Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  Still, Micky designed me a new board, which Fletcher, Yvon’s son, shaped and glassed for me. Still, I flew six thousand miles to Christmas Island, artificially mellowed by some kind of depresso’s drug to make me stop smoking. And I gulped back the dread that the point break had induced and walked down the beach with Micky and Yvon and Peter Pan, longing for some of that Old Blue Magic.

  What we found there at the break in front of the village was surfing’s equivalent of a petting zoo—little giddyap waves, pony waves, knee-high and forgiving—and if these weren’t the waves we had come for, they were nevertheless the only waves we were going to get this trip. The silverbacks made every wave they wanted; I made maybe one out of five, my body aching to restore its balance and former grace. Micky and Yvon tutored my rehabilitation, offered comfort: “It’s not like getting back on a bicycle,” said Micky. “You spend thirty seconds on your feet a day as a beginner or intermediate. Try learning anything else at thirty-second-a-day intervals.” “It’s the most difficult sport there is,” added Yvon, the rock-climbing pioneer. “There’s no more difficult sport, absolutely. You have to be young to learn it. You can start snowboarding at fifty years old and get damn good at it. You can’t do that with surfing.”

  Oftentimes when I pivoted my board landward to get in position, the fins would hook up in the reef. I felt clownish, hesitant, my judgment blurred by bad eyesight. But finally none of that mattered, finally I started hopping into the saddle, having fun. That I considered to be a mercy.

  I had collided head-on with my youth and what needed resurrection, though not in the boomer sense of never letting go. I had let go. But the dialectic of my transformation had reached a standstill: Surf=No Surf=??? I wanted more waves. I wanted more waves the way a priest wants miracles, the desert more rain. Throughout the middle years of my celibacy, living a counterpoint life, I had prayed hard to be welcomed home again to waves, and these tame ponies on Christmas Island would, I hoped, serve as that invitation. I have since surfed San Onofre with limited success. Florida too, but only once. I have yet to find the right equation that will spring open my life, rearrange my freedoms, and let me throw my desire back into the sea. My resources are modest, my obligations many; my dreams are still the right dreams but veined with a fatty ambivalence. Maybe the season has passed, but I don’t think so. My two lives, and my two selves, have to do the Rodney King trick and learn to get along.

  The thing about surfing, Chip told me, is that “you leave no trail.” Yes sir, Micky agreed: “It’s like music—you play it and it’s done.”

  The strategy, though, that you’re looking for is the one that teaches you to hold the note.

  (2001)

  Mount Ararat

  And then I passed on further into great Armenia, to a certain city called Erzurum, which had been rich in old time, but now the Tartars have almost laid it waste. In this country there is the very same mountain whereupon the ark of Noah rested. This I would willingly have ascended, if my company would have waited for me. However, the people of the country report that no man could ever ascend the mountain because they say it pleases not the Most High.

  —The Journal of Friar Odoric, AD 1330

  Well-trampled Erzurum, one of history’s doormats, seemed more than ever resolved to its continued existence, being rather conspicuously fortified. Alongside an airstrip, a village of camouflaged bunkers housed fighter jets. Stuporous conscripts dozed in the sun, manning antiaircraft guns mounded like anthills throughout the arid no-man’s-land of the plain. On the outskirts of town, Turkey’s entire Third Army was encamped, charged with the security of the eastern provinces. In NATO’s dossier of the Apocalypse, here was a vital frontier unit, its troops rotating along a border nervously shared with some major spooks—the Soviet Union, Iran, Iraq, and Syria—each an ancient and sometimes modern enemy, brother, slave, subject, or ruler of the Anatolian peoples of Asia Minor.

  The needles visible on the horizon were either minarets or missile sites—easy for a non-Muslim Westerner like myself to confuse, given the times. This part of the world was nobody’s idea of a playground, and my journey coincided with another questionable piece of adventurism: Saddam Hussein’s surprise trek into Kuwait. Waiting in Erzurum’s airport for my luggage, I tallied up the previews to see what I was working with so far: The Middle East. Impending full-scale war. Overwhelming military presence. Alleged Kurdish terrorist activity. A reputedly conservative and xenophobic Islamic city smack in the middle of what is one of the most earthquake-prone venues on earth.

