Ted Conover » Articles http://www.tedconover.com Web site for Ted Conover, Author Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:01:53 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Slipping from Shangri-La http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/slipping-from-shangri-la/ http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/slipping-from-shangri-la/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:30:12 +0000 tedconover http://www.tedconover.stevemotzenbecker.com/?p=208 The line of forty walkers moved quickly, which was good for keeping warm but bad for keeping my balance. Because we were walking on ice, a frozen river. The Zanskar, walled in on both sides by a towering gorge, is the only winter link between villages in that Himalayan valley and the outside world. And it’s only a link for a little while, in deepest winter, when its surface freezes enough to support human footsteps.

Zanskar is part of Ladakh—the eastern, Buddhist part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. At more than 11,000 feet above sea level (with peaks as high as 23,000), the area has long been defined by remoteness. The valley has the feel of a cul-de-sac, because there is only one real road in and out—a dirt track from Kargil, an untouristed and predominantly Muslim town just a couple of miles from the disputed border (or “Line of Control”) with Pakistan, to Padum, the main town of Zanskar. Summers are short there, and the Kargil road is only reliably open four or five months a year, from the end of May to early October. After that, snow makes it impassable and the valley gets very, very quiet. But for a few weeks each winter, when the ice is strong enough, the river provides the Zanskaris another way out—an ice road, a forty-mile trail upon the frozen surface called the chaddar.

The walkers were teenagers, mainly. They had maxed out the educational opportunities in Reru, a village with the area’s largest boarding school, and were taking advantage of the cold to get out of Dodge—to make their way to larger boarding schools in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, and in Leh, the capital of Ladakh, not far from the end of the chaddar at the confluence of the Zanskar and the Indus. They also were taking advantage of scholarships, offered by Europeans sympathetic to young Tibetan Buddhists in this poor part of the world.

To claim their new lives, the teenagers of Reru had to do just two hard things. They had to leave their ancestral home. And they had to go by way of a frozen river. But they would not have to go alone. A number of fathers, uncles, and brothers would accompany the group—as well as a handful of students from even smaller, outlying villages. Last, there would be me and my guide Seb Mankelow (an Englishman who was first drawn to Zanskar as a climber, then studied its agriculture as a graduate student, and now welcomed any chance to go back), and my interpreter, Dorjey Gyalpo (a clerk for the local government who was both a deeply religious Buddhist and a worldly Renaissance man, fluent in Harry Potter and eager to discuss the recent eclipse of the sun)—plus our cook and four porters. So, in all, about forty people walking the chaddar’s ice. As fast as we could.

Walking fast shortened the trip, allowing the students to carry few clothes and little food. Raised on steep mountains at high altitudes, the Zanskaris were adept at walking fast, even on ice. I was not. The ice could be extraordinarily slippery. Sometimes it wasn’t—sometimes it was dimpled or stippled with dirt or topped with rough crystals, so your boots could get a purchase. But most times it was the very soul of slipperiness, smooth like a mirror, or, even worse, smooth like a mirror hidden under a thin layer of snow. Often the uncovered ice was cloudy or opaque, laced with cracks and fissures, but occasionally it was transparent: you could look down into the current and, if the light was right, see pebbles at the river bottom.

And here and there, there were breaches, most often toward the middle, where it was perfectly possible to step into open water. Depending on the light and the sky, the water would be pitch black or pellucid blue, the surface rippled by ice crystals, a giant moving Slurpee swirling around frozen banks and then disappearing under sheets of ice. And even the frozen surface did not stay still. At night, sometimes, you could hear the loud reports of ice cracking. And, during the day, the chaddar would change while you were on it. You would take a step and hear a deep whump and feel a loss of elevation of maybe an inch or so and think: Am I going in?

In fact, as we learned on our second day from people coming from the other direction, that seemed to be happening right now: the ice was breaking up downstream. I was following in the footsteps of a girl named Stanzin Zoma when the line of walkers slowed, then stopped. At first I felt relief—it was a chance to take off my jacket, which was too heavy for the strenuous pace and warming weather, and I was wet with perspiration. But then relief turned to alarm because ahead, in place of silent ice, there was open water, the dark, rushing river risen to the surface. The only remaining ice clung to the edges of the sheer rock walls.

Glaciers in the Himalayas are melting faster than anywhere else in the world, and, according to a report by the International Commission for Snow and Ice, “if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.” A long-term study of a region in Himachal Pradesh state, just thirty miles from Reru, showed that glaciers have receded more than 20 percent in the past forty years.

Receding glaciers are grave news for Zanskar, but it took me a while to understand why. When I visited for the first time, in early summer, mountain snows were melting and the rivers and the streams were high; near them fields were green with barley and peas. Children clad in maroon robes worked alongside their mothers; a golden light of evening warmed the cool breeze. The scene evoked the idea of Shangri-La, of the possibility of Himalayan paradise.

But Shangri-La in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon was a land of lush forests, burbling brooks, and ponds. The real Ladakh is an alpine desert. After the snow melts the land is mostly treeless and brown. Farming takes place during a three-month window of warmth and depends heavily on irrigation. The crops I saw were fed by melting snow. Once this dwindles, often by mid-summer, glacial melt steps in to keep fields green.

Subtract glaciers and you have trouble. One ancient village, Kumi, recently had to relocate when its glaciers became too small for the job. And climate change causes other problems: locals say that more precipitation is arriving in the form of rain and less in the form of snow, which means that the snow melt so important to first waterings sometimes just isn’t there.

It stands to reason that climate change also will affect the chaddar. It might not have, yet; it’s hard to tell, in part because river ice is more volatile than a glacier and much more transient; glaciers change over years, but the chaddar changes over hours and often in ways you don’t expect. A layer of snow, for example, can function as an insulating blanket, warming the ice and encouraging break-up. Deep cold, on the other hand, can thicken the ice, forcing running water to the surface. In this place where life depends on ice, the ice is getting harder and harder to depend on.

A few days before our trip began, one man in particular was concerned about the forecast. His name was Lobzang Tashi and, as the village headman of Reru, it was his place to make the call about when the group should head down the chaddar.

Lobzang, a fifty-year-old widower with seven children, had many counselors. He spoke with other parents and with the elders in the village of two hundred and fifty people. And he spoke with men who were just back from the chaddar—a little soft yet, some said. He went down to the river himself—Reru is perched on a steep hillside about three hundred feet above the Lungnak River, a tributary of the Zanskar. The Lungnak seemed pretty well frozen, but it was smaller than the Zanskar. Lobzang then did what any reasonable person would do: he consulted a monk.

The monk, thin, thirtyish and wearing the traditional maroon goncha, a woolen robe tied at the waist, arrived from a village several hours’ walk upstream. He sat cross-legged on a rug atop an earthen floor, drinking salt tea. After a while, he took out his packet of block-printed prayer texts and began chanting quietly. Everyone else continued to converse. Then he finished and arose; deciding upon a date would take him a day or two, he said, and in the meantime he was going to return to the monastery.

>While we waited, I walked around the village. Sixteen-year-old Stanzin Zoma served me tea in the kitchen with her mom and dad, two younger sisters, and grandmother. It would be her first time on the chaddar, she said, and her first time to Leh. “I am packing wool socks, wool clothes, a sleeping bag and pad, gloves, butter, cheese, tsampa [roasted barley flour, a local staple, that a traveler could mix with tea], baked bread, sugar, and tea. Also, pictures of my family, my house, my aunt and uncle, my village, and my school.” Though a fire was burning in the small stove on the floor, it was cold inside the low-ceilinged kitchen. We sat hunched on rugs. Almost everyone in the room wore a hat. “I am worried about leaving my parents here and being alone. And about the chaddar: they say that sometimes you have to take off your shoes and walk through the water—I think that is scary. But I have my best friend, Sonam Dolma, and she will walk with me. I would like to become a doctor, because there are no doctors here.”

Sonam Dolma lived in a house with a brighter, sunnier main room that had pillows on the floor. She wanted to be a doctor, too—people had only traditional medicine to treat their coughs, earaches, bad backs, and dental problems, she explained. Though neither Sonam nor Stanzin seemed the type to show it, it seemed quite possible that both were excited about the prospect of busting out of their little village.

That was clearly not the case, however, with Tunzin Thongdol, at fourteen the second youngest of Lobzang’s seven children, and the first to have the opportunity to leave. She didn’t want to go at all. Apparently, she viewed my guide Seb and me as harbingers of departure and tried hard to avoid us—we’d been living in her house for at least three days before we even knew she was there—but finally Lobzang ordered her out of her room and into the winter kitchen. “I don’t feel good about leaving,” she said. “I’ve never left home before, and I don’t want to leave my family.” Tunzin couldn’t bear to talk about it any more; she fled back into her room.

Also upset was the mother of Thinlay Angmo, seventeen; she broke down in tears as Thinlay listed for me the things she would miss about home (“family, mountains, school, the land—I will miss them all”). Like all the other girls, Thinlay made and served me the tea herself—her hands so calloused from working around the hearth that she seemed not to notice the hot coals and steaming metal cup. But the petite young woman admitted, “I’m not going to miss some of my chores.” Teenaged girls were depended on heavily by most familes to do all manner of jobs, from cooking to caring for animals and younger siblings. For Thinlay, walking the chaddar meant a chance at a different kind of life.

Two boys professed to be equally eager. Tenzin Namdol, fifteen, said he had been to Leh before via the chaddar, and that it was “no problem” because he was “a fast walker.” Lobzang Teshi, a handsome boy, came from a family that was noticeably poorer than the others. Their kitchen was dark and dusty; his mother and siblings wore tattered clothes. His father, he explained, had died a few years before. His mother prayed that Lobzang would eventually be able to support the family from afar.

As in rural places everywhere, the outside world beckons to the young—even if it is difficult for them to leave. Teenagers who stay in Zanskar—their numbers are dwindling—are likely to follow in their parents’ footsteps, becoming farmers or monks or perhaps shopkeepers. Those lucky enough to continue their education outside have many more choices—including coming back as something like a doctor or engineer or schoolteacher or not coming back at all. To them, the chaddar means opportunity.

Lobzang Tashi received the monk’s message and announced that Friday was auspicious for our departure. But word came back to him that people in some outlying villages, from which a few students would be joining the trek, needed one more day to get ready. So Lobzang compromised: on the auspicious day, he staged a mock departure.

Seven of the nine students from Reru and a small number of spectators, mostly kids, gathered in the center of town—an open, snowpacked area with a community center on one side, a stone outcropping on another, and, in the middle (nobody could tell me why), a large, unused fuel tank upon which a few children sat. Lobzang chanted from a prayer book held in one hand; with the other, he swung a censer filled with burning juniper twigs. The teenage boys shouldered their rucksacks—mostly empty—and, joined by the girls, walked single file through the snow away from town, down the valley, until they were out of sight. Five minutes later, they turned around and came back.

Final preparations now began in earnest. In a room on the lower level of Lobzang’s house, a group of men put finishing touches on a small sled made of bent wild rose branches with strips of black PVC tubing nailed on as runners. This Lobzang would pull by a rope, which he would either loop over his shoulder or tie around his waist. It was an ice trailer. And when it wasn’t on ice, Lobzang demonstrated, the framework could easily be fitted with straps to allow it to be carried as a backpack. In other houses, bread was baked, tsampa mixed, amulets wrapped, clothing mended and laid out. Siblings watched, mothers feared, and everyone was worried and excited.

Early on departure day, villagers came out into the chilly, overcast morning. Mothers were clustered in the middle of the action, many of them sobbing; some younger sisters were among them. Lobzang and a tall, stiff, elderly man tied pieces of katak—flowing white cloth—to the branches of a rose bush that grew from underneath the stone outcropping that overlooked the village common. The rock was a village deity; by tying on the pieces of katak, the elders were aiming to please the deity and thereby ensure a safe journey on the river. Lobzang lit more juni-per twigs in his censer as the crowd grew. His daughter and two of the other girls in the group let tears stream down their faces.

Nobody blew a whistle, nobody shouted out that it was time to leave, but suddenly, departure began. Girls took the lead, the five from Reru in front. The line marched over a rise and then down the snowy hillside toward the frozen river. I scrambled to fall in close after them and was glad I did: in that monochromatic tableau, with everything else snow or rock, the brightly clad teenagers were a filament of bright energy. The boys wore knit hats, dungarees, and modern (if not new) nylon-shell parkas of dark green, red, or tan; the girls wore brightly colored silk scarves which covered their hair, wound around their necks, and hung down their backs. Under their jackets they wore the loose-fitting, pajama-type garment called a salwar kameez in purple, orange, royal blue, and emerald green, often with busy patterns. The girls wore thin knit gloves; the boys did not.

Then, at the very moment the town would disappear from sight, they all stopped, took seven steps backward, and each tossed a pebble toward home. I was surprised to see this and glad I’d been watching intently; it was over in seconds. No one could tell me what their cue had been, nor could anyone explain quite what it meant. But it seemed part of the family of gestures that includes truckers crossing themselves before beginning a long journey, or my own muttering of “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow” (a hymn sung in many churches as the Doxology and taught to me by my essentially non-observant father as a goodnight prayer when I was a boy) when I’m on the runway about to lift off—rituals of departure that are about safe arrival and safe return.

I hurried to keep up with the file; I had never seen such a large group move so fast. We descended the steep hillside to the river on a trail with switchbacks and paused once we got to the bottom. The river wasn’t completely frozen, and a couple of the grown men, seasoned chaddar-walkers, went first, using five-foot-long walking sticks to tap-tap-tap the ice surface before taking a step, sussing out a good route.

The Zanskaris’ everyday walking style seemed well-suited to a trip across the ice. They tended to take short, quick steps. This was partly a function of stature—few of them were tall people—but another part seemed a question of style: no footfall was emphatic, each was as light as possible. A passage across ice for many became a rapid shuffle. I am not tall but Seb is—six feet tall and strong. Keeping up on the ice was not hard for him, but later, as the line began to climb out of the riverbed, aiming for the road, he had his work cut out for him. Where the snow was deep, each walker stepped in the tracks of the person in front of him. The problem for Seb was that these footprints were very close together. “It’s like walking in a really tight skirt,” he said as he minced his way through the deep snow.

The group broke a path along the snow-

covered roadbed and finally stopped to rest at the foot of Bardan Monastery, an ancient redoubt overlooking the river. The road was the better route here, because the first night would be spent in Padum. Many of the group had relatives there and could sleep with roofs over their heads. The next day, the real chaddar trek would begin.

From Padum to the head of the chaddar was about twenty-five miles, and there was no need to walk it—the road alongside the Zanskar River would carry us there. The Reru gang would travel in a school bus, and another, smaller bus had been arranged for my crew and me.

We gathered on the dark and icy street at about four o’clock in the morning. There was no moon; the huge sky over the valley was filled with thousands of stars. I’d met my crew before and greeted them anew: there was Punchok Chosphel, the cook, in his mid-twenties, who had a wide, winning smile and good fashion sense (he had handsewn his leather boots and wore a variety of hats and scarves); Tsewang Rinchen, a fortyish workhorse of incredible muscle and endurance; Tsering Dorjey, a thirty-something plasterer inexperienced in the chaddar who had gotten the job through connections; and of course, Lobzang Tashi, the Reru headman who had been my host in the village. Another Lobzang, Lobzang Tsetan, lived in the village of Zangla and we would pick him up on the way. Though he had only one eye, this Lobzang was probably the best ice-walker and, like Tsewang, was steady and indefatigable.

Many of our bus’s windows were stuck open and, like a surprising majority of the vehicles in Zanskar—indeed, in greater Ladakh—it had no heater. This became significant about forty-five minutes into our journey, when we stopped on the road opposite the village of Zangla to pick up one-eyed Lobzang. It was some time before five o’clock in the morning, and no amount of blasting on the bus’s horn appeared sufficient to rouse him, though I imagine it must have woken everyone else in the village. Finally, when it became too cold to simply sit in the bus, we got out and walked on the dark, icy road. The sky, with the earliest hints of dawn, was deeply, hauntingly blue, but I was too cold to appreciate it: I’d put on every stitch of warm clothing I’d brought (down parka with hood, insulated pants) and yet my feet, even inside my insulated boots, were on the verge of freezing. Seb and I jogged up and down the deserted road to keep warm while others went to drag the porter out of bed. It took a long time.

Our flock of students, meanwhile, was somewhere behind us on the road, delayed with a flat tire. Before we left, I saw that they had been keeping warm by huddling three to a seat inside their bus. They were more accustomed to the cold than I, but still it made me understand just how vulnerable a person is when traveling in the Himalayan winter.

The wide-open valley closed in after about half an hour, and within a couple of miles there was no longer room for the road on the valley floor; it had to run along the steepening hillside. Below, down snowy, rocky slopes, lay a ribbon of frozen river. Above, their detail just becoming visible in the rising light of day, were various high peaks. I grew up in the Rocky Mountains, but the scale of everything in the Himalayas was much larger. The height of the peaks, the distance across valleys: everything was double-sized.

After we pulled our packs and sleds from the bus, there was no waiting around; the porters knew that the Reru group was traveling lighter than us and would catch up. And, more crucially, movement and speed were the best ways to keep warm. We broke a trail sideways down the mountain toward the river, Seb and I carrying our own gear in backpacks and four porters carrying cooking equipment, food for the group, and our sleeping bags. Each of them had a handmade sled that doubled as a rucksack frame, like the one I’d seen Lobzang make; these were on their backs. Dorjey, our translator, wore white rubberized insulated Indian Army boots, as did one porter; others wore thin leather boots.

There is a moment of magic when your boots first touch the ice—you know you’re on a special hard road that will extend, deities willing, uninterrupted for the next forty miles, taking you out into the larger world. It is like a train track that way—something hard that allows for speedier travel than caroming over the adjoining rock and dirt. Indeed, there were many points ahead where, in warmer weather, with the absence of ice, there would never be human passage at all.

And yet from the first step I also appreciated the unique perils of walking on ice. My small and tentative steps reflected my twin fears of slipping and of falling through, especially given the weight of my pack. My feet were cold enough already without being soaked. But here the ice looked firm, and the need to keep up with the porters overcame some of my caution.

Of the five porters, three had sticks and tapped the ice just in front of them constantly as they moved. It made different sounds when they did, usually firmly resonant, but sometimes hollow-sounding, at which time the forward motion of our line slowed. The surface changed as well, from perfectly smooth to the texture of coarse sandpaper to truly rough, cracked-and-healed. What I realized as we walked was that the surface was not truly flat, as a frozen lake might be; underneath was a huge, moving river whose flow waxed and waned, pushing the ice up or allowing it to slowly cave in.

The canyon walls were not steep here, at the beginning, nor were they pure rock. Trees and shrubs grew out of snow-covered gravel. The sun hit the rim of the canyon, and we spotted a roosting lammergeier, a huge vulture. But the view quickly changed as we walked lower and lower into the channel that had been eroded into rock over centuries, back into geological time. The rock walls moved closer and closer to the river until there was no soil left, no plants within reach. The wind seemed to abate and the sense of entering a special, private world increased.

An hour or two into our trek, the teenagers caught up with us, and the two groups merged into one long single file. The sun rose but the gorge deepened, shading us from its rays. When we reached a junction—another river, the Oma Chu (Milk Water), flowed in from a side canyon to merge with the Zanskar—Lobzang the headman declared a meal stop. I wasn’t sure I was glad, since a chilly breeze rushed in from the side canyon and I still wasn’t quite recovered from the predawn freeze. But then someone pointed out a cave: it was maybe fifty feet above the ice, and in the sun, and not hard to reach via a series of natural and manmade steps. There was a network of caves, I knew, up and down the chaddar. Most weren’t very deep but they had sheltered travelers from wind and precipitation for generations; most were even named. This one was known as Tsarag Do. The walls, darkened by soot from countless campfires, attested to this history. Men gathered driftwood and brush from the surrounding area and carried it up, and in twenty minutes fires were burning and tea water boiling.

I caught up with Stanzin Zoma and Sonam Dolma in the cave, nibbling on cold tsampa with some pickled cabbage and carrot while they waited on the tea. I was surprised to see that they were both wearing pink sneakers with wool socks.

“Aren’t you worried about snow getting in there?” I asked.

“If you just step in the tracks in front of you, sometimes you can keep away from snow,” Stanzin explained. “What I’m really worried about is falling in water. We heard there is some open water farther down.”

“Won’t your families buy you boots?”

They looked a little embarrassed. “It’s just that we don’t go out walking so often in deep snow,” said Stanzin.

