Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  By tradition you don’t enrol at Oxford, you “come up,” and graduating is called “going down.” Not since biking onto and off the Tibetan Plateau had this terminology been so existentially apt. In a blur I packed my bags and my bike and caught a flight to Ontario. My brother Dave drove me to Massachusetts, where a middle school teacher named Sara welcomed me into the house I would share with her and two others, including a pale, furtive woman who rarely emerged from her room and then only mincingly, on tiptoe. As we passed her closed door Sara whispered, as if by way of explanation, “She also goes to MIT.” Then she directed me to my room, a crawlspace that would just barely fit my futon mattress if I bent it like a hot dog bun. “Oh yeah,” Sara said as she left me to unpack. “Some mail came for you.”

  What does it mean when you build your own walls? You have no one to blame but yourself for inhabiting them. My hands shook as I tore open the thin white envelope from Oxford, which I knew contained my degree results. I reminded myself that it didn’t matter, that the history of science was just a detour, a side trip, a delirium of work that felt, confusingly, like deep play.

  I read the slip of paper. Read it again. Several worlds slid past me at different speeds.

  MIT started promisingly enough, despite the gutting regret brought on by the unexpected “distinction” on my master’s degree from Oxford. I’d barely unpacked my bags when my Ph.D. adviser, Dr. Tanja Bosak, sent me with her other students to Yellowstone National Park for fieldwork. Born in Croatia and trained at Caltech, Tanja was a brilliant scholar, a kind and encouraging mentor, and the sort of scientist who mostly preferred studying the natural world from within the walls of a laboratory, a preference I realized belatedly. In what should’ve been a warning sign, she didn’t seem especially heartbroken about missing a week of fieldwork in the Wyoming backcountry. “Don’t forget the bear spray,” she reminded us, her eyes bright with the barely suppressed cheer of someone relieved at being left behind.

  Every day the other students and I hiked around Yellowstone’s hot springs in search of samples, collecting slimy blobs of microbial mats from boiling puddles. Every night we ate dinner around a bonfire beneath the stars, watching geysers spill into the sky like the source of the Milky Way. I could get used to this, I remember thinking as I tucked into my tent each night. But the next time I went camping in the name of science was in my office at MIT.

  When the alarm blared at 6:00 a.m. I sat up in my sleeping bag and bashed my forehead against the desk above me. I’d stayed late working on a problem set that, among other things, asked me to calculate the flux of marine snow to the ocean floor. “What’s marine snow?” I’d furtively questioned a fellow student when the professor handed out the assignment. I pictured polar blizzards, Shackleton’s ship crushed in the Southern Ocean, Nansen drifting in the Northwest Passage at the pace of pack ice.

  “Planktonic fecal pellets,” my classmate clarified.

  By now the bait-and-switch was nearly complete. After returning from Wyoming, Tanja had called me into her office to explain that she had enough students working on the Yellowstone samples. Rather than studying life in extreme environments, how about I focus my Ph.D. on laboratory studies of molecular biomarkers instead? When microbes die, she explained, pieces of them survive as fossils under certain geologic conditions. Fat in particular is as difficult to get rid of in death as in life, and microbial lipids, such as polycyclic triterpenoids, can stick around in sedimentary rocks for billions of years. By comparing these molecular fossils to the lipids of modern micro-organisms, such as Rhodospirillum rubrum, we can piece together the history and evolution of life on Earth. Billions of years ago our home planet was by all measures an alien world, with different contortions of continents and a dearth of oxygen. “Using similar techniques,” Tanja added, “it might be possible to search for traces of life on Mars.”

  She won me over, if reluctantly, at the mention of the red planet, and I moved into the lab for the long haul.

  Why Mars still exerted such an obsessive pull on me I can’t really explain. I was caught in its gravity, I suppose, though any MIT physics student would dismiss that possibility, given the red planet has less mass than the Earth, making its pull a third weaker. Then again, literature grapples with forces science can’t detect or express. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote Joan Didion, and years later, reading those words, I recognized that voyaging to Mars was precisely that for me: a survival narrative I’d cleaved to in a world that seemed mapped and tamed. A fiction awaiting its paradigm shift—to another fiction, perhaps, but a better or at least wilder one.

