October 21
 

I look about me—who is it that spoke? And who is listening? Who is this ever-present “I” that is not me?
Peter Matthiessen,
The Snow Leopard (1978)

The dusty and cow-pocked streets of Nepal have not changed since Peter Matthiessen arrived at Pokhara in September 1973. It was a village then, and he a grief-stricken writer, looking for the snow leopard in the high Himalayas farther north. The invitation to join the expedition came while his young wife Deborah was dying of brain cancer in 1972. He did not write for over one year, and nine months after her death he was in Pokhara. He was forty-six.
      I arrived at Pokhara, now a trekking mecca, in March 2001, a self-exiled teacher, searching for the renegade Sherpa who guided Matthiessen. Because of lay-offs during 1999-2000, I found myself unemployed and bitter over the experience, determined to see as much of the world as my limited finances would take me, and I wanted to be anywhere but America.
      Tukten Sherpa served Matthiessen not only as a mountain guide, but also as a spiritual guide (albeit one in disguise), who exuded a “crazy wisdom” some Americans are particularly attracted to, myself included. Tukten was hired out of Pokhara many times, and I hoped to find him.
The last few years I have been asked numerous times why track a loner like Tukten? Not to ruin the book for those who haven’t read it, but Matthiessen endured great hardship over three months without ever laying eyes on the elusive snow leopard; and that fact enriched his trek rather than detracted from it. Writers don’t need much of an excuse to go to the places they want to see. For Matthiessen it was the snow leopard. For me, it was Tukten.
      In 1973, while Tukten accompanied Matthiessen on his journey, I was a teenager growing up on the vast, flat landscape of North Dakota. By 2001, I discovered the opposite of North Dakota, standing on a roof, beneath all 22,943 feet of Machapuchare (Fishtail). I stared up at a mountain which has only been climbed once, in April 1957, the week I was born, and I was filled with joy. I was forty-six.
      Our paths may never have crossed had it not been for a sudden thunderstorm in Amsterdam. During the fall of 2000, I ducked into the Bijenkorf department store and escalated up to the book department to dry off. Matthiessen’s 1978 classic, The Snow Leopard, the only English language book in the shop, was displayed like an island in a sea of Dutch. It was on sale for ten guilder ($3.50). Having an interest in the Sherpa culture and how they have changed since the advent of the trekking industry, I was planning the trip to Nepal at this time and picked up the book.

. . . .

We know he drank. He was shunned by the other Sherpas on Matthiessen’s trek who said he drank too much and used bad language. While on a mail run to Jumla, Tukten did get drunk and apparently finished a fight Gyaltsen had started, who returned to camp with news that Tukten had beaten him up and tried to run off with the mail. (Gyaltsen was one of the four Sherpas hired by George Schaller from Kathmandu.) Tukten arrived soon after, with the mail intact and without a defense. All of this is true, but there are other reasons why the Sherpas probably felt that way, and Khamsum and others were able to shed additional light on that.

With a copy of both book and photograph in hand, Khamsum began showing the picture to older Sherpas around Kathmandu. The few he found who remembered him said, “The last time I heard of Tukten he was training yaks in Khumbu and causing a disturbance from time to time.” Tukten claimed to be from the Everest region all his life, but a very famous Sherpa boss, or sirdar, Pertemba Sherpa, remembered Tukten clearly and was the first to tell Khamsum that Tukten “has been gone a long time, maybe twenty years.” Pertemba, with nearly twenty Everest summits under his belt, is quite a character, and as he made it clear to Khamsum, he had a very low opinion of journalists. He only agreed to speak to him, after numerous visits to his office, because he was inquiring on behalf of “a girl writer.” They talked about Tibet for nearly an hour, and in the last ten minutes, Pertemba said that Tukten was born in Tibet and had escaped over the mountains as a boy and was adopted by the Ang Dorje family who were from the Khumbu region.
      Khamsum was also born in Tibet and came over the mountains in 1970 on his grandmother’s back when he was an infant. While not a Sherpa, he was raised by Tibetan immigrants and is sympathetic to Tukten’s true origins and his reasons for hiding it. Pertemba said Tukten was “adopted,” but in Nepal this means he was sold into servitude, which is not as unkind as it sounds when you consider the alternative is starvation.
To gain some insight to what Tukten’s boyhood would have been like under these circumstances, I referred to Ed Douglas’ excellent 2003 biography, Hero of Everest: A Biography of Tenzing Norgay, the first Sherpa to reach the summit of Mt. Everest with Edmund Hillary in 1953. He wrote: “In Khumbu, Tibetan newcomers were called Khambas and were absorbed into the Sherpa community over a relatively short period of time. But in Tenzing’s youth [and later Tukten’s] they were looked down on, and even excluded. Tenzing’s childhood was colored by his family’s move to Khumbu, where he was regarded as a Khamba, a Tibetan immigrant who worked as a servant.”
      Given the long association the Ang Dorje family had with British expeditions, no doubt this is how Tukten gained access to camp work. Two sources indicate that as a teenager, Tukten served Major George Lorimer as an orderly. Lorimer climbed all over Nepal in the late fifties and early sixties with Lt. Col. Jimmy Roberts (the father of modern trekking) and Major Desmond Houston, all three first-class mountaineers, all formerly with the British Gurkhas. This would explain how Tukten was hired as a cook boy in 1960 on Bonington’s first climb on Annapurna.