Andy Isaacson

One afternoon eight

I am drawn to the borders that divide nations, to standing on the boundary of one world and imagining what lies over in the next. I think of borders as tall hedges, obscuring territory my mind wants to discover. Crossing them does more than satisfy that curiosity; it fulfills a primal desire to migrate. We are not birds, after all, but terrestrial beings, and being prevented from entering a country can make a traveler without a visa feel like a pronghorn fenced on the open plain.

Barrier to entry, however, gives the imagination an unrestricted permit to roam. Peering across a river bordering two nations offers teasing glimpses—a different language on signs, or different architecture of houses—that suggest life on the opposite side. Mountainous borders, however, are more like ramparts than hedges; from one side of a mountain, nothing is revealed about the other. The mind is left to conjure a most exotic story.

One afternoon eight years ago, I sat on a horse, high up in western China's Pamir Mountains. I had rented the horse for the day from Kyrgyz settlers I was staying with on Karakul Lake, which rests at 12,000 feet off the Karakoram Highway linking China with Pakistan. The emerald lake reflected brilliantly the snowbound flanks of Muztagh Ata, a gargantuan mountain whose sounded name evoked a giant in this lofty, treeless, and scarcely inhabited realm. I spent hours walking alone around its gravelly base, passing a sole horsebacked Kyrgyz and an ancient, mud-brick cemetery crumbling on the floor of an empty, adjacent valley. I often talk about that day—alone with horse on the ''Roof of the World''—as the freest I've ever felt. 

Twenty miles from Karakul Lake—in the reddish, rocky peaks to the west—lies China's border with Tajikistan. Tajikistan. As I sat on the horse, gazing in that direction, I had trouble even conjuring an image of the place because, surely, none had ever reached me: no brochures, no nightly news reports. In my mental map of the world, the country, along with the other, former Soviet republics it neighbors—''the 'Stans,'' collectively—occupied a blank area, a geographical negative space which I longed to color with experience.

I had been traveling for eight months already, across many borders: Thailand to Laos, over the Mekong River; Cambodia to Vietnam, farther down the same river. I walked into China across a bridge, and then crisscrossed the country—first up to the edge of the Tibetan plateau, then to Beijing, and then west, tracing the old Silk Road trading route across the Taklimakan Desert, to the storied outpost of Kashgar.

Now, in the mountains above Kashgar, I could go no farther. For one, the border with Tajikistan was closed to tourists, but a more pressing concern at the time was an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) gripping the region. All 14 countries bordering China, in a panic, were rapidly closing themselves off to travelers from China, indefinitely. I had to get out, fast.

Back in the provincial capital, Urumqi, my choices appeared limited: an indirect flight to Thailand was still available, I learned. This was not a desirable option; my instinct wanted me to move forward across a new frontier, not back to Thailand. I went to an ATM, anyway, withdrew 1,600 RMB—a little extra than the listed airfare to Bangkok—and took it to the Xinjiang Airlines office. 

Before paying for the flight, I asked the clerk whether they had any planes heading to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. I'd heard the country had sealed its border the previous day, but I figured, why not ask anyway.

''The last flight leaves tomorrow morning at six,'' she said; ''1,600 RMB.''

In my hand I held perfect change, and without hesitation, handed it over. The next morning, after a 45-minute flight across the ramparts, I was in Kyrgyzstan.

Never has a border crossing presented so sharp a contrast. My first sight, along the Bishkek airport's runway, was of American military planes poised for missions into Afghanistan: I was not in China anymore. Caucasian people with fair skin and blue eyes joined Koreans, Tartars, Uzbeks, and Cossacks—a melting pot of Soviet-era migrants—on the city's quiet, tree-lined streets. Signs in Cyrillic appeared familiar to the eye—there was the letter ''C'', and I could actually recognize it!—but its pronunciation, of course, was turned around. It all felt less foreign than in China and the countries of Southeast Asia, but I felt more lost—airdropped, as I had been, into the vestiges of an empire that mountains had hemmed in.

