CHAPTER 30: THE LAST CANYON

I remember waking up that last morning of the trek and stumbling half asleep to Tham’s outhouse. It was around six a.m., and a bank of thick fog hung over Nonghulew. The outhouse stood in solitary splendor in the middle of a bare rocky field, and as I walked out to it the rest of the village faded into the mist until it seemed as though there was nothing in the world but me and a lonely latrine.

Tham had built the outhouse himself, utilizing some concrete and rusty corrugated metal left over from other projects. More buildings were planned in the empty space around it, though work on these had yet to begin. The door to the latrine was, like the roof, just a sheet of metal. It had two nails driven into one side of it to keep it affixed to the outhouse, though it had no hinges, or even a handle. One opened it simply by bending the metal to one side. Upon entering the outhouse I saw that there was no lock. Instead, a nail had been hammered into the inside of the concrete wall, while a hook made from a bent piece of wire had been punched through the door. Tied to the hook was someone’s old boxer shorts. To keep the door closed, one stretched the underwear from the end of the hook over to the nail, the elastic band on the boxers just barely having enough strength to keep the sheet of metal from swinging outwards.

Read Through the Canyons of Living Bridges

None of this struck me as unusual. I had come across nearly identical setups in several outhouses over the course of the trek. But after returning to my homeland in a few weeks, encountering a latrine like the one Tham had constructed behind his house would seem most peculiar. People typically do not build their own toilets in Delaware. They also don’t live in little farming villages. Even accounting for the state’s large agricultural sector, most Delawareans do not, indeed could not, scrape out a living solely by working the land. People like Tham don’t exist along the I-95 corridor.

But it was a good thing the trek was coming to an end. The Khasi Hills had taken their toll. When I returned to the U.S. I was thirty pounds lighter than when I left. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel a mix of emotions as I prepared to set out for Jarain. This short interval of danger, discovery, and adventure was coming to a close. After the final push through the valley of the Umngot River, there would be no more ancient stone trails leading into the unknown, or waterfalls hidden deep in the shadows of gorges, or undocumented root bridges lost in the jungle. I would soon be trading immense canyons and brutal inclines for Mid-Atlantic suburbs and salt marshes.

After I reached Jarain, it would be the beaten path for me all the way back to America.

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Tham had kindly agreed to accompany me as far as the start of a major path that led first down to the Umngot and then straight up to Jarain. The trailhead was located on the eastern bank of a small river called the Rishi that flowed below Nonghulew, the same stream that provided Syntung with its magnificent waterfalls.  Near the village, the river is flanked by wide swathes of broom grass and is surprisingly smooth and calm, though bitterly cold. But a short distance downstream the course of the Rishi abruptly steepens, and the river jumps precipitously down from the highlands to the Umngot in a succession of white curtains.

The stream was crossed by a metal and wood suspension bridge which from a distance looked like a sturdy piece of infrastructure. But as Tham and I approached the span, I noticed that the wooden slats that made up the walkway had large holes in them, and the steel cables that held the slats aloft were heavily rusted.

Still, there was no choice but to follow Tham as he led me out onto the bridge. The structure barely shook as the newly elected headman walked on it, but it was only after I had gone quite some distance across the span that I realized the slats were bending underneath me. I began to hear wood snapping underfoot, and metal groaning. I looked at my feet and could see straight down through the cracks between the slats to the Rishi. On this particular Khasi Hills suspension bridge, which relied more on wood than most, there were plenty of spots where it would be perfectly easy for me to fall right through. I had saved the very most decrepit bridge of the trek for last.

Tham had made it to the pylon on the other side of the structure and was now staring back at me concernedly. I could tell from his expression that he had not factored in how much heavier I was than your typical Khasi when he led me across the bridge. But in the man’s defense, the metal and wood structure had clearly been designed to hold a weight much greater than that of me and my backpack. And I suspect the bridge was also meant to be regularly maintained. It hadn’t been.

“I think this bridge is not good,” said Tham as I shuffled across the decaying wood towards him. “I would come over to help you, but then we may both fall.”

