by Kate Harris
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The next morning we inched across the Ustyurt Plateau as though velocipede were not just the Russian word for bicycle but a historically accurate description of the contraptions we rode. Anyone observing Mel’s and my slow pace would’ve readily believed our bikes lacked pedals, tires, and drive trains like the cumbersome two-wheelers fashionable on the streets of Paris in 1876. Our hard-earned leg muscles and lung capacity had atrophied during our month-long hiatus from the bikes, meaning the previous day’s jaunt of a hundred kilometres from Beyneu to the Kazakh-Uzbek border was akin to running a marathon after weeks of bed rest. Even worse, the border road’s washboard texture had substituted bruises for where our butts used to be, so that Mel and I howled in unison whenever we mounted our bicycles. We resorted to pedalling standing up, which made for slow progress. I consoled myself with an old Arabic saying I’d read somewhere: the soul invariably travels at the speed of a camel.
By that measure we were right on pace. At one point we passed a pair of camels with flopped-over humps and shaggy dreadlocked hides, nibbling with pursed lips at what looked like pure dust. Judging by the letters AL spray-painted on their ribs, as well as the jaunty scarves tied around their necks, these camels were domesticated, being one of the few large species that can survive the blistering heat and aridity of the Ustyurt. Another is the saiga antelope, an ungulate with dual unicorn-like horns that I thought I kept spotting on the horizon, only to see the four-legged creatures disappointingly resolve into more camels. This wasn’t unexpected, for saiga populations have been decimated by illegal poaching for their horns, which are prized as aphrodisiacs by traditional Chinese medicine, the form of “healing” most harmful to life on Earth. The herds also periodically suffer mysterious mass die-offs, possibly due to bacterial infections from domestic animals. As a result, saiga are rarer than free speech in Central Asia. Based on photos I’d seen, their bulbous brown eyes and nose like an abbreviated elephant’s trunk made them look Dr. Seussian, even extraterrestrial. But who was I to judge? From the perspective of Uzbeks, Mel and I were the aliens in the Ustyurt, a pair of pale, mute barbarians who opted to bike for nine days across a desert that locals sped through by car or avoided entirely. Then again, the Uzbek language has no word for “fun.”
Before long our bottles and drom bags were empty. With no buildings or towns in sight, we resorted to flagging down vehicles for a resupply. The sky spilled onto the pavement where the road met the horizon, giving distant cars the appearance of driving on air. Regular cracks in the road made them sound like rapid-fire machine guns, an accelerating tat-tat-tat-tat that made us want to duck for cover. Instead, Mel and I stood taller and waved our arms. One tiny sedan was stuffed with peach-skinned mannequins, so that dozens of armless, legless, and headless torsos sprawled on the roof and crawled from the trunk. Mel and I dropped our arms and let it pass. Later came a Kazakh transport truck, and though the driver didn’t have any water, he generously gave us a dented bottle of warm Coca-Cola. I went to twist off the cap but the seal was already broken. We guzzled half on the spot and saved the rest for dinner. “I wonder how instant noodles will taste,” Mel mused, “when boiled in Coke.” Fortunately we didn’t have to find out. A few hours later we caught up with a crew of road workers who seemed delighted to fill our water bottles and bags—any excuse to stop shovelling tar in the smouldering heat. We posed for photographs with them and they thanked us effusively, as if we’d just given them water in a desert.
To avoid the worst of the heat, as well as the headwinds that did nothing to relieve it, we fell into a rhythm of pitching camp in the early afternoon and waiting until the world cooled and stilled before pedalling off again. Even with the tent doors opened wide to the wind, and sleeping bags draped over the roof to generate shade, the Glow-worm was an insufferable greenhouse. Veins popped out on my skin, charting hot rivers of blood. My hands and feet in particular felt oddly thick with heat, as if pressure were building up beneath my palms and soles with no outlet for release. It was too hot to sleep, to talk, to write, to exist. I lay on my sleeping pad and read as sweat pooled under my shoulders.
Among the books on my e-reader was a collection of John Berger’s essays, but maybe the heat corrupted the file, for throughout Berger’s text the word the was systematically replaced with die, as in: “Die third dimension, die solidity of die chair, die body, die tree, is at least as far as our senses are concerned, die very proof of our existence. It constitutes die difference between die word and die world.”
