Köpet Dag Days: The Letters (Part 2)

Click on a link below to be taken directly to a letter. Once at the letter, click on its title to hear the accompanying song. (Or return to Main Page.)

October 8, 1996 (Sheymal) (Oct 1996)
Gylych (The Thing in the Bathhouse) (Nov 1996)
Korpus (Dec 1996)
The Marlboro Man Came to Turkmenistan (Jan 1997)
Soviets/Those Left Behind (Feb 1997)
Across the Kaspie (Mar 1997)
Turkish Delight (and Disillusionment) (Apr 1997)
Haznaly Horjun (May 1997)
Muse of Mine (June 1997)
A New Allegiance (July 1997)
Durak (Aug 1997)
Gutardym (Sept 1997)
The Tapjan (He Left Behind) (Oct 1997)

Appendix (about the music)
Album

October 8^th, 1996 (Sheymal)
October 1996
Excerpt from a Letter to Another Volunteer

…you put in your two years and will be leaving soon. I decided I’d send this to you in the States, so it’s there when you get home.

I’m thankful for having had you as my neighbor. Of course in Turkmenistan, where virtually no one has a car and the public transportation tries a man’s soul, traveling to see a friend in a town up the way is no small thing. It’s odd to think you only visited me once and I only visited you once in the whole year we overlapped. I guess those couple times together, processing this experience we were having, were filled with extra potency.

I owe you gratitude for diving into things as deeply as you have here, helping me to better understand some of the intricacies of culture and language.

I’m a little less thankful to you for unmasking me – to myself – as being a bit of a fraud: I thought I was ready to have the full-on cultural-immersion experience like out of the accounts I read in my Anthropology 101 course freshman year of college. Compared to you, it’s obvious part of me has checked-out on this, my Turkmen experiment.

I have a feeling I’ll always remember that visit to you in Gyzylarbat when went out to see the Paraw-bibi shrine. In particular, I remember sitting outside that little restaurant on the plain at the foot of the mountains (the only building there) where we sat upon rugs and had afternoon tea. We were gifted watermelon, bread and soup from a group who’d come out to slaughter a sheep for some occasion. Very generous. As we sat there I watched a huge herd of goats tended by a man on a horse (this perhaps only the second horse I’d seen in my time in Tstan – despite them having the reputation as a great horse culture). In the distance across the plain we could see the train (snaking across the landscape as if on its way to some Clint Eastwood Western).

It was such a tiny adventure, but in the moment it felt grander than anything from a storybook. All the more enhanced from the feeling (so rare these days) of being content – glad to be here.

When we headed up to the actual shrine (tucked in the mountains), you told the story of Paraw-Bibi – how the mountains opened up to receive her and after she entered, they closed behind her, keeping her safe from the enemies who’d been pursuing her (why they were after her, I can’t recall).

All along the way to the shrine were small shrubs with little cloth-wishes tied to them. I added one of my own, but I can’t remember what I wished for.

And then there was that ride we got back to Gyzlarbat from the same group that had shared their food with us. Fifty or so of us crammed into the back of an old military truck. No luxury ride that, but we were glad to get it!

Now I’m wondering if I’m like Paraw-bibi. Have I come halfway across the world, fleeing some enemies (those in my mind), and been swallowed up by these mountains?

In a way, yes.

If I’d written this letter to you last month, there’s a good chance it would have said that I was going to beat you back to the States – that I’d decided to terminate my service early.

But something odd happened last week that I’m still trying (though not too hard) to understand.

It was night and I was sitting out on the tapjan platform at my house beneath the star-filled sky. As usual, the Hale-Bopp comet was there, hovering low on the Western horizon. I remember before coming here, in a copy of National Geographic, I’d seen an image-map of light pollution throughout the world and saw that Turkmenistan is in one of the “dark night” places that can’t muster enough artificial light to taint the heavens. I’ve tried not to take this for granted. Never in my life have I been so aware of the Moon. Never have I spent so much time gazing at the night sky.

As I was saying: a week ago, beneath the night sky, I was out there on the tapjan. I was playing my guitar in the dark, seeking comfort in the music. Upon wearying, I laid down with the guitar next to me.

As you may or may not recall from your visit here: Gazanjyk is a windy place. Some like to say the Inuit people having twenty-some words for snow – the Turkmen here in Gazanjyk could probably have just as many terms for the different variations of wind we get. On this particular night it was warm, sporadic, and gusty. Since I know but one Turkmen word for wind, I’ll call this wind that: Sheymal (capitalization is my touch). I really like that name – for me it gives the wind personality, almost like it’s a genie-like deity.

And as I lay there, Sheymal suddenly brushed across the guitar strings next to me, playing an open chord. Over the next half-hour or so (why try to define time when one is in a timeless void?), ol’ Sheymal continued to swipe across the strings in fits and gusts. Though playing with no melody or steady pulse, it was undeniably a song. A song that some less rational part of myself was listening to and “hearing” (in the deeper sense of the word).

Something changed in me right there. I never sensed a ghost, but (imagination-driven or not) there was some supernatural quality to that wind. Somehow, right in that moment, I knew that breeze was changing things for me: I would be staying in Turkmenistan.

It wasn’t even a difficult decision anymore – I was staying and that was that.

I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now, but I’m thankful for that sheymal wherever it came from. Things haven’t really gotten any easier for me since then, but somehow I’m more able to tolerate it all…

Gylych (The Thing in the Bathhouse)
November 1996
Excerpt from a Letter to Friends

…I used to love our storytelling sessions in the hidden tree house we found in the forest. I thought I might amuse you by recounting an event that occurred the other day. Unlike the stories we’d conjure from our imaginations, this one really happened. It’s a tale of suspense and heroism.

As I told you, I live in a compound with a large family; there are eight of us. One pair in the bunch is my host-sister-in-law, Nurgul, and her one-year-old, Maktum-aga (the “aga” part of his name means “grandfather” and apparently as the first grandchild, he took on my host-father’s-father’s name because they believe baby Maktum is the reincarnation of that man, thus we address the baby as “grandfather”).

For some reason everyone in the family had business one day that drew them out of the compound except Nurgul, Maktum-aga, and I.

You might ask, why didn’t I have any business to attend to?
I’ll tell you: I was unemployed.

The Minister of Education, on orders from the supreme leader Turkmenbashy, had suddenly, whimsically, ordered the English program to be shut down. I’d asked my local minister what I was supposed to do, but neither he nor the Peace Corps staff had given me any directive other than to wait and see what happened. And so for two weeks I’d had nothing to do.

Now, with everyone gone and Nurgul having countless chores to do, she asked if I’d watch over Maktum-aga while he napped – she was hoping to get some washing done in the bathhouse. I agreed. All I had to do was lounge there reading a book in the room where Maktum-aga was sleeping.

Before I (finally) dive into the action part of the story, a bit more profile of Nurgul is warranted. She is normally a mild-mannered, quiet woman. She chats with the family and raises her voice at times if needed (of course never in the presence of her father-in-law), but generally she seems to try to lie low. How strange it must be for her to live with her husband’s family. She’d told me she’d come from a tiny village not far from the Caspian Sea. I eventually discovered she’s the niece of my host-mother, so Nurgul and her husband are first cousins. That husband is currently living hours away, working in the capital. She’s lucky to see him once a month.

By custom, she’s required to be veiled when in the presence of her father-in-law, but the rest of us are lucky enough to get to see her pretty face.

When it comes to the amazing carpets the Turkmen make, she knows her business both in the making and caring for them. One morning I was enlisted to help her and my three host-siblings shake out the huge carpets of the family. She took charge, getting us in a line along one edge and then coordinating our movement in hefting those heavy beasts into the air. With a synchronized downward jerk, we unfurled each carpet with a healthy crack that sent dust into the air – much of which was destined to fall all over us. (I’d been warned to wear some kind of face covering and now I knew why.) It was imperative that we all moved in tandem to achieve that essential, satisfying “crack of the whip”. Nurgul kept us in line.

No, she was no dainty flower unaccustomed to back-breaking work and hardship, so it was intriguing when on this day (I’m back now to the day when all were away from the house save for me, her, and Maktum-aga) that she came quickly up to the house and insisted in strong and borderline desperate terms that I go deal with…
the thing in the bathhouse.

She called this thing a zemzen. I had no idea what the word meant. Though I wouldn’t call myself a particularly brave man, I puffed myself up a bit in preparation to deal with this zemzen thing. (Certainly I wasn’t going to cower in the house while there was a damsel in distress. Besides, I was rather curious what a zemzen was.) Nurgul stayed watching from the door as I moved slowly across the compound toward the bathhouse.

The outside door to the bathhouse was actually almost a foot above the ground, requiring the would-be bather to step over a section of wall to get in. (A design likely put in place to prevent drafts sneaking under the door – it was the only doorway in the compound designed like that.) Just within that doorway was a vestibule of sorts – a narrow room with bench and hooks to hang things. I poked my head in and looked around.

What was a zemzen? A large spider? A rat? A snake?
The only light in this room came from the door. Though that left the corners of the room in relative darkness, I felt assured that nothing was in this first room.

I stepped in and heard a hissing coming from the adjoining room. But this was the usual sound of natural gas burning as it blasted flame from a pipe into a crude metal stove (atop the stove was always kept a large cauldron of water).

I slunk into this main room.

Upon wooden boards (there to keep one’s feet off the cold tiles when bathing), was a red plastic tub. Within that tub was the unfinished wash Nurgul had begun.

Across the tiled floor from this was a clawfoot bathtub full of cold water. No one ever actually got into the tub to bathe – it served as a holding tank.

Creeping a little further into the room, I bent down to look under the bathtub.

Zemzen?

The dim light bulb hanging from the ceiling allowed for some visibility, but didn’t penetrate the space beneath the tub. Still, I sensed no presence there.

The steady hissing of the burning gas continued, this the only sound save for the occasional drop of ceiling condensation, plinging to floor.

There was one more place to check: in one back corner of the room was a narrow entrance that had no door. Through that portal was a dark, narrow corridor that wound around to a tiny room that’s only purpose seemed to be to house a second stove to help heat the place. I moved cautiously toward that entrance, feeling like Bilbo Baggins heading toward a goblin tunnel.

I had only just come to the opening when I saw it–

Within the darkness of the corridor a creature was staring at me.
Gollum?

No.

This creature was about the size of a cat but with no fur. The shape was a bit vague but was obviously some kind of lizard.

I stood in calm, but wary awe as the eyes of the creature locked into mine.

What Nurgul expected me to do about this, I wasn’t sure, so I did what seemed to me to be the smartest thing: I asked it politely to leave.

I really did.

I even used my clumsy Turkmen tongue (figuring it probably wouldn’t know English). I told it in very sensible terms, using a tone that carried no malice or ill-will, that I thought it would be best for everyone involved if it simply departed.

I figured this zemzen was probably ready to head on its way by this time anyway.

After my little speech, I backed slowly toward the entrance. I opened the door as wide as it would go and then – never taking my eyes from the building – I walked across the compound back to the house.

Nurgul met me there on the porch and seemed none too pleased that I hadn’t done a thing. With my limited vocabulary, I tried to speak as calmly to her as I had to the lizard. I asked her to just wait and see.

And we did wait. Long minutes passed as we watched the doorway.

