The rules my grandmother had about water

My grandmother had a rule about crossing water. You greeted it first. Not out loud, nothing anyone standing beside you would hear. You simply did not step into a river the way you would step into a room you had paid for.

She had a second rule about high places, which was that you did not boast at the top of one. Whatever you had climbed, you had climbed as a guest, and guests are quiet on the way out.

I have carried both of these into a life she would not recognise. I use them still. I could not tell you whether I believe them, and I have slowly decided that belief was never the question they were built to answer.

What happened this week

On the morning of the twenty seventh, a glacier came apart above the border between Nepal and Tibet. Ice and rock fell an enormous distance, dammed a river, and then the dam gave way. The villages downstream had almost no warning. Hundreds are dead. Thousands are still missing. The counting is not finished, and I am not going to put a number here that will be wrong by Tuesday.

People who study these things have explanations. I have read them. They are careful, and they are almost certainly right, and I am not writing to argue with them, because I would not know how.

I am writing because the first thing that arrived in me was not a question about mechanism. It was my grandmother's voice, saying that the mountain had not been greeted.

Where I have landed

I know exactly what that thought is. It is the oldest move people make. When something enormous and completely indifferent happens, we go looking for the sentence that would have prevented it, because a sentence is a thing a person can hold in two hands and an atmosphere is not.

But here is where I have come out. Those old rules were never really superstitions about weather. They were instructions about size. Greet the river. Do not boast at the summit. Do not build where the water is obviously going. Ask the people who have lived there longest before you decide what is safe. Every one of those is a rule about remembering that you are small, the mountain is old, and neither fact is negotiable. Strip the spirits out entirely and you are left with advice that still works.

They were never superstitions about weather. They were instructions about size.

My grandmother would have said the mountain was owed something. A glaciologist will tell you the frozen ground is losing its grip. I notice they are giving the same practical warning, which is that high ground is not a fixed object and should never have been treated as one. One of them says it in the language I was raised in. The other says it in the language that can be checked. I am glad of both and I am not confused about which one to build a road with.

For the families

I do not know anyone in Rasuwa or Nuwakot or Dhading, or in Gyirong on the other side. It turns out that does not matter as much as I would have expected. Tonight, in every one of those places, somebody is sitting with a phone in their hand, and there is nothing in anything I inherited that makes that lighter.

So I will do the one thing I actually know how to do, which she also taught me, and which costs nothing and helps nobody and is done anyway. I will think of them tonight. I will wish them whatever strength the morning asks for. And I will ask, in the way a person like me asks, that the mountain does not do this again.