But if the word and the world only differ by the letter l, an even slimmer border separates a desert from desertification in Uzbekistan. Mel and I were steeping in wildness on the Ustyurt Plateau, darkening in it like tea, but a few hundred kilometres east was a similarly parched-looking landscape that used to be the Aral Sea. Once the fourth largest lake on the planet, it was now a social and ecological wasteland. Historically fed by two rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, the lake had withered away because of industrial-scale irrigation in Uzbekistan, which began in the 1960s as a Soviet project to cultivate cotton, one of the world’s thirstiest crops, in a desert. Thirty years later, the rivers no longer reach the lake, which has lost 90 per cent of its original volume and quadrupled in salinity, resulting in the catastrophic collapse of almost thirty fish species and, with them, the Uzbek fishing communities that used to harvest them.
“You cannot fill the Aral with tears,” wrote the exiled Uzbek poet Muhammad Salih, and technically he’s right: they aren’t salty enough by current salinity measures. If you were unaware of the recent history of the Aral Sea, though, you might get duped into believing the stark, resilient ecosystem of the Ustyurt simply extends eastward to the former sea floor, a sweep of sand incrementally lighter in colour than the surrounding terrain, like scar tissue. Locals call that new desert the Akkumy, meaning “white sands,” and apparently only a graveyard of wooden ships stranded among the dunes betrays the landscape as freakish, unnatural—not a genuine, living desert but the result of catastrophic desertification. Maybe that’s the true distinction between a wilderness and a wasteland: the latter is of our own making, rendering the Earth a little more sterile, a little more arid, a little more like Mars every day.
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I thought I spotted the red planet when we set off biking after dusk: a bright ember on the horizon like the lit end of a cigarette. Mars—if it was Mars—looked so tiny I could redact that entire world with my pinky finger, the way Neil Armstrong said he could blot out the Earth from the moon with his thumb. “Did that make you feel really big?” someone asked him upon his return. “No,” the first moonwalker confessed in a rare candid moment. “It made me feel really, really small.”
Uzbekistan had a similar effect on me, especially after the sun went down. In that world suddenly cooled no speed seemed impossible, no destination too far-fetched. The desert was so flat the constellations came right down to Earth, and stars hovered all around me at eye-level, so it seemed like I was travelling to them, even through them. With every pedal stroke I was soaring closer to Saturn’s rings, I was surging past the heliopause, I was flying neck and neck with the Voyager spacecrafts as they sped toward Sirius, a sun just 8.6 light-years from our own.
Tellingly, I could never muster as much interest in the Voyagers’ scientific mission as in their more whimsical cargo: mounted on the instrument bay of each probe is a Golden Record, a twelve-inch gold-plated copper phonograph inscribed with earthly greetings in fifty-five tongues, snapshots from around the world, and a medley of natural sounds and human music: whale song; waves breaking on a shore; the heartbeats of a woman in love; pictures of Oxford’s spires and towers, and of a modern airplane taking flight. The biologist Lewis Thomas suggested including the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach, “but that,” he admitted, “would be boasting.” So they settled on just three of Bach’s compositions, as well as the first two bars of Beethoven’s Cavatina, supposedly the only music that moved the deaf composer to tear
s. Also etched onto the record are recordings as diverse as Azeri bagpipes, a Navajo night chant, and a Morse code rendering of the Latin phrase ad astra per aspera, “through hardship to the stars.” Such fragments present—to any extraterrestrial intelligence that might discover and decipher them—a partial survey, a kind of haiku summary, of the unguessable gamut of life on Earth.
