CIRCUMSPECTION AND ADVENTURE
Longitude: Daring
Latitude: Sensitivity
Joanne Keoney represents that rare kind of person who can stand at the crossroads of daring and sensitivity and not only operate easily, but glory in the experience. More simply said: Joanne has the ability to see and appreciate, both, the forest and the trees. Many of us get caught-up in a particular aspect of an adventure, and in doing so, miss other equally wonderful facets of that undertaking. I have learned something important from Joanne. Her story of the Askoli hat provided that lesson.
In the spring of 2000, Joanne attended a slide presentation at REI in Berkeley where I showed slides of Pakistan. After the talk ended, she waited patiently to chat with me. She figured, I think, that the answer to her question would be longer than those of most other people.
Finally, we stood alone at the back of the room, next to a long table filled with albums of color photographs of the North-West Frontier of Pakistan and the North-East area adjacent to Kashmir. Joanne commands attention in a very subtle way. Attached to the lapel of her business suit hung an exceptional, hand-crafted broach. It is the type of broach one searches for and carefully considers buying. In fact, everything about Joanne breathed an air of being out of the ordinary.
“I’m in my 50’s and my next trip will probably be my last grand adventure,” she said. “I have two choices in mind – one is Pakistan, crossing the Baltoro Glacier and seeing K-2. The other is climbing Mt. Killimanjaro and visiting Africa.” Her question for me was: “What would you recommend?”
My answer, equally simple, literally flew back to her, “Baltoro Glacier.”
Having climbed Kilimanjaro the previous January, I appreciated her choices. Africa remains one of the last strongholds of exotic animals, breathtaking landscapes, and cultures which remind us of the antiquity of other peoples. Seeing a Massai herdsman, standing on one leg, leaning on his walking stick, silhouetted against the vast African plain, has exactly that effect.
“Baltoro,” I repeated. We stood eye to eye in absolute silence. She had just seen the slides of the dynamic mountainscape she was considering.
Northern Pakistan is the meeting point, or, conjunction for the three giant mountain ranges on earth: Himalaya, Hindu Kush and Karakoram. All are products of enormous collisions of continental plates which began to move eons ago and continue to move today. Baltoro, a huge moving river of ice, creeps down the Karakoram Mountains, the youngest of the three ranges. The sharp-pointed Karakorum rises faster than erosion can wear it down. Of the 110 known mountains over 24,000feet, 50 are in the Karakorum, 19 of these peaks rise over 25,000 feet high, and 4 measure over 26,000 feet. The crown jewel of the Karakorum is K-2, the second highest mountain in the world, rising to 28,268 feet.
Standing there, in her business suit and leather pumps, absorbing my answer, I could sense her weighing the gravity of crossing one of the longest glaciers in the world, almost 40 miles long and a mile wide, and then, after camping at K-2, re-crossing the glacier on the trip out. Baltoro is reputed to be one of the most fearsome landscapes on earth. It is, as I portrayed it in my comments during the slide presentation, “The devils very own collection of pot holes, crevasses, boulder fields with rocks the size of mini buses and boot wide ledges along mountain walls.” Indeed, crossing Baltoro is something to weigh and weight heavily. Rows of jagged stone fangs erupt from this vast display of the raw forces of nature, shooting two miles high into the heavens.
In July 2000, Joanne walked among the mountain giants of the Karakorum.
She clung, like a spider, to the towering stonewalls, at times as much as 500 feet above raging water. She crossed crude hand-hewn plank bridges strung between boulders over swollen glacial-melt rivers, braved monsoon rains washing out treacherous roads etched into the mountainsides, and watched the fascinating process of selecting Balti porters for her group’s trek. She marveled at Trango Tower, the monolithic stone finger of Pakistan, pointing skyward. It is, however, the story of the Askoki hat which best relates the quintessential experience of Joanne’s time in this awesome landscape.
Joanne lives and works in San Francisco, elevation zero. Laughingly she says, “I was so clumsy as a child, that I was 10 years old before I could unlock the backdoor of our house.” Hearing this self-description, I wondered what her mother thought about her adventure: “My mother’s jaw just dropped open!”
