Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road Read online

  Dedication

  For my family, especially Nevs

  Epigraph

  To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure.

  We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities.

  VIRGINIA WOOLF, THE WAVES

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  1: Marco Made Me Do It ~ North America

  2: Roof of the World ~ Tibetan Plateau

  3: Natural History ~ England and New England

  Part Two

  4: Undercurrents ~ Black Sea

  5: The Cold World Awakens ~ Lesser Caucasus

  6: Angle of Incidence ~ Greater Caucasus

  7: Borderlandia ~ Caspian Sea

  Part Three

  8: Wilderness/Wasteland ~ Ustyurt Plateau and Aral Sea Basin

  9: The Source of a River ~ Pamir Knot

  10: A Mote of Dust Suspended in a Sunbeam ~ Tarim Basin and Tibetan Plateau

  11: Road’s End ~ Indo-Gangetic Plain and Greater Himalaya

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened to night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by a blackness that receded before us no matter how fast we biked. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. If I ever reach the end, I remember thinking, I’ll fly off the rim of the world. I pedalled harder.

  The evening before, Melissa and I had carefully duct-taped over the orange reflectors on our wheels. Just after midnight, we’d crawled out of our sleeping bags, dressed in black thermal long underwear, packed up camp, and mounted our bicycles. As we rode toward Kudi, a tiny outpost in western China, only our headlamps gave us away, two pale flares moving against the grain of stars. We clicked off the lights as we neared the town.

  It was three a.m. and moonless. The night air was cool for July and laced with the sweet breath of poplars and willows that grew in slender wands beside the river. No clean divisions between earth and sky, light and dark, just a lush and total blackness. I couldn’t see the mountains but I could sense them around me, sharp curses of rock. The kind of country that consists entirely of edges.

  Sometimes Mel and I drifted blindly into each other, our bulky panniers acting like bumpers. We navigated by the sound of our wheels, a hushed whirring indicating the pavement, a rasp of gravel the road shoulder and the need for a course correction. Travelling by bicycle is a life of simple things taken seriously: hunger, thirst, friendship, the weather, the stutter of the world beneath you. I was so focused on listening to the road that I didn’t notice the glint of metal until Mel did.

  “That’s it,” she whispered. “The checkpoint.”

  A guardrail scissored the road ahead, and somewhere beyond it, mythic and forbidden, was the Tibetan Plateau. Though Kudi isn’t technically in the Tibet Autonomous Region, or TAR, as China has designated the formerly sovereign nation, the village hosts the first and most formidable military checkpoint on the only road into the western part of Tibet, a place foreigners require permits and guides to visit. Mel and I had neither. We didn’t want to subsidize the Chinese occupation of Tibet by paying to go there, and we lacked the money for permits anyway. Plus, we’d just graduated from university and felt young and free and rashly unassailable: never once had we met a barrier we couldn’t muscle past. So we took a deep breath, looked both ways, and biked directly under the raised guardrail.

  Nothing happened. Somewhere to my left a river sounded like wind. The stars looked freshly soldered above the dark metal of the mountains, faintly visible now that our eyes had adjusted. Mel was a whim of shadow to my left but I could feel her giddiness, or maybe it was my own, adding a kind of shimmer to the air. The world seemed preternaturally honed and heightened, our vision and hearing sharper. I watched a star shoot to the horizon with an afterimage trailing behind it. “Did you see that?” I whispered. When that same star shot up again, we shoved our bikes into the ditch and ran.

  The flashlight scanned the road, moving closer in clean yellow sweeps. Mel dove into the ditch a few metres from our bikes and I bolted senselessly toward the nearest building, where I flattened myself against a wall. I heard footsteps approach, the click of heels on concrete, and regret seared me. I would never be a Martian explorer now. Instead I’d spend the rest of my days in a Chinese prison, desperately wishing I had something to read. With my cheek pressed against concrete, I stared up. If the heavens aligned, I told myself, if a single constellation clicked into place—the Big Dipper, say, or Cassiopeia—we’d be saved. I scanned the night sky for some reassuring sign, any familiar map to orient myself by—ironic, I suppose, when the great goal of my life was getting lost. But the stars reeled and spun and refused all their usual patterns. The footsteps came closer and closer and stopped.

