Into Thick Air (17 page)

I imagine that I can feel the air pressure building as I pass below sea level and keep dropping. Nobody was sure of the valley's elevation until a pair of British explorers in 1837 noted an increase in the boiling point of water—proof they were “considerably lower than the ocean.” My only clue is the change in vegetation. By the time the slope tapers off into the valley bottom, the junipers are long gone and I'm more than 1,000 feet below sea level, passing irrigated banana plantations in a stony desert. The water comes not from rain but from the canyons that drain the high plateau and spill out into the valley bottom in broad beds of flood-flattened reeds. There are mom-and-pop farms with stick houses and all-purpose donkeys. There are big industrial farms with Sudanese and Egyptian laborers—more evidence that the world's food is generally plucked by the world's poorest people.

From the shade of another immigrant, a Mexican palo verde tree, two young men pedal out on bicycles. It's a relief to see their super-wow Egyptian rides, with plastic scorpions clipped to their spokes and paper roses attached to the front forks.

My little thermometer says it's just over 100 degrees when I pass the southern edge of what used to be the Dead Sea. Now it's a grid of dikes enclosing the evaporation pans of the Arab Potash Company. Potash is, like wood ash, fertilizer. It's Jordan's number one export, four billion pounds a year, not including the stuff that blows off into my face when the trucks pass.

There are no towns along the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea. The
Israelis would not even let them build a road until last year, so sensitive is the border. Before I reach the true Dead Sea I must pass a military checkpoint. Nobody mentions the bike, but I am subjected to the usual grueling interrogation: How do you like Jordan? And won't you have some tea? Will I visit their wonderful capital city of Amman? Why yes, I say: tomorrow morning I' ll pedal to the main highway and catch a bus up and out.

It's a tough life for a soldier on the Dead Sea. Not enough guests, they tell me, and they must clean and oil their Beretta machine guns every day, or they' ll rust in the salty breeze.

I'm glad I stopped, because by the time I leave the wind has collapsed to nothing and the sun has emerged from the dust swirl, lending a hot but cheering clarity to my final miles. It's 94 degrees at 5:30 PM—no problem on a breezy bike. The mountains abruptly rising above the shore are fractured and leaking, with water dripping down walls colored like a kindergarten fresco. When the road drops closer to the water, I park the bike and trot down to the shore.

The beach is scattered with sandstone boulders with elegant curving strata, and the shore looks like an emergent reef of white coral. Nowhere in the world is water saltier than the Dead Sea, and everything is coated with a thick rime of nubbly crystals—the rocks, driftwood, even pieces of trash. A discarded yogurt container is like a cave formation, shining in its husk of salt. The sea is calm and absolutely empty, as boats are even more taboo than bikes along the border.

There's only one more thing I want to do. I ride on, passing one, two, three narrow canyons and thin creeks coming out of the mountains. Then the big one, Wadi Mujib, with what would be called a river in Arizona, twenty feet wide and gushing between sheer five-hundred-foot walls. Swallows are cutting through the shadows, and frogs are cranking up for the evening. There's just time enough for a swim in the Dead Sea, and a rinse in Wadi Mujib.

I ride, then push, then drag the bike to the shore, 1,300 feet below sea level. The water is lucid. There are bacteria and algae that can tolerate the Dead Sea, but I see nothing. Nobody around either, so I strip and tenuously enter. My toe says the water is balmy. I try skipping a couple of rocks, and
they bounce easily across the hyperdense water, ten times saltier than the ocean. I wade in, and refractive shock waves radiate out from my thighs and fade in swirls of distortion. I've never seen anything like it, and push on, to my bellybutton and my chest. One more step . . .

And although my head and arms are still above the surface my feet leave the cobbles and swing up and out of the water.

I'm weightless. A cross-shore current grabs me and takes me away, past the illegal bike that took me here from Cairo, along the shore of the loveliest pit in the world. I'm floating in the Dead Sea, and my elation is unsinkable.

—Paul Theroux,
The Kingdom by the Sea

 

BY THE TIME another year had passed, our house looked as if a two-foot-high wave had swept through and removed everything chewable or breakable. Down the hall crawled my son, a midget engine of destruction with a busted rattle in hand, slapping it against the white tile floor,
clunk, clunk, clunk,
like Captain Ahab pacing the deck. His name was Rudy, and he wanted a ride in my over-the-shoulder baby holder. I slipped him in. He was a portable pleasure, with breath like cake frosting.

I had work to do, listed on a scrap of paper on which I'd scrawled RUSSIA. I took a scissors to my maps, eliminating Siberia to the west and the Ukraine to the east, leaving the lands between Moscow and the shore of the Caspian Sea, ninety-two feet below sea level. I unzipped my first-aid kit and checked my aspirin supply and the expiration date of my bee-sting epinephrine injector.

Medically satisfied, I left the now-dozing Rudy to my mother-in-law and pedaled off, through the warm puddles of an afternoon cloudburst to Ajo Bikes.

Tracy Cook threaded new gear and brake cables into my machine, greased the bearings, then gave the frame a once-over. He beckoned me
over to the upside-down bike. There: a crack in the frame, a fissure thin as a Rudy hair.

“You need a new downtube.”

“But I'm leaving the day after tomorrow.”

“Then all I can do is take it to my place tonight and weld a big thick bead over the crack. It's going to burn off the paint and look like hell.” He poked his glasses back up his nose and gave me a look of pity and envy. “But you don't seem the kind that would care about the paint job. The weld should hold for the trip, but keep an eye on it. Don't want the headtube and front fork to break away.”

Pedaling a bike that could snap in two would have bothered me more if I were going somewhere other than Russia. It seemed a cross-your-fingers-and-pray kind of country. After all, the space station
Mir
had caught on fire and crashed into another spacecraft, and yet the Russians would not abandon it. Instead they would patch it and say,
Thank God it still flies
.

