This was the terrible thrill. Come August I would encounter it atop twenty-five wilder ponies, free of the tightly bound English fields. Our Mongolian ponies would be the descendants of Genghis Khan’s famed Takhi horses, who shouldered his empire’s postal system from the thirteenth century onwards. Their speed allowed letters from Siberia to arrive in Poland within twelve days, though our ride wouldn’t go beyond the border of Mongolia’s green oasis—a wide island surrounded by the Gobi Desert to the south, the barren Altai Mountains to the west, and the freezing wastelands of Siberia on the northern border with Russia.
I had begun to notice how the idea of Mongolia made many a Brit go quiet. I don’t think the reason is Genghis Khan as much as the void in our history. Where British culture has not forced its influence, we tread carefully, sensing a different lay of the land. England was crafted by roads and fields, flooded with a web of happenings with which I was familiar. The steppe would strip all this away.
V
The race was set to begin on August 4. In the first week of July, the organizers sent me a month-by-month “Your Year of the Derby” calendar. They had sent this to everyone else at the beginning of the year, since they had applied on time. We were advised to assemble our gear in February, get vaccinated in April, commence language-learning in May, use July to visit relatives and update our wills, and devote the entire year to training.
Maggie, an endurance-riding specialist, had apparently been sending handouts on fitness, navigation, horse pacing, and hydration. “You’ve missed those now and it’s too late for you to be training anyway. You can’t get fitter in the final two weeks,” she stated on the telephone. I gulped and clung closer to the daft resistance within me.
The month-by-month calendar from the organizers read: You could do all your preparation in July if you have unusually low blood pressure—no? Thought not.
I do happen to have low blood pressure, and a low heart rate. Perhaps that would help. When I was small and we measured our vital signs in class, Mrs. Bleakley said my results meant either I was an athlete, or I was nearly dead, or I couldn’t count. Likely the latter—despite being a decade older when I entered the race, I still struggled with numbers and time.
July rolled by. I researched all the race’s sore statistics and found that Lucy was right. Every year just over half the field made it to the finish. No woman had ever won the Derby, nor had a Briton. South Africans tended to triumph. The youngest person ever to cross the finish line had been twenty-three.
Me? I was not young. I had long since given up my rubber ducklings, I had finished high school, I felt ancient as a walnut.
Meanwhile, my father had forgotten his resistance. He helped me draft letters to family and friends asking for contributions to the charities I had chosen to ride in the name of—Macmillan Cancer Support and Greenhouse Sports. The latter, which sets up sports programs for London teenagers struggling with school, was a charity that amazed me, perhaps because sport had felt like my own lifeline in the city.
I needed to focus on this campaign before departure. No one would donate when I returned from the race having managed only 10 of the 1,000 expected kilometers. Aware now that the other riders had signed up for the Derby in October, giving them ten months to train and plan how much toilet paper to pack, I implied in my letters that I, too, had been aiming at the race for about a year.
When I was young, Dad had often called me “Sporty Mouse.” I was flat-chested and athletic enough that you couldn’t tell me apart from my brothers. In fact, as far as I was concerned, I was a boy. I existed in the mold of my siblings. I scorned at girly-girls with Barbies and bolted from pink, that color of social catastrophe—sickly and sweet, nothing like me. I sat best with blue, the color of distance and coldness, the favorite of my brothers and mother, too. “Where’s my willy?” I demanded of her in the bath at age three. She and I have hair growing out of us in surprising places. She says the forests on my legs and the two-inch hair growing by my belly button mean I’m strong.
The other half of the picture is one I tended to ignore. Mum sometimes referred to me as “Sensitive Mouse.” My stomach has ached since I was fifteen, I blush all the time, and my skin rashes red when you so much as brush a finger over it. You know what they say about thin-skinned people: a highly strung, sensitive lot, prone to withering like flowers in winter. Doctors do not prescribe them 1,000-kilometer horse races.