  Then I spotted the Big Dipper pouring out the sky. The footsteps started again, moved closer, and faded away. I didn’t dare move or breathe or glance at Mel, who was still playing dead somewhere in the ditch. A few minutes or an eternity later a truck sputtered into gear and drove off the way we’d come. The night settled back into silence.

  We grabbed our bikes and continued racing through Kudi, instantly unrepentant. Fear exhausted itself into euphoria, a sense of irrational hope. The man with the flashlight surely saw us, pathetic and full of prayers in the ditch and against the wall, a couple of dogs with our heads tucked under the couch, believing our whole bodies hidden. At the very least he must have spotted our bikes overturned in the ditch, their wheels spinning uselessly. Why he decided to move on was a mystery we didn’t question, in part because we were too winded to talk.

  But even as Mel and I pedalled hard toward the Tibetan Plateau, I noted the bomb-like ticking of excess reflector duct tape against the front fork of my bike. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, the sound went, a gentle yet ominous stutter. I should trim that, I thought to myself. That’s when a second checkpoint, the real checkpoint, loomed from the darkness like a bad dream. This time the guardrail was lowered, thigh-high, and secured with chains. Lighted concrete buildings edged the checkpoint on both sides, though we couldn’t see anyone in them.

  “Um . . .” I stopped pedalling, letting my bike coast and slow.

  “Yeah . . . ,” Mel acknowledged, but her voice came from somewhere ahead of me.

  I hesitated for a beat and started pedalling again. If Mel wasn’t about to back down, neither was I. “Throw your heart over the fence,” our Pony Club instructors had always urged us, “and the rest of you will follow. Hopefully the horse and saddle too,” they’d add with a grin. The only way to test the truth of a border is to ride hard toward it and leap—or, if circumstances demand it, crawl. Exposed in the pale light leaking from the checkpoint buildings, Mel and I glanced at each other one last time. Then we scuttled on hands and knees beneath the guardrail, dragged our loaded bikes after us, and pedalled as fast as we could into forbidden territory.

  Part One

  How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

  ANNIE DILLARD, THE WRITING LIFE

  1.

  Marco Made Me Do It

  North America

  Maybe all meaningful journeys begin with a mistake. Some kind of transgression or false turn or flawed idea that sets a certain irresistible
odyssey in motion. Growing up in small-town Ontario, where the tallest summit was a haystack and the widest horizon a field of corn, my blunder seemed obvious, though it wasn’t exactly my fault: I was born centuries too late for the life I was meant to live.

  Restlessness runs in my family, though with my parents it mostly found expression in real estate. For the first decade of my life we lived in Oakville, a suburb not far from Toronto. But after spending their own childhoods mucking horse stalls and tending vegetable gardens, my engineer father and artist mother wanted the same rustic upbringing for my younger brothers and me, so when I was ten we moved to a few acres of cedar forest and swamp north of Ballinafad. This no-stoplight hamlet is a quaint tourist trap today, with the general store dealing in embroidered saddle pads and overpriced potpourri, but when I was a kid it was the kind of place even the school bus sped through to get somewhere else. When I was fourteen we moved again, this time southeast of Ballinafad, to a horse farm with seventy acres of woods and pastures, two spring-fed ponds, a barn full of empty boxes and shafts of dusty light, a log cabin so tiny I could almost touch any two walls at once, and a crumbling structure that once served as a sheep shed—but no house.

