Oxygen

I

Three thousand, three thousand two hundred and beyond… In the Humahuaca Valley in northwest Argentina the altitude sets in and the human body’s resilience is tested. Just how much oxygen does a body need, anyway?

Normally there’s a mild headache that stretches on from several yesterdays. Normally there’s shortness of breath and lethargy. On a first occasion though, during a first clash with the heights, it must be usual to wonder through the night if the symptoms remain within that normal range. As there’s no past experience, nothing to compare an individual reaction to, there’s no exact measurement to be had.

Is this how initial acclimatisation should feel? Is it static? Is it getting worse?

What’s known: not all human bodies are the same. Elevations affect people differently and while three thousand plus metres is not nearly as high as we can go, at some point there comes for everyone that stage where the body is deteriorating faster than it can adjust – when, oxygen-starved, a body slowly dies. It’s not clear just at what elevation a body will succumb to altitude sickness. The only way to know about the nature of one’s own body is to try.

It’s supposed to take about a month to fully adjust. The body produces more red blood cells to better grab oxygen at lower air pressure. Usually after a few days the headache will go, and the breathlessness will gradually dissipate over the coming weeks. Usually the lethargy does not last.

But is this how acclimatisation should feel?

II

The country was a galaxy in grandeur, the bus turned into a toy with its passengers as pinheads, ants. In a landscape like that, of soft yellows, reds and browns, vast and empty, the human is easily understood to be not more than an unimpressive bag of chemicals, affected by changing conditions and prone to reactions. We’re no stronger than the wind and the air.

The country had been creative, with cacti decorated desert hillsides and twisted, multicoloured cliffs that earned their poetic names like the ‘Artist’s Palette,’ and looked as a great wealth of minerals. There were windblown rock formations and it was worth the breathing strain to see it.

Yet from the reaction to the lower pressure it should’ve been some alpine expedition. It should have been on foot with a walking stick, possibly ropes. There shouldn’t have been a bus service at all, nor a highway, nor beyond that open country, buildings.

That the human species has colonised almost every terrestrial environment would account for the two small towns on either side of the bridge. It would explain La Quiaca and Villazon.

It was time to get out and try to stretch one’s legs, because the future was up ahead, across the little bridge, where those bags of cement were, at great speed, going.

III

They were running across the bridge, hundreds of people, without any formalities. What drove their urgency was at first unclear; that they could run at all was a wonder. Where was the oxygen? Well, they say the locals are born with larger lungs.

It was a colourful procession, short indigenous men and wrinkle-faced women with swinging plaits and carefully balanced bowler hats. They lugged bags of building supplies, grain and cases of fruit, more, unknown boxes and baskets carried in multicoloured aguayo blankets slung over their shoulders and across their backs.

Among the bowler hats were several distinct varieties: black, brown or dark green, full-sized, nicely fit on the head or child-sized and looking a bit precarious, balanced at a fashionable side angle.

To the left, another line was coming southwards: people of the same crowd with the same tanned skin and distinctive cheek bones.  They were then carrying nothing but just as quickly. What was all the rush for?

The world has many borders. There’s a winding train line border from Belarus into Vilnius, a muddy channel with reeds between Iran and Iraq, there’s a long line of Tata trucks parked along the road to Haridaspore. And I remember how as another bus had once crossed from Bulgaria to Macedonia the passengers had hid cartons of cigarettes on the bus roof through the skylight as it drove slowly enough not to knock them off, through the checkpoint.

Still, of all borders it’s that one, La Quiaca in Argentina to Villazon in Bolivia, which is one of the strangest of all.

Why were they running? A tourist said they were contrabandistas, desperately smuggling as many loads of Argentina back into Bolivia as they could while Argentine customs officers stopped for lunch and siesta. It was a street market on the run; it seemed as if half of Argentina would be removed and resold before the customs post reopened.

Argentina has a Titanic-sized human border leak that’s impossible to fix; only a few people stood in the official queue.

And although it was but a small bridge it was a border that seemed natural, due to contrast, not least in the human faces to the north and to the south.

To the south was a largely immigrant country with a strong Italian influence that altered the pronunciation of the Spanish language. To the north there was an indigenous majority country still waiting, as at 2005, for its first indigenous president, an achievement which was surprisingly just one year away. His name was Evo Morales and people would speak of the end of Andean Apartheid after his election.

I wondered what it would be like to have an indigenous Bolivian friend, Quechua or Aymara. Would such a friendship have a distinctive Andean shape to it and how would it fit into the rest-of-life jigsaw, so entirely different as to be left waiting to one side, unable to place? What would life be like in La Paz, after I took up my new Bolivian job?

