karakoram highway

You’re in Kashgar, and you might as well tour the Karakoram highway, the passage to Pakistan. Nine hours there and back to Karakul Lake in a minibus. From the barrenness of Kashgar up to a boulder field with a gray opaque river running through it, past rust-colored, steep, furrowed mountains, to a huge gray plateau at 9,000 feet elevation covered in a layer of clay and water and surrounded by mountains made of white sand, then up to a black mirror lake at 10,000' with views of snow blowing off the peaks of the 21,000' Kunlun mountains behind it. Is the promise of the brochures. Put on a scarf.

Two hundred kilometers out of Kashgar to the lake. A stop in Upal to collect naan, tea and pomegranates. Coming up the road you first see the red foothills – iron. Copper too, says the driver. And the mining tunnels and the machinery, not much but enough to have presence. Behind the hills a mirage of snow peaks, like a fata morgana. The other passengers scrutinize the sky and say I don’t see it, but there it is, up there, floating above the rust hills. Everybody yearns to get closer. But first, a checkpoint, a soldier firing a rifle toward the hills, papers fluttered in the air, papers stamped, a face and an American passport scrutinized. The bureaucracy maintains the lines that say where China ends and Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Afghanstan, and India begin. Disembark, walk across a line, get back in the minibus, drive away.

The road winds. Brushes past overhanging rock walls. Ends suddenly, continues on gravel reroute. Five hundred workers died building it. They get a stone pillar marked with some words at the side of a road that is still at parts unpaved. The minibus pitches and yaws. It sweats up the hills. Everybody falls asleep or turns green. In the place of traffic cones, boulders are rolled into the street and painted with red and white stripes. An eighteen wheeler has plunged off the edge of a road. The crushed cab and cargo load is still there, a cautionary tale. The government or the driver’s family or whoever should be responsible does not have the wherewithal or the ambition to remove the wreck.

The minibus goes past boulders the size of refrigerators, trucks, houses. The houses are stacked up rocks mortared with pulverized rocks and water. Every few miles there are two such houses, and a goat, or a donkey, or a dozen sheep. The guide says more people live to be 100 in the mountains than they do anywhere else, but the long life is simple and lonesome. In the distance, the array of sixty red-roofed buildings? A settlement built for the mountain people. No word on whether it is occupied.

The other occupants – older, Chinese, friendly, protective – say: how old are you? Thirty-one? I would have guessed sixteen or seventeen. That’s a doll’s face. You look so young. America? I thought Chinese. That's a Chinese face, dollface. What do Americans think of China? What do Americans think of the depreciation of the U.S. dollar vis-à-vis the renmingbi? De-pre-ci-ation. You know, economic development? Development. Don’t you speak Chinese? What does it feel like to come from America to a country where every face is yellow? What kind of a bank does your mother work in? Does California have good beef noodle soup? Then why is there a fast food chain called "California Beef Noodle Soup" in China? Say “Michael Jackson” in English. What do you think of American education? Is it true that American children don’t have study habits? How could you not know what the Donghua cave paintings are? Can you see stars from the airplane if you fly at night? The men’s room is that direction. No - you’re a woman? I thought you were a man! Or, I couldn’t tell, and we guessed but – hmm! Really, I couldn’t tell!

Everybody smiles, it’s like you have four more parents, the curiosity and chatter never feels oppressive or probing, only familiar, and they invite you to dinner after the tour. They lean across your legs without asking to take photos. It's all very familiar.

The driver puts on the most inane and heteronormative music ever recorded that repeats for the next six hours of driving. Song #1, male lead: “Being a man is tiring / so tiring / everybody knows / woman is a rose / taking care of her tires me out / this is my punishment / my punishment.” Song #2, alternating male and female voices: “Pretty girl marry me, if you married somebody else I would so devastated / I’m a pretty girl, I’m going to be married / Pretty girl, marry me,” und so weider, ad infinitum, until the audience froths and reaches for the airsickness bag. Then the man who leaned over your legs leans over again and asks, “Hey, is that a male voice or a female voice?” It’s a high clear soprano, so you say, “A woman?” He says, “No! That’s a man! He’s very popular now.” That high flute of a falsetto makes you rethink every nasty thing you just spent the last hour thinking.

On the road, there are only mountains, boulders, rivers, pools of still water, and low, crushed grass. No trees. No explanations or only incomprehensible Chinese language explanations, so you are only left to imagine life on this section of connecting trade route to the Silk Road. The dirty ancients grubbing a passage over high, treacherous terrain. Bored, frostbitten prostitutes at the caravanserai fondling the unwashed parts of traders. How much measured in Hotan jade a strong central Asian steed traded for. Bandits descending from a furrow in the mountain to slaughter a merchant, steal a cargo of spices, break the axels. The watchful eyes of the mountain people, their lifetimes on horseback, in yurts, gnawing sheep. Mystics barefoot in caves. Talking monkeys. Flying carpets. No guide or curator or book cures these imaginations, so they just run on and on, like bandits descending from the mountain furrow, like central Asian steeds, like mining trucks undeterred by the red and white striped boulders on the road, for a moment flying free.

At the lake, you ride a horse in front of a Kyrgyz boy who slaps it into a gallop. You squeal and clutch at the saddle. The horse runs to the lake and dips suddenly, and you hear thhhup thhhup thhhup as it sucks up water. Karakul means “black,” but the wide, flat surface is today a robin’s egg blue that reflects a blurry striated double of the unfathomable peaks beyond it. You’re not there long and the structure of the adventure feels schlocky but the view is magic, and the imagination will last forever.