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

  The word desire, at its root, means “of the stars,” which seemed self-evident by the time I reached high school. After studying all the atlases I could find, I’d concluded with a sense of panic that I was wilder than the world in all directions. My neighbourhood wasn’t the only place circumscribed by an expanding network of highways and subdivisions; most of the planet was similarly under siege. My family couldn’t afford to travel abroad, and I worried that by the time I’d saved enough money to see Tibet for myself, it would be as tame as Ballinafad. There seemed few outlets left for the restlessness that ached inside me, this mad longing for a world without maps. My only hope, I realized eventually, was to leave the Earth behind. So I wrote a letter urging a human mission to Mars and mailed it to twenty-two world leaders.

  “I am a seventeen-year-old girl who has a dream,” I declared to Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Jean Chrétien, Jacques Chirac, and other influential heads of state in 1999. “That dream is for humanity to go to Mars.”

  Why the red planet, given the plurality of possible worlds? Because human physiology is as fussy as Goldilocks, and most planets are too hot, too cold, too big, or too gaseous to be habitable. Mars, if not just right because of its poisonous, fatally thin atmosphere, is otherwise fairly close: a world roughly the consistency and size of our own, only with a day that lasts longer by twenty-nine minutes due to its slower planetary spin, and a weaker gravitational pull due to its smaller mass. The gift of time, a lighter step—what wasn’t there to love? With gorges five times deeper than the Grand Canyon, deserts many times drier than the Taklamakan, and a mountain triple the height of Everest, Mars is a world of geological superlatives—and exploratory firsts waiting to happen. And while the red planet might lack little green men, little green microbes are a genuine possibility, given that single-celled organisms can survive similarly cold, dry conditions on Earth. Mars is also pocked and scarred with features that hint at a warmer, wetter past, when conditions might’ve been more clement for life as we know it. That neighbouring world, in short, could well supply an answer to the age-old inquiry “Are we alone?”

  In my manifesto, I rhapsodized to world leaders about how the urge to explore the unknown is ingrained in the human spirit. I reasoned that we had all the technology we needed to send humans to Mars, and all we lacked now was political will. I explained that the knowledge we could potentially gain there, such as proof of alien life, could have immeasurable benefits for people on Earth, such as making us feel less lonesome. I stressed that such a journey would ignite the passions of the world’s youth. “It is the inquiring minds of bold dreamers and explorers such as Magellan and Copernicus that help to extend the boundaries of knowledge, enabling the human race to understand more, to see further,” I wrote, noting that a human mission to Mars was the modern equivalent to these historic voyages—and an enterprise worthy of association with their good names.

  In reply I received a few desultory form letters. But if my missive didn’t launch a new era of interplanetary exploration, it did win me the Hakluyt Prize, given by the Mars Society for the best student letter advocating the human exploration and settlement of Mars. My reward was an eight-inch Bushnell telescope through which, late one night on the lawn outside the sheep shed, my father helped me spot the rings of Saturn for the first time. I also won an all-expenses-paid trip to the International Mars Society Convention.

  Most teenagers long for another world, but as far as I could tell in Ballinafad, I alone pined specifically for Mars. The convention, held that year in Boulder, Colorado, upended this feeling of isolation. I stood on a podium and shyly read my manifesto to an auditorium full of scientists, engineers, and other anachronistic explorer types who’d perhaps found themselves stranded, like me, on a depressingly fenced-in, paved-over planet. Academy Award–winning filmmaker James Cameron was among them, and Apollo moonwalker Buzz Aldrin. They gave me a standing ovation, just a sweet gesture of encouragement to a kid, but in that moment of being heard, I felt unlimited. These were my people, I exulted. Here was my tribe. I vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars.

  Science had long been my favourite subject at school, and not just because of the red planet. Science fair projects were a grand excuse for several weekend sleepovers in a row with my best friend, Melissa, who lived nearly an hour away. Other than at Pony Club, which only met in the summer, I rarely got to see her outside of school. In the sixth grade the two of us tested whether human saliva was more bacterially diverse (read “disgusting”) than dog drool—an experiment that began as a ploy to embarrass our younger brothers, whom we duped into donating spit. We won a medal at the science fair, though not without a few raised eyebrows from the judges, and I marvel that I ever thought I had a future in microbiology.

