Holidays in Heck (20 page)

“This canyon is one vast herbaceous border,” said Jennie, standing by a yard-wide clump of irises and naming a dozen other plants. “All these have to be so carefully tended in England, and here they just grow.”

“Herbaceous Boarder” is a clever name for the upscale bed-and-breakfast that will cater to the more ecologically conscious visitors.

We vilified progress all the way to our cooked meal, distilled beverages, and double-walled synthetic fabric expedition tents. The river at the mouth of the canyon will survive—sweeping fly fishermen and kayakers straight to perdition. We tried to take a bath in it. Ettie had the guts to go first, lowering herself into water the temperature of decompressing Freon and being beaten by the roil of pebbles in the current. “Yow,” she said, “this is worse than a spa. You know, there are people who pay thousands for things like this.”

“Us among them,” said Andrew.

We rode for two days through the Chakal Range's meadow fairways, not one of them less than a par ninety-nine.
Golf would be a more exciting sport if it had been invented by the Kyrgyz instead of the Scots. You'd hit a horse instead of a ball, and it would be you that would wind up in a hole in the ground, six feet under if you weren't careful.

Being careful on Trigger wasn't hard. The other horses were galloping around. But for Trigger, as for many of the world's great beauties, being beautiful was a career. Doing anything else that he didn't have to was a waste of his valuable talents. Trigger would go where the other horses went with a Kate Moss vacuity. But out on his own, on open ground, he'd prance, flare his nostrils, arch his neck nobly, gaze at the fields of wildflowers, and eat them.

Trigger and I were married or—I'll have to check the laws of Kyrgyzstan on this point—joined in a civil union. Anyway, there I was on top going “Yes, Dear.” Of course the other riders were skilled and accomplished. Although some of them said they weren't.

“I haven't ridden since I was a kid,” said Bahar.

“Bahar,” I said, “you are a kid.”

“Jean Baptiste has spent only two hours before on a horse,” said Gaetane. Jean Baptiste blushed with modest embarrassment at being a natural athlete and quick study.

I am neither. And I'm pushing sixty with a short stick. And I was chafed and sore in surprising places. In unsurprising places, too. Do not wear jeans on a 100-some-mile ride through a graduate course in geography. You'll have permanent raised seams right where Levis do. But I was also rubbed raw in my belly button from where the pommel of my saddle had dug into my gut going uphill and in the small of my back from where the saddle's cantle had caught me going down hill, and the bottoms of my feet ached because I'd been unconsciously pressing on the stirrups with an old
automobile driver's instinctive hope that one of these things was the brake. Yet every night, after half a bottle of vodka or so, I became a brilliant rider. In fact we all became quite brilliant. Adrian and Andrew figured out exactly where Osama bin Laden was hiding—in the unexplored cave where we'd seen the ibex. They trapped him there, put an end to terrorism, and forged a lasting peace in the Middle East, although they were somewhat fuzzy on the details the next morning.

Jean Baptiste discovered that he could play the guitar. Camilla staged a production of
Grease
, complete with choreography.

A week into our trip we awoke below the mountain where Trigger would experience near-gymnastics. It stood at the end of a seemingly endless meadow. Blossoms of clouds drifted down from its peak on sunbeam stems arranged in an urn of celadon mist, or something like that. It was a scene to make me wax as florid as the nature poets of the Romantic era, although, compared with Kyrgyzstan, the Lake District of England looks like a rest stop on I-95.

“I think,” said Shamil, “when we die this is what we see.”

I'm glad to say that's not the means by which I saw it. Trigger didn't tumble. We made it to the top. And I could ride Trigger after all. He didn't change direction with leg pressure. It was reins on his neck that made him turn. The quirt was no punishment, just a memo from middle management. I couldn't post; that is, I couldn't rise rhythmically
with Trigger's trot. His gait was too much like a hoppy toad's. But I could canter if I kept my mind—and my behind—on what I was doing.