Most people had left their things down on the ice; the view out from the cave was almost monochromatic except for the synthetic fabrics: the bright yellows, reds, and greens of knapsacks and jackets. Thirty years ago, I was pretty sure, you would never have seen such colors here. In fact, thirty years ago, much about the chaddar was different.

The earliest account of chaddar travel I could find comes from James Crowden, an English explorer and poet who, at age twenty-two, spent the winter of 1976-1977 in Zanskar. He claims to have been the first Westerner to walk the chaddar. “After three days waiting around for the auspicious moment we finally left at three in the afternoon,” he wrote. His companions were carrying tubs of yak butter to trade in Leh for things like cooking pots, soap, and fresh vegetables. Their shoes were handmade and of a kind hard to find in Zanskar anymore: leather and pointy-toed with woolen uppers that extended up to a tie below the knee. Nobody wore socks; instead, the shoes were stuffed with straw for warmth. Everyone in his group wore a woolen goncha.

Caves along the chaddar were as important when Crowden traveled as they are today, particularly for sleeping. In many caves, walls of stone help to partition the protected space into even smaller spaces. Just as they do not carry water bottles, the Zanskaris do not carry sleeping bags or tents. Instead, as I saw when it darkened that first night and the group stopped at another cave, they laid out a plastic ground cloth and stayed warm by lying together, and by using the gonchas and other clothing that had warmed them individually to warm them as a group. (In his day, wrote Crowden, the most popular Zanskari sleeping style was kneeling, preserving heat by putting the arms around the legs.)

Seb and I, by contrast, laid big, arctic-class sleeping bags with several inches of lofted down upon thick foam pads to insulate us from the cold of the ground. Knit hats kept our heads warm. I was torn between a sense of deep gratitude for my massive sleeping bag and a nagging concern that our equipment-intensive solution set us apart as rich. Still, I knew that it was too late for me: as a younger man, I had slept spooned with Mexicans during a trip across the Sonoran Desert in January and knew that, while it had kept me fairly warm, sleep had been practically impossible. You had to grow up doing this for it to work.

The worst part of the day, of course, was dawn and the first minutes out of the sleeping bag. I had the luxury of waiting until the porters had brewed a pot of tea and was glad for the crowd of people, among whom I could squeeze and try to keep warm, somewhat near the fire. Lobzang withdrew from his bag a packet of block-printed prayers, wrapped in cloth, and commenced quietly to chanting; I noticed he did this whenever there was a chance, usually several times a day. One of the porters reached for his cap, meanwhile, and produced a needle that he stored there. He tapped gently into the surface of a block of ice he had carried up from the river and, like magic, it fractured neatly into smaller pieces that would fit into a pot for melting.

It was going to be a long day, and nobody was getting any warmer by waiting around. Snow had fallen overnight, and we set new tracks alongside others that had been made while we slept: this morning rodent prints crisscrossed the river, along with the tracks—Dorjey claimed—of a snow leopard. “Are you sure?” I asked. They were so big and cat-like they could be nothing else, but books like Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, about Tibetan Buddhism and a trek with a biologist in search of the endangered animals, had led me to believe there were practically none left.

“Oh, yes,” Dorjey replied, and we stepped out of line a few moments later so that he could show me more evidence. He found it on the sides of two rocks at river’s edge, where the leopard had slowed and walked in a circle. “Look,” he said, urging me to get close. On the rough surface of the rocks were two or three white hairs; he pinched them between his fingers and held them up for me to examine; they were three to five inches long. “It is his whiskers,” explained Dorjey. “Here he scratched his face.”

The passage of such a large predator just yards from where we’d slept didn’t put me any more at ease on the chaddar, but Dorjey laughed and said the snow leopard wasn’t interested in us. In their scat one found mostly the bones of small animals, he said—marmots, pikas, and wildfowl. In rare cases they might eat one of the larger animals that lived in these parts, and which, in fact, we could see as we walked, sometimes high up on the canyon walls: ibex, blue sheep. Leopards willingly came near humans only in coldest winter, and then only in hopes of finding a captive farm animal such as a dzo, a yak-cattle hybrid common in the area. He reminded me about a house we had stopped at the previous summer, as we trekked to Phugtal Monastery. After dinner there, the family gave Dorjey something to show me: a large piece of stiff snow leopard pelt. I was amazed to find myself holding such a mythic relic in my hands.

“Did they hunt it?” I asked.

“Actually,” said Dorjey, “they found the beast in the toilet.”

He explained. Like most traditional Zanskari dwellings, the house was made of mud bricks and the ground level was devoted mainly to sheltering animals in cold weather; a small separate section of it was reserved for the household latrine. The mother had gone to squat on one of the holes in the second floor that opened above the latrine space, when she heard a growl. Below, perched on the frozen stalagmite of poop, a snow leopard showed her its fangs. Stalking the farm animals, the leopard had gotten trapped in there, instead. The family promptly did what any local family would do in such a circumstance. They stoned it to death.

Dorjey understood the irony; he was an interesting mix of older generation and younger, and a delightful guy to have around. Forty-something, he tended toward Western dress, but he was very religious; some part of him, I’m sure, would have been happy to have been a monk. Instead, he was a junior clerk in the provincial government, married with six children. This did not prevent him from taking a little time off to assist people like me, or to make pilgrimages to such religious centers as Dharamsala, where a lama had instructed him to perform ten thousand prostrations on the path to enlightenment.

But religious practice had not narrowed his mind. The day I met him, he was eating lunch seated on the floor in his traditional earthen house in Padum, in the company of two maroon-clad monks; the group was watching a fuzzy Indian television broadcast about the partial eclipse of the sun that was about to take place. Tacked to the wall of his son’s bedroom, I noticed, was the same magazine photo of pop singer Avril Lavigne that my daughter had on her bedroom wall in New York. Dorjey prayed and chanted several times a day but he was also immensely fond of the Harry Potter books, which English-speaking friends on the outside had sent him. His favorite character was Hagrid though Dorjey himself resembled no Westerner more so than Buddy Hackett. He was an Asian version of the jolly comedian, and he laughed at the sight of me imagining a snow leopoard—so elusive to Matthiessen on his spiritual journey into Nepal’s Dolpo region, a symbol of rarity and the beauty we can’t see—meeting its end in a frozen latrine.

We stopped for mint tea on a graveled section of riverbank in the sun. I chatted with the two boys, Lobzang Teshi and Tenzin Namdol, who said they weren’t tired at all; Tenzin, I noticed, was carrying a second rucksack and confessed that it belonged to a girl from a village near Reru. You had to look way up to see it, but the sky was blue, and for the first time in quite a while, no part of me was cold. Someone spotted an ibex, high, high up on the canyon wall across the river; its distance away and the immense scale of the rock walls made me feel small.

Another group of Zanskaris came shuffling into view, walking the chaddar in the opposite direction. There were two groups, actually, and they stopped to chat with us and compare notes on the terrain ahead. Three of the walkers, it turned out, were mailmen, carrying bags of letters from the big post office in Leh to the tiny one in Padum. In a good year, they said, there might be three mail runs on the chaddar. After that, Zanskaris had to wait until the spring thaw for mail service.

With the weather a bit warmer, we started seeing more and more open water. I was intrigued by the little birds, white-throated dippers, that skipped and dashed along the edge: they could submerge, disappear for several seconds, and pop up again a few yards downstream, and some of them did it again and again, searching for food in the depths. Among our group, however, the more seasoned trekkers began to worry. Our path down the chaddar began to meander more as the open water increased, and patches of ice began to seem suspect. Now and then you’d hear a loud crack or a deep whomp—or feel them, more like it, because these sudden movements of frozen, fractured water resonated in the pit of your stomach—and be pulled up short. Was something cataclysmic about to happen? Had you stepped on that One Bad Spot? Would the surface hold?

Even along relatively stable parts of the chaddar, fractures showed where pressures had made the ice shift. Sometimes this pressure seemed brought to bear on a single point near the chaddar’s middle, which resulted in a gently raised cone with fractures all around it, like the top of a volcano. Other times you could see where large pieces had cracked and tipped or fallen into the water below; sometimes, afterward, fresh water would rush up and over the opening, creating a new, uneven surface as it froze on top of the existing ice. Both when we were on the ice and when we were off it, we could hear groanings, crunches, and harsh reports as the constant pressure of water underneath, of changing temperatures, reconfigured what appeared to the casual eye as an immutable, solid surface.

Sometimes I imagined that our continued progress depended on faith, that we could walk without falling because we believed we could, a mass delusion. Sometimes I seemed to have better luck when I didn’t look too carefully at the next step. I’d heard ski instructors say don’t focus on your skis and skating instructors say look straight ahead, and I imagined that Zanskari chaddar sages had intoned that same advice throughout the ages. Certainly there was a lot to see. When the gorge opened up you could glimpse ragged peaks, sunny in the distance while it was shady on the ice. Once, when the surface of the ice was like a mirror, I saw such a peak while looking down. But it seemed like bad luck: I looked away, straight ahead.

There were landmarks our guides knew to watch for along the way. At a spot called Shukpa Chenmo, one was a giant juniper tree that had fallen over but lived on, and its trunk and some branches were festooned with prayer flags. Others were interesting stone formations. Thermally heated water spewed out of the canyon wall at one point, creating a ring of green around rocks that vaguely resembled a nose; this was Palda Tsomo, or Nose Spring. Another formation was known as The Clitoris. (“We don’t tell that to the children,” Dorjey assured me.)

And there was one cave that, because of its history, nobody ever used, even in an emergency. A king of Zanskar, Gyalpo Gyazo, had stopped there with his entourage many generations before. But overnight the river rose, and they could not leave. Days later, out of provisions, the king ate a knapsack made of animal hide; and his men “plotted to slay the cook for food.” But the cook, said Dorjey, got wind of the plan. When night fell, he joined together several walking sticks and laid them out across the water. Floating fragments of ice attached to them, making a partial bridge. He added more wood, and the bridge grew large enough for him to escape. Soon the others did, too—probably hot on his tail.

As the day warmed, the ice became more and more questionable. Larger patches of open water appeared, and near the shores, where the ice was thinnest but the water was not deep, a couple of people broke through and got their shoes wet.

As the students slowed on the uncertain surface, Dorjey took the lead. For a while he followed meandering game tracks across the thin layer of snow, on the theory that animals might possibly know something about the thickness of the ice below that we did not. But then the tracks disappeared. Dorjey’s experience of the larger world, his many trips through the chaddar, and, probably, his status as our translator may have made him overconfident. For whatever reason, he marched boldly ahead and promptly fell through, up to his calf. Laughing, he pulled his leg out and forged ahead; soon he went through again, this time up to his thigh. All eyes were on Dorjey as he tried to extract himself quickly, but no luck: leaning on the surrounding ice to pull himself up, he crashed through completely, this time soaking himself from the waist down. There was little danger but ample embarrassment.

Finally heading toward shore, he soldiered on until he came to a flat spot where we could have tea. We followed cautiously and then helped Dorjey collect firewood, pausing now and then to watch the others negotiate the tricky stretch of ice. Two or three chivalrous young men, including Tenzin Namdol, took off their shoes and socks and ferried many of the young women over the bad spots by carrying them on their backs, so that they would not soak their sneakers. They could not have enjoyed walking barefoot over ice and snow, but there were no theatrics as they did it, no shows of discomfort or suffering. The young men, and their feet, were admirably tough. Dorjey, as the tea fire grew hot, wrung out his trousers and placed walking sticks through the legs, which allowed him to spread them out for maximum exposure to the heat. “It seems the departure day was not auspicious for me!” he joked. As the fabric dried, we talked about other falls.

They could be quite serious. A few years before, Seb had been walking the chaddar with a group of English mountaineers; unlike the Zanskaris, they sometimes spread out as they walked, faster walkers moving ahead and some walking alone. Seb was ahead of his friend and couldn’t see him when he thought he heard something. He stopped, waited a moment, and turned to see a head bobbing even with the ice. His friend had fallen through in the middle of the river, and, laden with backpack and thick clothing, had little chance of pulling himself out. What Seb really feared was that the man would be swept under the ice by the swift current: even if you were a strong swimmer, the chances of bobbing up downstream where there was a gap in the ice were extremely slim. With Seb’s help, though, he was soon extracted. The shivering fellow hurriedly stripped down—to the amusement of the porters—and put on a set of dry clothes. However, he declined to backtrack to the cooking fire they had recently left in a cave, because it would mean recrossing the river. So his friends watched him carefully, and he warmed up by walking. Seb’s policy ever since then was that chaddar walkers had to stay within each other’s sight at all times.

Seb himself, on this trip, had taken one bad fall: for no reason in particular, his feet had slipped out from under him, landing him squarely on his tailbone. It hurt, but he could keep going. I myself had fallen several times, though never, yet, as badly: it seemed as though I could see it coming and put a hand out to cushion the blow. When falling, or the possibility of falling, left me particularly exhausted, I would stretch onto the soles of my boots a pair of rubbers worn by postal carriers in northern climes. They came with tiny metal studs, which provided dreamy traction, but they also prevented me from shuffling along in the swift, efficient Zanskari way. But, where the ice was super-slick and my nerves frazzled, they were a godsend.

Others fell, too—in particular, Tsering Dorjey, the novice porter who was a plasterer by profession, and a bit clumsy. One day he turned up at lunch with a bloody gash on his left cheek. All the other porters were chortling as he explained it to me through Dorjey, who could barely contain himself.

“He says,” Dorjey tried to begin, hardly able to speak, “he says the ice shifted and made him slip. As you can see, he fell through. He also has cut his leg.”

Tsering Dorjey, miserable, showed me the superficial gash on his shin and then made a further, more vehement statement to Dorjey.

“He says,” Dorjey began again, this time pausing to wipe away tears of laughter. “He says . . . he says . . . that when he went in the water—” Peals of laughter resounded from the other men, some of whom spoke some English and wanted to hear Dorjey say it. “He says,” Dorjey began again, this time determined to finish, “that when he fell in, he saw . . . he saw . . . t–t–the Dark Lord!” At this, Dorjey exploded in laughter, and the others doubled over with mirth. It was hard not to laugh along with them, but I tried my best, since Tsering Dorjey was looking mournfully at me, perhaps waiting to see if one person here would offer some sympathy.

“The Dark Lord,” I repeated to Seb. “Does he mean, as in Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter? He-who-must-not-be-named?”

“I don’t think so,” Seb began.

“It is sort of like that,” Dorjey said, regaining composure, “but different. Really, it’s the Lord of Darkness. Our version, you might say.” He left it at that.

As we continued it got warmer and warmer—a function of the weather, not of the change in our location—and before long the ice was no longer a thing that covered the whole river, but more often a band along either side of it. Sometimes this band became barely wide enough to walk upon, and occasionally this occurred where there was no rocky riverbank, just a sheer stone wall. Such was the situation on that second day, the day I was following Stanzin Zoma, and the line completely stopped before a tableau of open water.

Everyone waited as Lobzang Tsetan, the one-eyed porter from Zangla who was in the lead, tested the narrow remaining ledge of ice by tapping gingerly with his stick and then with his lead foot. He retreated to an area of loose rocks a few yards back, got two handfuls of dirt, and tossed them onto the ice in front of him to give it some friction and reduce the chances of slipping into the dark deep water that rushed alongside. From there he turned toward the wall and hugged it, shimmying along until the danger had passed—or rather, had moved on to the next person.

The next morning, our third, was brilliantly sunny and warm, and the ice briefly disappeared altogether. But here the river was wide, slow and shallower. For twenty or thirty feet, everyone had to wade. Apart from those few girls lucky enough to be carried, everyone took off shoes and socks. The water was very, very cold. Downstream from this spot, as feet were dried and laces tied, a group approached from the other direction: tourists. They were French, men and women, and they had good equipment, including neoprene divers’ booties for situations such as the one that lay just ahead of them. They also had a small army of porters, many of whom paused to chat with people in our group.

Next up, a bit later in the afternoon, came a group of Englishmen being led up the chaddar into Zanskar by Sonam “Jimmy” Stobgais, a friend of Seb’s at whose house I’d eaten a dinner of momo dumplings the summer before. Stobgais, normally sunny himself, looked troubled, and as it turned out, he had reason to be concerned: in the hours since our group had passed through, the watery area upstream had grown, and the chaddar was now impassable. Later, Seb and I would read in the Indian press that the chaddar had broken up especially early, stranding nearly fifty foreign tourists whom the Army had had to evacuate in helicopters, Jimmy and his group almost certainly among them. We were perhaps the last to get through.

On our last day of walking, the Reru contingent pulled ahead of the rest of us. Rather than progressively exhausted by their travail, they seemed energized, like horses approaching a stable—only, in this case, most of the teenagers had never seen the stable before.

At the end of the chaddar was the hamlet of Chiling, famous for being the home of four metalworking clans. Tradition has it that Chiling’s smiths are descended from four craftsmen brought from Nepal in the seventeenth century to construct the two-story-high image of the Buddha at the Shey Monastery. But Chiling is now gaining a different sort of fame, as the end of the road at this end of the Zanskar gorge. The chaddar kept going another thirty kilometers to the Zanskar River’s confluence with the Indus, but nobody walked it anymore because there was a road. The road had afforded access to a pair of small, rickety buses, into which the teenagers and their retinue promptly piled.

They were sitting there, four to a seat, when we caught up to them in the late afternoon. Some of the dads and uncles were busy tying gear to the buses’ roofs—including, I noticed, one of the chaddar sleds made of bent rosewood, with its short black PVC skids. There was something poignant about the sight, the Zanskari not wanting to give up an important piece of kit which had taken hours of careful work to assemble and had served him well but would henceforth, in the larger modern world, be all but useless. Maybe he would store it somewhere in Leh, in preparation for the return trip.

But for many of the young people on the bus, there likely would be no return. In my travels the summer before, I had tracked down a young man from Zangla who now attended a boarding school in Choglamsar. It had been more than a decade since he had walked the chaddar, and he had never been back home. Yes, his family was poor, and travel back and forth was expensive. But, more importantly, returning home to Zanskar once he graduated was increasingly inconceivable to the boy: what would he do back there, he asked me when I visited him in his dorm—become a farmer? As the glaciers melt away, the traditional way of life becomes more tenuous than ever. Meanwhile, communications improve—last year Padam got its first internet café, as well as cellular phone service—and the world outside beckons powerfully.

Even more significant, a long-planned road is slowly being chiseled and blasted into rock walls above the chaddar. When it’s complete, years from now, new opportunities will arise, but just as certainly young Zanskaris will find it easier to leave. And as our bus trundled down the short section of the road that’s complete, toward the world beyond, I wondered: when teenagers of the future peer out their own bus windows into the frozen gorge, will they see in the chaddar the same glorious adaptation to challenge, the path to freedom, that I do today? Or will it be for them the sidewalk of old fogies, a symbol of hardship and backwardness, a memory vanishing along with the ice itself?

]]> http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/slipping-from-shangri-la/feed/ 0 Wild Things http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/perus-amazon-rainforest/ http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/perus-amazon-rainforest/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:00:03 +0000 hotdogjohnny http://www.tedconover.stevemotzenbecker.com/?p=339 Travel & Leisure Family, September/October 2006.]]> Night is my favorite time in the Amazon because that’s when things get really loud. Some of the players in this orchestra can be identified: castanet frogs, for example, clickety-clacking rhythmically. Or the monkey frog, which makes an unpretty bonk, like an ambulance coming up on traffic. Occasionally, something crashes down through the brush, sounding awfully large—a big bat?A turkey vulture?An ocelot?

But the very coolest noise, as far as I’m concerned, is the call of the red howler monkey. This sounds nothing like the chimpanzee hoot of television and movies; in fact, I don’t know how it comes from an animal at all. An extended, whooshy roar—something between the wind blowing through trees and a blast furnace—it makes you think a twister is about to hit; it rises and falls like the sound track to a thriller.

My son, Asa, 11, and I were deciphering the cacophony from a lodge room on our first night in the Peruvian jungle when a striking multitonal plink! got added to the mix. It seemed almost electronic.

In a village known as Infierno—that’s right, Hell—our group of a dozen visitors descended a wooden staircase by the riverbank and stepped carefully into the vessels that would take us downriver. Long and narrow like a canoe, each had an outboard motor on the back, individual upright seats, and a tarp roof to keep out the sun and rain. Posada Amazonas, our first lodge, was a couple of hours away.

