Walking Through Fiction

April 12, 2009

There is a place in Northern Iraq that is as far as you could get from the war, strife, terror, and grief that plagues the rest of the country. It is located way up north just one hour away from the snowcapped Iraq-Iran border. They call it the “Grand Canyon of the Mideast”, or just plain old Rawanduz. And it really exists, though when you are there, it feels like you're walking through fiction. To get there, the four of us finagled a taxi for 40,000 dinars (~$35) at the Tayrawa garage. We drove northward through Shaqlawa, which now looks like Switzerland with its rolling green hills, past picnicking families, past the Wishing Cave, past the Iraqi war tanks that are on display at the spot where they were beaten in battle by the Peshmerga, the Kurdish army. Past boys and men sitting on the side of the road selling bunches of a vegetable that, according to the NYer, looks like celery with herpes (and tastes just as bad).

After about an hour or so, the driver dropped us off at the edge of a small town so he could go to the mosque and pray. He had dropped us off at the base of a stone-scattered, grassy mountainside that, despite it's steep angle, looked climbable, and so we climbed it. I climbed all the way up to this giant boulder that was flattened in the back and shaped like an arch and connected to a stone ledge staircasing down. Garden snails had wedged their way into its cracks, and bright yellow and red flowers sprouted heartily from them. I climbed onto the ledge, sat and looked out, sweaty from the climb and the heat. There was no doubt about it, the cold season was over and it was only going to get hotter from here. From this dizzying height, dollhouses lay at the base of the towering mountains on the other side of town, and a small forest of trees, toothpick-thin, gathered at the base of mine, the dozens of them all bowing in the same direction to the left, toward a long countryside road that curved all the way to the horizon. To the right, at this extreme height, I was almost level with the peaks of the jagged mountains that enclosed the road we were following like dinosaur jaws. Eventually, the driver returned after his chat with the Almighty, and we made our way down slowly- leaning so far back that I thought my back was going to touch the ground-, hopped back in the car and continued following that road until the fields and chiseled mountainsides and caves gave way to the waterfalls of Bekhal, and then to the deep, hollow chasms of Rawanduz.

The first thing I heard was Xena Warrior Princess cries- aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiai!- coming from every corner of the resort. Heh. They are sooo tribal. They sounded like they were about to start a war like a bunch of Injuns. The first thing I saw was a ferris wheel. It was the highest manmade point of the region, which I think is so much cooler than having the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building or the Space Needle as the highest manmade point of a region. It was perched in the middle of a field blooming with chartreuse wildflowers, along with a low-rising circus-like tent that housed the bumper cars ride, and a tilt-a-whirl. We wandered around all foreignly down a clean street lined with small beige-stone villas where the vacationers stayed, and it was then that I first felt the nagging feeling that this was not real. I mean, would you believe it if someone told you of a place in Iraq of streets with no rubble nor rubbish, beautiful villas, a ferris wheel, and a rollercoaster in the middle of a canyon, all enclosed by majestic mountains set against a clear, blue sky? Stage props, that's what the whole thing felt like! Walking through stage props designed for temporary delusionment for the sake of entertainment, and for the broader purpose of escaping into another world.

Just a couple decades ago, even the Kurds themselves would have laughed in your face and said you'd “gone to the mountains” if you'd told them that such a place would exist in the near future. Or perhaps they wouldn't have laughed because they were too busy running away from murderous Baathists or grieving over the bodies of loved ones who had just been gassed to death in yet another “project” aimed at eliminating the entire Kurdish population, village by village. It's gutting to see the pictures of this lowest, horriblest point of Saddam's Anfal campaign to wipe out the Kurds because I see my students in the faces of the dead children. If they had been born a generation earlier, that could very well have been them, or their brothers or sisters or cousins. No, even the Kurds themselves would not have believed in a place like Rawanduz.

The Other Edge

We threw our stuff down in the grass, and after taking some pictures with a bunch of Kurdish families, we went our separate ways to explore. I picked my way through rough, stony terrain, through tall grasses and weeds that had been allowed to grow naturally, haphazardly, and eventually I reached the lip of the gorge.

Woah, vertigo.