We were supposed to have seen the warning on the website before signing up:
Before you consider applying for this race, we want to point out how dangerous the Mongol Derby is. By taking part in this race you are greatly increasing your risk of severe physical injury or even death. The nature of the Derby means that if you do fall off, the response time of the medics is going to depend on where you are. If you are seriously injured you may be hundreds of miles away from the nearest hospital. The Mongol Derby is an extremely physically demanding and dangerous race, and holds the title as the toughest horse race in the world for good reason.
I had missed it.
I didn’t understand the coming race, and wouldn’t until I rode in it. I did, however, assume that something would go wrong for all of us riding and that we would need to step back and ponder the silliness. After all, didn’t entering such a competition demand a deviant imagination? Could we envisage ordinary days blown from their moorings? Could we pretend that moving through space with unbearable intensity had been a natural habit our whole lives?
Even some of the Mongolian parents I would meet, whose eight-year-old children could gallop for hours without saddles, thought the 1,000-kilometer distance crazy. No wonder, then, that the race had been thought up elsewhere—by a man in Bristol called Tom Morgan. Tom found out that the steppe’s medieval messaging systems were still in place until the 1960s, and with the guidance of an original postal rider, he staged the first Mongol Derby five years before I entered. The race had since grown, and was now summoning a field of thirty to forty riders annually.
VI
I like to laugh matters into detachment, but I found the approaching monster tricky to belittle. A week before my departure for Mongolia, I lay in bed thinking about William the Conqueror. How mad of him to risk visiting England with an army in 1066.
Me, 947 years later: No desire to conquer. Merely wanting to leave Normandy, as it were. Live a little.
Half an hour after these musings, across a breakfast table laden with tropical fruit, my godfather, Michel, lowered his newspaper to make an announcement.
“No one wins the Tour before their early thirties. . . .”
The man knows about endurance sport, having competed in Olympic luge and, more recently, cycled Tour de France sportives.
“They haven’t developed the combination of mental and physical toughness,” he continued, turning his bold gaze to me. “You—what are you—nineteen?”
This kind of pinpointing tended to prompt my rebellion and excitement. But next to me I noticed my mother’s mouth slowing down as she chewed, her forehead rising into wrinkles. The woman who often did not notice when she lost her six-year-old daughter in the supermarket as she floated along, silently focusing on the goat’s cheese—the woman who bicycles blindly across main roads, leaving traffic to swerve out of her way—began now to engage with the reality of the race.
A few days later, I walked over to Aunt Lucinda’s to borrow some equipment. I must’ve expected some advice, too—she was my go-to ahead of any equestrian event. She lived 150 meters away from us in Appleshaw.
Aunt Lucinda never likes to concentrate fully on one thing, so she was weeding the gravel in her driveway when she hollered some last words to me.
“I suspect you won’t make it past day three but don’t be disappointed.”
She raced inside to get me a can of Anti Monkey Butt—some powder for sore bottoms she had discovered in America—and waved me away, yelling she had to fly. She was on her way to Austria for teaching.
This kind of perennial
rush might be a family trend. We flee from the waiting, lest it confronts us with some startling boredom. If we really questioned why, though, I’m not sure we’d have an answer. Maybe rushing is a symptom of self-importance, or a fear of getting close to others, lest they shatter us.
Although Aunt Lucinda lived across the road, her house, which arrived flat-packed on a lorry from Scandinavia in the 1980s, was almost always deserted. I was frustrated by the absences of my champion aunt, whose achievements held a mythic place in my rural imagination. She earns her living flying around the world teaching people how to ride cross-country, saying things like “Squeeze the horse like a tube of toothpaste. Not too hard, we don’t want it all coming out at once.”
What I couldn’t accept was that it might be difficult for a champion to lay her head on the same pillow each night, since the glorious memories might only be going stale. It must, I suppose, be easier to be consumed by airplanes, hopping between sites of forgetful newness.