Much of a trip to the Amazon is spent in boats like these—there’s no other route to the lodges. Along the way, the kids listened to their iPods, and guides plied us with plantain chips, passion fruit, and a delicious lunch of vegetable fried rice, each portion bundled in a bijao leaf and tied with a vine, a wrapping approved for disposal in the river. But mostly we all watched the primordial landscape drift by. It was a slowly unspooling movie of sandy beaches, high tree canopies, occasional glimpses of small farms—discernible by the top of a roof—and surprise creatures: ostentatious oropendolas (weaverbirds), with long, forked tails, their basket-shaped nests hanging from branches; black caracara raptors; and family pods of the world’s largest rodent, the capybara, grazing casually among the grasses. The river water is so opaque that a submerged hand is not at all visible. The presence of parasites—as well as piranha, caiman (an alligator cousin), and unexpected currents—makes swimming ill-advised, though we couldn’t resist getting a little wet.

Eco-conscious Posada Amazonas is announced by nothing more than a sturdier-than-usual staircase. The cane-lined main structure stands in a clearing; when approaching, you can see into the surprisingly monumental meeting area and the dining room. The roofs are churchlike in amplitude, high beams supporting traditional thatch. Everything is on stilts to keep it away from bugs and moisture. Walkways lead to the 30 guest rooms, each with one side wide open to the forest, beds under mosquito nets, bathrooms with cool running water (no need for hot water here), and so many candles and lanterns you almost don’t notice that there’s no electricity.

We stowed our bags and, though there was little time before dinner, donned rubber wellies from the lodge’s large collection, applied insect repellent, and headed out for the first of many jungle walks. Hikes in the rain forest are an experience of enclosure. The dense canopy above means that you seldom get a direct view of the sky and may not even know when it’s raining. The air is usually still and moist and hovers around 85 degrees. It smells of the carpet of damp leaves, of sweetness here and sourness there. The lack of sunlight limits plant growth, and the understory is relatively open. You’re in a soft-light world of spaced-out trunks, low shrubs, and fallen branches. And though you get the feeling that there are plenty of animals around, the challenge, we discovered, is finding them.

Thanks to sharp-eyed Geraldine and Asa, we spotted titi monkeys, hidden by vines, and tracked a pair of toucans as we stood atop a beanstalk-like observation tower. The next day, we peered up at kapok trees, the giants of the rain forest (some grow to be 200 feet tall), and white-trunked Brazil nut trees (sales of the nuts constitute a big part of the local economy). Geraldine pressed the leaves of a small fern to Nell’s forearm, resulting in a cool white tattoo, and pointed out the round spiky pods that give the monkey’s hairbrush tree its name.

Slowly, we began to appreciate the radical mix of outsize and minuscule wonders. We crossed a path, only six inches wide, that intersected with ours—a superhighway of leaf-cutter ants, coming and going in prodigious numbers. Each ant was hoisting a polygon of green leaf over its body. These plant pieces, Geraldine explained, were being hauled to a vast underground nest, where they would serve as a growth medium for the fungus that feeds the colony. The freeway was guarded at its edges by soldier ants, five times the size of the workers, with massive jaws. We kept our distance.

Rainforest Expeditions has been deservedly praised for its partnership with the local community, largely made up of members of the Ese’eja tribe. Posada Amazonas is built on their land; community members make up the kitchen and other support staff and sometimes work as guides. The two groups share profits from the lodge operation. Another benefit we experienced the next morning: a tour of the Ese’eja’s Centro Ñape, a medicinal-plant garden. The Amazon is famous as a source of medicines—25 percent of Western pharmaceuticals, including many cancer treatments, stimulants, and tranquilizers, are said to be derived from rain-forest ingredients (though only about one percent of its plants have been studied by scientists).

Our guide, Don Jorge Mishaja, sported a San Francisco Giants T-shirt and a necklace bearing jaguar and boar teeth. As Geraldine translated his Spanish, Don Jorge showed us plants that supply cures for maladies ranging from the common cold and fever to bad luck and sexual impotence.He passed around twigs from the cordoncillo plant and we touched the ends to our gums, which instantly felt numb; these, he explained, were used in dental procedures. He extolled the virtues of the uña de gato (cat’s claw) vine, which a Japanese woman in our group said was the only cure she’d ever found for her intestinal troubles. He also described the powers of the ayahuasca vine, central to shamanic rituals and legendary among hallucinogen-seeking hippies of earlier days. Asa perked up when Don Jorge told us how the liquid center of an achiote pod could dye the skin a deep orange. Minutes later, our son, face thoroughly self-painted, was ready for any ceremony a medicine man might bring on.

“Dad, did you hear that?” Asa blurted. It was so dark I couldn’t make out his shape in the next bed, behind the mosquito netting.

“Yeah. What do you think it is?”

His frame of reference came from lands far away.

“It sounds like Mario getting upgraded.”

The Amazon rain forest isn’t for everybody, I’ll readily concede. It’s steamy and buggy, and where it’s not wild, it can look a little squalid. But I’d spent extended periods here twice in recent years, researching Peru’s new Inter-oceanica highway for a book I’m writing about roads around the world. Of all the places I’ve been to for work, this was the one I most wanted to return to for pleasure—and with my wife, Margot, and our children, Asa, and Nell, nine.

One reason is that our kids love exotic animals and insects, which, of course, the rain forest delivers in seemingly limitless variety. Another is that the Amazon is a true frontier, untamed and incompletely understood, yet not too hard to get to. The tropical rain forest that fills most of the Amazon basin—an area, incidentally, larger than Western Europe—has been called “the lungs of the planet.” I wanted my family to see it as it is today: large tracts remain pristine, but by the time my children have children, most will have been ceded to cattle pasture and cassava fields. That’s already the case in Brazil, the country most identified with the Amazon, but Peru’s piece of it is said to contain the greatest biodiversity of any place on earth.

We arrived in Lima during Thanksgiving week and from there, caught an 80-minute flight to the river town of Puerto Maldonado. Halfway, our plane stopped in the colonial capital of Cuzco, gateway to the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu, Peru’s best-known attraction. Many travelers combine a trip to the jungle with a visit to Machu Picchu (for details, see page 74). As we continued, we could see the snowcapped Andes quickly dropping off into the vast hazy sea of green that is the beginning of the rain forest. The giant brown rivers below, tributaries of the Amazon, are the traditional roads in this part of the world. One of them, the Tambopata, would be our link to the wilderness.

Most tour companies have their clients land in Puerto Maldonado and immediately spirit them away to a lodge in one of the protected zones that surrounds the town. But Puerto, with its dirt streets and one-story buildings, has an outpost appeal, making it the perfect midway point between civilization and the wild. Two of our gang’s favorite nights were spent here, at either end of our six-day journey: getting around by quaint three-wheeled motocar taxis, eating corn-topped pizza, drinking Inca Kola in the covered market, and thrilling to our first tropical downpours (winter is the rainy season— and in these parts, that means up to 79 inches of rainfall a year; Seattle, by comparison, gets 36 inches).

Our hotel—the thatched, slowly dilapidating Wasai Lodge—was replete with puffbirds, plica plica lizards, and even a sloth in a tree. Our real jungle adventure, however, began the next day. At the open-air headquarters of our outfitter, Rainforest Expeditions, Nell spied a tarantula on the underside of the roof. We were immediately assured by our Peruvian guide, Geraldine Coll, that it would keep its distance. Quiet and supremely attentive, with a dark braid, Geraldine, who would accompany us to the two lodges ahead, was an energetic recent college grad with impressive credentials in biology. Her specialty is medicinal plants, but she seemed to know something about everything around us, including the tree in front of the office—a marañón, or cashew, she explained, pointing out unripe nuts and picking two round fruits, which she cut up into sweet, liquidy pieces for us to eat as we boarded a bus to the Tambopata River.

An afternoon boat ride of five hours—with a stop at a checkpoint to get papers stamped and kick around a soccer ball—brought us to Rainforest Expedition’s Tambopata Research Center (TRC). A scaled-down version of Posada Amazonas, TRC has hammocks in the common area, 13 dorm-size bedrooms, and a row of spacious individual showers/bathrooms down the hall. Started in 1989, the research station began hosting a small number of tourists in 1992. The two purposes continue, with tourism helping to fund the fieldwork, most of which involves something that interests visitors a lot: macaws.

These huge, garish parrots, though protected in this preserve, are shrinking dramatically in number, partly due to the pet trade—in which they’re highly valued (though exportation is illegal)—but also because their jungle habitat is being replaced by farmland and because they’re hunted for food. TRC’s scientists are researching ways to re-establish macaw populations. In one early experiment, scientists rescued baby macaws that would have died in the wild and raised them at the station; these chicos, as they’re now known, eventually flew off, but many still return.

Soon after our arrival, the kids and I were amazed to see a scarlet macaw crash loudly onto a snack table, grab a cellophane-wrapped pack of crackers in his beak, and fly off in a flash of color. The next day at lunch, another chico swooped in, tipped over candlesticks, and swiped some papaya off Margot’s plate. “Don’t let them do that!” research chief Don Bridesmith scolded, offended by the bird’s bears-in-Yellowstone behavior. But we couldn’t help but be thrilled. The chicos> were impossible to resist—even for the staff. When Asa and an assistant scientist heard a chico calling noisily from a tree, the assistant grabbed a banana and suggested Asa place a piece of it on his shoulder. Seconds later, Asa’s head was enveloped by flapping red and yellow feathers, as the macaw gripped the back of his T-shirt and reached for bite after bite.

TRC is intentionally located near what is said to be the world’s largest macaw clay lick—a cliffside at which the birds engage in the geophagy (dirt-eating) they apparently need to stay healthy: many of the tropical tree seeds that make up their diet contain toxins, which the clay, a parrot Pepto-Bismol, is thought to neutralize. The lick is TRC’s biggest draw, and we learned all about it during a slide show by Bridesmith. But to witness the action without causing any disturbance, guests have to get there earlier than the birds, which means waking up at around 3:45 a.m. Nell and Margot passed on the outing; Asa, who had chosen the blue-and-gold macaw to study for a school report, insisted on going with me.

At first I wasn’t sure if he should have. With a contingent of EarthWatch volunteers, who were at TRC to help with a bird census, we stood in a clearing about a football field away from the lick and couldn’t see much of the mass visitation—up to 1,500 individual birds on a good day—without binoculars. Asa resorted to looking for feathers. But then, scarlet macaws and red-bellied macaws started flying over us, and a luminous blue-and-gold macaw—a sad, dusty version of which has been a fixture at our local pet store for years—landed right above our heads. Rush hour at the parrot airport had begun.

After breakfast back at the lodge (banana pancakes spread with dulce de leche), as we headed to a fishing pond, Geraldine spotted jaguar tracks in the muddy path. Satisfied that the cat wasn’t nearby, she taught us how to make a cast by dripping hot wax from candles into the paw print. The mold, framed in a shadow box, now hangs in our living room.

But the trip’s highlight—at least in Nell and Asa’s eyes—came at the end of a long day, when we should have been heading to bed. Instead, Geraldine took us on a night outing. It began in a boat from which she shined a spotlight into the water as the boatman trolled the shore, revealing dozens of pairs of caiman eyes. Returning to land, we walked along an embankment and, on Geraldine’s signal, turned off our headlamps; in the darkness, the ground glowed, a galaxy of bioluminescent firefly larvae embedded in it. Next, we slogged around in a swamp, lights out, waiting for the inhabitants to reveal themselves with their barks and peeps. Lights on, we spied them astride twigs and leaves: rain frogs, hyla frogs, monkey frogs. An owl hooted. A bat brushed my leg. As we turned back to the lodge, Geraldine focused a beam on a tiny tree in our path: coiled on a branch was a young parrot viper, one of the deadliest snakes around. The kids were ecstatic—indisputable danger! When the Amazon is right for you, it’s very, very right.

]]> http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/perus-amazon-rainforest/feed/ 0 Capitalist Roaders http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/capitalist-roaders/ http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/capitalist-roaders/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:33:24 +0000 tedconover http://www.tedconover.stevemotzenbecker.com/?p=904 New York Times Magazine, July 2, 2006.]]> Zhu Jihong cannot wait to get started on his holiday road trip. At 6 a.m. on Saturday, the first day of the October National Day week (one of three annual Golden Weeks in China, intended to promote internal tourism and ensure that workers take some time off), Zhu has parked his brand-new Hyundai Tucson S.U.V., with its limited-edition package of extras like walnut trim and chrome step-bar, in front of my hotel in downtown Beijing. He is half an hour early, but he is in a hurry. He cannot believe I’m not ready.

Li Lu, a friend who is coming along as my interpreter, has found me in the hotel restaurant. She was rousted even earlier than I, at her apartment a couple of miles away, and calculates that Zhu, to make it into Beijing from his home on the city’s outskirts, must have gotten up at 4. She adds that she’s a bit concerned: she helped me book a spot on this car trip and had assumed that the driver whose car we shared would be a person of, well, culture. But Zhu, she says, is “not educated.”

“What do you mean?” I ask as we leave the hotel’s revolving glass doors and come upon Zhu.

Zhu is nicely dressed, in the dark slacks, leather loafers and knit shirt of many Chinese businessmen. Cigarette in one hand, hair recently cut and wavy on top, Zhu, in his 40’s, has a somewhat dashing, youthful air. Before Li Lu and I are out the revolving door, he is at the back of the Hyundai, making room for my knapsack and pointing me in the direction of the leather passenger seat. He stops to shake my hand only after I pause and offer mine. Li Lu is our intermediary and tries to effect the introduction I’m after, but Zhu is not one for formalities; he gives a tiny nod, then circles the car, hawks noisily and spits by his door, climbs in and turns the key. Li Lu, from the back seat, gives me a look that says: See? What did I tell you?

But as the car fills with smoke from his cigarette and the CB radio battles for supremacy with operatic Red Army tunes on the CD player, I don’t much mind Zhu’s manners (which, Li Lu explains, reflect the factory owner’s peasant background) because we’re off on an adventure and Zhu’s excitement is infectious. Our trip is a seven-day excursion from Beijing to Hubei Province in Central China, including stops at the Three Gorges Dam and a mountainous forest preserve called Shennongjia, fabled home to a race of giant hairy ape-men. And though the trendy enterprise we are part of is known as a “self-driving tour,” we are not going alone: a dozen carfuls of other people have signed on with the tour, organized by the Beijing Target Auto Club, one of the for-profit driving clubs that are sprouting all over China.

Zhu is ready for a long day at the wheel — our destination, Nanyang, is more than 500 miles away — but it’s going to be even longer than he thinks. Our rendezvous with the other cars at the Zhuozhou rest stop, normally an hour away, will be delayed four hours, as thick fog closes the expressway. Heavy rain will fall, and our early start will count for little by midday as the highways swell with holiday traffic. There will be wrecks, like the fatal one-car rollover we’ll pass on a bridge around midnight, an upside-down Beijing-plated Mitsubishi. The hotel’s dinner will be waiting for us at 1 a.m., and we’ll all be happy to see our rooms. But right now Zhu is pouring himself tea from a thermos and telling Li Lu how rich he is and how lucky we are to be in his car.

“He says he is an excellent driver and we will go very fast,” she reports wearily.

The figures behind China’s car boom are stunning. Total miles of highway in the country: at least 23,000, more than double what existed in 2001, and second now only to the United States. Number of passenger cars on the road: about 6 million in 2000 and about 20 million today. Car sales are up 54 percent in the first three months of 2006, compared with the same period a year ago; every day, 1,000 new cars (and 500 used ones) are sold in Beijing. The astronomic growth of China’s car-manufacturing industry will soon hit home for Americans and Europeans as dirt-cheap Chinese automobiles start showing up for sale here over the next two or three years. (Think basic passenger car for $10,000, luxury S.U.V. for $19,000.)

But of course the story is not only about construction and production; car culture is taking root in China, and in many ways it looks like ours. City drivers, stuck in ever-growing jams, listen to traffic radio. They buy auto magazines with titles like The King of Cars, AutoStyle, China Auto Pictorial, Friends of Cars, Whaam (“The Car — The Street — The Travel — The Racing”). Two dozen titles now compete for space in kiosks. The McDonald’s Corporation said last month that it expects half of its new outlets in China to be drive-throughs. Whole zones of major cities, like the Asian Games Village area in Beijing, have been given over to car lots and showrooms.

In other ways, though, the Chinese are still figuring cars out and doing things their way. Take the phrase used to describe our expedition: “self-driving trip.” It is called self-driving to contrast it with the more customary idea of driving in China: that someone else drives you. Until recently, everyone important enough to own a car was also important enough to have his or her own driver. Traditions grew up around this, like the chauffeur joining his boss at the table for meals while on duty — something still commonly seen.

But those practices are growing fusty. What are new and explosively popular are car clubs — some organized around the idea of travel, like the Beijing Target Auto Club, and others organized around the idea of. . .well, simply fun. The Beijing VW Polo Club, for example, has an active Web site and hundreds of youthful members. (The Polo is a VW model popular in Europe and Latin America and now manufactured in China as well.) Club members meet regularly to learn about maintenance, deliver toys to orphans and take weekend pleasure drives reminiscent of America in the 30’s and 40’s. To celebrate the 2008 Beijing Olympics, four-dozen members recently turned up in a giant parking lot to form the Olympic logo with their compact, candy-colored cars, each circle a different hue. Single members have found mates in the club, and at least one of their weddings featured an all-Polo procession through the streets of Beijing.

In the West, cars can still excite, but the family car soon becomes part of the furniture. In China, however, it’s nothing of the sort. Li Anding, author of two books on the car in China and the country’s leading automotive journalist, told me why when he invited me to join some of his industry pals for dinner in Beijing. “The desire for cars here is as strong as in America, but here the desire was repressed for half a century,” he began. All private cars were confiscated shortly after the Communists came into power in 1949, supposedly because they were symbols of the capitalist lifestyle. Having a car became the exclusive privilege of party officials.

Across the table, Li Anding’s colleague Li Tiezheng explained that “people my age loved Russian movies. They gave us the idea we should all own a car, and we all wondered why we couldn’t.” Li Tiezheng bought his first car — a Polish-made Fiat — when private ownership was finally permitted in the mid-1990’s. But the stigma against ownership was still huge. “The pressure was so great, I couldn’t tell anyone. I lied that I had borrowed it.”

That didn’t last long. By 2000, enough regulations had been removed, and enough people were making money, that car ownership became a reality for many Chinese for the first time. Li Anding, born in 1949, the year the Communists came to power, said he was still astonished at the change: “When I started writing about cars, I never expected to see private cars in China in my generation, much less some of the world’s fanciest cars, being driven every day.”

As the men around the table listened to Li’s history and added to it, there was a palpable sense of pride. This wasn’t simply progress on the level of a convenience — analogous, say, to your neighborhood moving from dial-up to high-speed Internet. To them it was China finally entering the world stage and participating fully in human progress. It had the additional meaning of something long denied that could finally be acquired, like a wrong being rectified. Over and over again, the group described car ownership with a term I would never have thought to use:

“Once China opened up and Chinese people could see the other side of the world and know how people lived there, you could no longer limit the right to buy cars.”

“This right is something that has been ours all along.”

“Driving is our right.”

When Li Lu noticed the sign for the Zhuozhou Service Area of the Jingshi Expressway, Zhu Jihong was on one of his favorite subjects: destinations. He had done self-driving to Mongolia and Manchuria, he said, to Xinjiang and to Xi’an and the Silk Road. He made a round trip to Tibet — fantastic! — and was considering one to Hong Kong. The main problem with our current itinerary, in his opinion, was that it was too short: “A week isn’t long enough to really feel like you’ve been away.” His wife was less and less interested in these odysseys, preferring, lately, to stay home and mind the hotel and restaurant he had bought near his hometown outside Beijing. And his son, oddly enough, wasn’t interested in driving at all.

Li Lu interrupted Zhu and made sure he noticed — this was where we were to pull off and finally meet the group. Though it was early afternoon now and Zhu had been driving for hours, he barely looked tired. I thought to peek at the odometer of his two-month-old Hyundai as he slowed; it showed 7,700 kilometers, or nearly 4,800 miles. That was an annual rate of nearly 30,000 miles, and most of them would be pleasure driving.
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Though the parking lot was the first time most members of the trip had seen one another, they had been talking for hours: each driver, before today, had stopped by the Beijing Target Auto Club office to pick up a CB radio and rooftop antenna. The rendezvous was on one side of the lot, and in the middle of the group was a vehicle with the biggest antenna of all, a thickly bumpered, sticker-plastered, red-flagged Chinese-made four-by-four belonging to the president of the Target club, Zhao Xiangjie.

