Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  The next morning, closer to town, we watched the wrestling. Silk tents were pitched in a great circle on a greensward. Cavalry kept the crowd more or less in order, though periodically spectators rushed forward and threatening words were exchanged. The judges sat under a blue canopy adorned with white sacred symbols. Music played loudly; people jostled one another for good views or shady spots. One by one, the wrestlers came out in long leather del, paraded past the cheering crowd, then removed their coats to reveal hand-embroidered wrestler’s garb. Each solemnly performed an eagle dance around a judge, then slapped the front and the back of his thighs (thwack! thwack! and thwack! thwack! ). Next, partners began sparring according to ancient rules, striving not to touch the earth except with their feet and the open palms of their hands, while forcing their opponents, with a hair-raising mix of weight and precision, down to the ground.

  Nearby, the archers were competing, firing slender arrows over a long meadow. The men shot from a back line; the women, in white silk, stood a few feet closer to the targets. On another field was a pickup game of polo. Small stands sold cakes, carpets, or radios. The hillside that formed the backdrop for the events was a wash of color: the revelers had pitched a small village there. The smell of meat cooking on open fires mixed with scents of curdled airag and the wild thyme that the wrestlers were trampling. I could have lived five years on the hospitality the Mongolians offered. I photographed one man who looked particularly noble in his saddle, and he swept me up onto his horse. From that lofty height I watched the sport as his friends asked me questions and gave me cow’s-milk liquor.

  We left the Naadam, and as we traveled deeper into Övörkhangai Province (Kharkhorin is on its northern edge), the paved roads stopped. Imagine the worst dirt road you’ve driven. Now envision the worst stretch of that road; now that worst stretch in the rain; now that worst stretch in the rain immediately after an earthquake. You see in your mind’s eye one of the better roads in Mongolia. We crossed muddy fields where it was impossible to see the road, and we forded rivers when our driver thought the bridges looked unstable. It was rough going, and more than once we had to get out to push our car—or to assist others whose cars had given up.

  But despite the wild jolting, the magnificence of that drive will stay with me forever. The great hills were nearly mountains. There were, however, no trees; and grazing animals had cropped the lush grass so low that it was as smooth as a golf course. A brook flowed through the bottom of a valley, and yellow flowers bloomed all around. Slender columns of smoke came from a ger here and there. Herds feasted on the vegetation: yaks and cows and sheep and goats and even the occasional stray camel from the Gobi, and astonishing numbers of horses running free. There were no predators and no hiding places; the feeling was of sublime peace.

  Every so often a herdsman would come into view, smoking a pipe, watching his flock; children played and laughed by the water’s edge. Women emerging from their gers surveyed the scene with satisfaction as they arranged trays of cheese on their roofs to dry. Eagles circled overhead in deliberate patterns, while smaller birds flew lower. Marmots darted from their holes and scampered in and out of sight. Here were innocent stretches of earth that had been neither exploited nor deliberately preserved. I have never encountered a terrain that was at once so magnificent and so unthreatening; no evidence of the monstrous force of nature was here, but only the golden, the light, the perfect.

  Of all the animals of Mongolia, I loved the yaks most. Large and inept, with vain faces and a gratuitous leg-obscuring fringe similar to what you’d find on a Victorian sofa, they moved with the disgruntled self-assurance of old ladies elaborately done up in tattered versions of bygone fashions. A few spry creatures waved their absurd fluffy tails in the air like parasols or darted daringly across the road, mad great-aunts with spring fever. Most of them eyed us dubiously, offering no threat but preserving an air of mild disapproval. They liked being photographed; they would gaze straight into the camera and blink flirtatiously.