  Somehow three restless kids, two patient adults, a barely house-trained Labrador puppy, and an indoors-only Abyssinian cat with an escapist streak crammed into a twelve-foot trailer for our first six months there, which was long enough to renovate the rundown sheep shed into a human dwelling of sorts. I say “of sorts” because it had a composting toilet instead of a septic system, a mouse once hitched a ride to school in my brother’s backpack, and a snake slithered over my feet one spring when I was doing homework—details that mildly embarrassed my parents but delighted me, for they only enhanced the adventure of living there. “Race you to the sheep shed,” I’d challenge my brothers as we spilled from the station wagon after a grocery run to town. “The cottage,” my mom would correct me, insistent that the truth of a thing lay in its spirit, not the letter of its original design, but I was already off and running.

  Compared to the trailer, the renovated sheep shed felt palatial at nine hundred square feet. I didn’t even mind sharing a bedroom for a few years with my brothers. In our previous home, where I’d had my own room, I would always hear Dave and James chatting and laughing through the wall, cracking jokes or doing impersonations of teachers we shared over the years, like Mrs. Dingwall, whose madcap name contrasted beautifully with her elegant British accent, or Miss Pillon, a physics teacher who threw chalk around the classroom to demonstrate the weak force of gravity, thereby establishing for her students a lifelong association between theoretical science and the instinct to duck. In the morning our parents would find me cocooned in a duvet on my brothers’ floor, unwilling to miss the fun for the sake of a soft mattress.

  With few kids our age nearby, the three of us had to entertain each other. So we’d putter down to the pond on the lawn tractor, hauling sand in the trailer to build a beach, until Dave backed a little too close to the edge and the heavy load dragged the lawn tractor into the water. Or we’d pull backflips for hours on our trampoline, pretending we were on smaller planets, Pluto or Mars, whose gravities didn’t weigh us down as much. Then one winter James tried to clear the trampoline of ice for some off-season practice and accidentally hacked through it with a pickaxe. We still jumped on it for years, expertly avoiding the hole, until a visiting friend ripped through it and put an end to our experiments in soaring. After our grandmother informed us that we were related to William Clark, of Lewis and Clark, we set off on rusty bikes to pioneer a new route to the Pacific, stopping to resupply our expedition rations of red licorice at the Ballinafad general store.

  But whatever direction we roamed, my brothers and I would inevitably hit a wall. Sometimes it would be a fence, which we could scramble over, but more often a highway or cookie-cutter housing complex, paved and implacable, would stop us dead. The older I got, the more our neighbourhood began to feel quaint and delimited, more rustic than rugged. Dave and James, three and five years younger than me, didn’t seem too bothered by this. They were just as happy indoors, where they would construct model Star Trek spaceships or compose songs on the synthesizer my dad built. But the tamer my surroundings, the more I began to crave the antithesis: deserts and polar tundra, mountains and glaciers. The windswept margins and the steepest verges. The kind of wildness that could wipe me out if I wasn’t equal parts bold and careful. In southwestern Ontario, I mostly found it in books.

  My literary tastes, like my imaginative life, tended to the alien and extreme. Between homework and mucking horse stalls, on the school bus and at the dinner table—until my parents threatened to withhold dessert if I didn’t put the book down—I wandered the Empty Quarter with the Bedu, searched Cape Royds for a penguin’s egg, slogged east to west across Greenland on wooden skis, snapped photos of the dark side of the moon, answered the call of the wild in the Yukon, and trespassed across the Tibetan Plateau disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim. “I have a homesickness for a country that isn’t mine,” Alexandra David-Néel wrote about her stealth journey across Tibet, a country even more restricted to foreigners in 1924 than it is now. “The steppes, the solitude, the eternal snows and big skies up there haunt me.”

