Hold the Enlightenment (3 page)

I was standing at the bar after an afternoon class, having a beer and a cigarette, when John Schumacher stopped by for a chat. I was wearing a T-shirt I had bought from John, who runs the Unity Woods Yoga Center. The shirt featured a large triangle whose legs read: “serenity,” “awareness,” “health.”

“I suppose,” I said, “I’m a bad advertisement for Unity Woods.”

“Not at all,” John said. “We’ll just add the words ‘not applicable.’ ”

There were several people at the bar, and though some undoubtedly lived a yoga lifestyle, others did not. No one talked about Obstacles Along the Path. There were even a few smokers, and several who drank alcohol, though hardly in the quantities I find refreshing. A “yoga vacation,” I was told, is different than a “yoga retreat,” where I might have felt considerably more out of place.

In the class, there was a guy who taught stress reduction at various corporations, an engineer who’d worked in the Middle East, among other places, and a woman who’d been to India several times and studied with a man named Inyengar, who, I knew from my reading, was considered hot stuff and one of the modern masters.

There was a psychiatrist there, and we talked a little about my preconceptions. “Exactly,” the doctor said. “I don’t tell people I practice yoga for that reason. Some people automatically think it means you also do crystal healing or some such.”

The stress-reduction guy told a yoga story that made me laugh. “I was at a convention in one of those big hotels. I check in, strip naked, and start on my yoga. So I’m doing a headstand, and the door opens. There was a mix-up at reception and they’d given someone else my key. The guy says, ‘whoops,’ and closes the door. All I ever saw was his shoes. All he ever saw, I’m sure, was, well, what he could see from his level. I spent three days looking at people’s shoes, wondering which guy it was. He probably figured I was some strange kind of pervert.”

“Ignorant people think that about yoga,” I said, from the perspective of a twelve-hour-old yogi.

I spoke with the woman who’d studied with Inyengar. Her husband told me about the time he accidentally poured out her cake batter before an important party. “I thought it was a dirty dish,” he explained. His wife discovered the transgression just after her yoga class, and didn’t yell at him very much at all. “I decided then and there that I’d encourage her to take all the yoga she wanted,” he said.

The instructors had diametrically opposed styles of teaching. John Schumacher, who has studied with Inyengar several times, was about precision. I was amazed that he could stand there, tell me exactly what I was feeling, and then suggest a certain shift of balance that made the asana more steady, more exact, more difficult but somehow more comfortable. The right way felt right. The wrong way did not.

Barbara Benagh, on the other hand, tended to use visualization. I was not the only student who didn’t know exactly where she was going. You’d be sitting cross-legged, imagining roots sprouting out of your butt, or some such, and then she’d have you twist just so, move the other arm, extend the right leg, and suddenly you were up in a complex position you never imagined you could do.

Barbara’s overall strategy for the week, it seemed, was to guide the students through a plan to get energy running back and forth
from the groin to the back through what she called the lumbar bridge. This may not be entirely correct: I sometimes lost the thread of what Barbara was saying late in the class, either because I couldn’t feel what she meant physically, or because the concepts were too advanced for me. People who had been studying yoga for several years, however, like Inverted Naked Man, told me that they’d been working on those very concepts for the last year and that they were in the midst of a kind of mental and physical breakthrough, thanks to Barbara.

While Barbara and John had been teaching together at this “yoga vacation” for over fifteen years, they were quite dissimilar in other ways. Barbara, for instance, loved marathon-length mountain biking sessions, and she was an avid swimmer, racking up as much as a mile a day before teaching class. John, on the other hand, felt yoga, done consistently, was all a person needed to stay in good shape.

“Well,” I said, over dinner with the both of them one night, “you’ve gotta do some cardiovascular stuff, running or whatever.”

John didn’t think so. Yogic breathing, properly practiced, was all a person needed. He himself had recently had his cardiovascular system tested and he’d scored pretty much off the scale. He never ran. “I think all that stuff about keeping the heart rate at such and such for so many minutes is a real caveman way of doing it.”

Well, yeah, I thought, if you’re John Schumacher, maybe you can keep your heart healthy through a combination of breathing and asanas. I wasn’t John Schumacher and I was going to just keep plodding along in my own Neolithic fashion, but I’d throw in a couple of hours of yoga a week as well. I had discovered that it made me feel good.