  Almost none of the land in Mongolia belongs to anyone; it never has. You may drive over any part you want; you may pitch a tent wherever you like. A herder in the Gobi Desert said to me, “When I move my ger, I feel the exhilaration of possibilities and freedom. I can go anywhere, put my house anywhere, take my flock anywhere, except maybe some few little places where they built a city.” He stopped for a moment to pour me tea with camel’s milk. “Tell me, is America also a free country?” For the first time in my patriotic life, I found that question difficult to answer. One-third of Mongolians live below the poverty level, but when I talked about the American dream, that herder said, “Why would a son want a different life from his father’s?” I asked about his young children, who were playing underfoot. “I am sending them to school,” he said, “and if they want to be politicians or businessmen, that is up to them. I went to school and I chose to remain a herder; I hope they will make that choice also, because I can imagine no better life.” The fashionable wisdom is that capitalism has won out over communism, but I left Mongolia persuaded that these two systems had never been opposites, that the real opposite of both is nomadism, a way of life that can be as close to joyful anarchy as humankind will ever reach.

  We stopped several times for gas as we traveled south toward the Gobi. The desert starts gradually: bit by bit the plants become sparse, and then the land flattens. The smooth, glorious grass fades away. We drove for hours and hours across Dundgovi (Middle Gobi) Province, which was dull and bleak. Then we came to Ömnögovi (South Gobi), where the sand was even and yellow, and vegetation almost entirely absent. An hour or two later we arrived at one of the Gobi “forests,” full of plants with thick stems and thin leaves, like old driftwood stuck in the sand and decorated with arugula. After that, the real desert began: flat, without ornament of any kind, and vast, vast, vast.

  We spent the night at the Bayanzag—a region known as the Flaming Cliffs—where great crumbling formations of limestone, bright red and warm gold, frame and reframe the desert around them. The wind brayed at us through tunnels carved into the cliffs. In the distance we could see snowcapped mountains. Fossils were everywhere, as though the dinosaurs hadn’t bothered to clean up when they moved on to their next campsite.

  The guides, the photographer, and I decided to spend that moonless night with some camel herders, so we simply stopped at their ger and introduced ourselves. The camels of Mongolia don’t spit at you as Arabian camels do. They are curious creatures that turn to follow you as you pass. Their two humps are topped with tufts of long fur. When they lack water, their humps droop like aging bosoms. At night, they howl—an eerie sound, like the spirits of purgatory crying out.

  I liked the herders at once. There were a brother and sister and their spouses, none older than twenty-five; their parents, who’d recently departed after a long visit, were encamped within a day’s ride. The couples readily answered our questions. So I learned that camels are easier to take care of than sheep; your flock will not mix with others. You let the adult camels roam during the day, but you stay with the babies and yearlings and guide them home in the evenings. The mothers return to be with the calves, and the males follow them, so the herd stays together. Camels yield good wool and can manage with infrequent meals. About five times a year, the herders pack their gers onto their camels to seek better grazing land.

  We had by then learned basic ger etiquette, so we knew that men sit on the west side and women on the east, that you are always given something to eat and drink, and that it’s rude not to try what you are given. Usually you get milk tea, made with tea, salt, sugar, and whatever milk is on hand (this time, camel milk), and often you get airag. The herders made us soup from dried mutton, and we added some onions and potatoes we had brought from UB. These items were new to them. The onions they liked; the potatoes they found “disgusting,” complaining that they “had the texture of dirt.” At night, a ger is usually lit by a single candle, and in the flickering light we talked until it was late an
d the children started dropping off on the floor. Not wanting to take the only beds in the ger, we returned to our tents just outside.

  The next day the rain began. It seemed unfair that there should be heavy rain in South Gobi Province, where the annual precipitation is about five inches. It seemed particularly unfair that it went on for three days, making the road we took as we headed back toward Ulaanbaatar virtually invisible and barely navigable. It seemed utterly unfair that our tents were not waterproof as guaranteed and that none of us ever quite dried out. And it seemed cruelly unfair that I had gotten sick from something I had eaten at the Naadam and that it was now kicking in with a vengeance. I felt as though I were a dry-clean-only item in a mobile washing machine. We got stuck twice. We jacked up the vehicle, checked the tires, tore up nearby plants, and established traction by laying the branches underneath. I had just finished reading the manuscript of a friend’s novel, and its pages did well for getting the wheels reengaged. The earth might as well have been made of marshmallow.

