Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  Once outside, we managed to convince our would-be rescuers that all was well. No, the tea house owner hadn’t locked us up against our will. Yes, we were perfectly safe and warm and happy. Eventually the crowd dispersed, with people looking disappointed that such a promising drama had ended so meekly. As one did in such situations—really any situation in Turkey—Alkim, Onder, Mel, and I decided to have tea. Given that the tea house was closed at this late hour, we trooped across the road to the shop, where the shopkeeper seemed completely delighted by the trouble he’d caused. He poured steaming glasses of tea for everyone, including the tea house owner, who had followed us over, still muttering his mantra of woe.

  “He’s really upset,” I whispered to Mel. She nodded, rueful.

  Alkim overheard me. “Upset? What do you mean?”

  I told him what the tea house owner was repeating over and over.

  “It’s not English!” Alkim laughed. “It’s nothing, gibberish, like ay-yi-ay-yi or la-de-da.”

  He explained our confusion to the shopkeeper, who thought it was funny, and to the tea house owner, who seemed pleased by our sympathetic reading of his muttering. At least he smiled as he walked us back to the room and locked us in again.

  We were released as promised at seven a.m. It had snowed all night and was snowing still. Mel and I climbed down the stairs and went into the tea house, where our bikes were stashed. Already the room was steamy and packed with men, one of whom kindly brought us tea as we struggled to repair Mel’s derailleur. Her bike would no longer switch into the easiest or “granny” gear, which was suboptimal given the highest pass of the trip so far awaited us beyond town.

  The man who brought us tea inquired where we were going, and Mel told him, “Gurgistan,” Turkish for Georgia. A murmur of disbelief travelled through the tea house. “No, miss, car!” another man said. I protested the idea until I realized he meant kar, the Turkish word for snow. The shopkeeper from the night before suggested we hitch a ride with him; he was driving to Georgia that morning. But I was determined to pedal as long as our wheels could grip the road, and even if they couldn’t. Thanks but no thanks, we told him, prompting all the men in the tea house to laugh and cluck their tongues.

  When we wheeled the bikes outside, though, I worried the men might be right. I couldn’t see a road, just a general blankness where the road should have been: white clouds, white snow, and no distinction between them. Mel gamely toiled up the frozen pass in her second-to-lowest gear. I rode behind her, feeling equal parts guilty and grateful that my own granny gear was working. The earth and sky blurred together the way they do in certain moments of flight, and also certain moments of freefall, and for the moment I couldn’t tell which was which. Every pedal stroke took it on trust that the world, or something like it, still existed beneath our wheels. And yet we were having a grand time for no good reason, breathing clouds in, breathing clouds out, muscling toward the shared goal of the summit.

  In some ways our friendship existed best in motion. Mel and I had reconnected during university, when out of the blue she flew to Chapel Hill to visit me over spring break. Perhaps it was the “y’alls” salting my speech, or the fact that we’d barely seen each other since high school, but she almost didn’t recognize me when she landed in the South. “What planet are you from?” she said, smiling as if we’d been best friends forever.

  “The red one,” I told her, though after wearing a spacesuit in Utah I wasn’t so sure. Nor was I sure what to make of Mel’s visit, but in general I was too tired to question anything. The day before I’d run the Myrtle Beach Marathon on a whim and untrained legs. I’d signed up to run the half-marathon as part of a charity fundraiser, but when I reached mile thirteen and felt good, I kept going. Every step beyond that distance set a new record for the farthest I’d run in one go, and this exhilarating fact kept me shuffling to the finish line. In the surreal, trance-like state of that run, a tired beach town was briefly rendered mythic: Myrtle Beach seemed elsewhere, otherworldly, proof of the transcendent power of slogging. Only when I stopped did I notice the beaches bordered by sagging motels, the billboards advertising boiled peanuts and Jesus in the same bold fonts and neon lights—and the screaming agony of my leg muscles.

