Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  Neither did we, certainly not to our parents. When Mel and I called home with updates from the Silk Road, we told them the better half of it: the warmth and hospitality of the Turkish people, the delicious meals that rendered scurvy impossible, and the sweeping, moody views across the Black Sea, that liquid frontier always to our left. Maybe Polo also realized that some things are best left unsaid.

  The wristwatch alarm buzzed from the tent ceiling, barely audible against the drum of rain. I ignored it while Mel immediately jumped into gear. She pulled on soggy bike shorts and damp long underwear and soaked rain gear, rolled up her sleeping bag, deflated her sleeping pad, stuffed her belongings into panniers, and started boiling water in the tent vestibule, warming her hands over the steam. I still didn’t budge, immobilized less by physical tiredness than despair. If Ben had met his limits on the remote, tortuous back roads of Tibet, I’d hit mine on the paved, drizzly, populated Turkish coast. As for Mel, I wasn’t sure she had any.

  I eyed her from my sleeping bag with a remote astonishment. The distance between where I lay, limp on the tent floor, and where she sat, dressed and ready to bike, seemed intergalactic. Seeing I needed some inspiration, Mel retrieved her journal from its protective plastic bag and read me her list of “Reasons to Go On.” So far, she had four:

  This first month sucks, but maybe the rest of the trip won’t.

  Every other year in your life you can be warm and dry.

  This is a test you don’t want to fail.

  There’s no alternative.

  I groaned from somewhere deep in my sleeping bag. “Can’t we just read and wait out the rain?”

  “Drink this,” Mel said, handing me a steaming mug of Nescafé.

  Instant coffee propelled me onto the road. The highway pinched and swerved along the coast, the tarmac a dark river thrashing with cars. To the left the Black Sea kicked up all kinds of colours, the endless nameless shades between seaweed and pearl. I thought I saw a bonito leap, the flash of a bent knife blade and then nothing, and in such moments I could almost recognize the merits of biking this road. But after a few hours of pedalling the caffeine wore off, and any clarity I’d achieved would start shimmying again as though something crucial was loose—a wheel or spoke, possibly a mind.

  We wore crinkly plastic shopping bags over our socks and gloves, the only tactic that prevented total soaking until we sweated so much on a climb that we got drenched from the inside out. I didn’t enjoy going down again because that’s when the chill really set in, and I dreaded stopping for the same reason. Turkish stop signs say dur, which is fittingly also the French word for “hard,” because the only thing tougher than turning the pedals was not turning them. No wonder we resented being pulled over on a daily basis by the Turkish police, or jandarma.

  “Oh god,” sighed Mel as a patrol car squealed to a stop in front of us. “Not again.”

  Two officers swaggered out of the vehicle to check our passports. When they saw feminine faces peering back at them from androgynous swaddles of Gore-Tex, their tough-guy swagger subtly changed to a preening strut. I huddled next to the open door of the patrol car, relishing the puffs of warmth that escaped, while they consulted our passports—which they held upside down. No matter, it was all a sham, a preamble to what they really wanted: a photo. The officers took turns posing with us, one grinning and giving the thumbs-up, the other snapping photos with his cellphone, then they cheered as we pedalled off into the rain.

  A few hours later, we snagged the jandarma for a second time. We were scouting for a place horizontal and hidden enough to camp, which was no easy task on the steep, populated shores of the Black Sea. Finally we spotted a flat-looking field on the far side of the road, but before we could walk over to it, two men with staffs followed by two dogs and a dozen bedraggled sheep crested the hill we stood on. We pretended to admire the view as they shuffled past us, trailing the smell of damp wool. Once they were out of sight, we prepared to dash across the road, but two vans full of jandarma pulled over. A dozen uniformed men bristled around us.

  “Where you go?” an officer demanded, his every feature thickened with authority: fists meaty as steaks, arms like oversized kebabs. I tried not to be immediately irritated with him.

  “Hindustan,” Mel told him. This is Turkish for India, and the truth, if not the answer he was seeking.

  “Why?” he demanded, gesturing at our bikes.

  It was a reasonable question to which there was no reasonable answer. Why bike the Silk Road? Because it’s there, sort of, in a historical and metaphorical sense. Because I wanted to seek out the world’s wildness and plumb my own in the process. So far, I was sorry to report, it was roughly as shallow as the oxygenated surface layer of the Black Sea, perhaps because searching for wildness on civilization’s oldest superhighway was a flawed premise from the start.

  But I said nothing. Mel levelled a hard look at the policeman, her face flecked with mud, her clothes soaked with rain, her legs tied in knots with tiredness—at least if they felt anything like mine.

  “Because it’s fun,” she told him grimly.

  The officer raised his eyebrows. “Are you married?”

  Our standard answer was yes, of course; we were married to beefy Turkish truck drivers named Osman and Mustafa, who were following us in support vehicles and would probably catch up any second now. When a truck conveniently roared into sight, as they did every few seconds, we’d wave and smile at the driver, and the startled man (it was always a man) would wave back and sometimes even honk his horn, lending credence to our narrative. A Turkish friend had helped us contrive this story, insisting it was our “best only insurance policy.” But this stretch of the road in the late afternoon was remarkably quiet, so Mel and I simply pulled off our gloves to display our fake wedding rings.

  “How many children?” he demanded next. When we told him yok he seemed mildly impressed with our grasp of Turkish. He proceeded to inspect our bikes: pinching the tires, testing the brakes, trying and failing to lift the loaded frames. By now some of the other policemen were discreetly snapping photos of us with their cellphones. The officer asked where we would sleep. I told him çadir, Turkish for “tent.”

  “Terrorists,” he said disapprovingly, sweeping his arms to signal the evil skulking in the hills. “No good for the ladies.”

  Mel and I looked around and saw no evidence of either terrorists or ladies.

  “Tonight, you go Samsun,” he said, making a cycling motion with his hands. “You stay hotel. Okay?”

  Samsun was sixty miles away and it was nearly dark.

  “Okay!” we affirmed. “No problem!”

  The jandarma drove off and we scuttled across the road. Mud glazed with frost sucked at our feet, blazing a clear trail to our campsite. In the bare field, the Glow-worm’s red fabric looked as subtle as a flare gun. The tent was so huge we could park our bikes in the vestibule and still have room to sleep, cook dinner, and host a dance party if we had the energy, but most nights that first month we were too tired to even talk. “Argh,” I’d grunt at Mel, and she’d pass me the water. “Mrmph,” she’d mumble to me, and I’d swab toothpaste on her toothbrush.

  Brushing my teeth outside the tent that night, I spotted two human silhouettes on a distant ridge holding what looked like guns. Was it the jandarma, tracking the terrorists? Or the terrorists themselves? Or the herdsman who passed us earlier, shadowed by wet sheep, carrying walking staffs? That night we slept with a holster of pepper spray stashed between our sleeping bags, just in case.

  When some fluke rays of light strayed onto the road a few days later, I swerved into the gutter, convinced a transport truck with its high beams on was bearing down on my bike. Then I realized it was just the sun, that pale asterisk in the sky, referring to a footnote at the bottom of the Black Sea that reads, in very fine print, “Shines hotly in theory.”

  When I said this to Mel she looked at me like I was nuts, but even she was beginning to lose her mind. At one point the road
swerved through a dark, dripping, two-lane tunnel that was nearly three miles long and dangerously narrow. The safest way through it was along the raised ledge to the right side, just wide enough to push our bikes along, but not wide enough to avoid getting lanced by the side mirrors of speeding transport trucks. Luckily we could tell when those vehicles were approaching—and could squeeze against the wall accordingly—because the tunnel would roar as though collapsing under its own weight. Before we set off, I asked Mel to say a little something for the camera. She mumbled about needing to travel the tunnel at a “quick trot.” When we finally emerged into relative brightness on the far side, shaken and nearly deaf but intact, Mel couldn’t stop giggling in a slightly unhinged way. “I thought my dying word, captured forever on film, would be ‘trot’!”

  Finding places to pitch the tent along the busy coast was a challenge. By dusk one evening we still hadn’t found anywhere to camp. White flakes silvered the sky and for a second I thought it was snowing, but then I realized that it was ashes wafting from some fire. Garbage burning, I guessed, by the stink of it. Or maybe that smell was the Black Sea flipping over without warning and spewing up hydrogen sulphide the way anoxic basins are prone to do. Apparently you get one sniff of rotten eggs before the chemical obliterates your sense of smell, making it impossible to tell whether you’re inhaling more of the deadly miasma. After three weeks in Turkey, I wished highway pollution worked the same way—not to the point of poisoning Mel and me, of course, but enough to shield our smell receptors from the truck fumes. Finally even my kickstand couldn’t take it anymore. Unprompted by me, with the bike wheels still spinning, it put its foot down as if to say, Enough is enough.

  We walked our bikes onto a random family’s lawn, my broken kickstand dragging. A woman was yanking weeds from a garden, her face turbulent with wrinkles, her spine curved into a parenthesis. Later we were shocked to learn she was only in her forties. Merhaba, “hello,” I called out, and she shuffled over with wide eyes. The two of us looked like emptied oysters, our innards digested and slurped out by Japanese whelks, our eyes two neatly drilled boreholes.

  “Kamping?” I ventured. This is basically the same word in Turkish as in English, only pronounced with a subtle twang I could never quite master. The woman had no clue what I was saying. I tried hand movements suggestive of a tent, sleeping, cooking dinner.

  “Let’s just set up camp,” sighed Mel. “Easier to mime an apology than a request for permission.”

  We hauled out a wet slump of nylon from the tent bag. Several other people joined the woman to watch us untangle the ropes, click the metal poles together, slide them into a sodden mess of fabric, and abracadabra, tug entropy into an abode. Our audience clapped with quiet appreciation. Only after we’d unloaded our bikes, unfurled our sleeping bags, and primed the stove to boil water did a lean older fellow, whose name we learned was Hasan, admonish us to pack it all up again. It was too cold out here, the ground too hard, he explained, or we thought he explained. His gestures were mystifying, but the gist seemed clear: we were invited to stay with his family.

  The walls of Hasan’s home were covered in faded linoleum, the furniture draped with prayer beads. The wood stove made such a sauna of the main room that I could understand why he’d deemed our tent unlivable. His niece and two daughters were fashionably dressed, at least relative to Mel and I, who looked shabby and overheated in fleece pants and tops. I was suddenly grateful that my fingernails were still hot pink and hardly even chipped when the youngest girl, Fatma, admired them.

  Hasan was a farmer in his sixties, as we gleaned from his niece, who spoke some English. But while farming was Hasan’s day job, drama was his true calling. He continued to express himself with bombastic gestures that grew more theatrical as the evening wore on: thigh slaps and raucous hoots at odd times, finger taps on his nose, tugs on his earlobes, each movement blazoned with cryptic meaning. He jointly nicknamed us “Melika” and employed this moniker as often as possible. I caught his wife, her sweet face squeezed in a flowered head scarf, smiling at his antics as she served us shelled hazelnuts and tea the colour of teak.

  When she disappeared to prepare dinner, the rest of us turned to watch the news on television. The weather report was the only part that made sense to me, all those cartoon rain clouds covering little yellow suns. After the news we watched some kind of reality drama about a woman marrying a disabled man. The bride wore a creamy white dress, the groom in the wheelchair a natty black suit. Although the circumstances behind the wedding were unclear, it seemed as though outraged people were calling in to contest the union. A smarmy television host arbitrated the calls, his wiry arms gesticulating madly as he said who knows what. The couple held hands and said nothing. Her veiled face was fixed on the ground; his eyes gathered sorrows at the side of the room. I was horrified by the whole thing, but perhaps I misunderstood what was going on.

  Hasan’s wife reappeared with cabbage rolls and bowls of lettuce drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice. She tore bread into bits and tossed them on the table to be used as utensils. As we ate dinner, Hasan asked—through his niece—about our jobs. Mel said she’d studied capacity building and food security in rural communities. Based on the niece’s translation, Hasan took this to mean that Mel was a farmer, like him, and slapped his knee in delight. Then he turned to me. “A lapsed scientist,” I told his niece. She looked confused. “A wannabe explorer.” Was she baffled because she didn’t understand, or because she knew I might as well aspire to be a mastodon? I searched for some other neat descriptor of who I was, rather curious to know the answer myself. Only one label seemed sufficiently vague and quixotic to suit me now.

