Flying Off Everest by Dave Costello Read Free Book Online

overwhelming desire to learn how to kayak, had wound up taking a job, out of necessity, as a trekking porter the first four months after he arrived in Pokhara, carrying supplies for foreign hikers in the foothills of the Annapurna region. After the trekking season endedin December, when the high mountain passes became too cold for tourists, Exodus Rafting, a Nepali-owned outfitter just down the road, took him on as a guide trainee. Gaillard knew that Babu helped clean the shop there, including maintaining the rental equipment, and that he seized every available opportunity to take one of Exodus’s rental kayaks out on the lake.
    “He is one of only a few Nepali kayakers I know who goes kayaking for fun,” Gaillard says. “For everyone else it is work, guiding on the rivers,” he explains. “There are so many good kayakers here, but they only paddle during the tourist season. They don’t paddle when they’re not working. And I think Babu went kayaking every chance he got.”
    Gaillard liked the boy and his enthusiasm for paddling, and they quickly became friends. He wasn’t looking forward to telling the young man that Exodus had closed its doors while Babu had gone back to his village and that Babu was, once again, out of work. Yet here Babu was, standing in his shop in front of him with his backpack, fresh off the bus from Kathmandu, smiling as always. Completely oblivious to the fact that he would have to start over.
    “You know,” Gaillard said in Nepali laced with a heavy French accent. “Exodus is no more. It’s finished.”
    Babu’s smile faded. Gaillard knew that Babu had also been sleeping at the newly defunct outfitter and that his friend, along with now having no way to continue kayaking, was both unemployed and homeless. The same position Babu had been in two years earlier, when he had first gotten off the bus from Kathmandu.
    What Gaillard didn’t know is that while Babu had been away visiting his family, the seventeen-year-old had gotten married, which had turned out to be a surprise to Babu as well. While Babu had been in Pokhara learning how to kayak, his family had made arrangements for him to marry a frail-looking thirteen-year-old girl named Susmita Rai, who lived in a nearby village. They had sprung the good news, and the ceremony, upon his arrival. Susmita, who had been pulled out of school permanently for the occasion, had never metBabu before the day they got married. After being handed a small bag of clothes by her parents, she walked, alone, through the hills to meet him at his parents’ house, where they were quickly wed, and where she would now be expected to live and work. Babu promptly returned to Pokhara afterward, leaving behind a promise to return for his new child wife once he had earned enough money to bring her to west Nepal with him.
    “Anyway, if you don’t have a job,” Gaillard told him casually, “maybe you can come in my place, and I can employ you. Maybe work here?” It was an offer Babu couldn’t refuse.
    He spent that night, and most every night for the next two years, sleeping on the wood floor behind the desk located in the back of the Ganesh Kayak Shop. It was then and remains today a small, vaguely rail-shaped establishment not more than 20 feet wide and 40 feet deep, with kayaks stacked along both walls and one large window occupying the front of the store. Near the back, on the wall behind the low wooden desk, a few faded pictures of kayakers and rafters paddling on nearby rivers like the Kali Gandaki, Seti Gandaki, and Trisuli hang in neat, evenly spaced frames. A small wooden statue of Ganesh, an elephant-headed deity that is revered in the Hindu pantheon as “the Remover of Obstacles” or “the Lord of Beginnings,” and also the namesake of Gaillard’s shop, sits cross-legged on the corner of the desk, looking forward blithely. Never moving.
    Babu earned his keep by doing odd jobs around the shop and his home: cleaning the rental equipment, sweeping