Unexpectedly, my wife and I became friendly with several of our classmates. That was my biggest surprise. There was a singular lack of sanctimony among the assembled students. And, indeed, several of us made plans to return next year. My preconceptions about yoga people had been pretty well demolished, but I wasn’t able to absorb the whole discipline and philosophy in a single week. I resolved to work hard on my asanas, then come back next year, and make the lot of them look like pissants.

Given that state of mind, I suppose it hardly needs to be said that
I successfully avoided enlightenment. Happily, I suffered not a single stab of awareness, though I fear that if I keep this up for any length of time, I may have some difficulties with serenity. That’s something I’m going to have to work on, this creeping and insidious tranquillity. I’m a nail-biting, chain-smoking, hard-drinking deadline junkie. That’s my life. I love it, and I worry a lot about the curse of incipient equanimity. In my worst moments of serene composure, I assure myself that, even though I am currently practicing yoga, enlightenment is a long shot and I’m not going to get there. For that reason alone, I tell myself, every little thing is going to be all right.

I
was sitting in the Owl, a small bar in a small town in Montana, when I was lifted bodily from the stool—no small feat—and kissed exuberantly on both my cheeks. “Doctor C,” Tommy the Turk said by way of greeting. He was a barrel-chested man, bald as a billiard ball, and he wore a wool-woven blue and white cap, like a yarmulke. I assumed that he was back from one Central Asian war or another. People who know these deadly disputes and these places know Thomas Goltz. He is a war correspondent of certain distinction and has received invitations to share his knowledge of shadowy wars in obscure places from prestigious universities, various institutions, and the CIA. “I’ve got a quest for you, Doctor,” Tommy said.

He showed me a clipping from the London
Sunday Express
. The lead sentence said that high in the mountains of Turkey “could lie a secret which will stun scientists: the return from the dead of a lost species.” The article quoted a Dr. Guven Eken, of the Society for the Protection of Nature: “The Caspian tiger is considered to be extinct but in South East Turkey, local hunters claim to have seen tigers in the mountains.”

We toasted Tommy’s safe arrival back in Montana and discussed the idea of searching for the ghost tiger. As I recall, this involved many toasts. The next morning I woke up with some fuzzy recollection about an agreement to go to Turkey and search for the Caspian tiger with Tommy the Turk, a guy famous for covering
wars. Was that a good idea? Would we get shot at? And what the hell did I know about tigers?

One week later, to the day, Tommy and I were in Istanbul, along with photographer Rob Howard, nicknamed—for reasons impervious to investigative reporting—the Duck. We were sitting at a café overlooking the Bosporus and talking with Dr. Guven Eken, who had been quoted in the
Sunday Express
. He was an Art Garfunkel–looking guy who confessed that he had never actually been to the southeastern part of Turkey, didn’t know anything at all about tigers, and didn’t really actually have the names of any hunters who’d seen one. He’d only heard rumors.
The guy had only heard rumors
.

So now we were tracking
rumors
of a ghost tiger.

Dr. Eken sought to dissuade us altogether. The southeastern part of the country was “sensitive,” and “security” was a problem.

The security situation, in a nutshell—Tommy knew it well—involves a long-running Kurdish insurrection. There are 25 million Kurds living in five different countries, including the southeast of Turkey. The Kurds are said to be the largest ethnic group in the world without a homeland. But there is a homeland, of sorts. Northern Iraq is a de facto, unrecognized Kurdish statelet, and has been ever since the U.S.-NATO no-fly zone was imposed over the region after the Gulf War. The two ruling Kurdish groups there are largely sympathetic to the United States. A third group—operating in both Turkey and northern Iraq—is the Kurdish Workers Party, the PKK, a Marxist-Leninist organization which has been at war with Turkey since 1986. It had been largely defanged since the arrest of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in February of 1999. Ocalan, called Apo, was facing execution, and had recently spoken out against violence. But pockets of resistance still existed, especially in remote, mountainous, little-inhabited areas of the country, like the southeast, where there were skirmishes now and again. The day before our meeting with Dr. Eken, for instance, there had been an article in the paper: two insurrectionists had been killed by soldiers in a prolonged gun battle near the border with Iraq outside the town of Shemdinli. It was Tommy’s impression that things were
winding down in the southeast and that we could talk our way through most military checkpoints.

