KYRGYZSTAN ~ Moving Herds down Highways (Sept 23 2011)

A great and glorious day. Nomadic lifestyles. 
Alatoo Mountains.

Autumn on Otmok Pass

Some days abroad are great and glorious. Grab and write, else they  fade, blurring with ordinary days, lonely days, frustrating days, days of diarrhea and bedbugs, or worst of all, days when one remembers home too vividly.   So let me capture yesterday. 

Roadside Rest Stop

It was a mere 5-hour car ride, returning to my apartment in Bishkek from a week-long in-service training with Peace Corps Volunteers in the mountains near Talas, northwest Kyrgyzstan.  There was a professional driver – thank god, as mountain traffic features cars careening straight at you full speed, with cliffs on one side and a breath-stopping drop-off on the other – and  three colleagues, who fell immediately asleep. 

To them, nothing extraordinary.  Just a nice autumn day, clear blue skies.  But in the morning it had snowed, the first snow on the pass.  Kyrgyz herders, nomads for centuries, must register this first snowfall in their genes, for they’d already taken their best horse and best dog and trudged up the mountain where their goats, sheep, cows, or horses had grown fat on summer grasses.  They’d disassembled their yurt, wife and daughters packing up the honey, kumus (fermented mare’s milk), cheese and curds, and plastic Coke bottles of gasoline, whose sales to tourists and passers–by had augmented summer earnings.

 Mother & two sons serve bread, tea & kumus (fermented mare's milk)

Natural yurt lighting - hanging bulbs work only when generator is running

Outlines of white painted stones marked where yurts had been, yurts I’d seen on my way to Talas – now they’d disappeared.  In the old days they were carried on camel-back; today an old truck suffices.

As I looked up the mountain sides, I could see rivers of hoof prints, where a shepherd had driven his herd from the high pastures down to the highway.  For the highway on this great and glorious day was to serve not just cars enroute to Bishkek, not just rattle-trap trucks bouncing rolled-up yurts and a family’s entire possessions, not just 16-wheelers roaring cross-continent from China to Kazakhstan; it was also to serve thousands of hooved animals.

Speeding in the car, we’d see, first in the distance, a giant herd of – say sheep – followed by one or two herders on horseback, whirling lassos just like American cowboys, their sharp-eyed, intelligent dogs nipping at the heels of straying lambs or elderly grannies.  As our car plunged into the herd, it was almost as if it was lifted – we were on a sea of sheep, undulating bovine waves -- gray, white, brown, black -- endless sheep.  It didn’t matter whether the driver honked or passed through patiently; the sheep had their heads down and were on their own long, dispassionate journey.

As soon as we’d make it through the sheep, another mass appeared in the distance – only this time it would be cows, every color of cow, nonchalantly ambling their cow marathon.  Cars on either side hit the roadbeds, trying not to fall off the mountain.  The herders on horseback made a show of effortful herding, but the cows, like the sheep, plodded single-mindedly.

Particularly exciting would be the herds of galloping horses, beautiful in motion, inevitably one or two far in front:  runaways?  studs showing off?  My companions slept on.

While moving herds must be an entire season here in Kyrgyzstan, I felt I’d hit a peak day, with surely 70 herds of about 100 animals each, shepherds sitting tall in their blanket saddles, sun blazing against impressive peaks of snow.  I felt the urgency of the season, as well as awe at witnessing nomadic people on the move.

Some of the herders were small boys, making me reflect that moving animals closer to towns for winter probably also means that children are closer to schools.  Yet what a great life for a kid, to have a boot in two different centuries.

Alatoo Mountains enroute to Talas, Kyrgyzstan

I’m sure there are issues – women’s issues, poverty issues, land rights issues, and ecological issues -- not visible out my car window, but for sheer romance and beauty, it was a great and glorious day.

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Sent as Public Letter 6 on September 23, 2011 to family & friends