Namaste, Stranger
Copyright© 2026 by Art Samms
Epilogue
Months later, at the height of spring in the rural Pacific Northwest, Jack had mapped out the boundaries of a new horizon.
It wasn’t edged with mountains, nor softened by monsoon mist. Instead, it opened wide across a basin of scrubland and riverbeds, cottonwoods tracing thin green lines through ochre soil. Eastern Oregon had not been a place he’d ever imagined himself. But neither had Nepal, once.
The office sat in a low, sun-bleached building near the county watershed authority—a modest operation coordinating erosion control, wildfire recovery, and rural water education across a string of small towns. Jack’s title was unassuming: Regional Environmental Program Coordinator. The work, however, was anything but.
He spent his days moving between school gyms and council chambers, dusty roads and burned slopes. He taught teenagers how to read runoff patterns. He sat with farmers whose wells were failing. He worked with tribal leaders restoring creek banks with native grasses. The skills he had honed halfway around the world—listening first, designing second, staying present when progress felt glacial—fit here with unexpected precision.
No one called him a volunteer anymore. No one assumed he was passing through. That, he realized, mattered more than he’d once understood.
He rented a small house near the edge of town, where the evenings were quiet and the stars sharp. On his kitchen wall hung a single framed photograph: a lakeside path in Pokhara at dawn, taken by Anjana, sent months earlier with no caption. He hadn’t asked for another. He didn’t need one.
Jack woke early now, not from restlessness, but from purpose. His calendar stretched forward in steady, legible lines. Projects overlapped. Plans extended years ahead. For the first time in his adult life, the future did not feel provisional.
He wasn’t rebuilding himself anymore. Now, he was building—carefully, patiently—something meant to last.
Late one evening, after the house had settled into its quiet, Jack opened his laptop and followed a familiar path through bookmarks he no longer needed to label.