A Clean Line

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A truck went by.....
three hours ago.
Smoke Creek Desert
-Gary Snyder


A few years ago a group of us were speeding across the basins of Northern Nevada en route to a remote hot spring. Sitting in the passenger seat of our rented Blazer was mama Vickie Wiles who was visiting from the Mid-Atlantic. As she watched the endless sage roll by and slowly internalized the vastness of the country around her she murmered: "well boy, you wanted to be in the middle of nowhere and this is it". In times since she has come to love Nevada as many of us do. She has enjoyed the feeling of travelling for hours without seeing another person and the fun of shooting at distant targets in the open playa from the comfort of a warm soak. There is something about being in wide open spaces that is mind expanding. One tends to experience a feeling of immense smallness when surrounded by seemingly infinate expanses of stoic landscape; free of the comforts (and hence the impingements) of human society.
There is another feeling that comes with jumping off the grid, a feeling of excitement and trepidation. It comes from the sense that your time in a space, and maybe your time in any space, is limited and you have to ultimately move on. In the mountains and on the oceans we call this sensation "exposure" and it is addictive. Exposure is in many ways a matter of aesthetics; we can see ourselves in a given scenario and can thus observe the critical nature of the situation. In this sense it is also about creating beauty with our lives by navigating a certain path in a certain style. When we climb mountains and find a way back down we are not only looking for a way to the top and back. We are looking for what we call a "clean line", a way that subscribes to our sense of beauty and adventure.
In the past couple of weeks we have been seeking such a line across the western steppes of Mongolia. We began with a refreshing rest along the shores of Lake Hovsgol. There we relaxed by crackling fires as we ate smoked lenok and reminisced about our love of big, blue alpine lakes. When we had thoroughly rested our bodies and overcome our longings for Tahoe we began our journey towards Ulaangom. Up untill that point we had been on easily navigable "main" roads which even had a kilometer marker or two and plenty of traffic from whom we could ask directions. Here in the west we have had no such luxuries as the primary routes which do exist have far less traffic and are frequently filled with sand. In order to avoid the sand we have taken to the higher mountain roads, trading sand for rocks and passes. This was against the advice of many Mongolians but the average local cannot concieve of the nature of our endeavor and many have suggested that we simply take a jeep across the more difficult sections. We considered heeding this suggestion on several instances but the challenge of making the crossing under our own power was too great a temptation and so on we have ridden. Sometimes the journey has been straightforward with smooth roads and obvious navigation. Sometimes we have pushed our heavy bikes over rocky passes, from where we have spent hours lining up distant peaks to triangulate our position. Our topos, along with the most basic of our navigational skills, have been the sharpest arrows in our quiver over the last leg and have helped to bring us here to Ulaangom safe and sound with only two (easily corrected) wrong turns to our debit. While we cannot call it easy, it has been fun and though this has been the most taxing part of our trip so far, it has been the most rewarding. Three of our eight tires are now wearing repair boots over various tears and punctures recieved from serendipidously placed pieces of broken vodka bottles and sharp stones. One of those tires is a total loss but we will still cannibalise it for a few boots before trashing it. Otherwise our stout bikes are rolling strong and we have spent little time on repairs.
The few people we have encountered in the past weeks have been overwhelmingly friendly and courteous. Often we are visited in our camp by locals who spot us from afar in their field scopes and ride out over the steppe on their motorbikes to check us out. They are always kind and never impositional in any way, respecting our privacy as any westerner might (or might not!). Most refreshing of all is the fact that they (mostly) seem healthy enough in this harsh landscape. We have conducted a few basic checkups in some of the places we have stayed and have been impressed with the overall wellness of a people who smoke cigarettes, drink vodka, and never seem to eat vegetables, drink water, or walk anywhere. Access to medical care here is limited but not impossible and many nomads can count their medical records among their small cache of personal belongings. Some have seen Peace Corps doctors in recent years and are proud to show you gastroscopic images of their ulcers and records of distention in their overworked, hepatitic livers! The rest are at the mercy of the local chemists whose level of proficiency runs the typical third world gamut between stellar and abysmal. On several instances we have met poeple who are taking medications which are contraindicated with their conditions. Some people simply need to be told to stop taking their meds with a tin cup of vodka! All of this aside, they are a strong and intuitional people who can live to a venerable old age with limited help from modern medicine. Above all, they are happy and sing as they go about their daily chores. Their smiles seem to bring a certain brightness to the world around them and they know that they live in good country.
Tomorrow we will begin the short and final leg of our Mongolian adventure. The terrain changes here and we will be crossing a few large passes on our way to the Russian border. The land becomes more dramatically mountainous as we climb up to a higher plateau in Siberia; we can see the snow capped mountains rising into the clouds on the outskirts of town. We welcome this transition as well as the potential for a food source besides mutton, stale biscuits, strange cheese, and ramen noodles. It is, however, bittersweet considering that soon we will be trading physical obstacles for human vectors as we dust off our cable locks and rear view mirrors for the pavement of a more developed world. We find it strange to imagine that soon we will again be sneaking away like fugitives into roadside bivouacs behind abandoned buildings and pinching our copeks in an expensive industrialized nation. Life is simple here, for them as well as for us, and we will not soon forget our days of rambling through this care free land.

