“Namaste,” is what I said back as he walked by me on the trail.
In no other language have I ever found such a useful word. It goes for “hello,” “good day,” “good bye,” “good morning” sometimes I think it even can cover “thank you” and “your welcome.”
The literal translation is “I salute you.” Knowing the literal translation made repeating “Namaste, namaste” a little less monotonous by pretending that I was doing something as honorable as saluting every time I said the word.
I was sitting at Ngozompa Lake on that particular salutation. The lake is about a five-hour roundtrip hike from the small village of Gokyo. There is a point out by this, the fifth lake in the area running parallel to the glacial valley. The point is called “Scoundrel’s View.”
I was sitting, scratching my chin, and catching my breath when I started to realize that where I was sitting, may just be the best place to hold a girl’s hand that I’d ever seen. Could be, there’s more to that name than meets the ear.
Large baby blue cracks moved and awoke the quiet with precipitous crunches through the air. The North Face of Everest sat poking up through the coming storm.
Winds blew the clouds across the peak and stuck to it like cotton balls to a stubbly face, only to be pulled from the black Velcro with the evermore wind.
I took off the watch from my wrist and took a picture of it sitting on a pile of rocks known as a chorten, used as a Buddhist monument or sometimes to simply show the path threw the glacier fields, which then they become less symbolic and known as cairns.
It wasn’t my watch however; I haven’t worn one for years. It belonged to my friend Tony.
Tony and Kara met last year on this trek. Their destination was this view.
After falling in love in two minutes they ran out of time to make it here. This year they returned to finish their bidding. Tony had given me his watch to make sure I wasn’t late for the morning because remember, I don’t wear a watch or even own a sundial. When I made it to their room, I got a note telling the tale of altitude sickness and them having to retreat down in the middle of the night.
Because this is such a small world, it was of no worry about the nice solar powered watch.
I had to go all the way to the Himalayas, six days walk from the nearest road to meet someone from 30 minutes away from where I was born, who had to come all the way to this place of snow and ice and yaks to meet someone to fall in love with.
I laughed, took the watch down and with that little bit of insanity that goes along with being up that high in elevation, looked out where ice was breaking.
In the echoes of that ice yelling its own version of pick-up truck “yeehaws” I stopped to do a “Namaste” just for Kara and Toney. Only thing was that the echo came back, “YEE-HAW.”
The wind was dicing and the cold was biting my face. My cheekbones and nose raw from the harassment of wind and sun.
I adjusted my hat and picked a rock to place on top of the chorten that was the granite beacon showing me the way like a signpost bodhisattva. Tradition is that your supposed to add a rock to it as you pass.
Upon returning all hungry and gaze-crazy to Gokyo, I heard the news from a short-wave radio brought up the tracks and as I stood watching out at white windy slopes I thought about the news.
I thought about Baba Chirru.
He was a famous climber. A Nepali, he was a national hero. He made the name “Sherpa” something more than a glorified backpack carrier. He’d climbed Everest 11 times and even stayed up on the top for 24 hours. Baba Chirru also made it to the top of the world’s highest mountain faster than anybody ever has.
He loved his people and he loved the mountain called Everest. But, irony always goes to its greatest lengths.
The next day I packed up and left. Walking out through the glacier field a storm came in. A cairn stood high showing the path to take across that boulder field that, without the pebble pyramid, one could get lost more than easily.
Other than the silence and thick fog, there was nothing but moonscape and glacier cries. In the silence I was thinking about Baba Chirru again and I remembered a song lyric that seemed pertinent. It was sung that, “good lovers make great enemies.”
With that ringing in my ears over the echoes of glacial drift, I was stopped by admiration for a particular chorten.
I was off to the base camp of Everest and into the Khumbu valley, something his eyes would never hold again. I walked off thinking “That stone that I lay as I past was for you. Namaste, man I never knew.

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