Zhao and his truck were decked out for safari: he was wearing a khaki utility vest with many zippers, busily meeting members of the group as they arrived. Across the lot, a self-driving group from Guangzhou was similarly mustered, easy to spot by the big stickers with numbers on everyone’s side doors and rear windows. And this, it turned out, was Zhao’s next duty, to adorn each vehicle with its numbers. My driver, Zhu, accepted his with great ceremony, cleaning his doors first to ensure good adhesion, making sure the number decals were straight and even. If one theme here was safari, another was road rally, the decals suggesting that everyone was part of a speedy team.

Though most are organized around the idea of trips, Chinese car clubs come in many flavors. Some are run by dealers (like a Honda dealership in Guangzhou), and others (like the VW Polo Club in Beijing) are nonprofit and organized around a particular model. At least one is the offshoot of an outdoor-recreational-gear manufacturer. Many are just for four-wheel-drive vehicles and aim to go to the back of beyond. Travel agencies sponsor some; others are run for and by motorcyclists.

One of Zhao Xiangjie’s advantages, at the Beijing Target Auto Club, is good connections in officialdom. He has worked as a composer, filmmaker and official celebration organizer; he knows important people and has succeeded in getting them to steer big commissions his way. His auto-club offices are in the government-run Olympics Center. In a speech he gave to the 2005 Auto Clubs and Fans C.E.O. Forum, I heard him assert that more government involvement was needed if automobile-related industries like the clubs were to develop in an optimal fashion. I sensed that he wouldn’t mind being China’s first under secretary of car clubs.

But an alternate strategy may have more momentum. Back in Beijing, a young man named Chen Ming helps run what appears to be the largest self-driving organization in China: the auto-club arm of Beijing traffic radio FM 103.9. His employees, around 100 of them, occupy a floor and a half of a midsize office building. Chen Ming has high volume and a rapidly growing business. Linking an auto club to traffic radio seems inspired. Members pay $27 a year and receive benefits that include group insurance rates, gasoline rebates, “auto rescue” within Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, free rental cars if a repair takes more than three days, et cetera. Chen got his start in the business as Zhao’s protégé — he was assistant manager of the Beijing Target Auto Club — and when I spoke with him in Beijing, he shared his belief that Zhao’s approach, his eagerness to stay involved with the government, is outdated.

Maybe half of the vehicles in our group were S.U.V.’s and the rest were passenger cars, almost all with foreign labels — Toyota, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, Citroën — not the cheaper Chinese models that made up the majority of cars on the road, the Fotons, Geelys, Cherys, JAC’s. (More than 40 local brands are currently manufactured in China.) One of the foreign cars caught my eye: a flashy white Volvo S80, driven by a man who was also a distinctive dresser. With his white leather loafers, tight jeans, white belt with a big silver buckle and white shirt (“Verdace,” read the logo), Fan Li, a television producer, cut an intriguing figure. He was accompanied on this trip by his pretty 24-year-old daughter, Fan Longyin, who was recently back from film school in France. Longyin was quickly becoming friends with Jia Lin, a single female reporter for The Beijing Youth Daily, who was in her 30’s. Jia wore a tan leather jacket with a winged glossy-lip logo on the back that said “Flying Kiss.” Like me, Jia came without a car, but it looked as if she would start riding with the Fans.

And then there was the attractive young family in the white Volkswagen Passat, the Chens: Xiaohong (who uses the name Peter with English speakers), the personable information-technology executive; his wife, Yin Aiqin, an electric power consultant; and their 4-year-old daughter, Yen Yi Yi, whom, I would soon learn, was already taking voice lessons at home from a member of the Beijing Opera.

More nerdy but genial were the bespectacled Wangs, in their Citroën Xsara: she ran part of the back office of Air China; he worked for an international freight firm. They, too, had an unattached passenger who shared the driving and expenses. He was the urbane Zhou Yan, a partner in China’s third-largest law firm.

And then there were the businessmen. Organized by a cement-plant owner, Li Xingjie, these 10 or 11 guys from the same Beijing suburb, Fangshan, rode in S.U.V.’s and tended to stick to themselves. Some of them owned coal-processing plants, which meant they were rich.

Soon all 11 cars were bedecked with numbers and the club logo. Pit stops and snack purchases were completed; the service area looked a bit like one on an American toll road, though there was no landscaping, the simple restaurant was not a fast-food franchise and the convenience store was not as elaborately stocked as in the States. The gas station — state-run Sinopec — filled Zhu’s Hyundai for about $1.85 a gallon, and I paid in cash, gas and tolls being my contribution to expenses. (Sinopec stations only recently began accepting credit cards.) Everyone piled back in their cars, and we hit the road. We would reconvene for dinner.

China’s first modern expressway, the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway, was built in the early 1990’s by the Hong Kong tycoon Gordon Y.S. Wu. Wu studied civil engineering at Princeton in the mid-50’s, when construction was beginning on the U.S. Interstate Highway System. At the same time, the New Jersey Turnpike was being widened from four lanes to many lanes, and Wu has said it inspired him. (His powerful firm, Hopewell Holdings, is named after a town near Princeton.) Though Wu ran short of money and the ambitious project had to be rescued by the Chinese government, the toll-road model of highway development caught on.

Wu’s Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway was the beginning of an infrastructure binge that seems to be only picking up steam: the government recently announced a target of 53,000 freeway miles by 2035. (The U.S. Interstate Highway System, 50 years old last week, presently comprises about 46,000 miles of roads.) Some new roads, especially in the less-developed western parts of the nation, are nearly empty: China is encouraging road construction ahead of industrial development and population settlement, assuming those will follow.

The goal, of course, is not simply to replicate the boom of coastal areas, where the majority of the country’s population now lives. China’s larger aim is to consolidate the nation. Its version of Manifest Destiny — the “great development of the West” or “Go West” policy begun in January 2000 — envisions far-western territories, like Tibet and the fuel-rich province Xinjiang (the name translates as “New Frontier”), fully integrated, ethnically and economically, with the rest of the country. It seems quite likely that, similar to the case with American history, local indigenous cultures stand to lose along the way. What the United States gained (and lost) with the Pony Express, covered wagons and steam trains, China may achieve with roads and automobiles.

If highways in China’s west are so far awaiting traffic, easterners have the opposite concern. As we headed south from Shijiazhuang toward Zhengzhou, the roads packed with vacationers and truck traffic, Zhu jostled for position with all the other people who were late getting where they were going. His style of driving helped me understand better why China, with 2.6 percent of the world’s vehicles, had 21 percent of its road fatalities (in 2002, the most recent year for which figures are available).

Of course, there must be many reasons. The large number of new drivers is one; few of today’s Chinese drivers grew up driving, and road-safety awareness seems low. Many roads are probably dangerous — though not, I would venture to say, the beautiful new expressway we were on. It was like an American Interstate, only sleeker: the guardrails were angular and attractive, not fat and ugly, and in the divider strip there was typically a well-pruned hedge, high enough to protect drivers from the glare of beams from opposing traffic at night. Beyond the guardrails, grassy embankments sloped down to buffer areas carefully planted with a single species of tree, often poplar. The road surface was perfectly smooth, transitions even, signage sparse but clear. Periodically we saw orange-suited workers hand-pruning the center hedge or sweeping the wide shoulder with old handmade brooms. There was never a maintenance truck nearby; wherever they came from, they apparently walked.

It was the sweepers I worried about. Officially, there were two lanes of travel in each direction. But each side also had a shoulder, and on this expressway, at least, the shoulder was exactly as wide as the travel lanes. Thus Zhu and others (despite signs asserting that it was forbidden) used the shoulder as the passing lane. Occasionally, of course, a sweeper would loom, or a disabled vehicle, and Zhu would slam on the brakes and veer into the truck lane. Once past the obstacle, he would floor it and swerve back out, brake once again, swerve, honk — it was almost like being in a video game, except that video games end or you can walk away. We, on the other hand, had a long way to go.
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“Li Lu, does Mr. Zhu know that more Chinese die on the road every day than died here during the entire SARS epidemic?” I asked her. She translated. Zhu looked at me and laughed. “I think he didn’t understand,” she said. We consulted, and soon Li Lu announced from the back seat that we both really wished he would slow down a bit. Zhu looked at me sidelong and then, if anything, speeded up.

The next morning Zhu was tired, finally, and asked if I wanted to drive. I hesitated for a moment. I had researched the issue and was fairly certain that foreign tourists were forbidden to drive between cities in China. Most Chinese, however, seem never to have considered the possibility of foreigners behind the wheel, and from the beginning, Zhao asked whether I would be willing to help with the driving. Far be it from me to shirk this responsibility. So I said sure and climbed into the driver’s seat.

This day’s driving was different from the previous day’s. As we moved farther from the coast and its expressways, we spent more time on national highways, which generally are two-lane and pass through a lot of towns. Everyone in the club stuck pretty close together, and there was a lot of chatting over the radio. Our leader, Zhao, began by apologizing for yesterday’s overlong drive. Even if there hadn’t been a highway closure due to fog, slowness due to rain and holiday congestion, it was too long a drive for the first day, and he was sorry. But he was also upbeat and sounded excited about getting to Three Gorges Dam that afternoon. He moderated the CB chat that followed, prompting each car’s occupants to take turns introducing themselves. Some told a joke, some sang a song. Fan, in the white Volvo, put on an Elvis Presley CD and held his mike to the speaker, playing “Love Me Tender” in honor of me, Elvis’s countryman. As we passed through one village an hour past breakfast, a clamor rose for a pit stop.

The men had little trouble finding places to relieve themselves near the edge of town, but women were in more of a bind. China’s car culture — not to mention consumer culture — has not yet reached the countryside, and there was no restaurant nearby, no fast-food joint, no gas station/convenience store. Chen Yin Aiqin, her daughter at her side, knocked tentatively on the door of a farmhouse and was soon welcomed inside and ushered to the latrine out back. Afterward, before their car pulled away, she dashed back to the farmer’s door with a small box of chocolate from Beijing.

The lack of infrastructure for touring drivers is one reason that these organized self-driving tours are so popular. Besides having planned in advance (through arrangements with local travel agents) where we would stop to eat and sleep every day, Zhao had an expert mechanic in his four-by-four: repair garages were few and far between, and one of the Beijingers’ main fears was breaking down far from home, with nobody trustworthy nearby to help.

The national roads, while more interesting to drive than the expressways, were also more nerve-racking. There were considerable numbers of people on bicycles, on foot and on small tractors; there were crossroads; and least expected by me, there were many places where I had to swerve toward the middle of the road because of farmers having appropriated a strip of pavement along the edge for drying their grain, usually corn. Sometimes the grain was laid out on blue tarps; other times the drying zone was outlined by rocks or boards; more than once, traffic slowed because of it. I had heard of Chinese farmers sometimes laying their wheat across the road so that passing vehicles would thresh it for them. But there was something aggressive about this appropriation of the highway.

The suggestion of rural hostility toward traffic and the number of people using the road for walking put me in mind of the famous “BMW Case,” which received a lot of media attention two years before. A rich woman in a BMW, probably traveling on a road like this, was bumped by a farmer transporting his onion cart to market. Enraged, she struck the farmer and then revved her car and drove into the crowd. The peasant’s wife was killed, but despite widespread outrage, China’s Lizzie Grubman received only a suspended sentence.

BMW’s seemed to be a sort of class-divide lightning rod. Recently, the number of kidnappings for ransom has shot up in China — the government reported 3,863 abductions in 2004, higher than the 3,000 a year reported on average in Colombia, the previous world leader. “In one case,” according to The China Daily, “police searching the apartment of kidnappers in Guangdong Province found a list of all BMW owners in the city that appeared to have come from state vehicle registration rolls.”

I was hoping to needle Zhu a bit, and so I asked him, if he was so rich, why didn’t he have a BMW?

“Bad value,” he said, explaining that while many foreign carmakers had plants in China and produced high-quality cars at a reasonable price, BMW’s were all imported, with huge taxes added on. And indeed, this is true: tariffs and taxes add about 50 percent to the price of imported cars, making them high-status items. If you want to be really ostentatious, you do what rich guys like coal-mine operators from Shaanxi Province increasingly do and come into the city to buy a Hummer — those cost upward of $200,000. But Zhu thought that was ridiculous. The Volkswagen Passat he kept at home for his wife to drive was made in China, he said, as were growing numbers of other excellent foreign-designed cars, all of them produced under joint ventures with Chinese companies (some state-owned or -controlled), an arrangement the government hoped would encourage the growth of a domestic car industry. “Like my Hyundai,” Zhu said proudly, putting his cigarette in his mouth so he could pat the dashboard. “Made in Beijing.”
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Not long after lunch, we started seeing signs for the Three Gorges Dam and accessed the site through tunnels along an expensively built mountainside road. Security was tight, with numerous guard posts, cameras and warning signs, and I was happy to swap seats with Zhu as we pulled into a roadside waiting area — just before an official came by to collect every driver’s license. A guide boarded our leader’s car and, over the radio, began a running commentary. I asked Zhu, between her remarks, what he thought of my driving.

“He says you are a good driver, but he has some advice,” Li Lu reported. “He says to improve, you must be more brave!”

Three Gorges Dam, one of the largest construction projects in history, seemed a fitting first attraction for our trip, evoking superlatives in this land of superlatives. It has cost an estimated $75 billion so far (including corruption and relocation costs); it will require more than a million people to be relocated; it would generate more hydroelectric power than any dam ever had; and it spans the Yangtze, the third-longest river in the world. The reservoir began filling up in 2003 and has six years left to go; it presents a huge military target.

Like so much in China, the scale is almost too large to fathom. The 30-odd people in our group parked and then boarded buses that took us up to a visitor center above the dam; we peeked at a model dam indoors and then, like scores of others, scrambled around the viewpoint, taking lots of pictures. Fan turned out to have a serious interest in photography: his daughter posed, posed and posed again as her father assumed an exaggerated wide stance with his heavy Nikon digital camera. Others focused on the astonishing dam, proudly making sure I got a good look, witnesses to a great change who were, themselves, harbingers of a change.

Zhu was back at the wheel the next day as we drove from the Three Gorges area to Hongping, a town deep in Hubei Province and the jumping-off point for visits to Shennongjia, the forest reserve where everyone hoped to see a yeti.

His Hyundai had a six-CD changer in the dash, and among the titles in it were “The Relax Music of Automobiles,” which turned out to be instrumental versions of the love songs of Deng Lijun, the Taiwanese pop singer of the 1970’s. What Zhu really loved, however, was the old-time music on “The Red Sun: A Collection of Military Songs, Volume II.” He played the CD again and again. The soaring, triumphalist music evoked bygone days, and I expressed surprise that a modern business guy like him loved the old socialist music so much. Zhu responded that it was the music he grew up with. He had worked on a farm, he confirmed. His grandfather became rich, but the Communists took it all away.

“Don’t you dislike Mao for that?” I asked. He looked at me full on when Li Lu translated the question and then, at 60 miles per hour, turned sideways in his seat to show me the pin on his left lapel. It was a dime-size brass relief bust of the Great Helmsman himself. Steering with his knees, he put his chin to his chest, unpinned it and handed it to me as a gift.

“Many people still admire Mao very much,” Li Lu explained. “They know he made mistakes, but they also think he did much good. He got rid of the Kuomintang. He brought China together. He is still a very big hero, like a god to some.”

Fan, the television producer, I had noticed, was also in the worshipful camp. He had the leader’s portrait, in Lucite, affixed to the top of the dashboard of his Volvo so that he could not see anything through the windshield without Mao appearing in his peripheral vision. After I asked about that and complimented him on the DVD screens built into the back of the front seats (for rear-seat passengers), Fan invited me into the Volvo for the better part of a morning’s drive. Longyin, his daughter, took a seat in the back, along with Jia Lin, the reporter, and offered some background on her father. “My parents both suffered a lot in the Cultural Revolution,” she began. Fan interrupted impatiently.

“Oh!” Longyin said. “My father is saying: ‘There is no such thing as a perfect person. Everybody makes mistakes. Mao saved many people, but to do it he had to sacrifice his son, his wife, his whole family — everything. Now he’s gone, but I want to go back to that time, when people shared everything.”‘

But do you really want to share everything? I asked Fan. Wouldn’t sharing equally mean that a privileged few wouldn’t be able to own new Volvos?

“I think now is a necessary period,” Fan said, as his daughter translated. “We have to advance.”

“Capitalism is something we’ve been waiting to try for a long time,” Longyin said, quickly adding: “Personally, I hate the whole Mao thing. I think it’s weird. I don’t miss the sound of those old days at all.” She did miss France, however, and her French boyfriend. She said she hoped to play a part in the growth of the Chinese film industry, perhaps by becoming an actors’ agent. And some time in the next two or three months, she hoped to get a driver’s license.

I was pleased to get to Hongping. The mountain hamlet was shrouded in mist, and the air was cool. Steep hillsides covered with deciduous trees rose on either side, and a creek ran through town, reminiscent of Vermont. We arrived at our hotel early in the afternoon, a nice change. It was three stars, clean, basic, but without a restaurant, elevator or easy parking, and soon we were checking out. “Beijingers are very picky,” Li Lu told me. They didn’t like it, and so Zhao had to find another. The new place seemed only incrementally better to me, but others were satisfied by the change. At dinner, Zhao was back to apologizing profusely for his poor judgment. But the men, anyway, were more interested in getting soused, and the error was soon forgiven.

When everyone rolled out of the restaurant, vendors were on the sidewalk, and Fan made us — and them — laugh with his uncanny shrill imitation of an older woman who had been hawking a melon. Zhou and others had heard there was a “cultural promotion” — a show featuring local ethnic talent — on the edge of town and proposed we attend en masse. Zhu demurred, asserting that a strip club would be more fun, if only one could be found. We walked there without him, arriving early and securing a row of seats in the front.

Though Zhou, the lawyer, spoke little English, I very much enjoyed his company. He was witty and sophisticated and, after a drink, warm and outgoing; every time he opened his mouth, it seemed, he made Li Lu break into laughter.

Zhu, on the other hand, was a challenge. Along with being his passenger, I was his roommate, a difficult proposition. He smoked heavily, whether while sitting naked after a shower, braying into the phone at his wife or watching TV in bed, his head propped up by pillows. Often I knew he was awake in the morning by the click of his lighter and the smoke wafting over my bed. He snored raucously. He didn’t believe in lifting the toilet seat. And always he fell asleep with the television on. This wasn’t such a bad thing: usually I just reached over to the night table and clicked it off with the remote.

But that night in Hongping, there was a snag. When I came back from the cultural show, Zhu was lying in bed on top of his sheets, watching a famous black-and-white movie from 1956, “Railroad Guerrilla,” about Chinese peasant fighters throwing off the yoke of their Japanese imperialist occupiers. The guerrillas were just entering the imperial administrator’s quarters when I came out of the bathroom: an extended storm of hacking machetes ensued, the Japanese falling left and right. Zhu murmured appreciatively and soon drifted off. I watched Japanese get cut down until I couldn’t believe any could be left alive on the planet and then, over Zhu’s rising snores, looked for the remote. It was nowhere to be found. The television itself had no on-off button, and its plug was hidden behind a heavy dresser; I needed to find the remote itself. Finally I spotted it, poking out from underneath Zhu’s butt. I turned him over and extracted it, put in my earplugs and went to sleep.

The next morning, Li Lu sympathized with my desire to switch roommates. Zhou the lawyer had said he would happily share with me. But she declared it was an impossibility: Zhu would lose face if I abandoned him. “And there is nothing worse for a man like him than losing face,” she said.

The next morning we hiked through the misty, craggy hills of Shennongjia. The area, known as “the Roof of Central China,” is a Unesco biosphere reserve of 272 square miles, with six peaks measuring up to 10,190 feet above sea level. It was equally famous, among our group, as the home of China’s Bigfoot. This creature, in the local lore, lumbered through the mists with a big-bosomed mate; an artist’s rendition of the hairy couple appeared in the corner of a park billboard. But though the trails were beautiful and mysterious and we could imagine an ape-man happy there, none were spotted.

The police were directing traffic at the park entrance, and as we left, one officer noticed me in Zhu’s passenger seat and waved us over. Foreigners are not permitted to travel in the direction we were headed, he declared, pointing to a sign. Zhu pulled over and summoned Zhao on the radio. Our entire group stopped, and major discussion ensued, which resulted, some 20 minutes later, in the policeman consenting to my passage. Zhao could be very persuasive.

“What was that all about?” I asked Li Lu.

“There are army bases in the mountains ahead,” she said. “It is thought there are missiles there, to protect the Three Gorges Dam. You can’t see them from the road, but the army is afraid of spies.”

