Beyond avenging my childhood ideals of explorers, and figuring out how to be one myself, I wanted to bike the Silk Road as a practical extension of my thesis at Oxford: to study how borders make and break what is wild in the world, from mountain ranges to people's minds, and how science, or more specifically wilderness conservation, might bridge those divides. So there I was, rich in unemployable university degrees, poor in cash, with few possessions to my name beyond a tent, a bicycle, and some books. I felt great about my life decisions, until I felt terrified.
Always an overachiever, Kate Harris took a rural Ontario child's dream about going to Mars and endeavored to become an astronaut by obtaining an undergrad degree at UNC, earning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and starting a doctorate at MIT. Along the way, Harris set off on many adventures by bicycle, and when the lab work became too stifling, she enlisted her longtime friend, Mel Yule, to join her in finishing a quest they had started some years before: biking the Silk Road from Istanbul to its terminus in the Himalayas. On Harris' website devoted to this trip, you can watch a highlights video described as “showcasing ten months, ten countries, and ten thousand kilometers of the Silk Road...in roughly ten minutes”. And while the video does capture something of the punishing conditions the women biked through and the lovely people that the pair met along the way, it does nothing to showcase the power of Harris' written word in this book: the narrative is simply a delight to read, filled with personal anecdotes, historical perspectives, and an academically informed tying-together of the disparate bits; all written in the awe-filled voice of someone who has witnessed the ragged ends of the Earth and was changed by that wildness. Lands of Lost Borders is a rare and true pleasure.
The root word of the word explorer is ex-plorare, with ex meaning “go out” and plorare meaning “to utter a cry”. Venturing into the unknown, in other words, is only half the job. The other half, and maybe the most crucial half for exploration to matter beyond the narrow margins of the self, is coming home to share the tale.The obstacles that Harris and Yule faced on this trip are fascinating to read about, but not wholly unexpected: the physical challenge of carrying everything you might need – tent and sleeping bag, dry goods and cooking stove, clothes and spare bicycle parts – on the frame of your bike as you pedal down roads of varying stability; the weather that ranged from a month of sleet in a Turkish winter, to the punishing heat of a desert plain, to snow and thin air in the world's highest mountain range; attempting to interact with locals in an everchanging string of languages you don't understand; arranging visas to enter countries legally, or sneaking around the barriers to those areas that are barred to foreigners – as an adventure tale, there is much to inspire the imagination. And while I sometimes found the romanticism of Harris' writing to be a bit indulgent, I decided to submit to it as an honest expression of her own sense of wonder:
• We savoured nubs of chocolate all the sweeter for their smallness as the sun sank behind the mountains, and when it was too dark to read birdflight into speech anymore, even the silence was like something winged.When Harris was at Oxford, she focussed on the history of science, and in particular, was interested in the Siachen Glacier in the Himalayas; a region of Kashmir claimed by both India and Pakistan which is not only the world's highest battleground, but has become the world highest and biggest garbage dump. It was such places of fuzzy and disputed borders along the Silk Road – like the Aksai Chin (Tibetan by cultural heritage, Indian by treaty claim, and Chinese by possession), or the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblate (majority Armenian population, claimed by Azerbaijan because of imposed Soviet era borderlines) – that Harris and Yule sought out along the way, and because they had secured some funding for their trip from wilderness conservation groups, they meet up with local experts and guides periodically to discuss those species who choose to ignore mankind's imaginary boundaries. This kind of anti-nationalism becomes the undercurrent of the narrative, and along with other progressive truisms (I don't know about calling out North America and Western Europe as the world's biggest contributors to climate change while on a road that straddles India and China), there's an anti-capitalist bent to Harris' desire to avenge her childhood ideal of explorers (as quoted in the first passage). It was the adventure tales of Charles Darwin and Marco Polo that had first sparked Harris' wanderlust when she was a child, but as an adult, she learned that all her idols had feet of clay: Charles Darwin suffered a pitiable “withdrawal from wonder” as he spent his later years close to home, churning his data in theory; turns out, Marco Polo was never a true explorer, just a greedy capitalist who was looking for trade routes; the Wright Brothers gained the sky but sold their plane to the highest bidding military (a fact Harris had taken in at Oxford “like a knife to the heart”). Even the astronauts who once so inspired Harris were never sent on missions of pure exploration:
• As the sun rose it tugged gold out of the ground and tossed it everywhere, letting the land's innate wealth loose from a disguise of dust.
• Just another night on the Silk Road, with silence settling over the fields and the crickets resuming their own strange incantations, spells that conjured beads of dew from blades of grass and lulled us to sleep under a smoke of stars.
Astronauts rave about how they can't see any borders from low Earth orbit, yet the whole enterprise of space exploration is fuelled by a rabid nationalism. The same loyalty that sparked the Cold War also launched humans to the moon. How does cynical ambition, the capacity for mutually assured destruction, give rise to something as wondrous as a stroll on the Sea of Tranquility?My natural inclination has been to push back against someone who uses her position within the wealth and stability of western civilisation to attempt to tear down that civilisation, but Harris has studied more and seen more than I ever will and I find myself unwilling to criticise her conclusions too harshly: if Harris can really see a way towards easing deadly border disputes through cooperative conservation efforts, more power to her.
Ride far enough and the road becomes strange and unknown to you. Ride a little farther and you become strange and unknown to yourself, not to mention your travelling companion.Ultimately, beyond the political, this journey reads as one of self-discovery for Kate Harris. For anyone who was enchanted by, say, Cheryl Strayed's Wild, I would say read Land of Lost Borders: it's more serious and reflective, better written, and challenging of worldviews. I loved this book, cover to cover.
