Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  Maybe I was just woozy from altitude, for at 17,480 feet Taglang La was the high point of our trip, but I swear I saw the curvature of the planet from that pass. I felt convinced no bicycles had ever flown so high or so far. Of course this wasn’t true: others have biked higher and farther, and certainly faster, with fewer flat tires and false turns. But exploration, more than anything, is like falling in love: the experience feels singular, unprecedented, and revolutionary, despite the fact that others have been there before. No one can fall in love for you, just as no one can bike the Silk Road or walk on the moon for you. The most powerful experiences aren’t amenable to maps. Nor are they amenable to words, at least when you’re too out of breath to say much at all. Mel and I tied a string of prayer flags to the tangle of others on the pass and let them do all the talking.

  We coasted back to Earth for hours upon hours through a landscape almost lunar in its starkness, a magnificent desolation of broken purple and red peaks. Halfway down the pass a whitewashed monastery gleamed high on sunlit cliffs, and the walls of the village below it were covered in neat wads of dung left out to dry in order to fuel winter fires. Poplars dropped their alms of leaves along the road, more gold than coins can ever be. We turned into a canyon formed by huge plates of rock that sliced up through the crust like dinosaur vertebrae. The river the road followed ran apricot or copper or gold, depending on the mood of the rock it reflected. Above a river of sky mirrored the water’s course through steep mountains.

  When we finally spat into the Indus river valley, our lungs full of oxygen, I was half-tempted to bike the last thirty miles to Leh. But why rush to the end of the road? Instead we stopped at a restaurant in Upshi for momos, a kind of dumpling, then we pitched the Glow-worm for the last time on the bank of the Indus, that rush of meltwater straight off Siachen.

  In some ways it was the closest we’d get to the glacier. We biked into Leh the next morning, and just in time: within days a blizzard blocked the high passes we’d just pedalled across, closing the road for the year. A different road to the Nubra Valley and Siachen remained open, but we needed permits to go there, and those would take a few days to process. To pass the time, we took a shared jeep to the Indian shore of Pangong Lake, that spill of turquoise water we swam in in Tibet five years earlier.

  The edge of winter, the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Mel and I stood shivering in the spot we would’ve landed if we’d kept swimming east that first summer on the Silk Road, a faint slick of sunscreen in our wake. Then again, shortcuts never take you to the same place. Wearing down jackets and pants with the legs rolled up, we shuffled into water so calm and clear it was like wading through air. Ten seconds later we shuffled out again, numb from the shins down. That night we warmed up in the village of Spangmik over a dinner of dal-and-rice with two Indian tourists. All I remember from our conversation was that the men hailed from some massive city, Mumbai or Calcutta, and Pangong Lake was the first place they’d seen stars.

  Back in Leh we picked up our Nubra Valley permits, then continued by car to Panamik, the last civilian outpost before Siachen. The driver let us out at the final checkpoint we were allowed to see, more than fifty miles from the ice. We walked toward the lowered guardrail as a cold wind rattled the chains that secured it, then stopped and stared at the end of the road. I don’t know why I thought it would be any different now, the glacier miraculously more accessible, when nothing had changed politically. Soldiers from both sides still lived year-round at absurd heights, fighting avalanches and altitude sickness, wearing the same white camouflage and speaking essentially the same language, like a unified army. Meanwhile all around them, shimmering like mirages, were mountains trespassed by borders that nations swear have been there all along.

  The sun torched the rims of the peaks in Panamik. A flock of birds folded and unfolded the sky. More cold gusts stripped the poplars of the few leaves they had left, the wind more alive than the branches it moved, and so big it could only be the mountains breathing. Mel headed back to the car, hands in her pockets. I took one last look in the direction of the glacier, not so much to catch a glimpse of its ice but to give its wildness my full attention, if only for a moment.

  Then I turned around. In the end Siachen, like Mars, wasn’t a place to reach but a reason to go.

  Epilogue

  Departure is simple: you step out the door, onto your bike, into the wind of your life. What’s hard is not looking back, not measuring gain or loss by lapsed time, or aching legs, or the leering mile markers of ambition. You are on your way when you decipher the pounding of rain as Morse code for making progress. You are getting closer when you recognize doubt as the heaviest burden on your bike and toss it aside, for when it comes to exploring, any direction will do. You have finally arrived when you realize that persistent creak you’ve been hearing all this time is not your wheels, not your mind, but the sound of the planet turning.

  I watched people spill off a crowded bus in Leh and line up in a neat row, presumably to use a restroom. I was wrong. They were waiting to spin the giant prayer wheel near the city gate Mel and I had biked through a few days and forever ago. Several women wore their hair in long braids that looped together behind their necks like reins. Bundles of hay winged the backs of some men. Each sun-hewn face was creased with smile lines—the map of a hard life with certain redeeming hilarities, such as the dog sprawled out directly under the prayer wheel, soaking up all the good karma being released. I’d seen other dogs under similar prayer wheels across Ladakh, for they recognized a safe haven, or at least shade, when they saw it. The men and women were careful not to step on this dog’s tail as they spun the wheel clockwise, adding their momentum to its mantras.

  Mel and I were wandering separately around the city, craving solitude and buying souvenirs, our exhaustion beautifully earned. She was making travel arrangements for her boyfriend to join her on holiday after I flew home, and we’d made plans to meet at a tea house later that afternoon. I arrived first, the only customer there, so I got out the laptop and started editing photos to pass the time. Faint lights cast shadows on the cold concrete floor, yet there was a coziness to the place, with candles on every red plastic table and a large poster of the Potala Palace on the wall. Eventually a stout, motherly woman with a face like softened butter approached to take my order. I quickly glanced over the menu: among the items on offer were momos, tsampa, and “yuck” butter tea.

  “I’ll have a pot of honey-lemon-ginger tea, please.”

  “Oh nooooooooo!” the Ladakhi woman howled. She dashed to the front of the tea house and yanked down the corrugated metal awning, then switched off all the lights. I sat in the dark, mildly alarmed, wondering what I’d said or done to provoke this.

  “We forgot! Hee heeee!” the woman giggled, her voice disembodied in the dark. I heard the scrape of a match, then light flared above a candle. She waved for me to join her at the front of the shop.

  “Look, look,” she urged, pointing at an empty bolt hole in the awning.

  I peeked through the pinky-sized gap: it was like squinting into the viewfinder of a microscope or a reproduction of Galileo’s telescope, and I half-expected to see the rings of Saturn, Rhodospirillum rubrum, or the sign for the King’s Arms pub. Instead I saw the street flowing with people, some holding signs, others candles, a silent river of flame.

  “It’s for Tibet,” she whispered.

  The woman and her husband had forgotten about the march for Tibetan solidarity, she explained, so they were inadvertently playing hooky. For reasons I couldn’t understand, it was better for them to pretend they were away than to show up late.

  “But can I go?” I asked.

  “No, Miss, they will see!” the woman insisted. “Sit, sit, drink tea.”

  She brought me a steaming metal pot and some honey. I showed her a photo from Tibet on the computer, explaining that my friend and I had just biked there. The woman sat down, riveted. “More?” she asked.

  I hesitated to share the androg
ynous face masks and Chinese flags that Mel and I had used as disguises. “This is good, so smart,” she commented, giggling in conspiracy. Relieved, I moved on to red Chinese flags on traditional Tibetan homes. “They were made to,” she said with a sigh. “They had no choice.” She brightened at photos of power lines snaking along the highway—“Good, this is good”—and I shouldn’t have been surprised but I was. When I showed her the pilgrims prostrating themselves to Lhasa, the woman murmured something I couldn’t make out. At photos of Chinese tourists on high passes, where plastic bags fluttered among prayer flags, she clucked her tongue and was silent for a moment. Then she said, very softly, “Chinese government very bad. But Chinese people not bad. They have same problems as Tibetans.”