“Esh!” Nurgul suddenly gasped in the way Turkmen women do when someone or something upsets them.

A head was peaking out from the side of the doorway. The zemzen was emerging – not upon the ground – but clinging to the side of the wall.
“Holy shit…” I muttered as its full length was revealed. It’s tail looked nearly twice as long as its body which was way larger than a cat’s. As it scuttled across the compound wall, Nurgul sprang into action, dashing into the yard, grabbing a piece of black hose (they used to wallop unruly camels when necessary) and darting right after the zemzen. Letting out a warrior’s shout she whacked at the thing as it scuttled over the wall.

Now I should have mentioned, that my host-father had playfully tacked “gylych” onto my name. It’s kind of a middle name shared by him and his five sons.

Gylych means sword in the Turkmen tongue. It’s kind of a funny sound that hides it’s deadly purpose: to my thinking, the “ga” at the beginning is the stabbing; the “ly” sound is lugubrious, like your enemies’ flowing blood; and the “ch” is the removal of the sword or perhaps a final finishing slash.

No, Nurgul did not get the title “gylych” as I and the other men of the house had, but she’d just demonstrated she was perhaps more worthy of the title than all of us (or at least more than me).

I have no shame in having chosen to lay my imaginary sword down and let the zemzen go, but I also can’t fault her for wanting to attack. I can only imagine how that lizard must have startled her. I at least had warning something was there. If I’d been in there bathing and suddenly seen the thing, I would have surely dashed naked into the yard, inadvertently starting an international incident.

And who knew what other encounters she’d had with such creatures out in her village by the sea. More than likely there were hundreds of years of animosity between the Turkmen and the zemzen.

Me, myself, I couldn’t help but be starstruck by the size and elegance of the creature.

That tail..!

Korpus
December 1996
Excerpt from a Letter to Friend

…one of the biggest surprises here has been my growing friendship with many of my co-volunteers. Throughout the different landing places I’ve had in my life, I’ve always made good friends but – as you know – I’ve also trended toward being a lone wolf. Here in Turkmenistan, I purposely requested a remote post – I was here to be with the locals not other Americans. During the three months of training, when we were all cloistered together (together but living apart, spread around the small city), we would come together for long educational sessions during the days.

After “class”, with few appealing places to go out for a drink or find any other kind of diversion suitable for twenty-somethings, we became each others’ entertainment. We were allowed to hang out at the old school where we had our training sessions. At times, cards would come out. Other times I’d grab my guitar and round up a few people who wanted to sing or play (a couple co-volunteers had brought clarinets). At other times, one co-volunteer would rally as many of us as he could to play ultimate frisbee.

Between classes there were group lunches with food that was strange and often less than appealing to our unaccustomed taste buds. There were also weekend “field trips” to various sites. One trip found us on a long bus ride out to a remote region to learn about the unique flora there only to discover upon arrival that the local officials were denying us access. As negotiations dragged on (off-stage) we volunteers were left waiting and waiting. I pulled out my guitar and tried to beat back some of the tedium and anxiousness. Among other songs, I played and sang the The Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want, which had a calming effect on me at least. We ended up stranded for the evening and left the next morning without a glimpse of the region’s special character.

Throughout the long weeks of training, a fair amount of commiserating took place as we all got to know one another.

We are a menagerie of different personalities from all over the U.S. Sure, most of us share an idealism and naivete, but I’m not sure I would have befriended many of these people if not for the circumstances. I hate to admit it, but I guess I had a “type” of person I sought out in friendship, and (on the surface at least) most of these folks didn’t seem like that type.

And yet, our situation seems similar to how I’ve heard my grandfather talk about those he was with during WWII. He was with men (many from the Deep South) he never would have gotten to know or tried to befriend, but once they’d gone through the war together, there was a bond between them that was quite profound.

That’s how I’m growing to feel about this bunch.

During the first year, twenty of these new friends left. Due to my isolation, for me it felt like some of them were disappearing suddenly, usually without a good bye. If I continue with the war analogy, it’s almost as if they died in combat.

All the more precious are those that remain.

As I mentioned, I’m living very, very isolated from the rest of my cohorts. So how do I ever see these “war buddies” of mine?

The Peace Corps has a policy in which they pay us our living-wage stipend once a month (about $38). It’s supposed to be wired out to our towns, but in my time here I’ve yet to be visited by anyone on the Peace Corps staff, let alone had money wired, so the expectation is that I take the train once a month to the capital to get my money (traveling expenses are covered). The first month I didn’t bother going in, but by the end of the second month I was ready to get away from my town for a weekend (and have done so pretty much every month since).

When I make the overnight trip, the train gets me into the capital city a little after dawn and I make the walk of about forty-five minutes across town to the sleepy little neighborhood where the Peace Corps has turned a former house with walled compound into its headquarters here. The security guards – always seemingly a little surprised that someone is arriving so early – let me in and I make my way to the volunteer lounge and grab the bundle of letters that have come in over the month. Usually, despite the joy of these letters, I’m asleep within minutes on one of the lounge’s sofas (the train ride in is never restful). As the morning progresses, various volunteers drop in. I never know who will be in for the weekend, but it’s usually guaranteed there’ll be a good number of friendly faces to greet throughout the day.

I also never know where I’m going to stay, often a fellow volunteer who lives in the city or vicinity offers to put me up. Other times several of us seek out a hotel.

One of my better volunteer friends, Kendrick, has started co-renting a place with a young Russian-speaking local named Alyosha. Alyosha has become a friend of mine now as well and the apartment he shares with Kendrick has become a nice hangout spot. One of my favorite things about their place: it has a hot shower! The hotels don’t. The dip-and-pour method works fine at my home in Gazanjyk, but there’s nothing like a good hot shower.

Once or twice a year, when my group is all housed together at some location for a weekend training seminar, it becomes a party in the evenings. The nights are ours for cards (I’ve got a Spades group that has a running rivalry); strumming guitars (several of my cohorts have acquired one for themselves); and other less innocent revelry also happens. There’s almost always guaranteed to be an open-mic performance on one of the evenings too. That’s something I think I can take credit for starting during training. I love these events – there’s lots of singing and music, but anything goes, really. A couple co-volunteers keep a journal and it’s great when they share a bit of their writings.

Then there are site visits where we’ll try and get out and stay with one another. Travel can be very tricky here but I’ve managed to get out to various towns and cities across the country to stay with various members of my group.

Some of my friends are even intrepid enough to come out to my pocket of nowhere to see me. My host-family is always very tolerant of letting them stay with us. Most of these visits have been quite memorable, but there’s one in particular I’ll tell you about.

Somehow Kendrick and I hatched a plan to catch a bus from the capital to the underground cave, Kov-ata, and then hitchhike from there all the way out to Gazanjyk (where I live). This was very ambitious, but I guess we were both craving a little adventure.

The first part of the plan – visiting the underground lake – went off without a hitch (pun intended). During training I’d visited the cave with our entire group. This visit with Kendrick was better – we essentially had the steaming cave pool to ourselves. We were able to capture more of the mystery of the place and I felt like I was Bilbo Baggins himself, ready to confront Gollum.

Then came phase two: the hitchhiking. Hailing rides from anyone willing to give one is how things are done in the cities here. You just go to the side of the street and raise your arm. Freelance cabbies are everywhere. Price is almost never negotiated. You either ask at the end how much they want or estimate yourself and give them some money. I don’t recall ever getting in an argument about it.

I’d never tried it on the highway here though.

Kendrick and I managed to hitch our way along the highway from the cave to the city of Gyzylarbat (about two or three hours away). We then tracked down a co-volunteer, Jonas, who lived there. After a short and pleasant visit with him, he helped us catch the train to Gazanjyk.

The next day I took Kendrick out to see the mountains behind my home. I showed him the “bunker” I’d discovered hidden in the ground and spoke to him about how I’d first imagined the place as a defense against Iran. Later, after we’d hiked to the peak of one of the hills, it seems I’d gotten war on Kendrick’s mind. We looked down at my town on the other side of the canal. Kendrick declared he was going to attack it and that I had to defend it. The game was simple: a race to see who could get to the town first. I felt quite confident I would beat him – I knew the ins and outs of the hills. It was a fifteen to twenty minute run in which we each took separate ways, but sure enough, I beat him to the bridge over the canal. As I smugly waited there for him, he sauntered up and threw a rock, hitting the bridge, declaring: “That was a grenade. I just blew up your bridge. You haven’t saved the town yet.”

The game wasn’t over – we’d have to swim across the canal.

It was October. Not the hot season.

As I quickly stripped down and tied my clothes into a bundle I turned to see Kendrick, buck-naked attempting to throw his shirt across the water with a large stone tied in the middle to give it weight. Unfortunately for him, the stone fell out mid-flight leaving the shirt floating momentarily in the air like Wile E. Coyote having just run off the edge of a cliff. Down the shirt floated to the water. Kendrick didn’t learn his lesson and the same thing happened with his attempt to send his jeans over. Meanwhile, I swam across with my clothes bundle on my head, arriving first and saving my town.

I felt a bit sorry for Kendrick; he hadn’t brought a change of clothes. I’m sure I offered to lend him some and he refused. He caught the train back to Ashgabat that evening and I think he later told me he nearly froze. (The trains were unheated and frequently had broken windows allowing wicked drafts in.)

Anyway, it probably doesn’t sound like such an amazing story, but I guess everything is amplified in intensity here – even the tedium. I’m so grateful to this new group of friends I have here. I suspect when we all return to the States, we’ll each go our separate ways. I also suspect, even if I never see them again, that I will feel a bond with them for the rest of my life…

The Marlboro Man Came to Turkmenistan
January 1997
Excerpt from a Letter to Uncle

…I think I first heard about the Peace Corps from you after your stint in the Philippines. I still remember shortly after you’d returned, sitting with you at Pepito’s restaurant and you holding liquid in your straw and saying something to the effect that that’s all some people in the Philippines had to drink for an entire day. That was when I was about eight-years-old, so I’m probably misremembering the specifics, but I was spellbound. It was eye-opening to realize that not everyone lived with the comforts (and excess) we take for granted here.

I’ve since grown to be quite aware of the differences in living conditions around the world. Turkmenistan is its own confounding mix of having and not having.

I do in fact live in a house with electricity and heat. There’s a light in every room, but no secondary lamps. Our heat source is two gas stoves, but they can really only properly warm two of the house’s six rooms. There’s a refrigerator, but mostly it holds sheep parts not fresh produce (which is hard to come by, especially in the winter). No dishwashers, toasters, washing machines, dryers, or indoor plumbing.

One day a co-volunteer was laughing about the film Rocky IV. You may or may not recall that the big bad fighter Rocky must overcome is from the Soviet Union. There are clips in the film of this Soviet boxer training with machines/technology far more advanced than anything here. My co-volunteer was laughing at how opposite from the truth that is here. Almost all the technology from the former Soviet Union seems to be at least two decades behind our own. Perhaps it would be different in other parts of the Soviet Union, but I kind of doubt it. They may be able to match our ability to make missiles and arm soldiers, but it doesn’t seem to stretch beyond that.

