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.
