There were fourteen of us, including Adrian, Alexandra, and Shamil. It was such an intrepid cast of characters on such a thrilling journey during which I got beaten to such a pulp that introductions may be made according to pulp thriller conventions.
Andrew Stott—senior executive for Nestle, UK, master of campcraft and avid foxhunter, who could lead a charge of the Light Brigade every bit as well as he charges (quite reasonably) for coffee and cocoa.
Ettie Boyd—superb athlete and corporate headhunter, the horsewoman who saved me from my own “Into the Valley of Death” experience by tactfully pointing out that whipping Trigger while yanking on his reins was making him as confused and stupid as . . .
“Me?” I suggested.
Claire Morrissey—North Dublin colleen possessed of the Irish way with dumb animals, sits on a horse with the same aplomb and authority as Tip O’Neill sat in the House of Representatives (but cuts a much finer figure).
Jennie Crohill—Norfolk countrywoman and seemingly an unassuming farm inspector for the British government but actually the hero who shot the last feral coypu in England. (It would sound more thrillerish if I left that unexplained, but a coypu is a nutria, a giant South American aquatic rat with a body two feet long. They were raised for fur, escaped, bred in the wild, and were playing merry hell with the Norfolk marshes.)
Bahar Ghaffari—exquisite Persian miniature, looks nineteen but is a Master of the Universe investment banker in Hong Kong, juggling equity derivatives so complex they make Alan Greenspan’s head throb.
Camilla Coventry—raised on a ranch in Australia, but she and Crocodile Dundee are from the outback the way Lauren Bacall and Mel Brooks are from New York. Studied theater and can produce and direct Annie Get Your Gun and do all the stunt work, too.
Jean Baptiste Oldenhove de Guertechin and Gaetane Schaeken Willemaers, Belgians with educations as elaborate as their names. He a global management consultant with a degree in civil engineering and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. She an international finance lawyer and the former counsel to Belgium’s minister of foreign affairs. They are on their honeymoon.
Harold van Lier—another Belgian, a movie producer turned hotelier because guest towels have more wit than entertainment executives. He is on his honeymoon as well.
Emily—Harold’s beautiful English bride, a relief worker specializing in third world sanitation problems (of which I was one at the moment). She has given up international aid work to come to the aid of, well, people such as ourselves, at the Grand Hotel des Bains in Brittany. As the name implies, it has plenty of sanitation.
“In your article about Kyrgyzstan,” said Harold, “you must not use the term ‘tour group.’ It is as if we had silly Americans along in pink Hello Kitty bicycle helmets. None of us would ever join a ‘tour group.’ We are a ‘tour horde.’ We will sweep down upon Samarkand, Bukhara, and Tashkent and pillage . . . since some of us are Belgians . . . their chocolate and lace.”
“You had better have another vodka,” said Shamil, “because tomorrow the riding becomes difficult.”
We rode through the village of Kizel Kel’, where Djuman Kul and our horses were from. A lone electrical wire and a notional road connected it to the world. And even this much civilization the Kyrgyz leave, spring through fall, to graze their herds in the mountain pastures. Stay-behind women and kids and the eighty-year-old blacksmith (who had “about forty” grandchildren) came out to say hello and feed us apricot jam.
We went up into a cartoon-beautiful forest, climbing with animation—feature-length animation—through Shrek-colored fern glades with sunlight pixilating in the tree leaves. Irish Claire herself had never seen anything so green. We emerged to a view that looked even less real and left me faint with a wish that it weren’t. We were on a scythe blade of a ridge, thousands of feet in the air. Snowcapped mountains loomed, but they loomed below us. We could see rivers, in extremely small scale—threads of blue monofilament. Mile-wide turquoise lakes glinted minutely, beads lost in a shag rug. We were at the top of the Chakal range of the Tian Shan, above everything.
Above almost everything. Obese thunderheads materialized on top of us. Jovian flatulence erupted. The sky would have been black if it hadn’t been bright orange with lightning. Gaetane’s curly hair stood on end, making a nimbus three times the size of her head.
“It is an interesting phenomenon, an effect of ionization,” said Jean Baptiste.
