Rough Magic. Lara Prior-Palmer
all.
Beneath the plane window the steppe folded in green waves. As we descended, white tents appeared at valley mouths, met by colorful tin-roofed houses flowing down the gullies towards gray high-rises. The plane let me out in Ulaanbaatar, 8,000 kilometers away from home.
Through the taxi glass I saw fragments of a city. Men in big coats curled around fires, denim-clad figures spilled into the traffic. Small-windowed blocks stood alongside nomads’ tents at the outskirts; farther in, Soviet architecture leaned into slicker glass structures. By now there was no sign of the steppe. The only hint of horses rested on the tögrög—the Mongolian currency—that I handed to the taxi driver: wild-maned ponies cantered off the banknote edges.
At four the next morning I sat sleepless in a hotel room among bloated white pillows. Delving into my suitcase, I pulled out a collection of tangled ropes and confused penknives that had spent their lives dormant in my brothers’ drawers. There was also a copy of The Tempest, which I had taken no interest in at school, but after leaving found myself diving into for comfort. Shakespeare speaks another language, yet I never needed to know the whole meaning to be moved by the sounds—Caliban’s “I cried to dream again” moves me to real tears.
My eleven-year-old self, on the other hand, did not spare the play a thought—I was pursuing real commotion. There was nothing like the sound of Mr. Thompson’s angry voice soaring. “Get out,” he’d shout, when he caught me whisper-giggling. “I said, ‘Get. Out.’” In the wasteland of the corridor I would lean against the wall while the pink in my cheeks faded, unaware that in the play I’d left on my desk were a series of rebellions I might have admired.
Now I lay on the floor of that sublimely square hotel room ripping out soliloquies and gluing them into my flimsy Winnie-the-Pooh notebook. I imagined they’d live out the race in my backpack and might lift me out of any lows. U just have to get through the pain with . . . poetry, Mum had written in an email that midnight, British time.
The following morning, competitors met for the first time. Stuffed into a corporate room in the city, ours was a silence of not quite wanting to begin. Horses seem to do these things better. On meeting, they amble and sniff bottoms. Sometimes they squeal.
In the 1930s, John Steinbeck embarked on a scientific research trip to the Sea of Cortez. Reflecting on his fellow crew members, he wrote, “None of us was possessed of the curious boredom within ourselves which makes adventurers or bridge players.” Were we a handful of those people who cannot sit still? Or were we all seeking the great death? I believe we sought some kind of oblivion. The characters in The Tempest leap from their sinking ship in a “fever of the mad.”
Maybe we desired a heroic proving. I was aware there were people in the world who classified themselves as adventurers, inhabiting the realm of the extreme, dog-panting for epics and gagging for photos in Gore-Tex. I didn’t know how many were here, or whether I was about to become one. The “longest, toughest” superlative had surely appealed to many, though I’ve conveniently erased from memory whether or not it had been a draw for me personally. What would my eleven-year-old self think of me buying into such a constructed adventure?
As the hello-how-are-yous of the crew piled onto one another, I spotted Maggie, the race steward, at the head of the room. She had mattresses of curly red hair. In a phone conversation two weeks prior, she’d told me that I “frankly” didn’t sound prepared. She was not to take me seriously until the finish line, and even then her eyes would search me with the same unconvinced look, a sort of shock that I’d ever made it beyond the borders of my mother’s vegetable patch.
The day was made up of a series of briefings on the race. The veterinarians explained horses’ hydration levels, gut sounds, lameness protocol, and heart rates. Pushing horses too hard would lead to elevated rates. The rules imposed a two-hour penalty or race expulsion if a horse’s heart rate remained above 64 beats per minute for a period longer than forty-five minutes after the end of each leg.
“Look—after—your—horse,” concluded the Scottish vet.
It seemed simple enough, though it hadn’t crossed my mind you could take a horse’s heart rate, let alone how four hours’ exercise might change that rate.
During a break, the paramedic handed out medical forms. I didn’t meet his gaze as I handed the paper back to him, uneasy about its incompleteness. Aunt Lucinda is a stickler for eye contact. If I manage to look her in the eye when she’s telling me off, she congratulates me later (such is her stick-and-carrot formula), but I find focusing difficult.
“I haven’t had a rabies vaccine. I’m sorry. I’m not sure what these other ones are.”
His mouth opened. Apparently the steppe was teeming with rabid dogs. I’d not had time for the recommended vaccinations before departure.
“Not even hepatitis A?”
Was that a sexually transmitted disease? I slunk away.
Bureaucracy flapped on like a beached fish—riders weighed, papers signed, headshots taken. By the lunchtime talk, “Rules of the Race,” the room understood itself a little better. The Derby (they went on) was an unsupported one-stage race, but riding would be limited to the hours between 7 a.m. and 8:30 p.m., outside of which we’d be penalized. Positions were policed by rider satellite trackers, which would also allow people to follow the race on the internet. There was no set route, only twenty-five obligatory horse-changing stations, where we would choose our next steeds. Those stations changed every year, and the course had been kept secret until today, when we were handed map books with wiggly red lines on each page.
By the time Maggie and Katy, the organizer who discounted my entry fee, leaned back in their armchairs and opened the floor for questions, I had grown comfortable enough in my seat to share some qualms. I raised an arm and waited.
“Will anyone be waking us up in the mornings?”
My voice was meek, as if I’d emerged from a breathless swim in a chlorine pool. These voices—the chlorine edition is just one—bring themselves up from my internal cellar and pour forth, unfiltered.
The room cackled more with amazement than amusement. They didn’t know my alarm clock was an untrustable brand of wristwatch from a French supermarket. The panel, including Maggie, barely answered. “One fool can ask more questions than ten wise men can answer”—so says a Mongolian proverb.
My tongue asked the next question without me. “If you’re with a partner and one of you falls, can you both ride one horse?”
Heads swung around. I vacated my face as though my words weren’t intentional. I wanted to feel out the limits of this strange race. The panel admitted to having no rule against my proposition. As usual, I could sense everyone else in the room but had no grasp of myself—not of how I appeared, nor of what I might do next. Pixie mode is automatic, a relic from school, released to tickle any uptight armpits in a room. She was born, this pixie inside me, in response to an atmosphere of seriousness.
On she went, wondering aloud, “So you could do the whole thing in a truck? With each of the twenty-five ponies successively loaded into the boot?”
Frowns met frowns, a few stragglers laughing. In this way, the beginning quickly slipped from my control. That the great race was a bit ridiculous—that we were in danger of forgetting this—seemed to be the idea hiding behind my questions, but those questions probably just prompted other riders to decide I was delusional. Never mind. The following day would cast us into the grasslands.
I walked back to the hotel. Wet streets sobbed the summer away, waiting for the winter to return with a duvet of snow. A thin lady strutted past me, coatless, perhaps unused to her own bare arms. Ulaanbaatar sits at a coordinate