I was too focused on not tumbling to my doom to have a conversation with Tham. Now I found myself clinging to the rusty steel cables on one side of the structure in anticipation of the walkway failing beneath me. Perhaps I’d be able to hold onto the cables even if my feet broke through. Though what I would do if I found myself dangling from the bridge was an interesting question. I’d probably have to jettison my pack to lessen the strain on my arms.

This was just the sort of experience one never has in Delaware.    

“It seems we must make a better bridge here,” said Tham as I slowly made my last few careful, undignified steps to the eastern end of the structure and then joined him on the concrete pylon. The bridge had held…barely. Judging by the sounds of the wood crackling and giving way, I seem to have done significant damage on my way across. “We don’t often go this way,” continued the headman. “Usually in the dry season we just cross this river downstream from here, stone by stone. This bridge is not good. I think maybe we will tear it down. That way nobody else will be in danger.”

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As the rotting wood and rusted metal groaned and snapped beneath me, I wished that I was walking across a living root bridge. Not only would a root bridge have been more beautiful and interesting; it would also have been far safer. I was told that the steel and wood structure had been built sometime in the early 2000s. In 2019 it was already fast approaching the end of its usefulness. But had there been a healthy root bridge at the same spot for the last fifteen years, it would have provided an easy, stable, environmentally sustainable, way to cross the river even during the monsoon season.

At that spot, a living root bridge would have just been a better idea.

Over the course of the past decade, I’ve often pondered these questions: Will living architecture have a place in the modern world for anything beyond its novelty?  Are root bridges mostly of value because they are interesting pieces of human heritage, worth maintaining primarily as historical monuments? Or is there some chance that in the future, rather than having living architecture being merely an interesting curiosity relegated to an obscure corner of Asia, functional structures made from growing organisms will become as common outside of the Khasi Hills as within them?

To me personally, it goes without question that these astounding structures should be protected from eradication. I pushed myself as hard as I did during the trek in large part because I believed this. It would be a vast loss to human heritage were the root bridges of Nongblai to be consumed in a forest fire, for the span at Ur Ka Jynro in Thiedding to be washed away in a landslide, for the H.R. Geiger bridge between Kongthong and Wahkhen to fade into obscurity. To preserve the root bridges of Meghalaya because they offer a window into the past and are stunningly beautiful is a more than worthy goal.

And yet, as the rotting span over the Rishi neatly demonstrated, in the singular conditions of the Khasi Hills a root bridge is more than an esthetically pleasing way to cross a river. It’s a long-lasting solution to an acute problem. Yes, it’s true that the practice of Khasi living architecture has been in decline in recent decades. One might assume that this is due to some way in which root bridges are, from a practical standpoint, inferior to more conventional structures. But my view is that the fading of the practice has less to do with flaws in the idea of living architecture than with changes in Khasi society and land use patterns at large. And it’s worth pointing out that many of the factors which have resulted in the death of living root bridges would also lead to the ruin of more conventional structures. Certainly, if many root bridges were, as I suspect, swept away in landslides during the great earthquake of 1897, much the same would have happened to any conventional bridges that were around at the time. While it’s a fact that large numbers of root bridges appear to have been severed in recent years because of more material being washed down riverbeds due to deforestation and road building up stream, again, much the same happens to concrete and steel bridges.

The main cause of the disappearance of living architecture is the fact that a root bridge takes so long to become strong and useable. If a root bridge is severed, it needs at least a few years to be regenerated. But a concrete and steel span is functional the moment construction has been completed. And even if it does get knocked down after only a few monsoon seasons, a new one can be built at the same place in relatively short order.

 Conventional bridges are then a faster, though disposable, solution. But they’re also vastly more expensive, almost always being built with large sums of government aid money, while simultaneously being far less durable in the long term. I feel confident predicting that no pedestrian suspension bridge existing in the Khasi Hills today will be around in a hundred years. But living structures that were in their infancy in the spring of 2019 may well be in their prime when 2119 rolls around. 

