On Going to Nepal
When returning home from business trips, I’ve become deeply familiar with the wanderlust spawned by flight attendants’ listing out of connecting flight information. Reykjavik, Santiago, Shanghai, Singapore…and I’d think, one day, rather than the normal routine of grabbing my roll-aboard and heading out to the taxi stand while furiously responding to work emails on my phone, I’d get on one of those connecting flights and tell my husband — whom I love deeply — and my work — which I also love — that I’d be back later. A couple of days. A week maybe. Just not home, not yet.
And that’s not to say that I’ve had a boring, or land-locked life. My middle class upbringing has allowed me to collect a lot of experiences: I’ve seen the opera in Budapest, the Eiffel Tower, Mannekin Pis, Gaudi architecture, salt mines outside of Krakow, the Prague Astronomical Clock; experienced Mefloquine-induced hallucinations in Java; suffered from bed bugs in Yangshuo; been drunk for the first time — on Singapore Slings in Senggigi; destroyed a passport in Bucharest; had another passport stolen in Zagreb; experienced the momentary entrapment of a London Underground station closed due to the IRA; gone snorkeling in a Maldivian lagoon. And more locally: sang karaoke in a hillbilly bar in Cuba, MO while on a Route 66 road trip; felt the undulation of a balcony while dancing at a Phish show in St. Louis; driven through Death Valley; gotten married in the Beaux-Arts rotunda of San Francisco City Hall.
And then I started traveling for work: a loop of airports, car services, power cords, room service, and elite status on airlines and with hotel chains. There’s a routine, and one stops seeing what is around.
But as I realize that I am closer to 40 than to 30, I’m reminded — as one school Headmaster once said — that we all have a death sentence on life. If I were to die tomorrow, one of my biggest regrets would be never having been to Nepal. Growing up with a mountain climber for a father, who seemed to go on a trek every year, this country was woven into my psyche — albeit with the lens of the expedition physician and his patients. Some of the headlines from his slide shows: dysentery at base camp; sudden altitude sickness on a mountain ridge; pulmonary edema; fractures and sprains. And then there was my dad’s “Jesus is my Belayer” sermon (which gives me mixed emotions today, as I no longer identify as Unitarian, much less Christian).
I’ve never been on a flight where someone has announced a connection to Katmandu, and I wonder…if there were one, would that have been it. And, there are plenty of maudlin reasons that make next spring obvious, the time most ripe with meaning. So that, and airline elite status notwithstanding, is that: next year is when I go to Nepal.
