by Kate Harris
The road went from paved to gravel to paved again. The heat went from mean to murderous. At one point we crossed a bridge on which a pipe had burst, so that cold, clear water arced everywhere, spraying the road and the two of us as we biked through it. This impromptu shower kept us going to the top of a pass, where we could see the full scope of the Nurek Reservoir. It looked like a bathtub of turquoise water drained lower than usual, exposing a rim of bright red soil, like a rust stain. Created by a Soviet-era dam on the Vakhsh River, this reservoir generates hydroelectricity and also irrigates local farmland, and another, even bigger, power plant is under construction on the same river—to the chagrin of Uzbekistan, which depends on that water downstream. Tajikistan’s true wealth is gravity and water: the Pamir Mountains harvest rain and snow and store it in glaciers, which melt into rivers, which serve as the arteries of life in parched Central Asia. Among these rivers is the Pyanj, known historically as the Oxus and farther downstream as the Amu Darya, which we’d crossed on a bridge in Uzbekistan more than a month ago.
The only place that river still gushes into the Aral Sea is on old maps, or at least the Silk Road map we carried, which hadn’t been updated to reflect the modern, less liquid, reality. In the tent that night I pored over those contours, following the river’s blue swerve with my finger from the Uzbek desert into Tajikistan, where a road ran parallel to it, beginning in the eastern foothills and wending up and across the Pamir Plateau. Along its course the river marks the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and from what I could tell on the map, a high-altitude lake called Zorkul eventually swallowed it whole—and with it, the only visual evidence of the Tajik-Afghan divide. This river, in other words, was a chance to trace a border to its source.
It took us another week to reach it. We biked past rolling green hills like scoops of mint ice cream, past a donkey waiting in the shade of an old Soviet bus shelter. For once in Central Asia, we weren’t in a rush: Tajikistan had generously granted us sixty-day tourist visas, enough time to bike across the country twice, which meant we could take the Silk Road as it came. And in the western half of Tajikistan, it came slow, hot, and rarely horizontal. After a grinding climb into cooler layers of sky, we biked down past cliffs so red it seemed the rock was bleeding, and only then did we reunite with the fabled Oxus.
Beneath our wheels was Tajikistan, on the far bank was Afghanistan, and all around us mountains rose like cupped hands, the river running from them like an oblation. Ragged peaks spliced the sun’s general shine into neat rays, precise beams, illuminating one swath of the world and then another. Biking along the Pyanj was like going from black and white into colour. For hours and hours we’d travel a stark and seemingly lifeless land, a stubble of rock, and then see it suddenly bloom green where a creek silvered down the slopes. Villages took root alongside this vegetation. Stone buildings and stone walls surrounded neat mosaics of wheat and barley fields, cherry and apricot orchards, and groves of mulberry trees, the latter prized here less as fodder for silkworms than for the sustenance of the berries themselves.
The mountains above these villages were generally taller in Afghanistan, also sharper, like the nicked edge of a sword—the kind of landscape you could run a finger along and draw blood. Yet we saw more evidence of strife on the Tajik side. Military watchtowers tilted on struts above the Pyanj, and rusty green tanks littered its bank. Signs along the road showed cartoon human legs being blown off, warning of the minefields left over from Tajikistan’s civil war in the wake of Soviet independence. We stayed on the road to avoid land mines, hesitant to even pee off its shoulder, and camped in the yards of families for the same reason, but the most hazardous aspect of Tajikistan proved to be the weather. One afternoon a storm blew in while Mel and I were on an exposed stretch of road, so we ducked under an overhanging cliff to wait it out. Thunder and lightning lashed the mountains, and hail the size of molars hit the metal guardrail, with a sound like teeth chattering. The hailstorm thawed into heavy rain, which loosened the dirt stabilizing the slopes above us and sent rocks bombing onto the road. Once the storm had passed and the world seemed calm and stable again, we got back on the road and started pedalling. Seconds later, a rock the size of a human head fell next to Mel with a sickening thud.
One afternoon we saw an idyllic campsite tucked on a hillside behind a low stone wall. It was shaded by trees, with a well-worn trail leading to it. Assuming this obvious path meant it was safe from land mines, we hiked up the hill and stretched out behind the wall for a nap, figuring we’d wait until dark so as to pitch our camp unseen. An hour or so later we heard voices. I peered cautiously over the wall: on the road were six or seven men wearing camouflage and carrying guns.