The Golden Record, as far as I can recall, wasn’t discussed in the grade school science class that introduced me to the Voyager spacecraft. The discs weren’t science, after all, but something else, more like poetry, though I don’t think they came up in my English classes either. Instead I learned about the record early in university, from a book by Carl Sagan called Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, which gave me shivers with its hope that, “like Marco Polo, [the Golden Record] will find itself at the gates of some ancient and great civilization.” At that point I was still smitten with Polo’s Silk Road explorations—meaning still blissfully ignorant of their mercantile leanings. But if Polo fell in my esteem, Sagan remains an idol, an explorer equal parts scientist and poet. He led the team responsible for compiling the Golden Record, charged with making its selections fair in terms of geographic, ethnic, and cultural representation while giving a comprehensive overview of life on Earth. In the process Sagan slipped in some revealing humour. A picture from Sir Vivien Fuchs’s 1958 trans-Antarctic expedition shows a Sno-Cat—the love child of a monster truck and an army tank, which the team attempted to drive across Antarctica—tottering precariously over the edge of a massive crevasse. “Freeing stuck vehicles may be an experience we share with alien explorers, no matter how advanced,” noted Sagan. He also included a photograph of someone climbing a jagged spire in the Alps. “If the recipients recognize the silhouetted human figure, they may guess that it was both difficult and seemingly pointless to scale this rock needle. The only point would be the accomplishment of doing it. If this message is communicated, it will tell extraterrestrials something very important about us.” Possibly that humans are not entirely rational, though we often try to pretend otherwise.
The Golden Record itself was a seemingly irrational project: Why waste valuable payload space on a time capsule when it could be otherwise devoted to more fruitful scientific instruments? NASA even hesitated to take the “pale blue dot” photograph, for it required turning the spacecraft around (which was costly in terms of energy) and pointing a camera at the sun (which risked frying its optics). Such a photograph wasn’t sensible, in other words. It was a frivolous use of taxpayer dollars. It wouldn’t reveal anything novel or groundbreaking, given we already knew without a doubt where our home planet was situated in the solar system and what it looked like.
Science, sadly, has never been overly concerned with self-reflection. Only passionate lobbying by Carl Sagan managed to change NASA’s mind about the photograph. What those administrators and engineers didn’t seem to realize is that exploration is a systematic inquiry into the nature of things but also a radical, revealing art, much like science itself. Though exploration might result in new territory conquered or a heightened mastery over the material world, its real value lies in how it expands our consciousness, our sense of connection with each other and the universe of which we’re a part. Which means that seemingly impractical gestures such as the “pale blue dot” photograph or the Golden Record itself are not diversions from serious exploration but its essence. What is the point of exploring if not to reveal our place in the wild scheme of things, or to send a vision of who we are into the universe? A self-portrait and a message in a bottle: maybe no other maps matter.
During those night rides across Uzbekistan I felt like a message in a bottle myself. I tried to make it out, but all I could read was the thin scroll of road lit by my headlamp. Something about potholes, about grass shooting up in the pavement cracks. Something about how there are places you can get to by road, and places you can only get to by being on the road—a state of mind you can bring to almost any context, especially a highway paved in stars in Uzbekistan. At least until you’re so sleepy you nearly fall off your bike.
At about two in the morning Mel and I would pitch the tent by headlamp, doze for a few dreamless hours, then wake before dawn and launch into outer space all over again, pushing hard to make progress before the sun rose and the moon set. That first week it hung in the sky like a half-eaten rind of fruit. What was it like to walk there? people asked Neil Armstrong all the time, at the grocery store and the barber shop, their faces lit up, expectant. What was it like to be first? I would’ve done the same had I ever met him, knowing even as I voiced such questions that they were profoundly unoriginal, but wouldn’t any other line of small talk seem frivolous? I’d ask in the ludicrous hope that Armstrong, having gone where no one else had been, might offer me something no one else could: a different map, a new religion, souvenirs the colour of stars turned inside out.
In any case, the famously shy moonwalker didn’t answer. Maybe Armstrong’s silence on the subject was a courtesy, a kind of imaginative generosity, as if this deeply modest man sensed that anything he could say would fall short of whatever people could dream. Or maybe he was so busy on the moon he didn’t have time to absorb the marvel of being there, with his every heartbeat micromanaged by NASA. The checklist sewn onto the cuff of his spacesuit glove called for Armstrong to take photos, inspect the condition of the “Eagle” Lunar Module, hammer and scoop and bag samples of lunar rocks and dust—basically do everything but ponder his surreal place in the cosmos. Plus “the right stuff” in NASA’s early days included the terse courage of test pilots, but not necessarily a capacity for evocative expression, which in retrospect seems a missed opportunity. After all, the Latin root of the word explorer is ex-plorare, with ex meaning “go out” and plorare meaning “to utter a cry.” Venturing into the unknown, in other words, is only half the job. The other half, and maybe the most crucial half for exploration to matter beyond the narrow margins of the self, is coming home to share the tale.
