by Kate Harris
That night I coughed through small talk with the Turkish couple who graciously took us in, my throat scratchy despite the endless cups of tea they poured. Better medicine by far was the hot shower they let me take. When I stepped out of the bathroom, a pair of flowery high-heeled slippers was waiting by the door, which gave an oddly glamorous lurch to my walk despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they were many sizes too small for me. The slippers belonged to the couple’s young daughter, who giggled when she saw me in them. Her parents urged her to practise English with us over dinner. “Hello my name is thank you!” she offered shyly.
Before we left, the family in Rize scribbled another family’s name and phone number on a piece of paper, and in this manner Mel and I were passed like batons between generous friends all across Turkey. The challenge was locating our would-be hosts in the next town, for typically they didn’t speak English. We stumbled on a fail-safe tactic: upon arriving we’d head to a busy sidewalk and call the host family’s number. As soon as someone picked up, we’d hand the cellphone to a random (and now very confused) Turkish person. “Merhaba?” the baffled stranger would speak into the receiver, explaining that two random girls on bikes had handed him a cellphone. The host family he was speaking to would realize the stranger was referring to the foreign cyclists they were expecting. They’d explain where they lived to the stranger, who would hang up and direct Mel and me exactly where we needed to go. That’s how we arrived, a few days later, at a half-built apartment tower on a steep slope above Borçka.
The brick building looked stacked rather than cemented, as if a kick would send the whole tower tumbling. A middle-aged man and two little girls, maybe eight or nine years old, were waiting at its base. They helped ferry our bikes and bags up crumbling concrete steps, past rusty entrails of rebar, and into a beautifully finished apartment that smelled like fresh-baked bread. The living room contained the usual altars of a television and a portrait of Ataturk, whose icy blue stare seemed to follow me wherever I went in the room. Not that I could move around much, for the floor, couch, and several chairs were packed with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and half a dozen kids, among them an adorable four-year-old with rosy cheeks, ample batting eyelashes, and a demonic soul.
She dumped bowls of oily soup on the carpet and laughed as her mother silently sopped up the mess. She grabbed cushions from the couch and threw them with terrible force and impeccable aim at her siblings. She kicked her frail grandfather in the shin and laughed more as the old man howled in pain. Her family clucked disapprovingly at these antics but didn’t intervene; everyone seemed half in awe of her, half terrified. “Ahh, comic,” the grandma smiled weakly but indulgently, as if to say kids will be kids. And psychopaths will be psychopaths, I thought, narrowly avoiding getting kicked in the shin myself as the child apparently read my mind and decided to punish me.
That night Mel and I piled panniers against the bedroom door to stop the comic from sneaking in. At least the little girls whose room we shared were sweet, if also riveted by our every move: the way we brushed our teeth, the long johns we wore, the fact that we stared mutely at inanimate bricks for an hour before going to sleep. This absorption in reading seemed to puzzle them most of all. I’d rarely seen books in Turkish households, other than school textbooks, and I wondered what happened to would-be readers and dreamers who grew up in small towns here, especially with parents who emphatically vowed they’d never let their daughters bike across Turkey. Lying there half-asleep, I felt an overwhelming love for my own parents, who’d encouraged all kinds of exploration when I was a kid, in words and the world, though perhaps they regretted raising me to be a little too fearless. A few months after I’d told them about my plans to bike along China’s Silk Road for the first time, Mel and I were packed and ready to go when, forty-eight hours before our flight, she went for a last swim in the lake at her family’s cottage and was run over by a motorboat. She managed to avoid the propeller but the boat rammed her thigh, generating a deep muscle contusion that would require at least a month of physiotherapy to regain mobility. As far as biking in China that summer was concerned, Mel was a bust.
I’d received the news in North Carolina and hesitated over how to proceed. After all, I didn’t know how to speak Mandarin or Uyghur or Tibetan (neither did Mel, for that matter). I didn’t know, despite my best intentions to learn, how to fix a flat tire. And now, quite suddenly, I didn’t have an expedition partner. It seemed clear what I had to do.
“I’m going anyway,” I told my parents over the phone.
“You are not.”
