Book Review, Kate Harris, Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road, New York, 2018.
Because I am gearing up for years of travel across America, especially the West, I am reading books of adventure travel. I have reread Travels with Charley of course, and the published journal of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 descent of the Green and Colorado Rivers. I’m making a somewhat disappointed run at James and Deborah Fallows’ Our Towns: A 100,000 mile Journey into the Heart of America, and I will follow that with William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways.
I was heading out the door the other day when I spotted Kate Harris’ Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road (2018) on one of my bookshelves. Maybe I noticed it the way you notice a new vocabulary word, thanks to the word “borders” in the title, because I’ve read so much recently about the ways in which even the United States is coming apart at the seams, with serious talk about regional secession and a redrawing of state borders. I read about half the book on airplanes while making my way to Norfolk, VA, and finished it a few days ago when I came up for air. It’s an account of Harris’ bicycle trek on the Silk Road from the eastern frontier of Europe into the heart of Asia. She traveled with Melissa Yule, an old friend, from Istanbul to Kashmir through Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tibet, Nepal, and India. Border crossings become one of the main threads of the book: natural borders, artificial borders, metaphoric borders, psychological borders, the border of self. Two young women on a very long journey on heavily laden bicycles through difficult and sometimes dangerous and violent landscapes, including several semi-clandestine transits of parts of Tibet, with checkpoints of the sort you associate with Checkpoint Charlie. What could go wrong?
Amazingly, they not only survive but prevail. It’s a story of gritty endurance, and Harris makes no attempt to romanticize the journey. What makes this book great is not the journey story per se, but the quality of mind of the author. A Rhodes Scholar born in Ontario and now living in an off-the-grid cabin in British Columbia near the Yukon border, Harris’ story is not so much the day-to-day work of traveling thousands of miles on a low budget in capricious terrains as it is an account of how a remarkable, well-read, and thoughtful person transforms what might be regarded as a feat into a journey in the fullest sense of the term. We meet not just the Dalai Lama but also the Turkish reformist Ataturk and the Sufi poet Rumi. The British romantic poet Shelley makes a brief appearance, as do the contemporary novelist Michael Ondaatje and the philosopher Simone Weil. Harris wears her erudition lightly.
Lest you begin to fantasize, Harris reminds us, fairly often, that these two young women sometimes went days without a shower. Their clothes were often rank. They were occasionally too exhausted at the end of a long day on the road to do more than throw down their sleeping bags and pass out. She reports that by the end of the immense journey, their legs looked like sticks with a wad of chewing gum stuck on the back. There were moments of tension between them. “After nearly a year on the road, it was a wonder anything still worked, especially our friendship. … Both of us craved solitude as much as company, and more than anything it was this ability to be alone together that let us survive the trip” (Page 282).
Among other things, Harris is an excellent writer. It is a pleasure to drink in her prose. As I read through the book, I admitted to myself that I am not particularly interested in the Silk Road, in part because it tends to draw semi-wealthy Europeans and Americans who “do the Silk Road” by way of expensive outfitted tours that drop into and then quickly off of the actual trail. If I were going on a big life-risking trek it would not be there. But the excellence of Lands of Lost Borders is not finally about the physical journey, but about what happens to an interesting young intellectual and adventurer who chooses to undertake such a physical journey. Listen to this early sentence: “Travelling by bicycle is a life of simple things taken seriously: hunger, thirst, friendship, the weather, the stutter of the world beneath you” (Page 2). Simple things taken seriously. All the best travel does just that.
Harris had me at my first conscious exposure to the word “heliopause” (Page 12), “the outermost boundary of our solar system.” Because she had the benefit of a superb education — UNC, Oxford, MIT — she is able to evoke other explorers with grace. Her references to Lewis and Clark (with whom, somewhat vaguely, she claims some family relation), Alexandra David-Néel, Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, and Marco Polo deepen the discourse without ever being distracting or pretentious. Harris is pretty hard on Darwin, who was seasick for much of his famous five-year journey on the Beagle, and who settled down to a bland and sedentary life after returning to Britain. There is a good deal of self-warning here. Of course, Darwin also changed the way the world sees life, but who’s counting? And Harris becomes increasingly disillusioned with poor Marco Polo, who was more interested in commercial matters than she reckons a great explorer should be. Childhood heroes seldom hold up against scrutiny.
