One afternoon in 1990 as I rode in a dusty, bumpy bus over the Himalayas an elderly man told me extracts from his life story. He had rented a scooter in the early 1950s and rode the 10,000 km from India to England, through the Middle East. In England he went to medical school and became a successful doctor.
I asked how he handled his fears through rough terrain and bad weather and he just smiled. “Ahhh, where you see Pakistan today and the dirt roads through Afghanistan…there was no pavement…they were like a dream. It was great to be alive,” he said as he described to me with wistful eyes how a fearless boy could make his way to anywhere in the world back then with only a small engine on two wheels.
It sounded like he was doing in his youth what he thought should come naturally to humans. Sitting next to me in the safety of a bus made him seem uncomfortable or sad; a metal cage on four wheels obviously depressed him. He brightened up again when he described plans to run up the hills to the north of Pokhara in the middle of day.
“Mad dogs and Englishmen out in the midday sun” I thought to myself when I next saw him. He was covered in sweat huffing and puffing his way down from the foot of the Annapurna Mountains.
I myself had climbed with difficulty earlier that day through the cool pre-dawn darkness of thick brush and narrow dirt ledges to the Summit of Sarangkot. And I expected to face solace after overcoming my fear and obstacles to reach the top. Instead a group of children had run up ahead of me and played in the warm morning sun as if it were any street or park anywhere in the world. They laughed and yelled “Coke one dollar”. Here is the photo I took of my welcome party.
The little girl is demonstrating how to drink the bottle. Here she is again after I gave her a piggy-back ride and walked with them down to their village.
The old man’s stories, his views on risk, and life in the Himalayas came to mind recently when I saw the trailer for a new documentary called The Highest Pass.
The movie follows a modern motorcycle journey on the highest road in the world. Seven Americans with modern safety equipment and supplies, led by a Yogi named Anand Mehrotra, set out to find and face risk decisions outside their normal comfort zone — from high-altitude and steep, icy cliffs to chaotic Indian traffic.
Anand…bears the burden of a Vedic prophecy that predicts he will die in his late twenties in an accident. He is that age now, yet leads with a fearlessness and wisdom that reminds us that “Only the one who dies, truly lives.”
It looks like a movie about outsiders learning to trust insiders on new perspectives and how to manage risk.