  Blame the microscope I got for Christmas when I was about thirteen. This gift from my parents was less a scientific instrument, I quickly realized, than a way of seeing everything as if for the first time. Ordinary, everyday things—the cuticle of my thumb, a drop of pond scum—looked alien upon closer scrutiny, with unmapped mountain ranges and nameless oceans swarming with life. My stomach would flip as I stared into the distances of a single-celled alga, whose long Latin name and twitchy, see-through form seemed proof that life was just as I’d suspected it all along: a mystery we can barely pronounce, never mind keep entirely in focus. In high school a few years later, Darwinian evolution put a whole new spin on existence for me, as though I’d been staring at a portrait of biology for years upon years, studying its eyes, ears, and nose, mapping the pores and wrinkles of its face, and in a flash suddenly grasped its expression. Learning about Darwin’s seven-year voyage on the Beagle—in which he sailed around South America, collected strange life forms, and began formulating the theory of evolution by natural selection—taught me another valuable lesson about science: you can hitch a ride on it to some truly far-out places. So when the Morehead-Cain Foundation offered me a full scholarship to study biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I accepted it over the phone without hesitation, despite never having seen the campus and knowing nothing of the American South. The scholarship came with summer travel grants, and that was all I needed to know. I was desperate to see the Tibetan Plateau or the Taklamakan Desert in more than pixels or words on a page.

  Even before the travel grants kicked in, the scholarship paid for sturdy hiking boots and a twenty-eight-day Outward Bound course in Utah the summer before my freshman year. Until then I’d only car-camped on family vacations to Ontario provincial parks, and despite my voracious reading and Ballinafad-based adventures, serious expedition travel seemed daunting to me, requiring technical skills and equipment I didn’t have. Utah was a revelation: I learned how to slog up mountains and across deserts, carrying a fifty-pound backpack crammed with all I needed to survive—mainly oatmeal, a tarp and a sleeping bag, and a secret stash of books. I learned how to read where desert springs might be found in the contours of maps, and failing that, how to salvage drinking water from rain puddles afloat with dead frogs. I absorbed so much red dust into my pores that I began to resemble the red planet. On a daily basis the rough-hewn wonder of that place and experience brought me to my knees, in every possible sense. It was torture. It was sublime. It was basically everything I’d ever wanted.

  I spent my next four summers slogging across similar immensities of stone and sky, toting along my weight in books. I stretched those scholarship travel grants as far as they would go, which, as it turned out, was pretty much anywhere short of Mars. Though funding wasn’t guaranteed even to scholarship students, if I mustered a good enough reason for exploring a place, and justified my reasons for going in a written proposal, I could practically issue my own ticket. And so I stalked Sumatran rhinos in the jungles of Borneo, tracked wild horses through the Gobi desert in Mongolia, and skied across the Juneau Icefield for a glaciology field course, which I enrolled in never having seen a glacier and finished wanting to see little else. That cold spill of ice, rock, and sky b
ordering Alaska and British Columbia sent me skidding with its splendour, or maybe that was my lack of skill on skis. Either way, my preferred method of procrastination back at university became Googling for cabins for sale in Atlin, the remote BC town in which the glaciology course finished. I also became obsessed with Antarctica, a continent I envisioned as the Juneau Icefield on steroids—but travelling there would cost far more than a scholarship grant could cover.

  This was when I realized I could still issue my own ticket if I pitched the right idea to the right people at the right time, in language so compelling and persuasive they couldn’t possibly say no. And so I turned to writing during university less out of a love for words (though there was certainly that) than for where they might launch me, such as the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, where I went as a research assistant to a brilliant, generous scientist I politely lobbied for years. With a similar level of dedication, study, training, sacrifice, and more lobbying in the form of a written application, I also managed to launch myself to Mars—or at least to Hanksville, back in Utah, a place nearly as red and remote from human concerns. Once the desert hideout of Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch, who shook off law enforcers in a maze of red canyons, Hanksville now hosts crews of spacesuit-clad scientists and engineers on two-week simulated Mars missions. Picture ATV tracks, clumps of sagebrush, and a white space capsule gleaming cinematically before a world gone to rust.