And I had other epiphanies up there. I wasn't scared. I was still a coward, but I'd run out of fear. The grassy slope had depleted my proven reserves of trepidation, vast as they were. I'd also run out of adjectives. My ability to describe was as exhausted as my ability to worry. We went through a bunch-of-superlatives countryside down to a highly-evocative-metaphor valley and on to our campsite that was, oh, darn nice.

Except there was no camp. The trucks and the crew weren't there. The rain had been causing landslides on their routes. Alexandra's horse had gone lame and she'd ridden in one of the trucks that day. Shamil was grim with worry. It began to rain again. There was no food. Our canteens were empty. The sun set. It rained harder.

Miles down the valley was a government forestry station, intermittently occupied. The horses were worn out. We hobbled them and began to walk. The flashlights were with the camping gear.

Hours later, at that moment in a cold, wet, dark hike to an uncertain destination when the soul cries out for a cozy office cubicle and a job making unsolicited dinnertime phone calls asking people to switch their cable service, Alexandra appeared. Indeed there had been a landslide. She and the camp staff carried the supplies and equipment to the other side of the debris. They commandeered a logging truck. And they brought, thank God, the vodka.

The weather cleared the next day and so, eventually, did our heads. We rode on through mountains, fields, and forests. The Mongols and the Huns and Shamil's ancestors
must have felt like this. They didn't really mean to overrun the known world and sack it; they just didn't want to stop riding.

And one afternoon on the banks of a lake called the Sary Chelek, the “Golden Bowl,” I galloped Trigger. A real gallop with all hooves—and not me!—launched in the air. We ran for a mile and a half along the lakeside. We were a centaur. Trigger was Pegasus. I was Alexander on Bucephalus, conquering Kyrgyzstan after all.

Now I know what it is to be a
chevalier
, to be the Man on Horseback. I'm making the patio into a paddock. I'm building a stable in the garage. I'm getting Trigger a green card. I'm learning to jump so I can go foxhunting. There are plenty of foxes just an hour and a half away in the suburbs of Boston. And a hell of a hunt it will be because every hedge has a swimming pool on the other side. I wear my new jodhpurs around the house, and all that I talk is horse sense.

“One small sore butt for man,” says Mrs. O. “One giant pain in the ass for mankind.”

Hong Kong, December 2007

H
aving been a foreign correspondent for many years, I'm used to leaving home. I'm not used to home tagging along after me.

I was invited to give a lecture in Hong Kong.

“Let's take the children,” said Mrs. O.

“It's a sixteen-hour plane ride,” I said.

“Sixteen hours,” said Mrs. O., “equals about one Sunday sleet storm trapped in the house with the kids while you're someplace like Hong Kong.”

We'd traveled overseas with the children before. Muffin turned two in Venice. There, in the middle of Saint Mark's Square, a
Japanese tourist lady handed her an open bag of pigeon feed and every feathered rat in Europe descended on the poor tyke. I have mentioned that my wife is afraid of birds. The feeling was mutual after Mrs. O.'s rescue of our daughter in a Burberry-brandishing, Coach bag–slinging, swashbuckling attack on the flock. The Piazza San Marco was cleared of pigeons, maybe for the first time in history. The Japanese tourist lady was also run off.

Then there was the night—the whole night—in a Madrid hotel when Poppet was teething and Muffin was howling in solidarity and Mrs. O. and I were trying to figure out what's Spanish for “warm milk.” (
Leche picante
is not it.) But since Buster (our Iraq War baby boom baby) came along, skiing in Ohio and one trip to Disney World were as far as we'd ventured as a family.

The portability of children is not improved by their number, or, for that matter, by their age. Muffin, age ten, was starring in a preview of puberty. The preview had been edited for general audiences—that is, Muffin was experiencing all the moods, manners, and misanthropies of adolescence without (mercifully) the sex, drugs, and rock and roll. On the other hand, Mrs. O. and I were enjoying this about as much as we would have enjoyed adolescence ourselves without the sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Poppet, seven, was in that excessively imaginative stage of childhood so beloved by children's book authors and so annoying to everyone else. For example, many children are afraid of the dark, but Poppet was also afraid of having a night-light. “Because then the monsters stay awake and crawl out from under the bed, and they want to talk, and I want to be nice to them, but I'm tired.” She also had a tendency to burst into tears during random moments of television viewing.

