Fire

by Sebastian Junger

  As it turns out, Ayshen is originally from the city of Limassol, in what is now the Republic of Cyprus. Her family was solidly upper-middle-class—her grandfather a large landowner, her father a physician—until they lost almost everything in the “enclave era” of the 1960s. After the 1974 partition they moved north as refugees, and Ayshen eventually went off to attend university in London; she returned to the TRNC only a few years ago, a decision she clearly regrets. “Always it is the same here,” she says after one particularly long and tedious day of interviews. “The same politics, the same arguments. Sometimes I feel like I am caught in a nightmare and cannot wake up.”

  Until last year Ayshen had been active in the “bicommunal” talks initiative. Sponsored by the United Nations and international conflict resolution groups, the talks were designed to bring together small groups of Turkish and Greek Cypriots—businessmen, intellectuals, educators—in hopes that the dialogues might lead to a political opening. Ridiculed by the governments and conservative media of both sides, the effort has largely been abandoned. “It is too bad,” Ayshen says, “because I felt it was important that we try anything that might change the situation.” Now she carries the label of “peacenik,” which causes her some problems around the office.

  Between interviews, Ayshen tries to steer me to the more pleasant places to be found in the TRNC, one being the St. Barnabas Monastery outside Famagusta. In the deserted inner courtyard, she sits on a stone bench beneath a bitter lemon tree. “This is one of my favorite places in the whole country,” she remarks, “this and the Karpas Peninsula. Up there, it is so quiet—miles of empty beaches, small villages. It’s the best place to go to get away from everything.”

  I know her well enough by now to know what she means by “everything”: politics, the speeches, the Problem.

  At St. Barnabas Monastery, we are just three or four miles from the Martyred Villages. In late July 1974, a few days after the first phase of the Turkish Peace Operation, EOKA gunmen seized three Turkish villages, led over eighty residents out into the fields to be shot, then threw their bodies in mass graves. Today the road connecting the villages is called Martyr’s Way, and beside it are a couple of nearly identical memorial parks, both centered on a stone wall on which the names of the murdered have been carved, both containing freestanding posterboards displaying the same awful photographs of the mass grave exhumations. Along Martyr’s Way, large yellow signs, helpfully printed in both English and Turkish, point toward the actual mass graves.

  When I mention our proximity to the Martyred Villages, Ayshen’s mood falls.

  “Do you want to go to them?” she asks.

  When I say no, that I’ve already seen them, she seems tremendously relieved.

  On my last day in the TRNC, I convince Ayshen to take me to the village of Tashkent, in the hills just north of Lefkosa. I am curious to see Tashkent, both because of the massive Turkish Cypriot flag that has been painted on the mountainside just outside it and because it is known as the village of widows. The original Tashkent was in the south, and amid the fighting in 1974 nearly all the adult males were rounded up and murdered by Greek Cypriot gunmen. In the population transfer of 1975, the Tashkent widows were brought north and given the formerly Greek village of Vouno as their new home.

  Wandering around the village, I spot an old woman in black sitting on her porch on this sunlit day. Her name is Emine Mutallip, and sitting in the sun with her is her ninety-two-year-old father, Mustafa Sadik. Emine graciously brings out chairs for us to sit on and, at my instigation, begins to tell the story of those long-ago killings, the tragedy that took her husband and two brothers. Suddenly both she and her father burst into tears, and then Ayshen does as well.

  Afterward, as we wander along Tashkent’s main street, Ayshen apologizes for her outburst. “It brings back memories of my own family,” she says. “I was just a little girl when I was in the refugee camp, but I remember that we were very poor and I was always hungry. All my family, we had to flee to different places, and always my father was worried, trying to find the others, trying to learn if they were still alive. Three times in my childhood I was a refugee, but I have not thought about it for a long time.”

  As we drive down the long hill toward Lefkosa, however, I discover that there’s another reason for Ayshen’s unhappiness. Some ten days earlier, on the very day I arrived in the TRNC, Turkish security agents in Nairobi grabbed Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the militant Kurdistan Worker’s Party, and whisked him back to Turkey. Ocalan, a man the Turkish government holds responsible for the deaths of some thirty thousand Turks and whom the United States government has classified as a terrorist, had been harbored in Kenya by the Greek embassy and had been traveling on a doctored Republic of Cyprus passport.

