepal that has always resisted my attempts to put it into words. I can tell you about the mountains. The temples. The prayer flags. The smell of incense and wood smoke. I can tell you about Kathmandu and the Himalayas and the impossible way villages cling to mountainsides.
But those are things I saw.
What I have never been able to adequately describe is what I felt.
There was something there.
Magic is the word I have used for it, although even that feels insufficient. Maybe some places simply have a presence. Maybe history leaves something behind. Maybe thousands of years of prayer settle into stone. Maybe mountains that have stood above humanity for longer than we can comprehend have something to teach us if we are quiet enough to listen.
Or maybe Nepal simply reached something in me that I didn’t know was there.
I still don’t know.
What I do know is that I left Nepal in 2011 changed.
Eventually, I began to write.
That experience became the seed of A Journey to the Heart of Kumari. In many ways, I think the books have been my attempt to understand the question Nepal left me with.
What is it about this place?
I have written hundreds of thousands of words trying to answer that question.
I’m still writing.
And I still don’t have the answer.
Years later, I returned to Nepal. This time I brought my son Gabriel with me, and we trekked toward Everest Base Camp.
I wanted to experience the Himalayas differently. I wanted to walk the trails. Sleep in the teahouses. Cross the suspension bridges. Feel the altitude. Hear the rivers below me rather than read about them on a map.
I wanted to walk through the kind of world I had spent so many years writing about.
And Nepal surprised me again.
There are grand memories from that journey, of course. Mountains so enormous that photographs flatten them into something almost ordinary. Prayer flags snapping above bridges. Trails disappearing around bends with no indication of what waited on the other side.
But in the days since the catastrophic flooding struck Nepal and Tibet, it has been one of the smallest memories that keeps returning to me.
A teahouse beside a river.
Gabe and I were talking about it the other night.
We had stayed in Jorsalle on our way toward Namche Bazaar, beside the Dudh Koshi. We arrived early enough that we suddenly had something rare on a trek: time.
And I was afraid of suspension bridges.
So was Gabe.
We knew there would be many more ahead of us, including some much higher and longer than the little bridge near our teahouse. So we decided we were going to practice.
We crossed it.
Then we turned around and crossed it again.
Back and forth over the Dudh Koshi, getting used to the movement beneath our feet and the water below us, until the bridge became less frightening.
At the time, it was simply Gabe and me doing something together. One of those little moments from a journey that becomes a family story.
Then this week, we looked at the footage again.
The teahouse.
The river.
The bridge.
The mountains rising sharply around all of it.
“Is that teahouse gone?”
No.
It was important to tell him that.
This disaster occurred in a different part of Nepal, along a different river system. The river beside our teahouse was the Dudh Koshi.
But as I watched our old video, geography suddenly seemed almost beside the point.
I could see how close our teahouse had been to the river.
I could see the bridge.
I could see the steep walls of the valley around us.
And I found myself trying to imagine what a sudden, enormous rise in a Himalayan river would mean inside a landscape like that.
Nine meters.
Numbers are strange things.
You can read them in a news report and understand them intellectually without really comprehending what they mean.
But I could put nine meters into a landscape now.
I could put it beside that teahouse.
I could put it beneath that bridge.
I could put my child there.
And suddenly it wasn’t a number anymore.
I found myself wondering what we would have done.
Climbed, probably.
Up.
That would have been the instinct. Find the trail. Find the rocks. Find anything that gained elevation and climb.
But then comes the question I don’t like asking.
Would we have had time?
And that is where this disaster changed for me.
It stopped being something happening on a screen.
I know what those valleys can feel like.
I know how a river can occupy nearly all the space at the bottom of one, with homes and teahouses and trails tucked into whatever ground remains. I know how a suspension bridge can be not simply an attraction for a visiting trekker, but a road—a way to school, to work, to another village, to the rest of the world.
I know people there.
My friend Mingmar is still waiting for news of friends who are missing.
And perhaps that is the cruel transformation that happens when somewhere far away becomes somewhere you love.
The map changes.
A dot becomes a village.
A river becomes a river you remember hearing outside your window.
A suspension bridge becomes the place where you once taught yourself not to be afraid.
And the people in a news story stop being strangers.
I have watched Nepal endure terrible things before.
And still, somehow, the Nepal I know carries on.
Tea is poured.
Prayer wheels turn.
Children go to school.
Porters shoulder impossible loads.
Trekkers complain about the stairs.
Prayer flags fray in the Himalayan wind.
People rebuild.
Perhaps that is part of the thing I have been trying to understand since 2011.
I used to think the magic of Nepal was hidden somewhere in its mountains.
Maybe some of it is.
But perhaps some of it has always been in its people.
I don’t want to romanticize suffering. There is nothing beautiful about families waiting for someone who has not come home. There is nothing mystical about losing a house, a school, a road, a livelihood or a person you love.
Grief is grief.
Loss is loss.
And right now, Nepal is carrying far too much of both.
So I find myself back where I began fifteen years ago.
Trying to understand what this country has done to me.
Trying to explain why a place thousands of miles away can feel close enough to hurt.
Trying, once again, to put Nepal into words.
And failing.
Perhaps that is why I keep writing about it.
Perhaps some places are not meant to be solved.
Perhaps they are meant to change us.
Nepal changed me.
And right now, my heart is there.
