Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  Landlocked, mountainous, and far from the moderating influence of any ocean, Mongolia offers some truly operatic weather: 90-degree summer days, 60-degree-below-zero winter nights, and twenty-four-hour temperature swings of 80 degrees and more. A European friar, John of Plano Carpini, who visited Mongolia in 1245, called the weather “astonishingly irregular.” He experienced “fierce thunder and lightning” that “caused the death of many men, and at the same time there [were] heavy falls of snow.” Carpini lived through an absurdly fierce hailstorm, which was followed by such warm weather that the resultant flash flood killed 160 people. He thought the country “more wretched than I could possibly say.”

  There was a time when geographers, expressing a kind of universal medieval dread, called Mongolia “the dead heart of Asia.” The people who survived there were supposedly barbarians, nomadic herdsmen with no culture and no interest in agriculture. Every few centuries, throughout the whole of recorded history, these “uncivilized” Mongolians came bursting out of their high, cold plateau on horseback to conquer any peoples who stood in their way. Once, in the thirteenth century, they conquered the known world.

  Mongolians, like many people who live in cold climates, tend to be physically bigger than their southern neighbors, and I imagined them pouring down on, say, the smaller Chinese: merciless barbarians, armies of huge men on fast horses wearing boiled-leather armor, their faces smeared with sheep fat against the cold and wind and sun.

  So thundering across the steppes on a Mongolian horse in company with Mongolian horsemen carried a certain savage hormonal rush, like tearing up the highway on a Harley with a pack of Hell’s Angels.

  But the horses, when I first saw them, didn’t inspire confidence. They were small and ratty, with big gawky heads. No animal was of any one single color. They were all about half wild and there was a rodeo every morning when we tried to saddle them up. Flapping rain jackets spooked them. Shadows cast by the campfire set them bucking. A sneeze could start a stampede.

  On the other hand, they were fast, and by far the toughest horses I’d ever ridden. They could survive in conditions that would kill any other horse on earth. The animals graze on their own—they are never fed—and yet live through 60-below-zero winter nights, cutting through snow and ice with their hooves for something to eat. Unshod, our horses routinely put in thirty-mile days, accumulating as much as eight thousand feet of altitude change. And they did it day after tireless day.

  The herdsmen inspected their horses for sores or bruises. They doctored them when it was necessary and rested them when they were tired. They knew each horse intimately—probably saw it born; probably broke it—but they were never sentimental. Mongolians name their horses about as often as Americans name their cars.

  And the horses serve the same function as cars. They are transportation devices, meant to be kept in superb running condition. Out on the roadless grassland, a horse is the essential link to the outside world: to the market, to the nearest town or school or hospital.

  Mongolians in the countryside literally learn to ride about the time they learn to walk. Not one of them has ever attended Miss Prissy’s Academy of Equine Etiquette. They gallop right up behind you and give your horse a smart swat on the backside if they want to race. And, in my experience, they always want to race.

  For what it’s worth, I thought the seven of us from America made a fairly impressive group. Arlene Burns, a well-known river guide, had been Meryl Streep’s rowing coach in the film The River Wild. I believe Meryl does Arlene in that film: I recognized the confidence, the feminine athletic swagger, even the hairstyle.

  Christoph Schork was a pilot and ski instructor in Idaho. He rode his own horse in marathon hundred-mile mountain races and was the only one of us who might have had a chance against the yogurt riders.

  Photographer Dave Edwards was working on a photo book about men who hunted with eagles in the Altai Mountains. He guided horse trips out of northern Mongolia to pay his expenses. Jackson Frishman, eighteen, was the son of a woman Dave had guided with when he worked the Grand Canyon. Jackson had a lot of white-water experience and wanted to be a river guide himself. Michael Abbot, a computer networking expert, was an avid fly fisherman who’d spent a good deal of time camping along salmon and steelhead streams in Alaska.

  Kent Maiden, of Boojum Expeditions, was our guide. We were all getting a break on the price of the trip because it was an exploratory. Kent had never been to this area of Mongolia before and couldn’t vouch for the quality of the horses we’d ride. Or the wranglers who’d ride with us. There were no guarantees. Whatever happened, happened.