Dr. Eken said we ought to talk to the Society for the Protection of Nature’s big-mammal man, Emry Can, in Ankara. The Caspian tiger, I knew, once ranged from southern Russia through Afghanistan to Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. The last one was shot in the southeastern Turkish town of Uludere in 1970. A big creature—males measure nine feet from the tip of the tail to the nose and weigh in excess of five hundred pounds—it looked very much like the classic Bengal tiger, with khaki-colored skin and black stripes on its legs. In the winter, it got a lot furrier than your basic Bengal.

The Romans used to capture them on the banks of the Tigris in Turkey and take them to Rome for their circuses. And that is how the animal got its name: the Tigris cat,
Pantera tiger
. It is, I think, a good thing the big cats weren’t found on the Euphrates, or there’d be a magnificent animal with a very silly name: Euphrator.

The rest of our brief stay in Istanbul involved sitting around in innumerable offices smoking lots of cigarettes while Tommy talked about tigers in exchange for press passes and letters of introduction. Foreign journalists we met along the way assured us that we probably couldn’t get to certain towns in the southeast, notably Shemdinli, which was one of the last redoubts of the disintegrating remnants of the PKK.

Mostly, we were given to understand by our fellow journalists that the military didn’t want to see another “cuddly Kurd/terrible Turk” story: a piece about how the military oppressed these proud tribal people, who were not allowed to speak their own language, or wear their own distinctive style of dress. Only last month, we were told, an American TV crew and a British one had been expelled from the area.

We took the night train down to the capital city of Ankara, and sat in a dozen more offices while people smoked thousands of cigarettes. We obtained letters from the appropriate officials stating that our mission was a tiger search; we talked to the head of the
Hunting and Wildlife Directory of the Forestry Department, who said he’d send a representative to travel with us. So we’d have a minder.

We talked with Emry Can, the big-mammal expert at the Society for the Protection of Nature, who interrogated us fiercely—he thought we were hunters, looking to knock off the last tiger. He himself had not been to the southeast, but was planning an expedition “next year, or perhaps the year after.” Scientists, he suggested, will tell you that the species needs five hundred animals for a viable breeding population, but it was Emry Can’s opinion that the Caspian tiger could survive with a breeding population as low as fifty individuals.

Anything we might find, he said—tracks called pug marks, even confirmed sightings—would be of great significance. Unfortunately, he had no idea where we might start our search.

And so, with no destination firmly in mind, we flew to the major town in the southeast, Van, on the shores of Lake Van, the largest freshwater lake in Turkey. Traveling with Tommy, I discovered, involved all manner of minor and major confrontations. Like Cuban toilet paper, Tommy the Turk doesn’t take shit off anyone. For instance, the man has to have his coffee in the morning. He carries his own ground beans and coffee press, but when he asked for hot water at one hotel, the room clerk refused to fetch a pot. It was Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting from daybreak until sundown. The fast includes water, and indeed, some pious Muslims do not even swallow their own saliva but spit into a hankie all day long. No way the clerk was going to get hot water for a bunch of infidels.

“How dare you,” Tommy raged in fluent Turkish. “Did not the Prophet, peace be upon him, declare that travelers were specifically exempted from the fast? Did not the Prophet, peace be upon him, also say that …” And so on, for about half a dozen scriptural points until he had spiritually shamed this poor son of a bitch into getting us a pot of hot water.

Tommy grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, has a master’s in Middle Eastern studies, speaks fluent Turkish and passable Arabic along
with Russian, Kurd, German, and a handful of other languages. He is also the author and editor of the
Insight Guide to Turkey
. Over the last decade or so, he has spent a lot of time dodging bullets in various war zones. His
Azerbaijan Diary
is the definitive book on the conflict there, and he is currently writing a memoir about the war in Chechnya. With his Turkish wrestler’s build and shaven head, he can pass for a local in Turkey, and my man eats snotty room clerks for breakfast.