Barriers of Every Sort

So, like I was saying, we left Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in a southbound car headed for the 3000 year old Silk Road city of Osh. I had envisioned something along the lines of those big old hunky South American buses, all painted and hung with frills, puttering along with its deep and gaseous bellow to get us where we needed to go. But, in fact, there seemed no other option than to take a small car piloted by a duo of men who planned to pack it well beyond capacity and drive all night. Once we found the ride and demanded a fair price, my brother and I got in and waited for the seats to fill.

By a lucky chance, we found ourselves in the company of a Kyrgyz man who'd been a foreign exchange student in Kansas some 8 years before, and we had some good talks along the 14 hour ride over two rugged mountain ranges. Strangely, he spoke English with the same quirky accent that I relate to the Tonkawa and Navajo people I've spoken with, and he told me all about his time in America. Kansas was quite boring, he said, but he thought Chicago was great. Taco Bell was delicious, but he noticed a bold tendency towards obesity in his high school class. Americans, he said, drive for even the shortest distances, and he couldn’t understand why they were so shocked to see him eat bread all by itself. On that note, American bread, he said, was not bread at all. But, he liked the country and hopes one day to return.

            Before the car ride, I had told my brother stories of long night time bus rides in South America, bouncing over hopelessly bumpy roads with loud blaring salsa music keeping the drivers alert all night long, but also keeping my eyes open like full perfect circles, loathing the absurdity of my sleepless situation. I had hoped that he, my brother, would be fortunate enough to grapple with the same sort of night, and I was quite content to find our ride be all the same, save salsa replaced with traditional Kyrgyz songs.

"Old people like this music," my friend said of the songs. "We used to sing these songs after we broke from the Soviet Union, during the difficult times. That's why old people like to remember." In fact, as I learned, general expressions of traditional culture was forbidden (to such an extent that it could be policed) during the Soviet Union, and all peoples were forcibly encouraged to adopt the new Soviet culture, which was not Kyrgyz or Kazakh or Uzbek or anything else. Actually, it was quite Russian. So, upon the fall, the identity crisis that ensued prompted people to walk away from their several generations of Russian tradition and rediscover their own. Among such rediscoveries were the songs of the Kyrgyz people’s nomadic ancestors, many of which have been sung to those lands for many, many centuries past. 

`Sometime in the middle of the night, our driver stopped to switch with his co-pilot, and accordingly found his way to a late-night roadside stand for a nice tall glass of Russian vodka before his sleep. But, as it turns out, the new driver was no so directionally inclined, and quickly lost his way on the dark mountain roads. So, they switched back. Christopher put on his seat belt, but I, sitting in a spot never intended for a person to sit in, had no such accommodation. Rather, I decided to plan some bracing position, tucked under the seat in front of me, that I could quickly assume in the case of a crash. It almost certainly would not have helped me, but with our good luck, it was not necessary.

We arrived at Osh near day break, having slept so little that night, and picked up our bags to continue the journey.

            "Hey!" shouted our friend. "Where are you going? It’s too early. Get some rest."

Never had I heard such a welcome invitation. So we, along with the other occupants of the small van, passed out for two hours, flopped over the seats inside, sleeping off the early hours until life picked up in the city. Then, we set out to find out next ride in a small vehicle disturbingly similar to the one from which we then emerged.

            The drive to Osh over the Kyrgyz mountain ranges in the dark had taken about 12 hours, and, from what we could understand, the Chinese border was just about 10 hours away. With a sense of impending victory, anticipating our arrival to the destination that had thus far proved harder to reach than we had imagined, we were off to the high mountains pass of Irkestam, where the border crossing facilities are located. It was again a long ride, winding up high green grassy mountains, past encampments of modern day nomads living in yurts with horses, donkeys, and sheep, watching their flocks as they wandered about the paradise fields, and procuring their foods by age-old ancestral methods around a fire.

            At one point the road took us past a large yurt and homestead on the side of the mountain and the car stopped at the word of the oldest man. Our English-speaking fried said to us, “He wants to invite you for a bowl of kymyz.”

