The Meadow Read online

  Jane bided her time, waiting for the right moment to widen their horizons. It came in 1988, when they spent four weeks trekking on the arduous Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, in the shadow of Mount Everest. It was Don’s first big foreign trip, and only the second time he had left the US. He could not get enough of the Himalayas, which sparked a fascination in him with all things Asian. Soon his upstairs office in Northwood was crammed with books about climbing in the subcontinent, Tibetan Buddhism and Indian philosophy, yoga and meditation. Most evenings he could be found sprawled across the living-room floor, surrounded by books and maps, Indian music tinkling out of the speakers, plotting the next foray to the East.

  The only problem was synchronising their lives. While Jane had the long summer school holidays, Don could never take more than two weeks off. For a while they turned this into part of the adventure, Jane going on ahead and rendezvousing with Don at some distant destination, like the time she toured alone around Thailand and India, having arranged to meet him outside a post office in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. When Don quit his job at the Sacred Heart to set up Spokane’s first independent neuropsychology practice, he did it mainly so he and Jane could spend more time travelling together.

  They got round to marrying in 1991, a home-made affair in their back garden, literally tying themselves together with climbing ropes looped into a double fisherman’s knot. It could have been corny, but that was Don and Jane, bound to each other by the things they loved. The act, for Jane, ‘symbolised the dependence of each of us upon the other’. Afterwards, Don gave a set of Tibetan bells to the chaplain in thanks. For their honeymoon they returned to the Himalayas, this time visiting Ladakh, a solemn, arid mountain landscape dotted with prayer flags and Buddhist monasteries in India’s far northern Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) state. Don came home mesmerised by what they had seen, and also by what they had heard of another nearby destination, the Kashmir Valley, that lay three hundred miles to the west, a place of ancient gods with a landscape shaped by hunters and poets.

  Four summers later, Jane was packing for the Kashmir Valley. This trip would be a culmination of many things: ten years of climbing, ten years being together, almost a decade of foreign exploration. They had decided there was no better location in which to celebrate.

  The journey was well within their physical capabilities. Jane had worked it out. The twelve-day trek would, they hoped, fill their heads and hearts. If the maps were accurate – Don had struggled to find anything half decent – they hoped to cover over a hundred miles, which seemed about right for the kind of weather and the severity of the inclines they expected to encounter.

  Don read how the wilderness of glacial chutes and iridescent mountain lakes had a way of punishing trekkers, while serving as home to hard-pressed nomadic gujjars, dards and bakarwals, the native herders, hunters and cowboys who wore kohl round their eyes to ward off evil spirits, their children bound to the backs of their ponies with rope. Through a silent landscape they moved in slender single-file convoys to summer pastures of lush, flower-filled valleys and on to the high Himalayas, a medieval caravan of maroon robes and scarves. Up high, the temperatures careened from the seriously sub-zero to the high forties. There was a dry heat that cracked skin, and a wet cold that blistered everything. Sometimes the wind dropped, only to slam into you like a pantechnicon.

  But then, many times before Don and Jane had started off from somewhere beneath a cobalt sky, only to end up in a white-out. Jane had read that it was not exceptional for the highest passes in Kashmir to become blocked by snow even in summer. At times they might need to double back. She knew that, warming and cooling, dehydrating and freezing, the mountains would be punishing, but their years of experience should get them through the worst of it. In Kashmir, where the rich pastureland typically remained frost-free from May to September, they would probably walk for ten hours a day. In the upper reaches, where they would have to negotiate fields of scree that would punish their ankles and knees, they might go down to eight hours. But they had time.

  Their destination was a high-altitude ice cave called Amarnath that was dedicated to Lord Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and transformation. A giant, gaping hole, it looked as if a meteorite had slammed into the side of a mountain. While Amarnath was virtually unknown in the West, it was revered across India as an ancient Hindu pilgrimage site, to which hundreds of thousands of devotees flocked annually. Some came by foot, others by pony, a few on their hands and knees, the least able piggybacking on local guides, everyone scrabbling to scale the mountains so as to demonstrate the depth of their faith.

