Walking the Line (Cont.) | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> Walking the Line (Cont.)

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine January 2002

Page:

Walking the Line (Cont.)

I've always gone into the wild during trying times. When I was a kid, I would hunt and fish near my home in Oceanside, California; later, I'd take long solo trips climbing or on snowshoes into the mountains of Colorado. During the midseventies I spent over a year in northern Pakistan, much of it in the mountains along its border with Afghanistan. I was an unhappy academic in Chicago enduring the remains of a broken marriage, and my home wilderness in Wyoming and Utah seemed insufficient to my needs. When the adventure outfitter Mountain Travel offered me an opportunity to help lead a trek to K2 in Pakistan in June of 1975, I went. Afterward I turned west and spent the rest of the summer traveling in the Hindu Kush, a place I told myself was real wilderness, the kind that could soothe a battered heart.

I visited Hunza. I wandered west from Gilgit to Yasin, then north into the mountains along the Wakhan corridor, the narrow sliver of Afghanistan that leads to the border with China and is adjacent to Tajikistan. Then I walked and rode jeeps south down the Yarkhun and Mastuj Rivers to Chitral, and on to the dreary town of Drosh, and then back up into the mountains to Malakand and by bus to Peshawar. Beyond Drosh the river plunged down a valley into Afghanistan and became the Konar, which in roughly a hundred miles joined the Kabul River near the then-obscure town of Jalalabad.

The land was like Death Valley, but higher. Vast mirages covered the valleys. The passes were sometimes 15,000 feet high, broad saddles veined with ancient trails. The mountains rose another mile or two but were often obscured by dust storms. The only trees in the high mountains were dwarfed birch.

The border with Afghanistan was guarded by soldiers, but their presence back then was merely symbolic.

I wanted a haven, my own safe place, thoroughly known and loved, however vast and empty. And I thought of my own struggle, of how much, or how little, to engage with the world.

The guard station at the top of the Yarkhun Valley consisted of two men, one horse, a flintlock rifle, and a hand-cranked radio. One of them was reading—somewhat optimistically, I thought—a volume of Rommel's letters. In broken English he railed at us about American support for Israel at a time when "the Jewish infidels" had invaded Uganda. Uganda? He insisted on it, pointing to his radio. When I reached Islamabad, I learned of the commando raid at Entebbe.

The people inhabiting the villages in the northernmost valleys of Pakistan were farmers, masterly irrigators who were invariably kind and helpful. Some of the older village leaders had been educated at English schools at Srinagar, in Kashmir, before the partition of Pakistan from India in 1947. They wore Harris Tweed coats over their flowing Pakistani clothes, and several smoked English pipes. They hunted with modern British and German rifles. Occasionally they would show off fine markhor horns, a snow leopard skin, or an ancient scimitar.

At their invitation my groups and I often ate yogurt and paper-thin chapatis off silver platters arranged on old carpets spread on lawns beneath mulberry and apricot trees. Their tone was one of interest and amusement that Americans would come so far. For what? Just to look? To find what? Wilderness? They did not know that word. Beauty they understood, but it was faraway, in the cities, the beauty of fine mosques, mosaics, carpets.

And indeed it was not wilderness, it was their home. Much of the land was like what Thoreau, in The Maine Woods, called wild pastures, a blank on the map with few roads and little population but lined with trails and munched on by goats for thousands of years. The forests were logged to the point that many valleys looked like they'd been clear-cut. The game, especially predators, had been hunted almost to extinction. Nowhere did I find the carpets of flowers, the crystalline streams, or the concentrations of wildlife I so loved in Wyoming. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, refugees poured over the passes and up the Konar River into Pakistan. Trekking and climbing along the border came to a virtual halt. Eventually, I came home.

Page: