Imagining A Life Less Mobile
Try not to mourn the holidays you won’t be taking this summer. We all need to get used to travelling less anyway.
It was early evening, one day last August, when I found myself standing on a rocky buttress, cheering the sudden onset of clouds. A fresh weather-front was barrelling in over the Altai massif, and now the clouds were pluming at the mountaintops, draping columns of rain. By now, after four days in the mountains, I understood what this foreshadowed. Soon, the cloud-cover would fracture the dusk light, and sunbeams would daub chiaroscuro patterns on the land, transmuting the grasslands into prairies of gold. Far away, on the valley floor, smoke coiled from yurt chimneys; a pair of boy-herders chivvied their sheep alongside a stream. But these were pin-pricks of humanity on a floodplain big enough to swallow Manhattan. Up here, I felt certain, the only sentient beings sharing this vantage were the snow leopards padding unseen on the ridgelines, and the raptors wheeling in the sky.
A life devoid of this? Instinctively, I admit, the prospect still feels unconscionable. For much of my adult life I’ve lived in pursuit of moments like those I experienced in West Mongolia’s Chigertai Valley last summer. Over the last decade or so, during which time I’ve scratched a living from writing about…