  But even more than a story, if I’m being honest, Mars was almost a god to me, the galvanizing force of my life, and in that sense MIT was a firm step closer to the divine: after all, the university has graduated more astronauts than any other in the world. The problem was that I wasn’t sure anymore if I wanted to go. Especially if the statistically remote possibility of being selected as a Martian colonist required, in the intervening decades, that I wear clammy purple nitrile gloves and squint down a modified spyglass—not at the moons of Jupiter or even the King’s Arms pub, but at mindless battalions of microbes in a petri dish.

  Which isn’t to say wildness and mystery can’t be found on all scales, from bacteria to black holes. The poet Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand. A vantage tinier than my pinky fingertip yielded to Galileo an infinite vista, pinpricks of light that shattered the godlike perfection and glasslike immutability of the heavens. And so I talked myself into staying in the lab even as I suffered the elder Darwin’s data-driven loss of happiness, and the words of the younger Darwin rang in my ears, urging me “to take all chances and to start on travels by land if possible, if otherwise on a long voyage.” Instead I spent my days parsing apart the microbial equivalent of cholesterol, and my nights solving problem sets on the flux of excrement to the ocean floor. Was it any wonder I began to question the meaning of life?

  “Kate, Kate, Kate,” Tanja would cluck in her lilting Croatian accent. “That’s not a scientific question.” She encouraged me to pose more experimentally tractable queries, such as what kinds of polycyclic triterpenoids are produced by Rhodospirillum rubrum when incubated with varying concentrations of sulphur and oxygen?

  I had to admit I didn’t know.

  “Well, then,” she would say, beaming, “there’s a whole laboratory behind that door in which you can seek the answer!”

  A year came and went in a numbing blur of problem sets and experiments. Other than a two-week summer holiday in India, during which I tried and failed to see the Siachen Glacier, my sleeping bag lived in my office and saw a lot of use. I adored Tanja and didn’t want to let her down, so I tried not to think too much about Oxford, about detours versus destinations. I dated around out of the most flailing loneliness I’d ever felt, hoping the right relationship could remedy the wrong life. I even second-guessed breaking up with Jamie, though in England, where I was happy, I’d rarely doubted the decision. “One word of praise for my writing from you,” he’d written to me, “means more to me than my Oxford degree.” But he hadn’t failed out after all and was completing his doctorate in Development Studies. Most of the Jar Kids had stayed on at Oxford to do the same. The fairy tale continued without me.

  Life only made sense now when I rode my bicycle. I’d taken up cyclocross and mountain bike racing at MIT with my usual reckless avidity, which worried Tanja because the university’s cycling team members often took twice as long to finish their Ph.D.’s. In truth, I suspect racing was the main thing keeping us going: a regular dose of endorphins that made the daily pressure and tedium of lab experiments and problem sets bearable. In the total focus required to stay upright on the rutted, twisting trails of the race courses, I could almost forget the fact of grad school. I went on to medal in the national collegiate mountain biking and cyclocross championships, but competition for me was less about beating others than defying the tyranny of my ruling, rational self: wh
en my mind screamed stop, some more ancient and cardiac instinct urged go.

  So I went, around and around, pretending the race course was a tightly spooled Silk Road. How many laps back to Lhasa? How many pedal strokes to where Siachen noses coldly into the Nubra Valley? It was a relief to give anything my all again, to strain toward something as neat and tangible as a finish line. Was that Fanny Bullock Workman in tweed on my left? And Alexandra David-Néel just ahead, prayer beads rattling on her bike frame? I accelerated to catch them but they always disappeared after a few laps, though I couldn’t see any turnoffs, any alternate paths or escape routes, and the faceless crowd roared. Eventually the world would go mute and I’d be alone again, the elder Darwin mechanically pacing his cottage, or an astronaut looping endlessly in low Earth orbit, digging my own tracks a little deeper each time around.