One of the biggest “have-nots” here are cars. Maybe one in a thousand people in my town have one. My host-family does not. It raises the challenge of getting anywhere. There are the train and buses, but the service is sporadic, over-crowded, and not particularly comfortable. Of course, there are advantages to having less vehicles around: we all walk more and are thus probably in better shape (not to mention walking is more enjoyable when not sharing the roads with vehicles). There’s less noise and pollution. We live life at a slower pace (because we have no other choice).

Still, when one wants/needs a car, it’s rough not to have one.

Another “have not” area that’s difficult is that there are so few places to go. No shops, restaurants, theaters, parks, libraries… I guess the upside of this is that people end up spending more time visiting each other at their homes. Makes me think of how America (reputedly) used to be, when family and/or neighbors would just drop by unannounced and hang out to visit. I’ve visited more homes here in the past year than I have in my entire life back there in the States. (Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but not by much.)

Of course, lack of entertainment options can lead some to seek out less healthy options: I mean drinking. I get a sense that alcoholism is a problem for many men here. Drinking, I think, is not usually a big problem in Muslim countries, but Turkmenistan was under the yoke of the Soviet Union long enough to develop a taste for vodka. Luckily for me, my host-father doesn’t drink and so there aren’t drinking parties in our house (which seem to occur with frequency in many other homes). I’m no teetotaler myself – luckily (or sadly?) I had a lot of experience drinking before I got here and thus have a sense of how to manage my liquor. And to be honest, there is often something enjoyable about Turkmen drinking parties. We sit on a floor around a spread of food and have drinking “rounds” (about every ten minutes). At each round everyone raises their shot-glass of vodka while someone takes their turn at making a toast. But this is no quick “to your health” toast, the words of the toast-maker are expected to come straight from the heart, be meaningful, and usually contain sentiments directed at those around him. Obviously, with each round that sentimentality increases, but there’s something about trying to speak so directly from the heart – alcohol induced or not. I never have really spoken in this way much myself and wonder how much any of us back in the States really do it with each other.

On a darker note: there’s a fair amount of violence I’ve witnessed here. It’s not uncommon for a parent or teacher to strike a child (and of course the children strike each another). Women are afraid to walk alone as children might taunt and throw stones at them (an odd kind of moral policing). There’s also a kind of violence in words as people (especially within families) are constantly shouting at one another. During my childhood, we in my family only raised our voices at one another if we were really really upset. Here it’s like frequent flashes of lightning and thunder that pass quickly, usually with no hard feelings between either of the shouters. Part of me has kind of grown to grudgingly admire this way of interacting – there seems to be no fear of walking on eggshells around each other or worrying “My God, what if I just upset them.”

I imagine much (most?) of this is very different from your experience with the Corps in the Philippines.

To say I came here dewy-eyed in regard to my belief in the Peace Corps as a blemish-free organization, wouldn’t be true. I’d had my doubts even before the director of my training told me the Peace Corps was one thing the Democrats and Republicans could agree upon: the Democrats for altruistic reasons and the Republicans more for the PR angle of creating a positive impression of America for American “interests”.

Each of us volunteers have been given a free monthly copy of Newsweek. I wonder at times if this isn’t an attempt to keep us programmed into the latest propaganda or worse yet – pass that propaganda along. My host family loves looking through the glossy pictures and are all too happy to take the magazines off my hands when I’m done with them.

Billboards of the Marlboro Man have begun appearing in the capital, and now I’m wondering even more: am I the equivalent of a missionary? What I mean by that is that I’ve read that missionaries – though perhaps noble in their intentions – could be considered as agents, preparing the populations they served for future colonization.

I think myself and all my fellow volunteers have very honest intentions of serving the local population and aiding them how we might. But by doing that, we are making friendships and building positive relationships with many people; in so doing, we are creating a positive impression of America. And perhaps this is helping to open the door for companies like Marlboro. It may not be America’s intention to conquer and rule Turkmenistan by force, but perhaps they want to open it and other former Soviet Republics as new markets for American products and ventures (like oil/gas extraction). Isn’t that an essential part of capitalism? Always needing to expand to new markets?

I hope these suspicions of mine are wrong. I’d hate someday to come to the realization that my time here was serving as a unwitting cog in such a machine…

Soviets/Those Left Behind
February 1997
Excerpt from a Letter to Cousin

…seems like when I was learning about the Soviet Union, I never quite got past thinking that everyone living within its confines was Russian. Certainly Russia has been the dominant culture, but what a wide variety of races there are here. I guess if I’d ever taken the time to care, I would have learned this long ago.

During training I lived with a family who originally hailed from the Caucasus region and were thus of a different ethnicity than Russian. I’ve befriended another family in my town who hails from the country of Georgia. I was once hosted by another family that proudly proclaimed they were Tartar. Then of course there are those from the other nearby “stans”: the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, and Tajiks. All of these people in Turkmenistan now find themselves living in a place that has become completely and unapologetically Turkmen. Of course I wasn’t here during the Soviet era, but I get the impression that it was much more ethnically inclusive then (probably as long as the Russians were considered top dogs).

An analogy for you there in Minnesota might be to imagine if our state broke from the U.S. and became an independent nation with the Dakota (Sioux) people taking control. Now I have nothing personal against the Dakota and I’m not trying to say things would be worse if they were in control, I just use them as a rough equivalent to the situation here. Imagine if the Dakota had full control of the Minnesota government and all official positions were only to be filled by those of Dakota heritage. Then imagine the Dakota language becomes the official one taught in the schools with adults also expected to start using it as well. Imagine the programming on TV being almost exclusively that which is suited to the Dakota and their culture. Whether this is karmic payback for those who took the land from the Dakota in the 1800s or not, it would be rough for the non-Dakota people living in Minnesota. Many of them would likely leave if they could.

That’s kind of what’s happened/is happening here with the Turkmen now fully in control. It’s hard to blame them for all the self-aggrandizement after decades of repression and being treated as second-class citizens. But it’s also hard for me not to feel sympathy for those ethnic groups on the outside.

It’s only been five years since the Soviet Union dissolved, so obviously they’re in a transitional period here, but it’s a tough one for many. More than a few people (ethnic Turkmen too) have told me they thought things were much better in the Soviet time. I had come here just assuming that everyone would be happy to be living “free” in a new independent country, but I think people are more interested in having the shelves in stores less than empty.

I have befriended several non-Turkmen locals here. They’ve been in the minority their whole lives, but they seem to feel it much more keenly now. Though I do have sympathy for the Turkmen as many of them struggle with poverty, I feel a little extra pang for the Russian-speaking people who I think feel they’ve been left behind.

One of these is Lara, the babushka-aged nurse who’s the mother of a local English teacher I work with. Lara was orphaned during the Great War (WWII) and then sent on a long train ride to resettle and work here. She’s tragically sad: her husband is an alcoholic, her daughter has a young son and broken marriage, and Lara’s only other child has moved to Russia but won’t send for her.

Yet she carries on.

As do so many other babushkas I’ve seen throughout the country – having lost their state pensions, they’ve turned to selling fried meat pies and other edibles (wrapped in newspaper napkins) at markets and train stations.

Then there’s Tolya, a young man in his early twenties that I’ve befriended. He’s a rock-and-roll loving graphic artist living in a society that has no place for him. At his age I felt misunderstood and out of place, but in America there’s plenty of niches for such youth to find room to breath. But here?

Was it really better here for minorities during the Soviet times? I can’t say. Though it’s only been five years since the collapse, I don’t know how much of what I’m witnessing and experiencing matches how things were before the Union dissolved.

The Soviet blah-architecture is still here (often in the form of buildings in various states of disintegration), I’ve yet though to see any Lenin statues or other standing tokens to the once glorious Soviet Union. The closest thing has been a monument in the town where I was for training. Reference to that monument appears in one of the songs I wrote (“May the Cow Jump Over You”):

“Concrete sitters there me and my friend, between cigarette butts, broken glass, and monument with eternal flame that had nearly reached its end…”

That monument, with its tiny gas-fed flame, I believe, was erected for the soldiers who’d died in the Great War. There was something forlorn about the place where it stood. That monument and the eroding Soviet world around me didn’t fill me with a sense that: “We won! The American democratic system has proven to be the better one.” It brought in me more a feeling of foreboding: most Americans feel that their world is solid; that the grocery stores will always be stocked with food; that the dollar will always maintain its strength; that the fifty states will never break apart into separate nations. But I think people here thought similarly – that the Soviet Union was strong, united, and would continue to be so into perpetuity.

Until suddenly, it no longer was…

Across the Kaspie
March 1997
Excerpt from a Letter to Friends

…it certainly sounds like you’re having an adventure up there in the wilds of northern Minnesota. I can’t imagine having to snowmobile to reach your house (which is actually a yurt!)

My adventures (and misadventures) here have been of a different kind. In the town where I’ve been living, there’s an English teacher who is half-Russian and half-Georgian (as in the country, not the state). She’s told me many times how beautiful Georgia is and after hearing others from my volunteer group tell of visiting Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, I thought maybe I should try to explore the former Soviet Union a bit more. As much as I loved visiting India last year, it did feel like I was on a well-beaten path (in terms of that used by other travelers/tourists).

Thus I hatched a plan to take a ferry across the Caspian Sea (the Kaspie) to Azerbaijan, then travel across land to Georgia, and then on to Turkey before flying back to Turkmenistan from Istanbul after completing this three week trek.

This was definitely getting me off the beaten track. No one I knew from here had taken the ferry and traveled to Azerbaijan. Also there would be no guide books or maps to help me along the way. (Boy, oh boy, had I used my Lonely Planet guidebook when traveling through India – one New Zealander had sardonically called it the “bible” – he felt too many travelers were using it to get off the beaten path only to end up creating a new one by going to all the same places the book espoused. That may have been true to some extent, but I still found that guidebook immensely helpful – especially the maps – and I was soon about to find out that traveling without any was quite disorienting…)

After completing a mandatory weekend workshop for us volunteers here, I took the train across country to the Caspian Sea. I managed to get to the ferry port which was located well outside the port city of Turkmenbashy (formerly Krasnovodsk). The port was isolated in a kind of rocky desert inlet. I waited with all the other ticket holders for hours through the hot summer afternoon until the ferry arrived. Once onboard I discovered my berth was a tiny cockroach-infested room with no window. Later that evening, without asking permission, I took my thin, plastic-coated mattress to the deserted top deck and laid it there to sleep. Just below me was an outdoor bar area with (to my ears) Turkish style music playing into the night. They had hanging lights there, but where I was was nearly pitch black. I suppose I was lucky not to get mugged, supposedly my ancestor on the Milton side of my family (my father’s mother’s mother’s side) slept in similar fashion when immigrating to America and found his money belt (and with it every cent he had) removed upon awakening one morning.

I forgot to mention: I was truly traveling alone this time – I wasn’t bringing my guitar. I’d hardly been parted with it since leaving the States (dragging it with me all throughout India). I guess I decided the less attention I got on this trip, the better.

The next morning, as the ferry drew closer to Baku, the oil derricks could be seen rising from the water in various places. Oil slicks showed in thin puddles upon the surface. Passengers on board the ferry added to this by throwing their garbage over the side.

One Azeri passenger came up to me as I was standing at the railing and struck up a conversation. I can’t remember what language we were using. Probably a combination of Russian and Turkmen (the Azeri language did share a fair amount of words in common with Turkmen). He introduced himself as Amin. He and his brother had driven a couple Korean cars (from China?) and were planning to sell them back home in Azerbaijan. They were curious about me and when they found out I had no hotel arrangements, offered me accommodations at their home.