  With that the woman disappeared into a back room, leaving me stunned at her refusal to take sides. She returned a minute later with some photographs of her own: A family snapshot featuring rows of solemn people wearing dark robes with sleeves so long they hid everyone’s hands. A monastery pearled among gritty mountains. Some kind of Buddhist painting, intricate curves and symbols and patterns rendered in yellow, green, red, white, and blue.

  “Sand,” the woman clarified. “This is sand.”

  I’d read about how Buddhist monks painstakingly arrange bits of coloured quartz into a geometric representation of the universe, or mandala, then scatter the art in a gesture of non-attachment. The photograph I held was the sole proof that the sand mandala had ever existed, only the real mandala wasn’t the completed work of art, but its attempt. That act of pure attention, the motion there and away.

  The husband chuckled next to me. He was clicking through the photos on my laptop now, and he’d found one of Mel high-fiving a statue of a Chinese police officer.

  After finishing my tea I packed up my things, and the woman lifted the metal awning to let me out. By now the march was over, the streets dark and empty, except for a wobbling light in the distance that I guessed might be Mel, heading back to the guest house after finding the tea shop closed. I shouted her name but the figure disappeared around a corner. I clicked on my headlamp and walked in the same direction.

  The air was so cold my teeth ached. Snowflakes accelerated into the light and disappeared in the enveloping dark. A pack of stray dogs howled across the city, hymns freighted with burrs and distances. In a few hours, before dawn, the muezzin’s call to prayer would sing across Leh, shrill and heraldic, followed by the low thrum of Buddhist long horns. In a few days a flight attendant would ask if I preferred steak and rice or beef and noodles for my meal, and I’d laugh and barely resist shouting “beefandnoodles, beefandnoodles” as nostalgia overwhelmed me—though not exactly nostalgia, with legs still too sore for that, but I wouldn’t know what to call that species of longing for a random night in Uzbekistan. For the hungry days when Mel and I lived on instant coffee and laughter and scraps of light, and lived well. And in a few months I’d move off-grid with someone I love to a cabin in Atlin, near the Juneau Icefield, where I’d travel the Silk Road in sentences over and over again, and only gradually come to understand where I’d gone.

  Of course I knew none of this as I wandered through Leh, as lost as I’d ever been in my life. My headlamp was almost dead, so I turned it off and found my way forward by looking up, walking in the faint gap between where the walls of buildings ended and deep space began. The dogs quieted and for a moment I heard whale song, a baby crying, Blind Willie Johnson humming the blues. Then silence, the hush of snow rewriting all the roads.

  Acknowledgments

  “There is no such thing as a solitary polar explorer,” observed Annie Dillard, and the same is true for writers. Every page of this book and the experiences it describes were made possible by the kindness of the strangers who befriended and helped me in my travels; the teachers who encouraged my addiction to questions; and the authors who inspired me out the door and eventually back to the desk. I have so many people to thank.

  Foremost among them is Mel Yule, dear comrade in exploration, who since the age of ten has propelled me to places I never would’ve dared alone. Creighton Irons, Laura Boggess, and Jesse Stone Reeck infused my time at Carolina with goofiness and soul. The Jar Kids, Marcie Reinhart, Mike Moleschi, and Jamie Furniss made Oxford a place of magic and mystery. Sara Bresnick, Linnea Koons, Andrew Frasca, and Alex Petroff kept me company on long bike rides or in the lab at MIT. Lori Ormrod, Bernadette McDonald, and David Roberts somehow believed in this book before I’d written a sentence. Sarah Stewart Johnson has bolstered my conviction that we’re not alone in the universe. Alison Criscitiello and Rebecca Haspell will always be my Fanny Pack. Thanks to my friends in the north—especially Wayne and Cindy Merry, Philippe and Leandra Brient, Dick Fast and Maggie Darcy, Judy Currelly and Stephan Torre, Don Weir, Oliver Barker and Piia Kortsalo, and Cathie Archbould and Jacqueline Bedard—for supporting the writing of this book, not least by wooing me away from it with hikes and home-cooked meals. Thanks also to Libby Barlow for the cabin at the end of the road.