  “For me, I think that is the end,” Ayshen says in the car. “Before, I think I didn’t want to believe how much the Greeks hated us, that maybe there was a way for us to live together again. But for them to support a man like Ocalan just because he kills Turks, now I see how much they hate us. Now I cannot see any way out of this.”

  As I drive, I think of what a hopeless, bitter place this is. Cyprus is like some boat sunk under a great weight of stones, and while the rest of the world talks of finding some way to refloat it, none of the stones is ever removed. Instead, the Greeks and Turks busy themselves finding more stones to drop onto the wreck: the Dherinia killings, the struggle over European Union membership, the Ocalan affair. Tomorrow, no doubt, they’ll find another.

  So how do you fix it? Both sides in this conflict wield history as a weapon and invoke it as the basis for their own plaintive cry for justice. But if the history of Cyprus—indeed, the history of most of the world—reveals anything, it is that there is no such thing as justice: You live in your house until the day someone comes along and throws you out, and then he lives there until someone else comes along to throw him out. Just where do you pinpoint the moment in this island’s history and say, “Here, we will right this wrong,” and let all the previous ones go by the wayside? Obviously, you cannot afford to go very far back, because in Cyprus, as everywhere else, there is always a prior victim.

  More specifically, how do you fix it when both sides clearly have so little interest in doing so themselves? Start small, I suppose. Point out to them that wallpapering their countryside with grisly photos of those killed by the other side may not be the best way to foster fraternal thoughts. Suggest that it might be imprecise to describe a military offensive in which thousands were killed as a “peace operation,” or that there may be a better way to bring one’s rivals to the negotiation table than by referring to them as “the so-called ministers of the pseudo-state.” Even these baby steps the Cypriots will not take. By steadfastly clinging to the rhetoric of a quarter century ago, by stoutly refusing to make any concession, you finally have to conclude that it’s because they want it this way.

  But there is, perhaps, another way to look at all this. In the fifteen years of ethnic violence before the 1974 partition, hundreds of Cypriots on both sides were killed. In the twenty-five years since, there have been a total of sixteen—or about the same number that die on the island’s highways in a bad month. At a cost of ninety million dollars a year, the United Nations has brought calm to an intractable conflict zone—about what the recent NATO military operations in Kosovo cost for just two days. Of course, people have suffered and lost a great deal in Cyprus—especially all those uprooted from their homes and forced to start over again—but at least now, kept apart by the buffer, they have been given the chance to start over. That’s far better than what usually happens in war zones.

  So perhaps what has passed as “The Cyprus Problem” all these years has actually been “The Cyprus Solution,” and perhaps the diplomats who periodically wring their hands over the ongoing stalemate on this island should actually be taking notes and trying to export it elsewhere. That would require new thinking among the power brokers of the West, and perhaps especially among those i
n Washington, embroiled in the latest crisis in the Balkans. Maybe what most needs to end is all the chatter about exit strategies. Those in power must recognize that there is no exit from bad history and that at certain times and in certain places the best that can be done is to simply stand between the fighters indefinitely and hope that someday they’ll get over it and move on—not in a year, not in ten years, but maybe eventually. Until then the least costly solution, in terms of both blood and money, is to give the Bosnians and Serbs and Kosovars of the planet what the Cypriots already have, a “dead zone” across which they can hurl accusations and threats in safety. At least it will give them something to talk about, and all that the rest of the world will have to suffer is the hearing of it.

  Back in Lefkosa I leave Ayshen at the entrance to the Office of Public Information and watch her walk slowly, head bowed in sadness, up the entranceway. It occurs to me that it is the people like her—the earnest, the “peaceniks,” the goodhearted and forgiving—who are the last, quiet victims of this place. They are to be found in Bosnia and Serbia and Kosovo as well, of course, those who refuse to believe that a culture once torn apart can’t be put back together again, who forever wait for their day to come.