It was not my bike but the Russians that worried me. I spent my last day in America making Rudy smile and reviewing my Russian language notes. “Do not expect a Russian to reply to
How are you?
in the happy-go-lucky style of the Americans, who will say
Fine
even if their mother just died. The Russian might say
So-so
, or
Normal
, or
Could be better
.”

This was from my first teacher, a Russian with fine skin that faintly glistened because she was doughy and squeezed herself into a tight sweater and slit skirt. My second teacher knew of my bicycle scheme, and concluded our lessons with, “I do not believe in God, but in Russia we make this thing for the good luck.” She made the sign of the cross, and because she was teary-eyed it seemed especially sincere. “I asked my friends and they said that you are not brave. You are crazy.”

Two weeks earlier the Russian currency had collapsed. This meant discount potatoes and vodka. On the other hand, a coup was not out of the question.
The Crisis
, cried the evening news, and proved the point with video of beet farmers with pitchforks. They were not happy-go-lucky. Their rubles were suddenly a joke, their banks locking their doors and taping up signs that said
Nyet Rubles! Nyet Dollars!

Discovery Online decided the time was right to send, via overnight mail,
an attachment to my contract, in which “The Undersigned acknowledges ... certain risks and dangers. . . . ” It was their lawyer's farewell:
Don't blame us if you don't come back in one piece
.

I signed it. I sorely wanted to pedal to the next pit. To any pit, actually. It was the moving I craved, away from the familiar. The money didn't hurt, either; I was certain I was a writer or a botanist only after the check came in the mail.

I crossed my fingers and did not pray and boarded the first of three planes to Moscow.

 

I HAD THREE SEATS TO MYSELF for the night passage over the Atlantic. My comfort and a bit of brandy gave me a warm feeling about Russia. The feeling lasted until I woke at dawn near the Arctic Circle. The entire planet appeared frozen, but it was only a blanket of clouds. The jet hurried into daybreak, accelerating the sunrise that tore the clouds into remarkably uniform strips of vapor. A coffee and juice cart rolled down the aisle while the sun continued its work, and over the next hour the strips of clouds humped like frying bacon, then broke into pearly bubbles.

Now I could see tin-roofed cabins and furrowed fields outside Moscow. The landing flaps curled out of the wings, and the plane dropped low enough to see Russians yanking cabbages from their gardens before the clanging finality of winter.

This worried me. My departure had been pushed back to mid-September by Discovery. The novelty of online bike touring to the pits had been surpassed by online whale sex off Madagascar. The humpbacks, I was made to understand, could only be aroused in August; I merely had to buy mittens.

Changing my route to something closer to the equator was appealing. The Caspian Sea is enormous—toss in Britain and it would glug out of sight—and there were a hundred thrilling routes to its shore. Sadly, many were potentially fatal for a cyclist with a spy telephone. The Caucasus Mountains were a crock pot of civil war, simmering in Dagestan and Georgia, blowing the lid off Azerbaijan and Chechnya. I didn't bother asking Iran, Turkmenistan, or Kazakhstan for permission to wander unattended.
It wasn't just phone worries or excitable fundamentalists. Those countries were in Asia, and I was riding to the lowest point in Europe, through Europe.

One look at a map and it's clear that the Asia/Europe divide is geo-logically bogus. The two have been one for around 400 million years. The boundary is cultural—us versus the barbarians—and dates back at least 2,500 years. The continental names have stuck, although the frontier itself has slowly crept eastward through time, from the Don River to its current location along the Ural Mountains and the Caspian.

Because my route was to go through Europe, Moscow was the place to begin. There would be no border interrogations—it was Russia all the way to the Caspian. Airport customs would not nab my phone—I would rent one in Moscow. And I knew Moscow from an earlier visit, less than two years after the fall of communism, when billboards had proclaimed “Glory to the Workers!”

Now, seven years after the fall, the billboards outside the airport bore ads for cell phones urging “Be Happy!” And along the drive into the old city were cheery banners festooning the light poles, and freshly painted wrought-iron fences around tidy parks.

“It is our mayor, Luzhkov, that make Moscow look good,” said Sasha the taxi driver. “Nobody knows where he finds the money for this.”

This seemed more than an observation; it was a warning, like the ones Australians gave of their crocodiles, of predators just over the horizon. Mysterious wealth meant Mafia and secret police. Sasha unzipped his genuine leather jacket and drove with one hand on the wheel while puffing on a slim Davidoff. I knew where he'd found the money for this: the fare was fifty bucks.

“Before the taxi I worked as a driver for the New Russians in the oil business. A good job, driving the German cars. It is also a dangerous job.” Sasha ignored the lane markings, squeezing his Volkswagen into a promising slot between a mammoth Mercury Navigator and an armored Mercedes. “When my New Russian buys the bulletproof car, I think this is not a good thing. I have only one head.”

Sasha knew the way to Stary Arbat, a pedestrian avenue awhirl with
street musicians and tourists, where my satellite phone waited at the home of Mr. Laurent Barrion. He was a Frenchman from a French company, Geolink, but he was a kind of New Russian, too. There were buckets of money to be made in a country full of oil and gas and nickel, but to get the stuff out of the ground it helped to be able to swing a deal from Siberia on a telephone that cost $3,000 a month.

Mr. Barrion helped me find a bank willing to change money on a day when the exchange rate ricocheted between thirteen and twenty rubles to the dollar. He offered a spare room for my stay. The least I could do was show him my maps and my route to the lowest point in Europe: southeast from Moscow, out of the birch forests and across the farmlands. Then I'd slip into the valley of the Volga River and follow her to the Caspian Sea.