  What happened was yogurt riders.

  For my part, I’d been trying, and failing, to get to Mongolia for over fifteen years. And now, in my saddle kit, I had eight Ziploc bags, full of human hair—hair cut from the heads of Mongolian herdsmen and herdswomen.

  It was what I had traveled to Mongolia to get. I am a member of the advisory board of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, located at Oregon State University, where it is believed, fervently, that the earth is a giant hair ball.

  Although no one knows the absolute average number, humans naturally shed an enormous amount of hair every day. Cosmeticians figure that number at about 170 daily strands. If so, the average human being sheds a little over 3.5 million hairs over a sixty-year life span. The figure is significant to the cutting edge of archaeology.

  Not far from my home in south-central Montana, for instance, there are several “early man” sites. One was populated by humans as early as fourteen thousand years ago. There’s a lot of naturally shed human hair buried at that and other sites. Previously, archaeologists, searching for the first Americans, discarded human hair in their digs. They tended to study bone fragments and stone artifacts.

  There were problems with this approach. The first was cultural: Some Native American groups saw the exhumation of bone fragments as a kind of grave robbing. Second, stone artifacts, such as Clovis points, could be dated by standard techniques, but isolating the technology in time sheds very little light on the identity of the people who embraced the culture. If Clovis points were effective, wouldn’t various groups of people adopt them, humans being human. Is someone who drives a Honda Japanese or American, African, or Latin?

  The study of naturally shed human hair at prehistoric campsites does not desecrate graves and provides important, confirmable information as to the identity of the people who populated those sites. Race can be accurately determined by microscopic and DNA analysis of human hair. That is the work being done by Dr. Rob Bonnichson at the Center for the Study of the First Americans. Field and lab work are focused on the single question: Who were the first Americans?

  The theory, of course, is that during the last Ice Age, when great volumes of water were concentrated at the poles and in various glaciers, the sea level was perhaps four hundred feet lower than it is today. The Bering Strait, today a fifty-three-mile waterway separating Asia and the Americas, was left high and dry. It was probably a vast grassland, alive with woolly mammoths, which humans, acting in concert, could kill and eat. They likely used spears tipped with Clovis or other points.

  The folks who crossed the Bering Land Bridge were probably Asians. My mission, for the Center for the Study of the First Americans, was to collect samples of Mongolian hair, bring ’em back through customs, and send them to Oregon State University, where they could be compared with ten-thousand-year-old strands dug up outside Melville, Montana. It is possible that the ancestors of the people who today call themselves Mongolian—the ancestors of the men I was riding with, of the men pursuing us with pails of yogurt—were “the first Americans.”

  The air route to Mongolia required a three-day layover in Beijing. There, I hired a taxi and drove two hours through the countryside to visit a section of the Great Wall, the largest building construction project in the history of the world. It’s fifteen hundred miles long, about thirty feet high, with towers rising to forty feet,
and it has everything to do with Mongols, and the fear of Mongols. In the fourth century B.C., the Chinese began suffering the attacks of fierce nomadic herdsmen living to the north and west. Almost immediately, they began building parts of what we now call the Great Wall.

  The ramparts I saw ran along the razored ridge tops of mountains rising several thousand feet above the rich agricultural lands to the east. There were guard towers every hundred yards or so, slitted windows for archers, and the land to the west—terrain attackers would have to traverse—was little more than a steep talus slope. No way could archers on horseback breach that wall.

  Those ancient marauding horsemen—the Hsiung-nu—are thought, by some accounts, to be ancestors of the people who were to call themselves Mongols. The Hsiung-nu, sometimes called Huns, would be the same folks who brought Europe the Attila the Hun Show in the fifth century A.D.

