The Urban Sherpa - a blog by Christopher DeWan

(laconic, not so much...)

Featured Entry:

The Man of Tomorrow

Originally posted: June 5, 2010

Superman was persuaded to hire an IT guy. "Why do I need email?" he asked. "I can see clear to the horizon. I can hear radio frequencies across the globe." But his mother Martha wanted to send him photos, and Lois was always looking for a decent Scrabble partner. Most compelling, the NSA had e...

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Sirenetta rating=4 new!

March 24, 2013
File under: Happily Never After, Mythic Proportions

This entry is not currently available.

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The Terrorist of Shangri-La rating=3 new!

February 10, 2013
File under: Fragments, Mythic Proportions

Himalayan moon

After working so hard to find contentment, I'm scared now it'll bore me. Have I been aimed at the wrong thing all along?

What I think, lately, is that I should keep marching toward it, as planned, but pack a bag full of dynamite so I can explode it once I get there: I'll be the terrorist of Shangri-La.

We're hiking the Himalayas, me and the sherpa who keeps talking, incessantly, about Elizabeth Bennett. Pierre—the sherpa's name is Pierre, a transplant from Picardy—rattles on with his theory: that Elizabeth Bennett was the first modernist seeker. Her campaign to challenge the mores of her day, and her slow and reluctant seduction of Darcy, were the precursors to this very expedition that he and I are mounting across this glacier toward the lost city of Shangri-La.

"What about Thoreau?" I ask, not because I care for Thoreau, but just devil's advocate.

Pierre makes a poo-poo face in that French way. "Thoreau was a pompous ass-sitter."

We walk on, and he begins humming some sordid love song. Just my luck, halfway around the world, to get a sentimental pseudo-intellectual French sherpa instead of the normal kind.

His humming echoes back off the icy walls above us and I start thinking, not idly, about avalanches. I knew a man in the Alps, a former scout for the Nazis if you'll believe it, who retired under a fake name to Geneva, and we met there on a ski trip. The man had taken up a late-in-life interest in the study of avalanches—the interannual variability of seasonal snowpacks, their effect on the cryospheric reservoirs, that sort of thing. He knew avalanches like Eskimos know snow. But he got to know one a little too well, when it collapsed on top of him and buried him alive, avenging Jews everywhere.

"Just shut up about Liz Bennett already. It's a girl's book and I'm tired of hearing about it. You know how things get done in this world, Pierre? What two things power all of civilization? Pride and prejudice. So just shut up about Liz Bennett."

We climb a while in silence, watching the clouds of a coming storm. There's a thing the wind does when it hits the mountain ridge above the treelike: it whistles. It stirs up the snow in swirls, and they rise off the crest like ghosts. The whole mountain seems haunted.

"Are we there yet?" I ask, a childish sort of peace offering mainly to break the silence. Pierre looks at the ridge and then back at me. "I have a confession," he says in that froggy accent. "I don't know how to get to Shangri-La."

The wind howls and the ghosts dance. We're at 18,000 feet, give or take, with carefully rationed supplies of food, water, fuel, and oxygen, portioned out based on the precise distance between our base camp in Nepal and a destination that Pierre now claims may or may not exist.

Where are we going, then?

My mouth starts watering for the panang curry we ate in Kathmandu, after our plane landed, maybe the last best meal I'll ever have.

"In my defense," he says sheepishly, "no one knows how to get to Shangri-La. I needed your money. For my daughter's hairlip. It's very treatable with surgery. She'll live a normal life now, thanks to you."

I consider jamming a stick of dynamite down Pierre's throat, but then I remember the avalanches. "I'm glad she'll be alright," I tell him.

Then I set off up the mountain.

"Where are you going?" he calls out after me.

"Same as before. I'm going to Shangri-La. It can't be far now."

My crampons in the ice are like a raspy heartbeat. The wind picks up and I can barely make out Pierre's tiny French voice. "There's nothing up there!"

But he's wrong. There is something up there, over the ridge, and I'm going to find it. When I do, I've got a bag full of dynamite and a decision to make.

