The Snow Leopard

Nepal – a land of where prayer flags, sky blue and cloud white, fly high over every building. The mountains harbor small hamlets, encircled by prayer walls and guarded by stupas. Old buddhist faith still flourishes in these mountains, and Peter Matthiessen and George Schaller (henceforth only “GS”) clamber up mountainsides, passing cairns built of prayer stones.

Om Mani Padme Hum, they read. This a mantra to those following the middle way.

Om, the mightiest syllable in the Buddhist faith. The single sound that “calls the universe to attention”.

After reading the Snow Leopard, all I can muster is: Eh.

I had to go to the Nature section of Borders (which consists of a few lonely shelves behind the World Music CDs) to pick up the book, and the content certainly reflects that. Matthiessen is a naturalist and a conservationist, and the book has quite a few warnings as to the decline of the environment. Of course, this book was written in the 70s – one wonders if things are as bad now as he predicted they’d be.

Besides being a naturalist, Matthiessen is a hippie, with all its attendant irritations: a penchant for mysticism, psychotropics, and the superstitious. One day, he witnessed a creature of indeterminate species – after briefly discarding the other possibilities, he lands on the yeti. Yep, this cat believes in the yeti. While it’s certainly interesting to read about how seriously they treat this mythical creature, it hurts credibility.

Matthiessen does a great job of presenting Buddhism; I enjoyed his musings more than Hesse’s Siddartha. Matthiessen shows great deftness in weaving his philosophical thoughts with natural description.

Unfortunately, the natural description was the most boring part of the book for me, and constituted the bulk of the material. Not only is there interminable description of torrents and ridges and passes, it’s compounded with confusing Nepalese proper nouns – are they crossing the Bheri to reach Jang La, or are they heading over Kang La to reach Shey Gompa? The mind wanders when there is nothing to latch onto but directions and locations I’ve no familiarity with – perhaps that reflects a weak spatial intelligence on my part (as Mr. Laffey might have it).

And of course, this being a nature book, I was most interested by the humans in it. GS in particular is a delight. I learn now he’s a German by birth, but the man’s upper lip can only be British. A preeminent field biologist, GS was one of the only Westerners at the time of writing to have witnessed the legendary snow leopard. The man is more comfortable amongst animals, and speaks very little. When he does, it’s to deliver some hard-ass lines. One of his walking companions had to turn back because his boots were filling with blood. GS said: “That chap was out of shape.” Or, after a sherpa takes ill, “A compound fracture you can live with – you can always break it and reset it.” After a death-defying section of trail: “Now that was the first really interesting bit of trail we’ve seen yet.” (Quotes not verbatim – the book has an index, but I doubt “Badass lines” is included). Unfortunately, GS doesn’t figure too prominently in the book – he’s a dyed-in-the-wool introvert, and he and Matthiessen keep to themselves in order not to grate on the other’s nerves too badly. Two months on the trail with a guy could get old, so this was smart thinking.

Matthiessen has some wonderful anecdotes about his 20th-century life. Most affecting is a scene with D, his cancer-stricken wife. This is where the book is at its most potent, and unfortunately, it only attains this summit once.

The rest of the time Matthiessen is attaining literal summits. The reading is at times as tough as Matthiessen’s hiking – there is simply page after page of descriptive text, with not a line of dialogue to break it up. One can only take so many characterizations of a river before you’d had enough. Certainly this description is at times beautiful; after they pass the last “civilized” town, Matthiessen speaks of “straying into another century.” Some of this writing was wonderful in particular because it is at times remarkably similar to my own.

Unfortunately, PM exults about the One-ness of the universe a few too many times for my taste. A leaf makes you see the underlying unity in all things? Really?

My tepid response is not due to any disdain of Buddhism, either – I do find the eastern religions very interesting. The intense individualism and focus on the present is a nice change of pace from Christianity, with its mass mentality and focus on eternity. In fact, though I’ve never meditated, most every hobby of my has it at its goal. So I can see the appeal, because when you’re in the flow of a story/movie/shootaround, the mind really does empty. The problem is this sensory awareness does not translate well to the page. PM acknowledges language’s inadequacy in this task several times – I appreciate his plight, but come on, man.

Matthiessen does have a wonderful descriptive eye for people and animals, and his insights into the character of the villages they pass through are incisive. But again, he doesn’t have much interest in humanity – he seems to share the growing opinion that the world might be better off with humankind on it. I don’t really agree – for all the damages we’ve done, when the sherpa Dawa comes down with dysentery, it isn’t meditation that cures him. No, that’d be the medicine provided by a Japanese doctor they run across.

But besides his sharp eye for description, Matthiessen also exhibits flashes of a wry sense of humor. I wish I could have seen more of this, as his natural description are pretty by the book.

After the tremendous string of books I’ve read for this 52 in 07 (little behind, aren’t I…), I’d forgotten that not every one will be an unmitigated success. I can offer no more than a lukewarm recommendation – glad I read it, but certainly looking forward to The Testament of Gideon Mack.