“You look like Medusa,” said Harold, “But much prettier, of course, and without the snakes.”
“@#$%! GET DOWN!” screamed the nervous person from a country with frequently toasted golfers.
The best we could do was a thicket of stunted trees with a lush undergrowth of stinging nettles. It poured. It blew. The temperature dropped thirty degrees. The nettles were enjoyed by the horses. Ettie and Claire got under their mounts. This, if you’ve seen a horse relieve itself, was a calculated risk of a worse wetting. Camilla said, “I know what—The Sound of Music.”
The hills are alive with the sound of . . .
KA-BOOM
“@#$%! GET DOWN!”
Doe, a deer, a female deer,
Ray, a drop of golden . . .
KA-BOOM
“@#$%! GET DOWN!”
The path descending from the ridge was washed out. Shamil found a crevasse leading . . . somewhere. It was too muck-sunk and brush-filled to ride. We had to lead the horses. An enormous creature is behind you, threatening at every moment to add the mud luge to the list of Olympic equestrian events. Taking a fall on a horse is just a matter of one’s own slobby body mass index hitting the ground. It is not to be compared to having a horse take a fall on you. There were places where leading was impossible. We had to jump and slide on our own, then call the horses like dogs, asking them to perform stunts that Lassie would have left Timmy down the well rather than attempt.
Trigger, who’d shown no previous inclination to obey, or even notice me, turned petlike and followed with puppyish devotion. The crevasse opened into a gorge, and the gorge opened into a canyon, and once, when he and I were stuck on a ledge, Trigger gave me a little nudge away from the abyss. (Though it’s possible Trigger is dyslexic and was pushing in the wrong direction.)
The rain kept on and so did we, in a trail-breaking slog until our spirits had descended as far as we had. And there on the canyon floor were our trucks. Using a frayed old Soviet topo map, drivers Valeri and Andrei had guessed where we might emerge. The cook, Tyota Vera, and her helpers Nadia and Lyuda had a hot meal ready. A tarp was stretched over the table.
“You had better have another vodka,” said Shamil, “because tomorrow the riding becomes very difficult.”
It did. We climbed 3,000 feet up a slope like a graph of crude oil prices to have lunch with the shepards of Kizel Kel’. Their yurts are streamlined for the mountain winds—Airstream trailers made of felt but with more spacious and contemporary open-plan interiors. We ate yogurt and little balls of goat cheese fermented in burlap sacks hanging outside the yurts, and we drank the whey that dripped from the bags. The Kyrgyz bring little with them by way of provisions except their livestock. There was a lot of gawking, mostly from the Kyrgyz. Being nomads, they are tourists themselves, and after a wet night in camp and a long ride we were a sight. Emily, with her background in relief work, was relieved to see no relief was needed. The camp’s three families and their fourteen kids were smiling and fit. Either they lead much healthier lives than we do or they roll their sick down the hill. I imagined the size of the saddlebag needed to carry to the mountaintop my family’s sunblock, bug spray, asthma inhalers, orthodontic retainers, vitamins, dietary supplements, and bottles of shampoo and conditioner formulated to correct high-altitude dryness and split ends. We rode out though a canyon with walls that will dwarf the luxury resort that is going to be built there someday, through clouds of blue butterflies where the parking lot will be, and under a natural bridge, naming rights available. The striated sediment in the sandstone
cliffs had been bent by mountain-building into a gargantuan taffy pull. Owners of leisure homes will be sure to frame this view in the master suite’s Palladian window. Hundreds of feet up, ibex skittered across the openings of unexplored caves. Unexplored cave tours at ten, noon, and two. Shamil, reconnoitering the canyon on foot a month before, had seen a Tian Shan brown bear and the spoor of a snow leopard. Call the concierge for safari bus reservations.
“This canyon is one vast herbaceous border,” said Jennie, standing by a yard-wide clump of irises and naming a dozen other plants. “All these have to be so carefully tended in England, and here they just grow.”
“Herbaceous Boarder” is a clever name for the upscale bed-and-breakfast that will cater to the more ecologically conscious visitors.
