There they were, a fleet of ships in the desert.
And nature stepped away from us
As if we are not needed…
– Osip Mandelstam
I’ve seen many strange things in my travels through Asia: the Karni Mata Temple in northern India, a holy place packed with thousands of holy rats that scurry up, down, around, and over everything, including visitors’ shoes; the Flintstones-like cave cities in Cappadocia, Turkey, carved out of volcanic rock, still inhabited today; the sarcophagus of the Old Testament prophet Daniel in Uzbekistan, a velvet-draped slab of marble 18 meters long, for legend says that his body continues to grow. But the sight I saw as the road now opened up in front of us on the Aral’s former seabed was the strangest of them all.
In this linked essay collection, award-winning author Jeff Fearnside analyzes his four years as an educator on the Great Silk Road, primarily in Kazakhstan. Peeling back the region’s layers of culture, environment, and history, Fearnside creates a compelling narrative about this faraway land and soon realizes how the local, personal stories are, in fact, global. He sees firsthand the unnatural disaster of the Aral Sea—a man-made environmental crisis that has devastated the region and impacts the entire world. He examines the sometimes controversial ethics of Western missionaries, and reflects on personal and social change once he returns to the United States.
There they were, a fleet of ships in the desert.
There were about a dozen in all, rudders jammed into the dry mud, anchors lowered—a redundant gesture. Two large ships, about 200 feet long and a thousand tons each, stood side by side so close that it was easy to imagine sailors scurrying about to transfer fish or fuel, supplies or crew. The smallest of the group was about 100 feet long and a hundred tons. It stood alone, an orphan. The others were pointed in every direction as if heedless of their neighbors, a massive traffic jam in the making that was stopped by the receding waters.
“It’s a shame these ships were wasted,” I said in English. A few minutes later, Agytai said nearly the same thing in Russian.
He explained that as the sea retreated, the fishermen kept moving their fleet to keep it from becoming grounded. Eventually it ended up here, the deepest part. But this became cut off, and the fishermen could do nothing as their ships rode the waters gently to the bottom and then rode the mud that was left until there was no water at all, only baked earth. Through it all, the ships remained completely upright. From a distance, a mirage shimmering above the sand, they still appeared to be at sea.
“How long have they been here?” I asked Agytai.
“For a long time.”
“Exactly how long?”
“A long time,” he repeated. He squinted into the past and estimated it had been about 30 years, or since the early 1970s.
We parked the UAZ and walked right up to the beached relics. It was easy enough to climb on board many of them; one featured an open hatch right at ground level, though for most we had to pull ourselves over the gunwales and onto the decks. Anything useful—radios, radar, sounding devices—had been stripped long ago. Even much of the metal had been salvaged as scrap. The rest was left to rust and remember better times.
I plunged down into engine rooms that no longer smelled of diesel but of decay, scurried up ladders on masts where I scouted not schools of fish but rather vistas of desolation. Rusting gangways gave way, imitating the roll and pitch of the sea.
Ordinarily, I’m not a rubbernecker. I don’t enjoy watching disasters, either in person or on the news. For some reason, though, I was drawn in fascination to this one. Perhaps it was because it had happened long ago, enough for me to feel removed from it. Perhaps it was because these ships didn’t have faces, faded eyes, or raspy, faded voices. Still, they were the ruined relics of real people’s livelihoods, and I was crawling all over them as if I were a kid again. I felt a little guilty, but I was having fun. We all were. At the time, it didn’t feel like exploitation, but now I’m no longer sure.
On the way back to Aralsk, our engine died. We were still some 30 kilometers from town, it was already late afternoon, and it had begun to rain. I had visions of a long, wet walk back. Fortunately, Agytai fixed the problem quickly; just as quickly, we became stuck in the sand. Even our four-wheel-drive vehicle could find no traction on the road where there was never meant to be a road. Twice we hopped out and pushed ourselves out of the mire. Eventually it stopped raining, and we found better ground.
Shortly after these incidents, we overtook a man on a bicycle, an old-fashioned model with one gear and high handlebars that forced the rider to sit up straight in his seat. The vision was so absurd that had someone told me it was a mirage I might have believed it, except that we could hear him talking to another man walking alongside him. Where they had come from, and where they were going, was an existential puzzle.
Though the area looked to me no different from what we had just passed through, Agytai became newly animated. He began talking about the spread of the old sea, a place where he swam and camped when he was ten, a beautiful beach with white sands.
“We had a camp there,” he said, pointing to a scrubby tree. “Do you see that hill over there? That was the edge of the sea.”
Though I consider myself to have a good imagination, I simply could not conjure up the image of how it once looked. The present reality was simply too glaring; it obliterated the thought of everything else. All I could see was a broad, undulating stretch of sand running to a distant bluff and lapping at its base. On the horizon, three camels plowed slowly through this sand-sea.
Back at the NGO office in Aralsk, hanging almost as an afterthought on a hallway wall, was a painting of the old Aral Sea. Bright blue waters with small whitecaps surged onto a beach so lovely it might have been in the Bahamas or Tahiti. A stout wooden rowboat lay parked there. Behind this, to the left, rose a steep, high bluff topped with a willow tree and thick, soft grasses. The scene was idyllic and inviting, absolutely pristine. One of our party, a local woman, gazed at it for a long moment.There’s a Russian saying, “Posle nas khot potop”—“After us, even flood.”
“If that’s what it looked like,” she finally said, “then the people who ruined it are twice the jerks.”
There’s a Russian saying, “Posle nas khot potop”—“After us, even flood.” It means, “If they won’t affect us personally, why should we care about the consequences of our actions?” Say some teenagers enjoy a wild party in somebody’s home while the parents are away. When the parents return, those responsible for the destruction will be long gone. Posle nas khot potop.
The Soviets had their party. The rest of the world is now aware of all that happened, but there’s not much to do about it; the liquor cabinet was raided, the good china broken, and the partygoers dispersed as soon as they heard footsteps on the staircase. We simply have to roll up our sleeves and put our house in order.
Read two poems by Jeff Fearnside also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Milosz Maslanka, courtesy Shutterstock.