Rough Magic. Lara Prior-Palmer
hung about in the air when I sidled up to Devan Horn to find out a little more. She was a gap that needed filling; I’d been circling around her in conversations all day. I found her facing away from the fire with her arms crossed. She answered my queries looking straight at me, the firelight flickering up her rounded cheeks. She was studying criminology at “the third-best school for criminology in the U.S.” and had grown up in Austin, Texas. She was on the U.S. national endurance riding team and “only” twenty years old. She asked me no questions. The conversation concluded with silence.
An American film crew from ABC had arrived earlier that afternoon to make a documentary of the Derby. They quickly discovered “Devan’s bravado” and took wide-angled shots of her staring at the horizon in her slick purple sunglasses, the wind mopping her hair and jostling the grasses behind her.
“What’s the plan, you gonna win this thing?”
She looked at the interviewer, deadpan. Universe, move out the way. Behold, Devan Horn, endurance rider from the West. “Yes.”
What had we all missed by not growing up in Texas?
I think the rest of us understood we, too, needed faith in the race and in ourselves. But we were under the impression that we would need just as much doubt, since the odds were against us. Could envisaging victory, or foretelling any story, make it come true?
Well, what if the race had already happened, in all our preparatory thoughts and words, and we were simply now going to receive it?
I hummed my way back to the ger, where Paddy and Matthias were in mad-rabbit mode, flinging discarded headlamps and Mongolian phrasebooks over their shoulders. They had come lathered in death-prevention equipment but they needed now to minimize their luggage weight. Theirs was a very professional paranoia, one that rendered most alternative attitudes naive. I slid into bed and wrote in my Winnie-the-Pooh notebook, feeling I was no match for their good middle age and doubled-up mapping systems.
Matthias soon interrupted our sleep to announce he felt very smelly. I lifted my head to check if his words were real. His legs were sprawled off the end of his mattress.
“Why do you smell?” I asked.
“It’s all the carbs I’ve been eating at this base camp,” he sighed. “Making me really stinky.”
Minutes later he let out a prolonged, equine groan.
And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.
—The Tempest
What gets you out of bed? The thought of breakfast.
What gets you out of bed? The idea there is somewhere to go.
It is the first morning of the race proper. An hour before the start gun, the mist gives way to a weighty heat. I wander among scurrying riders—saddles taped, ropes tied, Sesame Snaps packed—and queue up for luggage weigh-ins with scary steward Maggie. Others have packed a perfect 4.9 kilograms, just below the 5-kilogram limit. My kit, dangling from the miniature scales, only weighs 3.4 kilograms. Maggie deals me a look. I sprint up to the ger and stuff in some of Paddy’s unwanted toilet paper, unsure what else to take. According to one of the race organizers, Mongolians on the steppe often travel unladen, barely a vegetable in tow.
When the herder hands me the reins of a tiny gray pony, I think, Oh dear, if only I were as little. Snoozing Todd, my Australian tent-mate, waltzes over to the horse lines a few minutes after me as though it’s all a giant holiday. We are the last to arrive.
My tendency for lateness comes from a fear of feeling committed when early. Even on the special occasions when I decide to be early, I still end up being late. Time is a muscle that seems to randomly flex and relax in a bid to misplace me and many others. I can’t rid myself of the sensation that I’m about to fall off the back of the world, as you would fall off a treadmill.
The entity in charge of my dreams brings this theme up at least once a week. While writing about the race, I’ve had some specific Mongol Derby dreams in which I’m terribly behind time. In one, I can’t make the decision to sign on, and when I do, I’m too late, so I just drive the race in a car through a fantastic hybrid country of futuristic San Francisco, Mongolian steppe, and rural England. In another, I’m forced to bicycle through a swimming pool to get to the start of the race in time, but I miss it anyway. Time always wins.
I swing myself on. The gray horse and I walk over to Richard, the photographer, and I ask him to lengthen the pony’s bridle. I’ve seen other riders treating Richard with half-bowed heads—but the pony resists, butting him in the armpit as we turn away. I fear for his camera.
We move to the start line, tensed upon our horses, talking at their ears. There are stories of carnage at past race starts—ponies celebrating the gathering by flinging their backs and disposing of their riders. The pony I’m on doesn’t seem the type for such theatrics. He walks in a trance, his tail swishing against space, sights of grass. So much to eat, so little time. Is that what they all think? He sighs.
Ahead on the plain a blue banner hangs from leaning stumps: WELCOME BRAVE RIDERS. It’s a brittle sight. I am not brave, am actually very jittery—scared of the dark in the yard at home, always creeping through it in the gait of a chicken. Then again, I’m tired of the hype. Even here on the start line, I only half believe the stories about the race being so awful. A part of me is looking back up at the world from its underbelly, saying Come along, don’t be scared, there’s nothing down here, like Dad used to say from the cellar, even if it was full of deadly winter frogs.
We congregate around a red-robed lama, or “high priest,” who sits cross-legged on the grass. When he begins chanting a blessing for our journey, we try to hold the ponies still, but they’re fidgeting in reaction to our nerves. Todd is slurping water at my side. Bubbles slip up the plastic tube from his backpack to his mouth. He radiates the smell of last night’s beer. Around us are the other twenty-nine riders. I feel the steppe inspect us: a curious bunch, a motley crowd, a sea of legs dropping from horse tummies. In one of her text messages, Aunt Lucinda worried that my long legs would drag on the ground from a Mongolian pony. She suggested I purchase roller skates to protect my feet.
Aunt and I did not part on the best of terms. The day before she went to Austria, I decided to rub some sweat off her horse’s tummy while she was near his head, which upset him enough to bite her boob. She got cross. I think she was in large amounts of boob-specific pain. I felt bad. In Ulaanbaatar, I received a wordless email from her, with a photo of a pink-and-purple breast in the attachment. The subject line instructed me not to share it with anyone else.
Some minutes into the chant, my gray pony begins dancing his hooves. A giggle ricochets down my body. I turn him away and see Matthias splatted out on the ground. Above him stands his confused pony—What little effort, for such results. The lama in red chants on, unaware. To the rescue strides the British doctor assigned to monitor competitors. He picks his way through the ponies, moving to the glory of his bristling beard, and leans down to inspect the wilted Matthias, while the Scottish head vet marches in to catch the loose pony. It kicks him. He rebounds with a pained vowel, muffling his whelp so as not to interrupt the lama.
Twelve minutes of chanting quietens us, though most riders don’t know quite what has been said—as far as I’m aware, none of us understands Tibetan. I have a verdant urge to explode into the plains. There’s an umbrella planted at an angle ahead, absurd in the midmorning heat. If ultra-trained Matthias is already on the ground, I’ve no hope of making it beyond the horizon line. So I’ll be the first past that umbrella and at least begin the race with a win.
“Shall we give o’er and drown?” says the Boatswain in The Tempest. “Have you a mind to sink?”
10