  I was effectively crippled in the aftermath. So when Mel casually suggested we run another marathon together, one night over dinner in Chapel Hill, I remember looking at her like she was insane. Then of course I said yes. That fall we began training in our separate countries with characteristic zeal, which meant I soon got shin splints and Mel sprained her hip. But we set off across New York City that November anyway, guzzling water from Styrofoam cups at checkpoints and basically pretending high school had never happened.

  Cycling the Silk Road seemed to be the next logical step. Although Mel’s swimming accident meant I took off alone from California instead, even the rural back roads of America seemed alien and extreme. Mile by mile I pedalled past the slack-eyed casinos and prim army bases of Nevada, where military jets ripped open the sky and vultures sutured it shut; through the twisted red canyons miming Mars in Utah; over the continental divide of Colorado; and across the picked-clean plains of Kansas, where one dull, rainy morning Mel met me with her bicycle, still bruised but ready to roll.

  With enough instant noodles for dinner, and packaged pickles for snacks, there was nothing the two of us couldn’t do that summer: sixty miles, ninety miles, a hundred and twenty in a day! Broken spokes, flat tires, we could fix it all! Other than a single day off in Virginia—when we blew our budget on an all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast and felt sick the rest of the day—the two of us pedalled non-stop for a month to reach the edge of the continent. Where the road ended, in Swan Quarter, North Carolina, we boarded a ferry to the Outer Banks, our legs twitching from the strangeness of moving without turning pedals.

  Mel and I didn’t set any records when we ceremoniously dipped our bikes in the Atlantic, and no crowds cheered. We simply swam in the ocean for what felt like days, and I remember my euphoria at completing the journey blending with a searing pain where the salt water stung my saddle sores. What salvaged our friendship was a shared knack for slogging past checkpoints, past reason and restraint, past the past itself, all the way to a point of transcendent stupor that left our teenage grudges far behind us, as if somewhere along the way we’d arrived in a new land.

  We reached the top of the pass far sooner than expected. Suddenly a sign loomed from the blankness announcing “Ilgar Dagi Racigi, 2550m,” but this surprised me less than the wolf that loped out from behind it. We soon realized it was just a dog, lanky and grey with long iced lashes. Since she was sweet and Turkish, we dubbed her Baklava. Mel scratched her belly and I fed her trail mix until we decided to continue down the pass. When we pedalled away, Baklava followed.

  The three of us coasted for ten miles, the kind of descent cyclists (and probably dogs) adore so long as they don’t have to go back up. Tears issued from the press of speed into my face, as though velocity were a deep emotion. I squeezed the brake levers as hard as my frozen hands could, but grit and rain on the Black Sea coast had worn the pads down to metal, so that they practically threw sparks. As the elevation dropped, the temperature climbed, and long runnels of meltwater braided the road. Baklava raced at our side, her pink tongue flopping. She wisely stayed out of the way of traffic, which was sparse, though at one point a yellow construction vehicle sped past us only to stop suddenly on the road ahead. A man climbed out holding a rope. “My dog,” he asserted about Baklava, though she didn’t seem so keen on him. She sat on the far side of my bike, pointedly looking the other way.

  “Kate,” Mel said evenly, reading my mind. “The border’s just ahead. We can’t take her across.”

  Of course she was right. We didn’t have the necessary papers nor smuggling capacity in our panniers. Plus the last time we’d tried to rescue dogs on bikes, during our ride across America, things hadn’t exactly worked out. The two puppies we discovered abandoned in a ditch ou
tside a megachurch in Missouri had whined constantly through the breathing holes of the cardboard boxes we’d strapped to our bikes—a temporary transportation measure until we could buy a bike trailer in the next town. But when we arrived all the stores were closed. It was a Sunday in the American South, where only the police work on the Lord’s day of rest. Defeated, we surrendered the puppies at the sheriff’s office, where they promptly peed on the floor and gnawed on wooden desk legs. “Don’t you worry,” the receptionist said dubiously, swabbing at the yellowy mess with paper towels. “We’ll find these sweet things good homes.”

  “They’ll probably be shot,” Mel deadpanned as we exited the station.