“But times are changing, right?” I asked. She looked uncertain, and I wasn’t sure the answer was yes.

We drove for more than an hour, stopping for lunch in another little mountain town, Muyu. Halfway through the meal, a policeman looked in the room where we were eating. Uh-oh, I thought. As we left, a different policeman spotted me and uttered something grave. Zhao was summoned again. Other policemen arrived. My passport was requested, a phone call was made. Word came down: I had to go back. The old China was still around.

Zhao took me aside reassuringly and pressed a roll of yuan bills into my hand. Li Lu and I were to take a taxi back to Hongping, he said, while he figured out an alternate plan. We would call his cellphone from there.

The solution, we gathered, looked arduous: take a taxi, train and taxi, meeting up with the group the next night, or take a single long and expensive taxi, meeting up with them the next afternoon, but missing the Wudang Mountains and their monasteries famous for martial arts. As we waited for a driver, a call came in from the group up ahead: the cops in Muyu went home at dusk, they had heard. After dark, we should be able to blow through without any trouble. We consulted with some locals, and they concurred. And so it was decided.

We zoomed through Muyu without a hitch and, around midnight, passed as well through a couple of halfhearted traffic-boom-across-the-road checkpoints staffed by soldiers. I entered my hotel room in Wudang around 2 a.m. Naked on his bed, Zhu was sawing loudly, the television was blaring and the lights were all on. It was good to be back.

The next day we took a cable car to a cloud-shrouded monastery atop the Wudang Mountains. A particular temple there is said to be a place where cash offerings can influence your destiny. After conferring a moment with the attending monk, Jia Lin, the reporter, made a largish donation: 100 yuan, over $12. Li Lu explained to me that Jia really wanted to find a husband and hoped to effect that result. Jia’s search, in fact, was the reason she came on this trip, which she imagined to be the kind of exciting adventure where you might meet a man. So far, however, things weren’t panning out.

So belief in prayer was alive in China. What was less clear to me, after my brush with the police in the mountains, was how many in the urban, affluent world of self-driving tourers still believed in government authority.

My test question was speeding. National highways were typically posted with limits of 50 miles per hour, and expressways up to 75 miles per hour, and the orientation brochure that each driver had received from the Beijing Target Auto Club insisted that we adhere to those limits. (“This is only self-driving, not car racing!” the brochure read. “Speeding is not necessary.”) Yet all the drivers, including Zhao, paid the rules no attention whatsoever, often driving 100 m.p.h. or more. Police cars were seldom seen; when drivers spotted them, to my surprise, they paid no attention at all. The cops rarely used radar, it turned out, and they almost never tried to pull you over.

What did concern Zhu and the others, though, were the speed cameras mounted unobtrusively on poles in the median. If you went too fast past a camera, it snapped your picture, and the ticket arrived in the mail. Simple as that. Zhu knew the location of most of the cameras along his normal routes around Beijing, but whenever he headed afield, the bills really piled up — sometimes $70 or $80 a month.

His solution was friends in the police department. They had given him a special red license plate that was affixed beneath his regular one; he believed this stopped a lot of the tickets in their tracks. But Zhu — like many others on the trip — was also intrigued by a device in the Nissan S.U.V. of Li Xingjie, 42, the leader of the Fangshan businessmen’s group. The short, bald man was widely envied among members of the tour for his radar detector, reputed to detect not only radar but also cameras. I joined him one afternoon, and he proudly demonstrated: the rumors were true, and the device also gave advance notice of tollbooths and service areas. Made in Taiwan, the detector cost Li $350 and, as it stated in English on its bottom, detected “all speed equipment on mainland!” He used to pay about $1,250 annually in fines, but no longer did.

“But isn’t this kind of seditious?” I asked via Li Lu. “Isn’t this Taiwan helping to undermine the laws of the mainland?”

On the contrary, Li said, “this detector helps me obey the law. You have to obey laws. We have to obey the government!”

I wasn’t sure whether he was sincere. As we blew by an aging police cruiser at over 100 (the cruiser, by my reckoning, was traveling closer to 50), I asked him to help me unravel more mysteries of Chinese highway law enforcement. “Why isn’t anybody worried about those police? Why don’t they chase anybody and give out tickets?”

That’s just not how it’s done here, Li said. Occasionally you were hit with an expressway fine when you stopped at the next tollbooth, but ordinarily, unless there had been an accident or some other irregularity, cops wouldn’t chase you; tickets just arrived in the mail. Police cars were slow, but the mails were reliable.

He portrayed himself as very straight: “Twenty years ago, I was driving a tractor — I was a model peasant! There were almost no cars in China. I didn’t learn to drive until 1988.

“Under Deng Xiaoping, I got lucky because I was uneducated. Educated people think in traditional ways, but Deng said we should take chances.” He did, and now he owns the Beijing Fangshan Banbidian Cement Factory, which he started when he was 28. Li Xingjie was mild-mannered and unassuming, but when I later showed Li Lu his business card, she was in awe: “This cellphone prefix means he has had the phone a long time — since they were really expensive. He is very, very rich!”

I considered this as the group reconvened for the last time, just on the other side of a glitzy new toll plaza, its lines limned in neon that had been illuminated as the sun started down. All of the cars in our group — and the majority of cars you see in China, period — were recent models. Almost all the wealth of the drivers was first-generation. The digital cameras, the shiny wristwatches, all of it where I come from said nouveau riche. But the pejorative back home is the normative here: practically every wealthy person is nouveau riche, so the idea is meaningless.

The more instructive comparison, as we stood on this fancy bit of highway surrounded by rice fields and, here and there, people at work in them, was with the rural poor, the peasantry, the hundreds of millions of Chinese who do not yet (and, you imagine, will not in their lifetimes) share this prosperity. Many villages still are not connected to roads at all. When an expressway just south of here was completed last year, I was told sotto voce in Beijing, a series of demonstrations by peasants at a toll plaza delayed its opening. They were angry because the road had taken their land, and this, we are now seeing, is the story all over China: the government itself counted nearly 80,000 mass protests in 2005 alone. The country’s economic growth is fantastic, the urban atmosphere heady. . .but then you see through the glass the peasants just in from the countryside, burlap bags at their feet, looking utterly from another planet, representatives of hundreds of millions of others, almost standing still while Zhu and Li zoom on by.

We spent our last night in a four-star high-rise hotel in Luoyang. By the time I made it to our room with my suitcase, Zhu had already welcomed two sleek female “massage therapists” to our quarters; they were perched glamorously on the edge of my bed — legs crossed, lips glossed, high heels dangling — and beckoned me to join them. Zhu chortled with glee at my reticence, and I wondered which part of car travel he enjoyed most: the hours behind the wheel or the hours just after? Certainly, he seemed to take full advantage of all of them.

The end was anticlimactic: everyone was heading back on the same expressway, and Beijing was less than a tank of gas away, so there was no further need to stick together. Chatter on the CB dropped off slowly until the radio was utterly quiet, and in terms of its group dimension anyway, the trip was over.

Li Lu seemed pleased as Zhu’s Hyundai eased into the perpetual traffic jam that is Beijing. She confessed that her friends were amazed she had gone on a trip like this: “I’m just a Beijing girl, a taxi girl!” — not a sporting, auto-club type. But Zhu seemed a bit disappointed to be off the open road. He wanted to treat us to dinner at a favorite noodle restaurant near the city center, but first we had to get there.

Creeping along on the highway, we talked about how the Beijing government was trying to control the huge new popularity of cars: one solution to the growing chaos of the streets has been to severely restrict motorcycle use in the city. Zhu thought that was better than Shanghai’s fix: trying to cut down on car ownership by setting a high price (presently almost $5,000) on car registration. Trying to ease traffic and cut down on accidents, Shanghai had even banned bicycles from many main streets, news that still amazes me.

A policeman friend of Zhu’s met us at the restaurant and, in fact, even picked up the tab. (Zhu’s rapport with the department was quite impressive.) I asked him about the street racing I had heard was becoming a problem in the city. Yes, he said, he had heard of it but had not seen it himself, yet. Zhu looked a bit too interested in the subject.

In the coming days, Zhu would entertain me and others at the restaurant-hotel he ran as a hobby on the outskirts of Beijing; likewise, Zhou the lawyer would treat a group of us, including the Wangs of the Citroën, to a fabulous dinner on trendy Houhai Lake. Clearly, nobody wanted the trip to end. (“Was it really that relaxing?” I had asked several of them, many times, after 12-hour days at the wheel; all had sworn that it was.)

An ebullient atmosphere surrounds the automobile in China. You can see the excitement continuing, even growing, as more people buy cars: China now has fewer than seven of them for every thousand people, roughly the same level as the United States had in 1915. Everyone expects the ownership rate to keep growing, which means there could be 130 million vehicles on China’s roads by 2020. By 2030, according to one estimate, there could be as many as in the United States.

It is reminiscent of a fading romance in American life, this crush on the automobile, the thrill of car ownership, and it is fun to see. But in this area, American culture seems more mature than Chinese culture, and with the benefit of hindsight and statistics, it is not hard to spot a multicar pileup in the making. While I was in Beijing, the journal Nature reported that the city’s air pollution was much worse than previously thought. Concentrations of nitrogen dioxide have increased 50 percent over the past 10 years, and the buildup is accelerating. According to The Wall Street Journal, Beijing’s sulfur-dioxide levels in 2004 were more than double New York’s, and airborne-particulate levels more than six times as high. Last year China enacted its first comprehensive emissions law, but it is expected to have little effect on the transport sector’s copious carbon-dioxide emissions, which by 2030 are expected to exceed those of the United States, the world’s largest producer. The nation’s growing demands for gasoline make it increasingly our competitor for the finite global supply; by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, China may be importing as much oil as we do.

On the snail-paced drive back into Beijing, Zhu had passed through a zone on the edge of town that had been bulldozed and was being rebuilt as upper-income, car-friendly suburbs. In fact, this was happening around cities all over China: new gated communities, new themed enclaves, all for the car-owning class. What was conspicuously missing was a corresponding investment in mass transit, in public spaces and public access. And, in heavy traffic at the end of a tiring trip, it was easy to worry that the Chinese, rather than charting an innovative, alternate route into the automotive era, were on their way down a road that looks a little too familiar.

]]> http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/capitalist-roaders/feed/ 1 The Checkpoint http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/the-checkpoint/ http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/the-checkpoint/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:00:25 +0000 hotdogjohnny http://www.tedconover.stevemotzenbecker.com/?p=907 The Atlantic, March, 2006.]]> We in the modern world are used to waiting, and the first time one passes through a checkpoint in the West Bank, one thinks, Oh, this looks kind of familiar. This won’t be so bad. I will just need to stand in line a bit.

But then one sees that rather than a simple queue, this is more like a funnel—wide enough where it begins for thirty people to stand side by side, at the end of an open-air shed with a corrugated tin roof, but narrowing a few yards farther on, where everyone is pushing toward two tall turnstiles. One afternoon in the fall of 2004 (but it could as well have been today) it took forty minutes to reach the front at Qalandia, the checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem. It was an exercise in gradual compression: I went from having some choice of movement (I’ll head for the left turnstile) to having none at all, as my footsteps were foreshortened by the people in front, my arms were pinioned by the people beside me, and my shoulders were bumped by the people behind.

Sometimes a checkpoint queue creates a sense of instant community: we are all occupying one another’s space, all suffering together, and conversation can provide relief. The man at my right, it turned out, was a doctor. He was returning home to East Jerusalem from work at a clinic in Ramallah, as he does every day. “Sharon’s strategy is to make it so bad we will leave,” he said. “He forgets we have nowhere else to go.”

Because this was my first time through, I expressed some concern about the squeeze to which we were increasingly subjected. He warned me not to drop anything—an ID, for example—because it would be impossible now to stoop down and pick it up. He looked tired as he told me that it had been even worse before the Israelis put up the metal roof and created some shade.

To be encased, as I was, in a crowd of 200 or 300 people is a sort of temporary imprisonment. If the crowd panicked, we would all be in trouble. I was thinking these thoughts because just a month earlier, bombers en route from Jenin to Haifa had gotten spooked and exploded a device at this very checkpoint, killing two Palestinians and wounding six Israeli policemen. And only the day before a Palestinian woman had blown herself up in the Jerusalem neighborhood of French Hill, just a few miles from Qalandia, killing two Israeli policemen. And yet I had the feeling that if I were to freak out—say, from claustrophobia—the people around me would try hard to let me out. A situation like this increases one’s sensitivity to the stress level of one’s neighbors.

The doctor and I were separated a few minutes later, just as we neared what seemed to be the most fraught part of the ordeal: trying to decide when to step into an open space in the turnstile. The pressure from behind had grown so great that the decision was now almost entirely beyond my control; I had to lean backward to keep from walking into the ends of the turning bars. I also had to be careful not to stomp on the foot of a child or an elderly person. To my relief, a muscular man approaching the turnstile at the same time said, “Hello, my friend,” and used his bulk, like a dike against the ocean, to create a small discretionary pocket of space for me. A minute later I stepped through the turnstile of my own accord and said, “Shukran”—“Thanks.”

It should have been a relief to be on the other side, approaching the end of the shed, except that this is where the guns are. About ten Israeli soldiers were visible that day, all of them young and laden with combat gear, including M4 assault rifles. Things moved faster now. A young female soldier examined the contents of my shoulder bag. Ten steps beyond her another soldier protected by a wall of concrete blocks, a thick plastic window, and goggles motioned me forward. I handed him my passport and journalist’s ID. He studied them for a fairly long time, pausing (as Israeli officials tend to) at a visa I had gotten years before for a tourist trip to an Arab country. Then he handed them back wordlessly and turned to the person behind me. That meant I was through. Walking out into the open air beyond, into the bustling taxi lot and impromptu bazaar that every checkpoint occasions, I felt as though I’d been paroled.

W ith the Gaza withdrawal complete and the death of Yasir Arafat fading into memory, the world’s attention is turning once again to the land that remains among the world’s most contentious: the West Bank. The violence that ebbed in the months following the death of Arafat is on the rise again; suicide bombings have returned to Israel as settlements continue to encroach on Palestinian land. The intifada never really went away, and neither did the Israeli soldiers, who continue working hard to keep a lid on things.

Israel manages its occupation of the West Bank—which is home to 1.3 million Palestinians and 400,000 Israeli settlers and is roughly the size of Delaware—to a large degree by restricting the travel of Palestinians. The most famous symbol of this restriction is the new “security fence” still taking shape alongside and east of the Green Line that marks the de facto border of pre-1967 Israel. Although the fence has become controversial for impinging on Palestinian territory and cutting off Palestinian farmers from their land, it has succeeded in greatly reducing the number of suicide bombings inside Israel proper. But more meaningful than the security fence to daily life in the West Bank is Israel’s dominion over Palestinian roads. The Oslo Accords, in 1993, and Oslo 2, in 1995, granted Palestinians the right to govern their own cities, but gave Israel control over the main roads in the territories. Thus checkpoints, which once were few and temporary, became numerous and often permanent. Although their number varies according to the security situation, about seventy checkpoints dotted the West Bank at the time of my visit. There are nearly as many today.

Each checkpoint has a different character. Most permit both vehicles and pedestrians to pass, but some allow only pedestrians. Some close at dusk and open at dawn, permitting no passage at night; others are closed to vehicles at night but allow pedestrians through. Some allow anything to pass once the soldiers have left for the night. And some change the rules from day to day.

In addition to permanent checkpoints like Qalandia—which typically feature traffic dividers and concrete blocks behind which the soldiers stand, and sometimes roofs for shade and tanks of drinking water—there are “flying checkpoints,” which exist for only hours at a time and may be run by as few as two or three soldiers or border policemen, often acting on intelligence tips.

What are the checkpoints for? Israeli officials say that like almost everything else in the West Bank, checkpoints are for security—they enable the Israeli army to interdict weapons and bombers. The army hopes to find some of these through random searches; others may be captured through the powerful Israeli intelligence agency, Shin Bet, which provides daily updates on whom and what to look for. But soldiers at checkpoints spend most of their time examining the identity documents issued by Israel and by the Palestinian Authority to every Palestinian aged sixteen and up. If a man’s residence is in Nablus but he’s headed for Bethlehem, the soldiers may turn him back. Or they may not. The arbitrariness of checkpoint-rule enforcement makes life miserable for Palestinians. For them checkpoints have become not just bureaucratic irritants but emblems of Israeli arrogance.

Whether at crossings of the security fence or at strategic points inside the territories, checkpoints provide the human face of the occupation—his is as close as some Israelis and Palestinians will ever come. The face is seldom friendly: taciturn soldiers meet put-upon civilians, investigate their documents, and decide (often according to mood, Palestinians say) whether they may cross over to the other side. Sometimes the soldiers make Palestinians wait for hours in holding areas. For the soldiers checkpoint life is often grindingly dull, stress-inducing, and alienating. For the Palestinians it is monumentally frustrating, humiliating, and anger-provoking.

Checkpoints can also be brutal. During my visit the Israeli military convicted the commander of the Hawara checkpoint, just south of Nablus, of beating numerous Palestinians and smashing the windows of ten Palestinian taxis. One of the army’s own cameramen had videotaped the commander in the act of bashing a Palestinian man in the face with his fist while the man’s toddler held on to his shirttails; the camera’s audio then picked up the sounds of the man’s being punched or kicked in the stomach inside a hut where the commander had dragged him. One of the cruelest indignities to which they are subjected, Palestinians say, is the capricious and sometimes hours-long detention of ambulances carrying Palestinian patients; according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, at least seventy-one Palestinians have died because they were delayed unnecessarily at checkpoints.

According to the Israeli military, a total of fifty-six Israeli soldiers and border police officers have been killed at checkpoints and roadblocks since the second intifada began, in September of 2000. In 2003 two were shot dead south of Jerusalem by a Palestinian man carrying a rifle rolled up in a prayer rug. In December of 2004 members of Hamas and Fatah tunneled several hundred yards to place more than a ton of explosives beneath a checkpoint in Rafah, near the Egyptian border with Gaza. The attack killed five soldiers. And in December of last year a Palestinian passing through the Qalandia checkpoint, right where I had walked, fatally stabbed a soldier in the neck.

Omer (the Israel Defense Forces forbade me from using his last name, or the last names of any of the soldiers I got to know) is a wiry, affable red-haired man of twenty-six who commands a company of the elite 202 Paratrooper Battalion. His company consisted of about a hundred young army conscripts, and in the fall of 2004 they occupied a base camp atop a hill between Ramallah and Nablus, where I stayed for almost two weeks. The base is located just off a major highway known as the 60 Road.

The 60 Road runs north–south through the entire West Bank and is the main connection between the cities of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron. In ancient times the route extended all the way north to Damascus and as far south as Beersheva. The problem with the 60 Road, Omer told me, is that it has become a thruway for terrorists. The security fence has yet to be completed in Jerusalem and many areas in the south—one reason, according to the military, that on August 31, 2004, ten days before my arrival in Israel, suicide bombers from Hebron were able to kill sixteen people in two separate attacks on buses in Beersheva. More recently other bombers have increasingly used the 60 Road to travel south from the politically turbulent cities of the north. So in addition to Hawara and the other permanent checkpoints along the road, the Israeli army deploys units like Omer’s to patrol it. “A suicide bomber traveling from Nablus to Jerusalem will have to go right past us—and we’ll try to stop him,” Omer told me. His company sets up flying checkpoints, conducts surveillance missions, and makes nighttime arrests in nearby Arab villages, usually acting on tips from the Shin Bet.

Though still in his twenties, Omer has already served nearly eight years in the army. He still carries shrapnel in his leg from fighting against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the late 1990s, yet he is nostalgic for those days, because in that job he was engaged in actual combat, which to him is real soldier’s work. “The Hezbollah warrior was like me, dressed up like me—he had a gun,” Omer told me one afternoon in his command trailer. “When one of our guys fell, it was like, hey, they were shooting, we were shooting. It was an army for us. It was sexier. And there was no question in terms of the conflict. There was Hezbollah, a clearly terrorist organization. But here the mission is trickier to explain to the soldiers—what you’ve achieved in terms of terrorism, how you buy time, buy intelligence, and at the end you will catch them.”

He continued the comparison. In the West Bank “the collateral damage is unbelievably higher,” he said. “In Lebanon the villages were either with you or against you—they’d fight alongside you, or else shoot back. Here the collateral damage in moral terms is unbelievably problematic, and that’s a serious problem in the long term.”

Innocent civilians, in other words, are inevitably damaged by the army’s work in the territories. “Searching a house, looking for a gun, taking in nineteen- to twenty-one-year-old kids and telling them it’s okay to turn the house upside down to find one gun. It’s bad for the guy’s four children in there—that’s obvious. But what’s not plain until the fifteenth time is that it’s bad for you.”

Israeli soldiers are posted to checkpoints for anywhere from two to six months; three months is typical. Before the current assignment, on the 60 Road between Ramallah and Nablus, Omer’s company had spent a little more than three months at Hawara. Most of the Hawara posting, he freely admitted, had been exhausting and dispiriting. In rotating shifts the soldiers spent eight hours on duty, eight hours off, with few breaks. Every day 5,000 Palestinians—a mass of humanity with whom it was difficult to communicate—passed through Hawara. Many of them were inclined to ignore, or even argue with, the soldiers’ orders. Against this backdrop Omer’s soldiers had to be ever on the lookout for the person in the crowd who might be wired to blow them up.

Fortunately for company morale, two incidents toward the end of their posting showed that hard work could pay dividends. In the first a female soldier, looking in the large gym bag of a ten-year-old boy, discovered a cell phone with wires attached, and beneath it a bomb. When questioned, the boy seemed to know nothing about the bomb. Apparently a man near the checkpoint just a few minutes earlier had offered him a few shekels to carry the bag through. Army officials believe the bomber was simply trying to sneak the bomb through the checkpoint, but they always worry about what Omer calls the “default threat”: the chance that the bomber, once discovered, will set off the bomb no matter where he is.

The second incident came nine days later. A soldier of Omer’s named Doron, nineteen years old and from the city of Rishon Lezion, just south of Tel Aviv, had been in charge of a checkpoint line that morning. He told me what happened: “It was maybe two p.m., and the Shin Bet called me and said, ‘There’s a bomber in your line!’ And I said, ‘What do they look like?’ They said, ‘Maybe a girl, maybe a boy, maybe fourteen, maybe sixteen.’” The Shin Bet monitors cell-phone transmissions in the area around the checkpoint, and had overheard the bomber making a call. Doron immediately closed down the checkpoint and ordered everyone waiting in line to stand back and then to approach the soldiers one at a time for thorough pat-downs. “Then a kid—we said, ‘Remove the jacket,’ and he didn’t want to; he was shaking,” Doron recalled. “But then he did, and we could see something under his jersey. So we said, ‘Lift your shirt.’ And so he did.” When the soldiers saw that the boy was wearing a vest wired with explosives, they trained their guns on him. A bomb robot was deployed to deliver a pair of scissors to the boy, which he used to cut off the vest. The soldiers then exploded the bomb.

The army wanted the world to know about the dangers its soldiers face in the Palestinian territories, so Israeli officials had called an AP stringer in Nablus and arranged for a television camera to tape the incident. Images of the frightened boy dressed in the vest and holding up his arms were soon transmitted around the world. Afterward, as a souvenir of the episode, Omer’s soldiers had a T-shirt made with a likeness of the boy and a caption that read, “They promised me 72 virgins in heaven, but instead I got the soldiers of the 202.”

After doing their time at the Hawara checkpoint, Omer and his company spent a few high-adrenaline months in Nablus, a city roiling with politics and rebellion, which the Israelis considered to be a major source of terrorism. Their experiences were both terrible and, to hear Omer tell it, thrilling. Under cover of night they would slip into town—sometimes in an armored vehicle, sometimes on foot, occasionally disguised—to arrest suspects. They drove through the impoverished Balata refugee camp, on the southeast edge of Nablus, attempting to draw fire from insurgents in order to discover their hideouts. They demolished the dwellings of Palestinians who, according to intelligence reports, had engaged in attacks against Israel. In one incident a Palestinian boy threw a stone that broke Omer’s nose. In another Omer’s second-in-command was ambushed, and Omer himself, coming from behind an ambulance that had been called to the scene, walked right into a boy who was holding a lighted Molotov cocktail. Omer shot him reflexively fourteen or fifteen times “in the legs”—“but he died.”

Omer and some of his soldiers also recall having to drive into Nablus—in broad daylight on a number of occasions—to rescue buddies whose vehicles had become trapped or disabled. During some of these missions residents on rooftops assaulted the vehicles with an assortment of heavy objects, ranging from cinder blocks to an oven. I asked one of Omer’s drivers, a dark-humored man named Adam, which parts of Nablus were the most dangerous. Which were the bad spots? “All of Nablus is a bad spot,” he muttered.

One day Omer drove me up the hill overlooking the Hawara checkpoint, past an Israeli-only road leading to Bracha, a Jewish settlement of 400 to 450 people (checkpoint soldiers have barracks there, too), and, a little higher up, through an ancient town of Samaritans, who are now Israeli citizens. The hill, which is called Mt. Gerizim, is mentioned in the Bible; Abraham, having just received the promise from God “I will make of thee a great nation,” had brought his tribe to set up camp in the oak grove between Gerizim and Mt. Ebal, a hill to the north. Out of that camp grew the biblical city of Shchem, which today is Nablus, home to 300,000 Palestinians. It’s an affront to many of them—and illustrative of the problems facing this region—that Israeli road signs refer to their city not as Nablus but as Shchem.

My mental image of Nablus, based on the descriptions of soldiers I talked to, was of a large, foul-smelling slum. So I was surprised to see gleaming white buildings, many of them tall and invitingly perched on either side of a valley. At least from a distance, Nablus was beautiful. But to Omer the view was less glorious. He pointed out one landmark after another where bad things had happened to him and his company. As we made our descent, he pointed out a building that the soldiers called the Disco: it was a Palestinian party hall that the paratroopers had taken over during the tensions of 2002 in order to provide the settlers with additional protection. One night, as the soldiers slept, two Palestinian militants attacked, killing a sergeant and a lieutenant before they themselves were killed. Losing those two soldiers seemed to be Omer’s most painful experience, and yet I could see that some part of him really wanted me to know what had happened in Nablus. It had been his idea to come here. Weeks later, when I met up again with Omer and told him I had gone back to Nablus alone, he seemed amazed—and also a bit envious.

Israeli civilians are forbidden by military order to enter Palestinian towns; indeed, it would be dangerous for most of them to do so. But I’d been told it wouldn’t necessarily be dangerous for me, as a non-Israeli and a non-Jew. And so, in hopes of understanding checkpoints from a Palestinian point of view, I went.

I needed a Palestinian commuter, and I found one in the person of Abdul-Latif M. Khaled, a hydrologist who was educated in Holland. He lived not in Nablus but in Jayyus, a village about twenty miles to the west. His daily commute had once been an easy thirty minutes, he told me. Now between home and office loomed two permanent checkpoints and as many as five flying checkpoints, and the trip often took more than two hours each way. The afternoon of my visit Khaled invited me to attend a presentation on the subject of water conservation that he was giving in Nablus to officials from more than two dozen local villages. When it was over, we boarded a shared “service taxi”—an aging yellow Mercedes wagon typical of the semi-public transportation available in the West Bank—for the journey to his house.

Khaled is a tall, well-dressed man in his late thirties who speaks excellent English and clearly commanded the respect of the officials. As the two of us settled into the taxi, he chatted with the other passengers about the afternoon checkpoint situation, trying to assess what lay ahead. It was the Palestinian version of a radio traffic report. There was no alternate route, but at least he would know what to expect.

After passing through a flying checkpoint inside Nablus, we disembarked from the taxi at Beit Iba, a neighborhood on the city’s northwestern edge, and walked to a terminal-style checkpoint similar to the ones at Qalandia and Hawara. With roughly 250 people waiting to go through, Khaled expected that it would take us about half an hour to get to the front, assuming all went well. When I sighed, he told me just to be glad we weren’t there on a Thursday afternoon, when the students at nearby An-Najah National University headed home for the weekend. Their numbers, he said, usually swelled the queue to several hundred.

After fifteen or twenty minutes the tides and currents of the crowd separated us, and I found myself pushed up against a man in a checked shirt—or, rather, pushed up against his satellite dish. Apparently he planned to hand-carry the waist-high dish through the queue. As absurd as this seemed at first, it soon occurred to me that he probably had no other choice, and so I did what I could to help. Others did too. Before long the crowd had deposited me at the turnstile just ahead of him.

As I waited in a short line to reach the soldier who would examine my papers, I heard a clanking and saw that the satellite dish was stuck in the turnstile. Undeterred, the man in the checked shirt managed to dislodge the dish and started sliding it through a set of vertical bars next to the turnstile. When the job was almost finished, I reached over to help steady the satellite dish against the bars on my side.

Big mistake. The soldier in whose queue I was waiting stood up and shouted at me, demanding that I come directly to the front. His English wasn’t good, but he made it clear that I had broken the rules and that he was not happy about it. I was very apologetic; it was my first time through this checkpoint, I said, and I hadn’t realized I was doing anything wrong. When he took my passport and Israeli press pass, I thought I was going to be okay. But he pointed to the back of the sea of humanity in which I had recently been adrift and declared, “End of line!” Startled by this punishment, I tried to stall, promising it wouldn’t happen again. Khaled, who was in front of the next soldier over, began to argue on my behalf. For his troubles he was sent away to the holding pen, a small area of hard benches behind a clump of bushes, which was filled with eight or nine other men who, for whatever reason, had run afoul of the authorities. Still I dug in my heels. “End of line!” screamed the soldier.

As I started to turn back, a silent alarm seemed to go off among the soldiers: something had gone wrong toward the back of the line. My tormentor and five other soldiers picked up their M4s and ran outside the shed, quickly disappearing into the crowd. The checkpoint was now officially closed.

Twenty minutes later the soldiers returned and slowly resumed their duties. No explanation was offered, and the crowd was so big that I couldn’t see what had caused the ruckus. The soldiers were uniformly young and dull-eyed, their burnout showing through and through. I approached my soldier again, and he began to reexamine my passport with an air of studied indifference. Khaled could see me from the pen and started shouting at the soldiers; they ignored him.

The soldier called over his commander, who asked me questions for fifteen minutes or so before deciding to let me pass. Khaled, however, had to stay. I walked past the soldiers and took up a position at the far end of the terminal to wait for him. To see a person of Khaled’s stature treated so disrespectfully was unsettling. Several times he pointed at me; I feared that for championing my cause, he might get himself beaten up.

But after about twenty minutes the soldiers decided to let him go. Khaled was red in the face when he told me that his detention would have continued had he not been able to point at me and tell the soldiers about the bad publicity they were creating for themselves. When I blamed myself for his problems, he brushed it off. Before they would release him, he said, he had been forced to say “I am namrood.” He asked if I knew what that meant, and I said it sounded like “nimrod”—“idiot”? “troublemaker”? Yes, he said, though in Arabic it was more like “naughty.”

In the parking area beyond the checkpoint we ran into the mayor of Jayyus, who offered us a ride in his pickup truck. As we climbed in, Khaled said, “Sometimes they keep you in that pen until past closing time, until all the taxis have left.” He pointed to a clump of bushes next to the lot. “Once I had to sleep there, next to those.”

There was only one more checkpoint to navigate on the way home, but the relatively clear road didn’t improve Khaled’s mood. We came to an intersection where, he said, the week before soldiers at a flying checkpoint had collected everyone’s IDs, kept them for more than an hour, and then dropped them in a pile on the road. This prompted a mad scramble that had only amused the soldiers. Without an ID no Palestinian can go anywhere.

The 202 Paratrooper company’s base, just off the 60 Road, sat perched on a rounded hilltop, part of a bevy of rounded hilltops arrayed like beads on a string. This was clearly a contested area. On the sides of some hills were Palestinian villages, and on the tops of other hills were illegal Israeli settlements. It was easier to distinguish them at night, when you could see that the lights in the villages were irregularly spaced and of varying brightness and color, with one prominent green light marking the mosque, whereas the lights in the settlements were regularly spaced and consistent in brightness and hue. This was because the settlements had been built subdivision-style, with many identical units.

The settlers had for years felt most unsafe not in their houses but out on the roads. Part of the 60 Road had been dubbed the “Highway of Death” four years earlier, according to Marc Prowisor, the security chief for the Shilo settlement, which I could see clearly from Omer’s trailer. Many settlers had been shot at on the 60 Road and at least twenty-two had been killed. When a family of four from Shilo was attacked on the road (the parents were killed; the babies somehow survived), the settlers demanded protection from the Israeli army, and got it. Owing to the diligence of soldiers like the ones from 202 Paratrooper, Prowisor said, the road was much safer now.

I asked Omer how his unit had managed to reduce the number of attacks on the 60 Road. A combination of measures, he said: checkpoints, intelligence, raids on homes, and making the soldiers’ presence known in various ways—by simply driving through villages, or by making use of the talents of his sniper squad. When I asked what, exactly, the snipers might do, he told me this story.

A month or two before, just after his company had moved into its base (which is known as the 773 Outpost, because it sits 773 meters above sea level), reports came in that stones were being hurled at night from a nearby hill at settlers’ cars traveling on the 60 Road. Omer sent a squad of camouflaged snipers out to investigate, and one night, using special optics, they caught a twenty-year-old Palestinian man from the village of Sinjil in the act. They shot him just below the knee with a high-powered rifle. Oddly enough, Omer was standing by with a military doctor, and five minutes after being shot the man was being treated by the same army that had just maimed him. An Israeli ambulance took him to a hospital in Jerusalem, where the government paid for his treatment. Part of the man’s leg had to be amputated, but the point was that he was alive, and could serve as a living warning. “Every day now his village will remember what happened,” Omer said.

I asked Omer whether it had been necessary to shoot the man at all. Couldn’t the soldiers simply have arrested him, or given him a stern warning? Omer found my questions puzzling. From his point of view, he had acted with restraint, because “legally we could have shot him—to kill.” Omer argued that the man’s actions posed a lethal hazard to those riding on the 60 Road; people could have been killed. In fact, as Omer reminded me, in March of 2002, not far from where we were standing, a Palestinian sniper had opened fire on a 60 Road checkpoint known as British Police (after those who built it), killing seven Israeli soldiers and three civilians with an ancient rifle. The sniper had never been caught. British Police, which was near a stand of tall pines, was now abandoned, but the incident, like so many others in this part of the world, was far from forgotten.

At dusk one evening I went out with Omer and two of his men on a patrol of two Arab villages near  the base, Sinjil and Jiljilya. Omer drove the Storm, a special armored Jeep with bulletproof windows and flatproof tires. The narrow road on which we were driving, much of it dirt, wound its way up a hill and past the simple whitewashed houses of Sinjil, the first village, where a soldier pointed out to me a wall on which a map of Israel and the West Bank had been painted—the whole of it filled in with the green, black, and white stripes of the Palestinian flag. For the soldiers this was unmistakable evidence of the Palestinians’ refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist, and a clear sign that we were in enemy territory.

None of the soldiers had told me what to expect, so the flying rock took me totally by surprise. With a bang it bounced off the roof of the Storm and skittered across the hood, making me jump. We had left Sinjil, traveled maybe two miles across an arid, vacant hillside, and were just coming into Jiljilya. I looked through the Storm’s thick windows to see where the rock had come from, but nobody was in sight. On either side of the road, however, were the remains of a makeshift barricade that had been constructed by locals; once it had spanned the road, but now it was a ruin of rocks, boxes, chairs, and a television. “I think we won’t go all the way in tonight,” Omer said, turning the car around at the other end of the village.

Only later did I learn that Omer considered it unsafe to proceed with only one truck. That was the next evening, after I had asked whether we might go back and drive in farther. Though he couldn’t come himself, Omer okayed the trip, sending me out in the Storm with Adam, an experienced driver, and Rooey, a radioman. We were followed by other soldiers in a Humvee driven by a young woman who, like about a quarter of Omer’s troops, was an immigrant from Russia. The soldiers chatted to one another and to the base on their radios.

The chatter stopped when the first stone struck the Storm with a bang—once again we were passing the scattered remnants of the barricade in Jiljilya. I jumped, but Adam drove on, smiling ruefully. “Even for us the first one is always a little scary,” he said. “The first one?” I said.

Then two more stones hit the Storm, while others flew by, barely missing us. This time I saw where they were coming from—a bunch of kids behind a wall. But the soldiers ignored them, and we drove on to a third village, Abwein.

In Abwein, five minutes later, I heard a loud, shrill whistling for the first time—the signal Palestinians use to communicate that army vehicles are on the way. Another round of stones rained down on us, but our two-vehicle motorcade kept moving, neither speeding up nor slowing down, and Adam’s face was expressionless.

“Why are we here, exactly?” I asked him.

“Just to show them we are here,” he said, smiling darkly. In other words, I thought to myself, intimidation.

Soon we reached the end of the road—the army had placed a big earthen mound across it. Such strategically placed road closures (as opposed to checkpoints) are common all over the West Bank; the army uses them to restrict access to roads favored by settlers, and to increase its control over Palestinian districts like this one. We started turning around, which took a long time on the narrow street, especially for the Humvee. “You mean we have to go back the way we came?” I asked. Adam thought this question was funny.

Numerous rocks pelted the Storm over the next few minutes, and again as we neared the tumbledown barricade in Jiljilya. There was no exit from the road we were on, and the rock throwers knew we’d have to retrace our route. “Is that all they’ve got?” Adam muttered as we rolled slowly through the hail of stones. That was when a Coke bottle filled with engine oil smashed against the windshield and I discovered, from the patches of dark oil on my arm and pants, that the Storm’s seals weren’t perfectly tight. I looked back to see what the Humvee would attract and saw a Molotov cocktail explode right in front of it, drawing a straight line of flame diagonally across the road between us.

Both vehicles stopped. Adam turned on the windshield wipers of the Storm and cursed when they managed only to smear the oil. “I wish they’d hit us with the cocktail instead,” he said. The Humvee began to turn around, heading back in the direction we’d just come.

“What are they going to do?” I asked Adam.

“If they can catch them, they can shoot them in the lower legs,” replied Rooey, the radioman, from the back seat. From the military’s perspective, throwing a Molotov cocktail is aggression of a higher order than throwing stones. Shooting to hit the lower legs is standard practice if the provocation is violent but not likely to be lethal. (There is even an Israeli children’s game, like dodge ball, in which the object is to hit your opponent below the knee.) The Humvee disappeared for ten minutes as it rumbled around the back streets of Jiljilya, but then returned in our rear-view mirrors; it had failed to catch the throwers.

Back at the base Omer let his concern show more than usual. “The bottles and the rocks are normal, but the Molotov cocktails—that hasn’t happened before on that road,” he told me. “It says something very serious about them, about how ready they are to attack us. Molotov cocktails really can make a car explode.”

“But aren’t the armored vehicles immune?” I asked.

“Well, in theory,” he replied.

A day later Omer invited me to come along as he and a handful of soldiers set up a middle-of-the-night flying checkpoint along the deserted stretch of road between Sinjil and Jiljilya. It was about two a.m., very dark and very quiet. A few steps from the checkpoint we could look west to the Mediterranean and see the bright lights of Tel Aviv. It is such a small country.

There were almost no cars to be seen. But even when there’s “a very low probability of actual contact with terrorist activity,” Omer said, “checking a road in a random manner causes uncertainty, making it practically impossible to say when and where you can sneak out of a village without being checked.” He continued, “Working in various times and places lowers the level of threat faced by our forces.” When the first car finally approached the checkpoint, Omer’s soldiers turned powerful spotlights on it at the last minute and appeared to scare the driver almost to death. The driver told the soldiers that he was a pharmacist returning from a late-night restocking of his shop, and he was very accommodating of their requests to search his trunk, his back seat, and under his hood. Another hour and only two cars later we headed back to the base.

As our service taxi passed near the now abandoned  British Police checkpoint on the 60 Road, Khaldoon   al-Khatib, a student at Birzeit University, just outside Ramallah, pointed it out as a landmark, just as Omer had. For him, however, the checkpoint had a different name—Ayoon al-Haramia (“Eyes of the Thieves”)—and the massacre of the Israelis by the mystery gunman was not a tragedy but a triumph. “Even on the Palestinian side we still don’t know how he did it,” Khaldoon said, beaming. “It’s like Spiderman!”

Traveling south on the 60 Road, I was revisiting familiar terrain, but with a tour guide so different that it seemed like another land entirely. Khaldoon’s brother, Ahmed, an acquaintance of mine who is a student in Pennsylvania, had suggested that I look up Khaldoon. When I got to Ramallah and told Khaldoon of my interest in checkpoints, he proposed that we travel south for a weekend at his parents’ house in Hebron, where often a checkpoint was set up just down the street.

