Extra grit? Superhuman strength of character?
A man who had to actually go through this ordeal eight years ago after falling off a cliff and crashing on a rock ledge says that faced with such a trial in life, any of us would devise ways to live.
“It was survival instinct that we all have, and an enormous series of good fortunes that saved me,” says journalist Kanak Mani Dixit, 53, who shared with Republica the personal and emotional side of his accident and his recovery.
Five people who fell from the same cliff before Dixit didn’t have the luck to live on to recount their stories.
Last solo trek
Dixit’s love for solitary treks began in 1971 when he graduated from high school. Thirty years later, a 150-feet freefall, and four days of living on a jutting rock and dealing with severe vertebral injuries would end the love affair.
It was the final day of his solo trek around the Annapurnas in late August 2001. Dixit was heading for Besisahar from Jagat on a rainy morning, wearing shorts and taking notes.
From a place called Syange to Bahun Danda, there’s a trail cut out from rocks that goes past cliffs. In wet months, rainfall comes in a gully over the trail, making it slippery. Looking back, Dixit says he probably bypassed the slippery trail by walking towards the edge.
“I don’t remember the last one hour of the trek, probably because of shock,” said Dixit, the publisher and editor of the Himal Southasian magazine. “But I remember flying in the air, and trying to save myself on the ledge of the trail with my weight and my backpack pulling me. I hit a rock and crashed.”
When Dixit regained consciousness, the rain had stopped and sharp monsoon sunlight shone on his face.
The backpack was lost. His hands were weak. There was a strip of his scalp skin and hair on his face. He was in excruciating pain, the reasons for which he would know only days later.
“I tried to drag myself and actually fell into a cul-de-sac, a little ledge of rock, about 4-5 feet long and a couple of feet wide. That ledge became my home for the next three nights and four days,” he said.
Some 200 feet below, the Marsyangdi River roared in full monsoon fury.
Under an anthill for four days
His ordinary skills and the hope that his wife would somehow find him and pull off a successful rescue operation kept Dixit alive for the next four days.
“I have this ultimate faith in my wife. I thought she would somehow devise a way to save me,” he said. He remembers talking to himself, calling her name, Why haven’t you sent someone to save me? Why haven’t you sent a helicopter?
The rock ledge was inclined towards the river, so Dixit had to constantly drag himself to the cliff. But the ledge was also full of pebbles, so constant slipping and dragging himself back gave scratches all over his body.
“I remember there was a tuft of grass on my left. I held on to it to try and keep myself from slipping. But that tuft also happened to be the mouth of an anthill. I was bitten by ants in every part of my body. And my undergarment, when I was rescued, was full of fistfuls of dead ants,” he said.
On the rock ledge, he also found a stick that he put across the cliff’s edge so that he could lock his legs to it to prevent himself from slipping.
Dixit spent the first day shouting for help. Though his voice hardly stood out against the roar of the Marsyangdi, he shouted for help until he lost his voice.
The next day, he fashioned a pillow out of his woolen socks that were swollen with rain and mud. And he found a way to keep himself hydrated.
“To my left was a huge rock. Water was trickling from its middle. It was monsoon. Once a day, I would lean on my side and fashion a little dam to collect water. With great difficultly I sucked the water. Because I had practiced while trekking in dry areas to drink beyond need, I managed to do that,” he said.
Dixit says he didn’t lose consciousness in those four days, though he often hallucinated at night. He also mistook the source of noises. For instance, he thought the murmur of a bee to be a male voice, and the roar of the Marsyangdi to the noise of a copter.
Hunger was an overwhelming feeling. Once he tried to eat grass but could not.
“One thing I noticed was that even when one is dying and there’s grass available, you don’t eat it. I tried, disliked it and that was it. I would rather die, but I just wouldn’t eat it,” he said.
One night, he felt a quadruped walking over his body.
Saddest moment
Dixit had fashioned a flag, using a stick and a piece of plastic that had whitened from sun and rain. He hoisted it above his stomach with his palms, hoping someone would see it.
“I would say the saddest moments of my life were that particular situation. Here I am, I can see on the other side of the Marsyangdi, the five houses and even trails. But probably because it was monsoon, I didn’t see even one person walking along those trails during those four days,” he said.
On the third evening, he heard a chopper. He tried to wave the stick. But within 15 minutes, the copter went back.