We vilified progress all the way to our cooked meal, distilled beverages, and double-walled synthetic fabric expedition tents. The river at the mouth of the canyon will survive—sweeping fly fishermen and kayakers straight to perdition. We tried to take a bath in it. Ettie had the guts to go first, lowering herself into water the temperature of decompressing Freon and being beaten by the roil of pebbles in the current. “Yow,” she said, “this is worse than a spa. You know, there are people who pay thousands for things like this.”
“Us among them,” said Andrew.
We rode for two days through the Chakal Range’s meadow fairways, not one of them less than a par ninety-nine. Golf would be a more exciting sport if it had been invented by the Kyrgyz instead of the Scots. You’d hit a horse instead of a ball, and it would be you that would wind up in a hole in the ground, six feet under if you weren’t careful.
Being careful on Trigger wasn’t hard. The other horses were galloping around. But for Trigger, as for many of the world’s great beauties, being beautiful was a career. Doing anything else that he didn’t have to was a waste of his valuable talents. Trigger would go where the other horses went with a Kate Moss vacuity. But out on his own, on open ground, he’d prance, flare his nostrils, arch his neck nobly, gaze at the fields of wildflowers, and eat them.
Trigger and I were married or—I’ll have to check the laws of Kyrgyzstan on this point—joined in a civil union. Anyway, there I was on top going “Yes, Dear.” Of course the other riders were skilled and accomplished. Although some of them said they weren’t.
“I haven’t ridden since I was a kid,” said Bahar.
“Bahar,” I said, “you are a kid.”
“Jean Baptiste has spent only two hours before on a horse,” said Gaetane. Jean Baptiste blushed with modest embarrassment at being a natural athlete and quick study.
I am neither. And I’m pushing sixty with a short stick. And I was chafed and sore in surprising places. In unsurprising places, too. Do not wear jeans on a 100-some-mile ride through a graduate course in geography. You’ll have permanent raised seams right where Levis do. But I was also rubbed raw in my belly button from where the pommel of my saddle had dug into my gut going uphill and in the small of my back from where the saddle’s cantle had caught me going down hill, and the bottoms of my feet ached because I’d been unconsciously pressing on the stirrups with an old automobile driver’s instinctive hope that one of these things was the brake. Yet every night, after half a bottle of vodka or so, I became a brilliant rider. In fact we all became quite brilliant. Adrian and Andrew figured out exactly where Osama bin Laden was hiding—in the unexplored cave where we’d seen the ibex. They trapped him there, put an end to terrorism, and forged a lasting peace in the Middle East, although they were somewhat fuzzy on the details the next morning.
Jean Baptiste discovered that he could play the guitar. Camilla staged a production of Grease, complete with choreography.
Tell me more. Tell me more.
Did you get sore, of course?
Tell me more. Tell me more.
Like, does he have a horse?
A week into our trip we awoke below the mountain where Trigger would experience near-gymnastics. It stood at the end of a seemingly endless meadow. Blossoms of clouds drifted down from its peak on sunbeam stems arranged in an urn of celadon mist, or something like that. It was a scene to make me wax as florid as the nature poets of the Romantic era, although, compared with Kyrgyzstan, the Lake District of England looks like a rest stop on I-95.
“I think,” said Shamil, “when we die this is what we see.”
I’m glad to say that’s not the means by which I saw it. Trigger didn’t tumble. We made it to the top. And I could ride Trigger after all. He didn’t change direction with leg pressure. It was reins on his neck that made him turn. The quirt was no punishment, just a memo from middle management. I couldn’t post; that is, I couldn’t rise rhythmically with Trigger’s trot. His gait was too much like a hoppy toad’s. But I could canter if I kept my mind—and my behind—on what I was doing.
And I had other epiphanies up there. I wasn’t scared. I was still a coward, but I’d run out of fear. The grassy slope had depleted my proven reserves of trepidation, vast as they were. I’d also run out of adjectives. My ability to describe was as exhausted as my ability to worry. We went through a bunch-of-superlatives countryside down to a highly-evocative-metaphor valley and on to our campsite that was, oh, darn nice.