Even on the ground, Lucinda advances in quick, short strides, as if awakened by a storm. Apparently her mum once told her, “Being mother to you is like being mother to a lightning conductor.”
After I left her that day, she sent me a text reading Xxxxxxx. This is the type of message she sends when at a loss as to what to advise.
From an old history teacher, I had a short email: I’ve heard from people that know people that they eat testicles in Mongolia. And that was it.
It didn’t surprise me that no one was taking my race attempt seriously. I was that scatterbrain who lost Oyster cards on the Underground and failed driving tests. “I find it difficult to park between the lines,” I explained to my eldest brother, George, who has been serious about cars, and many other things, since the age of four.
“You don’t even know where the lines are,” he said.
What was it that kept them all from trusting me—not with the keys, the cars, the dogs? Nor with time? The not trusting meant bits missing. Lara’s got bits missing. She’s not fully here. She’s a clock without some numbers, a clock who forgets to tick. I trusted myself a little at least, suspecting the missing bits were waiting for me somewhere. Certainly I had felt flashes when I went to get those chickens from Dorset on the train. Ticktocks sounding out in my core.
It is too late to get fit, too late to pull out, but not too late to organize kit. With five days to go, the lights are out in the kitchen as I draw a stick figure of my Derby self and label the clothes I’ll wear on each plot of body, ticking off my bottom first. The super-padded knickers have arrived and seem good—larger than granny pants, fatter than boxing gloves. Every day I mold my stubborn bunions—big bone onions, my witchiest features—into my new secondhand trekking boots. For other stuff, I am deep into bargaining wars on eBay, tending towards items cheaply made in China. Many will decompose during the race, maps and water bottles flying out of my broken pockets across the windy plains. I begin scribbling a list of things to pack.
1.Me
2.I like lists
3.I can be orderly
4.I do love lists
5.And so I stumble
6.Like a poem unfurling
When the day came to peel myself from the British Isles, summer was high, the best plums were ripening, and all the grass looked Wimbledon-worthy. These commonplace things I had rarely noticed before transformed themselves into snippets of certainty, their impending disappearances conjuring my new appreciation.
I’d discovered, via Facebook, that a certain competitor had been thrown a send-off dinner at which she was presented with a horse-shaped cake wishing her good luck. Seeing how the race could merit celebration before its first kilometer had been ridden leant me a sense of achievement, although my own departure was not a public affair.
My father blasted my mother and me out of the house, fretful, as usual, that we might be late for the airport. In the terminal Mum shed tears, which were, as always, saddening to receive. I sometimes think of her as a balloon not entirely tied to earth—she drifts along until the concluding point, when her emotions burst out. I myself did not weep. I was leaping out to Mongolia to ride in a giant horse race. It was either too much, or nothing at all.
VII
Beneath the plane window the steppe folded in green waves. As we descended, white tents appeared at valley mouths, met by colorful tin-roofed houses flowing down the gullies towards gray high-rises. The plane let me out in Ulaanbaatar, 8,000 kilometers away from home.
Through the taxi glass I saw fragments of a city. Men in big coats curled around fires, denim-clad figures spilled into the traffic. Small-windowed blocks stood alongside nomads’ tents at the outskirts; farther in, Soviet architecture leaned into slicker glass structures. By now there was no sign of the steppe. The only hint of horses rested on the tögrög—the Mongolian currency—that I handed to the taxi driver: wild-maned ponies cantered off the banknote edges.
At four the next morning I sat sleepless in a hotel room among bloated white pillows. Delving into my suitcase, I pulled out a collection of tangled ropes and confused penknives that had spent their lives dormant in my brothers’ drawers. There was also a copy of The Tempest, which I had taken no interest in at school, but after leaving found myself diving into for comfort. Shakespeare speaks another language, yet I never needed to know the whole meaning to be moved by the sounds—Caliban’s “I cried to dream again” moves me to real tears.