  The Morehead-Cain and Rhodes scholarships both widened my world in ways I can’t possibly express, but I hope this book is a start, as well as a token of my gratitude. Heartfelt thanks to Seven Cycles, Polartec, WINGS WorldQuest, OneWorld Sustainable Investments, The Wild Foundation, and everyone who supported the Cycling Silk expedition, with shout-outs to Milbry Polk, Vance Martin, Ruthann Brown, and Berna and Diarmuid O’Donovan. Working for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin team has been a regular source of inspiration and solvency; special thanks to Kimo Goree—I still owe you a bike ride.

  The Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, Banff Mountain and Wilderness Writing Program, British Columbia Arts Council, and Canada Council for the Arts afforded me the means and time to write. Marni Jackson, Tony Whittome, Fred Stenson, Lori, Kim Rutherford, JanaLee Cherneski, Erin Fornoff, Elizabeth Reed, Karen McDiarmid, Tanya Rosen, and Mel read early chapters or drafts of the manuscript and made it vastly better. Any flaws or inaccuracies that remain are, of course, all mine. Thanks also to Doug Carlson and Stephen Corey for publishing an essay in The Georgia Review that eventually expanded into this book. Writing retreats were generously offered to me by Karen at Shawnigan Lake, Mel Ashton and Chris Pleydell at Ségur-le-Château, Cathie and Jacqueline at Lina Creek, and Jan and Pat Neville in North Carolina.

  Thanks to my wonderful agent, Stuart Krichevsky, for helping me tease one possible Silk Road out of many and travelling it with me to the end. Deep gratitude to my publishers, Anne Collins at Knopf Canada and Lynn Grady at Dey Street Books, for their faith and enthusiasm. I’m grateful to Ross Harris for launching this book into lands abroad; Rick Meier for handling permissions and proofs with skill and aplomb; Five Seventeen for his dazzling design work; and Deirdre Molina, Ruta Liormonas, and Libby Collins for all they do behind the scenes. I’m especially grateful to Amanda Lewis, who made the writing itself an experiment and adventure, and to Lynn Henry and Matthew Daddona, who have been such fierce champions for this book from the beginning.

  And finally, thanks to my parents, brothers, and extended family, who truly believed (feared) I’d make it to Mars. I’d choose a sheep shed with all of you over a new world any day. For Kate Neville, my love is as deep as Sloko Inlet on a late summer day, the wind quiet and the lake calm, paddling home on meltwater, mountain light.

  Permissions

  Excerpt from The Writing Life by Annie Dillard © 1989 by Annie Dillard. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Excerpt from A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit © 2005 by Rebecca Solnit. Used by permission of Penguin Random House Limited.

  Quotation from In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje © 1987 by Michael Ondaatje. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  Quotation from Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel by Evan S. Connell © 1962, renewed 1990 by Evan S. Connell from Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel: A Poem. Reprinted by permission
of Counterpoint.

  Quotation from “The Clearing” by Tomas Tranströmer, translation by Robert Bly © 1962 by Robert Bly from The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer. Reprinted by permission of Greywolf Press.

  Excerpt from The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy © 2002 by Ellen Meloy. Used by permission of Penguin Random House Limited.

  Quotation from “The Swimmer” by John Cheever © 1947 by John Cheever, renewed 2000 by Mary W. Cheever from The Stories of John Cheever. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House Limited.

  Selected Bibliography

  Works quoted, consulted, or referred to in the writing of this book.

  EPIGRAPHS

  “To speak of knowledge . . .” in Virginia Woolf, The Waves. London: Vintage, 2004.

  “How we spend our days . . .” in Annie Dillard, The Writing Life. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.

  “Never to get lost . . .” in Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York: Penguin, 2006.

  “I should like to do . . .” Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise. New York: Vintage, 2003.

  PART ONE

  1.MARCO MADE ME DO IT

  Thesiger, Wilfred. Arabian Sands. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.

  Cherry-Garrad, Apsley. The Worst Journey in the World. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1997.