  Such facts had been nicely titillating back home in Tallahassee, but the truth was I felt relief to finally be here on Marco Polo’s Silk Road, since I was traveling under the strange impression that I had been called to this land. Called—not like a god-struck novice or the Son of Sam; more like a delinquent summoned to the tax collector’s office. I had the queer feeling that something big was up and that somehow I had a role to play, perhaps as a stable boy to the Four Horsemen. One doesn’t argue with intuitions of destiny, one buys a plane ticket and a bottle of Kaopectate. The date was September 7. Two more days and the calendar would provide a most portentous serial: 9/9/90. On that day I would be on Ağri Daği—Mount Ararat—attempting what Friar Odoric had counseled against on the premise of annoying God.

  By any account I was a vice-ridden sinner and ill-conditioned to do what I had never done before: climb a dormant volcano-cum-­mountain, especially a 16,943-foot one, higher than any peak in Europe or the contiguous United States. I found the friar’s words not only provocative but an implicit challenge, meant only for me, because 9/9/90 would also be my thirty-ninth birthday, the starting gate of my fortieth year, crisis time for any nicotine-fouled, under-exercised, previously able-bodied ex-surfer loath to wander far above sea level without a chairlift. Something definitely was up, some lure irresistible to the disposition of my mortal self. I could smell it. Something not too dressy, like Reckoning, or Enlightenment.

  I had not come unprepared. In my rucksack I carried an emergency library of the soul, should I have reason to call upon the wisdom of the prophets: a portable World Bible, accommodating all faiths including fire worship; a paperback edition of the Koran; a scholarly survey of biblical sites in Turkey, the “other” Holy Land; the newest translation of the Gilgamesh epic, in case I encountered heavy rains. And since an American could not go anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean Diaspora without that most pertinent of testaments, The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain’s travelogue through the Ottoman Empire, Europe, and North Africa, I had that too.

  Of personal effects, my toilet kit bulged with Nicorette chewing gum, to prevent me from becoming deranged and inadvertently killing somebody should I elect to stop smoking. I also had with me my new, first-ever pair of hiking boots, broken in by walking the dog to the park. What I lacked, however, were crampons and an ice ax, two items rumored to be convenient atop the glacier-bound summit of Mount Ararat. But I had never seen such equipment in my life, and neither had the Florida outfitters where I had shopped. Come back in January, they had said, amused, and we’ll sell you a sweater. In all other aspects of preparation, I was either uninformed or ignorant, and considered both states to be the mother of adventure.

  So here I was in Erzurum, where the road to Mount Ararat began. Erzurum had a reputation for being somber and severe, a city “never recovered from winter,” and though no one thought to disparage its tenacity by calling it lovely, the negative image seemed unjustified, even if Erzurum did have the only university campus in existence where wolves were a lingering security problem.

  I had thrown in my lot with a robust band of mostly German alpinists. Erol, our courier from an Istanbul agency called Trek Travel, ushered all seventeen of us onto a dolmus, the Turkish word meaning “stuffed” and referring to grape leaves, aubergines, and minibuses. We were outward bound for Doğubayazit, a four-hour drive east, the staging area for any ascent of Ararat. We slalomed through
an army convoy onto the scorched pastures of the valley, the higher landscape a geological punishment—rocky, sunburned, and unyielding. But not infrequently would we top a rise and be treated to a golden vista of bulgur wheat or men harvesting green lakes of hay. The horizon would pour into a gorge, then split open again into a vastness daubed with the parched wheels of sunflowers. Whatever watercourse cut through the distance was described by perfect lines of Lombardy poplars or hairy clumps of willows. The farther we went, the more the land’s few resources were given over to nomads, their flocks out beyond, muzzling the scrub.

  I had never been among Germans before or traveled anywhere with a single one, so I knew no better than to be glad about it and, for the most part, was. Wolf, a physician from Bavaria, spoke English. White-haired Rudi was an Austrian, splendid to look at, with a profile you could pledge allegiance to and the personality of Kurt Waldheim, circa 1943. There were twelve others, all of them middle-aged, and all had wasted their youths by interminably scaling the Alps and whatever else got in their way. I was, and would remain, the only pilgrim.

