In Search of Adventure: A Wild Travel Anthology
465
In Search of Adventure: A Wild Travel Anthology
465eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781888729306 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | CCC Publishing |
| Publication date: | 03/01/1999 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 465 |
| File size: | 950 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
In Search of Adventure
A Wild Travel Anthology
By Bruce Northam, Brad Olsen
Consortium of Collective Consciousness
Copyright © 1999 Bruce Northam Brad OlsenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-888729-30-6
CHAPTER 1
Mongolia: Adventures in You-Cut Hairstyling
Tim Cahill
A popular archaeological theory is that the Mongolian people may have been the first Americans. A dedicated "Mer-ee-koon" sets out, and encounters the yogurt riders.
THERE WERE A DOZEN OF US, riding the immense central Asian grassland on sturdy Mongolian horses. When I glanced back for a view of the glacier and the sacred mountain we had just visited, I saw two tiny specks inching down the steep windswept hillside, moving in our direction. I turned on my horse, and glassed the hill with a little four power Russian monocle. The pursuing riders were coming towards us at a stiff trot. They were at least two miles back and about 1000 feet above us. Each man held something in his right hand. I could plainly see the glint of metal.
"They carrying," one of the Americans asked.
"Yeah," I said, "both of them."
Bayarra Sanjaasuren, our translator, conveyed the information to the Mongolian wranglers. This was serious: We had yogurt riders on our tail. Again.
"Tchoo," half a dozen men shouted at once.
Tchoo is the Mongolian equivalent of "giddiup." Mongolian horses respond smartly to tchoo, no matter who says it. Guy next to you says "tchoo," you're off at a gallop. We were riding a dozen men abreast because Mongolians do not ride in single file. A defeated army, they say, rides single file. And now, with the dreaded yogurt riders in pursuit, our little party sounded like the whole first grade trying to imitate a locomotive.
"Tchoo, tchoo ...
"Tchoo, tchoo, tchoo ..."
Significantly, there is no Mongolian word that corresponds to "whoa."
We'd been riding eight to twelve hours a day, every day, for a week, and I was fairly comfortable in the old Russian cavalry saddle I'd been given. It was a pair of metal hoops on a wooden frame, covered over in peeling leather stuffed with horse hair. The stirrups were metal hoops connected to the frame with rawhide straps. The Mongolians in our party rode ornate handcarved wooden saddles, the best of them festooned with beaten silver medallions.
"Tchoo," I said, and stood up a bit in the saddle so my horse could stretch into his long gallop.
The ground we were approaching, however, was humped up in the marshy tussocks characteristic of soil that is permanently frozen a few feet below the surface. We were only at about 48 degrees north — about the latitude of Seattle — but cold fronts originating in Siberia, to our north, seem to flow down the great Yenisey River, Northern Asia's Amazon, and funnel into Mongolia. Nowhere else in the hemisphere does permafrost extend so far south.
Trees can not grow in permafrost, and here, in the shadow of the mountain called Otgontenger, with bare hillsides rising to 10,000 feet on all sides, we were sitting ducks. We could run, but we couldn't hide. There were no fences, no roads, no trees, no telephone poles, no buildings, no cattle or livestock of any kind. It was just us: a dozen or so men, one woman, along with several pack horses and a string of remounts, all of us dwarfed under the immense vault of the sky.
If our party had consisted solely of Mongolians, it might have had a chance. But there were seven Americans in our group, and — with one exception — we couldn't outpace a pair of determined Mongolian horsemen with only a two mile lead.
As we hit the hummocky marshland, our horses settled into a short hammering trot, which is the gait favored by Mongol riders who want to make time. Mongolian herdsmen churn butter by strapping a jug of milk to the saddle, and trotting for ten minutes. This is the truth. I had a bottle of aspirin in my saddle kit, and it had long ago been reduced to powder.
Every night, as I tried to massage what ever it was that was sore and measured out my dose of powdered aspirin, I thought about this: Mongols have a reputation of being the best horsemen on earth, while their horses have what must be the world's most punishing gait. It was, I concluded, the nature of the land itself that produced this jackhammer trot.
Often the ground was marshy, but studded with grassy hummocks, so that a horse either ran tussock to tussock, or it stayed in equally uneven footing of the marsh. Additionally, there were marmot holes everywhere. In places where springs flowed out of rock walls, the relatively warm water melted the permafrost below, and, on a warm summer day, a horse could sink into mud up to its withers.
