When The Sky

They’re tiny encouragements, those dust whorls in the heat and the bits of dung and trash, brake lights on the sprinter van we hired to transport us from Bishkek, a moment ago the firm handshake of the driver with whom we share no language. This dirt patch off the edge of broken asphalt contouring along deep blue Lake Issyk-Köl, our bicycles and gear and full plastic grocery bags in excitable heaps. Now we’re stashing a week’s worth of food into frame and saddle packs, the fruit of hours trying to puzzle ingredients from pictures on the outside packaging. Finally the perpendicular road wavy with children who say hello by putting their hands up and laughing, some chase us but most just continue playing as they were, adults smile and shake an arm with genuine seeming joy, early on we pass a few cars horns honking and occupants pressed against the windshield in grinning greeting. It will transform into a two track and then a path and then just our pedalstrokes rising towards a Tien Shan ridge line that points at the sky like tips of neatly lined up spears. Glint capped peaks inevitably further away than they seem. We see our first yurt even if it’s just another farm building, a woman leaning forward a wheelbarrow between fencing, a flat green pitch for ball kicking and used now for it by a hollering half dozen, an old Subaru.

We’ve come because of the legend of Kyrgyzstan’s beauty, mountains and steppe, high meadow yurt camps, Silk Roads and Soviet history, Islam and horsemen and crashing cold rivers. None of the confirmed superlatives will match our wide-eyed skipping heart wonder in the place.

The first giddy expectant revolutions were at five thousand feet, by the end of tomorrow we’ll have ridden to twelve through trees and subsequently none to grey rock moraine staircases, a narrowing canyon, limpid plateau lakes. Along the way curious unfettered horses standing in the way to get a steady look at us, a herdsman’s grin, a yapping shepherd dog, the sound of mud scraping in our tread, horse manure fires from afar until we don’t see anyone anymore. Our camps will be on grass as smooth and low as a fairway, and we’ll sit in our kitchen circle whiskey drinking marveling. And in our chests we’ll ride through the realization that, whatever we expected this place to be, it’s more than that in the way that the unfurling kilometers of green levitate us.

A man in fatigues on a small horse trots into the middle of our site, his tone curious greeting nodding he shakes all our hands and asks until we realize and say, “USA, America!” and he laughs and asks “New York City?” and Joel and I nod vigorously, point to my Yankee cap, he laughs nods more, we stand in a circle reckoning that we’re on this patch together. Lucas says that elsewhere we’d be happy to have reached this view at the end of two weeks of riding but here it’s just our beginning. Just a half day, that first one, so we sleep the swallows of labored breath and contentment, galaxy and shooting star afterimages and cricket chirp echoes. The earth is so soft under us that we hardly need inflating pads. Dream of the smell of sage and it’s there vivid and pressing when we wake, repack and off, climbing again.

Sometimes we ride in twos and shuffle through to chat. Other times our line stretches, goes invisible, and when alone: every direction, even the valley behind, everything seems looked up at because your pulse is traveling its way there, reeling towards summits and sunbeams, glacier glint and falcon wingtip. Talk to the herds to use up the words that aren’t doing any good anyway. Lunch together again, afterward nap.

The route we’re on goes fainter yet. To the left a cleft vectors away with just a cowpath on one side, that’s where we’re headed. No jeeps come through here, vertical walls clack echo funnel embrace. “It’s like we’re sequentially visiting all the US national parks but impossibly next to each other,” we laugh but Joel’s right and this is an entrance into a serene wildness that we’re grateful for. We’ll be asked a few times over the next weeks why here? and I can’t help but think our stammering incomprehension at the question is a snapshot of this very moment.

I feel it like nostalgia, or like the whisper of a name on tongue tip, that there is beauty here that is remarkable so that beauty itself should be remarked. I want to make inquires of the blades of green, of the rust lichen, of the cloud tendrils that reach around the highest pyramids but then grow tentative and retreat, shadows and chilled air the groundlocked analogue. Shoulders tensioning and bobbing into the effort, the climb is at the limit of my traction and fitness, and I find the ache behind my ribs is a kind of answer in that it says something of what beauty means, the aim of striving heaving coiling, the aim of aiming.