  For the first half of our trip we enjoyed camping and driving and staying in a different place every night. But now we’d had enough of it, so a friend and I flew north to stay in Khövsgöl Province for the rest of the trip. It’s hard to write about Khövsgöl in a fittingly superlative tone after having described Övörkhangai’s very different beauty. We took a bumpy four-hour jeep ride to Khövsgöl Lake National Park. Having a national park in the middle of Mongolia is like having an urban development zone in midtown Manhattan, but in principle it means that hunting is forbidden, which explains why the wildlife is particularly plentiful there. Khövsgöl Lake contains three-quarters of Mongolia’s fresh water; it is enormous, lovely, dark, and deep. On its banks are fields of wildflowers so brilliant you might think you were looking at a shoreline of butterflies. All around the lake are steep mountains. There are no buildings with foundations anywhere. Each morning we decided whether to take a boat ride or go hiking or ride horses or ride yaks (which no one who had a horse would ever choose to do except for the novelty of it).

  I’d heard of the Mongolian reindeer people, the shamanist Tsaatan, and had always wanted to meet them. The five-hundred-odd members of this race keep far from the beaten path; anthropologists and devoted travelers often have to ride three or four days through the woods northwest of the park to find them. We were in luck, however: a Tsaatan child had spent the night nearby, and he agreed to lead us to his cousins. We were told it was an hour’s drive and then a three-mile walk. We had not fully understood that it was a three-mile vertical walk, but we climbed gamely with our seven-year-old guide and a few relatives he had gathered in the valley—assimilationists who had turned to goatherding. We followed a mountain stream that runs into the lake. As we ascended, the view opened up behind us. From time to time the boy would point out a bear’s cave or an eagle or a deer.

  After about three hours of hiking we found ourselves above the tree line, and on the crest of the mountain we could just make out an ortz (one of the conical tepees the Tsaatan inhabit) and a herd of animals. Soon we were at the encampment of the reindeer people. In their dwelling we were given the usual warm welcome, reindeer-milk tea, some nasty cheese, and fried biscuits. (“Cooked in reindeer fat?” I asked the oldest woman. She reached behind a cabinet. “We prefer sunflower oil these days,” she said, showing me the bottle.) Along the side of the tepee were various practical hooks made from antlers, and a few reindeer-skin bags. We asked about a small bundle, hanging opposite the door, of feathers, ribbons, dried flowers, a duck foot, and part of an antler. We were told that it was a magical device, and they made clear that further questions about it were not welcome. The boy who had brought us said that his mother was a shaman.

  Then we went outside to see the animals: three snow-white reindeer and twenty-seven brown ones. I’d always thought of reindeer as inhabiting an eternal December; these had shed their heavy winter coats and seemed happy with the afternoon sun. They came over to rub their noses and heads against us. Their antlers were furry and sensitive, and we soon discovered that they loved to have them scratched. The father in the Tsaatan family saddled one up and let me try it out. Reindeer sway as they trot, and an amateur rider’s natural impulse, upon feeling he is about to slide off, is to grab on to the thing in front of him—which is, alas, their antlers. Doing so, as I found to my chagrin and to the Tsaatan family’s immense amusement, jerks back the reindeer’s head and sends him running. Reindeer are a great deal faster than you think.

  I was glad to return to Ulaanbaatar, which is a funny, mixed-up city, with grand neoclassical Russian buildings, Buddhist monasteries, and grim housing from the Communist era. Throughout the city, people have a wry, ironic view of the Cold War government, whose monuments are ubiquitous. In one museum, a Turkish restaurant has opened under the eighty-foot-high mosaic of Lenin. When I walked in, I saw two signs: one on the wall that said WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! and the other on a freshly whitewashed stand that said DRINKS HALF-PRICE BEFORE 6:00!

