Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road

Every time I got on my bicycle after a long hiatus it was like riding back to myself, the only way there. The dissipation of life in the city—days of to-do lists, errands, emails, small talk with strangers—generated static in my mind that I didn’t notice was there until I started pedalling and realized it was gone, the way you don’t hear the hum of a refrigerator until it stops. Such is the paradoxical freedom of cycling the Silk Road. In restricting the range of directions you can travel, in charging ordinary movement with momentum, a bike trip offers that rarest, most elusive of things in our frenetic world: clarity of purpose. Your sole responsibility on Earth, as long as your legs last each day, is to breathe, pedal, breathe—and look around.

I’m not sure where I go when I spin wheels for hours on end like that, except into the rapture of doing nothing deeply—although ‘nothing,’ in this case, involves a tantrum of pedal strokes on a burdened bicycle along a euphemism for a highway through the Himalaya.

You are on your way when you decipher the pounding of rain as Morse code for making progress.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

define stones as rocks that have been put to use, so that, as the poet Don McKay put it, “What happens between a rock and stone is simply everything human.” At

But it was the truth I was after, the deepest wonder, nothing less.

I have a homesickness for a country that isn’t mine,” Alexandra David-Néel

The wildness of a place or experience isn’t in the place or experience, necessarily, but in you—your capacity to see it, feel

Isn’t that the final, most forceful triumph of borders? The way they make us accept as real and substantial what we can’t actually see?

Finally the ox ambled off, a slow, unhurried swaying that set its hump nodding in all directions, from side to side and up and down in that manner so distinctive of the Indian subcontinent, as if saying yes and no to everything at once.