Seemed a good start to me.

Once at Amin’s home, I was treated to a meal. He offered a toast to world peace that included everyone except the Armenians, who he hated. The Azeris and Armenians had been fighting over a region called Nagorno-Karabakh. I had nothing against the Armenians, and in fact would like to have visited their country, but I had already decided to go straight to Georgia from Azerbaijan. I don’t think my hosts would have felt so kindly toward me if I had had plans to visit Armenia.

The next day I was introduced to a cousin of theirs named Hafys. He was about my age and currently unemployed. Amin had to work and so asked Hafys to show me around the city. We walked about and played some billiards. Backgammon players were stationed here and there on the sidewalks and eventually we found a vacant board and had a game or two.

We spent a little time walking along a deserted boardwalk-like area that ran along the sea. Neither of us could spare much money so we mostly just wandered around.

I was much more interested in getting into the mountains and so said my goodbyes the next day.

A town called Sheki had been recommended to me, so off I started. On the four-and-a-half hour bus ride I struck up a conversation in English with a college-aged Azeri woman named Nasrin who was traveling with her mother to visit friends. When these new acquaintances found out I had no hotel arrangements they asked me to join them in visiting their friends.

I agreed and soon found myself meeting a gray, mustached, curly-haired Azeri named Weli. He lived with his wife and two young sons in a small house that had an equally small but lushly landscaped compound. There they had set out a table and banquet. Without hesitation I was welcomed. There was a sadness that hung over Weli but his heart was huge and he engaged me in earnest conversation. He seemed to understand most of what I was saying in Turkmen. I couldn’t believe my luck to have stumbled upon such a warm group of people. We spent hours around the table and even had a little entertainment in the way of one of the sons donning his karate outfit and giving us a demonstration. The night ended with me sleeping in their kitchen on a roll-away bed (with very clean sheets).

The next day Weli took me to meet with a local official, I think essentially to announce I was in town and show them I was no spy. I suppose some elements of the former Soviet Union were still in place. Weli had no car. We returned to his home to get his children and Nasrin to join us as we began a walking tour of Sheki. The town was very picturesque, with the neatness of the homes and yards enhanced by the mountains in the background. Weli took me to a war memorial. He didn’t express the anti-Armenian sentiments I’d heard in Baku, but he too obviously felt the effects of the war. We also visited an old caravanserai from the Spice Road era. It was like a castle. We were the only tourists there.

If I had known I would meet such kind people, I would have tried to get a visa for a longer stay, but my transit visa of four days had run out and I had to go. Weli took me to a bus stop the next morning and seemed truly sad to see me go. I too felt sad, but in the end it was better to go before I outwore my welcome.

At the border, trouble awaited me. The Azeri guards there were suspicious and detained me. They claimed I had no proper visa and told me I needed to pay a fee. I dug in my heals and insisted my transit visa was sufficient. I demanded to speak with my embassy and continued to do so until they finally told me to just go.

I walked across to Georgia and after a minivan ride through the glorious countryside, found myself in the rather gloomy capital of Tbilisi. Georgia was having its own conflict at the time and at least one tall hotel was filled with refugees whose laundry was hanging over their porch railings. I found my way to the American embassy and spoke with the guard there about cheap places I might stay. The cheapest he told me of was a hotel that cost $25 a night. This may sound laughably cheap, but on my budget ($8 a day) it was a lot (especially as compared to what I’d spent in India and the $0 I’d thus far spent on lodging on this trip).

I wandered the streets a bit, hoping to find other accommodations. Might some of the luck I’d had in Azerbaijan of finding someone to welcome me into their home continue here? Sure enough, a kindly-looking old man struck up a conversation with me and he said he had an apartment I could stay in. I agreed but when he asked me if I “in general preferred girls or boys?” I took it as a hint that he was hoping for something else out of the deal. I could have been mistaken, but I bid him a hasty goodbye and decided to just stay in the hotel. I would have liked to see more of Tbilisi, but felt I couldn’t afford it. With no guidebook to help me, I decided to head toward the city of Kutaisi, which I’d heard had some ancient sites.

I found minivan transportation. Passing through the forested mountains and coming around one turn, I spotted a magical little valley. As the late afternoon sunshine alit upon a cottage and stream there, I had a sudden impulse to call to the driver to let me off – I’d just get out and go down into that valley, come what may.

I was on the very tipping point of doing so, but in the end I hesitated. Right there my whole trip could have gone quite differently.

So much regret I had when I arrived in Kutaisi as the sun was setting – I found myself in a smoggy, Soviet-cement-laden urban blah. Feeling some despair, I strolled out of the bus station where the van had completed its journey.

If you look at pictures of Kutaisi you will likely see sections of the city that look right out of a storybook. This was not the Kutaisi I saw. I had no guidebook to get me into that storybook – or even to a hotel. Not wanting to panic as the night started pushing out the day, I started walking toward a small patch of green. Despite the urban setting, there was cow grazing there near the broken remnants of a small building. I sat there and rolled myself a cigarette. Nearby, a man was playing with a child of two or three years of age.

Did he stroll over to me or did I ask him about a hotel? I can’t recall, but we struck up a conversation. Though he looked to be in his forties, he was the grandfather of the child. He told me his name was Volvo but he (or his parents) were originally from Greece.

He invited me for a drink. I accepted. After taking his grandchild back to his apartment, we walked to a dingy little cafe. The display case had nothing but one emaciated piece of smoked fish. Volvo bought it and a bottle of vodka and we sat there in the gathering dark (either the power was out or the owner was saving on his electric bill). We were joined by an unshaven dwarf of a man wearing a tank top. His name was Sasha. Soon the three of us were trading toasts and shots with pinches of fish-meat as chasers. Sentimentality began to flow. By this time I was well-practiced in the art of toasting. I recall at one point Sasha being so moved by my words that he leaned across the table to kiss both my cheeks – his scruffy, sweaty face closer than a sober me would have allowed.

I felt like I’d stumbled into a Tom Waits song.

Eventually the party moved to Volvo’s apartment where his wife had laid a nice spread upon their dining room table. Several others joined us, but as the drinking continued I was done for. I awoke the next morning nicely tucked into a double bed. As it turned out, I was in their bedroom. In the TV room, Volvo had slept on the floor and his wife had taken the couch.

They had me watch a video recording of their wedding. I decided – despite their amazing hospitality – that I’d had enough urban and that I wanted to move on to the Black Sea. They took me to the bus station and Volvo was actually fighting tears as he waved goodbye. The depth of his emotion and kindness was difficult for me to understand.

I’m not sure why I chose to visit the town of Kobuleti on the Black Sea coast. Someone must have recommended it. I arrived there and as I started wandering the streets looking for a place to stay, I entered conversation with a group of young fellows who were carrying instruments. One of the group, a kind of manager or perhaps roadie, was named David. He was very gregarious and plied me with questions. It became known that I too was a musician and he insisted one of the guitar players lend me his “axe” so I could play a song for him. I did so and he insisted that I not only come hear the band play at the club that night, but sit in for a song or two.

We parted ways and I told them I would turn up at the club that evening.

Meanwhile, I still needed a place to stay. After several rejections, I managed to find lodging at a place in which I was given a bed in a room with about ten other men.

Wandering the shoreline that day, I was shocked at the amount of trash strewn everywhere. People were swimming, picnicking, laying out…but no one seemed to pay any attention to the bits of rubbish spread like autumn leaves upon the ground all around them. Could it be like this all across the former Soviet Union? It hadn’t been like this on the Caspian Sea coast in Turkmenistan, but perhaps that was because there was less disposable packaging available to the Turkmen.

This spot on the Black Sea, with large trees and open beach, would have been lovely if I’d been able to ignore the blight of trash.

That evening I turned up at the club, which was really just a large tent with stage, dance floor, tables, and bar. Open on the sides, the sea was about fifty yards away. David saw me and when the time was right, pushed me onto the stage. The guitar player surrendered his instrument to me. The first song we played was the Beatles’ Get Back.

The crowd reacted favorably and I decided to step up to the mic and address them. Here again, all the training I’d had at the art of toasting really came into play – I trusted that if I spoke from my heart, I’d find the right words. I addressed them in Russian, apologizing for not knowing their language. I told them of my Georgian friend living in Turkmenistan who had spoken so lovingly of this country. I also spoke of how amazed I was that people would just welcome me, a stranger, into their homes (as Volvo had done). I might have sprinkled in a bit more praise for the kindness of everyone in their country – perhaps adding how I’d been raised to fear and distrust those in the Soviet Union and how unfounded that now seemed. They seemed to hang on my every word and gave me a rousing applause when I finished.

The band then went into Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. I came nowhere near matching Kurt Cobain’s vocal performance, but I gave it my best and I’m sure the audience wanted me to succeed (and it probably helped that they didn’t understand the words and that the vocals in the song are meant to be raw.) There was big applause after the final chord and I left the stage to return to a seat near David. Soon a waitress arrived carrying a tray accompanied by the owner. He made a speech to the audience while taking from the serving tray a large chocolate bar, a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of champagne. He also planted a kiss on both of my cheeks.

After he departed, a young man came up and insisted I join him and his friends at their table. I soon determined that they just wanted me there as part of a cool factor or something. As the evening progressed, I was kind of getting that vibe from everyone. They were young, had money, and were living out a “scene”.

Disinterested in these kind of interactions, I eventually just drifted back to my guest house.

The next day I felt ready to keep rolling.

If I could go back to Georgia, I would skip the cities and try and get out into the villages in the countryside. It may not be true to say I missed the heart of the country, but the different realities I’d stumbled into seemed tinged with a certain gloom that I think the countryside might have dispelled.

I set my sights on Turkey…

Turkish Delight (and Disillusionment)
April 1997
Excerpt from a Letter to College Professor

…I know you grew up as an ex-pat in China. I’m not sure if your time overseas ever brought you to Turkey, but I thought you might be interested to hear about my recent trip there.

When first flying over to Turkmenistan, my group had had a layover in Istanbul and I spent a couple hours there, but that of course wasn’t enough to get much of a sense of the place. Since then, I have acquired a good working knowledge of the Turkmen language which has a fair amount in common with the Turkish tongue – the numbers, for example, are the same, so at the very least, negotiating prices would be doable.
From Turkmenistan, I took a ferry across the Caspian Sea, then spent a week traveling across Azerbaijan and Georgia. When I reached the Black Sea, I hugged the Georgian coast until I came to the Turkish border, where I crossed with no difficulties.

Once in Turkey, I headed into the nearby mountains to a place called Ayder. On the minivan-taxi ride, I met a young man named Kemal who seemed a bit down. He was traveling with his elderly mother. He helped me negotiate a stay in a guesthouse and we decided to hang out. We went for a hike in the forested hills. I had not been in a true forest in over a year. How it does my soul good to be among the trees.

A fog had drifted in and at my suggestion, Kemal and I started running through the forest with a bit of abandon. Such an activity I’d done many times, but I got the sense it was unusual for him (if not a first). His glumness, seemed to melt away. For me also it was a bit of “nature cleansing” after all the post-Soviet-urban-blah I had been experiencing in Georgia.