            Kymyz, I happened to know, is fermented horse milk – a sort of dairy beer. I had drunk it before, but had never really enjoyed it. It gets you tipsy, sure, but for a weak baby’s stomach like me, it also gets you sick and gassy. But, we could not decline. We took of our shoes to enter the yurt, the inside of which was lined with wool blankets on the floor, ceiling, and one circular wall. A steel stove burnt wood for warmth, as those mountains are chilly in the summer (I can’t even fathom the winters there). We sat cross-legged around a tabled laid with bread and hardened balls of salty milk curds, and the owner of the home, a hefty old woman, brought before us three large bowls of the milk, which I expect was drawn from the horse we’d passed to come inside.

            The milk essentially tastes like what Americans would call ‘bad milk.’ Its not quite the same of course, because it’s both drawn from a different animal and left to ferment in a most eloquent and practiced manner. But still, I found a lesson here. Many things that we consider bad or even unsafe to eat are not so. These phrases are just a way of side stepping the truth. This food is not good enough for us. For people who take their livelihood from the land by the products of their own toil in the natural manner of human beings that goes so many hundreds of thousands of years back, there is no such thing as ‘not good enough for us.’ Once you are able to think in this way you’ll ask yourself, “Does this really taste bad or have I just convinced myself of that from the start? Is there actually any reason that this food should be paired with this adjective: bad? Or, am I simply espousing the training I’ve received from people far, far away from here who’d learned to live a life that neither I nor any of my surrounding companions are living here?”

            Well, the kymyz was good, and it made it easy to quickly fall asleep.

            The rest of our car ride took us through some of the most dramatic terrain I’ve ever witnessed. We ascended slowly a range of mountains that forms part of the same macro-range of the Himalayas; thousands of miles and millions of tons of Earth thrust upwards to the sky by the South Asian tectonic plate smashing steadily, intently, and yet furiously into the rest of Eurasia. For many hours we continued up and up, until the trees began to disappear and jagged rock faces protruded with a monumental grace from the living cover of vegetation. Then, things got muddy: giant riverbeds plastered with the fine red silt ground by high glaciers, the melted waters of which saturate the ground each year from Spring to early Fall. Farther up the range, the water never melted at all. Coming over a crest, the highest point the road would take us, we found an almost psychedelic landscape. There, in those mountains, the snow hadn’t melted for many thousands of years, and had created its own kind of glacial ground. Compressed by its own weight accumulating every season since the dawn of mankind, the icy crystals has been smash so eloquently over the face of those massive mountains that it seemed like a rough blueprint for Earth. The most basic texture was there – that which you’d see from outer space, but the fine details on it were gone. No color, no pumps, no rocks, no trees, just a thick glacial plaster that was smooth in every sense. It was June, and we were along latitude close to that of San Francisco. 

             The high crest of this range separate Kyrgyzstan from Western China, so the border facilities were located just below this highest pass. We arrived in the early afternoon. Victory. We had arrived. I’d spent the past few months in Central Asia, and the adrenaline surge prompted by total helplessness and ignorance to everything around had subsided somewhat as I’d grown more and more comfortable with the people’s way of being (and their language, not to mention). Now, I was pumped to be at it again, diving into another great unknown to explore and build ideas from very bottom on up. Victory, at last. The new journey was about to begin.

"The border's closed," we were told. "It will open on Monday morning." It was Saturday.

            I turned and looked around. The place we had landed in was not a village, but rather more like a trashy encampment; the ruins of trailer park. Along a 100 meter length of road, amidst heaped up piles of accumulated garbage and food waste, about 30 rusted out Soviet trailers housed the unfortunate inhabitants of the 4000 meter high pass. The mud was dotted with homemade toilet facilities, built of whatever material could be salvaged and nailed together in a square around a hole in the ground. I will now discuss these toilets in some more gruesome detail, so feel free to abstain from the paragraph that follows.