  For a while it was fun, a grown-up game of make-believe. Yet as four crewmates and I trundled around Utah in canvas spacesuits, I found myself disconcerted by the fact that when I gazed at a mountain, I saw a veneer of Plexiglas. When I reached out to touch canyon walls the colour of embers, I felt the synthetic fabric of my glove instead of the smooth, sun-warmed sandstone. As all kinds of weather howled outside my spacesuit, I heard either radio static or my percussive panting amplified in the plastic helmet, like I was breathing down my own neck. The very technologies that would sustain me on Mars made me feel at a deep remove from the place, my interactions with it neutered and sterile and more than slightly absurd.

  “Okay, crew,” ordered Commander Roger, a fifty-something engineer. “Fan out and find us some fresh rations!”

  Having run out of food on the red planet, we patrolled the aisles of the local grocery store, wearing spacesuits to avoid fully “breaking sim,” the worst misdemeanour aspiring Martian colonists could commit. I headed for the vegetable aisle with Tiffany, a molecular biologist, while another engineer named Allan and a geologist named Shahar hustled toward freezers of hamburger meat. When I glanced over at Gernot, an astronomer, he was frozen in front of the beef jerky stand, his helmet fogging over the flavours he couldn’t find in his native Austria: honey-glazed, salt-and-pepper, teriyaki, chipotle, mesquite barbecue.

  “Move along, Gernot,” scolded Roger. “I said fresh.”

  After half an hour we regrouped at the checkout counter, our arms spilling with terrestrial bounty. The middle-aged cashier had seen our ilk before. “How’s space camp treating you?” Roger visibly bristled inside his slightly too-tight canvas spacesuit. “It’s not space camp,” he shouted through his helmet. “It’s a Mars simulation!”

  “Easy, buddy,” soothed Allan, patting Roger on the back. Gernot, seeing his chance, slipped two bags of beef jerky onto the checkout counter. Tiffany flipped through a celebrity tabloid and pretended not to know us, as if she were just another tourist dressed like Sally Ride. An older lady shuffled into the store, saw us, and hastily shuffled back out.

  “So,” the cashier said as she bagged the last of our rations, “I assume NASA will want a receipt for this?”

  Maybe my own motives weren’t so different after all from Cassidy’s Wild Bunch: to escape a given reality, to flee to less mapped and lawful territories, to go rogue. Strangely, my crewmates didn’t seem to miss anything on Mars, not the lack of fresh air or birdsong, not the freedom to dictate our own days. Then again, the ideal Martian colonist doesn’t complain. In fact, the ideal Martian colonist must possess a deeply paradoxical blend of personality traits: They should be emotionally astute and empathetic in order to thrive in a small social group under stressful conditions, yet detached enough from life on Earth to leave it behind forever. They must be sufficiently daring and rebellious to edge into realms no one has risked before, but not so independent or dismissive of authority that they don’t obey orders once they get there. A gregarious recluse, in other words, a compliant adventurer. I used to think I was the perfect candidate.

  But after two weeks of following orders, speaking in acronyms, and inhaling recycled air, I’d had my fill of living in a bubble, even the red-tinted variety. I never admitted it to the rest of the crew, but I was homesick for my native planet. So on the final night of the simulation, when everyone was asleep, I slipped out of the airlock without donning my plastic helmet or canvas spacesuit, without confirming my plans with Mission Control, without a radio to report back on my every sneeze. Crossing the equivalent threshold on Mars, I would’ve died in so many ways at once: poisoned, flash-frozen, depressurized. But here the Earth simply announced itself with a gust of wind spiked with sage, beneath a night sky tacked up with stars.

  The first sign of doubt is a renewed fanaticism. Back at university I studied harder than ever in hopes of becoming an astronaut, despite questioning, deep down, whether I wanted to permanently emigrate to Mars if it meant a lifetime of containment. I spent my spare time presiding over a space club and volunteering in a marine microbiology lab, where my job was to tease long, invisible threads of DNA from the basaltic crust of the Pacific Ocean. Though I didn’t have the opportunity to retrieve those sea-floor samples in a submarine, the lab was located in a windowless basement, which offered a similar experience of sensory deprivation only without any of the adventure. Whenever I walked outside, pale and blinking, I felt as if I’d been submerged for months. Books kept me going like bubbles of oxygen. One afternoon, shielding my face against the sun after the dim fluorescent flicker of the lab, I settled onto the grass on campus with my old friend Marco Polo, hoping to let my eyes re-adjust to wider horizons with the help of a childhood hero—this time in his full, unabridged glory.

