by Dina Bennett
Today could be my chance to fulfill the quest, yet there are obstacles. For one, there’s the 385-mile drive to Bishkek. It should take twelve to fourteen hours. We’d like to complete it in ten, despite two eleven-thousand-foot passes and winding mountain roads iced with the year’s first snow. Then there are those soda bottles filled with an opaque white liquid akin to bleached Pepto Bismol. Who knows how long the milk’s been there, its temperature rising, bacteria starting happy little families.
My quest for mare’s milk is a solitary endeavor, as Bernard has already made it clear he has no intention of supporting me other than being willing to apply the brakes if I ask him to stop at a stand. His abstinence doesn’t surprise, as his disinclination to be adventurous with food and drink is long-established. I much prefer he be honest with me and true to himself about this, and I no longer urge him to join me on my gustatory adventures. I’ve had more than my fair share of rancid, bitter, or otherwise unsavory beverages thanks to Bernard deciding politeness to our host trumped being considerate of me. “Yes, thank you very much, I’d love a cup,” he’ll say jovially. Then he sniffs it cautiously when the host’s back is turned, quickly tipping his half-full cup into my mine. Our host smiles with pleasure eyeing Bernard’s empty cup, regarding me with suspicion as I sip and sip and sip, trying to drain my double portion.
Regardless of these incidents, I do wish I could have Bernard’s enthusiasm backing me up, especially since I feel uncertain. As it is, I’m naturally more a follower than a leader, and it suits my temperament to know that I have a companion in misfortune, not just a chauffeur. A willingness to stand with me and take just a little sip would suffice, even though on this latest quest I have no inkling whether I’ll be able to drink my own glass of mare’s milk once I find it, let alone his.
Today’s rain doesn’t do much to stoke my enthusiasm. Absent any vivacity from Bernard, I droop, any oomph I had succumbing to the weather. Despite it being early afternoon, the low blanket of storm clouds makes it as dark as dusk. When I take my first sips of equine dairy, I want to savor it, not huddle in a downpour. Besides, if no nomad is milking his mare in the rain, that tells me something. We drive on.
Day two finds me at a Bishkek hotel talking with the concierge. “Where can I get a glass of mare’s milk?” I ask, expecting to have a choice of places within walking distance.
“Oh, this is not possible in Bishkek.”
“But the nomads are just over the pass. Don’t they bring it to the city for sale?”
“Never. It doesn’t transport. You have to drink it fresh.”
“Really? So the only place to get mare’s milk is back three hours toward Osh?” We’re heading the opposite direction, toward Kyrgyzstan’s border with China.
“Suusamyr is the main place for mare’s milk.” She pauses to consider. “Here in Bishkek, though, there is one café, a very special place, that sells kumis, but …” her voice trails off.
“Kumis?”
“Mare’s milk that is … how you say … fermented. I will show you how to get there.” She unfurls a city map with a smart snap, jabs a furious dot with her pen to denote our hotel, and skips a dashed line several blocks up and over. “Here it is,” she exclaims, scribbling a wild circle of happiness around the location of the kumis café.
I find the café midway down a quiet, tree-lined side street. It’s patronized that Sunday by Kyrgyz families, a couple of men indulging a table-side snooze and a crone swaddled in layers of clothing doing some timid begging. Settling in at a well-shaded iron table by the sidewalk, I barely have time to look around before a harried waiter slaps a menu on the table. “Kumis, please,” I say.
“Kumis?” he echoes, in a tone that should have filled me with doubt.
“Kumis,” I repeat, trying to mimic the confidence with which the concierge said it that morning.
He whisks the menu away, turns on his heels and departs, swiveling his hips through the crowded tables in a blue-ribbon cha cha cha. Five minutes later he’s back, carrying a tray with one glass and a clear carafe filled with a viscous white liquid. Taking a filthy rag from his back pocket he swishes it around and inside the glass, which he places in front of me with a flourish, heavy pitcher alongside. He lingers, raises his eyebrows in expectation, perhaps hoping I’ll pour and gulp in his presence. For reasons I couldn’t then explain, I sense it’s important to take my first taste of kumis in private, so I wait him out till he’s called to another table. Only then do I scoot my chair in, lean over the pitcher and inhale deeply.