            First, I will describe the design. A large hold had been dug in the ground, approximately 2 feet in diameter and two meters or so deep. On top of that hole a surface was placed. Because construction materials didn’t often make their way so far up the mountains, no single piece of wood (or anything) was large enough to sturdily cover these holes, so something was nailed together and supported on rocks or even tied at points to create a chunky composite surface of garbage. In the very center of this surface, directly above the hole in the ground, a rectangular hole, approximately five by twelve inches, was cut, and foot-sized board were nailed to the ground on either side. These boards served as pedestals on which the feet could be placed while the owner of the feet assumed a squatting position aimed straight down into that hole. The ‘walls’ that surrounded the floor of this bathroom facility were similarly constructed: any imaginable sort of material was heaped up, attached with ropes, nails, or simply gravity, to create some sort of vision barrier. Essentially, it was a dark stinky cave of garbage suspended above a great pit of shit. There were two poignantly unpleasant aspects of using these toilets. First, they were an insatiably popular hang-out for the flies; I guess sort of their equivalent to a pub. This proves unfortunate when one assumes the functional position. If you can imagine this sort of squat, with your knees up in your armpits, you could understand how vast regions of generally well-insulated and protected flesh are suddenly exposed to the air, and these deep forbidden crevices are also, it turns out, really nice places to be in the minds of the flies. They jump at the chance to slurp some fresh human slime, and activity which is unsettling to host. The next really bothersome thing is that, given the constraints of a community without any sort of government services (mostly garbage disposal), throwing toilet paper into the hole that was so laboriously dug to store human waste is really a waste of your effort. You wouldn’t want your hole to fill up so quickly with paper then go off to dig another one already. But, at the same time, ‘trash cans’ are a silly idea, because once trash is in the trash can, where does it go? No garbage trucks come to get it, so it must be inevitably dumped into heaping piles on the ground. For who knows how many generations, industrial waste has accumulated at this encampment – plastic, paper, concrete, and rubber. Also, toilet paper. These little bathrooms are surrounded by the soiled papers of all their patrons passed, and these damp mounts of paper, brown and yellow with the occasional red, also make a great hang-out for the local fly population, and must be sidestepped in order to achieve optimal positioning over the hole in the floor. To cap things all off, these ramshackle constructions bore all the marks of a bathroom not cleaned since ever. To be more explicit, large parts of the inside were crusted with dried shit.

            But, enough of that. Back to the present moment, in which China had once again repelled us for a few more days. I got a sinking feeling as that word, “closed,” ran over through my head, and my mind raced to identify alternative options to waiting it out in that filthy camp. But in the obvious foreground was the concession that, so long as the border was closed, we would be in Irkestam. China: still not yet.

By the nature of the border crossing, a long line of freight trucks was amassing before the closed gate, anticipating their crossing into China come the start of the work week. As a result, the encampment took on a sort of disgusting liveliness, as if it were some filthy medieval trade hub. The truckers spent most of their two waiting days sitting with calm indifference in their trucks, which offer far less living accommodations than American big rigs. They drunk tea and vodka and smoked cigarettes: a lot of cigarettes. At other times, they paid the women of the trailer household a few com (currency) to be served tea and eggs or to pick through a collection of pirated DVDs to watch on the TV. My brother and I found a shanty hotel, one of two solid brick buildings in the town, and drank ourselves to sleep the first night, wondering how we would pass the day to come.

In the morning we headed out of the population center, back in the direction our car had come from, to hike in the mountains. In a quite ironic fashion, the hideous scar on the earth that is Irkestam was set just in front of some spectacular high mountain peaks, blanketed flawlessly in a smooth and purely white coat of snow, shining with a heavenly brilliance as proud pillars in the sky. This was beauty in its realest form, I thought. There was beauty in its scale: inconceivably massive, like all of the New York City metro-plex ground into rubble and piled upon itself several times over. There was beauty in its color: white as pure as white could be here on Earth. It was a perfect juxtaposition of peace and power, a gently raging force that tore the planet’s crust apart and thrust it towards the sky with such graceful agility. There was beauty in its nature: it had made itself. The colossal pillars upon which I gazed in that pass were not an art project nor were ever mean to decorate some human’s home, but were simply the by-products of simple metabolic cosmic activity. Yet, they could never be outdone except by the same natural forces on a larger scale.

