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We couldn’t have been cooler. At least we thought we couldn’t have been cooler which at 19 years of age adds up to the same thing. There we were driving north from Baltimore on route 95 to our temporary home in Philadelphia, stopping off at a drive-through, singing along to the sounds on the radio, watching all the states roll by. We didn’t think we were invincible. We simply assumed it.

“It looks so much like America” Davy said to me and I laughed and replied “that’s because it is America”.

There were four of us in the car. A great big hulking long red and white Ford Torino and I was in charge of the machine. We’d spent the weekend in Baltimore to celebrate my biggest sale of the summer, selling aerial views of the local area to the white middle-class house owners in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I had gone across the Atlantic for a summer job and on the fourth of July I cleared over 500 dollars in commission from knocking on the right door at the right time. An entire extended family bought the photos of their childhood home and so I spent the afternoon in their back-yard with my hot feet dangling in their pool. Eating barbeque, telling stories of Europe, drinking beers. I might have even sung the American national anthem when it got later.

So the four of us thought a trip to Baltimore would be the right thing to do and we headed south to spend my fortune on a baseball game, cocktails, motel bills and t-shirts with “I love Baltimore” on them. We couldn’t have been cooler.

But it was late in the night and the other three must have drifted off to sleep somehow, so there I was driving up the edge of America alone. It dawned on me that apart from my passengers there wasn’t another on the planet who knew where I was at that precise moment in time. Or what I was doing. I was overcome with the excitement of this, so didn’t notice when I started drifting across the lane onto the left-hand side of the road. I was listening to the radio, singing along softly and a calm sense of love was beginning to approach me too. An idea that just two seconds of sleep would make me even happier.

And then I heard it. The police siren. I think it woke-me up. I pulled over and stopped and, instinctively got out of our car to address the men in their uniforms.

“Get back in the car ma’am, get back in the car” the officer with the gun shouted. His instructions were not so clear to me, so I kept walking towards them.

“Get back in the car” the second officer called out. This time I listened and retreated back to the driving seat and waited for them to come to me. They were not happy. But I had youth, an accent and arrogance on my side and managed to convince them that I realised the error of my ways and that this would never, ever, happen again. I would never again fall asleep, drive the wrong side of the highway, be so content.

So they took us to the station, and this detail I do remember after over two decades. They gave us blankets and warm tea while they filled out their forms and checked the vehicle. “You drive carefully now ma’am”was all they said as we left. And we drove home in silence, all the way home. We didn’t know why they were so kind to us, or why we were so lucky, but I was right, it did never, ever happen again.

There have been other journeys, other fine days and other Davys but that was different. Now as a middle-aged mother of none, I think of that trip often and always with the same sadness. We didn’t concern ourselves with plans for tomorrow, we didn’t even have a map, we just followed some signs. The small details of life didn’t concern us and we had a disinterest in the future and a peace in the moment. Riding up beside the Hudson River all the way to Philly, and how easy and pleasing it was.

I didn’t even want to see the lake but Odtsegseg insisted, so we went. Three days of bumpy van driving didn’t excite me at all, but she couldn’t have been happier. “The best time to visit Lake Khovsgol is in the spring when it rains less and the flowers and bird-life are at their best” she read aloud from my English version of the Lonely Planet. “Imagine a lake in Mongolia” she said sighing in contentment. “Imagine a lake frozen in time withholding billions of litres of fresh water. Imagine it frozen just for us”.

I smiled and pretended excitement but it was hard to convince her of my longing for the lake. Other Mongolian friends had told me about it and had always used the words sea or ocean when describing it. I had pointed out that landlocked countries couldn’t have oceans but this was met with giggles. In truth, I simply wasn’t in the mood for further scenery. I’d done all I’d wanted to do during my moons in Mongolia and had all the photos and anecdotes I could desire. In fact, all I really wanted to do for my last few weeks was hang out in favourite bars in the city, the ones that played Abba songs and dance and laugh and relax. But Odstegseg was adamant

For two years we had been colleagues in Ulaanbaatar. Working and worrying, laughing and crying and she couldn’t believe I was planning on leaving the country of a thousand blue-skies without a trip up north. So this was my last trip to the countryside, our last trip together.

