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Outside Magazine October 2003

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The Ghost Road (Cont.)

THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN the end of it. But what began as a private passion, I now twist into a professional goal. I secure a contract with a publisher to write a book about the Stilwell Road. This, I think, will legitimize my bewitchment. Although my editor believes I already have enough material for the book, I insist I have to complete the route.

I return to India in the fall of 1999, hell-bent on finding a way around the Pangsau Pass military compound. The Naga tribesmen I manage to speak to refuse to guide me. No amount of bribery will change their minds, and I can't do it without them. I briefly consider bushwhacking my way into the jungle in a parallel traverse of the Stilwell Road, or whatever is left of it.

Instead, I decide to attack the problem from a southern approach. I'll take a train from Rangoon to Mandalay, then another train up toward Myitkyina, a city of 75,000 on the Stilwell Road. Recently opened to foreigners, Myitkyina is accessible only by plane or train, the region between it and Mandalay remaining closed. I intend to secretly hop off at the closed city of Mogaung, 25 miles southwest of Myitkyina, and light out from there, to the west and north, along the Stilwell Road. I buy a black backpack and a dark-green bivy tent and dark Gore-Tex raingear. I conceal a knife and cash in the sole of one of my boots and obtain declassified Russian and American maps.

This all somehow seems appropriate to me. I have only one crisis of confidence.

While studying the maps on the flight to Bangkok, trying to guess where the military checkpoints along the road will be, I suddenly experience a visceral foreshadowing of my own death. It isn't a vision, just a profound blackness, a terrifying emptiness. My body goes cold, and my mind feels as if all the synapses are short-circuiting and exploding. Then I begin sweating profusely, soaking my seat. It is such a powerful presentiment of my own death that I begin to cry.

For several hours I convince myself that I will get on the next plane home. Instead, I write farewell letters to my wife, Sue, my eight-year-old daughter, Addi, my six-year-old daughter, Teal, and my parents. I mail the letters from Bangkok, but they never arrive.

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