The twenty-two-year-old Khaldoon, slender, handsome, and hyper, was in his third year at Birzeit and studying psychology. As we rumbled south in a succession of service taxis, switching whenever a checkpoint or a barrier required it, he kept asserting that none of the checkpoints was impregnable. Show me a checkpoint, he would say, and I’ll show you a way around it. The Qalandia checkpoint, between Ramallah and Jerusalem, was Exhibit No. 1: if you were willing to make a big detour and to pay about eight times the normal taxi fare, you could avoid it completely. South of Eyes of the Thieves we did just that, switching taxis at a junction called Arram and ending up in the taxi lot south of Qalandia. Our circuitous and costly route demonstrated why most Palestinians prefer to subject themselves to the checkpoint.

But in other places, Khaldoon told me, evasion was riskier. You could get around a checkpoint by taking a dirt back road or a remote footpath, but the army wasn’t stupid: knowing the net had holes, they sent out patrols to catch the fish who slipped through. Every Palestinian has heard stories like the one told me by a waiter in Nablus. Returning home late in the day and finding the Hawara checkpoint closed, he hiked up Mt. Gerizim to walk around. The soldiers who caught him beat him up and held a pistol to his head. Service taxis are regularly fined or confiscated when caught detouring around a checkpoint. Khaldoon nevertheless sounded defiant. “They close a road, we find a hundred roads!” he proclaimed. “We will make more roads! Anywhere!”

I was starting to believe him when our service taxi stopped at al-Quds University, in East Jerusalem. Across the street a panoramic view of the city had been replaced by a long section of Israel’s new security fence—a blank, imposing structure that ran along the edge of the school’s dusty playing fields. The original plan had called for the wall to cross the fields, rendering them useless, but it was revised after Condoleezza Rice intervened. At that moment only one panel remained to be installed before the stretch of wall was complete. “You’re not going to make a road around that,” I commented. Khaldoon gave me an unhappy look and said nothing more on the subject for the rest of the trip.

Outside Hebron, Khaldoon used a cell phone to alert his father, Awni al-Khatib, that he would have to pick us up downtown. But his dad called right back: traffic was so stacked up at the checkpoint near their house, he said, that it would be hours before he’d be able to get there. An alternative rendezvous was picked. As we approached the city, the taxi dropped me and Khaldoon on the side of the road. We climbed a five-foot-high earthen barrier (the army has constructed hundreds of these to restrict Palestinian access to main highways like the 60 Road) and hiked a quarter mile or so down a back street to meet Khaldoon’s father.

Awni, an engaging, outgoing man in his early fifties, welcomed us into his Volkswagen Polo, where we also met his youngest son, Muhammad. We drove about ten minutes to an intersection that was in total gridlock with long lines of cars and trucks.

“Uh-oh,” I said.

But Khaldoon had a different reaction. “No, no—we’re home!” he exclaimed. He clambered out of the VW, threaded his way across the road through the bumper-to-bumper traffic, and opened what turned out to be the gate to the family’s driveway. After about five minutes the drivers nearby were able to make enough space for the VW to squeeze through, and we pulled into the driveway. “You see what we have to put up with,” Awni said, as Khaldoon closed the gate. I didn’t at first, but then Khaldoon explained: those cars and trucks were all queued up for the local checkpoint, a hundred yards down the road. “When they set up the checkpoint, they don’t put in enough soldiers,” Khaldoon observed. “People have to wait a long time.”

Awni is a scientist with a doctorate in inorganic chemistry from the University of Florida at Gainesville. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Utah State University and was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of Oklahoma. He has a family of six, who lived in an apartment block for years after they moved to Hebron. Awni’s promotion to vice president of Hebron University had enabled them to build this gracious house, perched on a hillside on the edge of town, with a balcony, flower gardens, and commanding views of an olive orchard across the valley.

But their lives had been completely changed by the arrival of the checkpoint on their doorstep, in 2001. As Khaldoon’s mother, Latifa, served us tea on a patio outside the living room, a succession of Palestinian men scrambled furtively past the gardens every few minutes, prompting wild barking from the family’s German shepherd. “They’re getting around the checkpoint,” Khaldoon explained. They would have to run across a settler road below the house to do it, he said, and then wind through the olive orchard. As long as they didn’t get caught, they’d save a lot of time.

I was curious about how much time, so the next day we walked down the road to where the soldiers were. One stood guard up on an overpass, and two more were stationed below. I joined a crowd of about forty Palestinians who were waiting impatiently for the soldiers’ attention. Being American, I discovered, did not speed things up. After more than half an hour, when I was finally allowed to approach him, a young soldier with red hair examined my documents and then stepped close enough to whisper in my ear that it was dangerous in town. “If I were you, I would climb up there,” he confided, pointing to the settler road up the embankment, “and hitchhike out of here.” I thanked him for looking out for me; he was clearly harried, and not required to enhance my safety. “But I’m with a friend,” I said, pointing to Khaldoon. “I think I’ll be okay.” The soldier looked surprised and let us both pass.

Omer kept referring to “the old 60” and “the new 60,” and one day I asked what he meant. The old 60, he explained, had connected all the major Palestinian cities of the West Bank. But with the growth of Israeli settlements in the territory, and with Israeli settlers encountering trouble when they traveled through Palestinian cities, bypass roads had been created. The peak of this construction was in the late 1990s. Bypasses now constitute the main 60 Road, which skirts not only the cities but many of the villages as well.

One morning intelligence reports indicated that bombers out of Nablus would be heading to points south, and Omer decided to set up a flying checkpoint on the new 60 Road where it intersected with the old 60, just below the company’s base. After all, a smart bomber might decide to avoid the main routes, with their permanent checkpoints, in favor of a longer journey on back roads.

Four soldiers went out at mid-morning with a Humvee driver to set up the flying checkpoint, and I went along to observe. In charge of the operation was one of Omer’s most trusted platoon leaders, a twenty-one-year-old man named Ori, who unloaded from the Humvee two ammo boxes containing the pakal machsom, the checkpoint kit, which included reflectors, a warning sign on a tripod, and two lengths of “dragon’s teeth”—collapsible spikes that extend about six feet across the road, to make sure cars stop where they are supposed to.

I had talked to Ori at length the evening before, at a picnic table on the base. Short, handsome, and conscientious, he had served two years in the army after an eight-month stint in the navy. Like many of his buddies, he was still trying to make the adjustment from his active life as a soldier patrolling Nablus to a relatively more passive one manning checkpoints. “In Nablus you feel like a warrior,” he told me. “You arrest people, you bring them to justice, and all of that. But here you don’t see the fruit of the work. The challenge is the people and their problems and all the pressure they put on you, and your soldiers looking at you and trying to see how you do it. And you need to deal with the threats, which at a checkpoint are very large. The threat could be in a lady’s bag, or in the engine behind an air cleaner, or behind the nearest hill, or a grenade could be thrown at you from fifty meters.” As Ori spoke, I thought of his platoon’s symbol: a clown juggling grenades.

The low points of his military service, Ori told me, were the three months he spent working the Hawara checkpoint and a recent dangerous assignment in Gaza. He had been sent to Gaza the day after a rocket-propelled grenade had killed five Israeli soldiers traveling in armored personnel carriers. Ori’s challenge, in the middle of taking fire from snipers, was to try to retrieve the remaining small body parts of the slain soldiers, so that their relatives would have something to bury.

But today he was back at a checkpoint, battling the heat and the boredom of examining each and every document handed to him from a slow-moving line of cars. As the line began to stretch back over a hill and out of sight, much like the scene in Hebron as I had waited with Khaldoon, Ori, exposed on the blacktop, summoned one vehicle at a time to move ahead of the rest, and then spoke to the driver in the Arabic phrases he had learned during his boot-camp training.

Wain raieh? (Where are you going?)
Jai min wain? (Coming from where?)
Lahalak fi al-saiara? (Alone in the car?)
Laish raieh? Shu al-shughul? (Why are you going? On what business?)
Itfee al-saiara! (Turn off the car! [An order that is often ignored at first.])
Itla min al-saiara! (Get out of the car!)
Iftah al-sanduq! (Open the trunk!)
Irfa qameesak! (Lift up your shirt!)

All morning long I watched Ori and his colleagues do their work. I watched them stop an ambulance and make everyone get out, including an old man in back who was apparently on his way to a hospital and looked pretty close to death. Later, in their defense, Ori and other soldiers pointed out that ambulances had been used on more than one occasion to carry explosives.

I watched them allow cars with yellow-and-black Israeli license plates—as opposed to white-and-green Palestinian ones—to skip the queue and pass through the checkpoint by using the oncoming-traffic lane. Most made eye contact with Ori before proceeding, but some just zoomed by.

I watched them make a pregnant woman wait more than twenty minutes in the broiling sun while a soldier ran her ID through a computer back at the base.

I watched them order several Palestinians to pile out of a service taxi, leaving inside an incapacitated man whose foot was wrapped with gauze through which blood had oozed … I wondered what had happened. Ori, wary of a trap, then made the man, despite his evident pain, get out of the taxi and hop over to him with his documents. After getting the all clear the man was carried back to the taxi by the other passengers.

I watched an old woman climb out of the car she was riding in and hobble up the road, saying that her husband could pick her up once he got through the checkpoint, but she was not going to wait a minute more. “Go ahead and shoot me!” she told Ori as she walked by.

After about three hours Omer arrived and decided that although no bomber or contraband had been interdicted, the checkpoint had served its purpose. Back at the base Ori and the other soldiers seemed glad to take off their heavy combat gear and eat lunch. Ori told me that he would have liked to be a soldier in the time of the Haganah—the Israel Defense Forces’ precursor—or of an early elite strike force like the Palmach. Such fighters, he said, recruited themselves, lived in a group, and worked together for one purpose. “Now it seems so complicated—you don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong, and if we’ve done the right thing every time.”

Surely this sentiment is shared by thousands of soldiers—Israeli, Russian, American—at the dawn of the twenty-first century, when it appears that the hardest thing is not taking control of a territory (the West Bank, Chechnya, Iraq) but attempting to administer it once you are there. The battlefield is no longer a highly militarized beachhead, plain, or jungle but a road, a checkpoint; and the challenge is picking out the enemy—a teenager in a long coat; a woman with a baby carriage—from the large mass of civilians, who are noncombatants, without creating additional enemies in the process. The great risk, as you contend against the unseen, is that you may come to demonize even those who are not part of the resistance. That’s what the job does. No wonder Ori felt nostalgic for the old days.

And no wonder Omer, in command of a base surrounded by historical enemies, didn’t seem at all fearful of traditional defeat. His side clearly enjoyed overwhelming military superiority. But Omer did worry a lot about his men’s state of mind. Arriving back at the base one morning just before dawn, after a particularly difficult arrest in a house in a Palestinian village, he sat on his bunk and ruefully told me of a boy’s shaking, a mother’s sobbing. They had got the bad guy, he said, but the work still took its toll. He unlaced a boot. “The real daily fight,” he said, worried about his soldiers, “is fighting for a soul.”

]]> http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/the-checkpoint/feed/ 0 Backstage Man http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/backstage-man/ http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/backstage-man/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:45:41 +0000 tedconover http://www.tedconover.stevemotzenbecker.com/?p=210 IN 1984, when I was beginning my book Coyotes, my editor at Random House handed me a brand-new book about the Rolling Stones that he said was very, very good. The editor, David Rosenthal, had just come to the book business from Rolling Stone magazine and so, I figured, knew what he was talking about. I browsed Dance With the Devil: The Rolling Stones & Their Times, by Stanley Booth, noticing that much of it took place in 1969, during a tour of the United States that ended with the infamous Altamont concert in California. “Why’s it only coming out now?” I asked Rosenthal, who grimaced. “Long story,” he said, and never told it to me.

I do not read many books about music, but this one drew me in. Part of the reason was that Booth’s style of research with the famous rock group seemed similar to what I had in mind with Mexican migrants: participate and immerse rather than simply interview and observe. Yes, the Rolling Stones on tour led a life different in most respects from that of people sneaking into the United States, but there were similarities (young men traveling in a group, young men working but also having an adventure, young men breaking laws, young men staying up late and getting blasted, etc.). The other reason was that, as I soon discovered, Dance with the Devil is a treasure of participatory journalism, a book with something good on practically every page.

It was also a book suited to the disjointed way in which I was living at the time. Dance with the Devil, in other words, though mainly about a tour, digresses frequently and does not impel you breathlessly toward the end. So I could read it in little pieces, a few pages here and a few pages there; unlike most books that I don’t plunge into, I kept it around, in night table or knapsack. Maybe because those early days were also a time when I often found myself stuck in writing, too self-critical and unable to find the words, Booth’s book also came to hold a sort of magic for me, the power to break a dam and start a flow. Which is more, somehow, than I can say for most books I admire.

The hardcover edition didn’t sell and so the paperback was retitled (in the way the author had always wanted): The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. But that didn’t help sales either and both editions soon fell out of print. In 2000, however, True Adventures got a new life when it was republished by Chicago’s A Cappella Press. Blurbs on the cover, I was delighted to see, showed that it had found other admirers. “The one authentic masterpiece of rock ’n’ roll writing,” raved Peter Guralnick, a writer not given to hyperbole (or blurbs, for that matter). "In all the annals of the 60s, there is nothing on paper that so evokes those days and nights," sang Robert Stone. Harold Brodkey, in the early 1990s, called it "the best book so far about the 60s." There was a new afterword, too, so I picked up a copy and read the book again.

True Adventures begins in a way that gives readers a taste of what they’re in for, and foreshadows the disaster to come. Six strange paragraphs in italics, a kind of prologue, describe Mick and Keith’s nighttime reconnoiter of the coming evening’s venue, the Altamont Speedway east of San Francisco, where they would give a long-awaited free concert:

It is late. All the little snakes are asleep. The world is black outside the car windows, just the dusty clay road in the headlights. Far from the city, past the last crossroads (where they used to bury suicides in England, with wooden stakes driven through their hearts), we are looking for a strange California hillside where we may see him, may even dance with him in his torn, bloody skins, come and play.

Inside the band’s limo, The Crystals are on the radio singing “He’s a Rebel.” Outside, people waiting for the gates to open are everywhere, with their dogs, packs, and sleeping bags. The driver doesn’t know where to go but finally arrives at a fence. “So we stand on one foot and then the other, swearing in the cold, and no one comes to let us in, and the gate, which is leaning, rattles when I shake it, and I say we could push it down pretty easy, and Keith says, ‘The first act of violence.’”

The story of the free concert, which is well known, ends the book: as the Stones play the next night, the Hell’s Angels, acting as security, will kill a black man, and beat others. Altamont is considered by many to be the calamity that began the eclipse of the Age of Aquarius. Ending the italicized section is a cartoon panel with the title, “J.P. Alley: Hambone’s Meditations.” The black man pictured in it, leading a mule, is saying “O, lock up de do’ en set down yo’ load — hones’ folks asleep en de debil on de road!!”

It’s the only drawing in the book and, with its racist dialect, its presence seemed strange — until I discovered that “Hambone’s Meditations” was until 1968 a regular feature of the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Then I saw how it ties together three important elements of Booth’s project: Memphis, where he began his career writing about the blues (he is originally from Georgia), the Stones’s satanism, and black people (and their music and their rhymes) as depicted by white people. Because what apparently drew Booth to the Stones was music: they were set apart from most other acts by their interest in and adoption of the blues, and Booth’s association with that music, and the South, seem to have been a reason they agreed to let him chronicle their tour.

That chronicling gets under way after passages about the formation of the Stones, their rise to popularity in Britain, and the death of the guitarist Brian Jones, apparently from a drug overdose. Booth also recreates early meetings with the Stones and their managers, repeatedly sharing his anxiety over whether the arrangement will work out, whether he’ll have a deal signed before the tour begins. As Booth tells it, what probably clinches the deal is when Jagger asks him:

“What would your book be about?”
“About?”
“You know, what would be in it?”
“What will be in your next song?”
“A girl in a barroom, man, I don’t know. It’s much easier to write a song than a book,” says Jagger . . . .
I told Mick that I had written a story about a blues singer who had swept the streets in Memphis for more than forty years, but he’s more than just a street sweeper, because he’s never stopped playing, if you see what I mean. I didn’t look at Mick to find out whether he saw. You write, I told him, about things that move your heart, and in the story about the old blues singer I wrote about where he lives and the songs he sings and just lists of the things he swept up in the streets, and I can’t explain to him, Furry Lewis, what it is about him that moves my heart, and I can’t tell you what I would write about the Rolling Stones, and so, well, I guess I can’t answer your question. No, he said, you answered it, and for the first time since I thought, long months ago, of writing this book, I felt almost good about it.

It’s when the tour begins, in the book’s middle section, that the ship leaves the shore and Booth finds his pace. He is with the band during rehearsals, at arena gigs, and inside recording sessions, cars, private jets, hotel suites and house parties with a changing cast of groupies, handlers, cops, and other musicians. Booth has said in an interview that “I wanted to write a book that readers could walk around in and know what it was like to be in London in 1968 or America in 1969,” and he works hard to capture the texture of the times.

He is strongest when writing about the music — the history of it, the business of it, and the experience of it. Booth’s believer’s passion results in all sorts of luminous insights into the enterprise: “The Stones’s show was not a concert but a ritual; their songs . . . were acts of violence, brief and incandescent.” And later, “Making love and death into songs was exactly the Stones’s business.” Booth tells a story in which “Each night we went someplace new and strange and yet similar to the place before, to hear the same men play the same songs to kids who all looked the same, and yet each night it was different, each night told us more.” He suggests that “In the sixties we believed in a myth — that music had the power to change people’s lives. Today people believe in a myth — that music is just entertainment.” He writes about what it was like backstage and what it was like in the audience, what it felt like when things really clicked and what it was like when they did not.

The backstage view is, of course, the main draw to a book like this, and Booth offers anecdotes intriguing, disgusting, and amusing. He writes about a comely woman in the studio audience during the taping of the The Ed Sullivan Show who does not succeed in getting taken advantage of: a minion picks a “big blond in buckskin” to visit the boys backstage instead. Booth writes of leaving the studio with a friend, “the pretty little girl in the brown outfit ahead of us, smiling, lucky to be left with her dreams.” He reports on how, a couple of days after a recording session, the Stones “made more money than they had ever made in one day by recording a television commercial for Rice Krispies . . . .” In one particularly delightful scene, Booth describes Jagger on his hotel bed after a concert, exhausted, eating Chinese food, and taking flack from others for his smelly socks:

Mick drew his feet up under him . . . and began talking to me about the future, where to live, what to do . . . . “I’ve got to find a place to live, got to think about the future, because obviously I can’t do this forever.” He rolled his eyes. “I mean, we’re so old — we’ve been going on for eight years and we can’t go on for another eight. I mean, if you can you will do, but I just can’t, I mean we’re so old — Bill’s thirty-three.”

Sometimes there’s just pleasure in the writerly risks Booth takes, and seeing how they pay off. Toward the end of the tour, he describes waking up at the Plaza Hotel in New York “still anesthetized by the heroin.” His friend, Gore, “being like all speed freaks evangelistic,” takes him to a “speed doctor,” who gives them shots in the butt of something restorative for ten dollars apiece.
Booth then writes:

I had felt faint and limp-wristed, but with the charge in my ass I decided we didn’t need a cab, we could walk across town to Madison Square Garden for the Stones’s afternoon concert. Out of an earnest desire not to rob this account of its true interest, I will confess that I was carrying the red carnation from my bedside table at the Plaza; so there I went, boots, jeans, and leather jacket, sniffing a long-stemmed red carnation, looking like some insane faggot ought to be kilt with a shovel, as we walked briskly through the streets, fatigue gone, feeling ardent.

What Booth captures so well is the particular energy of the time. The style is sometimes Beat, Kerouacian — there’s a sense of experimentation under way. And in that, True Adventures achieves true oneness with its subject: like the Stones, Booth is full of aspiration, trying something new, unsure where it will take him. And that, in retrospect, is I think the book’s great resonance for me, and its promise for any young writer: take these chances, it has continued to tell me, and some of them will pay off.

The Random House cover photo of the author, apparently taken years later, showing him neatly groomed and wearing coat and tie, made you wonder how on earth he hung out with the Stones. But a much better shot of Booth and Keith Richards at the end of the new edition shows him long-haired and modish, bandanna around his neck, perhaps backstage somewhere, looking like maybe Keith’s brother. (Throughout True Adventures he seems to connect more readily with Keith, and, indeed, years later he published another book about only him: Keith: Standing in the Shadows.)

