by Kate Harris
Mel and I turned around and shivered back down the road we’d just biked up. At least it was downhill. Sometimes detours are the destination, and sometimes they’re just detours. I didn’t dry out from all the puddles until we reached Tbilisi days later.
Based on 1.8-million-year-old Homo erectus skulls found not far from the Georgian capital, the South Caucasus is one of the first places people (or hominids like us) migrated to out of Africa. The natural barriers of the Black and Caspian Seas, as well as the Greater Caucasus and Lesser Caucasus mountains, formed the indigenous borders of the region, parsing human communities more effectively than barbed wire and bureaucracy. In the relative isolation imposed by such rugged frontiers, different groups developed distinct quirks, preoccupations, and tongues, prompting Arabs to call the region Jabal Al-Alsun, or “mountain of languages.” Even today the Caucasus Mountains (including the Russian side of the range) host one of the highest densities of distinct languages on the planet, with Georgians, Azeris, Armenians, Ossetians, Abkhaz, Kurds, Talysh, and Lezgins generally not speaking to each other in their mutually unintelligible tongues. Linguistic diversity is frequently coupled with biodiversity, and the South Caucasus is no exception. Some of the planet’s richest and most threatened ecosystems are crammed into a chunk of land half the size of Manitoba. Somewhat ironically, the individuals dedicated to protecting these wildernesses are crammed into government buildings and NGO offices in Tbilisi.
Dressed in our very best synthetic hiking pants, Mel and I shuffled around the city interviewing these experts after applying for tourist visas for Azerbaijan, the next stop on our Silk Road. After a while one civil servant or government minister blended into the next, for when we asked questions about wilderness conservation they all answered with the same economic jargon about markets and incentives, or the same catch words of ecotourism, natural resources, and sustainability. But sustainable for who, what, why, and how long? Sustainable for the planet, or for the status quo of capitalism and consumerism? I had reason to suspect the latter, given that Georgia had recently tried to purge its Ministry of Environment by subsuming the Protected Areas Agency under the Ministry of Energy. The government eventually backed down, but only because it realized a dedicated Ministry of Environment would lure in more foreign aid money.
During these conversations I had the disconcerting sense that I was talking shop with Marco Polo. He and I both travelled to the same places by similarly slow modes of transportation, but the motives compelling each of us to and along the Silk Road were vastly different: Polo wanted to monetize and quantify whatever he could in the trading hubs along it, while I hoped to highlight the immeasurable worth of the places in between. To call us both “explorers” simply exposes the dangerous relativism of the term, its infinite co-optability, just as “wilderness conservation” was beginning to seem so malleable a concept as to be meaningless. When I asked about the latter I wanted to talk reverence, sufficiency, the economics of enough. I wanted to discuss the ways wilderness brings us alive in every possible sense. Isn’t that the most obvious reason to take care of the planet, the fact that we can’t breathe, drink, eat, or exist without it? Every attempt we’ve made to create a long-term closed ecological system—an artificial, self-sustaining planet-in-a-bottle in which all human waste products such as carbon dioxide, urine, and feces are sustainably metamorphosed into oxygen, water, and food—has failed, often expensively and dramatically, such as when Biosphere 2 in Arizona went hypoxic and suffered mass extinctions of plant and animal species, as well as population explosions of katydids, cockroaches, and ants. Knowing what we know now, we couldn’t colonize Mars without serious and ongoing reliance on Biosphere 1. We need this world, and this world doesn’t need us. Why do we persist in behaving as if the converse were true?
At least the NGOs we met with were a little more subversive in their thinking, a little more radical, particularly in how they worked across contentious borders in the South Caucasus. When formal nation-to-nation co-operation through a transboundary protected area or “peace park” proved impossible because of intractable conflict, civil society could sometimes pick up the slack by working through informal channels, below the political radar. In other words, scientists in nations that weren’t exactly on speaking terms—such as Turkey and Armenia—could still discreetly share data and harmonize nature management strategies in a kind of “guerrilla” conservation effort. Such an approach has limitations, namely the restricted power of NGOs to formally change policy, but also certain advantages, given how nimble and adaptive civil society can be compared to sluggish post-Soviet bureaucracies.
Admittedly, I was also partial to NGOs because the Caucasus division of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) let us camp in their conference room. Mel and I quickly decorated the businesslike room with our bike clothes and camping gear, draping sopping wet long underwear over chairs and unfurling our sleeping bags beneath the long central table. This set-up was somewhat reminiscent of my office camping days at MIT, though it offered proximity not to a lab but to nearby Georgian restaurants, bakeries, and cafés, which we frequented because the WWF-Caucasus headquarters lacked a kitchen.
No cuisine is better suited to the black-hole hunger of cyclists than Georgia’s, which combines carbohydrates, dairy, and nuts in the most creative, delicious, calorie-dense permutations imaginable. One favourite was khachapuri adjaruli, a boat-shaped vessel of dough filled with molten sulguni, a briny traditional cheese, and topped with cracked raw eggs and hunks of butter. Another was badridzhani nigvsit, or eggplant and walnuts pulverized with lemon juice and garlic and spices in a rich pâté. We stumbled on these dishes by delicious accident or by admiring what someone else had ordered at an adjacent table, for the menus were written in Kartuli, the Georgian alphabet, whose thirty-three curlicue letters resemble the etchings of beetles in bark. English-translated versions weren’t much easier to decipher. “Would you like spewed brain with mushpom?” offered Mel. “How about fried chick or minked meat with boiled bough, paired with battle wine?”
We ordered battle wine, obviously, as well as a host of other dishes with no English equivalent. The Romantic-era Russian poet Alexander Pushkin remarked, “Every Georgian dish is a poem,” but it’s also a song-and-dance routine, judging by how frequently poker-faced boys and men would get up after a restaurant meal to mince around on tiptoe wearing enormous furred hats. Our lessons in the challenges of translation continued back at the WWF headquarters, where we hung out with the security guards at night, watching television and drinking inky homemade wine. During commercials they tried to teach us some Georgian words, all of which sounded to me like choking on consonants, such as gvbrdghvnit (“you tear us into pieces”) or vprtskvni (“I am peeling it”). Another favourite was shemomedjamo, meaning “I accidentally ate the whole thing,” a word I’d needed on a few occasions involving baklava in Turkey. We also learned zeg, or “the day after tomorrow,” which is what the Georgian secretary at the Azerbaijan embassy told Mel and me when we checked on our visa applications. I despaired a little at this, suspecting zeg was the Kartuli equivalent of yok—no, not yet, never—but amazingly, as promised, the visas were ready two days later and we hit the road.
Winter was melting away when we left Tbilisi in early March. Every tree branch was fisted with buds and the air smelled of freshly chopped pine, earthy and warm, all those rays of sunshine released. Every time I got on my bicycle after a long hiatus it was like riding back to myself, the only way there. The dissipation of life in the city—days of to-do lists, errands, emails, small talk with strangers—generated static in my mind that I didn’t notice was there until I started pedalling and realized it was gone, the way you don’t hear the hum of a refrigerator until it stops. Such is the paradoxical freedom of cycling the Silk Road. In restricting the range of directions you can travel, in charging ordinary movement with momentum, a bike trip offers that rarest, most elusive of things in our frenetic world: clarity of purpose. Your sole responsibility on Eart
h, as long as your legs last each day, is to breathe, pedal, breathe—and look around.
Rolling, forested foothills gave way to walled fields and wooden farmhouses. Some were painted a delicate robin’s-egg blue, and their cracked walls gave the impression that something enormous inside was pecking through, ready to hatch. Practically every homestead boasted its own tangle of grapevines. Wine has been cultivated in Georgia longer than anywhere else in the world, by some estimates since the late Stone Age. Georgians seemed as self-sufficient in terms of growing their own food, for the shelves of shops were mostly bare except for an odd surplus of pickled vegetables and “Barf” laundry detergent. The villages were drab and dung-splattered but charged with life, especially when four young boys with flushed, ecstatic faces raced a horse-drawn buggy down one main drag, whooping joyfully as people leapt aside.