  Don was drawn by the collective act of devotion, and loved the idea of going on Shiva’s trail, but he and Jane intended to arrive at the end of June, before the main pilgrimage season began the following month. That way they would have the route to themselves. After Amarnath they would head west, following the ice-water streams down to the lush pasture of the Lidderwat Valley, where mountain flowers gorged on snowmelt, according to the guidebooks. There they would pitch their tents at a legendary campsite that travellers simply referred to as ‘the Meadow’, a velvet green cleft at a little over ten thousand feet, with an icy river running through it and enveloped on all sides by conifer forests. There was something prosaic, minimalist even, about the sound of the Meadow. Don and Jane looked forward to pitching camp up high, surrounded by aromatic mountain pasture.

  By late evening, Jane had placed tidy little heaps of possessions all over the bedroom floor. Now she slid each one of them into a separate waterproof pouch, working on a maximum load of fifteen kilos per person. Using the vacuum cleaner, she sucked the air out of each before slotting the shrivelled jellyfishes they now resembled into the new frameless purple-and-red Sundog daypacks she and Don had bought during a recent club trip to Montana. For Jane, packing was an art, the trip broken down into components, each of them carefully arranged like evidence at a crime scene, then layered in a bag that just might save you one day. Plasters, antiseptic spray, teabags, Don’s favourite Snickers bars; and should she bring some more Imodium? Could you get Imodium over there? She did not know, and threw in an extra packet.

  The most important thing was her journal, in which she would note down the route, the ascents, the views, as well as snippets of lore picked up from locals and information on flowers and plants. Sometimes she enjoyed the quiet moments after dusk just as much as the walking, a time to lounge across their sleeping bags making notes, with books scattered around, her head propped against Don’s flat stomach, their limbs heavy from exertion. This was a real existence, the living that gave purpose to life.

  Batteries, waterproof bags, first-aid kit, rolls of film; she counted the final items off her list. Don’s post-expedition slide shows at the house had become a tradition among the Spokane Mountaineers. They were nothing flashy, just a chance for Don to cook, try out the latest micro-brewery beers and give a talk. He loved to share what he had seen. Some people didn’t get that Don and Jane were just who they appeared to be. They had no interest in getting one over on anybody, or crowing about their far-flung adventures. There was no edge to them. Their lives were about getting out and making it back sufficiently healthy to tell others what they had experienced.

  As she finished packing, Jane reminded herself to remind Don about his black-and-yellow Casio altimeter. He would be sorely disappointed if he got halfway over Mahagunas Top at fifteen thousand feet, only to realise he’d left it at home in a bedside drawer.

  Finally she stood back and surveyed her handiwork, pondering the things that were not yet sorted out. Was this really a good time to go to Kashmir? What did they actually know? They had both had a gnawing sense of unease that had kicked in after they had bought the tickets, as they read that the region was in a state of flux, a worrying instability that became more real to them with every new snippet of information they gleaned from newspapers and magazines.

  Don knew from his research that as a geographical and spiritual crossroa
ds between the Arab world to the west, China to the north and the tropical subcontinent of India to the south, Kashmir had always been steeped in one conflict or another. Its recent troubles stemmed from the Partition of India in 1947, when the predominantly Muslim principality, whose residents longed for independence, had been split in two after both India and the newly founded Pakistan claimed it. Since then the two countries had fought three wars in their attempts to gain the other’s share, in 1947, 1965 and 1971, with the Muslim population of the Kashmir Valley caught between the aspirations of the warring neighbours, and held in a firm grip by the Indian government in New Delhi.

