by Kate Harris
We barely talked for years. I suppose we both felt hemmed in by our small-town high school, with its narrow hallways and narrower minds, but we responded to these constraints in clashing ways: Mel strove to excel within them, to belong and be cool, while I was obsessed with elsewhere, with escape. I couldn’t feign an ironic detachment from the world if I tried. It was a relief when my family moved again and I switched into a larger and less cliquish high school, where I poured my energies into riding horses, learning to skateboard, and plotting my launch into space. Which perhaps explains why, on the Kars Plateau, a petty, regressive part of me thought that if Mel had spent less time in high school being popular, and more time studying the polar expedition narratives of Cherry-Garrard and Shackleton and Nansen, she’d have a richer understanding of what constituted hardship and extremity. This wasn’t suffering; this was adventure!
“We’re hardly in the middle of nowhere, Mel,” I began unsympathetically. “I wish! But no, we’re on a paved road, we have a cellphone, and there’s even a gas station just ahead. It’s a joke, we can bail in milliseconds if we need to. There’s no safer place to be cold in the world—and it’s not even that cold!”
Some pep talk. Mel didn’t say anything, not even to justifiably point out that she’d been the one to coax me out of my sleeping bag on the Black Sea. She just got on her bike and rode away, only to slip on black ice and crash into the pavement. When she crashed a second time farther down the road, I felt sickened by my previous smugness and accelerated toward the gas station, willing it to be open. By the time Mel walked her bike over I’d bought two packages of cookies and three chocolate bars, and in silence we ate them really fast. The lone gas station attendant fetched us hot water to mix with Nescafé, and even went so far as to scrape the frozen gruel from our mugs, and in these simple gestures it seemed possible to rebuild the world.
* * *
Do grudges ever go away, or do they only go dormant, like black seeds slinking just below the surface awaiting ideal conditions to sprout? I wanted to believe in a world without borders, which meant believing in hearts and minds without them, too, and this wasn’t easy when I looked into my own. Or when I looked around the Kars Plateau, a region variously known as eastern Anatolia or western Armenia, depending on who you asked at the turn of the twentieth century.
Back then, this region was violently contested between Turkish, Armenian, and Russian forces. Much of the Armenian population in Kars was killed in what the Turks still refuse to call genocide, and the bloodshed didn’t cease until the Treaty of Kars in 1921 ceded most of eastern Anatolia/western Armenia to Turkey, including Ararat, the Armenians’ sacred mountain. Once perceived as the highest point in the Christian world (though it barely scrapes the bottom of the Tibetan Plateau), Ararat is where Noah’s ark supposedly struck dry land after the deluge—at least as far as we can tell, given Genesis lacks GPS coordinates. The Turks renamed the peak Agri Dagi, or “mountain of pain,” in what seemed a pointed nomenclatural demotion from sacred to profane. With the fall of the USSR in 1991, Armenia regained independence, but not its revered mountain, which loomed out of reach across the border with Turkey somewhere down the road we were travelling.
“Is that Ararat?” asked Mel, pointing at a snow-capped summit from the car that had picked us up not far from the gas station.
“No, no, not yet,” growled Onder from behind the steering wheel, not because he was angry but because he always spoke that way. Dishevelled and rotund, the thirty-something nature conservationist reminded me of a bear prematurely woken from hibernation. Perhaps this wasn’t far from the truth: while he’d been expecting our call, it came earlier than anticipated, namely from the gas station where we stopped for snacks. Mel and I biked on a little farther to the turnoff to Georgia, where Onder met us and would drop us off a week or so later, to continue biking to Tbilisi from exactly where we’d left off. In the meantime Onder had offered to show us the conservation projects run by his employer, KuzeyDoga, a local non-profit working in the Turkish borderlands, including at the base of Ararat, or Agri, depending on where you stand.
“How about that one?” I asked when another large peak loomed into view.
“Trust me, you will know Agri when you see it,” said Alkim, cracking sunflower seeds between his teeth. He had jokingly introduced himself as a filmmaker “famous in northeastern Turkey and parts of Iran,” which sent Onder into high-pitched giggles. They were old friends, working together on a film about KuzeyDoga, and Alkim looked kind of like Onder, only stretched—taller, thinner, smoother—and doused with considerably more cologne. When he tried to spit sunflower seed shells out the car window, they blew back and got stuck in his glasses.
