On the final lunge toward Kathmandu, I found myself wondering how Ten Tsewang’s story had survived at all. He’d been left out of the written history, his kids had never known what he did, and no one else seemed to remember, either. It wasn’t a story people told.
I was quite far into this journey before I realized that there was someone else with Ten Tsewang on the mail run.
Palden Sherpa.
Everyone remembers the same detail about Palden.
“Always drinking,” his son Anu Sherpa said.
“Drinking, every day drinking,” Pemba Tsering told me.
Palden lived to be 90. He was Ten Tsewang’s cousin. They made the run to Kathmandu three times together, but Pemba Tsering never knew that. He would see Palden at weddings, at ceremonies, and Palden never brought it up.
That might be because Pemba Tsering had left Namche, left the community. He was off guiding famous climbers, or he was in Kathmandu organizing logistics for foreign trekkers. He was raising his family’s standard of living, but losing his connection to the Khumbu region in the process.
It wasn’t until Pemba Tsering was in his thirties that this situation started to change. That was when he moved back to Namche, when his kids became fixtures playing in the grassy field at the center of town. One day, hiking the steepest part of the trail between Namche and Lukla, he realized that there was a stretch where almost everyone got thirsty but there was nowhere to get a drink. It was the very first spot where you could see Everest. He opened a teahouse and worked there every day, carrying his liquor inventory back up the hill at night to keep it from being stolen.
Palden walked between Namche and Lukla constantly. His house was in Namche; his wife’s family was near Lukla. He was probably the only person in Nepal who really knew Ten Tsewang’s story. He stopped in at the teahouse all the time but never talked about it.
All Pemba Tsering knew about his father’s death was that he’d gotten sick in the low country and died very young. He had no idea why he was down there. Everyone knew you didn’t go below Lukla after May.
Palden knew why Ten Tsewang had gone. But he wasn’t telling. Not to outsiders.
From left: Prayer flags at Lamjura Pass; Palden Sherpa in the mid-1990s (Photos from left: Ang Pemba Sherpa; courtesy Nyima Tshering Sherpa)
One reason for Palden’s silence may have been that the story wasn’t so flattering. To tell it would mean describing how Ten Tsewang was always urging Palden to move faster. How Palden would protest and plead with him to take a break, slow down. And how, instead of easing the pace, Ten Tsewang would run ahead, drop his stuff, and come back to carry Palden’s pack.
Or maybe his silence was because, in the end, they weren’t the people who broke the news of the climb’s success. As it happened, the first message, the one sent by radio, made it through. News of the first Everest ascent was published in the London Times evening edition on June 1, 1953, the night before the queen’s coronation. The longer dispatch, which Ten Tsewang and Palden carried, was published a week later, on June 8. They came in second.
Maybe he didn’t talk about it because, according to Morris, not a single mail runner knew the contents of the message they carried, in order to guard its secrecy.
More likely, they did know. They would have been aware that Tenzing was going for the summit that day. And suddenly they had a message of the highest importance to deliver? They weren’t stupid.
Whatever the reason, the story of the mail run might have been lost forever if Pemba Tsering hadn’t opened that teahouse and Palden wasn’t such a loyal drinker. One time, probably in the mid-1980s, he stopped in and the place wasn’t busy. And there was Pemba Tsering behind the bar, with plenty of time to chat.
Palden sat down and ordered his usual.
“You know, you look just like your father,” he said after a moment.
“Really?” Pemba Tsering said, pulling up a chair and settling in. “How did you know my father?”