After flying into Islamabad, acclimatizing a day or so, and meeting with government officials for travel documents, one usually (weather permitting) flies to the village of Skardu. In Joanne’s case; weather did not permit; the jeep ride along the Karakorum Highway takes roughly 30 hours – inshallah (God willing). Skardu sits at 7,500 feet elevation. It is a lovely, isolated village surrounded by enormous mountains, through which the wide gash of the Indus riverbed lays. Vendors stand in the small wooden lean-to shops offering goods of all kinds while sheep amble and motorcycles buzz down the narrow, well-packed dirt roads. In the small hotels, bulletin board messages and remembrances of famous trekkers and climbers, who have pasted this way before, are tacked to walls in reception areas. Their comments come to life as travelers happen upon them. Reinhold Messner, probably the most famous climber in the world, commenting on the approach to K-2, said that it was as dangerous as his climb to the summit.
The “off-roading” jeep ride from Skardu to the camp where the trek begins travels along one of Pakistan’s engineering marvels of road building. The daylong ride traverses up a one-lane dirt road, scratched into the sheer walls of the Shegar Valley. Far below, roars the turbulent Indus River. Hairpin turns along the way, necessitate steering the jeep to the very edge of these precipices, backing up a foot or so, inching forward again. Hair-raising becomes an anemic adjective. Pakistani drivers cut the steering wheel and shift gears with the dexterity of a skillful surgeon using a scalpel.
The same monsoon rains that had made Joanne’s flying into Skardu impossible had not let up. The soft dirt road fell victim to mudslides and washouts again and again along the way. Shovels and picks welded by porters, cooks and guides move boulders, and fill in gaps in the road allowing the vehicle’s slow progress. Under these circumstances, by keeping count of the number of times the driver utters “inshallah”, passengers have a rough gauge by which to measure the terror of their jeep ride.
Joanne was approaching the place of “no mores.” There were no more roads, and after the village of Askolie the next day, there were no more villages. Only wilderness lay ahead.
It was only a hundred years ago that the full extent of the Karakorum became known. Many glaciers, mountains and passes have yet to bear a single human footstep. K-2 hides itself among the giants, straddling the border of China. Not until one completely crosses the Baltoro does Concordia open up into a magnificent amphitheater where five glaciers converge. K-2 finally reveals itself, standing in splendid solitude at the head of the Goodwin Austen Glacier. Clouds and light play on its lofty summit. Little K-2 stands respectfully behind the mighty giant, a pup, cut in the image of its mighty neighbor, but not its stature.
Askolie sits at 10,000 feet altitude. It consists of a jumble of houses built
next to and on top of each other. Stonewalls, topped with thorned branches
provide enclosures for living areas and livestock. Within these areas, expeditions
leaders find, choose, negotiate, and purchase goats which will accompany the
groups until the time when they are sacrificed and served for supper. A fast
running watercourse, beside the well-worn footpaths, flows throughout the village.
It provides water for cooking, cleaning, irrigation, and play area for the children
on occasion. 
The
“Post Office” is the official building where a team’s documents are scrutinized
and recorded before moving into the vast wilderness beyond. The stone gateway
into the courtyard of the “Post Office” is topped with the curved horns of Himalayan
ibex. Daily life, in Askolie, is necessarily geared to the seasons, moving
livestock from pasture to pasture and tending the crops. Dress is traditional;
faith is firm and tradition rules.
Trekkers and climbers have added the sounds of their voices and footfall in the village for the past several decades enroute to Concordia. They have not endeared themselves to the villagers. Children are taught to turn their back on travelers, and women make comments which are clearly meant to be rude. Witnessing first hand, however, the extent of rudeness displayed by some trekkers and climbers alike, it is an understandable relationship which has evolved. For the sensitive traveler, like Joanne, however, the attitude of the villagers becomes a painful experience…the consequence of other people’s bad actions.
Hats in Askolie are a woman’s only outward vanity. Dressed in identical clothes, the distinctive decorations on a hat highlight each woman’s ingenuity and resourcefulness. The thick, wool fabric of the hat is hand woven and each of the decorative elements is traded, bought or found. The greatest fun would be to walk through the village and compare every hat you came across, yet, because of the animosity of the villagers that is not possible.
Hats
often have shinny round, metal rings, which prove to be part of shell casings.
Colorful plastic
beads and cowry shells, most likely, make their way to Askolie from China.