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Comments

[Patti Dowden]

Finally catching up with you
Your trip sounds incredibly bold, challenging and rewarding. Michael and I are thinking about you two out there in the vast "new" land of experiences with people living in the "old" ways, tried and reliable ways of ancient cultures. Thank you for the great commentary of what you are seeing, feeling and wondering about. This will make a fabulous book when you are ready. Take good care of yourselves and your tires !!!!! Patti

[Lisa Ansley]

Unbelievable!
Chad and Allison, your journey's are so incredible to read and even better to imagine. I am relieved that you guys are safe and enjoying this most unbelievable adventure together! Thanks for keeping us all informed and for describing everything in such detail, as to let us "feel" the experience. I am so happy you two have this unbelievable oppurtunity!! I love you both and wish you safe and happy trails... until next blog.... Lisa

[mark lonac]

well done guys
to chad: you may remember me, the (now former) afro haired kid from one of your kili trips last summer (also with my aunt sherry). i met your buddy mark fogg cause the lab i work in at colorado state did some exercise testing on his fire crew from estes park. when he came in to our lab he was wearing a tahoe cross country shirt...the rest is probably clear to you. the puppy following you guys around after you got off the train reminds me of the little kid who hitched a ride on my junky cruiser bike that i rented from the springlands and that we cruised around moshi town on. if /when you get back to americana and you still have the video you took of that with your demo oregon scientific bike camera, i'd love to get ahold of a copy. i think i mailed you a letter about that to your speckled address, probably after you already left for el mundo tercero. if you get the chance to respond when you're back, cool. to allison: i exchanged a snail mail letter or two with you while chad was still in tanzania. i look forward to reading the actual book you write about this trip when it's all said and done. nice writing. sounds like the customized touring bikes chad told me about in tanzania are working out quite well for you two. i think he told me a friend of his out of boulder was helping you guys out with those. i liked your description of the absurdly fickle weather in mongolia. people say that "if you don't like the weather here in colorado, wait 5 minutes." but all you get here is rain then sun then rain, certainly not 40 degrees C then a few hours later snow and 5 degrees C and wind coming from the opposite direction! two questions for ya: are you / how are you treating your water? and how on earth are you posting blog entries from the middle of nowhere mongolia?? thanks for doing the blog. super cool. have fun with the rest of the trip! -mark

[Bike Tour Eurasia]

Mambo Vipi Mark Lonac?!
Greetings Mark, Fogg told me of your encounter at UC a few weeks ago. Thanks for checking in. I have had some troubles reviewing those movies that I shot in Tanzania last summer. I know what disk the film you want is on but for some reason I have had issues bringing it up on any device besides a television. When I get back to the States I will make a blind copy of the whole disk and send it to you. As to your questions..... We are treating our water with a filter, then a Steripen though sometimes (i.e. from non-turbid sources) the steripen is enough. If the water is strictly for cooking we simply boil it before adding any food. This being said, our steripen has died and will soon come home in a box like a soldier, along with it's fallen comrade the GPS. We are in Russia now so the filter is sufficient anyway and we won't have to take the time to charge batteries with out portable solar panel as we were before. In many places we had no access to water that was free of salt and we carried a lot of water there. Sometimes upwards of ten liters per rider. Needless to say, moving expediantly was critical in these regions. Here in Russia, water is everywhere and we filter whenever we can as the bottled stuff is actually costly. As to the internet access we have been able to connect in major towns on shaky hookups. In places like Ulaangom the internet flows via satellite and local teenagers crowd around computers to learn about a world they could never glimpse otherwise. Here in Barnaul there is 24 hour internet access and several cafes have wifi. Russia is a different world. Great to hear from you Mark. Run fast my friend. By the way, Chitanda LOVES the binoculars you sent him, thanks for doing that for him. Tutoanana Rafiki!