We rounded a bend and I realized Alkim was right: Agri was so obviously Agri, or was it Ararat? Perhaps I’m biased in believing all mountains holy, whatever their names, but this one in particular, with its towering twin peaks, looked particularly divine. It was less an upheaval of rock than a cold slump of stars. The usual minaret towered above the village of Aralik, but its relative prominence was beggared by the peak behind it. The village’s buildings looked excavated from, rather than built with, the basalt scattered like birdseed around the volcano’s base. Children herded livestock through the streets, swatting at the bony rumps of cattle with reeds from the marshes next to town—the last dregs from the deluge, perhaps, supplemented by a steady drip of glacial meltwater.
Similar wetlands flank the sacred peak on all sides, spilling across the borders of Turkey, Armenia, Iran, and Azerbaijan. Because the marshes sit at such a low elevation, down below the edge of the Kars Plateau, they remain an unfrozen oasis for water birds year-round. As we admired a pair of herons wading through one marsh on stilt legs, a herdsman roared up on a shiny blue motorcycle. He spoke with Onder for a while, gesticulating at the wetlands, the fields, the village. When the man sped off, blurring the horizon with dust, we asked Onder what he’d said. “He wants to drain the wetlands, replace them with fields for growing crops.”
While the lifeless peak of Agri is a national park, the marshes at its feet lack protected status, which seems a little like valuing the ark more than the biodiversity it carried. KuzeyDoga was trying to persuade the Turkish government to designate the marshes under Ramsar, an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands, which would protect the habitat while helping to promote birdwatching in the area, a potential source of tourism income for villagers. “This is the best part of you being here,” Onder said. “It shows them that this place, their home, is valuable as more than grazing land.”
I hoped he was right, but I wasn’t so sure. One Turkish word for foreigner is gavur, which historically meant “infidel.” I was also slightly uncomfortable as an ambassador for ecotourism, which encourages people to see dollar signs when they look at a bird or a wetland, though I suppose they already saw money in the marsh in the form of grazing land for animals, or income from growing pulses or grains. I didn’t blame them, not a bit, especially when I breezed in, swooned over the birds and mountains, and would soon breeze out again. Putting a price tag on wilderness can pay off, especially in places like Aralik, where the locals need support and the wetlands need protection and ecotourism could enable both. But I worried that something crucial gets lost in such transactions, namely a recognition that the world has value and meaning beyond its usefulness to us.
We walked back to the car, now surrounded by shaggy grey donkeys nibbling on grass. They didn’t blink when we opened the doors and slammed them shut. Onder swerved to avoid first the donkeys and then the marshes that the Turkish government had so far refused to protect, perhaps because Armenia was enthusiastic about the idea. KuzeyDoga was trying to get the locals on board in hopes the government might come around, but nature conservation doesn’t translate well into Turkish. Even Onder’s grandma was still convinced he was unemployed, and her confusion was understandable given his job ran the gamut from collaring wolves to petitioning government
s to peeling dead animals off the road. “Remember!” reminded a note taped to the car’s vanity mirror. “Do roadkill surveys while driving out of town.”
Mel rolled down her window and stuck her head out, savouring the hint of spring in the air now that we were past the donkeys. Ararat seemed to grow bigger behind us, gaining heft and stature with distance, and the wind rustled in the reeds. Out another window I noticed an enormous trident on the horizon, its three stubby prongs spewing smoke or steam, I couldn’t quite tell.
“Oh, that’s Metsamor,” Onder clarified cheerfully. “The next Chernobyl.”
This Soviet nuclear reactor was built on shaky ground. After a 1988 earthquake killed 25,000 Armenians, with its epicentre less than sixty miles from Metsamor, the plant was closed for safety reasons. But when the Soviet Union dissolved just a few years later, the newly independent republic of Armenia found itself desperate for cheap power, in part because Turkey and Azerbaijan, its nemesis neighbours, had deliberately routed a natural gas pipeline to circumvent the country. So the Armenian government resurrected the antiquated reactor, which fumed defiantly only six miles from Turkey and not much farther from Azerbaijan. If I’m going down, Metsamor seemed to menace on the border, I’m taking you all with me.