The horses knew the land, and they made their way over it in a jouncing weaving sort of way. The short punishing gait — I wasn't the only American who called it "the Mongolian Death Trot" — fit the terrain perfectly. A horse that extended — that stretched out his trot or gallop — was a horse that was going to break a leg, which is to say, it was a dead horse. Mongolia is a harsh land, and only the fittest survive.
Our Mongolian companions, raised in the saddle, simply stood up in their stirrups on legs made of spring steel and pneumatic shock absorbers. The trot was too jouncy for me to raise and lower myself in the saddle, as western riders do. I could stand, like the Mongolians, but for only a few minutes at a time. Sitting, I had the sensation of internal organs shaking loose. When I looked back after an hour, the yogurt riders had halved the distance between our parties.
* * *
Mongolia, sometimes called Outer Mongolia, is an independent country. Inner Mongolia, which borders Mongolia on the east, is part of China and it was the Chinese who coined the what has become a hated terminology: Inner Mongolia is closer to Beijing; Outer Mongolia is further away.
In fact, the country isn't outer to anywhere. Mongolia is set square in the center of Asia, and lies between Russian Siberia to the north and China to the South. It is protected by impressive natural boundaries: the Altai Mountains rise to 14,000 feet in the west; to the north are the dense forests of the Siberian taiga; to the south and east is the Gobi desert, the coldest, most northerly desert on earth, a place where trekkers still find dinosaur bones scattered across the wind shattered gravel-like sands. These natural boundaries protect the grazing lands of the steppes, in the interior of the country. The average altitude is just about a mile above sea level, making Mongolia one of the highest countries in the world.
Landlocked, mountainous, and far the moderating influence of any ocean, Mongolia offers some truly operatic weather: 90 degree summer days, 60 degree below zero winter nights, and 24 hour temperature swings of 80 degrees and more. A European friar, John of Plano Carpini, who visited Mongolia in 1245, called the weather "astonishingly irregular." He experienced "fierce thunder and lightening" that "caused the death of many men, and at the same time there (were) heavy falls of snow." Carpini lived through an absurdly fierce hailstorm, which was followed by such warm weather that the resultant flash flood killed 160 people. He thought the country "more wretched than I could possibly say."
There was a time when geographers, expressing a kind of universal medieval dread, called Mongolia "the dead heart of Asia." The people who survived there, supposedly, were barbarians, nomadic herdsmen with no culture and no interest in agriculture. Every few centuries, throughout the whole of recorded history, these "uncivilized" Mongolians came bursting out of their high cold plateau on horseback to conquer any peoples who stood in their way. Once, in the 13th Century, they conquered the known world.
Mongolians, like many people who live in cold climates, tend to be physically bigger than their southern neighbors, and I imagined them pouring down on, say, the smaller Chinese: Merciless barbarians, armies of huge men on fast horses wearing boiled leather armor, their faces smeared with sheep fat against the cold and wind and sun.
So, thundering across the steppes on a Mongolian horse, in company with Mongolian horsemen, carried a certain savage hormonal rush, like tearing up the highway on a Harley with a pack of Hell's Angels.
But the horses, when I first saw them, didn't inspire confidence. They were small and ratty, with big gawky heads. No animal was of any one single color. They were all about half wild and there was a rodeo every morning when we tried to saddle them up. Flapping rain jackets spooked them. Shadows cast by the campfire set them bucking. A sneeze could start a stampede.
On the other hand, they were fast, and by far the toughest horses I'd ever ridden. They could survive in conditions that would kill any other horse on earth. The animals graze on their own — they are never fed — and yet live through 60 below winter nights, cutting through snow and ice with their hooves for something to eat. Unshod, our horses routinely put in 30 mile days, accumulating as much as 8000 feet of altitude change. And they did it day after tireless day.
The herdsmen inspected their horses for sores or bruises, they doctored them when it was necessary, and rested them when they were tired. They knew each horse intimately — probably saw it born, probably broke it — but they were never sentimental. Mongolians name their horses about as often as Americans name their cars.
And the horses served the same function as cars. They were transportation devices, meant to be kept in superb running condition. Out on the roadless grassland, a horse was the essential link to the outside world: to the market, to the nearest town, or school, or hospital.
Mongolians in the country side literally learn to ride about the time they learn to walk. Not one of them has ever attended Miss Prissy's Academy of Equine Etiquette. They gallop right up behind you and give your horse a smart swat on the backside if they want to race. And, in my experience, they always want to race.
