Lands of Lost Borders

by Kate Harris

  Everything was falling apart, grinding down. Our clothing was in tatters, our socks poked through holes in our shoes, my watch strap was broken and the battery dead. Mel’s bike had been missing a handlebar grip since Kyrgyzstan, a bungee cord was tangled permanently around her rear hub, and my kickstand and mirror had bailed on me several countries ago. Our inner tubes were more patches than rubber by now, and the chains and gears on our bikes protested loudly with every pedal stroke. The tent zippers refused to zip, the bit of wire that fixed the burner to our stove was broken, and our Therm-a-Rest mattresses leaked from pricks so microscopic we couldn’t find and plug them, so we woke up hugging the cold, hard ground. After nearly a year on the road, it was a wonder anything still worked, especially our friendship.

  That was saved by the smallest of things: The way Mel would kick out her legs with a goofy flourish when I glanced back to see where she was. Her sense of absurdity perfectly matched the landscape we passed through, and her commentary about it was always illuminating, such as when we came across a patch of ground creepily strewn with long grey hairs. “Satanic rituals involving shears and senior citizens,” confirmed Mel. “You said that a little too knowingly,” I replied. Both of us craved solitude as much as company, and more than anything it was this ability to be alone together that let us survive the trip. Of course we had bad days, terrible days, like when Mel poured herself a hearty mug of instant coffee at breakfast and drank it all before noticing she’d barely left me any hot water. “Oops!” she said, as if morning coffee weren’t a matter of life and death. “You grew up with siblings, Mel!” I fumed. “You know proportions matter!” I drove her crazy at times too, but even so she’d follow me to the ends of the Earth and I’d follow her in turn, because that’s what we did on a daily basis. We biked on and on, whatever our mood or the weather, until finally, after ten months, we were as close as the Silk Road gets to the stars.

  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 forty-five kilometres 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 eighty kilometres 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 kilometre 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 androgynous 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.

  Taklamakan desert.

  Tibetan Plateau.

  Border between Turkey and Armenia at Ani.

  Desert crossroads.

  Biking with the moon.

  Uzbek women at the Registan.

  History under renovation in Samarkand.

  The Pyanj River.

  Pamiri family.

  Bus stop in Tajikistan.

  Barbed wire between Tajikistan and China.

  Kyrgyz herder.

  Mountain pass in Tibet.

  Tibetan pilgrims.

  Tiger tracks in Nepal.

  Angle of repose in Ladakh.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “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, David Roberts, and Bernadette McDonald somehow believed in this book when I’d barely written a sentence. Sarah Stewart Johnson 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, 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 Scholarship and Rhodes Scholarship 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 else who supported the Cycling Silk expedition, with special shout outs to Milbry Polk, Vance Martin, 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.