Handmade Blog is light this week because I’ve got another professional licensure exam (hopefully the last). But I’ll set my readers to an interesting task: visit the town of Tange, Nepal. Zoom in with Google Earth until you can see the small collection of terraced plots of land. What are they growing? The mud brick or stone houses look to be going up, coming down, or a little of both. Do people still live here? Good luck finding a road into this place, or even an easily navigable trail. This place is somewhere but also nowhere, a stony convergence of dry riverbeds in an arid warren of mountains, itself in a jumble of rock and snow the result of the Indian subcontinent’s slow-motion crash into Asia. I’d post a picture but it would ruin the surprise of finding it yourself, zooming out from Google Earth to realize there are places in the world like this, the tiniest barnacles of human existence in a place that would seem anathema to life. I’d like to visit Tange someday.
Writer, architect, father, husband.
Ask my dad. He was in Nepal a month ago.