We end below the pass but it’s in our sight, leaving it for tomorrow with the plateau marsh crossing that follows. Right now we’re too elated to wonder anything about that. Trapezoidal and cubed rocks all round, crouch behind them to talk over the wind and warm our fingers. After dark I’m in my tent, Joel and Logan are reclining in their down bags and they go silent to track in the black the sound of pebble fall along a route high up on the slope, rocks shifting sluffing left to right. When they tell the story we’ll choose and hope that it’s a snow leopard that imagined it perceived the four of us transfixed and wondered.

Yesterday was a hard day and we slept a punished sleep. From the giant’s toy block strewn campsite, we’d ascended and climbed with forty minutes of pushing the bikes to a keyhole opening. Wending through lakes over marshland, horsetrack here or there but mostly just pointing the bikes and going. Above us, seems like right on the stitching of our pulled close hoods, rolling billowing grey boiling hissing wind.

Takes us some time to find a spot to cross the river, we’re all shivering, I’m wearing all of my clothes and buttoned up lockdown. Scrolling through the track, it was a bit more south and then a sharp turn west along what should be a visible trail and it is, but just. The now gale flapping howling in our faces so we pedal the flat ground with the effort of a canted up but hardly walking speed, hail then rain then hail again. It may have been the main thoroughfare across the plateau forty years ago, you can catch its traces but not by looking for them, more the feeling of seeing the faintest stars from the peripheral corners. Too dark for sunglasses but they’re on to shield eyes and I’m inexplicably laughing at the stinging sharps against my cheeks. The effort has at least thawed my toes and a little bit of the icy instinct to isolation that I feel, my sense of sociality glaciated even though I rode shoulder to shoulder with Joel.

Hours toward evening, pop out onto a wide mining road with giant steel utility line statues that we know head up valley toward a mine. We revel in the speed and ride for another while before finding water and pitching the tents in a basin. Rain again, cold and dinner is quick silent so sleep is the only last thing.

Shuffle roll over in the tent, check time gather the quilt about, plat glack plat of drops on the fly a continuation of the sounds to which I fell asleep. Logan, whose tent is closest, hears that I’m up and asks whether I’d been outside yet this morning. I pfft at the rain and he suggests I take a look. Unzip the top of the fly, wet heavy snow shushes off, ground covered and the flakes are falling hard in orderly Euclidean slants. Twelve thousand feet or so, stuttering breath to laugh together through the thin layers of fabric. In about an hour we’ll pack our things, that grim accepting packing with hunched shoulders and hooded faces, leave tracks behind us to ascend, not just to another pass, but to our own forward glint.

Kicking up these rooster tails of mud, I can feel every now and then a dirt turd flip around and land on the bill of my cap. But the insult is a last gasp, we’ve gone from a sludgy mist lid on the sky to blue cracks to pulling our hoods back. We know from the map that we’re approaching a precipice, a series of switchbacks down to a long river valley that we’ll hare straight west on. We didn’t know it would be an embrace, an assurance, a dreamscape that leaves us headshake clinging to those hours and telling stories about the track for days after it’s a wheel’s memory. I think that span, the morning snow, the frustrations of the mud slog up and past the high point, the clacking rollercoaster descent and then whooosh, silence of our big tires on green carpet doubletrack for days; I think that span snapped and adhered this place to us so here’s where we never want to have missed or ended.

Joel carves off the track, finds a straight line toward the lone horseman who is herding cows. I see them in the distance grip hands, their silhouette somehow metaphorical. The handshakes here are hearty and intentional. Sometimes we see the younger boys light up when we offer our greeting, feeling older at regarding us strangers at close distance. But they’re already impossibly composed in our view, riding hard and skillfully, bundled against the chill. That evening we camp early because the setting won’t let us not. Tents in a line pitched into the gusts, but down low cross legged around the stoves it’s quiet enough for us to mark the long pauses between when we say anything. After sunset we’ll smell cooking from distant camps, tomorrow there will be unfettered horses concentratedly ignoring us as we pedal away.

We talk about the close relationship between expectation and fear, the way that those naive images set the pace and landscape before you’re ever even pressed by the cold and colors. Invited into a yurt, bread and jam, my first fermented mare’s milk. Tastes like a thick creamy demented kombucha with the heavy essence of horse, we’ll drink a fair bit more of it over these next weeks and often chased by Russian vodka to make sure we wobble and squint on our way. As we leave we’re given a coke bottle that we think is more kumys but we find out later that it’s butter. We laugh, seems like it’s crazy but we’ll enjoy it in our soup.