Making Sense of Carl Sagan’s Golden Record
Harris twice attempts to make sense of Professor Sagan’s work on the Golden Record, the 12-inch gold plated copper disk featuring sounds of the Earth that was attached to the Voyager I spacecraft. Assuming that superior aliens first of all encountered Voyager I, and secondly figured out how to “play” the record, they’d hear Bach, Azeri bagpipes, Morse code, a Navajo chant, Blind Willie Johnson, Beethoven, the sound of a humpback whale, Azerbaijani folk music, and much more, including spoken greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages. The record also includes 115 images, mathematical symbols, and much more. Maybe the best moment in this excellent book reflects on narrative and the Golden Record. “The farther I traveled along the Silk Road, the more the Golden Record seemed a lie. … Far more revealing than what was included in that cosmic message-in-a-bottle, I’d come to realize, is what Sagan and his committee left out, namely details like women twitching alone on sidewalks. In fact, the record doesn’t contain any hint of war or greed or death or cruelty. … Sagan’s committee passed countless judgments on what was meaningful about life on Earth, and ultimately decided to present, with few exceptions, our best and brightest side to the cosmos. As a result, Golden Record reads like a sanitized encyclopedia of earthly existence.” (Page 267). Harris knows, of course, why a more truthful recording of what it is to be human on earth would never have been approved by NASA or the U.S. government. But she is surely right that reform and revolution must begin with the courage to tell the truth. She is equally hard on the “Overview Effect,” where astronauts ritually rhapsodize that from space there are no distinctions worth fighting over. With a little more than her characteristic snark, Harris writes, “Astronauts rave about how they can’t see any borders from low Earth orbit, yet the whole enterprise of space exploration is fueled by a rapid nationalism. The same loyalty to arbitrary lines that sparked the Cold War also launched humans to the moon” (Page 162). In fact, had I been her editor, I would have suggested that the title be not Lands of Lost Borders, but Loyalty to Arbitrary Lines.
Harris’ writing is almost always a real delight to consume. Page 19, for example, contains the best use of “ilk” I have ever read. “The middle-aged cashier had seen our ilk before.” Or this excellent sentence: “… the paved highway we faced, edged by enormous powerlines that made the sound of knuckles cracking” (Page 239). And how about this great passage: “Around every bend in the road I braced myself for a police convoy, a glimpse of the plateau, a woolly mammoth. Nothing would have surprised me, for the world seemed less unknown than unknowable, wavering around me like a half-formed thought.” There, just as the passage was beginning to feel a little abstract, she adds. “Then I realized I was dizzy with thirst” (Page 24). Or how about, “Mel and I biked up the pass side by side, barely speaking, sent into parallel solitudes by the effort of the climb” (Page 27). Or — even better and getting at one of the central themes of the book — “What if borders at their most basic are just desires written onto lands and lives, trying to foist permanence on the fact of flux?” (Page 33).
You don’t just write like that. You have to bring a very interesting consciousness (serious education, the hard reading, endless honing of writing skills, and an understanding how to condense big thoughts into a small handful of words) to produce such passages. There was, inevitably, a lot of thinking time on the great bicycle trek, but what it suggested to me was that the trek itself — from one flat tire to the next, one iffy hostel to another — was in some ways the least interesting thing about this book.
Harris wanted to experience Tibet, which is not an easy quest for a random person to accomplish. Thank goodness she is not Richard Gere, making an impassioned statement about China’s oppressions in Tibet at the 1993 Academy Awards. There is such rigor in Harris’ experience of things that she avoids the common tropes. Most movies and books, she says, “depicted a lush, paradisiacal Himalayan aerie hidden in Tibet, falsely fixing the place in popular imagination as a kind of prelapsarian refuge, a place of mystical innocence and immortality.” Prelapsarian. Splendid. Then this: “The real Tibetan Plateau, or at least the western corner we’d biked so far, was by contrast, ‘beyond doubt among the world’s bleakest stretches.’” She’s quoting Nehru here. With similar commitment to truth, Harris writes, “perhaps because searching for wildness on civilization’s oldest was a flawed premise from the start” (Page 91).
