HEADING OUT

photo © bob arnold

JULY IN THE SUN




We pick blueberries this way —

I wear jeans and t-shirt

you wear a pretty dress



the rest is easy

SUGAR CONE




She’s in a small building
ready to serve us ice-cream cones

but before she does that she’s on the
phone and

when she hangs up she tells us she has
just become a grandmother! and then

she asks us what we’d like today and
we tell her what we’d like today is to say

she doesn’t at all look old enough
to be a grandmother




Bob Arnold has just about heard enough about himself and would rather be in love.

RAIN, OWLS, DRUNKS

Yesterday we took a hike in the rain. Me in yellow slicker coat, Sweetheart under an umbrella. The rain coming down hard. Hard enough to keep a barred owl still on a low beech tree branch, 6 feet off the ground, just blending in with the soaking rain. Only because I stopped and tapped Sweetheart to see the owl did it get bothered and set off across the road right in front of us. That great round head. A young woman was once very close to buying our cabin in the woods and we were settling the deal when a barred owl called as evening was coming on. It was summer chilling to hear the calls over and over. But this frightened the woman, who said she studied Shaman rites, not to buy the cabin.

Whatever

After the owl we came upon two fishermen returning to their pickup truck. Both drunk. One was loud and the other was goofy and a little sweet, so they balanced one another out. As we passed with a friendly wave, the loud one glared at us and blurted, "ANY fish in this RIVER?" as if we owned the river and his poor return was our fault.

Heavy rain, spooky owls, and drunks.

Bob Arnold has lived on the Green River almost 40 years and to the dismay of everyone when they ask if he fishes in the river and he says, “no”. He bathes in it.

YESTERDAY IN VERMONT photo © susan arnold











EXTRA INNINGS




It thundered and roared five inches of rain last night

Right onto and off the big steel roof

Visitors about to leave took a look outdoors and back-tracked inside

We talked one or two more rounds

Said goodbye one more time

Had all that extra living

Because of the rain




Bob Arnold says this poem has less to do with baseball and everything to do with affection.

A DREAM WITH MY FRIEND JEWELL ON THE SUBJECT OF LIFE & FAME

I know I told you long ago, but when I was 10-12 years old my father was giving serious consideration on moving the family to Phoenix. For a building contractor he heard it was a hot spot. We’d be loading up the wagon in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts and somehow making it to the southwest. It seemed impossible, it was impossible. I can easily imagine us though meeting, as if in a dream, in some bookshop a few years later in downtown Phoenix where you were busy growing up as a boy.

[ A bookshop corner, given light by only a shabby window.]

"Excuse me, do you like Oppen?"
"Huh? George Oppen? Yes. Yes I do!"
"Me too." Some silence, because we are 16.
"Do you like William Carlos Williams?"
"Absolutely."
The rest was easy.

Of course I'm giving ourselves pointers for knowing Oppen's work at 16, when I didn't, but I know we were both reading Pound, Stevens, Cummings, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Rexroth and Kerouac. Certainly Creeley, Levertov, Olson, Duncan, Reznikoff and Snyder. Though we’d be equally as excited when falling into the hands of Spicer, Eigner, Zukofsky, Corman, Niedecker, O’Hara, Baraka, Corso, Whalen — the gods of poetry list is very very long — and we haven’t even dipped a toe into Europe or parted Asia’s curtain. South America was where Rockefeller's son was eaten by cannibals, or so we thought, but it was really New Guinea. Head-hunters. Africa was Tarzan. Period.

It would have changed things for us both as poets; maybe we'd both work for my father and become builders. You thought of law school and your father, but you were being rebellious. The building trade fit right into our dreams of being independent of the Man. After all, it was the Sixties! We thought we would set off and start a commune up near Oracle.

We'd build all the buildings for everyone and everyone would come, including Ed Abbey who didn't like us one little bit and our hammering ways, but he liked all the silver girls who liked rugged poets with tools in their fists and Bonnard paintings on their walls.

Abbey would become most difficult and we'd end up in one of his essays on self-serving-commune-builder-poets-good-for-nothings. People would read this in the thousands and soon print a broadside manifesto out of it. It was posted on all college campuses. At public readings it was Abbey's highest request to read. He did so with glee, each time describing us worse and worse, until we couldn't even recognize the "Scabby white rich boys from Phoenix who I bet get weekly checks from their daddies. And their poetry sucks."

