The Treasure Is The Glaciers Of Ice

Part 1: Kedarnath
Later that day...

The glacial lake was empty. Girlface Buddha and I had walked up a long stone trail above Kedarnath to a sacred lake on the edge of the mountainside, one of the various places to have been distinguished by the sprinkling of Mahatma Ghandi's ashes. We reached the end of the trail, and it was about as definitive an ending as there could be because beyond the lake was nothing but sheer faces of ice and rock. If you were very determined you could equip a full-scale expedition to cross the glaciers, but you wouldn't get anywhere but even more isolated mountains and glaciers to climb over. Nevertheless, reaching the end was slightly irritating seeing as this lake has gotten the shit global-warmed out of it.

Everyone in Uttarakhand believes in global warming. You don't have to tell them about complicated observations of glacial meltage and carbon emissions and such, because they will just point out across the rocks and say "When I was a whippersnapper the glacier used to be here, now it's there. It's global warming." In the lowland city of Dehra Dun one man told me "Did you know it used to snow here in the winter?"

Cue the cries of a million Republicans: "Global warming? But it's sooooo coooooooooollldd." Cold? You shut the fuck up and you shut the fuck up NOW; that's what the fuck you do. Let Ghostface Buddha tell you some stories about cold. For instance, falling into a glacial river, that's pretty cold.

Well, I didn't so much fall into the river as slip into a shin-deep creek I was crossing on the slopes of the snowy ridges whence the water tumbled. In any event, the frigid waters soaked my legs and flooded my shoes, and though it was not miserable it was certainly unpleasant. When it really became ugly was when we realized that because of laundry issues I had made the 14-km hike up to Kedarnath the previous day without bringing a spare pair of socks. Not so easily discouraged, I planned on walking around town looking exaggeratedly miserable until someone agreed to let me dry my socks by their chai-boiling fire. Then we got kicked out of Kedarnath.

Once again, I may need to clarify: we were merely kicked out of our hotel. The owner, who I did not like, was upset with us for two reasons. 1) I had been repeatedly ignoring his angry bangings on our door on the assmuption that he was a member of the pilgrim group that was having exceptional difficulties keeping track of which four of the eight rooms in the lodge they had rented. 2) It was four hours past checkout time and nobody had informed us that we were supposed to vacate the premises in favor of a group of huddling pilgrims. The man was livid and within five minutes we were on the streets of Kedarnath village looking around very anxiously at a donkey-train of pilgrims passing through town that definitely outnumbered the amount of available hotel rooms. Girlface and I looked at one another in despair. She realized before I had to break it to her that we were about to have to make an unexpected and rapid descent of the Kedarnath trail before nightfall.

"OK, we must go" she said in a no-nonsense manner. Trying to lighten the mood she added "It's no problem, we're the fastest people here!" There actually was one problem: I had no socks and a sheet of ice had formed in the bottom of each of my shoes. But then, rummaging through my bag, I remembered I still had my emergency hot-floor socks I take everywhere! Except there was only one sock. I then had one of those perverse flashes of inspiration that come to me from time to time. I may not have had any more socks, but I did have two pairs of clean underwear. I tried to decide which I liked less. "Alright," I thought, "It's going to be the last flight of the Scotch Red," and tied the ill-fated pair in a knot around my right foot and began hobbling down the mountain.

In no circumstances are boxer shorts the ideal footwear for rough stone trails in the mountains, but the experience was made all the more unpleasant by the now-pervasive coating of dry, pummeled shit of three thousand donkeys on the entire length of the trail. Or at least it was dry, pummeled shit until it started to rain. And it least it was merely cold, squelching shit rubbing on my bruising feet through my much-abused underwear until it became goddamn freezing, squelching shit when it started to snow. Four rushed hours of this torment and one failed attempt at squeezing into Girlface's petite spare loafers later, we arrived in a darkened Gaurikund and went to retrieve the bulk of our luggage, to discover that the hotel we had hoped of returning to was now full. Fortunately, we found a place nearby in a closet-sized box to sleep in, and the hotel boy brought us down to the manager to check in. "Room is OK" I said. The manager looked at me with a face somewhere between fear, confusion, and contempt. I realized what the problem was, and decided to clear up matters so he wouldn't think I was crazy. "OK, Girlface, translate this very carefully into Hindi so the man understands...."

"You must know... that I did not shit my pants... I was just wearing my underwear as shoes... and this is donkey shit... and I promise to throw them away."

It did not help at all.


Intermission

Travel in Uttarakhand is a huge pain in the ass, and getting from one place to another takes days. Besides the fact that vehicles can rarely exceed 25 miles per hour on the dangerous, narrow roads, one frequently comes to a chokepoint where two buses are extremely slowly inching forwards and backwards to clear each other on the one-lane roads without sending one of them and its fifty passengers for a thousand-foot plummet into the nearest sacred river. Furthermore, you can only even travel for half the day because for some reason the people of the highlands are loath to depart any town in the afternoon. Even if you get out at seven in the morning and arrive in your transfer point in midafternoon, too fucking bad, you're spending the night, because the last bus out left at 11:30. It's partly because they don't want to travel after dark, but this is hogwash because the scheduled trips always end up hours late anyways and crawl through the dark whether they like it or not.