My eleven-year-old self, on the other hand, did not spare the play a thought—I was pursuing real commotion. There was nothing like the sound of Mr. Thompson’s angry voice soaring. “Get out,” he’d shout, when he caught me whisper-giggling. “I said, ‘Get. Out.’” In the wasteland of the corridor I would lean against the wall while the pink in my cheeks faded, unaware that in the play I’d left on my desk were a series of rebellions I might have admired.
Now I lay on the floor of that sublimely square hotel room ripping out soliloquies and gluing them into my flimsy Winnie-the-Pooh notebook. I imagined they’d live out the race in my backpack and might lift me out of any lows. U just have to get through the pain with . . . poetry, Mum had written in an email that midnight, British time.
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
VIII
The following morning, competitors met for the first time. Stuffed into a corporate room in the city, ours was a silence of not quite wanting to begin. Horses seem to do these things better. On meeting, they amble and sniff bottoms. Sometimes they squeal.
In the 1930s, John Steinbeck embarked on a scientific research trip to the Sea of Cortez. Reflecting on his fellow crew members, he wrote, “None of us was possessed of the curious boredom within ourselves which makes adventurers or bridge players.” Were we a handful of those people who cannot sit still? Or were we all seeking the great death? I believe we sought some kind of oblivion. The characters in The Tempest leap from their sinking ship in a “fever of the mad.”
Maybe we desired a heroic proving. I was aware there were people in the world who classified themselves as adventurers, inhabiting the realm of the extreme, dog-panting for epics and gagging for photos in Gore-Tex. I didn’t know how many were here, or whether I was about to become one. The “longest, toughest” superlative had surely appealed to many, though I’ve conveniently erased from memory whether or not it had been a draw for me personally. What would my eleven-year-old self think of me buying into such a constructed adventure?
As the hello-how-are-yous of the crew piled onto one another, I spotted Maggie, the race steward, at the head of the room under mattresses of curly red hair. In a phone conversation two weeks prior, she’d told me that I “frankly” didn’t sound prepared. She was not to take me seriously until the finish line, and even then her eyes would search me with the same unconvinced look, a shock that I’d ever made it beyond the borders of my mother’s vegetable patch.
The day was made up of a series of briefings on the
race. The veterinarians explained horses’ hydration levels, gut sounds, lameness protocol, and heart rates. Pushing horses too hard would lead to elevated rates. The rules imposed a two-hour penalty or race expulsion if a horse’s heart rate remained above 64 beats per minute for a period longer than forty-five minutes after the end of each leg.
“Look—after—your—horse,” concluded the Scottish vet.
It seemed simple enough, though it hadn’t crossed my mind you could take a horse’s heart rate, let alone how four hours’ exercise might change that rate.
During a break, the paramedic handed out medical forms. I didn’t meet his gaze as I handed the paper back to him, uneasy about its incompleteness. Aunt Lucinda is a stickler for eye contact. If I manage to look her in the eye when she’s telling me off, she congratulates me later (such is her stick-and-carrot formula), but I find focusing difficult.
“I haven’t had a rabies vaccine. I’m sorry. I’m not sure what these other ones are.”
His mouth opened. Apparently the steppe was teeming with rabid dogs. I’d not had time for the recommended vaccinations before departure.
“Not even hepatitis A?”
Was that a sexually transmitted disease? I slunk away.
Bureaucracy flapped on like a beached fish—riders weighed, papers signed, headshots taken. By the lunchtime talk, “Rules of the Race,” the room understood itself a little better. The Derby (they went on) was an unsupported one-stage race, but riding would be limited to the hours between 7 a.m. and 8:30 p.m., outside of which we’d be penalized. Positions were policed by rider satellite trackers, which would also allow people to follow the race on the internet. There was no set route, only twenty-five obligatory horse-changing stations, where we would choose our next steeds. Those stations changed every year, and the course had been kept secret until today, when we were handed map books with wiggly red lines on each page.
Rough Magic Page 2