  Still, in the mid-twelfth century, the people living in what is now Mongolia were a fairly diverse group of warring tribes, living rather like the American Plains Indians. Superb horsemen, they believed all things possessed a spirit: mountains, rivers, rocks, hillsides. They particularly worshipped the sky, which they called Tengri. Mongolia’s continental climate produces 260 clear days a year: the sunniest spot anywhere on earth at that latitude. The sky, a brilliant blue dome, arches over the rolling grasslands of the steppes. It is a felt presence: Asian Big Sky country, with a vengeance.

  The ancient peoples of Mongolia lived in round felt tents, and the archaeological record suggests it was a way of life that stretched back to at least 10,000 B.C. The clans warred among themselves, engaged in shamanistic rituals, stole horses and women, put great stock in personal courage, and were terrifyingly accurate archers.

  It was Genghis Khan, born in 1167, who unified all of these feuding tribes—the hunter-gatherers of the northern forests; the people who skied across the frozen lakes on polished animal bones; the camel breeders of the Gobi Desert; the herdsmen of the grasslands. In 1206, after years of tribal warfare, Genghis Khan, triumphant, declared himself “the ruler of all those who live in felt tents.”

  Illiterate and probably alcoholic, Genghis Khan was, according to many historians, the greatest military genius who ever lived.

  The people who lived in felt tents probably numbered two million. This was the Mongol Horde. The great Khan, directing an army of only 130,000 Mongols, conquered the known world, and established the largest empire that ever was’ and probably ever will be. Genghis and his sons and grandsons ruled from southern Siberia to Syria, from the Pacific on the shores of what is now China all the way to the Adriatic Sea.

  His horsemen sometimes rode eighty miles a day over deserts or mountains others thought to be impassable. In Europe, they were known as Hell’s Horsemen. To the east, the Great Wall was little more than a speed bump on the way to Beijing, where Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis, built his Xanadu. He said, “A wall is only as good as those who defend it.”

  • • •

  Probably because of the harsh, irregular climate, Mongolia, the fifth largest country in Asia, is also the least populated: 2.3 million people inhabit an area larger than England, France, Germany, and Italy combined. About a third of all Mongolians live in the capital city of Ulan Bator.

  This was a little hard for me to figure out, because Ulan Bator did not sing sweetly to the soul. What I saw was a town of rectangular gray cement buildings—Soviet-style apartment blocks—with peeling, pockmarked facades, all of which appeared to be bleeding to death, the result, I saw on closer inspection, of rusting fire escapes. Packs of starving dogs slunk about in the alleys, cringing and snarling.

  Our group had been picked up at the airport by the director of the Mongolian Democratic Party Travel Company, the estimable Batchyluun (“call me Baggie”) Sanjsuren, thirty-seven, a big, hearty man with big, round muscles. He looked remarkably like a Crow Indian artist I know in Montana.

  Our translator, Bayaraa Sanjaasuren, was a few years younger: a slender, elegant, and highly educated fellow. One of the first things these men taught us how to say was—I render this phonetically—“Mee Mer-ee-koon,” which means, “I’m an American.” Caucasian people, Baggie explained, were often taken for Russians and sometimes had the snot kicked out of them on the street by roving gangs of angry, unemployed young Mongolians. Americans, on the other hand, were highly welcome in Mongolia for a variety of reasons.

  To wit: After the fall of the Khans, Mongolia fell under Chinese domination. By 1911, Inner Mongolia was already Chinese. In Outer Mongolia, just after the Russian revolution in 1917, defeated anti-Communist forces, led by the “Mad Baron” Ungern-Sternberg, took Ulan Bator, then called Urga. The Mad Baron specialized in citywide arson and mass executions. Mongolian freedom fighters, notably D. Sukhbaatar, Mongolia’s national hero, sided with Russian Communists, defeated the remnant Chinese warlords in Urga, and eventually captured the Mad Baron, who was promptly executed. The capital was renamed Ulan Bator (Red Hero), and in 1921, Mongolia declared itself a Communist state, the second country in the world to do so.