In fact we were once in the back row at one of these readings in Tucson, and we looked at one another getting angrier with each other by the second because it might be true. Abbey said so! The crowd was cheering. What a mess.

Bob Arnold often climbed Mt. Greylock with local cub and boy scout troops as a boy. Once he persuaded a few to leave the pack with him and venture into other parts & trails of the mountain. This caused panic with the troop leaders. One representative came to Bob’s house to speak to his parents. His older sister posed as a ‘parent’ and listened diligently to the scolding about Bob and saved him from further scolding by his parents. Nothing like teamwork.

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED THE OTHER DAY

It’s late morning when I see the Fed Ex white pickup truck go down the dirt road, slow up, look in, see under the tall tamarack tree my chalkboard quote with Jimmy Hoffa, and he probably thinks about that a moment. Keeps going. Comes back, slows down again, I wait for him to sum up the right place. We don't use a road # on the house because we like being in the woods, hidden, not some suburbia. So we help people when they are looking for us. He gets out of the truck. "Who you lookin' for?" Looks down at his clipboard, "Susan Arnold?" He appears hopeful. "You found her." He snaps up, "Terrific!" On his shoulder he brings my Mexican tiles. I know they're the tiles. We've been waiting weeks and they never returned our query for a tracking number. Asked 3 times. No answer 3 times. Let's hope they were busy buffing our ceramic tiles instead, down there in old dusty Mexico.

Sets it down. I sign. I then say, "I'm not Susan Arnold, but you've brought me work to do." He looks at me, "I hope that's okay?" I smile, "Couldn't be better." Another "Terrific" from him. Off he goes, happy, did his job. Then he abruptly stops and turns and asks, "Last name?" like he's just recalled his business code of ethics. I say, "Arnold". He's happy again and strides off. I almost said, "Bond. James Bond."

Ah, the box looks like shit. Are the tiles all busted inside? $80 down the drain?

I open the box. Still no breakfast in me and past noon. Inside each tile, 100 of them, are protected in a beautiful styro-wrapping. Couldn't look nicer. I unwrap one bunch and unfold 8 tiles, all shiny and no cracks. Let's hope the bottom of the box looks just the same. I want to save the way it looks for Sweetheart to have a look when she gets home from town so I won't dig deeper. Whoever in Mexico wrapped it up, did as well as I do in Vermont with every book order out of our bookshop. And occasionally I ship out orders in an old lousy box, too.

In his senior year of high school Bob Arnold was thoroughly flunking Algebra II and Chemistry and if memory serves French II. But he won the English Dept. award for excellence. Still, no college wanted him and he didn’t want them. Off to the woods, youngman.

TEXTING

I was in bed at 1 o'clock last night with an Isaac Babel short story when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, came a sound through the trees that didn't sound like a rare vehicle on the dirt road passing at such an hour, but maybe it was, and then a burst of rain released with complete abandon. I loved it. No matter what is in the way, the rain seemed to say, is now getting wet. Down came the torrent, and it lasted only one minute. Like a spigot was turned on and off. I only realized then I had lifted my eyes off Babel's words on the page and was listening eyeless to nothing but the rain. When it stopped, I continued with Babel.

Bob Arnold is the oldest son of four children born and raised in a borough at the foot of Mt. Greylock.

I SAW THE FLOWERS SHIVERING

I saw the flowers shivering
yes actually shivering
in the sunshine

they know something
we don’t quite know yet
about changes to come

summer to autumn
and it’s in people too
and even the windchimes




Bob Arnold believes a poem a day, at least, keeps the doctor away

BACK ROAD CHALKIE FOR THE AUTUMNAL

photo © longhouse

photo © bob arnold

LONGHOUSE ON TOUR

GOODBYE MARY (1936-2009)

A GREAT GRAB~BAG OF
HEAVEN & EARTH LOVERS





LXIII

My home's a hole,
and a hole's where nothing is.
Pure, clean, emptiness, to venerate. . .
A blazing flower of brightness, sun oh sun . . .
Food? Wild plants will make this meager body maigre feast,
and a cotton robe's enough to robe illusion . . .
Bring all your thousands of Sages, all sorts, here to meet me,
what's left of me, and the Heavenly Buddha!

Han Shan
COLD MOUNTAIN POEMS
EDITED & TRANSLATED BY J.P. SEATON
Shambhala

Nothing in the world is finer than more Han Shan, and mostso from the nimble strong-ankled mind of J.P. Seaton. Included in this capsule of heaven are the likes of Han Shan, side-kick Shih Te, and much lesser known devil may-care Wang Fan-chih. Those familiar with Longhouse publications have seen this crew at work, via Seaton's care, for some years now.







Neil Young
FORK IN THE ROAD
Reprise CD


The Canadian folk rocker's finest fest in years. Back to a grinding
guitar used as chain saw and lyrics that take on Empirical rogues.
He may be a millionaire, but he shares his wealth.

There's a bailout coming but it's not for me
It's for all those creeps watching tickers on tv

PLANTING MELONS

When I follow my nature I'm rash
too careless to earn a living
this year I tried planting melons
in a garden that was mostly weeds
the plants all shared the rain and dew
but mine ended up in the shade
and once spring work got busy
the time for hoeing was past
the farmers laughed at my useless efforts
from dawn to dusk resulting in nothing
clearly this isn't my kind of work
I'll stick with ancient texts instead

Wei Ying-wu
IN SUCH HARD TIMES
TRANSLATED BY RED PINE
Copper Canyon Press


One more outstanding tome to pass down generations. Like J.P. Seaton's Han Shan above, Porter's scholarship and trail wise ways offers a steady hand at the poems and enriched commentary throughout. Drop out of college for awhile, find the good books!






www.movingmtn.com
guest editor: Clemens Starck

From the heart of the Pacific Northwest & ranging a bit down into the Sierra for some of the poets & writers & carpenters & gardeners & fishermen & woods workers & plain fine storytellers that bursts this issue. Seekers please take note.


WOMEN

I'm doing dishes.
It's summer.
My wife and my mother
are outside
sitting by the fire
laughing so hard
I have to set the pans
aside
and watch.

It's important to
pay attention to joy.
To love that is serious.

Now they are showing
each other earrings,
mom's silver bracelet,
Pat's jade teardrops
looped around her neck.
The night sky
bringing its own
slow jewelry to bear.

It hasn't always been like this.
I wasn't an easy son.

To those who say
redemption
dwells only in the house
of the Lord,
I say:
you haven't met these women.

FINN WILCOX



Are we finally tired of all the documentary films showing pursuists climbing Everest at $40,000 per person and at last count leaving 200 dead bodies up on the mountain? Despite the surf music they often use in these films, everybody doesn't come home. Try the much quieter and brotherly film Blindsight (2006) directed by Lucy Walker. Six blind Tibetan toughies (children) take off on a trek with adult guides to scale 23,000 foot Lkakpa Ri, a northern neighbor of Everest. They share the same Advanced Base Camp. Keep an eye and ear on Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind climber to reach the summit of Everest — he provides just the care as a guide throughout this beauty.







Rebecca Solnit
A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL
THE EXTRAORDINARY COMMUNITIES THAT ARISE IN DISASTER
Viking

Yes! my very thought: the rebellion will come against Kindle and all the toys. The human psyche and frame can take just so much of watching itself dissolve into a micro-bite. It will want itself back. And the young people will rebel against the notion of no books, no vinyl records, no real paintings, no touch. Humans aren't stupid. Individually many are. But this act will come from a unity of spirit and an overview of how the landscape is looking depleted of life. I'm finishing Rebecca Solnit's new book on disasters (like 9/11, like Katrina, earthquakes etc) and the overpowering courage and community that evolves from the survivors. Written during the author's own struggle with an illness, with a pinpointed survey on the media, Hollywood, varied authorities & vigilanties who often think they rule the roost. Here's a cry out to the passionate ones.

~

Since postmoderniem reshaped the intellectual landscape, it has been problematic to even use the term human nature, with its implication of a stable and universal human essence. The study of disasters makes it clear that there are plural and contingent natures — but the prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave. The language of therapy speaks almost exclusively of the consequence of disaster as trauma, suggesting a humanity that is unbearably fragile, a self that does not act but is acted upon, the most basic recipe of the victim. Disaster movies and the media continue to portray ordinary people as hysterical or vicious in the face of calamity. We believe these sources telling us we are victims or brutes more than we trust our own experience. Most people know this other human nature from experience, though almost nothing official or mainstream confirms it. This book is an account of that rising from the ruins that is the ordinary human response to disaster and of what that rising can mean in other arenas — a subject that slips between the languages we have been given to talk about who we are when everything goes wrong.

REBECCA SOLNIT

TEN SEASONS
EXPLORATIONS IN BOTANICS
EDITED BY GERRY LOOSE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MORVEN GREGOR
Luath Press www.luath.co.uk



autumn wind
still alive and seeing ourselves
you and me

~ ONITSURA

version by Gerry Loose


TEN SEASONS grew out of Gerry Loose's three
years as Poet in Residence at Glasgow's Botanic
Gardens. This gathering of texts, along with
stunning photographs, shows that poetry,
although presented here on the page, in its
most portable form, exists off the page, on
scraps of material, in stone, even in water. The
book both celebrates a particular residency
and offers a rich resource for the interaction of
botanic gardens and creative language. Plant-
lovers and poetry-lovers will find much to
enjoy in its pages.
~ Scottish Poetry Library

~

And then this beauty just walked in the door today. . .
one large volume collecting twenty of John Martone's
small, beautifully fugitive books of poems. You gotta have it.






John Martone
KSANA
RED MOON PRESS
PO Box 2461
Winchester VA. 22604-1661
www.redmoonpress.com






holding
a stone
moss holds

~


no gloves
no money
these pockets


~


washing
dishes first
then shaving


~

autumn
woods

on my
knees


~


stream
boulder

sheep
color


JOHN MARTONE







THE DEAD WEATHER
HOREHOUND

With an album cover to die-for. No one in this house says "CD cover". Back to the roots ladies & gentlemen. Not all of the album holds, but just unload one-cut "Rocking Horse" (it goes great back-to-back with Beck's "Youthless") with the windows open on the highway late at night and the summer ending — you're ready for winter. With shades of 13th Floor Elevators and produced by johnny-everywhere Jack White (also on drums & vocals), along with Alison Mosshart and other surprise guests.





Philip Whalen
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF PHILIP WHALEN
Wesleyan


If you own a poetry library, and don't have this book yet, think Loser. Almost 1000 pages of primo and it's not just the poetry, it's the attitude and perseverance and scope and humor and love and protest of the poet that is essential. And it's probably best not to eat too much all at once, so the book becomes truly a companion for months on end. And before you know it, you can't be without the book. The editor and publisher and layout crew have done a splendid job. As terrific as the poems are, don't forget Whalen's brilliant and tricky mind, so read the prose and all the appendix slots at the back of the book. In fact, maybe read those first, like a trail guide before heading in nibbling raspberries. I've selected one stunning poem that has reverberated in my bloodstream for decades, and then a hot lick example of PW prose.


THE LAUNDRY AREA

Each time I hang up a washboard
The slenderest thread of cold water
Runs down my wrist and into my armpit
Without wetting my clothes.


Tassajara 22:iii:78

If my friends had not helped me, I should have starved or gone, at last, to the nuthouse. They fed and clothed and housed me, arranged poetry readings for me, got my work published and reviewed, made other people buy my books, and now they faithfully write letters to me, which I answer promptly. These experiences made me realize that I didn't need money in order to write: what I needed was love and poetry and pictures and music in order to live. This knowledge not only freed me from a lot of old hangups, it also changed my feeling towards poetry and all the other arts. I saw that poetry didn't belong to me, it wasn't my province; it was older and larger and more powerful than I, and it would exist beyond my life-span.
~ PHILIP WHALEN

Pete Nelson
NEW TREEHOUSES OF THE WORLD
Abrams

I'll ignore just how expensive and ridiculous some of these treehouses are, since many are spectacular, and in the right frame of mind & hand can be built by true builders with used and found material and become genuine arboreal habitats. In my time, I've built a few. And they can't be beat as just the crow's nest to climb into and read all the books mentioned above & below.


~



From Italy:






Just read the Shiki that Walter Franceschi shares with us here and your troubles are over poet!

Kindle-Dindle is what I call it, and publishers going out of business, and great bookstores and all the whoa-is-me. Publish yourself and let the chips fall! Blake and Whitman did; Walter now has. It's in the morning mail for 9/11. All the way from Italy. There were many poems that unfold in the manner we publish in booklets regularly from Longhouse, but I'll keep things somewhat private since Walter expected these for our eyes only, but he already knows I can't help myself and will enjoy sharing a few poems with you here.