There was a very nice hammam (public bathhouse) in Ayder, though I must admit, it was a bit strange to bathe in a room with a large group of people (especially as the only “white” man).

(Another hammam, I visited later in the trip was different – almost cave-like. While bathing in that one, a rather large, hairy, shirtless male attendant offered to give me a scrub down. He vigorously applied his scrub pad and showed me all the dead skin he was getting off of me in Playdoh-like worms. “See!” he would say with an air of satisfaction. After the scrubbing I was shown to a small room where I could relax, wrapped in towels, enjoying a hot cup of tea.)

After Ayder, I traveled to Trabzon to visit the ancient church-turned-mosque, Hagia Sophia. More interesting was my next stop at the 1,600-year-old Sumela Monastery (built on the side of a cliff). Then on I traveled from Bayburt to Sivas to Divigi. At these places there were highlights: hearing the transfixing calls to prayer broadcast over the town’s electric speakers; climbing a minaret in a mosque; visiting a mosque from the times of the Seljuk Empire (about 900 years old).

But what to say? I was more-or-less just an average tourist, following the path of thousands of other tourists. Very little out of the ordinary was happening now.

It’s a pros-cons trade-off. My recent experiences in Azerbaijan and Georgia had been much harder and full of misfires, but the memories of those places remain more potent in my mind. I think I benefited from those countries being (way) less accustomed to receiving tourists from the West.

Turkey was proving much easier to navigate, but was that actually better?

Not really for the kind of travel I had come to prefer.

Memories of these Turkish places mostly feel kind of empty now. Seems to be a thread that the best experiences I have traveling are those involving people I meet along the way. In India, that was mostly other travelers. In Azerbaijan and Georgia it was mostly the “locals”. In Turkey it was proving to be mostly nobody.

But onward: Nemrut Mountain was to be my next destination and the most remote of all my stops thus far. Supposedly, atop the mountain there, were massive stone statues – part of a tomb complex dating to the 1^st Century B.C.

Arriving in the nearest city (name escapes me), I needed to negotiate transportation up the mountain. By this time it had become apparent to me that the Turkish tourist industry was decades in the making and that they knew how to squeeze tourists. I was suspicious of the prices being offered to me for transportation to the site. In the office of one such place I found myself with three Israeli tourists: Alexander, Cosma, and Micael. Alexander as it turns out was from a family that had immigrated to Israel from Russia, thus he could speak Russian. We thought we were being pretty clever speaking covertly in Russian in front of the transportation-arranger, coming up with an angle for negotiating him down in price. We were successful and quite proud of ourselves for the low fare we procured until our bus transport dropped us off at the foot of the mountain, nowhere near our final destination. The driver chuckled a little as we protested.

We tried to laugh at ourselves as well as we started the long climb up the mountain on a winding country road. Night was soon upon us. After a couple hours in which hardly a vehicle passed, we stumbled into a lonely restaurant that was deserted but for a small party of young Turkish men (twenty years old, if that). One of them, Unluer, seemed amused by our predicament and offered to take us the rest of the way. Somehow – as if using a clown car in the circus – we managed to all squeeze in the car (the Israelis had large mountaineering backpacks).

Arriving at the top of the mountain, I learned that the one small guesthouse there had no vacancies. Unluer and his friends seemed unfazed and just planned to stay up all night. The Israelis had tents and Alexander offered a space in his for me (Cosma and Micael pitched theirs nearby). With no sleeping pad or blanket, it was a cold restless night for me.

Before dawn I slipped out of the tent and hiked the twenty minutes or so to the actual site of the ruins. I had read that the sunrise viewed from the mountaintop was spectacular. Obviously it wasn’t secret knowledge: there was quite a crowd gathered when I arrived, including some kind of martial arts club with children in karate garb. There was plenty of chatter and antics and my hopes for enjoying a peaceful, inspiring, once-in-a-lifetime kind of sunrise were crushed.

The sun climbed above the horizon after which everyone headed to check out the actual ruins. As I wended my way through and among the ancient, colossal, stone heads (no longer attached to their bodies), I couldn’t find space for my imagination to inhabit the place – everywhere were tourists taking pictures of themselves next to this stone head or that. They didn’t really care about the place – there was no sense of awe or reverence that I could detect. (I would see this phenomenon play out again and again – tourists coming to ancient and sacred sites but not really “being” there – yet wanting a picture to show they’d been there…)

Little by little the sunrise-come-photo-op crowd disappeared until hardly a soul was left. The place was all mine – except there was one last joke on me – I needed to use the bathroom – “no. 2” – and it needed to happen soon. That meant I had to make the long hike back to the guesthouse. Upon completing that hike and my “business”, I just didn’t have the will left to go back to the tomb site.

I might have stayed longer (and probably should have) but when Unluer offered me a ride to a city further down the line toward my next destination, I jumped at the chance, wishing my Israeli acquaintances good luck.

The car ride was a lengthy one. Unluer explained that he’d borrowed the car from his uncle and that it was actually a taxi. He and his comrades had lost a lot of the pep they’d had the previous evening, but they decided to pull the car over next to a lake that bordered the highway and have a swim. I demurred from joining them but sat there intrigued by an ancient bridge (aqueduct perhaps?) spanning the water. It might have dated back to Roman times. Unluer eventually got me to a city where I caught a train to Kayseri and from there I traveled to Goreme.

Goreme is a fascinating place with “fairy cone” hills that seem to be made of a kind of sandstone that ancient people carved rooms into. I’ve never seen a place like it anywhere. Of course, because it’s so curious, the tourists flock there – soon I was lamenting the crunch. I made the decision to walk the mile or two from the town where I was staying to the site of the main cone city. Trudging along the small highway, I veered suddenly off the road, down into a narrow canyon that looked like it would get me to the cone city in the distance.

Soon I was all alone, meandering down a path through a canyon which had been converted into orchards and small gardens. It seemed right out of a fairy tale. I saw no dwellings and no people. Climbing one tree, I tried an unusual fruit there (looking at pictures later, I think it might have been a mulberry).

It was all slightly eerie – I sensed the presence of people but saw no one. In my memory, I see some cave dwellings above the ground, but my imagination might be putting them there. I do know that I found a cave at ground level that appeared to be carved and was filled with water (a cistern perhaps for this dry country?) I shouted into the cave and listened to my voice echoing far far within.

I continued on to the cone city. The ancient dwellings carved there were like something I would expect only to find in a fantastical film or book. I explored them, avoiding other tourists as best I could. This caused me to find an exit I don’t think was generally used. As I passed a couple of Turkish women working, raking the grounds at the base of one of the cones, I felt animosity emanating from them toward me. In hindsight, I suspect we tourists were disrupting their lives and probably that of other people who still lived in the vicinity (and likely didn’t profit from the tourist trade). And me – despite believing myself to be more conscientious than the other tourists – was perhaps worse than the lot of them for my trespassing outside the lines.

I think you must be discerning a theme by now: my disenchantment with tourism. Whether disrupting the lives of the local people or supporting those who profited from the industry (and saw me less as a person and more as money), I just felt kind of gross. As hard as my experiences were in Turkmenistan, I’d learned there what it was like to more truly connect with foreign peoples. This connecting was what I was craving wherever I went.

In Turkey, I wasn’t finding enough of it.

From Goreme I traveled to Yazihoyuk to visit Derinkuyu, an underground city where up to 20,000 people had reputedly once lived. I think the belief is that they may have been early Christians hiding from Roman persecution. I was ready to have my mind blown, but instead found myself crammed in the passageways of the underground city with hundreds of other tourists. I had no freedom of movement and no way to escape the inane chatter of the other tourists discussing things like what they’d had for breakfast at their guesthouse. Essentially I had no chance to let my imagination give me a sense of what life in this place might have been like. The only moment of inspiration I can recall is poking my head into the massive, mutli-floored ventilation shaft – where it terminated above or below, I could not discern.

When I was finally back above ground, after shaking off a rare bought of claustrophobia, I decided I’d had enough of tourists – I was going to hitchhike to my next destination.

I admit that it was a bit rash and that I had no idea what the laws in Turkey were regarding such (let alone the local customs) but I was determined to escape the tourists and have a bit of adventure off the beaten path. I walked down the deserted highway a spell until I was outside a small village. A man and some children harassed me there, demanding I gift them with pens or whatnot. I continued down the road.

I did get several rides and made it to Ihlara: a narrow valley full of cave-like homes and churches carved into the stone cliffs there. Religious paintings adorned the walls of some of these caves. I breathed several sighs of relief as I spent a couple hours in this serene, forested valley which was so wonderfully devoid of tourists. Soon though I was heading to the road to hitchhike again.

To my surprise, I was picked up by a tractor.

I clung to the side while the farmer started down the road. He eventually veered off into the fields and I just rode with him as he went about his work. Frequently he would turn to me beaming and gesturing to the lands saying: “ii” (good).

I liked him. Rarely had I met someone who seemed so innocent and good-natured. I think I was with him for only about an hour before he took me to the town just up the road. I believe the agreement we made (language was a bit of a barrier) was that we were going to hang out once he dropped the tractor off.

While waiting for him, I was beckoned to by a man sitting outside a cafe. He was at a table with several other men. His name was Ergul and he could speak English fairly well. He looked to be about fifty with some gray lightening his long dark hair and beard. He told me he used to be the mayor of the town there. The conversation was pleasant enough and he insisted I join him as he left. I suppose I could have told him I was going to meet the farmer, but for some reason it was almost as if the decision was being made for me. He took me on his motorcycle out to a small hut in a farm field where a friend of his was watching TV. Beer was produced and we watched the Turkish national team playing in a soccer match against the Egyptians. At one point we took a break and went out to the field to help the friend reposition a long irrigation pipe.

That night I stayed at Ergul’s home and joined him and his family for breakfast on the veranda the next morning. We sat on floor pillows around a low table.

I thanked him for his hospitality and then carried on to Konya. From there I went to Denzili and then to Pamukkale. It was here that the ancient Greek city Hierapolis had been located. There are thermal springs there and loads of tourists, most of them seeming to be Turkish this time. This was the first time I heard the song Macarena. It was being blasted through a boombox (one more place conquered by that song in its move toward world dominance).

Once again, any magic the place might have held for imagination was buried beneath the tourist throng.

The ruins of an amphitheater from Roman times were there, somewhat isolated from the rest of the site. I wandered over to it and was lucky enough to have the place to myself.

Well, almost–

A young boy came up to me and showed me some ancient coins he wanted to sell to me. After I turned him down and he realized I could speak Turkish a bit, he sat next to me and admitted the coins were fakes. We sat there quietly as the sun sank low and I was able to get a sip of the kind of historical awe I was so thirsty for.

From there I traveled to the Mediterranean coast and the city of Selcuk. It was near there that the ancient Greek city of Ephesus had been. Thankfully the Ephesus ruins were sprawling enough that I felt I could avoid the masses and let my imagination soak in the place. I was especially intrigued to learn that John the Apostle had lived and perhaps written his gospel there. Also that Mary the mother of Jesus may have lived there.

Kind of strange for someone (me) who’s essentially renounced Christianity to be so starstruck by the thought of those two having lived there, but I guess – they being such colossal figures from my youth – I was left with a giddy feeling to be walking where they once might have.