“It's an ad for kitty litter,” I'd say.

“People are littering with kitties! Just throwing them out car windows!”

And then there was Buster, three—Bill Clinton in a diaper. He's an almost pathologically friendly child and terribly upbeat but, at three, still in a diaper all day. Airplane toilet changing tables are not built for sturdy three-year-olds or their ham-handed fathers who've had a drink or two. What with getting the changing table down and Buster up and the bulky diaper bag open, Buster and I could spend the whole sixteen-hours wedged inside the airplane toilet.

I tried to have a talk with Buster about being too grownup to be in a diaper. I said, “Now, how old are you?”

Buster—Clinton-like in his free-and-easy way with his past—said, “I'm five.”

“No,” I said, “You can't be five. Five-year-olds don't wear diapers.”

Buster gave his lip a Clintonian bite, thought for a moment, and said, “I'm six.”

The lecture invitation had come by way of our Hong Kong friends Tom and Mai. They race horses and it was International Race Week, with the Hong Kong Jockey Club hosting the best turf-racing horses from all over the world. The Jockey Club runs the horse racing in Hong Kong, and all the betting proceeds go to charity, making the Jockey Club the largest charitable organization in the Special Administrative Region and—thanks to Hong Kong's mania for betting on horses—one of the largest in the world. Various affiliated organizations also hold charity functions during race week. Tom got me to talk to something we'll call “The .50 Caliber
Club,” an all-male group of 400 of the most prominent and drunkest race horse owners in Asia. Every year they put on an epic five-hour lunch with numberless courses and bottles to match. What little I know about horses I left, with a fair amount of hind-end skin, in Kyrgyzstan. But I know a lot about drinking in the daytime. (The speech apparently was well received, although nobody, me in particular, seems to remember much about it.)

Cathay Pacific Airways was the principal sponsor of International Race Week. Cathay offered to fly me over, and gave us a deal on additional seats. For purposes of economization we got two seats in business class and a three-seat row in economy. Muffin and Poppet grabbed business class and surrendered themselves to the joy of chairs and footrests that can assume hundreds of positions and an entertainment system chock-full of stuff they aren't allowed to watch at home, not to mention a magic button that you push and a nice lady brings you things to eat. Each of our daughters was as happy as a newly hired CEO in the corporation's Gulfstream G-5. And I have great expectations for Muffin in this respect. Her egotism, unwarranted self-assurance, and continual exercise of pointless willfulness make her into pretty much every boss I've ever had. Poppet will need to find a different route to private luxury jet travel. Perhaps her disordered imagination and romantic notions about actuality can be channeled toward derivative swaps and collateralized debt obligations.

Poppet can be quite convincing, if you make the mistake of listening to her. Our flight took us over the north pole. Poppet went straight to the window, looking for lights from Santa's house. Never mind that she wasn't in a window seat. This caused some inconvenience to the person across the aisle. I went forward to check on the girls and found Poppet
and the businesswomen to whom the window seat had been assigned both earnestly searching the ice pack for evidence of Saint Nick. I tried to extract Poppet.

“No, no,” said the businesswoman, “I think I just saw the glimmer from an elf lantern.”

As it got toward midnight our time (three drinks and a
New York Times
past the girls' usual march to bed), Muffin and Poppet discovered the lie-flat feature on their seats. This, combined with Cathay's privacy cubicle seat layout, gave the kids ample boudoirs with space for the Serengeti migrations of stuffed animals with which they travel. (Muffin considers herself too old for stuffed animals, but if she gave them up Poppet might enjoy them and that would spoil things for Muffin.) They went to sleep, or what passes for sleep with traveling children, meaning they got up every twenty minutes to make sure their parents weren't enjoying three drinks or getting to read the
New York Times
.