Namche Bazaar-(Hillary Bridge)-LuklaOn this bridge, I am not a separate human subject imprinting and moving the inert nonhuman. Rather I am a part of a dynamic assemblage wherein the more-than-human, human, and nonhuman intra-act. The bridge becomes so much more than a discursive symbol, but a doing and becoming with the phenomenon of tourism in Khumbu. This intra-action involves my muscles lifting to tie the prayer flags to the bridge, the wind that blows the flags up valley, the gravity and physics of the bridge construction pulling it down, the weight of the pack and the slight hyperextension of my knees. Within that is the cultural manifested on printed fabrics, with sacred mantras on each - the flags - cosmologies of Sherpa Tibetan Buddhism and the modern mysticism that travelers connect to prayer flags. The movement of the wind, weight of the pack, instability of the suspension bridge are all “active forces that intra-act with [my] body and mind and that [I] have to work with and against” … I am active in this case, but in this “new materialist perspective, I cannot be thought upon in terms of a superior autonomous and intentional humanist subject” (Hultman & Taguchi, 2010, p. 530). The wind, the prayer flags, the bridge, and the physics are active and playing with me just as much as I do with it - as I am in a state of becoming with the bridge, the bridge is in a state of becoming with me (Deleuze, 1990 in Hultman & Taguchi, 2010). The bridge is neither inert in space and time; the haunting of the historicity, of Hillary’s charity and the tallest peak in the world are woven into the meaning of this bridge as much as the steel wires holding it taut.