The Snow Leopard: Peter Matthiessen

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At age 46, in 1973, Peter Matthiessen walked, with biologist George Schaller, from Kathmandu to the Crystal Mountain in Tibet and beyond. Matthiessen was a novice at this kind of extreme expedition, as who among us wouldn't be, yet turned in 10- and 12- hour days walking up and down icy, fragile, whip-thin mountain trails. Food was meagre. Boots caused blisters. Winds blew cold. Grief over personal matters was impossible to shake. The Hook - Peter Matthiessen passed away April 5, 2014 at the age of 86. I had read some of his fiction, loving the way his adventuresome novel Far Tartuga (1975) made me feel. I decided it was time to give this memoir, The Snow Leopard (1978) recounting his climb of Mount Everest in search of Blue Sheep and a quest to spot the elusive snow leopard a try. It was late fall, with winter a whisper away. Would they make it before the snow season turned the world impassable? Would they see the snow leopard? The element of suspense at the heart of this story exerts a mighty pull.

Mentally, spiritually, it was perhaps more demanding. Talking to Alex, I mention how over the years that one or two people have told me how special the book has been to them, in helping them to understand or cope with death. In particular, my friend the writer Sonali Deraniyagala, who lost her whole family in the 2003 Sri Lankan tsunami, once told me how the book was just about the only thing she had ever known truly to comfort her. “It’s odd to say but I found that the book really helped with the actual physical pain,” she said. I wondered if Alex felt it to be primarily a book that encompassed grief. Matthiessen’s book is part travelogue, part naturalist observations, and part coming to terms with loss. About a year after the death of his wife, Matthiessen travels along with a friend in search of a snow leopard, really in the search of big blue sheep. It’s much hiking and camping, and eating. Schaller, G., J. Tserendeleg, G. Amarsanaa. 1994. Observations on snow leopards in Mongolia. Proc. Int. Snow Leopard Symposium, 7: 33-42. Matthiessen's endlessly droning voice reassures us that One Day we will all be completely happy.... Freeman, H. 1982. Characteristics of the social behavior in the snow leopard. Int. Ped. Book of Snow Leopards, 3: 117-120.

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Snow leopards are top predators, they have few natural predators other than humans. However, interspecific killing between leopards ( Panthera pardus) and snow leopards can occur when competition for resources between these sympatric carnivores increases. Adult snow leopards are also potential predators of younger cubs. ( Lovari, et al., 2013) Up-front confession: My own interactions with Buddhism have been tangential and shallow, and I may be missing a lot. The sense I get (and to which this book contributes mightily) is that the emphasis this religion places on one's own acceptance, one's own enlightenment, and one's own self-knowledge doesn't really do diddly-squat to help your less-fortunate neighbor down the road. Mathiessen writes, quite movingly, of a child in India, dragging her twisted, crippled legs through the mud, and smiling up with the most beautiful face he's ever seen. While it's nice to be appreciated and memorialized in this way, perhaps studying medicine or public health instead of The Way would provide more tangible benefits to children like this. Similarly, the author's own children, shortly after the death of their mother, were left with another family for months while Mathiessen did, I suppose, what he considered more important than being there for them.

For Matthiessen, a serious student of Zen Buddhism, the expedition wasn’t strictly scientific. It was also a pilgrimage during which he would seek to break “the burdensome armor of the ego,” perceiving his “true nature.” After it was published, in 1978—first, in part, in The New Yorker, then as a book—“ The Snow Leopard,” his account of the trip, won two National Book Awards, becoming both a naturalist and a spiritual classic. It overflows with crystalline descriptions of animals and mountains: “The golden birds fall from the morning sun like blowing sparks that drop away and are extinguished in the dark,” Matthiessen writes. But it’s also an austere Buddhist memoir in which the snow leopard is as alluring and mysterious as enlightenment itself. A few things about the trek had undeniably changed. When Matthiessen senior made the journey, there was a genuine sense of extreme remoteness. The author had cropped his long hair short to his skull as he set out and began to walk barefoot like the Sherpas when they left paved roads. As a reader, you feel exactly how, camping in his wet cotton and wool clothes at minus 20C, he would “quake with cold all night”. Chapter 21: Role of Zoos in Snow Leopard Conservation: Management of Captive Snow Leopards in the EAZA Region In the autumn of 1973, the naturalist and writer Peter Matthiessen and the zoologist George Schaller set out on a gruelling trek into the Himalayas. They were headed toward the Dolpo region of the Tibetan plateau. Schaller wanted to study Himalayan blue sheep; Matthiessen hoped to see a snow leopard—a large, majestic cat with fur the color of smoke. Snow leopards, which belong to the genus Panthera, inhabit some of the highest mountain ranges in the world, and their camouflage is so perfectly tuned that they appear ethereal, as though made from storm clouds. Two of them feature on the Tibetan flag of independence, representing harmony between the temporal and spiritual planes. Early in the book, I found myself wondering why or to be more exact what type of father would leave a young son just a year after the son lost his mother. Matthiessen himself seems to be aware of this reaction, and he does not try to beg excuses. Instead, he quotes his son’s letter, a sobering missive.Despite a few more forays into the spiritual journey, the expedition and scientific research parts of the book are much more heavily featured in the following chapters. Oh boy. I gave up on this book. An alternative title to this book should be: “The Snow Leopard: As elusive in this book as in real life”. There is a ghastly amateurishness to the expedition, money given to sherpas for them to buy boots is not spent on boots, they can't hire porters for the entire duration of the trip - I might hope that today someone might attempt the simpler solution of training someone who already lived in the area to observe the bharal rather than trying to organise a dozen and a half Nepalis plus the occasional animal to transport two non-Nepalis plus food, firewood and kit for all involved to a remote plateau. Matthiessen is so focused on being observant that he fails to notice on the return, GS remains to watch the bharal mating (or not) for longer, that one of the two sherpas going with him has dysentery. I started this book a few times in my twenties. It won the National Book Award in 1978, when I was first teaching, and I was not yet ready to read it. Or maybe, if I had gone “on the road” as Kerouac got a generation to do, one way or the other, I might have taken it with me then and actually read it. I tried on a few other occasions to get into it, and I couldn’t do it, for one reason or the other, but for some reason I always knew at some point it would be important for me to experience. Something like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it was a book for a time, highly influential, but this book is in my opinion a much better and richer book. But even then, having slow-read it over the month of my trip, it has still taken me months to get to writing about it. I warn you, this could go on for a while. I’m mostly writing it for myself, but you are welcome to come along for my (reading) journey. There are a lot of biological facts and observations and insights about the conservation of Nepal. A lot of their exploration that year helped to establish the National Park that preserves the snow leopard territory.