“I’ll be fine!”
“Forget about it!”
“Love you, bye, leaving for the airport now!”
When I flew only as far as California, instead of Beijing, and started pedalling back to North Carolina, instead of along the Silk Road, my parents’ relief about me biking solo and coast-to-coast across America was directly proportional to the relative risk of what I’d proposed to do. This proved a canny lesson in future expedition planning. “Mom, Dad, I’m going to Mars,” I’d announced gravely after my meeting with Zuber at MIT, explaining with regret that it would probably be a one-way ticket. Then, amid their loving protests, I’d graciously relented and proposed the real plan. “Okay, okay, fine . . . I’ll just finish biking the Silk Road, from the Caucasus to Kashmir, skirting the Afghan border and sneaking across Tibet again along the way.”
I glanced over at the girls, wishing I could share these expedition planning tactics, spur them into a life of experiment and adventure, but I didn’t have the language and they were already fast asleep.
The world, seemingly overnight, went wild with multiplied cold. Mountains loomed steeply on all sides of the road, and creeks cut the air with their freshness as we passed. Freezing rain on the Black Sea had turned to falling snow higher up, but the road was plowed to a thin layer of white. Though traffic was sparse, it wasn’t nonexistent, and at one point a lone sedan slowed to a crawl as it passed. I saw curious faces pressed flat against the windows but didn’t think anything of it until we crested a hill and saw the car parked on the top. Waiting on the road shoulder was a tall spindly man in a tweed jacket who sported a greasy comb-over, so that his thinning hair was rendered eerily motionless in the wind. He aimed a camcorder our way as we approached. “Where are you from?” he quizzed us. “Where are you going? Are you cold?”
“Canada, Hindustan, not cold, though if we stay still we will be. Goodbye!”
We didn’t get much farther. The snow grew so deep and the road so steep that Mel could barely move. “It’s not fair,” she complained, her wheels whirling in place like dervishes. “I’m pedalling twice as hard as you and going half as fast.” I managed to maintain some forward momentum thanks to the valuable skills I’d learned in graduate school at MIT, namely biking recklessly fast on slippery terrain. Figuring it wouldn’t be wise to exult about how much I loved this technical riding, the way it forced a total focus, I suggested we take a break at the nearest bakery. When the lady running it brought over our order of baklava and Nescafé, she said the road to Ardahan was kapali, closed. Mel didn’t seem disappointed. “More Nescafé?” she suggested brightly, settling in with her book.
A few hours later the road opened, but only to four-wheel-drive minibuses with chains on their tires. The jandarma had already forced us to hitch a ride over a previous high pass, because of an earlier blizzard, which meant I was doubly reluctant to load my bike onto the roof of another vehicle. The bus struggled up and onto the Kars Plateau, which like Tibet was buckled skyward by colliding land masses, in this case Eurasia and Arabia. The resulting sweep of plains and mountains lies more than five thousand feet above sea level and borders Armenia, Iran, and Azerbaijan. Although much of Turkey enjoys a temperate climate, kar is Turkish for snow and the plateau spells it out in the plural—at least when we arrived in February. As the bus sped past horizons swept clean by wind and snow, the kind of landscape on which light falls in huge cold slab
s, I silently fumed with regret. If we were going to travel parts of the Silk Road by car, why didn’t we skip the murderous traffic and freezing rain on the Black Sea?
“Thank god we’re not biking this stretch,” muttered Mel.
We reached Ardahan in the late afternoon and ducked into a restaurant. While eating lentil soup, we happened to glance at the television just in time to see ourselves broadcast on the news. Cue the spindly man in tweed, speaking with commanding authority into the camera. Cue us slowly cresting the hill, muttering a few words between panted breaths, and disappearing into white oblivion. Best of all, this particular channel gave news stories the full Turkish soap opera treatment: slow-motion clips played on repeat to a musical score better suited to crime dramas than reportage. The story about us was no exception, though Mel and I biked away at such a glacial skid that we supplied our own slow motion, no special effects necessary. Once we disappeared after an awkwardly long time, the newsman turned the camera back on himself and resumed his authoritative commentary.