We approached the lake from the south side in the late afternoon and I felt that yelling of adrenalin only felt fully in beautiful and new places. The lake was still half frozen and seemed to be moving under the closing light mirrors of the day. The alpine style sunset and mountains reflected on the water and the ice was still and silent. I smiled and looked over to her, expecting that radiant look of wonderment she gave me, without expectation, so often. But she was looking elsewhere. There in the foreground of my view, was a dead yak drifting on the edge of the water. She looked as though she were going to cry which I couldn’t understand at all. She’d seen dead animals before, she wasn’t sentimental about that. But then I saw it too. Surrounding the yak were empty vodka bottles, plastic bags, finished cigarettes, papers and rubbish. All cajoled around the animal, and this decay would now evaporate the thousand images she wanted to show me.

We drove on by until we found a place to pitch our tent. We set-up in silence and ate the last of the brown bread from lunch with some meat and butter. She said she was going to go to sleep, but I found the bottle of Russian champagne I had in the van for emergencies and so we drank it sip by sip from the bottle. She drank more than she normally did and was so distant from me so I let her wander. The lake, still not fully defrosted yet, made a unique sound of crushing ice movement and this was echoed by the sound of shamans praying in the distance. We let the fire go out, the champagne was gone and then she asked me.

“What will you miss about my Mongolia”

““I’ll miss so many things about your home.” I told her.

“I’ll miss marmot sandwiches and camel polo. Snow on the ground and blue-sky. Sand-storms in the city and the delight of transparency, mostly my own. There are some things here which will never leave me, and I will miss them all.”

For the first time in hours she smiled at me.

“Actually, do you know what I’ll miss the most about Mongolia?” I asked her.

“I’ll miss the sea”.

One evening one summer I found myself teaching English to a teenage commercial sex worker in a brothel in northern Ethiopia in return for free beers and cigarettes.  Her name was Eleni and she was sixteen and the first thing she said to me was “I don’t want to talk about AIDS, you Europeans always want to talk about AIDS, but to me it is not so important”.  So we didn’t discuss it.  Not at all.

I had descended into Addis Ababa early one morning a couple of weeks earlier while the cool dew clouds were still settled on the mountains surrounding the city they call New Flower.  During my first few weeks I engaged in appropriate tourist activities such as museum visits and waterfall sightseeing excursions, but when I got to Debark in northern Ethiopia I was tired.  Tired of taking photos, tired of traveling alone, tired of checking the time for the next bus ride and so I welcomed the chaos the electrical storm brought.  It caused a landslide which made the road impassable and it also broke the computer in the bank which made accessing cash impossible, so I was stuck in this chilly little town with just 4 dollars and no ways of leaving.  Then I met Eleni.

“If you teach me English, I will pay for your beers” she offered as she sidled up to the bar next to me “I know the owner of this house so your room will be free and you can stay until the road is fixed” so I made myself more comfortable and agreed to her deal.  There was a single silver pink clip in her curly brown hair which matched the same pink of her lipstick and chipped nail polish.  The youth of her skin matched the short leather jacket she was wearing, but not the high-legged boots with the broken heels, or the way she exhaled my cigarettes.  Yet, despite her bored expression she seemed to enjoy talking.

She told me about her short sixteen years of life.  The eldest of five children she had moved from her village when her father died to support the family, and at first, she cleaned rooms in the hotel and ran errands for the owner.  Then some man said she was beautiful while another one offered her money for sex and it started like that.  One man turned into another and this was now life.  It wasn’t the worst of lives but she hoped for better…

“And it’s better with the foreigners because they pay in dollars and this is why I have to learn more English” she said to me.  So we began our classes.

I met her at the bar before or after her sex with the clients and she would practise her English.  At first she just looked around the room vacantly, but when she was sure there were no customers present she would write down her new words in her tatty little notebook; her verbs and her tenses, her adjectives and nouns.  She would repeat new vocabulary carefully with the precision of a poet until she was sure she had them memorised in her heart.  For three nights we did this and I grew to be fond of her.

But then one morning, without much warning, the road was fixed and the bank was working so I was able to buy my onward bus ticket and leave Debark.  I looked for her all morning, so that I could say goodbye and give other words of such insignificance.  But I couldn’t find her on the main street, in the bars, down near the river or in the Church.  So I got onto the bus, headed west and  never saw her again.