My nostrils fill with a scent reminiscent of vomit.
There is only one thing to do in these circumstances: rely on my taste buds. I pour a drip, sufficient to taste, but little enough to pass for the dregs of a once-full glass. To bypass my nose, I exhale while I sip. Smell aside, I see no reason why milk from a mare shouldn’t produce something similar to the sweet-sour deliciousness of other fermented milk drinks, like Greek kefir or Indian lassi.
I am wrong. Horribly, gag-worthy, wrong. But I’m in a public place, a guest of a foreign country, so I swallow the thick, sour, fizzy stuff. It does not go down easy. Abandoning my afternoon of kumis-sipping, I hand the waiter appropriate currency and leave. On the next corner, I buy a bottle of water, which I drain.
Now that it’s clear kumis will not satisfy my mare’s milk quest, there’s only one thing for it. I must find the real thing.
Day three and we are driving west to Naryn, our last stop before reaching China and after which all hope of mare’s milk will be lost. The Naryn Region (called an oblast) is the most definitively Kyrgyz of all Kyrgyzstan, with plenty of livestock of the sort that produces wool and meat, but not milk. Through 125 miles, I see small flocks of sheep, scrawny cows, plenty of spunky black goats, but no lush pastures, no yurts. No mares. The countryside alternates flat and dry with hilly and dry, neither conducive to horse nomads. Until, that is, we crest the pass above Naryn and discover we’ll be descending through a rumpled landscape of grassy gullies and meadows.
Immediately I see horses, but they’re geldings, only useful for travel and transport. I go on high alert for picketed mares. We round a hairpin curve and there, snuggled in a narrow gulch of green grass, I see a square black tent. A young woman with red cheeks and a dark kerchief over her hair stands in front. She places the toddler she’s holding onto the ground, where he wobbles like a dashboard doll while she wipes her hands on her apron. The family granny has placed a low three-legged stool on the grassy edge of a wrinkled rise, where she rolls balls of white cheese, tossing them onto a sagging net awning to dry in the sun. Grazing behind them, foals nearby, are mares.
“Mares!” I shout to Bernard. “Stop, stop. Pull over.” Though there are no roadside tables sporting soda bottles filled with white liquid, I have no doubt I can get what I’m after. Where there are mares and where there is cash, a transaction can be made.
Jumping a small stream, I walk up the short grassy slope, trying to keep my excitement from quickening my stride into something aggressive and too obviously foreign. Being out of my element is now very much my element. I’m not just seeing, I’m becoming part of what I see, my arrival changing the lives around as they part to allow me in, shifting from being a voyeur to a participant. I no longer care whether I speak the same language as those around me, because I know that gestures can convey paragraphs and a smile can open doors.
Seeing that the woman has moved to the tent entrance, I give her an Esperanto smile and she holds open the flap, as if I’d called in advance. Inside, the one-room summer living quarters of her family is crammed with a wood stove, table, chairs, a pile of sleeping quilts, horse tack, and the accoutrements of daily living. Light filters through a plastic window onto a stack of small enamel bowls on the table. She picks one painted with faded flowers, removes the lid from a slender wood churn, and ladles out white liquid. Her outstretched hand offers me the full bowl. “Mare’s milk at last,” I think, stepping forward to take it. Then she says, “Kum
is?”
I parlay with myself. “Try it! This is homemade. It’s probably completely different from the city stuff.” “Leave it! Kumis is kumis.” I look down at the contents of my bowl, taking a discreet sniff. There it is, that odor of things one should not be drinking. Smiling, I hand the bowl back to the woman and shake my head apologetically. Without hesitation, she pours the contents back into the churn.
“Milk?” I ask, hoping other travelers have used the same word. She looks at me blankly, then ushers me over to another churn, this time removing the lid for me to peer at the contents before ladling anything out. I bend low for a whiff. I detect the beginnings of the same sour smells. Adolescent kumis, not yet fully ripe.
“Milk?” I ask again, my voice meek, at a loss for what else to say. She returns the same apologetic head shake I’ve just given her and opens the tent flap to usher me out. But when it comes to food experiences, I am not a quitter.
