Anicha

Well the last day of home life is wrapping up for a while. The cats sniff open suitcases suspiciously as I pace around the house leaving nothing undone. Plane to Paris tomorrow, a couple days to loitter under the Eiffel Tower and through the Louvre, then on to Italy for a month. The excitement is mounting.

For some reason when I travel out of country, I always feel slightly apprehensive about the plane ride. I suppose this comes from a deep-seated primal fear of the intrinsic vulnerability that accompanies spending ten hours in the air, contained in something that takes half an hour to land (that is, without oxygen masks and shitty pants). I am generally fine for the trip though. To assure my utmost equanimity for tomorrow's ride, I have asked my partner to turn off the documentary he was watching on airplane crashes.

My experiences on planes have generally been good. The only time that warranted any concern occurred during the flight back from Nepal in '92. My friend Melissa and I were green with hangovers, having stayed up until the wee hours of the morning drinking rice wine with some restaraunt owners in Kathmandu. I think one of the owners was trying to arrange a marriage between her son and Melissa, perhaps thinking that with enough rice wine she might submit. "Dude, do it. He's hot", I slurred encouragingly. But a gallon of rice wine later, Melissa was still unrelenting, and we decided that if we didn't want to be stinking drunk in the morning while going through the airport, we better hit the pillow. Too little, too late.

I was half drunk and half hungover while staggering into the taxi only hours later that morning, and hopelessly sick while boarding the plane. This kind of nausea could only be treated with copious amounts of Gravol. After taking more than the recommended dosage each, we could be found with our heads rolling around at strange angles, leaking drool onto each other's shoulders. I woke up at some point, likely from our heads clacking together, and felt that I needed to take a haul off of my ventolin inhaler. I rummaged around in my pocket and found it amidst the large herbal pellets that a Tibetan herbalist gave me to treat my asthma, which resembled dog kibbles (and could have been for all I know).

Finding my inhaler, I sucked back hard. Since this incident I have always checked my inhaler for foreign objects before inhaling, because in this case my inhaler was without cap, and inside was lodged one of those asthma kibbles, which, after generously sucking back on the thing, was now lodged in my throat. Wide eyed with shock, I sobered up pretty quickly while I shook the hair off of my drugged friend beside me. She looked at me with blurry eyes and furrowed brow as I desperately mimed my predicament, making hurried pointing gestures to my open mouth. No use. And could I blame her? If she had woken me from my Strawberry Fields dream, pointing at her open mouth, I would have told her to buzz the stewardess for lunch. So I ended up straddling the isle in view of surprisingly unconcerned onlookers, bent at the waste and upside down, hacking away and jiggling my body in several awkward convulsions. Out came the kibble.

As I look over the the picture of me, Melissa, and Everest on my home office desk, I can't help but marvel at all that has changed. There I was on Gokyo Peak at 5360 metres, wrapped in a Tibetan yak wool jacket and shawl, wearing jeans that I gave up washing weeks ago. To be replaced fifteen years later with North Face synthetics and vacations to Europe, boarding planes without pockets of Tibetan kibble but with a healthy sense of mortality. As my Vipassana meditation teacher used to say: "anicha...anicha....anicha" (change...change...change).