  What finally sent me spinning back to the Silk Road was a meeting with Dr. Maria Zuber, then the chair of the Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences department at MIT. Slim, resolute, and formidably smart, Zuber always looked to me as if she were leaning into a brisk wind. A geophysicist by training, she’d led or been involved with several NASA missions to map various asteroids and planets, including the red one. This was my motivation for meeting with her, to see about doing a different research project on Mars. That planet had once made me want to be a scientist, after all, and I desperately hoped it would do so again.

  “So,” she began sharply as I settled into her office in Building 54. Most buildings at MIT are known by numbers, not names, a quirk that struck me as charming when I first arrived and chilling when I left. “What do you plan to do with your life?”

  “I’ve always wanted to be an explorer,” I confessed, and instantly regretted it. Such an aspiration sounds whimsical from a seventeen-year-old high schooler with a dream, but worrying from a twenty-seven-year-old Ph.D. student with a graduation deadline.

  To my surprise, Zuber responded with enthusiasm. “Wonderful! You’ve picked a great time to be alive,” she exulted, as if I’d had a choice in the matter. “It’s the Age of Discovery, whatever the history books say.” She tidied a minor avalanche of papers on her desk. “I mean, how amazing is it that we can sit at a desk, right here in an office, and explore Mars from a computer screen?”

  I winced and hoped it didn’t show.

  “Just imagine,” she continued devastatingly. “Magellan had to sail in rough seas for months, even years on end. Risking scurvy, cannibals, strange diseases, who knows! But today we can wander another world with our feet up on a desk and a Diet Coke in hand. There’s never been a better time to be an explorer.”

  On her desk was indeed a soda can, slightly dented in the middle, as though it had been clenched tight in a spasm of late-night frustration. Zuber’s feet were firmly planted on the floor and it was hard to imagine them anywhere but. I thought about the NASA space probe named after the Portuguese explorer she’d mentioned: Magellan was launched in 1989 to map the surface of Venus using radar to penetrate the planet’s obscuring clouds, allowing scientists—among them Zuber—to study its volcanism and tectonics. After five years in orbit, roughly the time it takes to finish a doctorate, NASA deliberately incinerated the probe in Venus’s dense atmosphere, a series of events that suddenly struck me as a parable.

  I forced my attention back to Zuber, who was discussing other matters now, plans and logistics for the next semester, research methodologies. I listened and nodded, eyeing a framed map of Mars on the wall. It was slightly crooked and covered in names. Near it a few plants wilted on a windowsill.

  “. . . and then we munch cucumbers,” Zuber finished.

  “Excuse me?” I said, startled.

  “And then we crunch the numbers,” she repeated. “Simple as that.”

  I politely thanked Zuber for meeting with me and walked out of her office. And then I left the laboratory and launched on a long voyage.

  Part Two

  Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.

  REBECCA SOLNIT, A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST

  4.

  Undercurrents

  Black Sea

  The Silk Road is old news now, fable uncombed from fact. Once a dynamic flux of trade and ideas between Europe and Asia, this bygone caravan route now mostly traffics in drugs and violence at worst, myths and souvenirs at best—wares Mel and I hoped to avoid as we set off down it on bicycles. Or more accurately, with bicycles. I tried to muster an air of dignity despite wearing a helmet while pushing, and not pedalling, my overburdened wheels through the crowded streets of Istanbul. “Don’t crash!” a lanky Turkish teenager mocked in English. I pretended not to understand.

  The sky was dull and shapeless that January morning. Camera-slung tourists strolled past pyramids of turmeric and paprika in the Ottoman-era Spice Bazaar. Sizzling torsos of marbled meat pirouetted in restaurant windows. Outside the New Mosque, a man with a drooping white moustache flogged Turkish flags by draping the red fabric cape-like around him, perhaps hinting at nationalism’s superpowers or offering himself as part of a package deal. Noticing my stare, the man shouted something at me, startling a flock of pigeons into flight. Fat grey birds scattered in the square like a toss of ball bearings.