In high school I’d been obsessed with the science-fiction movie Contact, adapted from the eponymous novel by Carl Sagan. The main character in the film is Dr. Ellie Arroway, an edgy, whipsmart astronomer who is obsessed with searching for signs of intelligent life in the universe. “If it is just us,” she reasons, “it seems like an awful waste of space.” One day in the New Mexican desert, where the Very Large Array of radio telescopes listens patiently to the cosmos, Ellie picks up a faint but unmistakable transmission from the vicinity of the star Vega, twenty-five light-years away. The radio signal is eventually decoded into a blueprint for a machine with a pod for human transport, though nobody knows where the pod will go once the machine is activated. After a gruelling selection process, Ellie is chosen to find out.
Upon ignition, the pod plummets into a wormhole—a tunnel through space and time as predicted by general relativity—and takes Ellie on a warp-speed tour of the cosmos, past black holes, spiral galaxies, and other living, breathing worlds. During this journey, and despite her rigorous scientific training, Ellie doesn’t reach for some kind of measuring stick or a compass or other instrument with which to quantify the experience, nail it down in data. What she reaches for is words. If only she can get them right, she knows life on Earth will be transformed forever, for what she sees and desperately wants to communicate is that the universe is more vast, resplendent, strange, and alive than we can possibly imagine, that we belong to something far greater than ourselves, that none of us is ever alone. She longs more than anything to share that awe, that humility, that hope. So she reaches for words, but like Armstrong she can’t find them. “They should’ve sent a poet,” she whispers instead.
When delegates from the UN Outer Space Committee recorded greetings for the Golden Record, many included lines from their countries’ poets or spoke poetically themselves, such as the Nigerian who described his home continent as “a land mass more or less in the shape of a question mark in the centre of our planet.” I often tho
ught of his words as I hunched over my handlebars on those dark desert rides, feeling like a question mark myself in the centre of the universe, because wherever we go, there we are, even on a bicycle slogging slowly across Uzbekistan.
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Deserts have long been landscapes of revelation, as though the clean-bitten clarity of so much space heightens receptivity to frequencies otherwise missed in the white noise of normal life. This was especially true just before dawn on the Ustyurt Plateau, when the horizon glowed and shimmered like something about to happen. As the sun rose it tugged gold out of the ground and tossed it everywhere, letting the land’s innate wealth loose from a disguise of dust. The air smelled of baked dirt spiced with dew and sage. Our bicycles cast long cool shadows that grew and shrank with the desert’s rise and fall, its contours so subtle we needed those shadows to see them. The severity of the land, the softness of the light—where opposites meet is magic.
In those cool hours before dawn the chinstrap of my helmet was stiffened with salt, a rough blade at my throat until I sweated enough that it softened. It didn’t take long. As the sun climbed higher it seemed to roar, but that was just the wind rising with it, building in heat and intensity until biking felt like re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere at a viciously steep angle. The horizon went from lovely to lurid, a red smear of lipstick on the rim of sky. By nine a.m. all the beauty and benevolence of the desert burned away, leaving a landscape seared of nuance and detail, and our pace became so slow that Mel and I risked being confused for roadkill.
Surely that’s what the steppe buzzard had in mind when it circled above us for hours, barely flicking its broad wings yet soaring, mockingly, as if the whole sky were a downhill slope. Far below, spinning wheels across Uzbekistan’s formal, blazing flatness, I smelled the real casualties of the road long before I saw them. A hint of rot on the breeze was followed by a flattened lizard, or a smashed-up hedgehog, or a tortoise whose cracked half-dome looked like a puzzle of the Earth with a few pieces missing. The wreckage was nothing compared to what I’d seen biking across America. I was somewhere east of Carson City in Nevada when the road began to shine. At first I thought it was the sun setting behind me, spilling slick light all over the tarmac. Then the noise started. A snapping and crunching like popcorn under my wheels, only the kernels were brown and endowed with six or fewer frantic legs. Locusts. Thousands of them.