  Perhaps because of the echoing chill of Midnight Express, the gringo hordes continue to bypass Asia Minor, which is a shame, but not for me, since I occasionally see Americans in Florida and get my fill of them there. Besides, there were two others on the bus: Rob of California and Chris of Michigan. Rob, my junior by ten years and a ringer for Superboy, chiseled out a living as a photographer. Chris was an economist for the state government in Lansing. I found his company agreeable, mostly because he was smaller than me and because he was the only other fool on the expedition who had come this far in life without scaling a mountain. Chris and I mulled over the prophecies of Nostradamus, particularly those predicting that, on or near the second millennium, a charismatic Antichrist (Gorbachev) would reunite the world (Europe), Babylon (Iraq) would be back in business, and mankind could kiss its butt good-bye, as these events would culminate in the Last Judgment, for which we were wondering if we had front-row seats. In the Christian mythology of the Second Coming, Mount Ararat had been approximately targeted as Ground Zero. The Koran located its own End-Days epicenter farther south, a long drive across the border into Syria.

  For reasons other than salvation, though, Mount Ararat has been off-limits to foreigners (except NATO snoops) for most of the twentieth century. Only since 1982 had the mountain been officially open; no one can set foot on it without first obtaining written permission, a months-long process requiring a daunting seventy-two signatures. This absolute triumph of red tape explained why Erol was among us and why we clung to him. Trek Travel was one of the very few outfits with a knack for expediting the formalities. Erol’s assignment was to escort us all in a piece to Doğubayazit and deliver us to our mountain guides.

  Chris and I, brother greenhorns, compared notes we had culled from the available literature. We were most encouraged that the books unanimously emphasized one needn’t be an experienced mountaineer to achieve the summit, though they allowed the climb was strenuous and demanded great stamina. We asked Erol to bolster our courage with a little pep talk, and he fortified us with good information. Trek Travel had succeeded in marching 98 percent of its customers to the summit. If our group was representative of the whole, this was heartening news, implying that the majority of Ararat trekkers were well sunk into middle age, and that the mountain was cake.

  In Erol’s experience, the worst incident to unfold on Ararat had occurred last July, when a trekker—a German trekker, it so ­happened—somehow concealed a hang glider in his baggage. The packers hauled it unaware to base camp, whereupon the German flew down to Doğubayazit on the day of the World Cup soccer finals, in search of a TV. “If the soldiers had seen him,” Erol explained soberly, “they would have shot him out of the air. They wouldn’t have known what it was they were seeing.”

  I asked what the soldiers were doing on Ararat anyway.

  “They are guarding the camp against terrorists.”

  But what was this bull about terrorists—there were none, not this far north, anyway. Yes, Erol conceded, but the soldiers didn’t know that. “Whatever you do,” he told us solemnly, “don’t go outside camp after dark.”

  “The great provocation,” Wolf pronounced, from the veranda of our hotel in Doğubayazit, assessing Ararat in the early morning light. It wasn’t just big, you could forget big. The surrounding tableland, flat as a Nebraska cornfield, swept the eye across an uninterrupted horizontal right into a dead stop, whereupon a mountain as perfect and unreal as a child’s rendition, a great breast of mountain that had nurtured the very roots of civilization, heaved abruptly more than thirteen thousand feet straight off the plateau. Without outlying foothills to interfere with its immensity, the mountain, skullcapped with dazzling ice, was startlingly exposed, as if it had no other choice than to be naked and divine. I looked at it and felt the awful undertow of attraction.

  We were quite a party now—forty-six of us—having rendezvoused with two other groups. One had come, like us, from Erzurum. The other had been hiking a week, gaining unfair advantage, in the Taurus Mountains.

  Erol came to notify us of a delay: Our permit awaited its final signature, which it would receive automatically once the commander of the local garrison remembered he had something to do today. As we kicked around, waiting, I noticed that Chris seemed aloof and unwell. As we mustered in the parking lot, our documents secured, our gear collected, he bailed out, citing reasons of health and personal scheduling problems that conflicted with Armageddon. I was sorry to see him go, since I had hoped we might launch our alpine careers together, humiliation being a state best enjoyed with a comrade.