I was also greatly intrigued by Ephesus’ public latrine which had long stone “benches” with holes symmetrically carved into them. Apparently in its heyday, water (diverted from a canal? river?) would have run non-stop through a trench beneath the holes to carry the waste away.

Where I was staying (in nearby Selcuk) I had had trouble finding a room in a guesthouse but finally stumbled upon an innkeeper who would let me sleep on the roof where the small bar was. There was of course no security for me or my things, but I made due. Also staying there (in rooms) were two young Turks, a brother and his beautiful sister, Gul. They could speak some English and we hit it off, sitting there at a rooftop table playing cards. They taught me a game called Pishki and we had many laughs. I had a bit of a crush on Gul and she perhaps felt something for me, but her brother was there to make sure she stayed out of trouble. I respected that and tried nothing. I enjoyed their company too much to blow it on making a pass.

I was soon off to Istanbul anyway. I spent some time wandering that city, intrigued by the modern Turks (it seemed odd after living in Turkmenistan to see jean-clad Muslim men and women walking hand in hand).

The next day I flew back to Turkmenistan, ending my rather strange and daring jaunt through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey…

Haznaly Horjun
May 1997
Excerpt from a Letter to a Friend

…so I thought of you to write this letter to you because I feel like you were a big part of helping me scratch free from the gloom-suit I’d draped upon myself in those Portland days. The connection we made playing guitars – in combination with the other things going on – helped me get onto a path that had a bit more joy and devil-may-care freedom.

After a shaky first year here in Turkmenistan, I’ve been having a similar kind of rising feeling as I seem to be understanding better how to make things work for me here–

Like when I’m traveling, to just get on the train and pay (bribe) one of the attendants for a seat, instead of joining the non-queueing-scrum of people trying to buy tickets at the station window.

Or requesting to actually co-teach with local teachers instead of insisting I have my own classes (what was I thinking my first year?)

Or learning to enjoy more of the local fare I had been rejecting, such as camel’s milk and a dipping sauce made from watermelon juice combined with melted sheep lard.

Of course, knowing the language better and having a better understanding of the culture are key elements – these the oil that lubricates the machine of contentedness.

Perhaps my secondary project best encapsulates how things have started coming together for me. Outside of and in addition to our primary assignment, the Peace Corps wants all us volunteers to take on a project of our own choosing and to design it. Initially as a project idea, I approached the administration about getting funding to get mics and a four-track recorder to travel around the country, recording people singing and playing music – from traditional singers wailing as they strummed their two-stringed dutars to modern rock bands in the capital (not that there are many of these). My supervisors agreed and told me the first step would be to get together a board to oversee the project. And…

I immediately lost interest.

I wanted complete control. Now, in hindsight, it seems like it would have been helpful to have a group to work with, but at the time it seemed like it would be a hindrance. I came out of college biased against collaboration, having hated all the “group processing” sessions I’d had to take part in there.

So the idea for my secondary project changed instead to putting together a book of games for local teachers to use in classrooms to assist them in teaching English.

I had a number of activities that had worked well with my students. I enlisted my volunteer group to submit successful ideas of their own to bulk up my own collection. Then I came up with a formatting/structure for the book and wrote it up in English.

Next I teamed up with one of the local English teachers in my town to help translate the book into the Turkmen language. These were nice sessions working with her at her home. Her family had a great big shade tree in their compound under which was a wooden tapjan platform. We’d sit there and drink tea and work. (The compound where I currently live is on newly-developed land and has no shade trees – what a difference it makes having a large tree for shady-summer-day-comfort and ambiance.)

There was still one more element I wanted for the book: pictures, and I had a plan for how to get them.

A few months ago I found myself unemployed; Turkmenbashy, the supreme leader of the country, had decided suddenly that English would no longer be taught in the schools. The Peace Corps encouraged us to wait and see what happened and so I did. For weeks.

During that time I got an idea to teach drawing classes. My family back home had sent me a huge bag full of used pens and pencils. There was a local night school I found that wasn’t being used and I got permission to offer some after-school classes. I invited students from four of the local schools to come. I was a little surprised by the animosity they had toward one another, but they were peaceful enough in their desks, happy to have this rare opportunity to simply express themselves artistically. Truthfully, I didn’t teach them that much (the only official training I’d had was a Drawing 101 course in college). But they loved putting pencil to paper. Soon I was giving them prompts of things I wanted them to draw that I hoped could be used to illustrate the book. These ended up being the thing that really gave the book life.

The Turkmen words Haznaly Horjun were suggested as a name for the book. I wouldn’t have gone for the English translation: “Treasure Chest”, but I liked the alliteration of Haznaly Horjun and so took it as the title.

When I had it finished, I was a little surprised (probably due to my naivete) to discover I had to find funding to get it printed. I guess I had assumed the Peace Corps would take care of this. They suggested I go to the outskirts of the capital (near the U.S. embassy) to where several international oil companies were headquartered in brand new buildings. Essentially I was being encouraged to go into the den of thieves and beg for assistance (I’m not a big fan of the fossil fuel industry).

Not seeing any other options, I sucked it up and headed out there. The first place I stopped was Unocal. Without much to-do, I was shown into the office where I met the assistant manager (I can’t recall his official title). I explained the project; he asked how much money I was needing; and I told him the amount (hoping he’d cover at least a third).

Without batting an eye, he said Unocal would cover the entire amount (as long as they got some acknowledgment in the book).

I took the money and ran (without looking back at the other headquarter offices). Just like that I’d made a “deal” with the same company I’d just been reading about was negotiating with our neighbors in the next country over: the dreaded Taliban. (Unocal and all the other fossil fuel companies here are trying to figure out how to pipe out Turkmenistan’s vast resources of natural gas so it doesn’t pass through Russia. One option is through Afghanistan, Pakistan and on to India…)

My Peace Corps supervisors seemed pretty surprised when I turned up saying I had the dough. I’d also found a printing company, but the Corps took that responsibility away from me and had the books printed by a company they already had a relationship with.

Finally, the idea was born that I’d travel the country doing workshops with teachers in various cities, demonstrating ideas from the book while also giving out copies. This I did and enjoyed very much.

If you had told me before I arrived here that I’d end up negotiating a “deal” with Unocal (or any major oil company), I would have told you you were crazy. But the craziness doesn’t end there. I’m thinking very seriously of getting my host-family a color TV as a parting gift when I leave. I hate television and consider it one of society’s evils, but my host-family loves their beat-up old black-and-white set. And I want them to be happy.

I guess their happiness is worth more to me than my ideals. In fact, more and more I’m wondering how well I’m actually served by these ideals of mine…

Muse of Mine
June 1997
Excerpt from a Letter to Friends

…I have fond memories of different times with both of you up in the Bradshaw Mountains strumming guitars – and feeling like that was enough.

Some days, strumming and picking on my guitar is enough for me here too.

You know there are many different styles of music I like to play, but a form I’ve been expanding upon lately are instrumental pieces that have a contemplative quality. Creating and playing these puts me in a kind of (needed) meditative state.

I’m off from work in the summers and I really have nothing to do. This summer I’ve taken to spending long hours sitting on the outdoor tapjan platform where I live, tinkering around with my guitar, making up songs. I decided since I have so much time and a memory that won’t hold things forever, that I’d document every song I’ve ever conceived. It’s laborious for me to scrawl these musical ideas on paper, but I’m forcing myself to do it. Sometimes it seems strange to try and “eternalize” music – by its very nature it seems ephemeral – like a butterfly that shouldn’t be captured and pinned to a placard. Yet here I proceed anyway with my net, pulling them from the air.

Truthfully, I suspect part of the motivation for this work is that I’m starting to lose the young man’s belief that he’s immortal, and putting the songs on paper is perhaps me genuflecting before the inevitability of death (and being forgotten).

There has been a real warmth here from people toward my music making. At times it makes me feel like I have the “It” factor. At other times I’m more rational about it: there’s very little live music here for people to be exposed to (and certainly no one that sounds like me) so of course the interest is going to be heightened – over-inflated even.

At times I feel like I’m getting a glimpse at what the song-crafting skills I have now might have been like had I lived in a time before recordings of music were available (say, before 1850). Live music must surely have had a (more obvious) magical quality to it for listeners in those days. And surely because of this dearth of music in the past, me and my songs would have been elevated to a height that is (apparently) unachievable for me here now.

But I live in this time where we’re all surrounded by as much music as we want – thousands upon thousands of songs from all genres to choose from, within which we can envelope ourselves in perpetual sonic comfort. This more than anything I believe diminishes what I do.

The flip side of all this is, if I lived in one of those past times, I very likely wouldn’t have had the opportunity to acquire an instrument (so readily available in our time now) let alone had the leisure time to develop some skill upon it.

And so for me, I shall have to be content having my relationship with my musical Muse be mostly a private one, unrecognized by the wider world. I love the songs my Muse and I create together. I’m trying to have that be enough.

I’m not sure why there’s this other part of me that wants others to listen in glowing awe to the songs my Muse and I have created together. I suspect that dissatisfied part of me has a neediness that has nothing to do with music – he’s trying to take the musical creations and use them as a way to gain esteem and favor for himself – to try and fill some hole inside.

I feel this other part of me is cheapening and lessening the songs by trying to use them to sell the product: Me.

I suspect though, this internal battle for control of the music is one that will continue to play out for as long as I my relationship with my Muse lasts…

A New Allegiance
July 1997
Excerpt from a Letter to a Pastor

…I imagine you’re a little surprised to hear from me. Over the past years I’ve grown to appreciate how you took time to just talk with me even though I wasn’t a member of your church and had renounced being a Christian. In my childhood I was so often disappointed with the supposed Christian examples I encountered, but you were/are different.

I’ve been living among Muslims for over a year now. I have also spent time while in India among the Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists (including staying for a couple days at the monastery-school of the Dalai Lama).

The Turkmen where I live call their god Huday. I think they feel He’s the same supreme being as Allah. Yet they still use the name Huday preferentially over Allah, this despite having adopted Islam into their culture and many Arabic words into their language.

At the end of each meal, when my host-father is present, a prayer is recited. All hands are held up with palms toward the face while the words are spoken by one person. Upon conclusion all say “ah-llo” and pass hands one after the other across his/her face in a kind of quick washing gesture. I’m not much for prayer these days, but one day I asked my host-father to teach me the words of the prayer. He was tickled and now occasionally when guests come to sit for tea or a meal, he proudly has me recite the closing prayer.

I suppose this could all seem suspicious, like he feels happy because he’s slowly converting me to Islam, but it really doesn’t feel like that. I’m as godless (or godful?) now as before I came here. This after-meal prayer recitation feels more like an important cultural connection – a showing of respect (and for whatever reason, I like the motion of the hands over the face).

There’s another kind of “religion” I’ve been scrutinizing recently: nationalism. The U.S. has a history of introspection, seemingly reaching its peak with your generation during the Vietnam War. Sometime during high school, I too began to look at my country much more critically. I didn’t come here to Turkmenistan to tell stories of how great America is. People here ask me how things are in my homeland and I always try to offer pros and cons.