* * *
There were seven of us from America, and, for what it's worth, I thought it was a fairly impressive group. Arelene Burns, a well known river guide, had been Meryl Streep's rowing coach in the film The River Wild. I believe Meryl does Arlene in that film: I recognized the confidence, the feminine athletic swagger, even the hair style.
Christoph Schork was a pilot and ski instructor in Idaho. He rode his own horse in marathon 100 mile mountain races and was the only one of us who might have had a chance against the yogurt riders.
Photographer Dave Edwards, was working on a photo book about men who hunted with eagles in the Altai Mountains. He guided horse trips out of northern Mongolia to pay his expenses. Jackson Frishman, 18, was the son of a woman Dave had guided with when he worked the Grand Canyon. Jackson had a lot of white water experience and wanted to be a river guide himself. Michael Abbot, a computer networking expert, was an avid fly fisherman who'd spent a good deal of time camping along salmon and steelhead streams in Alaska.
Kent Maiden, of Boojum Expeditions, was our guide. We were all getting a break on the price of the trip because it was an exploratory. Kent had never been to this area of Mongolia before and couldn't vouch for the quality of the horses we'd ride. Or the wranglers who'd ride with us. There were no guarantees. Whatever happened, happened.
What happened was yogurt riders.
For my part, I'd been trying, and failing, to get to Mongolia for over 15 years. In my saddle kit, I had eight plastic ziplock bags, full of human hair — hair cut from the heads of Mongolian herdsmen and women.
It was what I had traveled to Mongolia to get. I am a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, located at Oregon State University where they believe, fervently, that the earth is a giant hairball.
Although no one knows the absolute average number, humans naturally shed an enormous amount of hair every day. Cosmeticians figure that number at about 170 daily strands. If so, the average human being sheds a little over 3.5 million hairs over a 60 year life span. The figure is significant to the cutting edge of archeology.
Not far from my home in south central Montana, for instance, there are several "early man" sites. One was populated by humans as early as 14,000 years ago. There's a lot of naturally shed human hair buried at that and other sites. Previously, archeologists, searching for the first Americans, discarded human hair in their digs. They tended to study bone fragments and stone artifacts.
There were problems with this approach. The first was cultural: some native American groups saw the exhumation of bone fragments as a kind of grave robbing. Secondly, stone artifacts, such as Clovis points, could be dated by standard techniques, but isolating the technology in time sheds very little light on the identity of the people who embraced the culture. If Clovis points were effective, wouldn't various groups of people adopt them, humans being human. Is someone who drives a Honda Japanese or American, African or Latin?
The study of naturally shed human hair at prehistoric campsites does not desecrate graves and provides important, confirmable information as to the identity of the people who populated those sites. Race can be accurately determined by microscopic and DNA analysis of human hair. That is the work being done by Dr. Rob Bonnichson at the Center for the Study of the First Americans. Field and lab work is focused on the single question: who were the first Americans.
The theory, of course, is that, during the last ice age, when great volumes of water were concentrated at the poles and in various glaciers, the sea level was perhaps 400 feet lower than it is today. The Bering Strait, today a 53 mile waterway separating Asia and the Americas, was left high and dry. It was probably a vast grassland, alive with woolly mammoth, which humans, acting in concert, could kill and eat. They likely used spears tipped with Clovis or other points.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In Search of Adventure by Bruce Northam, Brad Olsen. Copyright © 1999 Bruce Northam Brad Olsen. Excerpted by permission of Consortium of Collective Consciousness.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Page,
Acknowledgements,
Prologue,
Introduction,
SIMPLY AMAZING - The Wild and the Wacky,
SO THAT'S HOW IT WORKS - ... Or Does It?,
MISTAKEN IDENTITY - Who (or What) Are You?,
SERENDIPITY AND FRIENDSHIP - The Kaleidoscope of Personality,
GLOBAL ISSUES AND VIEWPOINTS - Lost (and Found) Idealism,
BOY, WAS I A BONEHEAD OR WHAT? - Misadventures,
INTIMACY - Love on the Move,
INNER QUEST - The Will and the Why,
INTREPID ARCHETYPES - They Broke the Mold ...,
TRAMPLED UNDERFOOT - The elusion of boredom isn't always a vacation.,
BEGINNINGS - Setting Out,
THRIFTY TRAVEL SAVVY - Cheap Tricks,
GOING HOME - The Final Hurdle,
Author Bios and Quotes,