  But as I read The Description of the World, I was shocked to encounter a stranger in the Venetian explorer, someone who didn’t relish slogging across lands that left me dizzy with longing. Instead, this Polo skirted the Taklamakan’s wandering dunes as widely as possible, meekly plugging his ears against the spirit voices he feared would lure him into the trackless sands. He may never have seen a big-horned sheep alive in the Pamir, just their horns carved into bowls or stacked as fences, though this species, Ovis ammon polii, was eventually named after him: the Marco Polo sheep. And when he visited the Tibetan Plateau, he dismissed it as a blighted wasteland. “You ride for twenty days without finding any inhabited spot,” he complained, “so that travellers are obliged to carry all their provisions with them, and are constantly falling in with those wild beasts which are so numerous and so dangerous.” Again and again the so-called explorer dashed around mountains and deserts as quickly as possible, cursing wilderness as a mere obstacle to swift progress and profit.

  I couldn’t exactly blame him, for the Silk Road was a thirteenth-century superhighway for trade, after all, and Polo a merchant. After following his businessmen uncles to Cathay, where Kublai Khan took a shining to the Venetian teenager, Polo was tasked with assessing the value and variety of goods throughout the Mongolian empire, which at the time spanned Asia to the edge of Europe. Polo took this duty seriously, and as a result his travelogue reads more like a catalogue. The book details the precious commodities available along the Silk Road: silver in Armenia, rubies in Badakhshan, black magic charms in Kashgar, ivory in India. With regard to lands less obviously exploitable, such as Tibet, the text is far terser.

  I was gutted. Like so many explorers falsely portrayed as noble trailblazers in my high school history textbooks—from Christopher Columbus to Sir John Franklin—Polo
turned out to care mostly about fortune and fame. Did no one but Alexandra David-Néel set off for the pure sake of setting off, propelled by a basic need to see around the bend, without the ulterior motives of wealth and conquest? Sitting in the quad, feeling bereaved, I resolved to see the Silk Road for myself, on a pilgrimage to the precise wildernesses Marco Polo most feared and shirked. I briefly considered travelling on horseback, but the lack of water in the Taklamakan was concerning. Camels were better suited to such arid environments, but the terrain would be bumpy enough as it was. A bicycle struck me as the perfect substitute: self-propelled and unlikely to spit.

  That night I called my parents and outlined my preposterous plan. There was a long silence on the line. Then my mother said, “Please go with a friend?”

  So I asked Mel if she wanted to join me on a bike ride. Just the Chinese section of the Silk Road for starters, I reassured her; it boasted the greatest concentration of places Polo most dreaded. After a warm-up trip across the continental United States that summer, we graduated from university the following year and hit the Silk Road. And that’s how we found ourselves dodging landslides in the Pamir Mountains, gritting teeth through sandstorms in the Taklamakan Desert, and slinking toward Tibet while the stars looked the other way.

  2.

  Roof of the World

  Tibetan Plateau

  Salvaging the art of exploration, however, wasn’t so simple. When Mel crawled beneath the checkpoint guardrail in China, she prudently left ample clearance between her back and the metal rod. In my haste and terror, I didn’t scurry quite low enough. I’m not sure whether my backpack or my helmet snagged against the metal guardrail, rattling the chains that secured it, but either way I might as well have sounded a gong. Dogs barked, lights blazed, a voice shouted into the night—but we were already gone, racing into a tar-like darkness. We were mired in it, we couldn’t pedal fast enough, we couldn’t see anything but stars. I nearly lost control of my bike when I rode blindly into a pothole, and soon after a pylon. At the first hint of pursuing headlights I was ready to abandon my bike and flee up a mountain or into the river. But after minutes, and then hours, none appeared.