Is there a solution to the problem of how long it takes to generate a functional living root bridge? Here, I think the answer lies not in preferencing living architecture over conventional structures, but in combining the two. It is not especially difficult to use steel wire, bamboo, and various sorts of wood to create useable short-term structures over which living roots can then be directed. A bridge meant to survive only a few years can become the scaffolding upon which a long-lasting living structure is generated. In this way, as the conventional part of the hybrid structure decomposes the living part will keep growing. And the bridge will be useable the entire time. In the manner that the Mawpdai Mystery Tree took on the shape and structure of the plant it had grown around and strangled to death, a living root bridge grown over a conventional structure would, after only a few years, come to take on the shape of its host bridge. And then, once the roots could hold the full weight of the people who wished to cross it, the conventional elements of the structure could be allowed to disintegrate, while the living parts would, generation after generation, century after century, only get stronger and more magnificent. Once the ficus treeis doing most of the architectural work, neither Indian taxpayers nor Khasi village councils will have to spend anything for its upkeep. And if that’s not a practical benefit, I don’t know what is.      

Hybrid structures using both ficus roots and conventional elements may provide a way for living architecture to remain an important part of the infrastructure of Meghalaya in the 21^st century. This fact is not lost on the Khasis. As the steel, wood, bamboo, and ficus structure near Ksaid village shows, villagers in Southern Meghalaya are well aware that a bridge does not need to be either all living or all conventional. Numerous root bridges across Meghalaya utilize nonliving components to some degree. One of the longest root bridges on record, near the village of Mawkyrnot, relies largely on bamboo and areca palm trunks for its railing. There is a structure near the village of Kudeng Rim that even incorporates rather unsightly waterpipes into its structure. But perhaps the best example of a hybrid exists on the outskirts of Nongriat village, where ficus roots were allowed to grow and develop over an already built conventional steel and concrete span. Over the years, the metal bridge has given way to a living one.

But can growing architecture from a living organism succeed in places beyond the Khasi Hills? I’m inclined to say yes. As I’ve alluded to elsewhere, there are other parts of the world where remote villages in tropical regions have to contend with a similar set of challenges to those in Southern Meghalaya. For the same reasons that I think it’s likely that there are other locations in Asia where living architecture once existed, I also think that there are many places where it could be introduced. One need look no further than the rest of Northeast India. Root bridges would be perfectly suited for the needs of the Khasis’ next-door neighbors the Garos, whose portion of Meghalaya is, while not quite as rainy and rugged as the Khasi Hills, still quite hilly, remote, and monsoon smacked. A similar claim could be made of the lovely Baptist-dominated state of Mizoram, or the rough mountains of Nagaland. These are all places where many villages exist far from reliable road infrastructure, where the primary economic activity is farming, where people often have to cross small to medium sized streams and rivers which swell in the monsoon season, and where ficus trees could easily survive. But beyond Northeast India, there are places where people live and face similar infrastructural challenges throughout the entire tropical belt of Earth’s landmass. There’s no reason why a root bridge could not exist in Congo or in Columbia.   

And really, why not grow root bridges in the U.S? I make no pretense of being an engineer or city planner, but having spent a great deal of time looking into the practice of Khasi living architecture, what I think is this: If you can grow a large ficus elastica tree in, for example, Scottsdale Arizona, then you can also generate a root bridge in Scottsdale Arizona. Perhaps in such a context living architecture would be more a matter of civic beautification than genuine utility…but I’m all for civic beautification. Even just to see living architecture being created in botanical gardens would add something good to the world. It seems like a no brainer for Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania, to have a living architecture exhibit where return visitors could see a root bridge develop year after year from a few thin strands into a giant botanical marvel they could one day walk across.

Then again, hicks in the swamps of Florida could also buy ficus cuttings and grow their own backyard architecture complete with root swings for their kids and living porches for their friends to drink beer on. And I’m all for that too.   

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A future in which living architecture has proliferated throughout the globe is not a fantasy. Even setting aside practical considerations, the idea of bridges made from trees is one that people, generally, just seem to really like. That’s why tourists have travelled from all over the planet to see them in Meghalaya. And so, if living architecture spreads across the world, it will be because the world was inspired by the remarkable achievements of Khasis living in isolated villages tucked deep within the grand canyons of southern Meghalaya. Living architecture helped them survive in some of the most intense conditions on the planet, and that in itself should be a testament to the fact that root bridges are much more than a mere curiosity.

But if Khasi living architecture is genuinely important, that only makes the need to conserve root bridges for their history, for scientific study, and for their practical value, all the more acute.