I sat down quickly on the flat stone surface before my body could lose its balance completely and tumble undesirably down the cliff's edge. Wow, I thought, at a loss for words as the sun set behind the gorge, casting a golden glow on the canyon wall directly across from it. I sat there with my legs dangling over this other Edge, watching the glow shifting slowly over the tiered innards of the gorge as the sun sank lower and lower, watching the skinny ribbon-like river running through it way below, opaque and slow-moving, the same milky gray color of the canyon crags. In the distance to the east, screams of delight pierced the tranquil air as the rollercoaster cars spiraled down the canyon, jarring dissonantly with the fluting of the birds that flew above and around me, and through the open space between the canyon walls. I felt like Heidi in the Swiss Alps. Every day she would go with Peter the Goatherd to the mountainside and not come back until the evening. I always wondered how anyone could just hang around on a mountain with no books, no tv, and only a goatherd and goats for company, and not get bored. But actually, it's really easy if your surroundings are beautiful and awe-inspiring, and the air is fresh. You feel like you could stay there on the same rock for hours and hours and be totally content without having to do things. I stayed there until the clouds turned a coral pink, goosebumps covered my bare arms, and a cloud of mosquitos convened nearby, hovering hungrily. They never said anything about mosquitos in Heidi. That's the beauty of fiction- you can read about romantic escapades in the mountainside and sleeping in caves, and ignore the fact that there are mosquitos and poison ivy and rabid bats and ants to deal with. Curse nature.

Later, at night, the four of us emerged from our villa and gaped at the full moon that had risen over the shadows of the jagged mountain peaks. The yellowish orb floated just to the right of the ferris wheel like an eerie crystal ball. The Brit had a bottle of Kefraya under his jacket, and I had the corkscrew in my pocket. We were ready for the wheel. What we weren't ready for were the words “doo ba doo”.

“Two by two?” But how were we supposed to drink communally if we were sitting in two separate cars? This was not making sense to me, especially since the Brit had already hopped into the first car along with a second passenger. That meant the wine and the corkscrew were going to be in two separate cars. After a bit of futile pleading, the NYer and I climbed into the second car, having failed to charm the men into giving in, though they were very apologetic about it. They started up the machine, and the wheel began to spin up into the starry sky. This place at night reminded me of the Moulin Rouge, except with a ferris wheel instead of a windmill. The view of the full moon and the nearby town of Diyana, twinkling like reflections of the stars above, was beautiful. In the car ahead of us, New Day screamed as the Brit rocked their car. The NYer and I took turns swigging the bottle of Jameson he had sneaked in under his sleeve as the wheel spun leisurely around, gently swinging the moon up and down and up and down. Later, we bought tickets for a second ride on the ferris wheel, and this time, through the powers of both reason and, more importantly, my sad puppy dog face, we were able to charm them into letting us all go in one car. Aiaiaiaiaiaiaiai!

Even later at night, we took a walk along the gorge's rim, all the way to where the canyon splits, and there, I climbed over the fence and sat on the edge of the precipice, hugging my knees and listening to the rush of the river, to the Kurdish music blaring from one of the villas, and the tribal cries. My body was caught in limbo between two kinds of space, both black and enormous, the one above filled with stars millions and trillions of miles away, the one below an abyss carved out by water over hundreds of thousands of years. It was kind of scary sitting at the edge of a cliff. Even if you have no desire to jump, just thinking for a millisecond about falling over the edge makes your body almost want to do it for real, like when you're playing a video game and find yourself jerking around as if you really were fighting or driving. I don't know why that is. The thought that death is just a small step away is shocking. In a split second, you could go from happy and in love with everything and everyone to falling to your death, and that would be end of it all, the end of everything and everyone you love and hate and feel indifferent to, the end of your future plans, your future journeys to Nepal and Argentina, your future kids and grandkids, your future discoveries and gains and losses, and the end of your cherished pipe dreams. Halas. In one split second, all can become missed opportunities and murky, unfulfilled dreams never to be carried out by the dreamer. Crazy. I tried to push it out of my mind so my body wouldn't follow.

We met a Danish-Kurdish family on the way to the gorge, and they were still out there barbecuing and drinking when we headed back sometime past midnight. There seems to be a lot of people from outside of Iraq that come to Rawanduz, like Danish and Iranian Kurds. Even the Kurds from Sleimani three hours south are very different. The three girls from Sleimani wore gorgeous racier Kurdish outfits with totally see-through sheer fabric “covering” their bare arms and shoulders, and they touched and flirted with the Brit worse than a bunch of American college girls. Strange how much of a difference 3 hours makes. In the US, if you drive 3 hours south from wherever you are, I feel like the people would act pretty much the same. Here, if you drive 3 hours south, it's a whole other world. You can go from being a whore to being a prude in just 3 hours. You can go from peace to war in maybe 6 hours, or even just 1 hour if you drive west to Mosul. You can go from having a life worth equal to a man's to one worth only half of a man's in just 3 hours. Who came up with these silly rules? Was it God? Who came up with God? Was it man? What an imagination we have...

I awoke early the next morning in our villa, walked out, and saw jurassic mountains painted in the sky like stage props. An hour later, I was spiraling straight into the belly of the gorge on a toboggan, wondering what would happen if I didn't brake like the signs were telling me to. I'm not stupid, though- I pulled the brakes every single time I saw a warning sign. Some rules are worth following, especially those concerning rollercoasters in Iraq.