Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  Zakir arrived and showed us into his office. He was a fit-looking, well-built man in his forties, and every line in his weathered face ended in a smile. Working in shirtsleeves and open neck, he had an air of relaxed authority that communicated a warm informality to his staff. A big map of the upper Ferghana Valley was pinned on the wall, the areas of walnut forest shaded in green: by far the greatest, and probably the oldest, wild walnut forests in the world. Green tentacles of forest ran up the valleys of the Ark-Terek range and followed the contours around an average elevation of 9,000 feet. A collection of walnuts of all sizes and forms lay on Zakir’s table like bowls on a green. Hand-labelled jam jars of them stood in rows on top of a cupboard. The miracle of the walnut forests and wild fruit woods, said Zakir, is that they were planted by God, not man. In southern Kyrgyzstan there are one and a half million acres of them. Gathered round the map, we began to outline a possible journey through the mountain forests. Zakir, it turned out, would be only too happy to join us a couple of days later for an exploration of the woods, travelling by Russian jeep and on foot, staying in farmhouses, cottages or cabins along the way. In the meantime, it was agreed, Zamira and I would arrange a jeep and driver, and set off next morning for Ortok, a village 6,000 feet up in the fruit forests to the east of Jalal-Abad.

  We had arranged to be collected by Gena and his Lada jeep, ready to set out for Ortok and the walnut forests. A toot on the horn, and there he was, down in the street. Dressed in T-shirt, navy tracksuit bottoms and the Chinese trainers everyone seemed to wear, Gena was lean and fit, and in his early thirties. He was good-looking too, in the high-cheekboned, narrow-eyed way of the Kyrgyz people. But he also had the deadpan look and the slightly hooded eyes of Buster Keaton, and we were to discover his talent for clowning. As a tank driver in the Russian Army for six years, he had seen plenty of action and certainly knew how to handle a jeep.

  Gena’s full name was Egdenberdi Oljobaeb, and he was to be our cook as well as driver. He owned a small café/restaurant and billiard hall in town, and he and his partner Rafjan had saved up and bought a Russian jeep together so they could hire themselves out as drivers for cross-country journeys or expeditions. We took the bumpy road towards Ortok and the mountains, passing groves of pistachio bushes and almond trees all over the dry, brown hillsides. In every village, men stood about in kalpaks while the women laboured in the cotton fields. Gena at the wheel of his Mark Two Lada was soon in high spirits, singing snatches of song and swerving deliberately whenever he could to scatter flocks of turkeys. Poplars and pollard willows lined the road as we began winding up the valley of the Kork-Art River, gleaming in its wide stony bed and in the rice fields it watered.

  We had climbed into the most beautiful stretch of parched and rolling yellow hills, which seemed to go on for ever into the intensely blue sky. Mothers and farm children sat making bricks of mud and straw, which would be baked in the sun and then used to build the cob walls of new barns. Sparrows blew in clouds along elm hedges that could have bordered lanes in the Somerset Levels. Skylarks rose up like messages on kite strings. Below us the silver river ran faster than it had before and snaked about between luscious green rice paddies. Haystacks whizzed by, and on the hillsides mynah birds strutted about the backs of dark brown cattle. As we went still higher, thickets of wild apple and hawthorn, whose succulent berries we had bought in the bazaar, began to appear in the hills. In a clearing I caught sight of a yurt, a horse, a tethered calf and two women firing up a bread oven.

  There were wild apples here too: beautiful, rugged trees, their branches arched over with the weight of rosy fruit, just like their cousins in Kazakhstan. Zamira and I braced ourselves as Gena hurled the bucking jeep up the stony track, gripping our steel panic-handles as we climbed steeply, then levelled off on the ridge.

  There were the first walnuts: a few occasional clumps of big, gnarled trees growing among the apples, wild hollyhocks, yellow butterflies and old man’s beard. Then, as we rounded another spur, clouds of vivid walnut green surged up the hillsides like the dense up-curling smoke of a bonfire. Softening the contours of the mountains, the canopy of the walnut forest mantled the entire landscape between 3,000 and 6,000 feet. Only the higher slopes, with their stubble of juniper, rose out of the great sea of green to the distant snowy mountain-tops over towards China in the east.

