July 11, 2012
All that separates us from Afghanistan is a rushing, frantic river; 30 yards of water and the pitch dark of a moonless night. Including the one emanating from my screen I can count 16 lights, single 60 to 100 watt incandescent bulbs in my entire field of vision. All are on the Tajik side. Afghanistan, so close, is utterly black. When we arrived there were no lights at all. Electricity is a capricious thing in this hamlet, appearing when if feels like it and vanishing with equal impishness. The river’s rush is a constant companion, along with the trills of night birds and amphibians, insects and mammals.
I know Afghanistan to be there because I saw it all
afternoon across that one wicked body of water – wicked because it separates us
from setting foot in Afghanistan, a lunatic desire our hosts at the US Embassy
have tried deeply to dissuade me from realizing. “You have a single entry visa,
so, good luck getting back in if you figure out how to go across,” has been the
common source of discouragement. More effective: “we had someone determined to
set foot in Afghanistan earlier this year. He walked across the bridge from
Tajikistan to Afghanistan. The Afghans turned him away. When he went to come
back to Tajikistan they wouldn't let him in because he’d used up his single
entry visa. Took six hours, the Tajik KGB, the Afghan Foreign Ministry and the
head of Consular Affairs in Dushanbe to get him admitted again to Tajikistan.
All that time he stood in the middle of the bridge, the river running under
him, with nowhere to go. He could have been there a month.”
I seem to have settled on getting within 30 yards and no closer. I like
bridges, but…
We knew we had reached the point where Afghanistan sat on
the shore to our right not because of a sign, or a designation. No, we knew it
to be there because it was our first sighting of entire villages of mud brick –
villages completely and totally abandoned. No one in the fields. No one on the
banks. Empty. Tiny towns of mud-brick, with glassless openings for windows and
not a soul in sight.
Barren.
Barren.
An occasional donkey foraged, yet if it had anyone tending
it, it was at distance. The domesticated animals had been left to their own
devices, solitary beasts of burden munching on pale green grass as though they
were the last inhabitants of earth. You wondered, when winter came, would
anybody return to claim them, to shelter them, to feed them in the dead cold
and deep snow of the high mountains?
At points a good throw of a solid stone would have landed on
its shores. 90 feet away.
Overhead the Milky Way shines deep, a band across the night
sky I have seen perhaps six times in my life. Such it is to grow up in the era
of electricity and the thick haze of burnt fossils, and to be from Manhattan,
where a cloudy night produces an orange sky more like a blanket than a void. To
see the Milky Way stops you in the careful walk along the dirt road running
through the village in which our guest house lies. That road is the often one
lane path between Dushanbe and the South along the Afghan border.
Its name is the Pamir Highway. It is high, to be sure. And
it is the only way to get where we’re going by land. Beyond that any
resemblance to the word as we understand it in the States is purely
coincidental.
The Pamir Highway runs, for much of its length, along the
Tajik bank of the river, the river separating Tajikistan from
Afghanistan here in the Tajik southwest. A map shows it to be in the panhandle
of Afghanistan – the part which juts out east in a sliver of land, separated
from the chaos of the heart of the country by deep cut mountains and, its
seems, but spirit.
The river funs with such force it sounds like a strong steady wind through
thick forests, even 100 yards from its banks. Cars pass by perhaps every 15
minutes. Other than that, at 10:30 at night, the sounds are solely those of
creatures of the night and of the river.
Earlier, along the first mountains in the climb from
Dushanbe to here, the landscape was easily the most tortured I had ever seen. Tortured
not by man. By nature. Mountains folded in on themselves as though rolled –
like slices of cheese you bend. Deep folds and 45 to 90 degree thrusts – a
geologic wonder that is almost impossible to describe.
The sheer geologic power of the Indian Subcontinent slamming into the Eurasian land mass, bending the flat earth into thick folds which reveal layer upon layer of sediment, at one time buried under the sea floor, now bent like so many slices and hurled up thousands of feet into the sky. In places volcanic rock, magma which had poured out millions of years ago, lay dolloped on top of the sedimentary rock, so much topping on the land.
The sheer geologic power of the Indian Subcontinent slamming into the Eurasian land mass, bending the flat earth into thick folds which reveal layer upon layer of sediment, at one time buried under the sea floor, now bent like so many slices and hurled up thousands of feet into the sky. In places volcanic rock, magma which had poured out millions of years ago, lay dolloped on top of the sedimentary rock, so much topping on the land.
Driving that landscape, dwarfed by it and at any moment
tumbling down into it if the road gave way (which seemed all-too likely), the
sense of being small within the geologic combat yet going on in these
mountains, was everywhere.