Walter Franceschi
A FEW MOMENTS
OK Buddha (Italy)






Gerrit Lansing
HEAVENLY TREE, NORTHERN EARTH
North Atlantic Books
www.northatlanticbooks.com

A long time coming these collected poems of Gerrit Lansing and done with precision and grace as the inaugural volume in a new series of cloth editions from North Atlantic Books. If this beauty, designed by Jonathan Greene, is any indication of what's ahead, we will have well chosen and lovely books ahead. A big book by Kenneth Irby is next in line.


OCTOBER SONG


Who is rich in love will lay
An autumn table for his guests
And shape in autumn ornaments
The shapes and omens of his love
So from these purple frets his love
Will take for sure that when they lay
Away all summer ornaments
And evening is the normal guest
He will not be surprised. What guest
Would snub his friendly honest love
That laughs at foolish ornaments
And tumbles them in straw to lay
A guest in ornaments of love?

GERRIT LANSING




Mary Oliver
EVIDENCE
Beacon

In this collection of new poems something has happened with Mary Oliver since the last book. Something important. A loss or a gain or both. She is addressing this theme on almost every page, or wishing to, and May I never not be frisky, / May I never not be risque. Congratulations to a poet who practices what she preaches, or sings.


YELLOW

There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.



LI PO AND THE MOON

There is the story of the old Chinese poet:
at night in his boat he went drinking and dreaming
and singing

then drowned as he reached for the moon's reflection.
Well, probably each of us, at some time, has been
as desperate.

Not the moon, though.



SNOWY EGRET

A late summer night and the snowy egret
has come again to the shallows in front of my house

as he has for forty years.
Don't think he is a casual part of my life,

that white stroke in the dark.



WATER

What is the vitality and necessity
of clean water?
Ask the man who is ill, who is lifting
his lips to the cup.


Ask the forest.

MARY OLIVER

and, lastly greatly


edited with commentaries by JEROME ROTHENBERG
TECHNICIANS OF THE SACRED
Doubleday/Anchor


Just look at that book cover! I did 40 years ago this year and bought it because I couldn't help myself, after hitchhiking from a college town back home and two very fine bookstores in that town, but neither had a copy of this book. In fact in North Adams, Massachusetts where now Mass MOCA resides, there was no new bookstore in that town in 1969, though somehow a variety store with a rack of newspapers just happened to have this oracle on display. One long look into the book and I was lost forever, or as the wizardly editor described it, appropriately, that where poetry is concerned, "primitive" means complex. I was in my last year of high school and nothing in those 12 years of schooling had remotely come close to touching this.

ORIGINS & NAMINGS ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That there are no primitive languages is an axiom of contemporary linguistics where it turns its attention to the remote languages of the world. There are no half-formed languages, no underdeveloped or inferior languages. Everywhere a development has taken place into structures of great complexity. People who have failed to achieve the wheel will not have failed to invent & develop a highly wrought grammar. Hunters & gatherers innocent of all agriculture will have vocabularies that distinguish the things of their world down to the finest details. The language of snow among the Eskimos is awesome. The aspect system of Hopi verbs can, by a flick of the tongue, make the most subtle kinds of distinction between different types of motion.
~JEROME ROTHENBERG

Keep on bloggin'
Til the power goes out
Your battery's dead
Twist and shout


NEIL YOUNG

REMEMBERING JIM CARROLL

NUTSHELL IN HELL


Well, Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina hollering "You Lie!" at Obama's Health-Care speech (9 Sept 09) only took 10 minutes for Wikipedia to pick it up and have it on Wilson's biography page. Of course it was said because a vast majority of the country remains racist and is just tolerating a black leader. The way they tolerate is by making the black man (and wife) prove themselves. Every inch, every day. It's heartbreakingly mean and corrupt. Think of the opportunities over the last 40 years where "You Lie!" could have been shouted at a President and it would have been the absolute Truth. We remain in outrageous irony.

The speech is all the more flowering considering the horrendous treatment to the American people on top of the general overthrow of our civil liberties and way of life. Little will improve. The elephant in the room is just what damage and desecration the Cheney regime smeared over 8 years. All Obama is doing is picking up shitheads' shit. And the Republican party is essentially a trap of criminals. The Democratic leadership, except for a dozen or so, are wealthy and floundering in their own survival in a takeover economy. Next to none have Obama's abilities to work cross-pollinated, and the Republicans almost down to one or two (two senators from Maine!) have no receptive talent for Obama. The smallest sound is now the loudest Truth.