  I took off my helmet and slung it from my handlebars. One thing certainly hadn’t changed in the epochs since Istanbul was Constantinople, and before that Byzantium: the place was a bustling shopping mall. Mel and I wheeled our bikes through the crowds toward the Bosporus, a sinuous strait cleaving Istanbul across two continents as it flows for twenty miles from the Black Sea into the Sea of Marmara and eventually the Mediterranean. We wandered past fishermen casting long lines into the soupy green channel, past bait stands selling bouquets of startled-looking silver anchovies in plastic cups. We found the ferry ticket booth, waited in line, and walked our bikes over a gangway as the call to prayer warbled across the water.

  Mel and I leaned on the railing of the ferry and watched Istanbul fade behind us, with fog swallowing it dome by spire by billboard. I wasn’t sorry to see it go. If the Silk Road’s legendary trading hubs are now mostly reduced to rubble, or modernized beyond the reach of nostalgia, the hinterlands that Marco Polo cursed still exist much as they did millennia ago: deserts that slow all travel to a camel’s slog, mountains that ramp into solitudes of ice and sky. Or so I hoped. For now I gave Istanbul a last glance. If all went well, we wouldn’t see this many people in one place for almost a year.

  Clouds pinched the sky. The air smelled of brine and coal smoke. Mel ducked inside to warm up just as a Turkish businessman came on deck and stood a polite distance away, puffing on a cigarette. He was fifty-something, stout, and stubbled, with a face that seemed on the verge of a yawn. “Forget biking the Black Sea,” he told me, staring into the smudged mirror of the Bosporus, as if long ago he’d lost something in that murky water and expected it to resurface any second. “It’s winter, very many rain,” he said. “You must go south. Cappadocia, Konya, the Aegean . . .”

  I smiled at the man and shrugged. We’d been warned the same thing by others, but how bad could winter biking at sea level be? Give me storms and scurvy any day over a slow, pale death by computer screen and Diet Coke. “I’m breaking up with Mars,” I’d declared to Mel on the phone shortly after my meeting with Zuber. “The long distance thing just isn’t working for me.”

  It took a while to end it, as these things do, but eventually I was free and so was Mel, and we decided to finish the Silk Road we’d started five years earlier. Which meant biking over roughly a year from Turkey back to Tibet and on to the Siachen Glacier—a place Polo didn’t actually visit but surely would’ve despised for its vastness, severity, and glaring lack of marketable commodities. Beyond avenging my childhood ideals of explorers, and figuring out how to be one myself, I wanted to bike the Silk Road as a practical extension of my thesis at Oxford: to study how borders m
ake and break what is wild in the world, from mountain ranges to people’s minds, and how science, or more specifically wilderness conservation, might bridge those divides. So there I was, rich in unemployable university degrees, poor in cash, with few possessions to my name besides a tent, a bicycle, and some books. I felt great about my life decisions, until I felt terrified.

  The propellers churned a stripe of turquoise into the smoky, emerald waters of the strait. Europe was to my left, Asia to my right, and below me a fluid borderland whose depths I couldn’t fathom. The name Bosporus is Greek for “ox ford”—but was I coming up or going down? Too early to say, or perhaps too simple a distinction.

  In 1680 a young Italian nobleman named Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli tossed a weighted line into the Bosporus and realized, as it arced first away then toward him, what Turkish fisherman already knew: the strait flows two ways at once. The history of science and exploration is full of wealthy foreigners winning fame and glory for “discovering” the sorts of things locals already knew, but Marsigli deserves credit not for realizing the Bosporus has an undercurrent, but for figuring out why: a salinity difference between Black and Mediterranean sea water. As rivers pour freshwater into the Black Sea and eventually out the Bosporus Strait, denser, saltier water from the Mediterranean flows in to fill that space. The ferry was muscling against the surface current of the Bosporus on its way to the Black Sea, but would effortlessly surge there if it could only dive a few dozen metres deeper.

  The businessman stubbed out his cigarette and went below deck. When I went inside a few minutes later I found Mel chatting with a genial-looking young man with round cheeks. After a double-take, I realized it was Jeremy, a classmate from elementary school whom I hadn’t seen since the ninth grade. He and his fiancée, Kerri, were enjoying a holiday in Istanbul and happened to board the same ferry as us, which meant we had a hometown witness when we missed our stop.