Nepal, 1989

These are simple geographic facts: we have just taken off from a runway that was covered in small yellow flowers, and flown into a cloudbank, at an altitude maybe three or four thousand feet lower than the mountains all around us.

The monk behind me fingers his mala, worn prayer beads made of some kind of seed, and I file that idea away for the future. If there’s going to be a future.

My broken knee and I have been jammed into a seat that would only be comfortable if you had no bones to begin with.

This morning, when the sky was still bright and we were contemplating the too-abrupt end of our trek, while we were petting the pig, the mountains glowed with that peculiar Himalayan light, the kind of light you expect a genie to make when it’s popping out of the bottle, all promise and special effect.

And now the mountains are invisible. We are swallowed by cloud, the plane is jumping on thermals, and the monk, beads not quite enough, has begun a low hum that sounds like a metal ice tray vibrating in a broken refrigerator.

If there were not a clear language barrier, I would turn around and tell him this story: When I was in high school, my English teacher liked to discuss ways of committing suicide. Always, he’d come back to the idea of jumping off a very tall building, because you’d have that lovely freefall sensation, and, of course, when you’re falling, “only the last inch hurts.”

But I don’t think the monk would go for that.

Let me back up a minute—or a couple days, anyway.

Under most circumstances, this would all be pretty interesting: my left knee, over the past forty-eight or seventy-two or ninety-six hours, has taken on the size and appearance of a basketball, one of the basketballs from the long-defunct ABA, those red, white, and blue balls that gave Dr. J. his start.

Call it a lesson in Nepali transport: the motorized rickshaws are better than taxis, because you can’t slam your leg in the door of a rickshaw.

But it’s quite possible to slam your leg in the door of a taxi. Or, to be exact, your knee.

Okay, so it still isn’t that easy. And no, I don’t really feel like explaining exactly how it happened. Enough to say it did. Slam. Scream. Pain. And then lots and lots of very colorful swelling and a complete inability to walk in a straight line. Or to walk much at all, for that matter.

Even that might have been okay, but after two days on a bus—past, by actual count, fourteen overturned trucks or buses, and those road signs that are nothing more than exclamation points, as if to indicate should your own bus pitch over the cliff you won’t even have time to get a word out—day one of the trek into the Himalayas starts, against all common sense, with a 3,000-foot descent.

And by the end of the day, the real question is, what genius planned this?

That first night, I had no idea where we were, but it simply didn’t seem that important. We were next to a stream—the echoes of the pig that they dragged across the bridge a few minutes ago finally died away—in a shelter with a thatched roof. Standing seems entirely out of the question, so I laid down, unable to see my foot over the swelling in my knee.

Under most circumstances, that would be pretty interesting, too, but we have nineteen days of trekking left, and what’s really interesting me now are the chances of an emergency flight out.

There are different kinds of limping, I discover. Uphill limping, when the porters, tump line around their foreheads, seventy pounds or so of gear hanging down their backs, pass my by as I try to figure out how to work the incline without having to bend my knee. There’s the flat-land limp, up on a ridge line where small girls, carrying half a forest worth of sticks each, come out to see who’s walking by their village. There’s the late-night, how-did-we-ever-trust-local-flashlights limp, stumbling in pitch black under a moonless sky.

I meet a doctor on the trail, show her my knee, and she says something really useful, along the lines of, “Wow, that sucks.”

Helpful. I like that.

That first night, it rains, hard. Nearly drowned out by the sound of water hitting the tent, there’s the frantic sound of the porters and the sherpas digging trenches around us.

And about twenty minutes later, there’s a scream, because they dug the trenches so that all the water flowed straight into the trek leader’s tent.

These guys can’t even lift the packs they’re carrying—it takes two of them to lift each pack, helping a third settle it on the line around his forehead—but once loaded, they’re off to the races, singing, laughing, and going much, much faster than me, as I discover the “even the bloody porters who are half my size and carrying a hundred pounds each are moving faster than me” limp.

Looking back, I don’t remember going up very many hills. Surely we must have, because we were in the mountains, and the general trend was up. But what I mostly remember are the downhills, putting all my weight onto the strong knee, heading towards the bottom of yet another river valley, where there would be a small house or two, a few pigs, and a view that, properly framed, would sell thousands of photos out of a booth in any mall in the world.

People wait all their lives to see things like this, the mercury glow of the river, the hills reaching up towards the pure white mountains.

I’m looking down too much. I know I am. But I have to watch where each footstep lands, or my knee will buckle, and I’ll be down for the count.

My wife, very beautiful in a trekking skirt we bought her in Kathmandu—our one practical purchase—keeps me company until I get too pissy, and then she rambles off on her own, checking back on me just enough to know I haven’t been forgotten, and if I weren’t so busy being grouchy, we could probably still have a pretty good time.

On a ridge line at twilight, there are the most beautiful trees I have ever seen, the kind of trees that old National Geographic specials promised me when I was a kid, making me want to go into the huge world.

This is as huge as it gets. I realize I’m limping through the Himalayas, and despite the pain, start laughing in sheer glee.

Update, Vegas, 2005

I've been walking with a cane for much of the past year. It started with an undefined knee problem, which gave way to arthritis in my left foot. Then, in Venice in May, in my right foot, a couple tendons decided they wanted to go on vacation. Most recently, in August, I got on a boat in British Columbia just fine, but when I got off, something had gone quite dramatically wrong in my left knee.

So really, in the past year, I've traveled through ten countries, spent three weeks north of the Arctic Circle, but mostly, I've passed the cane back and forth between hands, depending on which leg has decided to go AWOL.

But one must make the most of all situations. I have learned cane moves--twirls and spins and Fred Astaire taps. And I have discovered that when you have a cane, you can really get away with murder. Get on the airplane first to avoid the herd seating arrangements. And, if somebody annoys you, you can whack them in the ankles, then smile and apologize. "Gee, sorry, I'm just not used to using this thing yet."

But I really should have bought that silver elephant-headed cane in Venice. If something is going to be in your life all the time, it might as well be beautiful.