  Very quickly, Mongolia became a Soviet client, marching in lockstep with Russia and possessed of its own secret service, its own purges, and its own little Stalin, a mass murderer named Choybalsan. Religion was outlawed. For centuries, Mongolians had been Buddhists, of the Tibetan variety. Under Choybalsan, soldiers burst into the lamaseries, marched the older monks out back, shot them dead, and buried the corpses in mass graves. Nomadic herdsmen found themselves members of collectives. They were encouraged to move to towns, where they could become industrial workers, striving for progress. Mongolian writing was outlawed, and Russian, “the international language,” was taught in schools.

  Discussions of Mongol heritage were discouraged. The very mention of Genghis Khan was an embarrassment to Moscow in that the great Khan and his descendants had ruled large parts of Russia for over three hundred years. For the last seventy years, Genghis had been a name to be whispered in Mongolia. In 1962, for instance, a party official named Tomor-ochir made the mistake of attending an ill-advised ceremony designed to rehabilitate the image of Genghis Khan. The man was accused of “wrong thinking,” dismissed from his post, expelled from the party and, eighteen years later, mysteriously hacked to death in his own apartment.

  People had to be circumspect: They hid their Buddhist beliefs, and they found it expedient not to mention Genghis Khan. Ever. Politically correct thinking was the order of the day. Here, from a 1987 book entitled Modern Mongolian Poetry, is the celebrated poet Tsevegmidyn Gaitav (1929–1979), with a stirring effort entitled “Our Party”:

  Radiant,

  Boundless,

  Thinking so clearly and

  with perspective

  Steering wisely

  The state

  and the people

  Illuminating our road

  By the teaching of Lenin—

  Sagacious, meaningful,

  Daring, straightforward,

  You are leading our people,

  Forward, along the socialist road

  Our Party!

  And so on, until the people got pretty damn sick and tired of all that sagacious illumination. The first demonstrations started in the spring of 1990. Many people carried signs reading MORINDOO, which means “mount up” and was the battle cry of Genghis and his warriors. The Mongolian Communist party, perceiving that it was riding a razor edge on the arc of history, voted to dissolve itself.

  Soviet soldiers pulled out of the country. Russia cut its subsidies to Mongolia. By 1992, the country was in a poor way, unable to feed itself or employ its workers.

  Baggie, driving down the muddy streets on the outskirts of Ulan Bator, said the country was grateful for an influx of foreign aid from the U.S., among others. “We know,” Baggie said, “that the money comes from taxes American people pay. Mongolians want to thank the American people.”

  We passed Sukhbattor Square, where the demonstrations had begun. Baggie and Bayaraa w
ere among the organizers, and both had been active early on in the Mongolian National Democratic party, which advocated democratic reforms, a free market economy and, inexplicably, I thought at the time, a national diet that included more vegetables.

  Looking out at the street scene, it was clear that the times had changed. Robed Buddhist monks strolled across the square; a vast expanse of stone stood where there had once been a statue of Stalin. I could hear, faintly, the tinny sound of someone playing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on a boom box. The Beatles were very popular in Ulan Bator. Huge hawks buzzed the statue of D. Sukhbattor, and men with ancient cameras took black-and-white souvenir photos of herdsmen in town for what might be a once-in-a-lifetime visit.

  At dinner in a new hotel, one of several springing up around town, Baggie explained how he’d fallen into the travel business. In 1993, as a member of the Mongolian National Democratic party, he’d visited the U.S. on an international goodwill trip. One of the stops was in Bozeman, Montana, where he met Kent Maiden and Linda Svendsen, who, through Boojum Expeditions, had been running horseback trips in Chinese Inner Mongolia for over a decade. The couple had even been legally married there, in a Mongolian ceremony. International goodwill led to business arrangements.

  Prior to 1992, only one institution could issue the written invitations necessary to obtain a Mongolian visa. Juulchin, the government tourist agency, was essentially in the business of soaking the capitalists. When I inquired about a visa in 1980, the price of a three-week trip was $25,000. Expensive, yes, but you got to hunt and kill Marco Polo sheep, among other exotic and possibly endangered animals. I passed on the deal.

  By 1993, with the demise of the Communist party, Baggie was free to team up with Kent and issue his own written invitations to visitors. Prices are a small fraction of what Juulchin used to charge.