“What on earth is he saying?” Mel marvelled. “We barely spoke to the guy!”
I glanced around the restaurant to see if anyone had connected the news with us, but perhaps we were hard to recognize without our scarves, hats, and helmets. People went on sipping tea, their eyes fixed on the screen, oblivious to the “celebrities” in their midst, which was fine by us. We bundled back into our warm layers and wheeled our bikes into the lung-crackling cold.
When I woke the next morning the tent ceiling was constellated with frost. All the stars seemed alien, ungathered, and for a moment I felt unsure what planet I was on, the sky above suspiciously crimson. Then I spotted an earthly landmark in the tent’s laundry line, where two pairs of wool socks and my watch drooped stiffly. I sat up to check the time and accidentally brushed the tent wall, sending the visible universe into supernova. Frost flaked off the ceiling, the fabric of space-time buckled and creased, frozen socks drop-kicked my lap. It was eight in the morning.
“Are you awake?” I whispered to Mel, eager to hit the road.
“No,” she whispered back, flakes of ice settling on her lashes.
I crawled out of my sleeping bag in my long underwear and dressed in all the clothes I carried: fleece pants, a fleece top, snow pants and a matching shell, a down jacket patched in a dozen places with duct tape. That jacket was a map of all the cold, lonely places that had mugged me with their beauty: the Tibetan Plateau on our first bike trip, Norway on a ski traverse during a break at Oxford, Kashmir after I quit MIT and two friends and I followed in Fanny Bullock Workman’s footsteps up Pinnacle Peak, the 22,000-foot Himalayan mountain on which she set the women’s world altitude record in 1906. The colder and harsher the terrain, the more I seemed to come alive in it, but Mel lacked my enthusiasm for deep-freezes. Her sleeping bag showed no signs of movement, so I read her some inspiring lines of poetry I’d copied into my journal. “What is the colour of wisdom?” wrote the poet Evan S. Connell. “It must have the colour of snow.” Mel groaned from somewhere deep in her sleeping bag. Nescafé, stat.
I lit the camp stove in the front vestibule with the door cracked open for ventilation. Our lone titanium pot was welded with burnt noodles from last night’s dinner, but I filled it anyway with water from a bottle I’d cuddled with all night to keep from freezing. The resulting coffee tasted like cinders, and not even gobs of peanut butter could override the burnt flavour of the oatmeal. “Let’s just save this for later,” I said to Mel as the gluey mass froze in our mugs, explaining that at times polar explorers were reduced to chewing their leather boots for calories. For some reason Mel didn’t find this reassuring.
Hours after waking, we finally crawled out of the tent and jumped in place to get warm. Packing up required the dexterity of bare hands, and our skin stuck to all the metal that made up our life: the stove, tent poles, bikes. We rolled the frozen-stiff fabric of the tent into its frozen-stiff bag, then dragged our loaded bikes through deep snowdrifts back to the road.
The British Antarctic explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard claimed that “polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.” Winter bike trips in Turkey might be a close second. Yet when traffic was scarce, when it wasn’t raining, when mountains set the mood of the road, when I wasn’t aching and hungry and miserable—and even sometimes when I was—biking was the cleanest and most isolated bliss I knew. Even Mel seemed to be enjoying herself, for every so often she would stop and turn cartwheels on the road ahead of me. I kept stopping as well, but to snap photos: of the air scrubbed clean and blue with wind, of the mountains smoothed over with snow, of a landscape indifferent to my admiration, and all the more compelling for it. More sky than earth. More wind than world. No wonder Kars sent me soaring.
In that respect, I wasn’t alone. Millions of birds wing it over the plateau every year, travelling from western Siberia and the Middle East to southern Africa and back, though we were sadly months too late (or too early) to see the sky storming with feathers. The migratory highway through Kars is especially popular with birds of prey: hawks, eagles, vultures, and falcons that skip like stones from thermal to thermal—vortices of warming, rising air that form as different surfaces absorb different amounts of sunlight. Raptors soar effortlessly up one thermal, then glide down to meet the next one forming, and in this way travel thousands of miles without flapping a wing. I’ve often wished bicycles could be powered on the same principle.
