The Unfolding Tragedy in the Himalayas: A Personal Tale

You know how life goes. The day-to-day existence of food shopping, cleaning the house, scheduling a gentle yoga class.

So much of the world news interests me. Still, most of it has little to do with my life—the Strait of Hormuz remains closed another day, Meta is forking over 17.2 billion because they created a product young people are not only addicted to, but that harms their developing brains.

And then one day you open the newspaper, and there it is. Fate’s unforgiving hand. The personal story.

It was barely three months ago my son wended his way through the Gyirong Border Port in Tibet around 10 am on a sunny morning. As he and so many others traveled through Tibet on the journey of a lifetime, getting an up-close and personal look at the Himalayas and Mt. Everest, life was excellent. He sent me photos of sweeping landscapes and snow-peaked, majestic mountain ranges…and of his Tibetan tour guide in saffron robes and dark sunglasses.

Less than a decade ago, I traveled not to Tibet, but to Nepal with my son. We hiked the Annapurna Range, the birthplace of Buddha, in the north-central Nepal Himalayas.

I was one of the lucky ones, as was my son. We saw what we had come to see and returned home safely.

Reading about the disaster this past week has felt like being caught in a haunted trance. I cannot stop poring over articles about the glacier rushing down the Himalayas at 120 miles an hour, ice pulverized with seismic force before crashing into the river below, now still moving at 45 miles an hour toward Gyirong and the Port Building where my son stood on that sunny May day.

An apocalyptic scene relegating Hollywood disaster films to Tinker Toys.

Why them on August 26 and not me? Over 4,000 dead and missing now. The randomness of it leaves me numb and exhausted. All those Sundays spent in church hearing about and ultimately believing in a loving and merciful God. Had I invested my faith in a false idol?

In clearer moments, I realize this tragedy was human-made, not God-made. We create global warming; we trek the Himalayas, leaving behind human waste and trash defiling the beauty of God’s landscape. We seek the exotic and the spiritual.

Now all we have are the news stories, the Facebook threads and reels of unimaginable catastrophe captured by the ubiquitous cell phone…the unsuspecting going about their day, walking the dog, cutting up vegetables for the noon-day meal…patiently waiting in a passport checkpoint line. Suddenly, completely wiped out, the only warning a deafening, thunderous roar. Then the deluge, the sand, the mud, the boulders burying them with unleashed fury. My mind is a jumble filled with an unimaginable collage of horrifying images.

Mass graves, and then a miraculous story…a 7-year-old girl pulled from the mud and debris.

This is why I write, why I write this now.

Putting it down in words.

The total unfairness of life, the beauty, and mostly my life and how I traveled there and remember the people: our Nepali tour guide who dreamed of starting his own tour business and did…the little boy in flip-flops in the flower-scented hills flying a homemade kite made from candy wrappers…the long bus ride past rivers and villages to the search for the elusive Bengal tiger in the jungles of Chitwan.

Gold light slants across brilliant green rice fields as the evening sun sets across a cerulean sky. Old men hunch over, carrying bales of straw on their backs, walking dirt roads where dogs sleep oblivious to passing cars and motorbikes. Women squat along riverbanks, washing clothes.

We all want the same thing: a roof over our heads, food on the table to feed our families, and for our children to survive. This is where I practice gratitude. I have that. What more is needed?

Life goes on. What can be said?

One Nepali man put it best after losing his wife and daughters. “They were unlucky. I was lucky.”