Naryn is our first resupply opportunity since setting out. We arrive on the sixth day, all of us digging at the bottom of our bags for a piece of candy that got loose. Finally eating those things that we’d been avoiding or that we bought by mistake. We spread the butter on stale flatbread, it’s a legitimately delicious lunch. We talked up the pizza and desserts we’d eat in town, but in the event it was the inevitable letdown. The day we spent in that urban setting, the trafficked streets and notably unhandsome Soviet architecture and art, the repeating sequence of shops—mobile top up, money change, liquor—the unromantic reality of it: our eagerness to head out again was axiomatic, but more than that I think we were sheepish and wanted to escape from our pretense that this is an uncomplicated landscape as if all one valence threatening to collapse into no meaning at all.

In the south and moving west, the day of the grit sticking to our sweat and the cloying steadiness of our cadence isn’t our favorite. The only mistake would have been expecting it to be our earlier lifting valley, and fearing that it wouldn’t be. Two horses with their riders on a long slow traverse to meet us at our camp. Maybe a grandfather, father, son. They nod and smile, not effusively but companionably, we bid our happiness at being here, they continue on.

Not wanting or wishing or chasing something else. I’m in stationary timestopped movement liberated from hoping for a better view or a softer light or a more ragged horizon. Kyrgyzstan is stasis that I know isn’t permanent but that I can at least be present in heat and contentment. Within this fixity we’re zigzag brownian motion through a depression in the round hills. See the vee of what we judge is the high point, each of us on his own path surfing tussocks and babyheads. The shepherd told us to stay left of the wash but Logan’s up above me to the right on the shoulder of the ridge. He’s moving pretty good, I think he’s grinning. Joel’s well ahead, steal a glance behind at Lucas swiping sweat from above his sunglasses, I start off again. It wants to be a bike push kind of section, we’re feeling stubborn instead, churning our easiest gears to float forward. We top out, shirts soaked from effort. The soft grassy tread and tall sky somehow absorb the ifs so that we’re left with now and here.

Lowland sticky dust is behind us now, yesterday we visited Tash Rabat and found it shrugging unremarkable. At least the tourist yurt camp nearby had excellent food and beer that we chilled in the stream. The highlight was meeting and mingling with Kyrgyz visitors who beamed with pride at our truthful confessions of the unrivaled beauty of their home.Turned the bikes around to head back into the sparsity, a northern course traversing valley folds, back to altitude to a splendid nothing.

Ascend into that sensory inversion where the sweep before us expands, bursts toward the sky and where your own self-awareness shrinks crowded out. This is the spatial analog to the frozen time of not waiting for something better, where there is no distance to cross because you fill all the corners of the universe, where the universe spans you and so you’re already a completion. The breathless work of straining climbing, the wet weather gear when drops turn to torrent, backtrack when a lone horseman on the quiet unused track we’re on emphatically assures us that the river crossing 50k down the way will be deep over our heads. We laugh when he mimes our bikes getting swept away and all four of us cartwheeling underwater in the boil and hydraulics. It’s a section on the map about which I had questions, we debate pressing on anyway, but we’ll be glad we didn’t because on the reroute the descent into Baetov rocket drops us down to transcendence with a red gold glow on the canyons like forever in front of our wheels.

We’re fitter now, we’re faster, we see better now, we’re slower. In a day we reach lake Song Köl, subject of postcards and also popular with Kyrgyz tourists. The serenity of the place wrestles with trash and blowing toilet paper, our chests squeezed tight. Wind comes through indignant and a drop then another, we rush to put up our tents close to the shore and dive in. I eat raw ramen while listening to the lash and beating against the fly. Tomorrow we watch a game of kok-boru, a kind of polo, but a grimacing mythic underworld shadow of it. The primal raw striving, sweat and close contact shoulders that’s always present in sports but here is closer to the surface, the horses dancing for footing, surging, the jockeys bent low off the side of the saddle to grab the desiccated goat carcass then lifting it hip high to gallop fury and dust toward the goal.

