The Parvati Valley has earned its own nicknames: the Valley of Shadows, the Valley of Death. It is a place where every moment exists on a knife edge, where a wrong turn tips a vehicle over an unbarriered cliff edge, a wrong step pitches a traveler into a churning maelstrom of a river, a wrong turn sends a hiker to ranges unknown. Since the early 1990s, dozens of international backpackers have vanished without a trace while traveling in and around the Parvati Valley, an average of one every year, earning this tiny, remote sliver of the subcontinent a dark reputation as India’s Bermuda Triangle. The circumstances of each disappearance are different — the tourist’s country of origin; villages visited or paths walked; last known location — yet eerily similar. All feature a spirited backpacker seeking an off-the-beaten-track adventure, a collection of anecdotes from fellow travelers relating the backpacker’s final days, a family’s anguished search, and thousands of unanswered questions.
I absolutely loved Harley Rustad’s last narrative nonfiction tale — Big Lonely Doug:The Story of One of Canada’s Last Great Trees — so I was excited to read his latest: Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas. And while Rustad brings the same eye for detail, background, and narrative tension to this story of Justin Alexander Shetler — a thirty-five-year old American backpacker with an incredible life story, a large social media presence, and who mysteriously disappeared in the Indian Himalayas — I’m left feeling, somehow, that the story of the tree was ultimately more interesting and relatable. This is still an intriguing story, well told, that asks interesting questions about what a meaningful life looks like. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Over time, Shetler’s stories began to acquire their own near-mythological quality. There was the time he carried the injured toddler in Nepal, running for hours — some who have heard the story say days — to take her to the nearest clinic; there was the time he went into the wilderness in Idaho, or, as some recall in Montana, with nothing more than a knife and emerged weeks later wearing buckskin clothing; there was the time he was beaten up, or possibly even stabbed, in Bangkok while trying to save a young woman from harassment. Shortly after quitting his job, he found himself at a Los Angeles restaurant talking with Jonathon Goldsmith, the actor who was appearing on television commercials as “The Most Interesting Man in the World” for a long-running advertising campaign of Dos Equis beer, who remarked, “I think you might actually be the most interesting man in the world.” Shetler illegally climbed the most famous bridges in the United States, he became a Buddhist monk in Thailand, and he crossed snow-covered Himalayas in flip-flops. It was all part of a story that Shetler wanted to build, a story that, as he saw it, was just beginning.
This passage doesn’t even reference Shetler’s unconventional childhood (that saw him attending a wilderness survival academy instead of high school), his time fronting the alt rock band Punchface, or the three years he worked with a tech startup and travelled the globe on a luxury budget. Approaching his mid-thirties, Shetler decided to leave his high-paying job, give away the majority of his worldly goods, and embark on a quest for deeper meaning (which he believed could only be attained ascetically as the heroes had in the books he grew up reading). Shetler spent the next couple of years vagabonding across the United States, South America, and Asia — boosting his social media following with beautiful pictures and enviable adventures — and by the time he found India calling to him irresistibly, Shetler was on the horns of a dilemma: Should he continue to focus on growing his ego-boosting online presence or was it time to give himself over to a sadhu, an Indian holy man, who could teach him to entirely free himself from his ego by learning to let go of the world. When Shetler decided to accompany one such sadhu on a dangerous trek to a holy lake, his last post to social media was:
These Babas are said to have magical powers from decades of ancient yoga practice. But. I really don’t know what to expect. I’ve never done yoga, and his style is extreme — based on the grotesque swellings on his joints. But I want to see the world through his eyes, which are essentially 5000 years old, an ancient spiritual path. I’m going to put my heart into it and see what happens. My back is in bad shape, (broken when I was 19) and even with daily soaks in hot springs, this cave/mountain life has recently put me in a state of constant discomfort. I’m sadly inflexible, and I can’t even sit still for a few minutes without pain. Maybe Baba Life will be good for me. I should return mid September or so.
If I’m not back by then, don’t look for me. ;)
And as it turned out, that was Shetler’s last ever social media post. So, how seriously were his friends and family to take that final thought, “If I’m not back by then, don’t look for me”? How to interpret the wink? Was he joking or saying goodbye?
Rustad went to India (several times) in search of those answers, and this book is filled with his conversations with the people who knew Shetler, as well as long passages from Shetler’s own writings. Rustad quotes freely from famed literature set in India and fills in the history of the area: many foreigners have contracted “India Syndrome” in this magic-filled valley at the foot of the Himalayas and disappeared into mountain caves to live undetected; sometimes for decades. This is also one of the remote settings of India’s illegal cannabis cultivation (the hash produced here is apparently world-renowned) and the hills are filled with black marketeers, thieves, and fake holy men. As we get to learn more and more about Shetler and his quixotic nature, there is certainly narrative tension in wanting to know what Rustad learns of the backpacker's fate. Despite all of the crazy antics in Shetler’s life, I really did find the story of Big Lonely Doug to be somehow richer, but it’s not really Rustad’s fault that I wasn’t completely wowed — Rustad set out on his own journey without knowing what he would ultimately find and he presents the results in a narrative that is consistently interesting and well-written.