  David-Néel’s book about that expedition, My Journey to Lhasa, was the closest I’d found to a portrait of the explorer as a young woman. Never mind that she was fifty-five when she donned her sheepskin cloak and trespassed boldly into Tibet (accompanied by her adopted Tibetan son, Yongden); age was less relevant to me than motivation. David-Néel wasn’t trying to “find herself” through travel. Nor was she jolted from a routine, domestic existence by some kind of emotional crisis, as though only grief or loss or a search for love could justify a woman seeking risk and adventure on the open road. Refreshingly, David-Néel knew herself just fine, and what she was searching for, if anything, was an outer world as wild as she felt within. She didn’t even have the luxury of a blank literary or geographic slate when it came to Tibet: dozens of Europeans had already been there, from diplomats to missionaries to soldiers. They’d drawn maps, written reports, even owned real estate in Lhasa. That none of this deterred the Frenchwoman was deeply consoling to me, a hint that exploration was possible despite precedent, that even artificial borders were by definition frontiers, and therefore worth breaching as a matter of principle. What propelled David-Néel onto the plateau was her wide-cast sense of wonder, exuberant wiliness, and fondness for travelling under the stars by night—in part to avoid being caught by day. In her era, Tibetan officials, not Chinese police, were the authorities to evade.

  Tibet first cast a spell on me at an even younger age, maybe ten or eleven, when I found an illustrated, abridged edition of Marco Polo’s travels on the Silk Road, the ancient caravan route that for thousands of years ferried people, goods, creeds, and ideas between Europe and Asia. The book had been my mother’s as a child, and I loved seeing her maiden name elegantly inscribed on the inside cover, as if endorsing the adventures contained within. Its pages showed the seventeen-year-old Polo roaming far-flung lands with a camel caravan in tow, gazing at horizons that melted into fantastic mirages—turquoise-tiled domes and shifting deserts, labyrinthine bazaars and ice-mazed mountains. Polo looked bold and rugged and every bit the intrepid explorer. I decided to be just like him when I grew up.

  Meanwhile I plotted his travels across the pages of an atlas, tracing the Silk Road, which actually consists of many roads, as it laced and frayed past Constantinople, Trabzon, Erzurum, Bukhara, Samarkand, Badakhshan, Kashgar, Khotan, Cathay, each name an invitation to elsewhere. But even more compelling, then and still, were the hinterlands between those trading hubs. Not only the Tibetan Plateau, that upheaval of rock and ice and sky, but also the Pamir Mountains, where herds of sheep with improbably huge horns dodged avalanches and snow leopards with an elegance close to flight. And the Taklamakan, a shifting sands desert dwarfed only by the Gobi and Sahara whose name, according to leg
end if not literal translation, means “he who goes in never comes out.”

  I would’ve gladly gone where none had before, with no promise of return, for even a whiff of insight into the basic perplexities of existence: Where did we come from and are we alone in the cosmos and what exactly—or even generally—does it all mean? Places like the Tibetan Plateau or the Taklamakan Desert seemed to promise not answers, exactly, but a way of life equal to the wildness of existing at all. Even more compelling than far-flung mountains and deserts were the stars above and beyond them, distant suns lighting who knows what other worlds. Only I couldn’t imagine how to reach them: the Voyager I and II spacecraft were long gone by the time I was born.

  Launched by NASA in 1977 to study the most distant planets in the solar system and then cruise forever into interstellar space, the Voyager probes were the farthest human-made objects in the universe when I learned about them in my eighth-grade science class. I got chills thinking about those robotic emissaries speeding out past the heliopause—the outermost boundary of our solar system—into the largest possible story of what is. What would they see out there? Who would they meet? How could we stand to never know, given the difficulties of data transmission across galaxies?

  I would’ve jumped at the chance to hitch a ride on either of the Voyagers, their lack of life support systems notwithstanding. Of course I would ache for family and friends, setting off for some faraway place with no escape route or ticket home. I’d miss my books and my brothers and even the sheep shed. But it was the truth I was after, the deepest wonder, nothing less. “The the,” wrote Wallace Stevens in a poem I read years later. I was grateful someone had finally managed to articulate it.