  In the years after the 1971 conflict, Kashmir had settled down for a time. Srinagar, its summer capital, became a place of pilgrimage for Western backpackers, the valley eulogised by the likes of Led Zeppelin, whose music evoked a mystic kingdom of the mind, a lyrical paradise wreathed in hash smoke, drawing in thousands of visitors who put up on intricately carved wooden houseboats moored on the city’s tranquil lakes, Dal and Nagin. Between the lotus gardens, floating markets and bobbling villages glided some of the world’s most persistent salesmen, touting shawls woven from antelope hair, almond biscuits, semiprecious stones, papier-mâché boxes and sticky gobbets of dark charas from their hand-painted shikara boats, against a backdrop of the jagged Zabarwan mountains.

  But these days Kashmir had an undercurrent of tension, especially after reports that New Delhi had rigged the state assembly polls of 1987, so as to box in the independence lobby. This ham-fisted act of muscle-flexing had gone largely unnoticed in the West, but had led to an explosion of protests in the state that had developed into an armed insurgency. For the past six years, bloody clashes had been erupting between Kashmiri Muslim youths calling for freedom from India, and the Indian security forces sent by New Delhi to neuter them. India accused Pakistan of exacerbating the dissent. Pakistan slammed India for triggering a revolution through its brutal crackdowns, as army bunkers rose up on the street corners of Srinagar, and post offices and cinemas were requisitioned as barracks and interrogation centres.

  What little news leaked out had served to deter much of the foreign tourist trade. Rather than Kashmir, stoners and their disciples, adventurers and refugees from the West now headed for India’s Parvati Valley, or far south-west to the beaches and freshwater lagoons of Goa and Kerala. The number of tourists visiting the mountain state shrank from eighty thousand a year in the mid-eighties to fewer than ten thousand in 1994, leaving the houseboat owners destitute, dreaming of a time when their paradise had paid the bills.

  Jane and Don knew they would have to be careful. But then, ascending a mountain was no different. ‘We did a lot of preparation before we left,’ Jane said. ‘We knew there was some turmoil in Kashmir, but we had been in northern India in 1991, and what we had heard about the Kashmir area from various people was that … there were no problems trekking in the areas where we were most interested.’ But in those days it was difficult to find up-to-date and accurate information about such a remote area without actually going there. ‘Don had recently purchased a computer for work, but he hated technology and we were not on email yet,’ Jane recalled. ‘Thus, we had limited access to news of that area.’ Jane and Don decided to leave for Kashmir with maps in hand, ready to switch destinations should they become spooked by the ground realities.

  A few nights before they left for New Delhi, Don took out a notepad. ‘The Don Hutchings yellow-legal-pad method of decision-making’, as friend George Neal called it. The biggest ‘pro’ was the weather. Don’s work commitments meant they could only trek at the end of June that year, and for a maximum of two weeks. That ruled out possibly safer destinations like Nepal, which would be lashed by monsoons at that time. For Jane, there was also Kashmir’s flora, which she had read was second to none: wild mountain strawberries, lilac and forget-me-nots.

  The obvious ‘con’ was the unrest. What to say about that? Don made a list.

  According to the limited information they had been able to pick up, the trouble was largely restricted to the northern and western portions of the Kashmir Valley, close to the border with Pakistan, far from where they intended to trek in the mountains rising to the east of the valley.

  None of the violence had been aimed at foreigners.

  ‘We had heard consistently that as long as you stayed out of the central part of Srinagar, the summer capital, out of the old part of the city … there were typically no problems,’ Jane said. Although they would have to fly in to Srinagar, they planned to stay only as long as it took them to negotiate a taxi ride south to the hill-station town of Pahalgam sixty miles away, the starting point for many treks.

  Don and Jane invited some Spokane Mountaineers over for a farewell dinner. They were leaving with open minds and a back-up plan, they told them. Mount Rainier was probably far more taxing than anything they would encounter in Kashmir, Don said, reminding them that in 1981 an ice plug had fallen from above, entombing eleven climbers traversing the Ingraham Glacier on the mountain’s eastern flank, the worst mountaineering accident in American history. And Don and Jane had erred on the side of caution once before, and regretted it. Having travelled to La Paz in Bolivia so as to climb to Machu Picchu, they had been warned away by local officials, only to discover from other climbers that the route had been safe.

