Washing Feet in Dolpo
I HAD A SORROW I COULD NOT SHAKE. It tailed me, waited for me around corners and whispered from the shadows. Sometimes it seemed to jump into my path. Because of it, I resolved to go for a walk. A long one. Although hardly young, I elected to go to the back side of the Himalaya, near the edge of the Tibetan plateau. I would go walking with doctors, nurses, and Buddhist clerics to deliver health care in a land where trained clinicians rarely go. I hoped to absorb the medicos’ approach to caring for people even when the care could not cure, even when routine ailments, for want of laboratories, scanners, and operating rooms, resisted their powers. Perhaps their dilemma might teach me about my own. The planetary disasters now in constant view—extinction, climate change, and the ills arising from them—also resist cure, yet they demand much care. My delight in the beauty of the world now coexists with grief at its destruction. These emotions are like cellmates who cannot get along. They dwell in my head and my heart, and their argument creates a moral ache that sometimes sours the taste of life.
And so in September 2016 I packed my clothes, hat to boots. And also my gear: collapsible bucket (for washing clothes), pens that write upside down (for making notes while in a sleeping bag), headlamp, batteries, tent cord, and so forth. We would be a community in motion, employing scores of mules and horses, guides, camp tenders, and muleteers to transport our gear and ourselves along the precipitous trails of a land identified with Nepal only in modern times and for previous ages part of a shifting assemblage of theocracies and kingdoms.
We were headed for Upper Dolpo, which is “upper” by reason of both remoteness and altitude, most of it rising 12,000 feet or more above sea level, with many summits higher than 20,000 feet and crucial passes, which we must cross, touching 17,000. A quart of air at such a height contains roughly half the oxygen it has at sea level.
Dolpo lies in northwest Nepal, bordered on the northeast by the Tibetan Autonomous Region, a subdivision of China. (China began its forceful “liberation” of a more truly autonomous Tibet in 1950; the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959.) The Himalaya’s tallest mountains shield Dolpo from the monsoons of the Indian subcontinent, rendering it a high, cold desert, where success in the brief growing season requires irrigation from mountain streams.
Dolpo’s communities are delicately poised between sufficiency and want, between satisfied stomachs and empty ones. The Dolpo-pa, its people, are few, widely scattered, and (in Upper Dolpo) ethnically Tibetan. It is easy to think of them as shut off from the rest of humankind and suspended in time, but they too have felt the winds of geopolitical turmoil, and they too hear the siren song of the market-driven world that surrounds them. They also feel the slow tumult of climate change: melting glaciers, floods, droughts, and ill-timed rains. Where better, I thought, to witness the beauty of the world and also its decline? If proof were needed of the predicament of the Dolpo-pa, the 2021 calving of the Nanda Devi glacier, 200 miles to the west in Himalayan India, should provide it. The ice collapse burst a dam, with more than 200 persons killed or missing.
At the beginning of our journey, I had no idea how much the Dolpo-pa had to teach a questing Westerner like me. Still less did I suspect that part of their lesson might be delivered through the strangest of means and the oddest practice of