All this assumes the transport actually leaves. Often, you can sit in a stationary jeep for hours at a time waiting for more customers to fill up the 'departure quota', only for the driver to decide he doesn't really feel like working today. The locals take this bullshit in remarkably good spirits and I always wondered what gave them this zenlike composure in the face of such intransigence. Over the course of some recent conversations I've realized it's because they never leave the state and have spent their entire lives assuming that this is the best you can expect from the operators of motor vehicles. I don't find any fault in this provincial attitude; attempts to leave the state are doomed to near-certain failure.

For these various reasons, it took me no less than three days of travel to cover the 250-odd kilometers (155 miles, seriously) between Gaurikund and Gangotri. The last transit point, the rather uninspiring town of Uttarkashi, marked a sad moment for this blog: it was as far as Girlface Buddha could continue on the journey. Alas, despite all my arguments that gainful employment is wildly overrated, she felt obliged to end her vacation and return to her accounting job as scheduled and not get fired.

Wait till she finds out I switched the pocket calculator in her purse with a similarly sized glow-in-the-dark, plastic-framed mini poster of Lord Ganesh.

Part 2: Gangotri and Gaumukh

In Kedarnath I walked 14km down a mountain on a shit-strewn pilgrim trail, some of it in a snowstorm, wearing a pair of boxer shorts on one foot. Oh, I can hear myself telling the grandkids now. But it was on my next adventure that shit really got...real.

There I stood, at the source of the Ganges, looking upstream at another 18 or so kilometers of the Ganges river. Gangotri isn't really the source of the Ganges, they just say it is. I really can't figure out why, because to get here you have to pass along an very long and dangerous gorge whose foot would quite happily be identified as a 'source' by Hindus anywhere else, and beyond Gangotri to the actual source is actually much easier terrain. However, for those pilgrims whose piety trumps both their curiosity and their negligible desire to walk up to 4000 meters above sea level at the end of a glacier, the holy waters of Gangotri are quite satisfactory.

The Ganga temple of Gangotri marks the spot where King Bhagirathi meditated for the goddess Ganga to descend to Earth in the form of a river. You see, the king's wife had 60,000 sons, but the king sent them on a mission and they, like, pissed off this sage and he turned them all into ashes, so the king was like, please, we need a really big holy river to perform funeral rites and/or restore my 60,000 sons to life, and Ganga was like, yo, that sounds reasonable, I'ma come down, but wait, I'm too powerful, I'll destroy the Earth so someone has to catch me, and all of a sudden Shiva was like, yo, no worries, I'll meditate over here and I'll catch you with my dreadlocks.

And that's how it went down.

Gangotri is a beautiful place and on such an obnoxiously long, inconvenient route into the mountains that it is much less pilgrim'd than the first two Char Dham temples we've visited. It's a narrow valley full of pine forests and a small pilgrim town, with little stone hermitages dotting the edge of the wilderness. Right through the middle of it all, the upper reaches of the Ganges river roar through a deep, pitilessly vertical gorge where the water leaps through holes and crevices in the the smoothed stone walls, gouging it ever deeper like a taut wire cutting through a block of cheddar. The temple itself, however is not much to look at, and whoever has been going around publishing the common claim that the roof is "gilded" obviously has some difficulty distinguishing between a sheet of gold leaf and a sheet of gray metal that one of the gods left to be battered in an asteroid belt for a few cosmic cycles.

My real purpose in coming to Gangotri was to begin the hike up to the actual source of the Ganges, the ice-cave of Gaumukh, the "Cow's Mouth", the legendary formation at the bottom of the Gangotri glacier way up in the mountains. The trail is actually quite gentle and easy, but it is long, and there are several points that would appear difficult to the squeamish who don't want to cross icy creeks on slick logs or pause and cling to dusty cliff-faces when gusts of wind threaten to blow you off the extremely narrow footpath. Midway through the hike, you leave the forest and the trail really deteriorates as it becomes exposed in the whistling expanse of rocks and scraggly grass above the treeline. Rocks tumble onto the trail with bursts off wind and waterfalls crashing down from the snow-capped ridges directly overhead carve fresh little chasms in the loose dirt of the spindly path.

After many hours of walking you arrive at a place called Bhojbasa, which people have the audacity to call a village. Bhojbasa consists of: 1 restaurant with dormitory tents for hire, 1 police barracks, 1 ashram, 1 utility shack, and 1 utility manager's shack. Just beyond Bhojbasa is the massive pile of rocks left thousands of years ago when the Gangotri glacier reached its greatest length and didn't push no further. Neither the restaurant nor the ashram had anywhere for me to sleep, and I had a feeling the weather that night would be distinctly, well... glacial.