We finished class at 10.00pm so Egiimaa and I would walk home together.  She was so delighted on the first day of term that we both lived so close to the wrestling palace that she said to me“teacher  Ruth, we will walk home together now and talk about our days”.  So she linked arms with me and we wandered like penguins through the snow covered un-lit streets of Ulaanbaatar.  Talking about our favourite students, our days, our lives.

Egiimaa told me about her days when she was a child.  She told me that she thought the films were far more beautiful when she was a girl when they didn’t show sex or horror but just love and dancing.  She told me that she missed the films where characters burst into song and the extras joined in with the dance steps.  She missed the ballet too.  The Soviets had such nice ballet, she told me.  One night after class she said “teacher Ruth, the University director would like you to teach the American Literature course”.  Intrigued I asked her “what part of it” and she laughed as she replied “well all of it.  Our students need all of it ”.

So the next day I went to the university library to find American Literature.  The library was in the basement of the building with steep stone steps and the smell of yesterday.  The librarian put both hands to her mouth to physically prevent herself from laughing when she saw me and then she handed me a three-page form to complete before I would be allowed entrance.  Later I would discover that her name was Altanod which means Golden Star and even later still I would go horse-back riding with her and drink fermented mare’s milk with her grand-father as the sun set on the Gobi.  I would also go to the funeral of her brother who died of TB, but on this day Altanod let me wander through the aisles and let me touch the book jackets as you might the glass over precious museum pieces.  Book after book on the former glory of the former Soviet occupier slept on the shelves.  Biographies of Stalin and Lenin, 5 year plans, agricultural farming techniques, Soviet collective systems and a whole aisle devoted to the space race.  But no American Literature.  As with so many days in Mongolia, time took on another meaning for me there and perhaps an hour or perhaps three went by as I looked at these books from the past.  Eventually, Altanod brought me back to the present as she gestured I should follow her into the shadows of the back office of the library.  I followed her obediently as she pulled down an un-opened box from the top cupboard with a USAID label on the outside.  We un-packed the box like children  and found inside 50 copies of Death of a Salesman  and an annual report from USAID.  Delighted I thanked Altanod and helped her number the books and place them on aisle 14.  We set them up in their new homes in between Rasputin’s discovery of self and Stalin’s concept of totalitarism and we were delighted with our days work.

When Altanod asked me what Death of a Salesman was all about I tried to explain that it was a critique of capitalism with a notion that even the struggles of small people mattered.  People who others might describe as a dime a dozen were important and had voices and had stories to tell and that our collective power would always be much stronger than our individual goals or the charms of consumerism.   I thought she would be interested but her response to me was “is sounds very sad.  I don’t like sad stories” and she never read a word of it.

That night was particularly cold.  It was minus 42 and even Egiimaa was walking home quickly.  She kept her questions very brief that night as her mouth was covered by the camel wool scarf I’d bought her for New Year.    

All she asked was “how was your day teacher Ruth” and all I could say was “it mattered”.

There’s a cloud over Lake Tana that reminds me of summer and a day in a boat when Amara took me looking for hippos.  The rains had been ferocious the night before but this morning the lake was calm while flamingoes helped the fishermen in their red papyrus boats look for the freshest fish of the day.

“Don’t move at all or the ripples will disturb her” Amara said when he saw the female hippo bathing with her two young calves.  I didn’t move an eyelash and could barely breathe.  She spotted us from a distance and wriggled her ears, came closer to her young and then all three gracefully turned under the water like Disney ballet dancers accidentally marooned in 21^st century reality.  Amara waited a while before putting the engine back on, in case the mammals were under the boat but we started to move north soon and I watched as the birds followed us.  Bright yellow, green, purple and pink birds that I had never seen before and didn’t know the names of and still don’t.  Later we stopped again, this time for our picnic of mangos, bread and fried chicken and we spent the entire day with just one sentence between us “don’t move at all or the ripples will disturb her”.

By sunset the lake had changed and Amara was concerned that we should stop and rest before it got too dark.  The equatorial sunset reflected on the water and the source of the Blue Nile was stiller than it had been all day.  As we came closer to the shore I could see some women collecting water from the lake in their bright orange plastic containers while some children bathed and swam and laughed.  The children waved at me and called out “hello foreigner” and I waved and shouted back at them “hello Ethiopians”.