  We were now in the walnut forest on a dusty holloway that wound for a dozen miles along the steep sides of gorges high above streams or rivers below. In the winter rains and snow, said Gena, such tracks are treacherous with mud or ice. Everything up here becomes thick red mud and nothing can move for it. Now it was a thick layer of the lightest, most powdery dust imaginable. The walnut trees dwarfed any I had ever seen before, even in France or Italy. Some were as much as ninety or a hundred feet tall, and most were sixty feet, all with immense, sculptured trunks. Beneath the canopy, the wood felt airy and open like wood pasture, with little sunny glades and paths, and a great sweep of silver-grey trunk before the first branches between fifteen and twenty feet off the ground. We saw the pale flanks of cows flickering through the woods as they wandered in and out of shadow and sunlight. A boy called and waved to us from a treetop as we passed, and three women, a mother and two daughters, led a donkey laden with sacks of fresh nuts down a rocky path. The forest had all the steepness and cathedral scale of a Chiltern beech hangar combined with the fruitfulness and bustle of an English orchard at harvest time. A cockerel stood in the track. Gena deliberately near-missed it by inches. ‘What if we hit it?’ I asked. ‘We pay the farmer. They’re only about fifty som.’ It was nearly lunch-time when we rounded a steep hairpin and dropped down into Ortok. We arrived outside the forestry office, almost the first wooden building in the single village street, a wide mud road, deeply rutted, fringed by tall poplars and single-storey wooden dachas.

  Set back behind a front garden full of vegetables, wallflowers and marigolds, the forestry office acted as village post office, having a short-wave radio as the only means of communication with the outside world. Here we met Kaspar Schmidt, a Swiss forestry academic whom I had contacted in advance from England through Barrie Juniper and Peter Savill in Oxford. Both had met Kaspar here the year before. In cooperation with Zakir and the Forestry Department, Kaspar was working on a Ph.D. study of the walnut forests and their culture, and had come up to stay in Ortok to try to find out from local farmers how the forest impacts on their lives and subsistence. He had helped arrange a place for our little party to stay, and took us up to meet Buruma at her farmhouse on a hillside in the village.

  Buruma, round faced and olive skinned, was sitting shelling a big heap of walnuts in the farmyard. She wore a long red dress, pink headscarf and grey felt waistcoat, and was assisted by her mother, a frail, deaf, ninety-year-old lady who never seemed to move from her station in the shade of an even older, more wrinkled fruiting hawthorn tree. Walnuts lay spread out to dry on sacking all round the yard, even on the raised porch, and Buruma’s tiered rows of beehives rose up the hillside beside the house. Everyone in Ortok had beehives, whitewashed to keep the bees cool inside and to help guide them home. The farmhouse and its yard were perched on a terrace in the steep hillside above a gorge and a river, looking across to a dense walnut forest canopy that covered the opposite side of the valley, rising over the hilltop and beyond sight to the head of the valley. Whenever I see a forest like this, steep and luxuriant, I think of Nestor Almendros’s camera panning majestically over the French chestnut forests to a soundtrack of Vivaldi’s mandolin concerto at the beginning of François Truffaut’s L’Enfant Sauvage.

  While Buruma prepared lunch, I went exploring. The house itself was a single-storey wooden structure, entered up a set of wide wooden steps into a porch with a tapchan covered in coloured woven rugs and cushions. The collection of shoes and galoshes just inside the door supplied clues about the inhabitants: boy, girl, mother, grandmother. The father was away in the woods for the walnut harvest. The elegant galoshes lined with felt were
the perfect mud-proof footwear for slipping on and off with ease at the threshold, according to custom. Each time I did this I had to lace or unlace my walking boots and was always left behind by the others.

  Across the yard at the edge of the terrace, with a fine view of the woods, was the wonderfully economical bathroom: a post with a tin-roofed soap dish on top and a two-litre piston-operated water cistern hanging from a peg. The value such an economical washing system set on water seemed to me the very height of civilization. In the morning, when we needed hot water for shaving, Buruma filled the cistern with warm water. A hand towel hung on a nearby apple tree growing out of the centre of a lorry tyre, which could be filled with water during dry weather, allowing it to percolate into the roots. Everything on the farm, down to the plank-built drop-latrine at the far corner of the land, effectively a composting system, was turned to the economy of nature in an entirely unself-conscious way. Buruma would probably never have heard the word ‘green’ applied to anything other than a walnut leaf, yet life and farming in Ortok was essentially organic in character. Bees foraged in the wild fruit forests. The people went out and harvested walnuts, apples and all sorts of other wild fruit and fungi from the forest. Their cattle, horses, donkeys and flocks of turkeys grazed it, and they manured their domestic orchards and gardens from the farmyard. The farm dogs lived in an ingenious tin-roofed two-storeyed kennel constructed of simple poles of poplar lashed together, with walls of woven wattle and daub. They had made the daub by mixing clay, straw and cow dung with water, slapping it on inside and out. I admired its simple architecture, equalled only by the kennels of hollow tree-trunks I had seen in southern Poland.