“Nationality is babyishness for the most part,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, and for the most part I agreed. The more I learned about the South Caucasus, with its closed borders and warring enclaves, the more the place seemed like a playground game of capture-the-flag turned vicious, all in the dubious name of nationalism. And yet political frontiers, while sometimes solid as brick, are finally only as strong as shared belief—the flag-waving faith that the name “Turkey,” say, or “Armenia,” represents some kind of genuine, immaculate sovereignty, etched out and inviolable. But when Polo travelled through the South Caucasus in the thirteenth century, he visited Silk Road territories long since vanished or metamorphosed, such as Lesser and Greater Hermenia, Turcomania, Georgiana, and Zorzania. “Names are only the guests of reality,” the Chinese sage Hsu Yu noted in 2300 BCE, suggesting that borders are little more than collective myths—fictions that a certain number of people, for a certain period of time, believe are fact.
The ground seemed no less shaky at Ani the next day. Once the bustling capital of Armenia, this former Silk Road metropolis is now mostly ruins on the modern edge of Turkey. Over the past thousand years the city had been sacked by Turks, Georgians, and Mongols, and what they left standing was devastated by an earthquake not long after Marco Polo went to China. The gaunt remains of Ani’s cathedrals and mosques suggest openness, but behind them is the hermetically sealed border between modern Turkey and Armenia. Demarcating this frontier is a river, the Akhurian, flowing next to Ani through Arpaçay Canyon, which cuts like a dark scar across a plateau smooth-skinned with snow. Both edges of the canyon are a military buffer zone, strung with barbed wire and regularly patrolled by armed forces. People have been banned from the inside of the canyon for nearly two decades.
For years KuzeyDoga had petitioned the Turkish armed forces for permission to document the diversity of birdlife in Arpaçay. After consent was finally granted, a biologist with the NGO surveyed the length of the canyon, listening for songs and scanning for nests. In the process he discovered a half-dozen aeries of Egyptian vultures. This endangered species of raptor had found a rare swath of undisturbed land in the canyon, ideal breeding grounds between the barbed wires. There is no explaining borders to the birds, but they know a safe haven when they see one.
Staring at the canyon through a window in the mosque of Minuchihr, I was torn between wanting to applaud this oasis of wildness and despairing of the strife that created it. Nature is typically the victim of our blunt and inflexible borders, with barbed wire and brick walls fragmenting ecosystems into useless bits and stopping the movement of migratory species that need to roam as widely as wind. Yet here an endangered species wore the border like a bulletproof vest, finding asylum between the walls our conflicts create.
The canyon reminded me of another frontier I’d visited the year before. After attending a conference in Seoul, I’d signed up for a cheap day tour to the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, a belt of formerly cultivated land on the contested waist of the Korean peninsula. Two miles wide and more than a hundred long, the zone is fortified by steel walls topped with barbed wire, and for sixty years people have been forbidden to enter. During this time the farmed land slowly went feral, cultivated fields sprouted unruly forests, wild cranes flocked to wetlands no longer drained for irrigation, and Asian black bears, leopards, water deer, and other rare species flourished. A war-torn borderland became, in effect, the most fiercely guarded wildlife sanctuary on the planet. Could the same thing happen for Siachen? I’d read about the Korean DMZ at Oxford, for my research on scientific peacekeeping, and I’d wanted to see its resurrection for myself.
“On a clear day like today,” the tour guide promised as I boarded the bus in Seoul, “you’ll see right into North Korea.” But when we arrived at the first stop hours later, the sky was as hazy as gauze over a wound. A Ferris wheel and merry-go-round whirled to deafeningly cheerful music. Restaurants with jaunty names like A Walk in the Clouds and Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen advertised the chance to dine in view of the DMZ. Tourists crowded into gift shops that sold T-shirts, key chains, shot glasses, and other mementoes of the military divide. The whole place had the feel of people laughing at a funeral.