Except there was no camp. The trucks and the crew weren’t there. The rain had been causing landslides on their routes. Alexandra’s horse had gone lame and she’d ridden in one of the trucks that day. Shamil was grim with worry. It began to rain again. There was no food. Our canteens were empty. The sun set. It rained harder.
Miles down the valley was a government forestry station, intermittently occupied. The horses were worn out. We hobbled them and began to walk. The flashlights were with the camping gear.
Hours later, at that moment in a cold, wet, dark hike to an uncertain destination when the soul cries out for a cozy office cubicle and a job making unsolicited dinnertime phone calls asking people to switch their cable service, Alexandra appeared. Indeed there had been a landslide. She and the camp staff carried the supplies and equipment to the other side of the debris. They commandeered a logging truck. And they brought, thank God, the vodka.
The weather cleared the next day and so, eventually, did our heads. We rode on through mountains, fields, and forests. The Mongols and the Huns and Shamil’s ancestors must have felt like this. They didn’t really mean to overrun the known world and sack it; they just didn’t want to stop riding.
And one afternoon on the banks of a lake called the Sary Chelek, the “Golden Bowl,” I galloped Trigger. A real gallop with all hooves—and not me!—launched in the air. We ran for a mile and a half along the lakeside. We were a centaur. Trigger was Pegasus. I was Alexander on Bucephalus, conquering Kyrgyzstan after all.
Now I know what it is to be a chevalier, to be the Man on Horseback. I’m making the patio into a paddock. I’m building a stable in the garage. I’m getting Trigger a green card. I’m learning to jump so I can go foxhunting. There are plenty of foxes just an hour and a half away in the suburbs of Boston. And a hell of a hunt it will be because every hedge has a swimming pool on the other side. I wear my new jodhpurs around the house, and all that I talk is horse sense.
“One small sore butt for man,” says Mrs. O. “One giant pain in the ass for mankind.”
12
SWEET-AND-SOUR CHILDREN AND TWICE-FRIED PARENTS TO GO
Hong Kong, December 2007
Having been a foreign correspondent for many years, I’m used to leaving home. I’m not used to home tagging along after me.
I was invited to give a lecture in Hong Kong.
“Let’s take the children,” said Mrs. O.
“It’s a sixteen-hour plane ride,” I said.
“Sixteen hours,” said Mrs. O., “equals about one Sunday sleet storm trapped in the house with the kids while you’re someplace like Hong Kong.”
We’d traveled overseas with the children before. Muffin turned two in Venice. There, in the middle of Saint Mark’s Square, a Japane
se tourist lady handed her an open bag of pigeon feed and every feathered rat in Europe descended on the poor tyke. I have mentioned that my wife is afraid of birds. The feeling was mutual after Mrs. O.’s rescue of our daughter in a Burberry-brandishing, Coach bag–slinging, swashbuckling attack on the flock. The Piazza San Marco was cleared of pigeons, maybe for the first time in history. The Japanese tourist lady was also run off.
Then there was the night—the whole night—in a Madrid hotel when Poppet was teething and Muffin was howling in solidarity and Mrs. O. and I were trying to figure out what’s Spanish for “warm milk.” (Leche picante is not it.) But since Buster (our Iraq War baby boom baby) came along, skiing in Ohio and one trip to Disney World were as far as we’d ventured as a family.
The portability of children is not improved by their number, or, for that matter, by their age. Muffin, age ten, was starring in a preview of puberty. The preview had been edited for general audiences—that is, Muffin was experiencing all the moods, manners, and misanthropies of adolescence without (mercifully) the sex, drugs, and rock and roll. On the other hand, Mrs. O. and I were enjoying this about as much as we would have enjoyed adolescence ourselves without the sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Poppet, seven, was in that excessively imaginative stage of childhood so beloved by children’s book authors and so annoying to everyone else. For example, many children are afraid of the dark, but Poppet was also afraid of having a night-light. “Because then the monsters stay awake and crawl out from under the bed, and they want to talk, and I want to be nice to them, but I’m tired.” She also had a tendency to burst into tears during random moments of television viewing.
“It’s an ad for kitty litter,” I’d say.
“People are littering with kitties! Just throwing them out car windows!”