“Should we let them know we’re here?” I whispered to Mel, not wanting to surprise a Tajik military patrol. But it was too late. A soldier spotted our bike tracks in the dirt of the path and followed it with his eyes up to the wall where we were spying on him. Mel and I quickly stood up and shouted hello, waving our hands in what we hoped was a friendly fashion. He motioned for us to come down.
The soldiers were alarmingly young, tall, and gawky. Using hand gestures we explained we hoped to camp here. At first they nodded in agreement, but after talking among themselves, they changed their minds. One of them pointed at Afghanistan and mimicked someone swimming across the river and then aiming a gun. The bank was barely a stone’s throw away, but the river frothed and churned with such force it was hard to imagine anyone making it across. The soldiers insisted we return to a guest house in the town we’d biked through earlier, now two miles behind us and up a horrible, hilly stretch of gravel road.
I’d rather bike ten miles forward than two in reverse, but the sun was setting and we had no choice. The soldiers watched us as we packed up our bikes, wheeled them down the path, and set off grinding up the first steep hill. When we reached the village, we were told there was no guest house, but a family of sweet if slightly off-kilter women took us in. One daughter, who was roughly our age, giggled constantly and was otherwise mute. Another, slightly older daughter had one blind, opaque eye and never smiled. We helped them milk some yaks, meaning Mel and I tugged uselessly at the teats to the entertainment of the gathered bystanders until the daughters took over, expertly sending white spurts into a pail.
Inside their home, crimson carpets with floral patterns covered not just the floor but also the walls, as if you could walk right up them. Round tree-trunk beams in the ceiling were painted turquoise, with rough-hewn boards in between. A flickering bare light bulb dangled from a beam, and plants that looked tenderly cared for flourished on the windowsill. A boxy metal stove was balanced rather precariously on rocks and wood, an occasional flame escaping from its hinges. When the mother—an ample, exuberant woman whose breasts practically sagged into her pockets—put a kettle on the stove, I snuck a peek under a floor carpet: linoleum the colour of wheat.
As we ate homemade bread with butter and fresh cucumbers for dinner, the mother carefully wrote down her cellphone number on a scrap of paper and gave it to us. I tore a page from my journal and gave ours to her in turn, though there was no reception in that part of Tajikistan, and even if there had been, neither of us could understand a word the other said.
Centuries ago, both banks of the Pyanj River were part of the same political territory known as Badakhshan, which was populated by Ismaili Muslims and ruled by various emirates. The boundary now severing the region was drawn in the Great Game, a British-Russian standoff over Central and Southern Asian territories during the late nineteenth century. The Emirate of Kabul, supervised by British India, ceded the east bank of the river to the Emirate of Bukhara, a Russian protectorate. Although local trade and travel took place across the Pyanj for nearly a century after the border was established, the situation changed following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, and the civil war beginning in 1992 in Tajikistan, with the boundary growing more militarized and less fluid. Familie
s found themselves stranded on opposite banks, able to wash clothes in the same water but forbidden from boating across.
I felt the vertigo of that divide as Mel and I biked farther along it. The road in Tajikistan, though rough, was paved in places, and some of the families we stayed with watched television over dinner. Across the river in Afghanistan—seemingly across the centuries—the stone-hut villages went dark at night and there was no road, not even a euphemism for a road, just donkey tracks scuffed into the riverbank. Some mornings we saw Afghan girls in elegant indigo robes walking those paths, presumably to attend school in a nearby village. They glanced over at us with—curiosity? Alarm? Longing? Pity? Their faces were covered, so we couldn’t tell.
Even for Tajiks the sight of foreigners on bicycles was unusual. In one town a young mother was bathing her child in a stream when he spotted us riding by. The boy was so excited he ran after us wearing nothing but sandals. I thought back to university in North Carolina, where a home team basketball victory would send students running half-naked into the streets to flip cars and leap over bonfires. I could never muster that kind of ecstasy over a sports win. For me to run nude and rapturous down the road, it would take something like NASA announcing the discovery of life on other worlds—which is basically what sent the little boy running after us. He stared at Mel and me, giggling and dumbstruck, until his mother came to retrieve him.