The question is, then, will Meghalaya’s living architecture survive?

When I first started wandering from village to village in the Khasi Hills, stumbling on accident into undocumented living root bridges, my outlook was not optimistic. In most places I went there was very little recognition of the practice’s uniqueness, and the process of replacing living architecture with conventional bridges was well along. In general, root bridges were seen as an old way of doing things. Steel and metal structures were quicker, more modern, and the government was often going to pay for them.

But in 2019 the situation had changed. Local guides, village tourism societies, conservationists, Khasi academics, government initiatives, and the occasional wandering Phareng had demonstrated to people in even the most remote Khasi settlements that living architecture was both a massive cultural achievement and a thing to be protected. Much has been lost, sadly, without documentation, but a situation like in the 20^th century where Khasi living architecture was almost entirely forgotten outside of Northeast India is now very unlikely. Root bridges have been firmly entered into the scientific record, and Khasis from the more recent generations are determined to save what’s left of the practice and to grow new examples.

My bet is that long after I’m dead and gone many of the root bridges I crossed during my time on earth will still be alive and stronger than ever.      

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After we crossed the Rishi, Tham showed me to a wide trail through broom grass that led up to the crest of a small ridge. Beyond this was the gorge of the Umngot proper and the final descent of the trek.

“Just go straight,” said Tham, “and stay on the path. If you don’t go off to the left or the right, you will come to another metal bridge. Go up from there, and you will reach Jarain after a few hours.” I then thanked Tham profusely and set off on my own into the last canyon.

By the winter of 2019 I had long been acquainted with the Umngot, but only much further along its course next to the lovely village of Shnongpdeng. There the river is a wide and placid stream that flows with a glassy smoothness between two mountains, where fishermen drift lazily in wooden boats across deep blue pools of crystalline water and crowds of boisterous day trippers from Shillong picknick on the banks. At Shnongpdeng the Umngot is already mellowing out as it prepares to leave the highlands and begin its meandering course through the swampy flatness of Bangladesh.

But as I approached the top of the ridge, I heard a deep intimidating roar from far below.  After climbing up onto a stony outcrop overlooking the valley, I saw that this was a very different Umngot than the one I was used to. Between Nonghulew and Jarain the river followed a steep, tumultuous, path, more violent and dramatic than any I had seen in the Khasi Hills. It sloped down precipitously from the north, cutting a succession of deep notches into the bedrock which it poured over in boiling rapids and several vast white cascades. From the point where the walls of its canyon start to rise in the north to where the river reaches sea level in Bangladesh, the Umngot drops an astounding 1100 meters over about 55 kilometers (For comparison, the mainstem of the Mississippi River descends only 450 meters over its entire 3730 kilometer run from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico). Though the volume of water here was less than next to Shnongpdeng, the river having yet to collect up several of its larger tributaries, the Umngot nonetheless clearly had an incredible power. 

Now I hurried along the path, which after leaving the broom grass plunged through ever greener jungle to the cacophonous river. With my head bent towards the ground to carefully pick my way down the nearly vertical stairway of unstable stones, I pressed on without stopping to the bottom of the gorge. Though I still felt the fatigue leftover from the past few days of trekking, my legs had grown accustomed to the brutality of Khasi trails…just in time for me to leave.

With the wind coming up from the Umngot growing colder with every step, I decided that once the path had brought me to the bridge I would find some way down to the riverbed and have a bath and eat my lunch. It was well before noon when I reached the long metal span that connects the western and eastern banks of the Umngot below Nonghulew. The river under the bridge was far from calm. It roared over boulders and was condensed into thundering sluices and raged against marbled walls of stone. The metal bridge shot out far above these mighty cataracts, and at first it appeared as though there would disappointingly be no way down to the water. But then I discovered a faint trail leading south from the western end of the bridge through the emerald jungle, running along the tops of the rocky white outcrops that bracketed the river.

With some climbing I was able to make my way down to a huge churning pool of turbid water hemmed in by tall stony ramparts. At the northern end of the pool a vast boulder the size of a building sat wedged between two lofty escarpments of bedrock. The Umngot burst out from either side of this choke stone in a pair of great waterfalls. Downstream the river was impeded by a natural dam of more giant stones, beyond which the Umngot dropped away in a great step further down into the gorge.