REMEMBERING KENNETH PATCHEN

FROM REGARDING THE NATURE AND
ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF HEAVEN
[ New Directions ]

Kenneth Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio in 1911. I didn't even have to look that up — I've known it for well over 40 years. A fabulous poet with fabulous book titles like, The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Sleepers Awake and Aflame and Afun of Walking Faces. A poet who wrote poems as novels as paintings as poems as painting at once. Who loved Miriam and neither had any children; they were children to one another, the books were children. Jazz recordings with poetry were some of his best work, a few times with Charles Mingus as accomplice. John Cage was another. A hefty and take-charge man, Patchen injured his spine once trying to physically uncouple two vehicles. The injury dogged him and put him into bed for many years of his life, and the paintings and poems continued. Miriam was always there. His main stay publisher New Directions seemed to have the most fun with his books than with of any of their authors. He wrote the grandest poems of humor & protest & love. He should have helped pen The Bill of Rights.

LABOR DAY!




Greg Joly came down this week for part of a day and we hauled out two cord, or ten truck loads, of different size firewood. All two years dry and some extremely small to move by hand. Pick up six at a time. Ideal for the small firebox in the kitchen wood cookstove. It's all worth the effort. Oak, beech, ironwood, some maple, even hemlock, and hornbeam turning a little punky. White birch gone all to punk. Those will go in the camp fire tonight Susan and I will build at dusk to make supper on a grill and watch the damp night fall down around us river sound and last of the insects and all. We asked the worker in the aisles of the town food co-op yesterday just where were the marshmallows; we knew we had seen them once upon a time when we didn't want them. With a campfire tonight we'll need marshmallows. Too bad we don't any longer have a child or friends of the child around. They go well with marshmallows. Hearing the giggles and firelight in their eyes as the white coated soft marshmallow turns maple syrup brown. A shriek when one bursts into small flame. Anyway, the wood has been pulled out of the woodlot just in time.

Yes, the mosquitos, the spider webs! in the woods. With the truck we made tracks up into this part of the woodlot where tracks haven't been for years. Once upon a time I made tracks there with my Willy's jeep all the time. Now it's by wheelbarrow. We built the wood into a two cord wood cairn and I'll share a photograph that Susan snapped. I'm up on a ladder peering over. Greg's posing for the pretty photographer.

We sold our Ford Taurus to my brother in Boston after I bought for Susan a used Subaru for our 35th anniversary. It's got what they call a "moon roof" but so far it seems to work best as a "sun-roof", though we've only driven it two times in the daytime. Never owned such a fancy car. 2001. My mechanic friend who sold it to us thought he was giving us quite a feature, but we almost didn't want it, when we heard the seats actually heated up! Yesterday, while driving, we both noticed two buttons near the seats and no idea what they were for. A few miles went by then it dawned on us. The heated seats. Truth be told it was the moon-roof that sold us the car even before we lifted the hood and checked the oil.

The silly hard working days of late summer.

HDT

photo susan arnold

Walden Pond
31:viii:09
7 AM
Looking dead across water to Henry David Thoreau's hut site

BILL PORTER

The Great Kashgar Bus Convoy

In the Fall of 1992 Finn Wilcox and I set out on the Silk Road from its eastern terminus in Sian/Xian. Four weeks later, we were sitting in the lobby of the Chini Bagh Hotel in Kashgar. We had traveled as far west in China as we could go and were waiting for word on how to proceed to our final destination, which was Islamabad. The Karakoram Highway was the only road there, and it had been closed by landslides more than a month. And there were no flights.

The Chini Bagh was where the old British Consulate used to be. The former Russian Consulate was down the street masquerading as the West Gate Hotel. A hundred years earlier, when Russia, Britain and China vied for control of Central Asia, these two consulates, along with the local Chinese yamen, housed the principal adversaries in what became known as the Great Game. During the heady days of imperialist expansion, the empires of China, Russia and Britain all met in Kashgar. For its part, China had preceded its rivals there by 200 years, but Moscow was just as close as Beijing, and Delhi was a lot closer than either.

But the Great Game was over, and Kashgar was once again a city of merchants, especially Pakistani merchants. The Chini Bagh was where most of them stayed, because it was from the Chini Bagh that the chartered buses left that took them and their merchandise home. The landslides that closed the only road to Pakistan had been a disaster for them. Many had to resort to reselling what they had bought in Kashgar to pay for another meal or another night at the Chini Bagh.

