As we approach the towering Altai mountains, it becomes clear to me that the interaction we had with people in China, modest though it seemed at the time, is a thing of the past; that the P2P, which is taking us through such extraordinary country, is not going to yield the connection with the local populace of which I’d dreamed. On the positive side, this stokes a disproportionate delight when I finally see a Mongolian on horseback. There he is, a young man on a small but well-fed black pony. His blousy cotton shirt, cinched with a wide belt, billows in the ever-present wind. A long, willowy stick with a lash of string at its tip, with which he moves his goat herd, rests lightly on his shoulder. He’s like a centaur, my own personal myth come true. After driving for hours through landscape that doesn’t change, seeing anyone at all is cause for delirious joy. To see both a person and a horse at the same time? Well, I’d given up hope. He’s a beautiful sight, a man and his horse in landscape that suits them both. We stare at each other. Out here in the true middle of nowhere, we’re as astonishing to him as he is to us.
On the negative side, my tiredness each day is mounting, and the more spent I feel, the more of a struggle it is to maintain cheeriness. I’ve always been moody, the child described by puzzled adults as perpetually having a dark cloud over her head. One of the tasks I’ve set myself for the Rally is to put extra effort into being a good sport. Luckily, I have good people to learn from.
That evening in Bayankhongor, we join Robert and Maddy for dinner. “How was your day today?” I ask Robert, setting my dinner tray on the table. He ignores my question and says instead, “Let me get you a beer,” and leaves. When he returns he plunks the chilled bottle on the table, gives my shoulders one of those squeezy little massage things, sits down, and bestows on me a devilish grin. “My day, you asked? Awful! Terrible! Right Maddy?” and he laughs so hard I’m not sure what to make of it.
She smiles broadly and elaborates, “We had six flats today.” Robert is now wiping tears from his eyes, running his fingers through his dustcoated hair and mussing it into startled spikes.
“Six flats!” he echoes her. “I’m a lucky man.”
“You are?” I ask, utterly lost.
“Yes. Because I brought seven spares.” He howls with merriment.
Maddy bestows an affectionate, bemused glance on Robert. “Didn’t that drive you crazy?” I ask her.
“What for? It gave me time to be out of the car and rest.” Her hair, too, is sticking up in spikes, but on her it’s fashionable, aided by the touch of lipstick and tight-fitting white T-shirt she’s put on for dinner. I make a mental note to buy a sexy white shirt, ignoring that there are no shops to buy anything in, even if I did have time to do so.
I’m not the only one struggling. The web of anxiety in which I’m often entangled has snagged others as well. The atmosphere in the camp’s dining tent at night is no longer as convivial as it used to be. Laughter is scarcer. People slump over their plates, eyes staring unseeingly at their carrots, too worried or tired or frustrated to talk. The whole tone of the Rally has changed. I hear that one of our early friends in Beijing, Ralph, is so lost that even GPS coordinates can’t locate him for rescue. As I learn later in Russia, he and his son will spend two days sipping warm orange Fanta and nibbling severely rationed crackers before a local truck drives by and rescues them, after which they complete a superhuman 72-hour drive, without sleep, to catch up to us. A tiny Fiat has disappeared. No one knows where they are or even how to find them, let alone make contact. I figure it’s only a matter of time before Roxanne has a catastrophic breakdown in some lonely corner of a lonely corner. I’ll be left there to ration lemon Luna bars, while Bernard’s tiny figure disappears over the far tawny hills to seek help.
The organizers are forever on their radios, trying to find other lost crews, organizing trucks to haul wrecked Rolls Royces. The last time there was a general mood of euphoria was over the champagne in Kharkorin. Tension grips the camp. Day runs into night runs into day. Many teams don’t pull in till midnight; others depart at midnight, fraught with concern that they won’t be able to complete the next day’s distance. The mechanics are inundated with demands for repairs, welds, tows, spares. They catnap in half-hour stretches, running on caffeine and nicotine and nerves. As for their lighthearted promise of taking care of cars in the order signed in? Never happens. Whoever whines loudest gets their attention. Everyone is zombie-like with exhaustion. People quickly gulp a few bites of food and then return to working on their crippled cars. When someone learns of a good mechanic or a well-equipped repair shop in town they guard it like classified information, a national secret not to be revealed.
There’s other bad news. Someone’s had their entire tool bag stolen while working under their car on a village side street. During the day people of course have to work on their car wherever it breaks down. In Mongolia that means a sand pit, a gravely track, a rocky slope. If a Rally mechanic’s van happens by, they stop to ask if you need help. If you do, they give it. If you think you can manage on your own, you give the classic OK sign, tip of thumb and index finger pinched together in a circle, remaining three fingers sticking up in the air. They continue on, looking for someone in worse trouble. I have no worries about things getting stolen while driving the desert. There’s no one around to take anything. At day’s end, when we’re near a village, it’s another story. In villages, people flock to our cars like thirsty goats to a stream. In the case of the stolen tool bag, everyone assumes it was a local, though I’m not above suspecting one of those Rally crews who came equipped with only a screwdriver and a wrench. I find it easy to understand how a satchel full of tools would make a tempting target. People are so poor here that even one tool would be worth a relative fortune. When Bernard works on Roxanne in a town I’m always standing guard while he’s underneath. This job pleases me to no end. I’ve finally found a way to have some face time with the locals.