A few times in Turkey I’d secretly worried that I wouldn’t discover anything new by slogging long distances on a bike again. What more could I learn by going through the same motions? Every day on a bike trip is like the one before—but it is also completely different, or perhaps you are different, woken up in new ways by the mile. If anything, the world grew more inscrutable the longer I looked at it, and the less focused I was on the brute mechanics of pedaling—aching legs and lungs, miles covered and miles to come—the more awake I could be to the world around me, its ordinary wonders. Like the bearded Georgian man I saw tossing straw with a pitchfork on a barn roof, presumably for insulation or storage, his grey hair and grey wool sweater fading into the cloudy grey sky so that he disappeared in the motion, became the stab and heave and fall of golden stalks himself. Or the way Mel would bike through a puddle and her tires would press wet fossils into the pavement, like the fine bones of Cambrian trilobites, only to evaporate and leave no trace. Or the face of the whiskery Georgian woman who sat by a wood stove in a small-town shop, her warm smile and watery blue eyes seeming to suggest that no road was long enough to learn all I wanted to know and get where I wanted to go.
Of course she was right, but I kept biking it anyway. We long our whole lives for things we’ve never known, places we’ve never been, abstractions that come alive to us in unexpected ways. What does the Silk Road have to do with Mars, except everything? Perhaps the great task of modern explorers is not to conquer but to connect, to reveal how any given thing leads to another: the red planet to the Silk Road, bicycles to the moon, a modern Georgian highway back in time to the Ujarma Fortress.
Once the fifth-century residence of King Vakhtang I Gorgasali, or Vakhtang the Wolf Head, who was said to tower above all others at a stately seven feet ten inches, the fortress is now in ruins that don’t tower much higher. Mel and I wandered the maze of shattered rooms carpeted with grass and then decided to camp at the foot of the fortress—not because we were tired after only a few hours of biking, but because reading the afternoon away in the sunshine sounded like bliss. Mel was still marathoning through War and Peace on her e-reader, and I was turning the paper pages of Don Domanski’s All Our Wonder Unavenged. This was the only physical book I’d brought on the Silk Road, and his words proved a perfect choice: they were inexhaustible, almost prophetic, as though Domanski were travelling the Silk Road a day ahead of me and writing about what he saw.
As the light faded we unfurled the tent on a rust of dry leaves. Among them was a pale, lemony-white flower that I guessed might be a Caucasian peony, or “Molly-the-Witch,” named for the Polish explorer Ludwik Mlokosiewicz. He “discovered” this peony late in the nineteenth century, meaning he reported its existence to botanists in Russia and Europe (locals were of course well aware of the flower). But to his credit, Mlokosiewicz also recognized that this particular flower thrived on the slopes of the Greater Caucasus mountains and nowhere else. Realizing this was also the case for several other plants and animals, he presciently called for a nature reserve to protect these endemic species. A few years later, in 1912, the Russian Czar established what would become the Lagodekhi Protected Areas on the edge of modern Georgia, bordering Russia and Azerbaijan, a park we would visit in a few days. Meanwhile the flower grew precisely where we hoped to pitch the tent, so we carefully arranged the vestibule around it, in a kind of greenhouse, and shared a roof among the ruins.
Our next campsite wasn’t nearly as bucolic, though it similarly reinforced the fleeting nature of life when it turned into a firing range. Several Georgian men wearing camouflage showed up after we’d eaten dinner and shot at targets pinned to trees a few hundred feet from our tent. The hunters recoiled with the kickback of the gun—the testosterone-fuelled punch of it like guys socking each other in the shoulder in greeting—and we recoiled from them.