Then he felt even more forlorn.
On the fourth morning, he decided to do something about the situation rather than wait for help. He planned to leave the ledge and fall, so that he might have some chance of being found, even though that meant being more injured or even dead.
“Then I heard voices. It came closer. Then there were people around me,” he said.
A series of good fortunes
Dixit believes in probabilities and not divinity. He says his rescue was not a miracle but the result of a series of good fortunes.
Unlike during his previous treks, he had made it a point to give his family a call everyday. He had made his last phone call from Dharapani. That gave his family an idea of where to conduct a search.
Also, though it is common for people, who have gone on treks, to be late by a few days, this time his wife didn’t wait for his return, and forced his older brother Kunda Dixit to go looking for him.
The search team wouldn’t have found Dixit if it weren’t for his nephew’s cap that he wore during that trek. The ledge Dixit was lying on was invisible from above. But the search team spotted the cap on a treetop. Then, descending the cliff with the help of a rope, they found him.
Among the rescuers was Dixit’s old friend Padam Ghale, a rescue specialist who climbed down on ropes to find him. Also, the rescue team found a porter, Lok Bahadur Tamang, at the right time. He carried Dixit up piggyback.
“Another good fortune is that I come from a well-to-do family in Kathmandu. So my people could conceivably charter a helicopter and send people to search for me,” he said.
Yet another good fortune was that there was a doctor like Upendra Devkota who also happened to be a relation.
Recovery
Dixit had broken three vertebral discs of his neck. The break should have left him a quadriplegic, meaning a total paralytic.
“People say my break is like that of Christopher Reeves’. But I was lucky while he was not in that when my neck broke, the bone shattered and my spinal column wasn’t injured,” he said.
Dixit had to undergo a nine-hour surgery, and wear an external fixation for three months.
He still has problems using three of his fingers, and his neck has limited turning radius because Dr. Devkota had to tie his three vertebrae with a steel wire.
“But the problems I have should be considered inconsequential,” Kanak says.
It was not the first time Dixit fell from a cliff though. In 1987, he broke his right leg falling from a cliff in Gran Paradiso in the Italian Alps. He was winched up by a helicopter by professional rescuers.
Changes
Dixit says the accident didn’t make him spiritual.
“I’m confirmed in my agnosticism,” he says. “I’m essentially the same person with the same lackadaisical attitude – disorganized.”
But in the years after the accident, Dixit felt that because you go around only once, you have to make the best out of it.
“Before the accident, I was a journalist. After, I was into civil rights, pluralism, social activism, human rights,” he said. But he is unsure whether it was the accident that made him an activist. “I would’ve probably done the same in any case,” he says.
“For the privilege of being alive,” Dixit also took some initiatives at personal and social levels.
Lok Bahadur Tamang, who is from a poor village in Gorkha, wanted drinking water and electricity in the village. Drinking water Dixit managed with his friends’ help. He still feels it is his duty to take electricity to the village.
Dixit also used his personal funds to put a guard railing along the entire trail, where he almost perished.
As a societal response, and with the cooperation of eight friends, he started the Spinal Injury Rehab Center that is presently located in Sanga, at the cost of US$1.5 million. The center was inaugurated by Sir Edmund Hillary in February, 2002.
“Nerves once broken can’t be rejoined. So we provide moral boost, physiotherapy and occupational therapy to people with spinal injuries,” Dixit says.
The center tries to give people with spinal injuries as much quality of life as possible. It is a not-for-profit organization. For the poor, the Center raises money.
“I was saved by what is best in Nepal: friends, family, and strangers,” says Dixit. “A wife who knew when it was reasons enough to panic; a brother who responded very, very quickly; and a friend who had the skills. A stranger who was asked by people, “Did you carry the man up on contract?”, and he replied, “No, I did it out of humanity!”
Well, if you happen to see a 53-year-old trekker wearing shorts and taking notes in the Annapurna Circuit this spring, the man is unlikely to be Kanak Mani Dixit. For he doesn’t trek anymore.
“My family will worry too much,” he says.
(SURVIVOR is a series of personal sagas of people who survived life-threatening situations, such as accidents, terminal illnesses, crossfire, and other tragedies. In this section, we cover chronicles of those who refused to give up. We hope the narratives will inspire people who have faced similar experiences to take on life’s challenges and emerge as winners.)
bikash@myrepublica.com
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