  ‘We’re going to look into it,’ Don told his friends as he bade them goodbye. ‘We’ll ask the authorities there: the Indian government tourism bureau and the American Embassy. We’ll see what they have to say.’ He had already tried to call the Indian Consulate in San Francisco several times, but had been unable to get through. He had another worry too. Jane had recently injured her shoulder, and part of the reason they had decided to head for Pahalgam was because they had read that there they could hire ponies to carry their equipment. ‘That was the first choice, as I wouldn’t have to carry a heavy pack,’ Jane said. They promised to make some final checks upon arrival in New Delhi. ‘It only seemed logical that the Indians would know best what was safe or unsafe.’ For a seasoned traveller like Jane Schelly, asking people on the ground for advice seemed the logical thing to do.

  India even confuses Indians. And in June 1995, a 48°C heatwave was cooking everything, including the roads, chewing them up, licking deep concave bowls into the tarmac, while the humidity that made the night queen blossom like nowhere else in the world also peeled the stucco off buildings. Jane had taken the sensible precaution of ringing ahead and booking a hotel with air-conditioning for the two nights they intended to stay in New Delhi.

  But nothing had prepared them for the wall of opportunists waiting in the arrivals hall of the old Indira Gandhi International Airport, all of them with an idea, and an address. A traveller needed a rude strategy to deal with them, a fixed plan to stick by, a determined walk that gave not a scintilla of encouragement to the waiting crowd. Weakness was punished. Politeness was exploited. Indecision was manna for the middle man. Born-and-raised New Delhi-ites blanked strangers and brushed aside enquiries from touts. Surrounded by the throng, Jane and Don found their contingency plan failing the minute they arrived in New Delhi on 25 June 1995. The chaos bowled them over.

  Weakened by ‘thirty-five hours in the air’, as Jane put it, no sooner had they collected their luggage than they were lured into a conversation with reps from a private-accommodation agency and convinced that their pre-booked hotel was a bad choice. Hustled off to a different place in another part of town, Jane and Don began their Indian journey in confusion. It happened to everyone, Don said afterwards. It was no big deal, Jane murmured. They had seen this sort of thing before.

  The phone in their hotel room did not work, and the next morning Jane and Don headed out into the mêlée of New Delhi’s streets. A taxi they had not ordered was waiting to take them to a private tourism agency they did not want to do business with. ‘We knew there was another scam going on,’ recalled Jane. ‘But we said to ourselves, “OK, we’ll go and we’ll listen, but we
’ll be watchful.”’ At the agency, the staff proved helpful, and seemed knowledgeable about Kashmir. They assured them it was safe. The main focus of the insurgency, as Don and Jane had already heard, was far away, concentrated in the western portion of the valley near where Pakistan began, a ceasefire line so disputed that neither side could agree to call it a ‘border’. Instead, it was known as the Line of Control (LoC).

  This sounded reassuring. But they wanted a second opinion, and set off for the government tourism office. ‘They didn’t deny there were problems,’ Jane said, but the general message was the same: the insurgency was very localised. Stay out of downtown Srinagar and everything would be fine. Most importantly, the trekking areas were safe. Finally, they spent an hour trawling backpacker hangouts, searching for anyone who had just returned from Kashmir. There were plenty, and those they spoke to had all had a trouble-free time. ‘They seemed to love it, and gave glowing reports of the beauty,’ said Jane.

  Even though both of them were now flagging, Don insisted on one more stop. They took a ride to leafy Chanakyapuri, New Delhi’s diplomatic enclave, to get advice at the US Embassy. ‘It was closed for lunch, and we were intimidated by the long lines of people,’ Jane said. ‘It was hot as heck – we were jetlagged, and had been told at the Indian government tourist office that the area was OK for tourists.’ They gave up, and returned to the hotel. ‘If there had been a red flag at any point, then we would have researched further,’ said Jane.