Maybe all flight begins with the envy of birds. In the mid-nineteenth century, the young Otto Lilienthal longed to soar with the storks that ruled the skies in his German hometown. Not that he dared voice that ambition: back then the idea of building a flying machine was akin to designing a perpetual motion machine or transmuting lead into gold—the typical preoccupations of cranks and dreamers. With the help of his brother, Gustav, Otto apprenticed himself to wind and wings, often working at night to avoid being seen by gossipy neighbours. By trial and error he gleaned that flight is easiest when you launch against the wind, rather than with it, because the faster air moves against a set of wings, the more lift is generated, meaning headwinds don’t impede flight so much as give it a turbo boost. He began testing gliders by day, when the winds were strongest, and crowds gathered to jeer. As the gliders flew a little farther each time—thirty feet, three hundred feet, a quarter mile—they began to cheer. Over the next decade, thanks to Otto, the notion of human flight went from a foolish lark to a serious science. “The time has passed,” he proudly declared, “when every person harbouring thoughts of aerial flight can at once be pronounced a charlatan.”
I thought back to the photographs of Lilienthal’s gliders I’d looked through at Oxford, where I’d been struck by how birdlike they were, how plainly Icarian in inspiration, with wings built from feathers and sticks as if pure mimicry could provide sufficient lift. The design of flying machines gradually moved away from avian whimsy toward a more clean-edged efficiency—not because bird wings can’t do flight best, but because we’ve failed to mimic their flapping in more than a century of trying. Even now, as people snore on transatlantic flights and yawn at yet another rocket launch to the International Space Station, bird wings represent a union of mechanical efficiency, fuel economy, and metaphorical grace that no human invention has ever matched. Except, perhaps, the modern bicycle.
The clumsy ancestor of the sleek machine I rode appeared on the streets of Paris in 1876. Lacking pedals, drive trains, and pneumatic tires, these two-wheeled “dandy-horses” could only be propelled by kicking the ground, earning them the name velocipede, from the Latin for “fast feet.” Because velocipedes were small and less visible than a horse or a carriage, they gave their riders the “comical appearance of flying through the air,” as The New York Times rather mockingly reported. But just two decades later, right about the time Lilienthal’s glider flights were making headlines, velocipedes had evolved into the “safety bicycle,” a machine more akin to
our modern counterparts and whose relatively cheap price tag, comfortable ride, and ease of handling effectively granted humans wings, including Fanny Bullock Workman and her husband, who rode them across Europe and India. By 1896, The Aeronautical Journal was describing the similarities between cycling and flight not in jest, but in earnest: “It was not uncommon for the cyclist, in the first flash of enthusiasm which quickly follows the unpleasantness of taming the steel steed, to remark, ‘Wheeling is just like flying!’”
I said as much to Mel when I caught up with her in Kars, but she failed to agree. “I didn’t sign up for this,” she moaned, jogging in place. “I can’t feel my fingers, my toes. I can’t even muster the memory of what fingers and toes once felt like.” It dawned on me that her cartwheels hadn’t been expressions of joy, but attempts to centrifuge blood to her extremities. “This isn’t safe,” she continued. “We’re in the middle of nowhere and I’m freezing and I can’t do this anymore.”
She sounded close to tears. I couldn’t verify this because Mel’s face was concealed behind a balaclava and sunglasses, the kind of glamorous, oversized frames that celebrities wore to hide identities and hangovers. Even way out here, on the frozen Silk Road, I thought meanly, a part of her still insisted on looking cool.
For a spell as teenagers, Mel and I hadn’t been friends at all. We went from being inseparable in elementary school to nodding curtly at each other in our small-town high school, where homemade magic tricks quickly lost their social currency. I dreamed of becoming an astronaut and going to Mars, the last frontier left for a wannabe explorer. Mel, by contrast, was popular. She wore makeup to school and partied on weekends, while I was the kind of student who completed school assignments weeks ahead of time and suffered paranoid delusions on laughing gas at the dentist, convinced I’d be disqualified from NASA for taking drugs, even nitrous oxide for the filling of cavities.