My parents never babied my sister and me when it came to food. There was none of this, “Eat two peas for Mommy.” I ate peas, I ate beans, I ate carrots, I ate pretty much everything put in front of me. My sister did, too. It wasn’t just the specter of “those starving children in China” parents presented in the 1960s that haunted our every bite. My mother, reared on fish and vegetables of France’s Côte d’Azur, and my father, fed with the schnitzels and goulashes of Vienna, were serious gourmands who loved delicious food and knew how to prepare it. Raising us as if we were in pre-World War II Europe where they grew up, they injected every interaction with traditions of civility and culture, instilling in me a sense that food and eating were as noble an adventure as climbing a mountain. Every activity had its food component. It might be the sandwich of cold chicken in layers of crisp lettuce and creamy mayonnaise that we took on our Saturday hikes to New York’s Lake Mohonk, or the vanilla sundae at Schrafft’s ice cream parlor where my elegantly dressed mother happily sat at the counter with me, offering me an icy dairy treat while she sipped her coffee, to buck us up after the exhaustion of inspecting the Christmas displays at Bergdorf Goodman. It might even be the pleasure of picking strawberries in the fields of Long Island on our way home from a day at Jones Beach. In every instance, my parents’ happiness in the food they ate was shared with my sister and me. Food was not just eaten, it was analyzed and, above all, adored. We were a family unashamed to moan with culinary pleasure.
I have a memory palace that’s actually more like an overstocked larder in the castle kitchen. Whether I’m eating a juicy hot dog or a sizzling porterhouse steak, drinking a glass of apple juice or champagne, I have taste memories that require only a bite or sip to come flooding back. Food speaks to me of love, family, sadness, joy, being young, getting older. It’s everything. So now, in Naryn, my moment of hesitation vanished. If there was one thing I was certain of, it was this: where there are mares and where there is kumis, there must be mare’s milk.
The two of us stand in the sunshine, woman to woman, wanting to understand each other. And then it hits me. I go on one knee as if proposing, curling my fingers into two gentle fists which I raise and lower while opening one, closing the other. Though I have only milked a cow once in my life, even a clumsy milker is an understood milker.
Nodding vigorously, my hostess goes to a large black bucket at the corner of the tent, which I’d walked by without noticing. Wiping her own bowl on her apron, she pours in a full ladle and offers it to me. I stare at it. I squint at the sun. I take a deep breath. At my feet, the little boy tumbles onto the soft ground, somersaults, picks at a pebble, oblivious to the significance of the occasion.
Raising the crock, I pick up a clean, faintly grassy smell. For a second, worrisome thoughts intrude, about unsanitary conditions, about the bucket sitting outside uncovered day and night, about what else her apron may have been used for. Then I open my mouth to let the liquid spill in. It’s cool, not watery, but not fatty either. The woman’s eyes are on me. I swallow, tasting a creamy sweetness with a mildly sour finish. I want to savor each drop, I want to gulp it down and ask for more. I want to shout, “I found it!”
Handing the drained bowl back to her, I turn to admire the mares. The foals are sucking.
INSIDERS
PREAMBLE
Almost everyone’s taken a road trip in their life. But there are road trips and there are road trips. The ones I do are to the average take-the-car-to-visit-Uncle Bob drive as a Borneo jungle trek would be to a walk to the mailbox. Though the means of locomotion is identical, the experiences have nothing in common. When given the choice, we will take whatever route is less traveled by foreigners. If a trip works out right, I have a chance not only to become something other than I was, but to find a mirror reflecting all the more clearly the beauty and richness that is my life back home.
On these drives, we are eternally hopeful that we will not encounter tour groups nor, for that matter, others like us. Travel writer Paul Theroux captures it precisely when he says as travelers we want to be at large in an exotic setting, for every one of our senses to confirm that we are far away. We’re seeking differences in landscapes and people, not repeated versions of our own lives across someone else’s border. If we do things right, we’re hoping not just to see the story, but for a moment become part of it.