  “Mel!” I’d howled, ready to rescue the puppies all over again.

  “Just kidding,” she’d said, trying to keep a straight face. “They will be loved by small children.”

  Such is the joy and heartbreak of life on the open road: puppies, like nations, come and go. The Turkish man led Baklava away to what I hoped was a home full of adoring children, like her brethren in Missouri, and Mel and I biked into another country. Goodbye, Turkey; gamarjoba, Georgia.

  Other than the stamp in our passport, the only evidence we’d crossed some kind of border was the road: leading to the frontier it had been neatly paved, and leading away it was a cratered mudfest. When we heard a vehicle coming we scooted out of splashing range, but the driver swerved directly toward us. As he got closer I realized he looked oddly familiar. “Why me why me, hahaha!” the shopkeeper from Damal bellowed from an open window, steering his truck around puddles with one hand and with the other making that plucking-grape motion that seemed to signal approval. Mel and I waved back, then looked at each other and grinned: now all those doubting Turks in the tea house would learn we’d made it to Georgia.

  6.

  Angle of Incidence

  Greater Caucasus

  Flat light, flat mood. Flat road, too, except for the potholes, each of which cradled a puddle, which in turn cradled skies the colour and texture of porridge. At least it wasn’t raining, only splashing up from below. Our wheels slurred along the wet gravel, leaving waves in our wake. I accelerated into murky puddles with no sense of what lay below the surface—a pothole, a bottomless abyss. Halfway across one I hit something and had to sacrifice a dry boot to stay upright. Icy water oozed between my toes and stole the feeling from my feet.

  Georgia was torn between winter and spring, with a chill to the air that seemed on its way out. The landscape was the drab colour of decaying leaves. Some fields still had snow; others were partially thawed into dark bruises of grass and dirt. Every pasture was edged by thin, arching rows of trees. Large wooden crosses instead of minarets topped the hills—Orthodox Christianity swapping in for Islam. After Armenia, Georgia was the first state to convert to the religion, back in the fourth century BCE, and neither Mongol invasions nor Soviet imperialism have managed to shake the country’s faith.

  Eventually Mel and I came to a crossroads: we could bike on as planned to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, or go fifteen miles off-route to a small village where a friend of a friend was teaching English and had invited us to visit. Though we hadn’t confirmed plans with him, we decided to make the detour.

  A sense of purpose, however arbitrary, restores a dull road to its original lustre. Past the turnoff to Tbilisi we climbed steadily toward the village, the road paved now but still glittering with puddles. In a way those mirrors of water seemed more vivid than the landscape they reflected, as if the fact of a frame gave the sky and trees and hills a crispness and presence the actual world lacked. I pretended I could slip through to that more intense reality if I could only get the angle of incidence between my wheels and the water exactly right, like a space shuttle re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere: too steep and you burn up; too shallow and you bounce back into outer space; somewhere in between, with the speed and tilt just right, you soar into another world.

  Long before space flight, a pair of avid cyclists recognized the importance of the angle at which a wing meets the wind. Wilbur preferred long, languid rides on country roads while Orville loved racing, the faster the better. This blend of endurance and enthusiasm, and steadfastness and speed, enabled the Wright brothers from Ohio to soar where others had crashed, often fatally, including Otto Lilienthal. The doomed “father of gliding” permanently fell from the sky in 1896, but Orville and Wilbur took inspiration from his achievements and decided to fashion their own flying machines using tools and parts from the bicycle repair shop they ran in Dayton. To make the wings they used unbleached “Pride of the West” muslin, a tight-woven cotton cloth (“fine as linen, soft as silk!”) more commonly deployed in women’s undergarments. For the ribs of the wings they used lightweight ash wood, and for the frame, lumber from a giant spruce. They tested the angles of incidence (also known as “angles of attack”) of different wing shapes inside a homemade wind tunnel, and over years of trial and error realized—their eureka insight—that by warping wing tips in opposite directions, they could create different amounts of lift on each, making the plane tilt and turn. Previous glider designs forced pilots to steer by throwing around their body weight, meaning control was fickle. By belting the wing tips to their waist via wires and a harness, the Wright brothers could manoeuvre their Flyer by sashaying from side to side, the way you steer a bicycle at high speed less with handlebars than your hips.