The Nature of Exploration
As a Lewis and Clark scholar, I found myself making notes in the margins about the nature of exploration. Each of Harris’ passages on this subject helped me to think about the issue in a new way. Here’s her cut-through-the-red-tape description of the Doctrine of Discovery (recently repudiated by Pope Francis): “By contrast, greed and ego — both on the individual and national scale — were the driving forces of exploration, with everyone gunning to claim all they could of the world before someone beat them to it” (Page 57). Or in a more personal mode, years earlier gazing at a poster of Mount Everest: “I stared at the poster with a mountain-shaped hole in my heart and longed to be anywhere in that wildness, that slant of light so intense you could lean into it and be held” (Page 61). This is another of Harris’ gifts as a writer. I would be hard pressed to provide a prosaic paraphrase of the last fourteen words of this passage, but I immediately understood what she was feeling.
Oxford taught Harris that “The history of exploration … was basically synonymous with imperial expansion and indigenous repression — a rather cringe-worthy legacy for an endeavour I once deemed so essentially wondrous and searching” (Page 62). This generalization is too harsh. I found myself wanting to get into a long conversation with Harris over a cup of one of the many exotic teas she consumed as gifts of Central Asian people who lived in what we would call abject poverty. Was Captain James Cook’s journey to Tahiti to observe the 1769 Transit of Venus about “imperial expansion and indigenous repression”? Lewis and Clark may have been the tip of the spear of several hundred years of dispossession and cultural genocide, but even critics of colonialism give them largely high marks for a kind of Enlightenment-era innocence. You have to strain the evidence a bit — in our post-colonial righteousness — to see Lewis and Clark as agents of empire, though assuredly they were just that from a certain perspective. A sentence from page 218 perfectly sums up the distinction between Meriwether Lewis and William Clark: “… the fact that the same road leads different people different places.” In my book on the subject, I say, “Lewis and Clark may have made the same trip, but were on very different journeys.” “Nobody is perfect,” Harris writes, “not even explorers, which doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of a selective kind of worship” (Page 192). Agreed. And worship is not too strong a term. The only historical gaff in Harris’ periodic references to Lewis and Clark is that she succumbs to the tenacious Sacagawea myth: “he and William Clark followed Sacajawea across the American continent to the Pacific Ocean and back” (Page 189.) Emissary maybe, guide not.
Harris spends some time defending Neil Armstrong for being a dull explorer. She’s right, of course, that an explorer who sees wonders can never really find the language to describe the sublime to sedentary interlocutors who never leave asphalt. “What was it like to be first? I would’ve done the same had I ever met him, knowing even as I voiced such questions that they were profoundly unoriginal, but wouldn’t any other line of small talk seem frivolous?” (Page 182).
Perhaps without knowing it, Harris attends to the post-exploratory letdown that has beset many of the most notable explorers, including Buzz Aldrin (when you’ve been to the Moon, what’s left?) and Meriwether Lewis, about whom I have written extensively and always with a sense of saddened awe. She writes, “The true risks of travel are disappointment and transformation: the fear you’ll be the same person when you go home, and the fear you won’t” (Page 272). Both Lewis and Aldrin had severe re-entry problems. Poor Buzz wound up on Dancing with the Stars — from the “magnificent desolation” of the Moon to the mindless mediocrity of allowing oneself to be lured into a television dance contest. Lewis could never find a post-expeditionary equilibrium. He took his own life just four years after bestriding the source of the “mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri River.” Lewis never wrote the required three-volume account of his great journey. Harris reminds us that Polo wisely dictated his account. Eventually, she concludes, “All explorers must die of heartbreak” (her italics, Page 246).
Harris’ environmental concerns are clear throughout the book, but never strident. Like this: “After all, glaciers everywhere are vulnerable to the slow devastation of climate change, the war that extravagant lifestyles in North America and Europe are waging daily against ice” (Page 221).
Just three thoughts in conclusion. First, I cannot emphasize enough how much I urge you to read this book. Second, at its best it is not really about a bike trip, which is merely the clothesline on which Harris gracefully hangs a great deal of fascinating, sometimes profound and pertinent meditation. You don’t even have to own a bike to love this book! Third, I hope she writes more, much more, and I hope her next book is not about a wild adventure, a Kate Harris sequel journey. What I want is more of her densely populated and evolving consciousness.