The Pakistani sitting next to us said his government was planning to charter several 747s to take him and his countrymen home, although he didn’t know when. Another Pakistani cautioned patience, the road would re-open in a few more days. But a Pakistani tour operator wandering the lobby said it was too dangerous, an American girl who tried to cross one of the landslides had died the previous day, and the Chinese authorities were telling everyone the road wouldn’t re-open for months, if at all.

While the Pakistanis continued trading rumors – and in truth they didn’t have anything better to do, we finished our beers and decided the hell with it. We walked down the street to buy plane tickets back to Sian via the provincial capital of Urumchi. But by the time we reached the local airline office, the front door was locked. A sign said, “Closed for lunch.” We decided to wait and joined another foreigner sitting in the shade. He was from Australia. Like us, he was waiting to buy a ticket to Urumchi to spare himself the agony of the three-day bus ride. But unlike us, he hadn’t come from Urumchi. He said he had just arrived from Islamabad.

What? Islamabad? Wasn’t the road closed? Well, yes and no. He said there were landslides all right, but there were trucks and vans waiting to carry people to the next slide. That was all we needed to hear, and back we went to the Chini Bagh to spread the news. Apparently we weren’t the only ones to meet a recent arrival from south of the border. We no sooner returned to the hotel than the front desk announced the sale of bus tickets. A convoy was leaving the next morning. All the Pakistanis sitting in the lobby rushed to the counter. As luck would have it, we just happened to be standing there and managed to come up with the first two tickets. They weren’t cheap at 150 RMB, or 30 bucks apiece, but they were tickets on a bus heading south.
And sure enough, early the next morning two hundred Pakistanis began loading what was left of their merchandise onto the roofs of the five buses that made up the convoy. It took three hours to load it all, and we didn’t leave until midday. But we left. As we followed the old city wall west out of town, no one said a word. No one believed it was actually happening. We expected to turn back any moment. But we kept going.

Once we were out of Kashgar, we entered a landscape barren of everything but rocks and began following the Ghez River upstream into a long, narrow valley of wine-red sandstone cliffs that rose straight out of the river. As the road wound higher and higher onto the Pamir Plateau, my altimeter went from 1,300 meters to 3,200. After struggling over our first pass, the driver stopped, and all the Pakistanis got out, washed their feet in the icy stream at the side of the road, unrolled their prayer mats, faced Mecca, and joined us in praying for our bus.

An hour or so later, our driver stopped again along the edge of a lake, this time for a bladder break. The Pakistanis were all dressed in their knee-length kameez shirts and squatted to pee, while Finn and I stood. But we all gazed in admiration at what was one of the most beautiful scenes in China: the snowy peaks of 7,700-meter Mount Kongur and 7,500-meter Muztagh-ata shimmering in the breathless waters of Lake Karakul. During the summer, the surrounding grasslands were dotted with the yurts and herds of the Kirghiz nomads who lived in that part of China. But it was fall, and they had moved to lower pastures.

~

An hour later the sun set behind the Pamirs, and any warmth that lingered in the bus soon disappeared. To take the chill off, I reached into my pack and pulled out the first of two bottles of Chinese brandy. We were rolling along at an elevation of over 3,600 meters in what was Tajik territory. And we didn’t stop rolling until ten o’clock, when we pulled into the town of Tashkorgan.

When Ptolemy described the limits of the known world in the second century A.D., he called Tashkorgan the westernmost town in the Land of Silk, which was what the Greeks called China in those days. In those days, the inhabitants of Tashkorgan were called Sarikolis, after the river that flowed through the town. The Sarikolis were Tajiks, and unlike other groups that migrated into the area, the Sarikolis depended on agriculture and trade instead of herding. And Tashkorgan was their capital. The name meant “stone fortress,” and its ancient ruins, we were told, were on a hillside south of town. But we arrived at night.

After ten hours on the road, all we could think of was a meal and a bed. As we checked into the bus station hotel, the girl at the desk told us the road ahead was still blocked by landslides. The slides, she said, were all on the Pakistan side, and we were still a hundred kilometers short of the border. The girl added that nothing bigger than a bicycle had made it through for the past forty days and that we would have to walk sixty kilometers to get through all the slides. She laughed at the idea of our convoy making it. (continued)

[ Much more where that came from — see below and click on the image for how to purchase the publication ]

"This account has been edited from a series of 280 two-minute programs on the Silk Road Bill Porter wrote and produced for an English-language radio station in Hong Kong in 1992. We are happy to share this publication with Kyoto Journal."