I went mountain climbing today! It was so beautiful and adventurous! It was just me, New Day, and the cab driver. And the fine, misty rain. And the hail. And the mud and the rocks. Around mid-day, we called a trusted cab driver, a peaceful man who writes poetry in his non-native Kurdish dialect (Badini) which he picked up while living the mountains up north for a few years. “We want to go hiking in the mountains,” New Day told him in Kurdish. He drove us through Masif- where I got extremely violated by the female pat-downer at one of the checkpoints (”Did she feel up your crotch too?” No, my colleague was not so lucky)- , and into Shaqlawa, made a right turn, trudged up some extremely rocky terrain, and parked at the flat base. We got out of the car, looked up, and there it was- our mountain to climb. An actual staircase curved tortuously like a snake through the middle, but turned into a regular dirt/mud/rock path somewhere in the middle of the climb. It was hugged by jagged peaks on either side- rough, black, barnacled ridges sprouting tufts of green grass on the left, and smoothed-out vertical beige walls smudged with gray climbing steeply to the smoky white clouds on the right. The very top of the beige mountainside resembled the evenly-spaced, right-angled, nubby ridges that ring the top of a castle piece in a chess set.
It took us a long time to make the ascent- not because it was a difficult climb, but because we stopped to take pictures every two steps and marvel at the view looking outward. From up here, without considering the third dimension of spacetime, the land of Kurdistan was made of six distinct layers. The top layer was the sky, full of puffy white rain clouds that day; the second layer was shadowy blue mountains too far away to form any distinctive patterns or details; the third layer was the range of rolling hills, smooth and round, and of the lightest brown shade, generously inlaid with green like the handle of yesterday's hookah; the fourth layer a darker shade of brown, not so generously green, but streaked, instead, with iron red dust dribbling down its smooth, rounded surface; and below these mountain layers lay the tiny village houses, a motley crew of varying color and size, but all looking rather tiny under the shadow of the looming slopes and the sky above. And below the layer of village houses, forming a sharp V and rising high on either side of me, was the mountain I was currently scaling- a dark, chestnut-brown studded everywhere with gray stones, making it a rough climb indeed.
On the way up, we saw a vine plant, its branches coiling and curling like tendrils of a woman's hair, a nearly dried-up well about 6 or 7 feet deep, and a spigot which someone must have installed long ago to collect spring water, I guess, and a doorway. No joke- close to the very top of the mountain, there was a man-made doorway carved right into the rocks so that it blended in (almost) imperceptibly, an arched frame about 10 feet high, but with no door. (An aperture.) We climbed up the rock-staircase that led to this arched doorway, crossed through it, and on the other side was a cave! Its rocky roof was black with soot because as it turned out, it was no ordinary cave, but an “eshkawt murad”- a wishing cave. People made the trek up to this secret alcove in order to light a candle and make a wish. Possibly, this is the place where some villager had a vision of Mother Mary, and now It was all sacred and magical. At any rate, dozens and dozens of candles had been ritually lit and left to burn and melt inside this grotto, and so all the coal-colored rocks were dripping and oozing with old, solidified wax in different colors- honey-yellow, grassy green, lilac, scarlet, pale carnation pink, orange and basic white- it was as if the rainbow that we'd seen on the way up had melted onto these jet-black rocks. I couldn't stop marveling at the beautiful drip patterns that the candlewax had produced. But this was a wishing cave! What was I to wish for? I thought for a minute, but could not think of anything worth wishing for.
Some Wishful Thinking
If you wish for something, it must be worth wishing for, meaning it must be something you can't get just through hard work or other human powers. It must be unattainable by human powers alone, thereby creating the need for intervention by a higher power- by a superhuman power. If you make a wish, and it comes true, and it is conceivable that you could have made it come true of your own accord (through your own hard work, your own mental or creative genius, your own money), then the wish was not worth wishing for. It must contain an element of chance, of randomness, and if by chance, your wish (worth wishing for) comes true, it means you got lucky. In other words, a wish worth wishing for is by definition unattainable unless luck is on your side. But doesn't every situation require a bit of luck? Even geniuses go unrecognized; even rich people need stuff deemed “priceless”. Hence, all wishes are worth wishing for. So why did I have such a hard time coming up with a simple wish? Hmph, as if trekking up a mountain, discovering a hidden cave, and seeing with my own eyes the beautiful effect of everyone else's wishes wasn't enough. I wasn't really in dire need of anything. I didn't have enough foresight to think of what troubles may lay ahead in my path that I might want to wish away, and I didn't have enough selflessness to think of wishing things for others who may actually be in dire need of something. Plus I didn't even bring a candle. Hence my wish-y washiness, harhar. And maybe I just don't believe. Contrast this with the little girl in San Francisco who threw a penny into the large pond just outside a park and wished for a unicorn. I'm positive, I could hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes and in the way she wouldn't tell her mum at first what she wished for, for fear that it wouldn't come true, then- she had so much faith that the unicorn would appear, that she could almost see it standing, staring at its horned reflection in the water shimmering with rainbow. Next time, I'm gonna wish for a unicorn, dammit- unless by then my pet hamster is dying. Then priorities will have to change.