Of those pros, second only to my family, is one thing that will always keep my heart entwined with my homeland: the parks (national, state, and regional). I love the American wilderness and really miss it. If I mention this wonderful element of America to the people here, they seem largely disinterested and inevitably turn the conversation to economics. As soon as I confirm (among other things) that our grocery store shelves are still stocked with food, the Turkmen feel that ends any doubts: America is better. Of course, if they ever started wandering the streets of any average U.S. city, they’d soon realize it’s not all they dreamed it was.

But back to this idea of nationalism – there does seem to be an absolute devotion so many people feel toward their home nation. Is that just some kind of tribalism passed down since the Neanderthal days? We good, they bad.

It seems to be so innately human.

Countering this, I’ve frequently had moments of pure friendliness and goodwill with people here that’s left us both wondering why we thought of each other as the enemy for our entire lives. It seems our nations declared the other as bad, gave us films, books, messages about those misguided people, and it grew into a belief that all Soviets (or Americans) must be bad. Of course they can’t all be bad, but I think we can get trapped in a nationalistic mentality that makes such illogical and irrational conclusions seem reasonable.

After wandering through the mountains here one day, feeling a growing conviction of opposition toward nationalism, I scrawled down a new pledge of allegiance for myself:

I pledge allegiance to this planet,
united with the Moon and the stars
And to my life, for which it lends,
this chance–
Among souls so divisible,
with lightness and darkness for all

What it lacks in rosy optimism is hopefully made up for with a determination to face conflict and hardship as essential ingredients to life here on Earth.

No one gets out alive, but, ah, this life – what an interesting chance to be given.

Of course some back in the States – those who are of a more nationalistic bent – would probably call me a traitor or at least an ingrate for twisting the words of their precious pledge. I just can’t help but see slavish devotion to one’s country as more of an ill than a benefit. I’m not naive enough to believe we can live in a world without borders, but that doesn’t mean I have to wrap my entire identity in the flag of that flown within the boundaries from which I hail…

Durak
August 1997
Excerpt from a Letter to Cousins

…after years of training with you at the card table at family gatherings, I’ve felt just fine jumping into the various card games they play here. There’s one game in particular that is an obsession: Durak. I believe the Turkmen got the game from the Russians. The goal is pretty simple: don’t be the last one holding a card(s). If you are, you’re the durak (the fool, the idiot).

I first learned the game during training when several of our instructors taught some of us how to play. I soon discovered the big-babushka-host-mother of mine really liked the game. Nights after I completed a full day of training, she would enlist me to play in “our” small Soviet-style apartment. Since there is no nightlife here, I really didn’t have anywhere to go. So there we would sit playing while the one Russian television station blared away in the background. (The show I remember the most is the Russian equivalent of Name That Tune with the host shouting “Musika!” whenever the band was supposed to start playing.)

Durak, like most card games, is generally less interesting when played by only two. Though I didn’t enjoy those bouts with my host mother so much, she was giving me valuable training in some of the finer points of the game, so that by the time I arrived in the Turkmen town where I was to spend the next two years, I was ready for the multi-player games my host-brothers loved to engage in. (Side note: Turkmen women/girls are generally barred – or at least frowned upon – from playing.)

Matches with the boys, sometimes with partners, sometimes not, were full of brashness and bravado – the young guns throwing each played card down with force and conviction. And I soon learned a fine point my babushka trainer had not taught me: certain forms of cheating are allowed.

Before you express any disdain, just realize the “cheating” is similar to that in baseball where the hidden ball trick, sign stealing by runners at second base, or the infamous Chuck Knoblach/Greg Gagne fake-out of Lonnie Smith in the ’91 Series is not frowned upon – it’s part of the game. If you’re foolish enough to fall for someone playing cards that aren’t allowed, then you deserve to be the durak (last one holding cards). There is an art form to this kind of cheating – you have to wait for just the right moment, when your opponent is distracted and swept away by the action – that’s when you slip in the “illegal” cards.

I realize this would all make a lot more sense if I was sitting with you right now and we were actually playing, but just know that there is a certain intensity that often builds up in these games and though it never comes to blows, the losers can be left quite surly. It’s a great game.

Okay…apologies for that rather lengthy introduction, now let me get on with telling you about one particularly memorable game that I was involved in on a train ride.

It started in my home town where I was heading off for a weekend in the capital city, Ashgabat. Normally I take the overnight train to get the most bang for my weekend “buck” (time-wise). A twenty minute walk is required to get to the station. With streetlights at an absolute minimum in my town, those nights when there’s no moon can be drowned in near pitch darkness (especially when first departing before my eyes have had a chance to fully adjust).

I have experience from my wild days living in Arizona of finding my way through the woods at night without a flashlight to my hidden wiki-up, so I was not to be deterred by a bit of darkness. Here though there were a few problems I didn’t have in the American forests: roving dogs (who have a distinct sensory advantage over me); a couple spots in the streets with missing manhole covers (I once saw a distracted boy step right into one of these – luckily for him it was only about six feet deep); and then there’s the threat of being mugged.

Luckily, the night of this story, I didn’t have any such mishaps (and as of this writing, still haven’t had any such).

After completing my journey across town and arriving at the tracks, I was not surprised to see a hopelessly long oil-tanker train blocking the way to the station. As I prepared to stoop and cross under one of the cars, I recalled once again the account given to me of a friend of Uncle Dave’s who lost a foot when crossing under a train that suddenly lurched.

I moved quickly, not taking it for granted that the train would stay stationary.

Another hazard of crossing under the cars was the threat of getting my clothes dirty: the tracks were covered in oil, grime, and who knows what else – I believe the toilets on the train open to the tracks below – they are forbidden to do so near towns, but I’ve seen protocol being passed up in plenty of other areas.

Once safely passing across, I glanced inside at the tiny ticket window inside the small station building.

Closed.

Who knew if and when it would open. I didn’t care, I was getting on without a ticket. I’d had enough of battles with mobs of people unwilling to form queues. I’d seen how people just paid off the conductors on the train for a spot. Having an actual ticket perhaps would have entitled me to my own berth, but that didn’t mean the conductor wouldn’t divvy up that berth to as many as he could cram onto it.

When the passenger train arrived, the mob began pushing to get on the train and secure a place, but I’d learned to just get on last and make due with whatever spot I could get. Once on, I found my way into one of the second class cars. Here bunk beds face each other in four or five separate nooks. Above each upper bunk is a rack for luggage and occasionally bodies trying to sleep. I myself once used one of these racks to draw myself out of the mob below. If this train had been returning from the capital, every nook and cranny would have been filled with the large, colorful, plastic bags some use to transport goods – at those times it seems like these train cars are more freight cars than passenger ones. People stock up on goods for themselves and for sale either at their local market or one of the tiny shops (reminiscent of newspaper stands) that have sprung up here and there in many towns.

Within each nook of these second class train cars is a little table extending out from the wall just beneath the window. I was pleased to find a place next to one of these – it might give me a chance to write or play solitaire.

No such luck. Across from me was a “daitha” (“aunt”), a middle-aged Turkmen woman, who was spreading her picnic out across the table. Curiosity eventually got the better of her and she asked me in Russian about my guitar. I responded to her in Turkmen, asking if we could speak that language which I knew better than Russian. Predictably her countenance immediately warmed and before long she’d discovered I was in fact the American living in Gazanjyk she’d heard about. She plied me with tea and bread and questions about costs in America compared to Turkmenistan (this, always the prelude for Turkmen to express how prices/life had taken a turn for the worse since the collapse of the Soviet Union).

Outside the window, the Turkmen landscape began to roll by. I couldn’t see much in the darkness, but I knew the entire way to Ashgabat the view would largely be the same: scrubby, desert plain with the Köpet Dag mountains in the distance.

Eventually the little bubble of excitement this woman had found in me seemed to dissipate. When she packed up enough of her picnic to make room on my end of the table, I took out my pack of cards. I’d learned a solitaire game that required a smaller footprint than the traditional game and so there was just enough room to lay out my cards. The woman watched me with some interest – nothing unusual about that.

“My cow was stolen,” she said, proceeding to ask me if I knew anything about it.

I was confused. Another woman came forward.

“How is my family in Ashgabat?”

Did they think I was some kind of seer, gazing at Tarot cards?

A group of young men were passing through the car and seeing me and my cards, came and asked what was going on. The daithas told them I was an American and that I spoke Turkmen.

One of the young men scooched himself next to me and introduced himself as Shohrat. He reached over and began inspecting the cards.

“American?” he asked of the cards, knowing full well they were – the Russian decks sold in Turkmenistan didn’t have twos, threes, fours, or fives.

“Let’s have a game,” he said. “Do you play durak?”

“Alti cart, yes,” I replied, using the Turkmen name for the game.

Shohrat’s mouth twisted into half a grin. “Come on,” he said, nodding for me to follow.

I wasn’t so sure I wanted to give up my spot. Shohrat stood near the door, gesturing for me to come. I thanked the woman for her hospitality and followed after him.

We passed into the next car and a different nook that Shohrat and four of his companions had staked out.

Among them was one named Serdar: like a handful of Turkmen, his hair trended more toward blond than black. He knew a smattering of English and used it to ask me about where I was from and about the various members of my family (“Have you a mother? Have you a brother?”).

Then was Yusup: he had an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He asked if I knew Jean Claude Van Damme and Stallone. Unlike the Turkmen children who asked the same, he didn’t believe it when I said I knew them personally. He didn’t even smile – perhaps such idols were not to be joked about.

Berdish had a head full of thick black hair. He also was quick to smile. He asked to see my guitar and with some reluctance, I took it out for him to strum upon.

Arslan who seemed to have a tinge of vodka-induced haze about him, sang along, tapping out an accompanying rhythm with ten-finger play upon the table. His friends protested that he was getting the words wrong, but he sang on anyway.

Shohrat, having separated out all the smaller numbers from my American deck, announced it was time to play. He told Berdish to give the guitar back and come to the table.

They decided we’d play with partners. Serdar, the blond, quickly volunteered to be my partner. In this first game, the cards were in our favor and he and I soon successfully played out our collective hands.

Berdish and Arlsan were next to go out leaving Shohrat and Yusup as the losers. Arslan let them know rather loudly they were the duraki (fools).

Though obviously displeased, Shohrat acted disinterested. He called for a tournament. Each player would go it alone. Whoever was the durak would be out the next game until it got down to the final two players.

I had been involved in a bout like this once before with my host-brothers and a couple of the neighborhood boys. I felt ready; I’d been in Turkmenistan for almost two years; I’d plunged to the depths of a self-imposed isolation and misery and come out the other end; I knew the ways of the Turkmen and now I’d prove it by beating them at their own game.

The first match, I was dealt few trump, but I had several high cards. Yusup played high to me. He was trying to coax out all those high cards. I knew the ploy well and wasn’t going to fall for it. I took his cards, losing my turn to attack but biding my time. Soon I had more cards than any other player. Shohrat went out. Then Serdar. Looking on, you probably would have thought I was in trouble, but the other players knew better. Soon it was Berdish who was the only one left with cards as I used his own cards against him to go out. I felt a little sorry that he was the one banished from the next round, but he didn’t seem to mind and asked to play my guitar again.

We were down to five players.

In the next game, I was dealt a couple trump. Again though, I passed up my chance to attack, instead taking in cards, creating sets of three and four that matched. Soon I was playing out all my cards. This time it would be my former partner, Serdar, who was left with cards and thus out for the next round.

That left four players.

