Salaam Alaikum
In spring of 1998 I joined a group of friends on a rather audacious bid to climb a “little” 24,000-foot peak in the Hunza Valley as a shakedown before moving south to make an attempt on the infamous killer mountain, Nanga Parbat. I was down with the whole program, but when my brother’s wedding was unexpectedly scheduled right in the middle of that expedition, I considered cancelling. He convinced me not to, but after a week in a tent in a snowstorm I decided I had had enough, quit the expedition and walked out of the mountains on my own.
Ordinarily, this would not be remarkable, but we were in Pakistan, the year they successfully tested their first nuclear weapon and we had been warned by the US Embassy to leave the country. We didn’t, of course. Vacations are vacations, after all, and we had our priorities. Once down from the mountain a friend in Hunza found a driver for me, a stoic man in his late fifties, and we soon began our journey to Islamabad along the Karakoram Highway that precariously threads its way along the crumbling sides of the Indus River Valley. Driving to Islamabad by this route is akin to driving from San Francisco to LA on the crest of the High Sierra if there was a badly maintained jeep road you could do it on. The problem I was concerned with was that my driver wanted to do this in one go – which I insisted (rather rudely) we would not do. The problem I wasn’t aware of was the restive nature of some of the people living in the Pashtun regions and their growing (and justifiable) animus toward Westerners in general, and Americans in particular. The problem I was ignoring was the ubiquity of automatic weapons all along the KKH – they were openly carried in every village and in teashops they were lined up against the wall. After much arguing we stopped in a small village well after dark. I booked a couple of hotel rooms and we settled down in the hotel’s tea-bar for a meal when I was approached by a group of well-armed eighteen to twenty-two year old boys who began chatting me up as we watched a football (soccer) game on the television in the bar. The pushing and shoving soon followed, then the cold-face stare-downs and the veiled threats posing as jokes. My driver was apoplectic. Automatic weapons and teenagers are generally not a good combo in any culture. With deferential smiles and displays of respect and fealty I somehow managed to extract us. We retire to our rooms for two hours and left in the dark of the night. If I had been alone in that bar, without my insistent and stoical driver, I might not have come home in the same condition, if at all. My driver was right, and I was rude. I was the ugly, entitled American who expected to world to be laid at my feet – indifferent to the suffering and grievances of others, inured to the fact that I might not be welcome everywhere I planted my feet. I never admitted that to him. I never thanked him. I never apologized for my rudeness. And he saved my life.
