I’m sitting at the bar of an airport lounge that I just paid $199 to get into at the Istanbul Airport. I’ve never been in an airport lounge. The barstool I’m sitting in is unreasonably short for the height of the bar so my computer is almost at my shoulders as it rests on fake marble. Images of Benjamin Netanyahu, a map of the Golan Heights, and b-roll of rocket fire are playing on the TV in front of me. The space bar on my silver Macbook stopped working a couple of days ago so I’m thinking about the appointment I made to get the keyboard fixed as I muscle my way through this paragraph.
This isn’t exactly what I had in mind for my 18-hour layover. I was planning on going into the city, but the mental hurdle of navigating an unfamiliar metropolis after a month in the Mongolian countryside was not something I was up for. I don’t need a drink but I do need to charge my phone and the only outlet that was free in the busy lounge was at the bar. I’m watching my fully outstretched arms make what feels like an acute angle with my face as I continue smashing my keyboard. It weirdly feels like the right thing to do. The space bar is starting to loosen up a bit. Maybe I’ll cancel that appointment.
The only sip of alcohol I’ve had in the last two months was a thimbleful of vodka offered to me by a friend and nomadic herder, Galim, after a horse race—I followed him on several wolf hunts last spring so saying no would have felt rude given that seeing each other again felt like an impossible and beautiful reunion. Last spring he was clean-shaven and weathered by a brutal winter into what had become a deadly spring for his animals. Today you’d never know. It’s a perfect summer day in the middle of a perfect summer. The grass and people’s spirits are high. Galim is wearing a parted, pencil-thin mustache, yellow-lensed sunglasses, and a straw fedora with images of nomadic life sewn into the hat band. He reminds me of someone you’d see on Dollar Day at Golden Gate Fields, a racetrack in Berkeley, California that exists in a universe of its own making where every Sunday during race season it’s “$1 admission, $1 parking, $1 beers, $1 hot dogs, and $1 sodas!” Galim is very comfortable at a horse race. Over the next few weeks, I’d see why as his horses would go on to win over and over again.
Maybe I should get drunk? The beer is free after the price of admission and I’ll be sitting here for twelve hours before sitting on a plane to Houston for another thirteen. After that, I’ll take a taxi to a bus to another taxi to my house. It takes 4 days to get back to Austin from western Mongolia.
A week ago I was wide awake at two in the morning. I spent a few hours making long exposures of a wolf puppy under the Milky Way before the sun started washing away the stars. Sekish, my host, told me he’s raising the wolf to “teach my children what a wolf is.”
You learn a lot about a wolf by spending a few nights together.
Kazakh children are told to wear hats after it gets dark to prevent evil spirits from entering their bodies. I made sure to wear a hat.
What would the guy next to me think if I told him I spent hours, night after night, photographing a wolf puppy, wondering if there were any evil spirits nearby? That doesn’t sound real in an airport full of men in the prickly liminality between being bald and having hair again. The woman next to me has braces and an American accent. She’s on a video call talking about content creation and her personal brand. “Guess who just created a second Snapchat account?!” We have the same computer. I wonder if her keyboard still works.
It feels like I’m in my own liminal space between two worlds. In one world there’s a community that raises wolves. In the other, that sounds like a fairytale.
I’m still processing it all. I haven’t even looked at my photos yet. I need some space from it all.
While I was in the countryside I happened to read Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World—a book where, without giving it all away, there are two stories, two universes that feel completely separate but somehow connected that slowly swirl into each other. Right now I just feel dizzy.
I know the dizziness will go away. It always does. But the more time I spend asking about wolves…honestly, I don’t even know where the end of that thought goes yet.
On the second page of Hard-Boiled Wonderland Murakami writes that “Deep rivers run quiet.” I can’t get that four-word sentence out of my head nor the fact that it came on page two. What kind of maniac gives you the whole thing right on page two?
I’m not going to get drunk but a beer does sound good.
Cheers.
—
I looked up Golden Gate Fields and it turns out it closed on June 9th.