  COLTER’S WAY

  1999

  Late in the summer of 1808 two fur trappers named John Colter and John Potts decided to paddle up the Missouri River, deep into Blackfeet territory, to look for beaver. Colter had been there twice before; still, they couldn’t have picked a more dangerous place. The area, now known as Montana, was blank wilderness, and the Blackfeet had been implacably hostile to white men ever since their first contact with Lewis and Clark several years earlier. Colter and Potts were working for a fur trader named Manuel Lisa, who had built a fort at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Bighorn rivers. One morning in mid-August they loaded up their canoes, shoved off into the Yellowstone, and started paddling north.

  Colter was the better known of the two men. Tall, lean, and a wicked shot, he had spent more time in the wilderness than probably any white man alive—first as a hunter on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, then two more years guiding and trapping along the Yellowstone. The previous winter he’d set out alone, with nothing but a rifle, a buffalo-skin blanket, and a thirty-pound pack, to complete a several-month trek through what is now Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. He saw steam geysers in an area near present-day Cody, Wyoming, that was later dubbed Colter’s Hell by disbelievers. Within weeks of arriving back at Lisa’s fort in the spring of 1808, he headed right back out again, this time up to the Three Forks area of Montana, where he’d been with Lewis and Clark almost three years earlier. His trip was cut short when he was shot in the leg during a fight with some Blackfeet, and he returned to Lisa’s fort to let the wound heal. No sooner was he better, though, than he went straight back to Three Forks, this time with John Potts. The two men quickly amassed almost a ton of pelts, but every day they spent in Blackfeet territory was pushing their luck. Finally, sometime in the fall, their luck ran out.

  As they paddled the Jefferson River, five hundred Blackfeet Indians suddenly swarmed toward them along the bank. Potts grabbed his rifle and killed one of them with a single shot, but he may have done that just to spare himself a slow death; the Blackfeet immediately shot him so full of arrows that “he was made a riddle of,” as Colter put it. Colter surrendered and was stripped naked. One of the Blackfeet asked whether he was a good runner. Colter had the presence of mind to say no, so the Blackfeet told him he could run for his life; when they caught him, they would kill him. Naked, unarmed, and given a head start of only a couple of hundred yards, Colter started to run.

  He was, as it turned out, a good runner—very good. He headed for the Madison River, six miles away, and by the time he was halfway there, he’d already outdistanced every Blackfoot except one. His pursuer was carrying a spear, and Colter spun around unexpectedly, wrestled it away from him, and killed him with it. He kept running until he got to the river, dived in, and hid inside a logjam until the Blackfeet got tired of looking for him. He emerged after nightfall, swam several miles downstream, then clambered out and started walking. Lisa’s fort was nearly two hundred miles away. He arrived a week and a half later, his feet in shreds.

  Clearly, Colter was a man who sought risk. After two brutal years with Lewis and Clark, all it took was a chance encounter with a couple of itinerant trappers for Colter to turn around and head back into Indian territory. And the following summer—after three straight years in the wild—Manuel Lisa convinced him to do the same thing. Even Colter’s narrow escape didn’t scare him off; soon after recovering from his ordeal, he returned to the Three Forks area to retrieve his traps and had to flee from the Blackfeet once again. And in April 1810 he survived another Blackfeet attack on a new stockade at Three Forks, an attack that left five men dead. Finally Colter had had enough. He traveled down the Missouri and reached St. Louis by the end of May. He married a young woman and settled on a farm near Dundee, Missouri. Where the Blackfeet had failed, civilization succeeded: He died just two years later.

  Given the trajectory of Colter’s life, one could say that the wilderness was good for him, kept him alive. It was there that he functioned at the outer limits of his abilities, a state that humans have always thrived on. “Dangers…seemed to have for him a kind of fascination,” another fur trapper who knew Colter said. It must have been while under the effect of that fascination that Colter felt most alive, most potent. That was why he stayed in the wilderness for six straight years; that was why he kept sneaking up to Three Forks to test his skills against the Blackfeet.