I decided my best chance was to wait for nightfall and look miserable so that someone would take me in, and that in the meantime I might as well hike my ass up the last five miles to the end of the glacier. From there on out the path was a mere track through the sand and boulders winding its way through the massive, barren gouge left in the mountain rocks by the ancient glacier. After a while, even the grass disappeared, and I was walking amid nothing but the multi-tonne boulder scatterings of the last ice age. Occasionally I would see a carving in the rocks, marking the toll of global warming, as the scientific and religious authorities had collobarated to mark the spots where the Gaumukh ice-cave stood in 1935, 1966, and so on. These glaciers are definitely melting. Finally, around the last mighty pile of rock deposits I saw it, the source of the Ganges, the Alpha, the holy spring whence flows forth the timeless life-giver of Indian civilization.

It looked like shit.

I'm not saying that Gaumukh doesn't possess a certain majesty; indeed, it is spectacular, but you would be hard-pressed to call it gorgeous. You see, the thing about glaciers that I had forgotten is that in addition to being rivers of ice, they also carry along incredible amounts of rock and dirt, especially at the ends. It took me a while to realize I was not going to climb up the giant pile of filthy rubble I saw before me to get to the glacier; it was the glacier. Right in the center, in the gaping hole that must be the Cow's Mouth, you could discern that indeed it was a huge mass of greyish ice, but that the ice, like solid stone beneath soil, was obscured by a thick coating of ugly brown crap. And from that gaping hole emerged a surprisingly large and powerful Ganges river.

It must be said that Gaumukh doesn't look a damn thing like a Cow's Mouth. Of course I didn't expect any more than the most passing resemblance on a geological feature, particularly one that spends centuries moving and melting. However, Gaumukh looks about as unlike any part of a cow as it possible to be. The most important part is called the "Snout", which on every cow I have seen is an outwards projection of the head, whereas on the glacier the snout is a gargantuan indentation in the ice. It wouldn't look like a cow's face unless they were to find a cow that had recently confronted a sledgehammer. (A note to the Hindu priesthood: I have a suggestion for a service I could render...)

Some pilgrims caught up and began clambering over to the riverside to collect the holy water in big plastic jugs. They dipped into the freezing torrent and emerged with a proudly-filled containers of yellowish sludge. Far from being a pristine source of ever-clear melted ice poured from the heavens that many expect, even at its very source the revered Ganges is visibly disgusting, and doesn’t become clean for a single inch of its epic journey. I felt that this threw a new perspective on the last eight months of my life.

I stayed up at the glacier to watch the sun fall behind the mountains and cast massive shadows across the valley, and had half a mind to get to some serious plant-extract-assisted “meditation” only to find that it was impossible to keep a light in the whirling winds. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t see any saddhus up there. I trudged back to Bhojbasa for my delayed confrontation with homelessness. I made a point of befriending everybody who was huddled in the Spartan mountain canteen, and as the diners dispersed I stood with my day-pack near the front gate of the compound, very exaggeratedly and slowly changing my clothing in the chill alpine air. One person after another became alarmed and would say “Oh, please see for room at the ashram!”, the ashram being full, and people from the ashram would say “Best you look at the lodge!”, which was of course full. When this dilemma was pointed out, nobody really had anything to say.

Finally, the last diners tucked off to bed and I was forced to resort to plan 2, or rather, plan 2x10^99, where all other plans were “Say ‘fuck’ repeatedly.” I was going to sleep outside.

About a kilometer into the old glacier-path I had spotted a boulder with an Om sign painted on it, and had peeked around and discovered a cleft of sorts in the rubble where a Shaivite trident and some rusting butter-lamp trays marked the long-abandoned refuge of an unknown saddhu. Well, if the babas can do it, so can I. I put on every item of clothing I had and nestled into the rocks, found a way to shield a lighter from the wind, and decided that if I was going to curl up to sleep at 4000 treeless, windswept meters in the Himalayas at the end of a glacier behind a fucking rock like a deranged, frostbitten mystic, at least I was going to get high first. If a man has no principles in the face of hardship he has no principles at all.

It was, without a doubt, the coldest night of my life.

The next morning I shuffled down to the café for an overpriced potato breakfast. “Oh, where did you sleep?” the manager inquired. I answered first by brushing the coat of dust and small pebbles out of the fold in my wooly hat, sniffed a wet dribble up into my nose and added verbally, for clarity “Fuck You is where. Give me that chocolate bar or we’re both going to fucking die.”

That evening I was back in Gangotri. I hiked down that very morning despite my weariness because I refused to take a bed for the second night and give those people any money. Hot noodles awaited me, and after devouring three orders of them I creaked my body to a pay phone.

“Hi! How was Gaumukh!” Girlface said on the other end of the line.

“It was spectacular…” I said (and I meant it), “…oh, and how do you say cumming on the face of adversity in Hindi?”

“I’m at work. Don’t be disgusting. AND WHERE’S MY CALCULATOR?”