On the ground, this means we avoid the obvious road that is shortest, swiftest, or smoothest. This makes the driving harder, and the days more protracted than they otherwise could be. It is also more nervous-making for one of us. In my normal life, which means my life on our Colorado ranch, I do not choose a stressful existence. There’s already enough that can go wrong when you’re ranching at 8,500 feet on the fortieth parallel.
For instance, if a lightning storm is forecast for a summer afternoon, we distance ourselves from anything steel, having personal knowledge of friends who got, shall we say, too charged up. But things don’t always go well, even for the most experienced among us. One day a thunderstorm blew in early. Desperate to finish loading and tarp the stack of hay on his truck, our hay hauler raised his steel hay hooks preparatory to picking up a bale, turning himself into an instant lightning rod. He became airborne, blown off his semi, falling thirteen feet and breaking his back and pelvis as he hit the ground. And then there was the rancher who forgot the first rule of solitary cowboying: let the storm pass. Born and raised on this ranch, he certainly knew enough to leave his cows grazing where they were one more day, and he understood without even reflecting on it that he could finish stretching the last bit of fence line around the next field the following morning. We’ll never know what did or didn’t cross his mind. He was found dead next to his steel fencing tools, electrocuted as lightning coursed through the barbed wire he was gripping with them.
Where I live there are plenty of hazards in the wintertime too, which is long, cold, and white. It’s seventy-five miles of empty road and no cell service to get from our ranch to a pharmacy. If a blizzard is forecast, I’ll cancel the drive to pick up a prescription. I’d rather live with my flu symptoms another day than risk spending my night in a ditch as snow drifts over me. Whisky with honey and lemon, or what I call Rancher Advil, works like a charm.
Despite my pleasure in being safe and comfortable, doing an easy drive doesn’t appeal to me. The whole point of these drives is to thrust me into a continual state of amazement, eyes startled wide open, teeth clenched and heart pumping madly at the uncertainty of it all. Committing ourselves to the less-traveled roads means we can get to parts of a country where even the residents might wish they were elsewhere.
In the Peruvian Andes in 2010, we swooped over long, empty altiplano tracks, alongside young girls in pastel dresses and striped wool shawls herding white alpacas from a watering pond to a field with grass as cropped as a Marine’s high and tight. South of Nuwara Eliya in Sri Lanka we took a sharp right off a forest road onto a dirt lane hugged by rhododendrons and stalked by towering wild fig trees. The lower we went, the narrower the road, until turning around wasn’t an option.
When the forest suddenly ended, we blinked in confusion to find ourselves in the middle of a tea estate, the steep slopes to either side covered in a green gleam, as if cloaked in patent leather. Just as startled were the ladies picking tea leaves. We had only a brief interlude for them to admire our car while I admired the gold ornaments piercing ears and noses.
In a nameless hamlet in central India in 2009, we stood on a packed dirt sidewalk waiting for a flat tire to be repaired at the local bike shop. The air was torpid, abuzz with flies. There was no shade. Looking around, I noticed a wizened elder doddering slowly toward us on thin, bandy legs, his tiny grizzled head supporting a preposterously bulbous white cotton turban. Arms extended, brown parchment hands out to grasp and shake mine by way of welcome, he rasped out in a hoarse whisper, “Osama! Osama!”
Was this an ideological rant? It couldn’t be. We were not in a Muslim part of India; in fact, we’d driven by the village’s Hindu shrine. Yet the joyful fervor with which this citizen greeted us, his face nearly split with a toothless grin as I took his hands, was apparent. More villagers gathered, looking from him to me, seeking a reaction. I’m averse to crowds generally. As such I’m highly attuned to threatening behavior from even one person, let alone a group. I don’t need my college psych minor to know that a heaping helping of crowds plus a dollop of ideology gives a winning recipe for a quick-rise threat. With this crowd, though, I sensed nothing but geniality. Eying the people around me I saw them nodding in agreement as he touched his palm to his heart, showing reverence and gratitude. Osama bin Laden? Here? Really? And then things clicked. I realized the man hadn’t said “bin Laden.” What he’d said was “Osama,” plain and simple. Mimicking his gesture of hand to heart I corrected him with a name held in higher regard that year. Yes, yes, he nodded, as his smooth gums mouthed the name he’d meant all along: “Obama!”