  Fifty years later, whalers in New Bedford, Massachusetts, would find themselves unable to face life back home and—as miserable as they were—would sign up for another three years at sea. A hundred years after that, American soldiers at the end of their tours in Vietnam would realize they could not go back to civilian life and would volunteer for one more stint in hell.

  “Their shirts and breeches of buckskin or elkskin had many patches sewed on with sinews, were worn thin between patches, were black from many campfires, and greasy from many meals,” writes historian Bernard De Voto about the early trappers. “They were thread-bare and filthy, they smelled bad, and any Mandan had lighter skin. They gulped rather than ate the tripes of buffalo. They had forgotten the use of chairs. Words and phrases, mostly obscene, of Nez Percé, Clatsop, Mandan, Chinook came naturally to their tongues.”

  None of these men had become trappers against his will; to one degree or another, they’d all volunteered for the job. However rough it was, it must have looked better than the alternative, which was—in one form or another—an uneventful life passed in society’s embrace. For people like Colter, the one thing more terrifying than having something bad happen must have been to have nothing happen at all.

  Modern society, of course, has perfected the art of having nothing happen at all. There is nothing particularly wrong with this except that for vast numbers of Americans, as life has become staggeringly easy, it has also become vaguely unfulfilling. Life in modern society is designed to eliminate as many unforeseen events as possible, and as inviting as that seems, it leaves us hopelessly underutilized. And that is where the idea of “adventure” comes in. The word comes from the Latin adventura, meaning “what must happen.” An adventure is a situation where the outcome is not entirely within your control. It’s up to fate, in other words. It should be pointed out that people whose lives are inherently dangerous, like coal miners or steelworkers, rarely seek “adventure.” Like most things, danger ceases to be interesting as soon as you have no choice in the matter. For the rest of us, threats to our safety and comfort have been so completely wiped out that we have to go out of our way to create them.

  About ten years ago a young rock climber named Dan Osman started free-soloing—climbing without a safety rope—on cliffs that had stymied some of the best climbers in the country. Falling was not an option. At about the same time, though, he began falling
on purpose, jumping off cliffs tethered not by a bungee cord but by regular climbing rope. He found that if he calculated the arc of his fall just right, he could jump hundreds of feet and survive. Osman’s father, a policeman, told a journalist named Andrew Todhunter, “Doing the work that I do, I have faced death many, many, many times. When it’s over, you celebrate the fact that you’re alive, you celebrate the fact that you have a family, you celebrate the fact that you can breathe. Everything, for a few instants, seems sweeter, brighter, louder. And I think this young man has reached a point where his awareness of life and living is far beyond what I could ever achieve.”

  Todhunter wrote a book about Osman called Fall of the Phantom Lord. A few months after the book came out, Osman died on a twelve-hundred-foot fall in Yosemite National Park. He had rigged up a rope that would allow him to jump off Leaning Tower, but after more than a dozen successful jumps by Osman and others, the rope snapped and Osman plummeted to the ground.

  Colter of course would have thought Osman was crazy—risk your life for no good reason at all?—but he certainly would have understood the allure. Every time Colter went up to Three Forks, he was in effect free-soloing. Whether he survived or not was entirely up to him. No one was going to save him; no one was going to come to his aid. It’s the oldest game in the world—and perhaps the most compelling.

  The one drawback to modern adventuring, however, is that people can mistake it for something it’s not. The fact that someone can free-solo a sheer rock face or balloon halfway around the world is immensely impressive, but it’s not strictly necessary. And because it’s not necessary, it’s not heroic. Society would continue to function quite well if no one ever climbed another mountain, but it would come grinding to a halt if roughnecks stopped working on oil rigs. Oddly, though, it’s the mountaineers who are heaped with glory, not the roughnecks, who have a hard time even getting a date in an oil town. A roughneck who gets crushed tripping pipe or a fire fighter who dies in a burning building has, in some ways, died a heroic death. But Dan Osman did not; he died because he voluntarily gambled with his life and lost. That makes him brave—unspeakably brave—but nothing more. Was his life worth the last jump? Undoubtedly not. Was his life worth living without those jumps? Apparently not. The task of every person alive is to pick a course between those two extremes.