If life is chancy in Georgia today, though, it is tame compared to what Homo erectus faced in its venture out of Africa. As I slouched low in my sleeping bag I thought about the ancient hominid bones discovered in Georgia, with their flared cheekbones and chunky molars. Those early Pleistocene fossils were found cached in the former lair of a sabre-toothed cat, whose powerful canines fit like puzzle pieces into the holes puncturing the occipital dome of one skull. At MIT I’d attended a public lecture by a Harvard professor who referred to ancestral hominids as “those creatures” and megacarnivores as “their faunal colleagues.” The colossal scientific distance in his words struck me as so absurd I jotted them down. It was as if he were holding up a human precursor between pincers for examination, though I rather liked the ring of “faunal colleagues” for the convivial atmosphere it implied in the ancient world, as though sabre-toothed cats strolled about in tweed and held office hours just across campus. Now all the megacarnivores have gone extinct, Homo erectus has evolved into us, and the fiercest threats humans face generally come from each other, a truth made painfully apparent as bullets decorated trees nearby. I hoped our own perforated skulls wouldn’t be unearthed someday in the collapsed den of our tent.
As it grew darker the hunters departed and I could finally hear the river on whose bank we were camped. I lay there idly wondering what the Silk Road would be like in another million years, or even a thousand years, given the only firm fact is flux. Maybe the contested frontiers at Ani and Siachen would be mere historical footnotes, quirky details in some future student’s thesis or a revised Description of the World, its maps and names almost alien to us. By what moniker would Georgia be known in the future? How would people refer to the border town of Lagodekhi?
“Lagoducky!” proposed Mel the next day, when a flotilla of ducks waddled at us like a welcoming committee. The eponymous national park was a steep climb out of town, and people cheered us on from the road shoulder as we biked there. A stone entrance gate and signs formally marked the Lagodekhi Protected Areas entrance, and just beyond it was a granite boulder showcasing a bronze portrait of Mlokosiewicz. We parked our bikes and spent the next two days hiking with a stout, root-like ranger named Giorgi.
Though he didn’t speak English, Giorgi made the best of things by leading us to the nearest interpretive signs and pointing helpfully at the translations. He had salt-and-pepper eyebrows and a moustache to match, and dressed formally in a thick jacket, dinner shirt, and leather vest. There was a chill to the air when he led us into the woods, but Mel and I warmed up as we hiked, which meant we fussed continuously with layers to accommodate the temperature swings. Giorgi marched in his heavy attire regardless of sun or shade, movement or stasis, a steady-state weather system unto himself.
The forest was rayed with light, each sunbeam spliced by branches. Mossy trunks of oak and beech and maple towered over the trail. The interpretive signs disappeared, and I saw a man chopping wood and a woman collecting something from a hillside, filling a basket with whatever she found. I was confused: Wasn’t this a park? But when I pointed the people out to Giorgi he looked unconcerned. Later that afternoon, a local Peace Corps volunteer would describe how Lagodekhi was divided into two zones, a small “Managed Nature Reserve” in the lower woods and a much larger “Strict Nature Reserve” in
the alpine. The presence of humans in the park is mostly limited to the lower managed part, while the upper area is more like the zapovednik the entire reserve used to be under the Soviets. Back then the locals had collected wood and mushrooms from the strictly protected reserve anyway, the Peace Corps volunteer explained, and they grabbed as much as they could, to justify the stiff fine they’d pay if caught. With the managed buffer zone now permitting some legal collection from Lagodekhi, locals gathered only what they needed, knowing they could come back the next year for more.
The next day Giorgi took us to the Machis Tsikhe, a fifth-century summer retreat for bygone Georgian kings. The buildings were mossy and cracked with long, ragged lines. From inside the ruins, with daylight shining through the fissures, the walls looked scored with lightning frozen in its flash. Geologists define stones as rocks that have been put to use, so that, as the poet Don McKay put it, “What happens between a rock and stone is simply everything human.” At Machis I found myself wondering what happens the other way around, when our careful curations of stone ruin themselves back to rock. Maybe we need a word for stone that has shirked its human duties. Or perhaps what happens between a stone and a rock is simply the consolation of not mattering much, only in the way my degree at Oxford didn’t matter much, meaning it didn’t deplete my time there of significance so much as free up its fullest possibilities: We’re only here by fluke, and only for a little while, so why not run with life as far and wide as you can?