It was a rocky, stumbly descent back down the mountainside, and I watched the ground the entire way down to avoid going back to school with a broken ankle. As I reached the stairs portion of the path, my eyes were still focused on the ground, and so I noticed that the bricks that were used to build these stairs looked very much like the bricks that line Locust Walk on the Penn campus. Then I laughed as I remembered how girls would get their heels caught in the cracks between these tentatively laid bricks. Back in the cab, the driver asked where we wanted to go next. We decided only that we didn't want to go home just yet, though it was raining a bit harder, and the air was getting more and more frigid with each passing hour. He drove us past Shaqlawa to a place called Hiran, and along the way, he pulled over on the side of the road, saying this was a nice place to take pictures. I stepped out of the car and was overcome with this feeling of having just stepped into a painting. An utterly flat, grassy landscape stretched before me, aflame with wintery, barenaked trees whose skinny orangish-brown branches stuck straight up skyward, vulnerable in the openness. A few stray, golden-orange leaves dangled fragilely here and there, shivering in the damp and bone-chilling air. I shivered with them. At the feet of these trees lay gray stones, boulders large enough to sit and stand on, and hundreds of smaller ones too, plunked haphazardly across the grass as if there had been warfare between giants throwing stones at each other. (Possibly, this was the dwelling place of Hagrid's folk.) This stony expanse of flaming, bare-branched trees stretched flatly all the way to the base of the mountain range whose forest-green slopes rose suddenly and dramatically into sharp, craggy peaks shrouded softly in mist.
We went camera-crazy with this beautiful landscape and then hopped back into the warm, toasty cab and drove off again, past mountains and vineyards with their thick, dark, low-creeping vines, past cherry blossom trees and pomegranate farms. We drove into a quaint village where the women sat by the roadside in full-length black chadors holding their babies, their faces serious, solemn, unsmiling as they watched us driving by. The slum roofs here were covered with a tarp of sorts, and hanging off the roof from these tarps were plastic bottles- to collect rain water? I couldn't think of any other reason. As usual these poverty-stricken slum dwellings were outfitted with a satellite dish. Even the poorest of the poor must have access to Korean dramas and such. Strangely enough, the popularity of Korean dramas seems to have reached every corner of the Earth- even remote villages in Kurdistan. I finally figured out that what the locals were shouting out when I passed by was no Kurdish word, but the name of one of the characters in the Korean drama “Sad Love Story”. Ironic because I have the biggest aversion to Korean tv, and though I have never seen it, I am willing to bet that the drama would have been more aptly named “Cheesy Love Story”. Anyway, before I go on a rant about Korean dramas-
We stopped in the village to buy some of the famous Shaqlawa sweets, wandered around the village, took pictures in front of a Kurdistan flag painted onto a stone ledge, and then climbed back into the cab and headed home. On the way home, our cab driver confided that he liked to write poetry. We sat back and listened while he recited some of his love poems in Kurdish to us. New Day attempted to translate parts of it for me. One of them was about him falling in love with a Yezidi girl- truly a sad love story, given that Yezidis are forbidden by pain of death to marry outside of their ancient, ancient faith. Actually, a Yezidi cannot even use a spoon used by an outsider of their faith, let alone marry one (an outsider, not a spoon). Thus, the cab driver's crush on the Yezidi girl was doomed from the start, like a regular star-crossed attraction between a Capulet and a Montague. Ho hum, what would we do without religion to create so much strife and tragedy in human affairs? Half the world's problems would disappear like a bad dream. But then again, so would the poetry, and the candles. A small price to pay, really...Upon returning to the school, we handed the driver-poet 80,000 dinars, thanked him with heartfelt thanks, and trekked back inside with mud-encrusted boots and bags full of sweets, with images and poetry in our souls, and best of all, with a discovery, a secret, hidden high up in the mountains, where stands a wishing cave, colored wax dripping over its black rocks.
No comments:
Post a Comment