A few days later we were met with similar awe by two sisters, though they were fully clothed, in colourful patterned dresses that looked like extra-long shirts. These girls seemed to be between ten and twelve years old, one with brown curly hair, the other with straight black hair, and they were playing by the side of the road when we stopped briefly to say hello. They proceeded to pull out all the stops so that Mel and I would stay. First was a song and dance routine, in which the sisters warbled and twirled around until they were dizzy, which was clearly part of the fun. Next, they gave us a tour of the dollhouse they’d ingeniously built with bottles and bits of trash, a make-believe mansion on the edge of their yard. When we turned our backs on this work of art, two boys snuck over and stole pieces of it to throw meanly at the girls. Mel chased after them and squirted them with her water bottle, prompting the boys to run and howl in mock fear and the sisters to cheer. Then the girls and the two of us had a water fight ourselves, because it offered relief from the heat.
It was an afternoon of pure play, aimless and timeless and requiring no translation. The girls’ mother offered for us to pitch our tent in their yard, which we did, much to the fascination of the girls. Once it was up they scurried inside and swept it out with a broom, then inflated the Therm-a-Rest mattresses and unfurled the sleeping bags for us. That evening the sisters tried on our helmets and sunglasses, looking more bad-ass in our cycling gear than we ever did. We propped the bikes on kickstands and helped the girls into the saddles, where they pretended to ride even as their feet dangled high above the pedals. They leaned from side to side through whiplash curves, squinting through dust kicked up by the wheels, and crouched low over the handlebars as though travelling at tremendous speed.
At lower altitudes, the Pyanj ambled along at the pace of someone with no particular place to be. Higher up, the river shed its load of silt and turned indigo as it steepened and narrowed, with Afghanistan inching closer and closer. Rapids undercut the road in places, dissolving slabs of gravel or concrete like salt, forcing us to swerve wide or be swept away. Ragged mountains rose steeply on all sides, so that the town of Khorog looked pinched in the jaws of a piranha. When we stopped there for dinner at a local Indian restaurant, a giant poster with our blown-up, pixelated pictures on it personally welcomed us to the Pamir—or rather, welcomed me and “Mellisa Yue.”
A friend of a friend, Aziz Ali, had learned we were passing through Khorog and organized a party in our honour. Originally from Pakistan but now living in Afghanistan, where he works on community development in the Pamir borderlands with Tajikistan, Aziz Ali was a kind, swarthy man with round cheeks and a singsong accent that made music of normally bland sentences. He gave a long welcome speech endearingly peppered with “wholly solely,” as in, “We are gathered here tonight to celebrate these brave Canadian women who have biked here from Canada wholly solely by themselves!” If this wasn’t enough to make us blush, we were gifted with bouquets of roses and gorgeous Pamiri necklaces, an intricate weave of red and white and black beads that made even our ratty T-shirts look stylish.
There were about nine or so people gathered at the dinner, and one of the men, sitting across from Mel, kept glancing back and forth between the welcome poster and my friend. “Yue is a very strange surname,” he mused out loud. “It sounds Chinese, and yet you are not Chinese?”
Conversations around the table stopped. Everyone stared curiously at Mel, awaiting clarification.
“Well, haha . . . ,” she hedged, struggling to find a delicate way to point out the spelling error. “You see, it’s no big deal, but my last name is actually Y-u-l-e . . .”
Stricken looks all around. The truth has a time and a place, it turns out, and that’s rarely on the Silk Road—a lesson further reinforced when a thirty-something ethnobotanist named Munira, also at the welcoming party, asked us how much our bikes had cost. We explained that our custom-built titanium touring bikes had actually been gifted to us by a generous bike company. So then she asked what they would have cost, if we’d had to buy them.
“Um, around fifty dollars?” I lied.
“Yeah, about that,” Mel quickly agreed.
Munira’s eyes widened. We later learned that even this vastly downplayed price tag was more than her monthly salary at the Pamir Biological Institute, which despite being one of Tajikistan’s top scientific institutions has no Internet connection, not nearly enough lab space or offices to go around, no subscriptions to the latest scientific journals, no funding to send Munira and her colleagues to conferences to engage with the broader scientific community—none of the resources, in short, that I’d had in abundance at MIT.