  For lunch, Buruma had laid out bowls of fresh green walnuts, honey, yoghurt, nan, chai, and, greatest delicacy of all, walnuts in syrup. The soft, unripe fruits steeped in sugar and their own dark juices were the candied equivalent of the Catalan dish of calamares en su tinta, in which the squid are stewed in their own ink. These were the first of a great many succulent Ortok walnuts we were to enjoy.

  After lunch Zamira and I walked down through the village and took a steep path uphill through the forest. Gena wandered off to feed the farmyard turkeys, gather some walnuts for his family and take his siesta on some grassy bank. As soon as we entered the woods I realized they were full of people. The almost vertical track rose through towering walnuts, their grey, cracked bark swollen and blistered into burrs. They were heroic, dishevelled trees, and they were laden with walnuts. During late September and October thousands of people in the Ferghana Valley migrate to the forest and set up camp for up to six weeks to harvest the walnuts. We had entered the world of Thomas Hardy and The Woodlanders. The sounds of woodland work were everywhere. People called to each other across the valley or through the leaves. A boy greeted us from high up in a tree and shook down a hail of nuts. Further on Zamira even encountered an old schoolfriend of hers from Bishkek in the fork of another venerable walnut. He had come to help his relations in their woodland camp with the harvest, and she carried on a conversation with him thirty feet above us. He sat astride a bough and called down to us without a hint of vertigo. People climbed the trees to shake down the nuts, many still sheathed in the bright-green fleshy tegument, while other family members and relations combed the forest floor and picked them up. Everyone carried a shoulder bag or sack, and, like them, we shelled and ate walnuts as we went.

  A little way into the woods, not far from the top of the steepest part of the ascent, we saw a camp in a little clearing on a level place. Our path branched and led that way, and, as we passed, the older of two women sitting shelling walnuts outside their tent invited us to come and rest and have a cup of tea with them. We gladly assented and stepped into their neatly organized camp, with bright rugs on the ground before the entrance of a good-sized ridge tent, tall enough to stand up in down the middle and roomy enough, by the look of it, for four or five to sleep in. We sat in the saddles of several logs beside the morning’s harvest of walnuts spread out to dry in the afternoon sun. We introduced ourselves, and Aitbu sent her teenage daughter Gulbarchyn to find wood for the fire. Both women wore long quilted dresses to their ankles, Aitbu’s dark blue and purple in a bold floral pattern, Gulbarchyn’s crimson, showing off her plaits of long black hair. Aitbu’s family were from Ortok, and they had harvested this particular part of the forest since she was a child.

  Gulbarchyn returned with a bundle of sticks and lit the fire in a blackened open fireplace of clay and stone, with a circular ledge a foot above the fire pit that accommodated the kazan, the heavy steel cooking pan, shaped like a big wok, in which every Kyrgyz family cooks nearly every meal. Around the fire was an ingenious arrangement of spits and bits of bent iron designed to suspend things over it. Gulbarchyn filled a large kettle from a water drum, and Aitbu set out a cloth on the ground with a bowl of honey, another of fresh shelled walnuts and several flat loaves of nan. I cannot think of a more delicious combination than wet walnuts and mountain honey. Added to this was the pleasure, all too rare now in England, of eating food in its natural season and in its own place.

  By now, having shelled and eaten a good many nuts, my hands and Zamira’s were nearly as black as everyone else’s. Everyone in Ortok had black hands, stained by the potent dye in the walnuts, especially in the sappy green husk that mantles the woody nutshell. Sit peeling these off for a few hours and your hands soon took on the dark tan leathery look that marked out the inhabitants of the Ortok woods. As Gulbarchyn poured out the chai, we were joined by her brother Asylbek, carrying yet another sack of walnuts. The whole family were musicians, and they all sang and played together in a family band. In their love of folksong and horses, and instinctive respect for poets, the Kyrgyz kept reminding me of the Irish. Before we rose to go, Gulbarchyn shyly presented me with a walking stick of wild plum she had been whittling by the fireside, and the little family invited us to supper with them in the camp next day.