In the next match, Arslan and Yusup were next to each other and their brash style of slapping down cards was fed upon by one another. They stood and thwacked their cards upon the table like cracking a whip – one attacking, the other defending with just as much machismo. Shohrat was the first to play out this round, leaving me with these two, who continued their exuberant playing against one another.

Quick interjection: as mentioned, cheating is allowed if you can fool your opponent into playing on a card that isn’t allowed or if defending with an illegal card that the attacker doesn’t notice. But one time, in a match back in my home town, two boys I was playing with were both playing incorrect cards upon one another. I’d been confused. They laughed when they were both out of cards, declaring me as the durak. I protested that they had played incorrectly, but they countered that since I hadn’t objected, it was allowed for both of them to play out their cards that way.

Arslan and Yusup were now trying this same ploy, working as a covert team to get rid of unwanted cards. I quickly protested and they had to take back their cards. This time, Arslan would be the one left with cards at the end and thus out.

Down to three.

Berdish put down the guitar as all prepared to watch me, Shohrat and Yusup go at it. Shohrat quickly played out, leaving it just Yusup and me. Yusup may have lost his sparring partner, but he continued with his aggressive playing, each card hitting the table with a cry of “Meh!”, as if slapping me upon the face. Little-by-little I was drawn into this style, countering with my own cards aggressively. We got down to five cards each. Yusup went on the attack first. His first card, I defended. His second came down more quickly and was defeated. Cheers rose. A third card came even more quickly and when I successfully defended it the cheers grew louder. Then Yusup’s fourth card came down even faster. I had it beat and prepared to slap down my card, but stopped – Yusup had tried to lure him into a trap – using quick rhythmic play in a kind of call and response (and probably hoping I was riding a wave of adrenaline brought on by the cheering crowd), he hoped to get me to play on his disallowed card.

I didn’t take the bait. I stopped short of slapping my defending card down, announcing Yusup’s card wasn’t allowed.

He had to pick up all the cards and soon was defeated.

Anticipation pulsed through the group as they realized something akin to the Olympics was about to happen: Turkmen vs. American for the durak gold medal.

By now the group watching had grown beyond the original players. Certainly Shohrat was the hometown favorite, but his opponent, this guitar-playing American who spoke their language; knew the ins and outs of their game; and had yet to do anything offensive, was not altogether someone to be cheered against.

My final opponent, Shohrat, who displayed none of the boisterousness of his companions, had carried a cool demeanor since his opening loss in partner play. There would be no machismo card slapping now – just cold, calculated play.

As the cards were dealt out, luck was favoring me: trump cards were coming my way.

As the game progressed, I had to poker-face my excitement as I built a hand that was unbeatable. Soon I’d unloaded all but my last card.

I smiled triumphantly: Shohrat held nine cards, two of which I knew were non-trump 6’s (the lowest cards in the deck).

My final card was a 7 of trump.

Before Shohrat started his final attack, I magnanimously laid down my final card to show I was unbeatable and thus I’d spare him from a drawn-out ending. Shohrat immediately protested and told me to take back my card. He then played an 8 of trump, which I could not beat. He got to attack again. He played two 9’s, one of which being trump, was unbeatable by my cards. I had to take the 9’s. I was up to four cards now – but three of them were trump. He next played a set of four jacks. One of those Jacks was of course trump and thus unbeatable by my hand.

He laid down the pair of 6’s, which were beatable, but it was too late – those were his last two cards.

There was a roar from the crowd as the American became the durak – loser of the championship. Shohrat stopped short of adding humiliation to my defeat: he could have put those final two 6 cards on my shoulders (“epaulet” the Turkmen called them – like those ornamental pieces on a soldier’s uniform).

Shohrat gathered the cards back together and they were put away.

Friendly conversation continued the rest of the way to the capital, but my heart was only half in it. It was a bitter pill I’d just swallowed. Not so much for the loss, but for the realization that there really was no escape for me from falling victim to myself. In college I’d embraced being the fool, even going so far as to make myself a jester costume. I had thought nothing of acting foolish in public, challenging the rules and norms others bound themselves in.

Turkmenistan had driven that playful fool from me – it’d started all the way back in the first week in country when the dog I’d been wrestling with had been kicked.

A kick that I’d felt myself.

But here I was, two years later, revealed still a fool. But it was worse now as this was not of my own design. Truthfully, Shorat was probably one of those who counted cards and had known what my last card was. With it being his turn to attack, in the end – short of some uncharacteristic mistake by him – there would have been no way I could have beaten him.

The part that hurt was how I’d laid down my last card and started into my victory lap…

Yet, perhaps my silly defeat in this silly little game was a nice (albeit unintended) gift from me to them – did they really need America to beat them in everything?

And for me?

Among other things: a cheap lesson in humility and to never ever celebrate before crossing the finish line…

Gutardym
October 1997
Excerpt from a Letter to Family

…I remember writing to you after I’d been here a year, not sure how I could possible stay for another. Now here I am, just two months away from completing my service. Over the past year, I’ve been figuring out more and more how to “play by the rules” of this society. The more I’ve gotten used to and even embraced the norms here, the easier things have become. I guess this process is as old as time itself: someone ends up in a strange new environment and has a tough go of it, but gradually, as they adapt, things get easier.

Nothing unusual here.

Though I have had very little contact with the new group of volunteers coming in (T-5), when I have encountered them, I’ve realized how far I’ve come and how glad I am to be in my place and not theirs. There’s a satisfaction that comes from being the savvy veteran.

If I was asked to give three points of solid, concise advice to these newcomers, what would they be?

1)
2)
3)

I stopped writing for a time to try and think of three points of advice and I came up with nothing. I guess I can’t offer advice to them – what do I know about what their day-to-day will be like? When I look at the individuals in my own group, I can see we’ve had very different experiences. Sure, we overlap in many key places, but in other areas, it’s like we’ve been living in different countries from one another.

In the end, I think I just have to wish the newcomers good luck. I can see now that I’ve had my fair share of it:

Luck to have had a really solid cohort of co-volunteers.

Luck that we were all stationed together in the same town for three months of training (unlike now, where they split the new groups up into regions). Those three months allowed us to form war-buddy-like bonds.

Luck to have found the host-family I did. They were patient, generous, and forgiving. Other volunteers have not fared as well and found themselves moving on to another family (if not bouncing from one to the next to the next).

Luck also to have had my host-family living on the very edge of town. It was huge for me, having that open horizon to the west.

Luck to have had the Köpet Dag Mountains right outside my door to get lost (and found) in.

Luck to have had all of you back home cheering me on (or even just witnessing via my letters).

And perhaps luckiest of all: that I brought my guitar. It was like the life-preserver keeping me afloat in a vast sea while I waited calmly for some ship to chance by.

I feel that ship has finally come and I’m being pulled up to safety. Even as it’s happening, I’m looking back at the very water I’ve so often cursed and feeling an ironic sadness – almost a longing as if I’m being parted from a loved one…

But I’m anxious and ready to set off and see more of the world. My plan is to explore India again (and hopefully Nepal), before flying to Kenya to begin working my way across the African continent. Every country’s name promises an unique treasure – for me it’s not the kind the European conquerors were after; the treasure I seek is that of interactions with the people and their food, customs, and historical/sacred sites.

If I’m being honest (and I try to be), this opportunity to travel was probably the foremost reason I joined the Peace Corps in the first place (and being so close to so many places I wanted to visit during my service – yet feeling denied from exploring them – was one of the main causes of my misery). Yet I feel my time here has taught me what to really look for in these places I intend to visit: as real a connection with those lands and their people as I can find. (Even as I realize my experience here has probably ruined all my future travels – now I know I can’t really get anything more than a cursory, rather shallow, experience of those places I intend to visit unless I stay for a long time. And on that note: during some of my travels I’ve seen other travelers toting backpacks donning flag patches of the various countries they’ve visited. Oh, how these have stirred envy in me. How I’ve wanted to surpass their collections and strut around with more exotic flags than any of them…

…and then I come back to my senses. This quest to accumulate notches on the (traveler’s) belt may be grounded in an actual love of visiting foreign places and expanding one’s horizons, but to show-off and name-drop all the places one has visited seems ridiculous when taking into account – as I mentioned earlier – that you can’t really get to know a place unless you invest real time there.

Still those tastes of India, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey have me excited for the chance to go long and acquire a few more “flag patches” to sew onto my soul.

I’m glad I stayed here to complete my two years of service. It’s tempting to say it’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, but truthfully, I think getting through those first three years of high school was harder.

What’s Nietzsche’s quote? “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger”.

Something like that.

I don’t know if I’m any stronger from my time here, but certainly I’ve been irrevocably reshaped…

The Tapjan (He Left Behind)
November 1997
Excerpt from a Letter to Self

…I’m sorry to leave you behind. I didn’t realize when I signed up for this that a part of me could never come back home.

And what a great part of me you were.

I enjoyed your free-spirited antics and devil-may-care attitude. This was just no place for them – or at least, I didn’t have the strength to hold that door open for you here.

You can’t get too mad at me. Coming here was your fault, really. You and your crazy dreams.

Still, it seems cruel to leave you in the very place where you didn’t have enough oxygen to flourish. But I’ve got to believe you’ll be alright. Since you are part of my imagination, why shouldn’t I imagine you growing to love this place?

You’ll sit on that tapjan and watch each sunset across the desert plain. And the Hale-Bopp comet will be there every evening hanging from that starry, starry sky.

The grapes we planted will vine up into a green canopy over your tapjan. And a tree or two will grow in the compound yard, offering blankets of shade, transforming those cruel summer days into peaceful loaf-abouts.

While we’re at it, how about if we imagine opening a small cafe up the way. Adults and children will gather there to listen to you play songs and tell stories of how things are in America. You’ll speak the language fluently, but with an accent that charms.

And you’ll still roam the mountains, perhaps meeting, every once in a while, with other people’s lost-childhood-personas who’ve wandered in.

You’ll be better off without me holding you down…

I realize I’m writing all this to try and make myself feel better about leaving you here. You’re probably actually feeling more at peace about it than I am. You probably always had that peace in your pocket – you were just waiting for me to leave so you could enjoy it.

Peering through a different portal in my imagination, I can see myself thirty years from now – you wouldn’t believe all the things (I’m tempted to say “shit”) I end up surrounding myself with: computer, smart phone, car, house, bills, insurance, retirement accounts, failed dreams…

I wish I could have lived up to the lofty heights you’d envisioned for me in those dreams of yours, but I just can’t.

Losing you has a little extra pain to it – you being the main player in my second childhood (found during my late teens/early twenties after having driven out your predecessor at an age too young).

I thought you just might have the gall to go the distance with me.

I was kidding myself. I wonder what would have become of you if I hadn’t come here to Turkmenistan. How long could you have held on? Surely you would have been driven from me one way or another. Maybe leaving you here on this tapjan is a better fate than you would have otherwise met.

I recently was thinking about it and tapjan, if separated into two words (tap jan), can mean “find soul”.

That seems fitting somehow, even as I lament losing you.

We had a good run of it. We were something, weren’t we?

There’s no rule that I can’t come visit you, is there? Within my imagination that should be possible. I’ll come sit with you on that tapjan from time to time. And we’ll laugh and cry and wonder about all the things we did before – and during – those crazy Köpet Dag days…