The final stop of the tour was a tower overlooking the southern fringe of the DMZ. The haze had cleared by then, and the sky was the colour of a fading bruise, the pale blue of purest flame or glacial ice. For the equivalent of fifty cents I bought a peek into the DMZ through a spotting scope. Between the walls I saw a gnarled forest with pines, firs, poplars, and willows packed tight after a half-century of unchecked growth. I saw two herons tussling in a wetland, a breeze restless in the grass. In other words, to my shock, I saw wilderness staring back at me down the barrel of a cocked and loaded border.
In every respect Ani was less tense than the Korean DMZ, more abandoned than actively contested, with no souvenir hawkers in sight—just Alkim filming Mel as she gamely pretended to explore the same ruins over and over again. “One more time with feeling!” he requested for at least the sixth take. I made sure to stay out of sight. As the sun blinked cold and low over the mountains, the “city of 1001 churches” caught light the way I wished history would: the crumble and decay illuminated, some foundations still solid, graffiti aged gracefully to art. Walking past a cathedral built a millennium ago, I thought I heard a door slam somewhere deep underground, and ruins thick with dust stirred all answers into motion. Certain places, wrote Jorge Luis Borges, “try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something.” What Ani seemed to say was that no story, no wall, has only two sides. All definitions blur, all borders wander, and the longer I stared, the more I swear I saw them move.
When the sun began to set, Onder, Alkim, and Mel made their way back to the car. I scanned the canyon one last time, hoping to spot vulture nests, but what caught my eye were the broken halves of a bridge, that reached toward but didn’t quite touch each other above the Akhurian. In the heyday of the Silk Road, Marco Polo might have strolled across that very bridge. The Workmans could’ve biked over it a century ago. Now only birds could cross the river, where the sides of the bridge met in their reflection in the water.
The next morning Onder dropped us off at the turnoff to Georgia. Alkim filmed Mel and me as we hit the road to Tbilisi, crossing a part of the Caucasus that was once so densely forested, according to Strabo, you could walk all the way to the city without the sun touching your head. The sun didn’t once hit our heads either, but only because the cold sky was plated with clouds. Intensive clear-cutting had long ravaged the Caucasian forests of lore, at least in eastern Turkey, where only a few remnant stands of fir, Oriental spruce, Pontic oak and Medwedew’s birch survived.
Wha
t does it mean to find a broken landscape beautiful? I knew Kars was a tamed relic of its former wildness, but it looked nothing short of sublime that morning. Of course sublime is by definition beauty with an edge to it, though usually that edge is some element of danger that a landscape poses to people, not what’s left of a place after humans have pared it away. As with the vultures living between the lines at Ani, I wasn’t sure whether the beauty of Kars was a solace or a call for despair. Maybe it was a call to prayer, or at least that’s what we heard a few hours later, signalling the existence of a town long before we saw it.
We decided to stop in Damal and tackle the pass to Georgia the next day, because the road began climbing just beyond town and there wasn’t enough daylight left to make it over. When we inquired at the çay salon about accommodations, a thin man with a drooping face offered to let us stay upstairs. He showed us to an empty room whose concrete walls matched the concrete floor that showed through the worn spots of a musty grey carpet. “Chok güzel,” said Mel, relieved to have any form of shelter on this chilly night that wasn’t a tent. We agreed on a price and the tea house owner left us, explaining with hand motions that he would lock the door and fetch us at seven a.m.
I was just drifting to sleep when I heard a commotion outside. The shouting made it sound like a mob was bent on avenging some small-town evil, and I felt relieved that the door was locked. Then I heard our names. Mel and I went into the front room, which had a balcony, and shone our headlamps down on a street packed with people. Among them, waving their arms frantically, were Onder and Alkim.
“Girls!” they shouted. “Hang on! Don’t worry! We will get you out!”
“What are you talking about?” Mel shouted back.
Only later did we piece together the full story: Onder and Alkim had driven up the road to check on us, worried we’d freeze in the tent. When they reached Damal without seeing our camp, they figured we must be staying in town, so they inquired after us in a local shop. “Oh, the foreign girls? They are locked upstairs in the tea house,” the shopkeeper told them. Panicked about our apparent imprisonment, Onder and Alkim began shouting outside the tea house to get our attention, prompting half the town to show up to see what the fuss was about. The jandarma showed up as well and ordered the tea house owner to release us. The poor old man came stomping up the stairs, muttering “Why me, why me,” under his breath.