This photo is a valuable addition because it lets you see how close Booth got to the band, how much he identified with them. And by contrast, how little common ground he felt with other journalists on the Stones’s trail. Take, for instance, Booth’s descriptions of the Stones’s press conferences and interviews with the correspondents of various well-known media. The distance between these accomplished people and the author is fascinating. Instead of participating in these scenes, he simply observes cannily, letting the reporters’ superficial questions and the Stones’s sound-bite answers speak for themselves. It’s all summed up by a sentence which, when he wrote it, must have given Booth great pleasure: “When the Newsweek talk ended and the reporter left, we all decided to have lunch together on the Strip.”

At other times, his in-group status results in clear antipathy toward outsiders. He’s particularly hard on Albert and David Maysles, who are also along for parts of the tour, including Altamont, filming their now-classic documentary, "Gimme Shelter." The filmmakers’ sin, it appears, is to have gained access to the inner sanctum without the requisite knowledge of the music, or long-term commitment to the enterprise. Booth is in a New York taxi with the brothers on the last day of the tour: “As we rode we talked about the Stones. David and Al seemed to know nothing about them and two months later, after their film was shot, would still be talking about Bill Watts” (a conflation of the names of Charlie Watts, the drummer, and Bill Wyman, the bass player).

Another peril of participatory journalism is exposure to a subject’s vices — drugs, in the case of the Rolling Stones. Drug use was part of the ethic of the times. “Practically everybody who got near the band in those days got drug-addicted,” a friend whose family was in business with them told me. Booth comments on it (and has joked that the book was so late because he had to wait for statutes of limitation to expire). And yet Booth also, in being so firmly “embedded” with the Stones, seems unaware of what he’s being swallowed up by — or, at any rate, unwilling to struggle against it. Booth, with Richards apparently as his source, maintains that in the early days the Stones took “no dope of any kind . . . But in 1969 things had changed. It would be impossible to endure a world that makes you work and suffer, impossible to endure history, if it weren’t for the fleeting moments of ecstasy.” And so we have the drugs, and the justification for them. By the seventh paragraph of the tour, Booth is taking up a roadie for B.B. King on his offer of a sniff of heroin and then describing how particularly sexy Tina Turner and the Ikettes looked when he was high, how it figured in with the work (“People talked to me but I went on writing, no one could reach me in my Poe-like drugged creative sweats.”) Marijuana is omnipresent, starting on page four. In one passage, Booth, tripping on LSD, describes a policeman in a roadside café, “all dark blue, black leather, and menacing devices.” The cop, on his radio, receives a report of a crime committed by a black teenage girl. “The cop said he’d be right there, his tone loaded with sex and sadism. The only way he could be intimate with a black girl was to punish her. After he left, the place still reeked with his lust, if you had taken acid.”

After all these years, I finally see that drug use probably explains the book’s hallucinatory opening (where else do you get, “All the little snakes are asleep” and the suicides with stakes through their hearts?), and I can see it behind some of the book’s luminosity and its inscrutability. Booth makes clear that drug addiction was, indeed, one of the reasons the book took so long to complete; withdrawal, he writes, brought on epileptic seizures. But it apparently wasn’t the main one. In the new afterword he lays the blame mainly on changing times, on the end of the sixties, on the rise of Reagan and yuppies and greed. He claims:

I had to become a different person from the narrator in order to tell the story. This was necessary because of the heartbreak, the disappointment, the chagrin, the regret, the remorse. We had all, Stones, fans, hangers-on, parasites, observers, been filled with optimism there in the autumn of 1969 . . . we believed that we were different, that we were somehow chosen, or anointed, for success, for love and happiness. We were wrong.

Elsewhere in the afterword, he writes that he had to overcome depression and “domestic upheaval.” “So torn was I that at times I begged for death and for years tempted death almost constantly, at last throwing myself off a North Georgia mountain waterfall onto the granite boulders below, smashing my face, breaking my back.”

What to make of this? Cynically, I now wonder if such a talented writer simply requires a dramatic explanation — for himself, as much as anyone — for his book being nearly fifteen years late. But a better part of me appreciates that journalism approaching this level of art might necessarily exact such a price: If you take Booth’s explanation at face value, his time with the Stones becomes a kind of parable about participatory journalism. The book was a stand-out because Booth involved himself so fully not in just a band tour but in the passions of a generation. And yet, as the world changed, there was no way for that participant to write the book until he became somebody else and could look back on his experience as a thing apart, something that happened to a different person in a time long lost. Either way, the afterword brings me a bit closer to solving the question I asked my editor at Random House, those many years ago. I don’t think he knew the answer, anyway.

]]> http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/backstage-man/feed/ 0 Get Lost http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/get-lost/ http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/get-lost/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:00:37 +0000 tedconover http://www.tedconover.stevemotzenbecker.com/?p=337 New York Times Op-Ed page, December 14, 2005.]]> LIKE many American males, I tend to be pro-gadget. I like my cellphone (Motorola Razr) and Bluetooth headset, my iPod (third generation, 15 gigabytes), my Palm device (cool thing with a full keyboard called a Dana). I scan for the latest versions of computer software and adopt them readily. But despite a barrage of pre-Christmas entreaties by advertisers, what I do not want is a portable global positioning system.

My wife, Margot, feels differently: of all the gadgets in the world, a G.P.S. is the one that most interests her. She wants a G.P.S. – or even better, a built-in navigation system for our car – because, as she explains it, she “lacks the map gene.” And the New York metropolitan area is an easy place to make a wrong turn.

But built-in “nav systems” are costly, so we decided to look instead for a portable G.P.S. So far we have tested and rejected five of them. Two we deemed unintuitive and too hard to use. One kept losing satellite signals. All made significant mistakes (most memorably, a recommended U-turn in the middle of I-91 south of Hartford). We keep trying new ones – they seem to be getting better – but so far none has proved more skillful at navigating than I am (or think I am) with a map.

I am prepared to admit that I may also harbor a built-in bias against this particular gizmo. The problem, to me, is that navigation by G.P.S. changes the nature of car travel: it makes it seem all about numbers (distance to destination, time to destination) when I’m trying to preserve a sense that travel is also about something else.

Remember this? ” ‘Whooee!’ yelled Dean. ‘Here we go!’ And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that. We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.”

I wasn’t even born when Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” was published in 1957. When Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise, and his friend, Dean Moriarty, headed west from his aunt’s place in Paterson, N.J., Eisenhower’s plan for an Interstate highway system hadn’t even passed Congress. (Next year, by the way, will be its 50th anniversary.) Cars didn’t have seat belts or headrests – or anything more electronic than a push-button AM radio. Gas was pretty cheap. And though they landed for a while in my hometown, Denver, what Kerouac’s heroes sought wasn’t a set of coordinates on the map. Rather, as when they passed into Mexico, they wanted not to know where they were going. (“We were longing to rush right up there and get lost in those mysterious Spanish streets.”)

My first book was about riding freight trains with those Kerouackian heroes, hoboes. Repeatedly, when traveling this way, I had no exact idea of where I was: freights go places you neither expect nor recognize, and railyards often lack signs. One night, a train I had hopped in St. Louis at dusk stopped and left my boxcar on the edge of a town many hours later. When I woke up the next day, it was the first morning of my conscious life that I had no certain knowledge of even what state I was in.

Getting lost now has a bad name: we all know what happened to Sherman McCoy when Tom Wolfe sent him up the wrong highway ramp in the Bronx at the start of “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Hertz calls its onboard G.P.S. system Hertz Neverlost. Often when we get lost we, horror of horrors, lose time.

I first became attentive to maps on long-distance bike tours, where a missed turn costs you not just gas but your own energy. After high school, I rode coast-to-coast across North America – west to east, to take advantage of prevailing winds. But the wind seldom blows exactly east, and a couple of weeks into the trip I thought of an even better bicycle odyssey: start somewhere around the Rockies and, each day, take the road that best allows me to keep the wind at my back. Granted, this is not a practical strategy for the daily commute. Unlike most Beat poets, I now have a family and many commitments. I am happy about our car’s airbags and side-impact door beams and stereo sound system and generally not too unhappy to be reachable via cellphone. An in-car DVD player for long trips wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. I will readily take the Interstate if it will let me drive faster.

But the G.P.S, which makes a driver focus on the when and how of arrival, strikes me as the electronic equivalent of the child in the back seat querulously asking, “Are we there yet?” The more you think about those miles, the slower they tick by. I want to muse upon things other than numbers when I drive, want to cultivate a subconscious sense of where I am and where I’m headed, want to enjoy unmeasured moments of suspension between here and there.

Exact distance to next turn, next “services,” next “points of interest?” I’m hoping that Margot will hold off a little bit longer.

]]> http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/get-lost/feed/ 1 My Life As a Guard http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/my-life-as-a-guard/ http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/my-life-as-a-guard/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:50:58 +0000 tedconover http://www.tedconover.stevemotzenbecker.com/?p=335 New York Times Op-Ed page, May 7, 2004.]]> When they see the photographs of the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraqis and many others around the world will focus on the debasement and humiliation of the Iraqi prisoners. When I looked at the photos, I noticed something more: I couldn’t take my eyes off the American soldiers. I couldn’t stop trying to imagine the scene as one of the photos was set up: “Hey, let’s put ‘em in a pyramid. And now, you — get over there and give me the thumbs-up.”

This is not torture as we see it in movies, with bare wires or fizzy water up the nostrils. Those scenes always have an evil sadist directing things, an eccentric genius of pain. These soldiers do not look like sadists or geniuses, but rather like Americans abroad creating their very own souvenirs.

It is a heady thing to have prisoners at your mercy. Prison officials in the United States often say that the job involves “care, custody and control.” In New York, where I worked as a prison guard for almost a year in the late 1990’s, training focuses mainly on the final element — control — but the care and custody are in some ways more crucial. Because therein lies the true test of the officer, the system and indeed the nation: how will you treat those who are helpless before you?

President Bush has said that “the practices that took place in that prison are abhorrent and they don’t represent America.” How, then, does such abuse happen?

Prison work is easier if you don’t get too personal with the prisoners, don’t empathize with them too much. Soldiering is probably the same: it’s easier to fight the enemy if he is faceless, less than human. A military prison, then, has the potential to be the most heartless of worlds. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Third Geneva Convention, revised in 1949, addresses the rights of prisoners of war; the horrors of World War II were the great stimulus to the writing of the convention. The nations of the world, including America, were nearly unanimous that such atrocities should never be allowed to be visited upon anybody again, anywhere.

But here we see the faces of the American torturers of wartime prisoners — and they seem to be having a pretty good time. And the victims of this torture, it should not surprise us, are hooded and . . . faceless.

Up the chain of command, heads are rolling, of course; the general who was in charge of the prison has been reprimanded, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is reported to have received a dressing-down from the president. Not all those depicted in the photos have been charged, and they may have played a small or minor role, although six military police officers at Abu Ghraib are facing courts-martial. Still, there’s been no answer yet as to how this was allowed to happen.

In the prison where I worked (and in most prisons, I suspect), there are two sets of rules. There are the official rules, which you learn during training and carry in a booklet in your pocket. And then there are the real rules — the knowing what you can and cannot get away with.

Prison officers, in charge of people who are usually not nice, are bound to overstep the rules occasionally. The infractions may be relatively minor, like forgetting to unlock the cell of a difficult inmate when it’s recreation time, or more serious, like participating in an “adjustment” of an abusive inmate. And when and if the incidents are made public, the test is always: will your superiors back you up? Is the boss a good guy or a jerk? Which rule book does he follow?

In a prison, of course, the boss is the superintendent or warden. He’s the one who, in ways that are sometimes unspoken, sets the tone for the institution, making clear what’s acceptable and what is not.

In a military prison during a time of war, it may be little harder to divine exactly who is in charge, and what’s likely to happen if something goes wrong — if a prisoner dies during interrogation, for example. The discredited former commander of Abu Ghraib, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, has said that while the soldiers in the photos were technically under her command, military intelligence effectively ran the unit where the abuse took place.

What we do know about the treatment of prisoners in this “war on terror” (of which Iraq, we are told, is a part), is that the Geneva Conventions don’t always apply — the prison at Guantánamo Bay, filled with hundreds of “enemy combatants” (who are not afforded the protections of P.O.W.’s) being Exhibit No. 1. Is Guantánamo different from Abu Ghraib? The administration would say yes. Then again, the new head of Abu Ghraib, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, was in charge of the interrogations at Guantánamo until just recently.

President Bush may indeed have felt “deep disgust” upon seeing these torture photos. Then again, the man who sets the tone for the entire war effort has never claimed to be the prisoner-protection president.

]]> http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/my-life-as-a-guard/feed/ 0 Animal Magnetism http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/animal-magnetism/ http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/animal-magnetism/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:40:52 +0000 hotdogjohnny http://www.tedconover.stevemotzenbecker.com/?p=909 Travel & Leisure Family, Spring/Summer, 2004.]]> Travel & Leisure Family, Spring/Summer, 2004.]]> http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/animal-magnetism/feed/ 0 Ministering to the Enemy http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/ministering-to-the-enemy/ http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/ministering-to-the-enemy/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:30:22 +0000 tedconover http://www.tedconover.stevemotzenbecker.com/?p=332 New York Times Magazine, October 12, 2003.]]> There are serious charges laid out in the case against Senior Airman Ahmad I. al-Halabi, the Air Force translator at the Guantánamo prison camp — among them espionage, punishable by death. But the charge that stands out is unlawfully delivering baklava to detainees. Apparently, al-Halabi was being nice to these people. Apparently, he liked some of them. And this, in the eyes of military prosecutors, stands as damning evidence. Al-Halabi showed sympathy for the Devil. As did, supposedly, Capt. James J. Yee of the Army, the West Point graduate who served as Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo during some of the same period that al-Halabi was a translator. Yee told me that he had arranged for detainees to be served dates during Ramadan, a traditional way to break the daily fast. But he did it officially, and that, I imagine, is why he could admit to it. We don’t know yet what Yee is accused of having done wrong.

Of the nearly three dozen soldiers made accessible for interviews during my visit to Guantánamo in the spring, I thought that Captain Yee would prove to be far and away the most interesting. A Muslim chaplain at a U.S. military prison filled with Muslims, he would know more about the prisoners than practically anybody there, I thought. And yet he was one of us. I imagined a fascinating figure who occupied the no man’s land between Us and Them, one of only 12 Muslim chaplains in the entire U.S. military. But the conversation was a disappointment. Was he Sunni or Shiite? I asked. ”I’m a Muslim,” he replied curtly. Didn’t the detainees want to know? He ignored the question and said, ”Chaplain is the most preferred title of what I do here . . . facilitator of worship.” Did he speak Arabic well enough to converse with the detainees? He spoke just a little, he replied: ”But we have a whole section of linguists — they do a great job. I work very closely with them.” What about their anger toward the United States — the belief that we’re against Islam. Did that make it difficult to minister to them? Yee didn’t seem to understand. I repeated the question: Was it hard to act as imam when you represent the Man? ”It doesn’t prevent me from doing what I have to do,” he said blandly. Exasperated by his stiffness, I finally commented on it. Yee looked at the first lieutenant from the press office, who had been monitoring the meeting, and both of them laughed. ”I’m a good interview, huh?” Yee said to him, to my chagrin.

The job of translator may seem more mundane than that of chaplain, but if I were to write a play about Camp Delta, I would make a translator the main character. Both al-Halabi and Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, the civilian translator arrested after him, stood at the immediate interface between Us and Them. This is because, besides being a detention camp, Guantánamo is an ”interrogation mission” — and the hundreds of intelligence personnel at the base, the scores of interrogators, need translators in order to speak with the prisoners. Imagine this job: your boss is the interrogator, but in some significant way you have more in common with the prisoner. In addition, you perhaps mean more to the prisoner than you do to the interrogator: you are one of his few links to the outside world. Over the past 21 months, detainees have been subject to interrogation not just by U.S. military intelligence but also by the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Justice Department, the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, representatives from at least 16 friendly countries — even the N.Y.P.D. Translators must know certain prisoners’ answers to particular questions before the interrogator is even finished asking them. What translator, then, might not feel twinges of sympathy for the prisoner, for so many devout brother Muslims locked up for so long without any adjudication, so far from home and family? Though these men, so hateful of our country, may not deserve sympathy, it seems that at Guantánamo we have created precisely the kind of conditions most likely to elicit it.

I spoke with Captain Yee only once and never met al-Halabi or Mehalba. But the situation of all three reminded me of another American Muslim I met, in Lackawanna, N.Y. Lackawanna, of course, is the suburb of Buffalo from which hail a handful of young men who a year after 9/11 were discovered by the government to have spent time at a camp for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan the preceding summer. My acquaintance — who does not wish to be named — proudly served in the U.S. military during the first gulf war and organized an American flag-raising in Lackawanna after 9/11. He is also a devout Muslim. It pained him to learn what his childhood friends had done, made this ”knuckleheaded trip” inspired by another neighborhood kid who returned from a stay in Yemen a religious zealot. But he was dismayed to see the way federal agents then stormed through his neighborhood, roughed up and frightened people and set up a surveillance camera outside his mosque. I can think of few things that are harder to be right now than a Muslim and an American patriot. There seems to be less and less space for that crucial middle ground.

]]> http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/ministering-to-the-enemy/feed/ 0 Prisoners of Hate http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/prisoners-of-hate/ http://www.tedconover.com/2010/01/prisoners-of-hate/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:20:08 +0000 tedconover http://www.tedconover.stevemotzenbecker.com/?p=330 New York Times Op-Ed Page, August 28, 2003.]]> As with so many of the bad things that happen in prison, it is hard to ascertain from the outside everything that led up to the murder of John J. Geoghan.

The defrocked priest, convicted of one count of molestation and awaiting trial on others, had complained of harassment at the first prison he was sent to, a medium-security facility. According to prisoners’ lawyers, guards taunted him, his food was contaminated and excrement was placed on his bed. Yet because of his “poor institutional adjustment” at the medium-security prison, according to a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Department of Correction, he was moved to a tougher prison for more violent criminals.

It was there, despite being placed in protective custody, that the 68-year-old Mr. Geoghan was beaten and strangled to death, the authorities say. They say he was killed by Joseph L. Druce, who is serving a life sentence for the murder of a man who he said tried to molest him.

Victimizers become vulnerable in prison, none perhaps so much as child molesters. In the hyper-macho world of a maximum-security prison, “baby rapers,” as they’re called, are a common target of violence and frequently seek the sanctuary of protective custody.

And it’s not just the inmates who are after them. Guards, too, tend to abhor child molesters. I had thought this animus was just another sort of prison exotica until I learned that a prisoner I supervised on my floor at Sing Sing had committed sodomy on a minor. (I wasn’t supposed to know, but in prison you tend to find out.) My revulsion was immediate, visceral and stronger than I would have expected; I had never knowingly met a child molester before, and had only recently become a parent. After learning what he had done, I actually had trouble speaking to the inmate, a mild-mannered, middle-aged former accountant. Yet I had conversations every day with a variety of murderers.

In prison or on the outside, people feel this abhorrence toward this particular, pathetic kind of criminal — even knowing how often these criminals themselves were victims of abuse. And few tears are probably being shed for John Geoghan, who may have molested nearly 150 young people while still a priest.

The difference, of course, is that too often prisoners and guards are allowed to act on this hostility. Mr. Geoghan’s murder robs his other victims of their day in court, but it should also offend every citizen’s sense of justice: we do not leave it for prisoners to pass sentences and carry them out. A court had given Mr. Geoghan a 9-to-10 year sentence, not the death penalty.

Especially perplexing is why Mr. Geoghan was placed in such proximity to his murderer. Prison officials spend a great deal of time ensuring that enemies are kept away from each other; prisoners are constantly being transferred, from one cell block to another or from one prison to another, on the basis of perceived antipathies. Mr. Geoghan’s celebrity — he was the priest whose malfeasance ignited the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church — should have made prison officials all the more careful about his placement.

“Short Eyes” is the title of a famous play written at Sing Sing by the prisoner Miguel Piñero about a group of inmates that discovers a child molester in its midst. What I remember most vividly is how their guard turns his back when the moment arrives to rape and murder the man.

Massachusetts officials can profess to be shocked at what has happened; Governor Mitt Romney has formed a special panel to investigate the death of Mr. Geoghan, while prison officials have pledged to “get to the bottom of this.” Yet anyone who has worked in a prison can’t help but wonder how similar the murder of John Geoghan, surely one of the most despised men in Massachusetts, might have been to the one in the play.

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