  For a launch pad the Wright brothers chose Kitty Hawk, a small town not far from where Mel and I finished our cross-country traverse on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where the soft landing of sand dunes and reliable winds offer ideal conditions for flight. Orville won the coin toss that decided which brother would attempt the first sustained, powered, heavier-than-air flight that cold December morning in 1903, when the wind blew in the Wrights’ favour, which is to say strongly against them. Although Orville didn’t fly far that morning—a hundred and twenty feet, or half the length of a modern Boeing 747 jet—the glory was in the details: a machine took off under human control, soared for twelve seconds under its own power, and landed as high as it launched, meaning it hadn’t simply glided downhill. First flight.

  That same day Wilbur bested his brother’s pioneering flight by lasting nearly a minute in the air and travelling 852 feet, roughly the length of the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing. Seven years after that, the world’s first commercial cargo flight carried two bolts of silk from Dayton to Columbus, Ohio. And in 1969, roughly half a century later, Neil Armstrong brought fabric from the wing and wood from the propeller of the original Wright Flyer to the moon and back. I’ve always thought the moonwalker’s pithy first words—“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”—more accurately described the Wrights’ accomplishment. After all, Orville and Wilbur figured out how to fly from scratch, without institutional support of any kind, without a Mission Control monitoring their every move. I especially loved the fact that the brothers’ success in flight had depended on a bicycle. The Wright Flyer, a homespun contraption of cloth and wood and wire, relied on a modified sprocket chain to power its twin propellers, and the hub of a bicycle wheel to launch off a railing and into history.

  My own bike nearly launched off the road in Georgia, but only because the puddles turned to ice the higher we climbed. “Wish we had our riding boots!” Mel called out, a grin in her voice, and I was relieved she was in a good mood despite the dropping temperature. The two of us used to wear our scuffed leather riding boots to elementary school in the winter, not because the thin cowhide kept our toes warm, or because they were stylish by the already ruthless standards of the sixth grade, but because we’d discovered their treadless soles were essentially ice skates without blades. We’d taken turns towing each other across the frozen schoolyard at recess, seeing who could catch the biggest air on launch ramps built from snow. These were small acts of exposure, tiny flights into risk, and yet the world seemed a little larger each time we landed. Mostly we crashed unglamorously into snowbanks
, then dug ourselves out to do it all over again.

  Cold toes were bearable then because we knew relief awaited at the end of recess, when we’d troop inside a warm school, and they were bearable now because we’d finish the day in a cozy Georgian home. But when we arrived in town and asked around for the friend of a friend, a gloomy, blunt-shouldered man claimed he wasn’t there. He’d departed for a few days, or had never lived there to begin with, or possibly didn’t exist at all—I couldn’t quite tell which from the man’s dismissive hand gestures.

  Mel and I were wrong to stand there expectantly, waiting for an invitation to stay, but we’d been spoiled by hospitality in Turkey and dreaded the idea of backtracking. Icy slush gummed the cables and gears on the bikes, and when I wiggled my toes to warm them I only succeeded in sloshing frigid water around. The man stared at us without curiosity, as if into a great distance. When a grandmotherly woman shuffled over I was sure she’d be more sympathetic, but she just held her hand to her mouth in wordless surprise or perhaps dismay. Her age probably meant she had been a citizen of the USSR and had seen peaceful demonstrations for Georgian independence shot down by Soviet troops. She’d lived through civil wars and violent separatist movements, bread shortages and energy blackouts. She perhaps mistrusted the modern promise of neo-liberal democracy and wasn’t wrong to do so; it was just the latest fad for organizing life in the South Caucasus, a subtle variation on the kingdoms, dynasties, and empires that had risen and fallen before. A gold ring hung on her thin finger, loosely orbiting the bone—a hand that had held hunger once and probably expected to grip it again.