  “A writer?” I offered, and showed Hasan my journal. When he took it and flipped through the pages, I suddenly feared he might read my despairing rants about Turkey’s murderous traffic and overpopulated coast, the parabolas of pain that were its roads. Finally he held up my journal and announced, with characteristic flourish, “Jalal al-Din Rumi!” At least that’s what I later guessed he said, because all I heard, in the moment, was a string of syllables ending in Rumi.

  Relief washed over me. If he’d confused my scribblings for poetry, this was proof he couldn’t read the journal’s contents. I’d been surprised to learn most Turks knew of the thirteenth-century Sufi poet, though I shouldn’t have been, because he’s something of a national icon. Born in Afghanistan, Rumi’s family migrated west to avoid the conquering hordes of Genghis Khan and eventually settled in Konya, a city in central Turkey, where he lived as a wealthy nobleman and scholar for many years until a charismatic desert wanderer named Shams showed up. According to legend, Shams shoved Rumi’s treasured books into a fountain, declaring that it was time for Rumi to start living what he’d been reading and talking about for so long. So began an impassioned friendship that inspired the whirling dervish Sufi order and more than seventy thousand lines of verse. I’d been scanning many of them in the tent on my e-reader each night, which I’d loaded with hundreds of books, fiction and non-fiction, though all I seemed to read on it was poetry. After a long, tiring day on Turkish highways, I craved the sort of lyrical intensity this stretch of the Silk Road seemed to lack, and I also craved brevity: a few compressed stanzas were all I could take in. Mel, however, was soldiering through War and Peace.

  Her stamina in words was surpassed only by her social endurance. At the moment she was showing our hosts photos of her family and life back home. The ladies crooned over Mel’s boyfriend, making a gesture like plucking grapes from a bunch on a vine, which appeared to be a sign of approval. I zoned out, drank tea, and thought about how scholar and translator Coleman Barks described the psychic state of Rumi’s poems, namely “heartbroken, wandering, wordless, lost, and ecstatic for no reason.” I’d copied that sentence into my journal with a nostalgia close to pain: it’s how I’d felt biking across the Tibetan Plateau, where every day was tensioned between joy and suffering, heaven and earth. But then again, I wondered, couldn’t the same
be said for Turkey, if on a less grand scale? Happiness was sipping sugary çay next to a wood stove in a tea shop when catatonic with hunger and cold, or the moon spending its silver light over the sea, or total strangers treating us like lost family. Heartbreak, in one of its milder iterations, was how the road—I swear it—always went up. “The only rule is,” counsels Rumi, “suffer the pain.”

  Eventually the women noticed me yawning. Taking our hands, they guided Mel and me into our bedroom for the night. After Hasan had protested about us camping on the cold, hard ground, we were left to sleep in an unheated room on couches stuffed with granite, or some material like it. Mel and I looked at each other and laughed. At least it was dry. I crawled under a thin wool blanket that coughed dust with my every fidget and thought about the reality show couple, wondering how things had worked out for them. The television blared more news through the wall and soon enough I was asleep.

  5.

  The Cold World Awakens

  Lesser Caucasus

  All along the Black Sea I kept confusing clouds massed on the horizon for mountains. When the rain stopped one evening, near Rize, we finally turned a corner that revealed the mirage as real. Serrated peaks flared coral above the city, just for a moment, then the sun sank and the Kaçkar range snuffed out. But in that brief glimpse all was forgiven of Turkey: the rain, the traffic, the chest cold I’d developed and couldn’t seem to shake. Michael Ondaatje says the first sentence of every novel—and every travel book, I might argue—should be: “‘Trust me, there is order here, very faint, very human.’ Meander if you want to get to town.” But who wanted to get to town? I wanted to get back to the mountains. And there they were, many-bladed and growing moonward, just a ways down the Silk Road.