  Off I drove with Rob and the Germans and Rudi. We raised a terrible train of dust, bouncing across the plain toward road’s end on the hem of the mountain. I was a bit apprehensive about our drop-off point at the tiny Kurdish village of Çevirme, having been forewarned by a guidebook not to violate anyone’s namus and cause a ruckus. Eyeballing women was strictly out. Pointing cameras at Kurds was also an offense, so I figured that Rob, who couldn’t restrain himself, would be beheaded within minutes and that our arrival would result in a flurry of diplomatic gaffes.

  I shouldn’t have worried. Our appearance on the central pasture of Çevirme was the signal for the population to throw their touchy sense of honor to the wind. They scrambled forward to cull baksheesh and bonbons and to beg for fotoçek. Actually, the behavior of the villagers was exemplary, considering they were being invaded from outer space. I retreated to a stone wall fencing a sugarloaf stack of hay and smiled at three prepubescent Cleopatras who judged me satisfactory material to stare at. For reasons of epic length, I was smitten; these were Noah’s granddaughters.

  It would be unkind of you not to let me say a few words about the ancestor we share. Fundamentalists and frauds, maverick archaeologists, even a former astronaut all have mounted expeditions up Mount Ararat to prowl around its ice cap, hoping to chip out a hatch cover from the old boat. Which would certainly be a miracle.

  The story of Noah can rightfully be called the seminal myth of recorded history, the sequel to the Garden of Eden. Something devastating did happen; one winter’s snowfall probably was extreme, the spring thaw likely coincided with heavy rains and astronomical tides, the rivers rose, inundating the lowlands. But not to the preposterous level of 16,945 feet, the present height of Ararat, which last erupted in 1840, vaporizing its old cap and, presumably, anything stuck up there.

  The Old Testament version is derived from ancient Mesopotamian myths, anyway. The Mesopotamian prototype allegedly landed near the floodplain of the Tigris River, the same region where the Hebrew scribes probably intended to run their Noah aground. But Genesis, which properly set the patriarch down “upon the mountains of Ararat,” was misinterpreted immediately. The mountains became one mountain, and Ararat, “a land far away,” became Mount Ararat itself. By AD 70, Josephus was swearing the ark was up there in plain vie
w, and Marco Polo reported the same stirring news twelve centuries later, although neither man had seen the ark himself, relying on the accounts of others.

  Standing in Noah’s front yard, I told myself, all right, it doesn’t matter, since I preferred Noah as a metaphor for starting over anyway. Behind the Kurdish girls, atop the stone wall, lay a horse, or rather what was left of one, a long ivory chain of neck vertebrae still posted to their hideous skull, the macabre buck-toothed laugh rudely suggesting the distinction between Noah fact and fiction. The irony moved me along.

  Called back to the ranks, we were introduced to our Kurdish guides, Halis, Sandwich (or so the Germans pronounced his name), and Ahmet. We crammed bag lunches into our day packs while the staff loaded the more substantial gear into a Soviet four-wheel-drive Niva. Led by Halis, a rather arrogant sort with the impersonal eyes of a warrior, the Taurus Mountains bunch filed out the back of the village, disappearing into the rising folds of land. I quick-stepped to their rear, anxious to get going, though I properly belonged to Ahmet.

  Fortunately, the day’s agenda was cushy, a genteel stroll up past the 9,500-foot mark, and the weather was excellent, hosted by a magnanimous sun. Our collective mood was jubilant, even a shade romantic, and already the elevation was handing out rewards. The guides handled us well and were true professionals in their trade, having undergone years of rigorous training and apprenticeship as shepherds. The Europeans attacked the grade in stacked formation, unrepentant tailgaters with the playfulness of mules. This was the poetry of plodding; I found it inspirational, yet every tenth step I seemed to lose the eleventh, slacking off until I had been inducted as an honorary member of the Sandwich contingent. I did what I could to enjoy it until eventually I filtered back through the column, alone for a while before being reunited with my own tribe, who welcomed me with indifference.