I spent a month in Kyrgyzstan. Central Asia began to take shape, colored in with images of rectangular apartment blocks and round felt yurts, brightly patterned headscarves and flatbreads stamped with floral designs, lush highland pastures dotted with horses and roadside stands displaying mare's milk bottled in plastic soda containers.  One afternoon, an expatriate I met took me into the Pamirs, in the south of the country, to the home of a Kyrgyz man he knew. Our host was the caretaker for a Russian military depot, and as we ate dried fruit and lamb soup on his carpeted outdoor dining platform, under grape trellises—a common feature in Central Asian homes that I had come to love—convoys of Russian trucks rumbled down the road, heading towards the nearby border with Tajikistan. Where and why, I could only imagine.

Last August, seven years later, I finally entered Tajikistan. From the leafy capital, Dushanbe, I skirted its southern border with Afghanistan, along the Panj River. Compared with the Soviet-laid infrastructure on the Tajik side, the rustic adobe homes and donkey trails on the opposite, Afghan bank seemed suspended in a different time. One Saturday, at the mouth of the fertile Wakhan Valley, I attended a weekly bazaar held on a rocky island in the Panj River between the two countries. Afghan traders in long tunics and vests hawked teas, toiletries and rubber slippers. Turbaned fortune-tellers predicted futures for the price of a dollar. Tajik women bargained over resplendent bolts of fabric.

''Mousetraps, mousetraps, mousetraps, oooowww!'' crooned a white-bearded Afghan in the Iranian language spoken by locals from both sides of the border.

''They don't buy shit!'' complained a high-heeled-shoe salesman from Kabul to me in English.

''They always start the price too high,'' a Tajik woman in a blue patterned dress and headscarf whispered as she stood before bright red carpets.

I talked with a blue-eyed Afghan policeman sporting Bushnell binoculars and a Leatherman toolkit and later passed a Tajik boy wearing a cap that read ''Berkeley, Califopnia.'' He reacted indifferently after I explained that I actually came from there, and I realized that such sights are probably no more remarkable today than, say, a Chinese visitor there in the sixth century encountering Italians in silk shirts, or a Sogdian seen with the latest gadgets from the army of Alexander the Great, who crossed the Panj River in 329 B.C. At this ancient intersection—earlier crossed by Scythians, Persians, Greeks, Kushans, Hephtalites, Gokturks, Huns, Arabs and Mongol hordes—surreal juxtapositions of globalization date back for millennia.

The market, which ended in late afternoon after the island was emptied and the border gates were resealed, called to mind a time when the boundaries between nations and territories had no such lines. In the town of Ishkashim, adjacent to the market, I visited the crumbling remains of a sixth-century caravansary — an ancient motel for the Silk Road travelers who once wandered through the Wakhan Valley on their path between China and points along the Mediterranean Sea. The nomads, peddlers, pilgrims and, at times, the soldiers and emissaries of great powers who have traveled across the valley left stone fortresses, Arabic inscriptions, Buddhist stupas and Zoroastrian shrines, all in evidence today as relics of this historic crossroads.

Ascending from the Wakhan Valley into the high, stark plateau of eastern Tajikistan brought me closer to the border with China. Caravans of Chinese trucks coming towards me from Kashgar passed by laden with inexpensive household goods. ''Along this high plain, which is called Pamier, [a man] sees neither habitation nor verdure,'' Marco Polo reported 700 years ago. The craggy, mineral-stained earth, the sweeping, empty valleys—the place reminded me of, well, Nevada. Today the majority Kyrgyz population that endures this extreme realm live in settlements with a weathered, frontier character—tin roofs, rusty vehicle parts, satellite dishes—and remote summer yurt camps, which I stayed in along the way.

My last homestay, on the far side of Tajikistan, was at an isolated yurt pitched on the edge of an expansive valley facing a spectacular panorama of the serrated Wakhan Range, in Afghanistan. Beyond lay Pakistan and just east of me, over a lofty pass, was Karakul Lake, in China. I could now stitch my memory of that place into a single panoramic image. A wall had been breached—a border, dissolved.