My outsiderness is engraved on everything about me, from my clothes and shoes, to the quantity of pens stashed in Roxanne’s glove compartment. Even the soft layer of fat around my hips speaks to my well-being and thereby my otherness, though that layer is slowly shrinking thanks to my diet of gorp, jerky, and worry. Then, there’s the small matter of Roxanne. She’s hard not to notice. All this makes me an object of magnetic allure, and when we reach a town and try to accomplish repairs, I instantly draw a crowd. People swarm around like kids to a traveling circus. I’m the three rings and the elephant in a pink tutu combined.
It’s flattering, in an awkward way. I’m not above a few minutes of preening, until I realize the crowds aren’t the least bit interested in me. What they want to see, touch, sit in, is Roxanne. They jostle four deep around her. Every bit of car minutiae is a fabulous novelty that thrills them. Seat belts are tried on, windshield visors flapped up and down, the chunky plastic clips on them unclipped and pinched onto fingers and noses, wipers plucked like stiff guitar strings, plastic storage boxes popped open and snapped shut. Roxanne’s tail lights, fenders, steering wheel, and tires are knocked on, marveled at, twisted, caressed. As I stand aside like a proud mother, happy that Roxanne is able to offer such pleasure, I can’t help keeping a surreptitious eye on the movable belongings in the car. We need them all.
The towns that we pass through, or where we stop in hopes of more accommodating repair options, are plain and impoverished. I see row upon row of squat concrete houses, many with rebar sticking from the roof like a scraggly mohawk, walls gaping with holes where windows would be. Still, a village bespeaks humanity, and I’ll take a brief sojourn among even the most derelict of buildings when the alternative is fourteen more hours on desert gravel, cresting washboards the size of storm waves, heading straight into the afternoon sun. By culture and custom, Mongolians are a nomadic people, kind and generous when they’re not conquering neighboring countries. They have a fine decorative sense, lining their mobile gers with exquisitely colored and carved interiors. Unfortunately, they’ve been beset by mining interests from China, with its insatiable need for all the minerals that exist under Mongolia’s parched lands. Rich in copper, coal, and gold, the issuance of mining licenses has turned Mongolia’s economy into the fastest growing in the world in 2011, and prompted some citizens to start calling their homeland “Minegolia.” Formerly open grazing lands have been fenced off to protect the new mines, leaving families without enough land on which to sustain their herds. Selling their animals in hopes of securing a job in town, they wind up with neither. Without animals, they can’t return to the countryside as they’d have nothing to live on if they did.
While the move to town may have cost them their livelihoods, they haven’t lost their sense of hospitality. The people who jostle around all welcome me. Broad, gap-toothed smiles crinkle deeply lined walnut-brown faces. Some extend their calloused hands to clasp one of mine in both of theirs, in a long and hearty shake. So I’m doubly happy that I at least have a chance to contribute a little novelty to the hard lives of these displaced people. They’ve become town dwellers by circumstance, not by desire. Without jobs, they wander the streets, cluster around shops with bare shelves, share a hand-rolled cigarette to pass the time.
In one town, we find a handy repair spot. It’s a chipped and stained concrete ramp that someone built by the side of a street in the middle of town. It slants upward at a 45 degree angle clearly meant to elevate a car and has a gap running down the middle so you can stand underneath your car to work on it. Better yet, it’s open to the air, not housed in someone’s shop, which means that it’s free for anyone to use. We feel very fortunate indeed that, when we drive by, the ramp is clear of other vehicles. That there’s a mound of garbage in the gap between the two slanted slabs of concrete, where street dogs are nosing around for breakfast, is only a momentary deterrence.
As the usual crowd starts to mass, Bernard backs Roxanne up the ramp. Their collective intake of breath seems to suck the oxygen out of the atmosphere, as everyone waits for him to make a mistake, toppling Roxanne off the incline into the garbage below. Bernard is masterful, and when he cuts the engine and jumps heedlessly into the trash heap, the crowd does a collective hop of glee and surges forward. I stand high on the ramp, handing down tools for the usual shock absorber removal. From up there I notice a small girl, on the outskirts of the crowd, holding her mother’s hand. They both look curious, but too shy to force their way forward.
Politely pushing aside the men intently knocking on Roxanne’s fenders, I manage to open the trunk. I’m looking for something in my sack of giveaways that would please a child. I find it: a six-inch high stuffed brown and white teddy bear. By the time I make my way through the crowd, the mother and child are gone. I scan about, finally picking them out near the end of the street, the mother striding purposefully away, clutching her daughter’s arm, the child trotting along beside her in a ragged red dress, her head turned back toward me. I run to them and hold the toy out for the child to take. She stands stock still. Instead of reaching out a hand she looks at her mother. Her mother is impassive, not encouraging. I feel ridiculous. In the world of what these two need, a stuffed animal is not high on the list. Then again, a toy is a toy. I squat down, take the child’s hand, and close it around the little bear. She clutches it tight, her eyes fixed on my face. The two of them walk away.