Almost always, the women use zippers, sewed on edge, to create the look of several
rows of small silver beads. Round, white plastic, numbered markers are porter
identifications. A large mountaineering expedition can involve hundreds of
porters crossing the glacier into Concordia with supplies and equipment for
the team’s 4-6 weeklong stay. Each team member can be assigned 10 or so porters
just for his own personal belongings and equipment. For example, porters with
numbers 10 – 20 may belong to climber John Doe. Once the expedition is finished,
the white marker is likely to find it’s way onto a woman’s hat. The tradition
becomes a high elevation equivalent of a medieval jouster carrying his lady’s
colors in reverse.
A woman is never seen without her hat. By religious dictum, no pictures are allowed. At a distance, working in the fields, or washing the pots after a meal in the water beside the path, each woman proudly wears the red cap with the long black neckpiece which shields her from the sun in summer and cold wind in winter.
On Joanne’s way out, she again walked through Askolie. Like me, she wanted to buy a hat. Along the path she came upon a woman and her guide asked if the woman would be interested in selling her hat. The woman hesitated. Pakistani men have a way of cajoling the women of their country into doing what they want. Finally, after prolonged negotiations in Urdu, the lady accepted money and removed the hat.
Joanne, careful observer that she is, noticed how the woman bent her head, almost in shame at being bareheaded. She then raised her arms to cover her head and faded away. The image haunted Joanne and continued to haunt her long after she and the hat returned to San Francisco.
After many months, Joanne got the idea of trying to make contact with someone going back in that direction. Into the Internet, on a mountaineering web site, she posted the request that if anyone was headed to the Baltoro glacier, could they please contact her. No e-mails came; still, the request remained posted. Finally, a climber contacted Joanne. He was headed up Baltoro, the following season, in an attempt to summit one of the giants in Concordia. “What did she need?”
In an enthusiastic reply, Joanne explained to the climber how she had purchased the Askolie hat, the memory of the woman becoming her own shame, and her desire to reunite the hat and the woman. The climber agreed to be the emissary. Among all the climbing rope, crampons, pitons, and medications for high elevations illness, he would include a red wool cap decorated with silver Jordache buttons sporting a horse’s head, its mane blowing in the wind. The climber would be glad to do the errand for Joanne!
When the climber returned home to the states several months later, he e-mailed her to say that when he walked into the village, he realized that he had no way of knowing how to find the woman to whom the hat had belonged. Randomly asking someone, as he displayed the hat, he was met with a smile. The villager, instantly, recognized the hat, knew the owner, and would gladly return the hat to her.
Did I mention that Joanne has a Ph.D. in psychology? The landscapes of the human mind, like the unique landscapes of our world captivate her. In 1982 she ran the Paris marathon, on her second trip to Europe. That trip ended in Morocco where she found herself standing on the rooftop overlooking the Grand Bazaar of Marrakech. “Staring down at the fabulous chaos of that exotic place” changed her travel appetite forever. She has never returned to Europe.
Getting to know Joanne, I have come to realize that she is the consummate explorer both in her professional life and in the adventures she chooses. Each physical landscape she has chosen, the wild Rogue River, the highest waterfall in the world, the enigmatic Buddhist monasteries of Tibet enroute to Mt. Everest, native huts in Fiji, or the highlands of the lush Kakkar mountains of Turkey, like the broach on her lapel has been ultimately unique. Most important, is her talent for circumspection, which allows her to include not only the “sightseeing” part of adventure, but also the human connection with the people in those environments.
I’ll never superficially look at anyone like an Askolie woman again. I find, now, after talking with Joanne, that I’ve been a mere sightseer in extraordinary places-- a one-dimensional traveler. The physical destination has dominated my journey. Joanne, with her well-rounded view, has made the better trip.
Thank you Joanne for pointing out the true value of adventure lies not only in reaching the destination of a silent stone mountain, but just as importantly, in experiencing the unique people who inhabit them.
And thank you also for putting the villagers of Askolie on notice that all trekkers and climbers are not rude people. Just as I will never be able to see the villagers in the same light, so too, they will never be able to see trekkers and climbers in the same way.
I’m sure the villagers, for years to come, will tell the story of The Hat’s Return. There is real global power in what you accomplished with your action.
- Elizabeth Rassiga, The Outdoor Neophyte, 2001