I thought of our exchange a few days later, in the village of Darshai, where we stayed with a geography teacher whose lively, exuberant mind seemed too vast and searching for the narrow circumstances it found itself in. Though Mubarak Sho spoke some English, we couldn’t understand what he was saying about dinner, so he drew a cartoon of a long-eared rabbit caught in a snare (Mel was by now a “Central Asian vegetarian,” meaning she ate whatever she was offered). The meat—gamey, tough, but delicious—was served after an elaborate pre-feast of fresh bread, fried eggs, sweet milky chai, and a plate full of cookies and candies, for in Tajikistan dessert often comes before dinner. During the meal Mubarak revealed his intimate, far-ranging knowledge of the world by effectively giving himself a pop quiz and acing it. He listed Great Lakes in Canada like Superior and Erie, and rivers in the United States like the Mississippi and the Missouri. He described tribes in the Amazon jungle, mimicking blowpipe hunting to get his point across, and illustrated the Arctic tundra with cartoons of an igloo and a whale blubber lamp. Kangaroos, sharks, elephants, and cobras were discussed in turn, as were all the major mountaineering peaks in the Himalaya, from Everest to Lhotse to Annapurna.
How did he learn all of this, I asked him, living in a remote village in Tajikistan with, as far as I could tell, no library and no Internet? But Mubarak didn’t understand my question, for while his English was impressive, it was apparently limited to the wonders of the world—which were everywhere, by his measure, except Tajikistan. “What is Zorkul Lake compared to Machu Picchu?” he exclaimed when he learned that’s where we were headed. “Built by cosmos, Machu Picchu. By aliens.”
Here Mubarak’s knowledge fell short: when we arrived at Zorkul Lake a week later, I nearly fell off my bike at its beauty. The dark blue of the lake was liquid twilight, as though the sun were always setting on the Pamir Plateau and the stars were about to emerge from that water. The long, open valley in which the lake was set was surrounded by mountains: s
harp, ragged summits on the Afghan side, and gravelly, rounded slopes in Tajikistan. Even the valley floor loomed fourteen thousand feet high, but I hardly noticed the lack of oxygen: the air was fresh and cool and full of unexpected fortunes, like hints of sage and glacial ice. The wind untied my shoelaces as I biked but at least it was coming from behind us, propelling us forward, though the boost was mostly wasted on the rough road. At times it disappeared completely. We’d find ourselves pedalling across lush carpets of grass scattered with yellow flowers, or splotches of purple lichen in perfect concentric circles. As long as we kept the lake to our right, we eventually relocated the road, or the faint trace parodying as one, which was my favourite kind anyway: barely distinguishable from a trail, or better yet barely there at all.
From Zorkul I could almost see the end of our Silk Road. Across the lake was the Wakhan Corridor, the narrow finger of Afghanistan that points to China between Tajikistan and Pakistan, where Siachen spills over into northern India. The glacier was just a few hundred miles away, or a few days of biking as the crow flies, but political borders meant it would take three more months to get there.
I thought about Fanny Bullock Workman, who didn’t live to see her beloved “Rose” lose its status as the world’s longest non-polar glacier (the Fedchenko in Tajikistan proved longer by less than a mile). Nor did she live to see Siachen turn into a war-torn garbage dump, which surely would’ve broken her heart. It broke mine, after all, and I’d never even laid eyes on its ice. What I had seen was the Juneau Icefield, which suddenly struck me as pivotal. Without that summer on ice, the saga on Siachen probably wouldn’t have obsessed me so much. I wouldn’t have been able to imagine a remote glacier in Kashmir and so wouldn’t have lamented its desecration any way but abstractly. Instead, caring about one icy borderland had primed me to care for another that I’d never seen. Maybe exploration at its best is about building that kind of metaphorical muscle. After all, the term metaphor comes from the Greek meta (above) and pherein (to carry)—to be carried above, a flight into connection, so that after travelling long and far enough every mountain reminds you of another mountain, every river summons another river, and you learn enough landmarks by which to love the whole world.