  In 1931, a third of Mongolia’s male population lived in monasteries, and the nation’s wealth was concentrated in Buddhist holy places. Stalin’s thugs destroyed almost all of these, but a few remain. The most splendid is the Gandan Monastery in UB, the biggest monastery in Mongolia, at the center of which is a Buddha almost a hundred feet tall, enclosed in a tight-fitting pagoda. Dozens of monks in long robes offer prayers inside and outside, and the aura of peace is strong even with the crowds of noisy tourists shoving through. I ran into my friend the monk from the Beijing train, and he greeted me with warm smiles and talked excitedly about his family.

  We had also visited the great monastery in Kharkhorin, named Erdene Zuu, which felt more ancient, less touristed, more hallowed. The monks there, ages six to ninety, strolled through the unkempt courtyards in long red robes; inside the temples others chanted prayers, beat drums, and lit candles in front of golden Buddhas carved by Mongolia’s great seventeenth-century king and sculptor, Zanabazar. Worshippers made offerings and pressed their foreheads to images of the divine, then turned the prayer wheels. For $2, you could get the monks to recite special prayers for you and your livestock.

  The essence of Mongolia outclasses the sights; anywhere in Mongolia (outside Ulaanbaatar) you can see what you need to see, which is an innocent landscape and an immutable culture. Afterward, if you especially want to explore the Gobi or Khövsgöl or find some yaks, you can go ahead and do that, too. In China, people take a curious nationalist pride in the idea that no foreigner will ever penetrate the complexity of their society. Russians believe that their despair is a state no Westerner can attain or affect. Mongolians, however, seem gloriously clear about their place in the world and are delighted if you want to join them there. You get a feeling in Mongolia not simply of history, but of eternity.

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  Nomadism is declining in Mongolia; intense recent migration means that half the population now resides in Ulaanbaatar, many in vast shantytowns that ring the city. A fifth of the country lives below the poverty line. Though Mongolia remains a democracy, riots have occurred lately over election fraud, and former president Nambar Enkhbaya has been convicted of corruption and sent to prison. The environmental situation is getting sadder. Mining operations and overgrazing combined with global warming are leading to wide desertification and a significant loss of plant density. Many animals, hunted for Chinese medicine or for their pelts, are at record low numbers.

  But meaningful progress occurs, too. Modernity comes in fits and starts. The National Solar Ger Electrification Program seeks to equip nomads with portable, renewable sources of electricity. In 2011, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee designated Naadam as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Among the many shifts that reflect the move away from the Communist past, I found it particularly charming that the Lenin Museum has been turned into a dinosaur museum.

  GREENLAND

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  Inventing the Conversation

  The Noonday Demo
n, 2001

  Greenland is not terribly far from the United States or Europe, but few Americans or Europeans go there. In this place of transcendent beauty, a traditional way of life and modern technology are delicately balanced. If your country had to be colonized, you might choose Danish overlords. The Danes have invested heavily in infrastructure, medical care, and schooling. However, residents of the planet’s least densely populated nation speak Greenlandic, an Eskimo-Aleut tongue, as their first language and Danish as their second—which does not equip them particularly well for the global economy.

  * * *

  In a quest to examine diverse cultural constructions of depression, I visited the Inuit peoples of Greenland—in part because depression is pervasive among them, and in part because the culture’s attitudes toward it are distinctive. Depression affects as many as 80 percent of Greenlanders. How can one organize a society in which depression occurs so widely? Greenland is integrating the ways of an ancient society with the realities of the modern world, and transitional societies—African tribal communities that are being folded into larger nations, nomadic cultures that are being urbanized, subsistence farmers who are being incorporated into larger-scale agricultural production systems—often have high levels of depression. Even in the traditional context, however, depression has always been common among the Inuit, and the suicide rate has been high (though it dropped by nearly half with the introduction of television); in some areas, about one in three hundred people commits suicide each year. Some might say that this is God’s way of indicating to people that they shouldn’t live in such a forbidding place—yet most Inuit have not abandoned their ice-bound lives to migrate south. They have adapted to tolerate the difficulties of life within the Arctic Circle.