And, rather unpleasantly, there were the humans dumping filth upon its majesty. The pass was a necessary place for commerce, and thousands of trucks moved goods between China and Central Asia, filling great bazaars with every imaginable manufactured good – from TVs to pots and pans to shirts and sandals, decorations, electronic gadgets, furniture, bicycles, blankets, and anything that you could possibly imagine finding on the shelves of Wal-Mart. All of it is born in the industrial complex of the far, far East and then dispersed on trucks and trains and boats and planes around the whole entire world. That is the reason why people lived in such gut-wrenching conditions: they had to. Someone had to. And all those people needed food and drinks and other basic commodities, all of which come in a frail wrapping of garbage – bags, bottles, plastic, paper, etc. All these things, once emptied of their humble nutritional contents, lie eternally below the mountain’s majesty. Where outside of our own kind do we encounter ugliness? Nowhere. There are no ugly mountains, no ugly forest, no ugly river or sea. Ugliness is in garbage, waste, violence, and misery wrought by the vitality of people living in such places where no people should seek to live. We have slums and war zones a refugee camps, garbage dumps ad toxic wastelands, city back alleys and housing projects. As it would seem, we are nature’s tool for crafting the vile.

The entire surrounding region, a river valley cut through the high mountains, sported a treeless high-elevation environment with thin air and piercing rays of sun. On our way out of town, a woman with (relatively) impressively coherent English capabilities stopped us, professed her love for foreigners, told us how rare it was to meet such different people, and invited us to her home that evening for a meal and a good night’s rest. We agree to find her upon our return.

And, over the course of our 5 or so mile hike through the mountains, my brother and I got separated when he opted to scramble 150 meters up the side of a steep slope of cascading gravel, and I opted for the more obvious lower route by the side of the river. Once our paths diverged past earshot and out of sight, we didn’t encounter again until we’d both crossed the terrain on our own and found Irkestam once more. AS fortune had it, I had the water, and he had my shirt, so when we met some five hours later, I was ravishly sunburnt, roasted by the inescapable sun without shelter of a single tree for shade or even a standard hefty atmosphere for protection, and he was dehydrated. But, our evening had us making hopeless conversation with Kyrgyz, Chinese, Tajik, and Pakistani truckers, sitting on the floor around this old woman's table. Those conversations mark the height of my Russian language capabilities, which, after 4 months of survival in Almaty, reside around the level of a half competent 4-year-old who’s been struck soundly in the head. But, we communicate in was more than words. I’ve learned to laugh a lot in such conversations as these, laugh mostly because I have no idea what they are trying to say. Often times they laugh for the same reason, and as we sit together over dinner, our small group of absurd encounters – some big fat truckers who espoused Soviet nostalgia in every way, a skinny Tajik man with a sheep skin (and hair) vest and a decorated pill box hat, the old women of the mountain pass, cooking on the most rudimentary assembly of industrial cooking equipment, and my brother and I, two dirty white Americans – we all laughed about how strange it was to be sitting together. With may language capabilities, I was able to communicate that we two were brothers, that I had lived in Kazakhstan, that we were going to China, that I was 20 years old and that my brother was 18. From them, I could not gather so much, except that they were ecstatically please to be meeting me.

Often times the fattest and loudest man of the group would grab my shoulder tenderly, look me in the they eyes, and speak to me. I would reply, almost always, with a thumbs up and “да, да, да.” – “Yes, yes, yes.” Sometimes they would all howl with laughter, and others the leader would let out a whooping “Yeppah!” They had great fun, and I enjoyed myself in their company thoroughly.

Through the crude translation services of our host, one Chinese trucker agreed to drive us over the border come morning and leave us in the first town on the other side.

            Then, together, we retired to the trailer’s second half to watch some Russian mafia TV series with the truckers until the day became too much to bear and we fell asleep on the floor, then we were so kindly blanketed by our hostess. In the morning, it seemed, we might possibly be entering that great mysterious land that had thus far proved surprisingly hard to find.