Ak Joldor, The White Roads

There are places in the mountains

the old men name only in whispers.

It's where time loosens its grip

like a hand releasing a stone

into deep water.

It's also where strange presence is inexplicable.

I used to smirk at such talk.

Until I took a group of hikers to Suyok.

Right before we reached the pass,

The sky went the color of lead.

The wind flung open doors

between worlds

and our car engine, faithful all journey,

suddenly died,

as if someone knocked it out in one blow.

I climbed the road to check the way ahead.

The pouring rain set up the invisibility wall,

You couldn't see anyone or anything one arm ahead.

Twenty meters. Thirty.

The rain drops landing loudly on

my Gore-Tex gear and the road,

washing it in streams.

And then

the world

retreated.

No mountains.

No rain.

No sound of anything I recognized.

Only a white room,

square and luminous,

glowing from no source I could name.

In that room, I was

weightless,

floating above the floor,

but fearless and free,

which was the strangest feeling of all.

Something watched me.

I could not see it.

"Don't turn around," I said to myself.

"You don't need to see it to know it's here."

The watching was palpable,

warm like a hug,

pressed against my back

the way a thought presses

against the inside of your head

before it is spoken in words.

Thousands of voices whispered

in my language, but older than I knew,

distant and immediate at once,

undiscernible in a low hum,

turning into a high whistle, then

becoming deafening silence, and finally

becoming the hand on my shoulder.

My driver. I'd recognize his touch, always.

We are like brothers, united not by blood

But by the shared love of mountains.

I see the road.

The cold rainy wind slapping my face

like it tries to get me back to my senses.

"Where were you?"

I have no answer.

Two minutes, they said.

Maybe three. Or ten.

Everyone lost track of time.

I was gone completely, out of sight and existence.

But then they saw me standing

in the same spot

as if reappeared from the thick rainy air.

Later, the elder told us quietly

of the ak joldor (the white roads),

the other-worldly gates the mountains keep

in certain high places.

Of people who enter for a second

and return years later,

or do not return at all.

"If the mountains let you in

and gave you back," he said,

"they decided your time

had not yet come."

That was years ago.

Now, whenever I near that pass

before a big storm,

the engine stutters,

just for a moment,

and I feel it again:

something

standing

exactly

behind me.

Not threatening.

Not leaving.

Just watching

with the patience

of something that knows

it has already kept

a piece of what it wants.

I never turn around but

I do check the back mirror.

The road is always empty.

The mountains say nothing.

But I know what I know:

I did not walk out of that white room

whole.

Part of me is still standing there,

weightless, fearless,

listening to the voices

of those who perished.

I almost understand them,

waiting to find out

what the mountains

decided to keep.

***

Author's note: This poem is based on a recount by Kyrgyzstan's best mountain guide Davran Osmonkulov. "Suyok" in Kyrgyz means "bones." There are verified historical accounts that many Kyrgyz people died on that pass trying to escape during the 1916 uprising against the Russian empire.