"I'm not gonna write you a love song," I sing, as I disappear into the snow. 

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Brotherhood rating=3 new!

January 24, 2013
File under: Fragments, Future is Now, Mythic Proportions, Science Friction

The view from space

If you could hear sound in space, you'd hear the groaning of metal, creaking, popping, uneasy expanding at its bolts and seams each time the Sun's unbridled heat makes its way around its temporary daily eclipse of the Earth, the metal beginning to stretch and bend as its temperature changes, suddenly, from arid, frigid, airless cold to its opposite: searing burning irradiated heat. If you could hear sound in space, you might hear radiation screaming. Energy makes sound, but not in space. Space is silent.

There's a small crew of astronauts inside the metal can called Bratstvo, "Brotherhood." The craft is Russian, but there are no Russians inside. They take six-month shifts, and on this shift, there's a Swede and an Australian and an American, and for the fist time in Bratsvo's four-year history, the official language inside the can is English.

Though the three of them have only been in space a few weeks, they've lived together, more or less, for the past six years, every day training, sometimes in the old converted Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily base in St. Petersburg they use for mission control, sometimes in a deep-sea tank in the Swedish waters of the Baltic Sea. The astronauts were chosen partly for their complementary skills — "A scientist, a doctor, and an engineer walk into a space station…" — but mostly because they can stand one other's company without driving each other nuts. They're a quiet, kind, hard-working set.

They each have their own duties: a mix of maintenance, science experiments, and plain old chores. They keep a chart, like roommates, that tells them whose turn it is to cook, whose turn it is to clean, and though they've come to understand the Swede is their most gifted microwave chef, and the Aussie is a bit of mess, at least for an astronaut, still, they share these chores as equally as they can.

Today is different. They've put aside their tasks, at least the dispensable ones, so they can watch CNN and Al Jazeera. You can watch CNN and Al Jazeera from space. You can watch almost all television from space. The astronauts have a radio channel open to mission control, and they're receiving incoming calls from their various governments, too. But they can't get a clear understanding of what's happening. Pakistan struck first, or maybe India did, though there are reports that the initial launch may have come from somewhere in the South China Sea — from a submarine. What they know for sure, what's indisputable, what they've seen with their own eyes, is there were twenty-four blasts across Asia, mostly focused in the Indian Subcontinent, but a few spreading into China. There were ten sudden minutes of nuclear explosions lighting up a corner of the globe, and they saw it all.

Nuclear explosions, as you might guess, look beautiful from space.

The clouds of dust that rose up into the stratosphere changed very quickly the picture of Earth from space. The familiar blue orb was suddenly watercolor smudged, burnt sienna.

Every nation and every person on Earth is on high alert, except maybe a remote few who don't yet know what's happening. But the remotest people of all, drifting 350 kilometers above the planet aboard the Bratstvo, see it more clearly than anyone. The three astronauts watch it all unfold on their monitors and in their window, while cries of alarm go up on the news stations: it's happening. The United States, then China, then Russia, while making public pleas for calm, launch their stockpiles into the sky. Each one strikes, they claim, preemptively, at the other. The astronauts behold the longest hour mankind has ever made. From space, it looks like fireworks, like a switchboard, like a blanket crackling with static electricity in the dark, like the sparking neurons of a giant brain.

And then it's quiet. There is no radio. There is no CNN. There is no Al Jazeera. A blanket of rust-colored air rises up and blocks the view from space, and while those below suffer their fear and mortality, some instantly and some slowly, these three in space watch from above, no way out, no way down, nowhere to go, counting the days before starvation, before power failure, before orbital tugs pull them back toward the home they'll never see again. 

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Hoopty Time Machine rating=4 new!

January 21, 2013
File under: Fragments, In Print, Mythic Proportions, Science Friction

This entry is not currently available.

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Arbitrary Haiku #1 rating=3 new!

January 4, 2013
File under: Poetic License

 My contribution to "Arbitrary Haiku Day" goes like this:

My dog can write a
better haiku than this while
sucking on a bone.

It's supposed to be, I don't know, zen.

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