Later the horserider is on a line to intercept us, closer and I see that she’s in a boxy pink jacket, closer still and her socks match. Her feet don’t reach the stirrups but somehow she rides without so much as a bob of her cap, maybe nine years old and brimming with confidence. I convey that we’re headed to the pass out of the Song Köl basin, she wrinkles her eyebrows for a second, points, thinks, looks up at the sky. Points to me and the guys coming up behind, pantomimes that first we’ll go to meet her parents and brother to have chai in the yurt. We fall in in a line behind her, she helpfully waves us along. Fatima’s father is kind and welcoming, shows us photos of his champion kok-boru days, laughs easy and teases Logan for his beard. We can see the source of his daughter’s smart sparkling assurance, and the visit stays with me long after against the backdrop of a country where women’s lives in rural areas seem so little self-directed, a country where bride kidnapping is still a reality. We plunge down again, another swirling carving majesty downhill, we’ll camp half way down, roll onto startling tarmac and a string of towns before onward.

Lucas went into the shop to get another couple of liters of beer sold in plastic 1.5L bottles, we like the kind that comes with a tiny packet of corn nuts attached to the cap. We’re sitting outside chatting and horsing around with the little kids on their bikes. Lucas has been gone a long time, but then again it’s easy to picture any one of us laboring over the selection of years old frozen solid ice cream bars trying to decide between them. He comes out grinning his ass off, red faced. “Yeah, one of the ladies in there, it’s her birthday, she’s turning 55. So they made me do shots with them.” We howl, jealous, decide to camp at the edge of this sleepy town.

A shepherd, just a twentysomething kid, comes around to check us out. Trade tidbits, and eventually he reveals that his cousin lives in the USA in New York City. Shaking our heads in wonder, he calls her, it’s morning Eastern Daylight Time, speaks to her for a moment and hands me the phone. Nuri is stunned that we’re in her mother’s village, that we’re talking to Tamerlan, that we’re riding bikes in her native country. She lives a fifteen minute walk from the neighborhood Joel and I live in. The phone gets passed back a forth a few times so Nuri can translate Tamerlan’s questions and our answers. He’ll come back in the morning, wants to see more of Joel’s photos on the camera, Joel rides his horse around and Tamerlan tries the bikes. We meet his siblings and mother, she gives us bread and equally warm waves.

Last days in long valleys to passes, camps, whooping rides down, a detour to one more resupply before pointing the bikes endward. We camp part way up Kegety, sitting in the warmth to soak it up before evening and the inevitable chill. In the morning pack up, our last day on the trail so bittersweet and the agitation of the knowledge that we’ll have to shift into a different rhythm.

The descent is so long that we’ve stopped worrying that we’ve reached the bottom. Passing through lovely parklands now, off to my right there’s a Kyrgyz family picnicking on a broad ornate blanket. I wave and they do back, then I realize that they’re waving me to join them. Point the bike off the track and descend, they’re smiling and gesturing that I should stop and eat and the spread of beautiful food and their close joy encircle me. The boys arrive and food is pressed into their hands, we sit on the blanket and I try not to get my muddy legs on it. There are a dozen members of a family there, sisters my age with their children, their smiling directing mother that they’re all deferential to, brothers uncles teenagers. We drink apricot flavored water, bread, heavenly jam, a stew with potatoes and tomatoes and tender meat.

The rain starts to fall again and doesn’t let up this time, starts falling hard. We gather up the picnic and run to the van, all able bodied among us making several trips to put the food and picnic items into the dry. The grandmother is walking up the hill with her cane, she’s bent over it into the steep part. I’m the only one to see it so I skitter down and proffer my arm. She makes no big show of appreciation, no special acknowledgement the way one would if a stranger rushed over to help. She reaches to me and we slowly lift ourselves to the level of the road—eighteen footfalls that take a full minute—where I hand her off to her son but not before she squeezes my forearm once, harder than her frail frame might suggest is possible, maybe the grip of a simultaneity itself, without looking at me. I’m the one who’s been helped up right then by the implication that we’re all of us together at a picnic sharing bits of our happiness and hearts. I’m the one supported back to that road and so all the tracks that we’ve traveled here. Beauty is reaching this standstill while in motion.

The last 40k run is on a dirt path alongside an aqueduct all the way to Bishkek’s edge. Rolling west and the sun setting onto the backs of our hands, heads down riding flat out. During a break all of our fingers are trembling, share the last cookies and I produce a Snickers bar out of a secret cache. Now there are people everywhere, dogs and tidy developments or a shanty or just an urban shepherd. Now traffic fumes cacophony, we turn on our headlamps to be seen on the city streets but the bright comes mostly from behind us, from where we’ve been.

Written by Joe Cruz, photographed by Joel Caldwell