 As it rose above the surface of the raging, swirling, pool, the bedrock of the canyon was colored with a succession of thin white bands, like bathtub rings: recent high-water marks. Above these, the color and texture of the rock slowly changed from smoothed, recently submerged yellow and brown, to rougher unpolished gray. Higher still, and small plants could find purchase on the stone without being swept away with every monsoon flood. And then came the green jungle of the final slope I would have to climb, and a thousand meters above, the horizontal eastern rim of the canyon.

There had been no rain for over a week. The great turbid pool was as calm as it could be. Even still, the full power of the Umngot was lurking under the surface. I decided against taking a swim. Like every part of the grand canyons of the Khasi Hills, the great pool in the Umngot was just as lethal as it was beautiful, just as terrifying as it was interesting, and I was just as grateful to have survived it as to have seen it. 

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As I walked over the final bridge of the trek, I happened to glance up the rocky bed of the Umngot and wonder: Would I be one of the last trekkers to come this way and witness the river in all its untamed glory?  

Like at the River of Tears west of Sohra, a huge hydroelectric dam was planned on the Umngot. Though it was widely considered one of the cleanest rivers in India and had led to the development of a steadily growing tourism industry downstream which supported the livelihoods of whole villages, the Umngot was due to be harnessed and sullied by a vast construction project. What made the roaring canyon so immensely impressive was precisely what had doomed it. The incredible power of the river was due to be converted into hydroelectric energy, of course at the expense of immense, though obscure, natural and cultural wonders.

Once the malaise of Covid-19 settled over the planet, very few tourists could even set foot in Meghalaya, much less venture across the canyon of the upper Umngot. In the first half of 2021 it seemed that the project was still slated to go forward despite the raging pandemic and the noisy, desperate, protests by thousands of villagers living downstream who had come to depend on Umngot-based tourism and didn’t want to see the river in their backyards get turned into a sludgy mess.  It was odd that the state government, which had spent much of the last decade playing up Meghalaya as a tourist destination in large part by promoting the splendor of the Umngot would go and allow the river to be wrecked, but it seemed that the powers that be felt the statewide energy benefits of the project would outweigh the localized environmental degradation.

But then the government changed its mind. The project has been scrapped…at least for now. While the protests against the dam didn’t immediately force the government to change course, they garnered enough attention in the Indian media that the project became steadily more controversial. Sensibly, the current administration in Meghalaya doesn’t want to be associated with the ruination of the cleanest river in India.

It can be fashionable among conservationists and environmentalists to see every problem as invariably getting worse. I suppose this is understandable, given the current state of the world. But intractable pessimism is ultimately self-fulfilling. If one is always convinced the world is ending and that there’s no way to stop it, then there’s no reason to do anything, which only speeds things downhill.

It’s impossible to deny the scale of what has been swept away in recent decades. Many magnificent root bridges are now long-gone. Worryingly huge swathes of the region’s natural jungle have been stripped bare. While the Umngot has survived, other rivers across the state are either scheduled to be dammed or are horribly polluted with mining runoff. With the death of every village elder, more unrecorded myths, beliefs, and folk history is consigned to oblivion. 

At the same time, there are vastly more Khasis determined to keep their culture alive now than even when I began visiting a decade ago. The opposition to the Umngot dam is proof that both the state government and the villages are well aware of the need to save the wonder that is Meghalaya.     

Much of the beauty of the old Khasi Hills has been lost. But more will survive, and new things will grow.

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It was about 600 meters from the metal bridge up to Jarain. I climbed all the way without stopping. Then I came out of the jungle and stepped onto the cool windswept limestone moors at the rim of the Umngot canyon. In front of me was a little town full of tidy houses: Jarain.

 The path led me towards the settlement over a dusty field where hundreds of local ladies, speaking a dialect of the Jaintia language, were out working with hand tools, building a concrete walkway as part of a government-funded construction project. They were all so deeply concentrated on the task at hand that I was well in amongst them before they noticed the Phareng in their midst. Then I asked someone if there was a place where I could stay the night.

And the trek was done.

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