Amara smiled at this interaction and asked me again “why don’t you have any children?”  I shrugged and tried to explain again that I neither knew why or how I didn’t have any children, that it had never been a conscious choice at any time and that now it was too late as I was too old.  I wasn’t sad about it as I didn’t usually think about it much and normally people in Europe didn’t question me.  Only in Ethiopia was it a topic to raise such interest.  He frowned and replied “everyone should have children” as if this were an absolute and well documented truth of life.

We tied the boat ropes to a lime tree and walked the short way back to his home.  Outside his house we sat and drank some beers and honey wine and smoked cigarettes and ate injeera with lamb.  We talked about his work and his life and his son who lived with relatives in a nearby town because his wife had died and Amara couldn’t take care of him alone.  But it wasn’t long before we came back to his fascination with my life without children.

“Why don’t you take my son back to Europe with you, give him an education, let him live with you.  This would be very good for him.  And also very good for you” Amara suggested with a casualness usually reserved for asking someone the time or what their favourite colour is.

“You serious?”

“Sure, why not?”

I couldn’t think of a reply so I finished my beer and went inside his house and crawled under the mosquito net we’d bought the day before at the cattle market.  The rains began again and splashed down onto the corrugated iron rooftop with surprisingly subtle synchronicity and eventually I fell asleep to those sounds while he stayed outside finishing the honey wine and the last of the cigarettes.  He was watching the lake and watching the bright night lightening storm and might even have been watching as a female hippopotamus took care of her young and wriggled her ears.

Don’t move at all or the ripples will disturb her.

Yak Cabaret

In this one you are sitting in a ger with your new herders’ boots on, showing Batmunk a map of Monoglia from the Lonely Planet.  “It’s very beautiful” he tells you, but his smile implies a lack of belief.  In this one you are tired after your day with the horses, the milk mutton soup and the sunset.  Batmunk has been practising his English with you for an hour and you are pleased with his improvements.  He wants to see other photos from the guide book too and on page 91 he thinks he sees one of his cousins from Kazakstan.  He marvels at the photos of the people in the city eating pizza, talking on cell phones and going to discos and he tells you that next year he’ll go to the city to buy Calvin Klein underwear and a new pair of jeans.

Even at sleep time his fascination with dogs continues “do you really keep dogs in the house in your country, and you bath them, and you buy them different flavoured tinned food, and they have appointments at the vet?”  He doesn’t love his dog.  His dog works and has a job to do.  How can you love a dog?  He starts to laugh again remembering your earlier linguistic mistake when you tried to ask him to “hold the dog” but told him to “hold the husband” instead.  He’s laughing uncontrollably now as he repeats the mistake “hold the husband”, “hold the husband”.

“You come from a strange, mysterious and exotic country” he says to you.

You are from the ghosts of Treharris and the uncle who died.  He is from a circle home made of felt and camels with two backs.  You are from the steel and the mines and the park bench overlooking the stream.  He is from a statue of Ghengis Khan and mare’s milk.  You are from a woman with red-lipstick waiting for the bus to Blackpool.  He is from the delights of delusion and days of delays.  You are a herder’s daughter, he is your own memory and trapped like a marmot.

The outside darkness encourages Batmunk’s silence so it is you who starts the new questions.  “What do you want to do after you finish school?” you ask the question dreaded by children everywhere but he doesn’t seem to mind.  “I’m going to have over one hundred horses” he says “and then I’ll buy a motorbike.  After that I will marry a beautiful girl who can sing.  She will have two children, the boy will help me with the herd and the girl will finish school and become a doctor, or a teacher like you.  I want her to be a teacher like you”.

The only sound you can hear now is the dog barking itself to sleep, the sound of Batmunk sleeping and the fire crackling at the end of another day.  In this one, you are aware of the moment and the outside of the frame, the gaze beyond the photographer’s eye-line.  In this one, for once, your own perception of reality matches the second of the snap and click.  You remember the feeling of those new boots, the smell of the fire and the milk in your belly.   You can see Batmunk clearly sleeping in the tiny bed with you with no one around for a hundred miles and you can hear his breath.  You can hear the groans of the yaks on the mountains getting quieter as the night sky takes control of the steppe and you remember the mystery of not being lonely.  The sound of a yak cabaret under the azure night and a moment of a picture you’ll never have again.