Excerpt from my new book, No Barriers
This excerpt from my new book, No Barriers, recounts a story from my 2004 expedition with a group of blind Tibetan teens. Our goal was to climb a 23,000-foot peak near Everest, but in the course of our journey we learned much more about what a summit truly means.
Around a small juniper campfire that night, I sat next to Sonam Bongso, and asked her questions about her life. “She has very round cheeks,” Kyila, her friend, said from the other side of the seat. “She like it when you squeeze them.” I reached out, and Kyila was absolutely correct. I felt soft round cheeks. They lifted, and I knew a broad smile had creased the space between them. Sonam was tiny, a full head shorter than Kyila. She came from the Gompo district in eastern Tibet, from a village of only seventeen families. Sonam Bongso meant a Hundred Thousand Beautiful Lakes, which she said was strange because she hated water and never learned to swim. “Lakes and rivers may be beautiful,” she said, “but I prefer to stay on dry land.”
Sonam went blind when she was four months old. Like Gyenshen, her family believed a “Lu,” a water demon, cursed her. “One day my uncle went fishing,” she said. “He caught two fish, and when he got home, he threw them into a container of water. My mother ladled some water out of it while she was cooking, but by mistake she also got hold of the fish, and they fell on to the cook fire. She looked for the fish everywhere, but couldn't find them. She say they burned up in the fire. This offended the gods, because right after that, I went blind. It was my uncle's fault, because he caught the fish, but I was the one who had to pay. When I was little, I cried a lot. I was sad and angry because I didn't belong and because I was different from the other children in my village. Before I went to school in Lhasa, I had few friends. The children teased me and threw stones at me. When my grandmother and the others went to tend the yaks, I stayed behind by myself. I cleaned the house, fed the other animals, and then I would sit in the garden to guard the cheese where it was laid out to dry. The crows love dried cheese. If they got too close, I chased them away. In the mornings I often heard the other children laughing and whistling on their way to school. I would get especially angry when they came back and held a book in front of my face and asked me to read it to them. Sometimes I played school all by myself. I would collect flat stones and scratch things on them. I pretended they were the letters of the alphabet. When the other children saw what I was doing, they laughed at me, took my stones, and threw them at me. After I went to school in Lhasa for one year, I was looking forward to going home again. I did not miss my family, but for a different reason. I took my Braille book back with me and held it up for the other children to see. I held it to their noses and said, ‘Why don’t you read something for me if you're so smart?’"
At the punch line, the entire team actually cheered. I grabbed her small hand, folded her fingers under her thumb and into a fist, and guided my clenched knuckles to hers. “That’s a fist bump,” I said. “Then you open your hand, spread your fingers and palm upward, out to the sky, and go “Pow,’ like an explosion.” She tried a couple of times until she got it, and we all laughed.
Purchase your copy of No Barriers: A Blind Man's Journey to Kayak the Grand Canyon anywhere books are sold.
More information at my website: www.touchthetop.com
From NO BARRIERS: A Blind Man's Journey to Kayak the Grand Canyon by Erik Weihenmayer and Buddy Levy. Copyright (c) 2017 by the authors and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press, LLC.