  On the hilltop, we undulated along a ridge track, very dusty and eroded from the passage of horses, carts, tractors and pickup trucks. Beneath the cathedral of great walnut trees an under-storey of wild apples, cherry plums and the sweet fruiting hawthorn, Crataegus ponticus, grew in thickets and clearings. Many of these apples were the same species I had encountered in Kazakhstan, Malus sieversus, but we also found a good many groves of Malus kyrgyzorum with its small, tangy rosy-veined fruit. We picked wild apples as we went and sampled them, and I pocketed all the pips to take home as seed to try to raise in Suffolk. Most were sweet enough, with enough sharpness and tanginess to be interesting. Every now and again we encountered another family camp, and were invariably invited in for tea, bread and honey, and fresh walnuts. Combined with the apples, it was a healthy-enough diet, and we had no need of Mars bars to keep us going. The talk was invariably of walnuts, which were as varied in size and form as the honey was in flavour. Everyone we met insisted on giving us their prize specimens. The really big ones were called Bomba (‘the bomb’) and were much sought after.

  Nearly all the men wore the kalpak and climbed giant trees in nothing more hi-tech than wellington boots to shake down the nuts. They scorned the use of ropes, harnesses or climbing gear of any sort, relying on nothing more than their bare hands. Everywhere in the woods we heard the sound of scuffed dry leaves and the thunder of nuts drumming to the ground in sudden cascades. You would hear a whistle somewhere above you and look up, and there would be someone perched in the canopy, half hidden by leaves, rustling and swishing a branch to dislodge the obstinate nuts, setting the whole tree a-tremble. Or you would hear a song floating over the forest high up and think of angels, until a fresh shower of nuts came down and keen-eyed children appeared out of the under-shrub to scrabble about for the bright green nuts. Of course, there were accidents and sometimes fatalities. People fell out of trees every year, and there were broken bones or worse. Walnuts are not the most reliable of trees to climb. Their branches are susceptible to rot and can often break off. Some of the trunks ri
se straight up for twenty or even thirty feet before the first branches, so aren’t easy to climb. Others, with their warty, creviced bark erupting into hand-holds of knots and burrs, began branching almost at ground level like irregular stepladders, as if defying anyone not to climb them. The only consolation was that the deep, springy leaf mould of the forest floor might soften your fall.

  I felt oddly at home in the walnut forest, with its mosses and lichens and venerable, contorted trees, perhaps because I live with a walnut tree outside my bedroom window in Suffolk, or perhaps because the forest had a similar character and atmosphere to an English oak wood. Ortok and Hintock, the village in The Woodlanders, even sounded like echoes of each other. The woodland paths were like green lanes or droves, and the next camp, in the wide verges of a grassy droveway, had exactly the feeling of an English gypsy encampment. Four tethered horses grazed before the main khaki tent, almost a small marquee, probably originally used as an officers’ mess by the Russian Army on field manoeuvres. I had never seen such an impressive collection of vintage tents, and admit to coveting nearly all of them.

  Zamira and I must have looked an unlikely couple wandering through the woods so far away from anywhere, and were the object of frank and open curiosity wherever we went. Who was I? How old was I? How many children did I have? When I told them ‘one’, they didn’t believe me. Children existed only in the plural here: nobody could possibly have just the one. To have a single son would be like keeping a single chicken, or growing a solitary potato. As if to underline this, Kurmanbek’s prodigiously extended family sat in a semicircle in the entrance of the tent and brought cushions for us and yet more tea and walnuts. His young children Timirlan, Jangyl and Dilaram took us into a little glade to meet their donkey foal. It was barely three days old, and the children seemed to have complete charge of the animal and its docile mother. Kurmanbek’s wife said they had been camping for ten days and would stay a month longer. It was a good year for walnuts. Other years weren’t so good, especially if there were spring frosts after the trees flowered and the young nuts began to form. The families brought everything with them: all their livestock, dogs, cows and horses, even their induk – their turkeys. Flocks of these sleek, magnificent birds ran free through the woods, in exhilarating contrast to the concentration-camp conditions in which they are almost invariably kept in Britain. But was it really worth while to endure the hardship of camping out to harvest a few nuts? ‘Most certainly it is,’ they all agreed with a passion. It wasn’t just that it was a family custom to get away each autumn from the daily round to a kind of dacha in the forest. It was also a great social occasion, when families would meet others in the evenings round the fire and share a meal or drink vodka together. And, in any case, it was pleasant, sociable work, and the returns were good.