I remembered my mother, who’d warned me to watch out for the multitude sickness. I can only imagine that’s a rare type of affliction which strikes in elevated locations that are also crowded, places just like the La Quiaca – Villazon border.

And there, incidentally, running is certainly not as obvious an activity as stopping to catch breath.

IV

The Bolivian official reminded me, ‘thirty days’ as he stamped my passport. I thought he was fishing for an insistence on ninety for a small unofficial fee, but I might be wrong about that. In any case it was already planned to pursue a work visa, a process into which a week of my life would disappear, later, in the Bolivian capital.

My first Bolivian steps were in the town of Villazon, which, apart from that Andean dust you can’t do anything about, was clean and fastidiously swept. Somehow I’d imagined a more chaotic Bolivia.

They had an organised ticket system at the railway station and with my newly acquired Bolivianos I bought a ticket for Tupiza, the nearest town.

A robust train conductor in a hard cylindrical cap with a tin sign across it, labelling him in Spanish, greeted passengers at the carriage door; and he religiously swept the carriage every half hour or so.

I sat dusty-comfortable, watching the on-train video of traditionally costumed Bolivians dancing around a train, to the eclectic rhythms of Andean cumbias, and the out-the-window movie of banded dry hills, small gullies, distant mountains and a sunset over cactus flats.

There were a few adobe hut villages with washing drying on thorny bushes by a stream. The occasional goods truck chewed up dust and bowler hatted, long plaited goat herders walked from somewhere over the horizon to somewhere else over the horizon. Finally, there was night.

More Argentina...

More Bolivia...

More Mountains, or... 

Getting About by Rickshaw... which is nothing to do with it, really...

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Oxygen

Welcome to Vilnius

Photos: Ragnar Scheen

You can look, but while you might find seasons in the politics you won’t find politics in the seasons.

Autumn: the tracks appeared to trace a stream below, or several but as the train meandered along hillsides direction was difficult to contemplate.  The morning was reluctant and the wooded valleys were almost drained of colour.  In the yellow of the last leaves and the low grasses was a sense of farewell to the year; and while the white of the birch trunks had momentarily gained prominence and the first snow must’ve fallen by then, winter’s renovation remained awaited.  Primarily it was a landscape descending into brown, into the darkness of pine and wooden Belarusian villages.  It was the story of a border lost somewhere too in the season.

It was rather in the speed of the train, in the slowing, the pausing and the chugging along a little further that the border was at first suggested, as though there might be a schedule to the crossing.  Only when it seemed that the wood and the hillside might stretch beyond the autumn did other evidence appear.  It came in the unlikely form of low concrete posts, set among the trees in pairs, like statues of a long ago out-of-love couple meeting in the forest for old time’s sake, or perhaps to collect wood for the fire of their old age.  In each pair the nearer was painted red and green, for Belarus, while its mate was white with the feature of stripes in yellow, green and red: the stripes of Lithuania.  That old couple came near and withdrew: like the train the border held no steady course.

And it is possible to try to protect the blessings of the past from the uncertainties of the future.  And it is possible to try to safeguard the future from the ravages of the past.

In a pause in the forest the Belarusian guards boarded, to see that the passenger had all he papers they could wish for, including hotel receipts to account for every night in the country.  Beyond the post-couple the Lithuanians boarded, but for them the passport checking felt more as an afterthought, a ‘suppose we should know who is coming into the country.’  Perhaps their preference might more naturally have been to sleep longer, under the blanket away from autumn.

But a passport with a kangaroo on its cover was as the yellow leaves in the woods, it brought a slight energy with it, surprised as they were to see it.  Enquiries were made, assurances came that no visa was required.  Somebody official must’ve checked a nationality list.

The Vilnius station, not an hour from the border, sits upon a hill with the centre of the old town in the cobblestone capital in a small valley below.  There are about 500,000 people in Vilnius, 3 million in Lithuania.

I trailed the other passengers moving down into damp streets.  While for many, they must’ve been coming home; while for others, they must’ve been there a thousand times before: I was busy not knowing where I was going, taking in the charms of history as recorded in the buildings as I followed a random road.  Church spires multiplied as the valley city took over.

Too, I was busy contemplating the need for a scientist, how to, in a new place, locate a pathologist in a diagnostic centre.  It’s not that I’d befallen any illness, fortunately.  I required no tests and indeed it wasn’t just any pathologist that would do.  I needed one called Rita.

Lithuania has a long history.  They say its language is of the Baltic branch and related to Latvian, and that it’s the most conservative language in Europe, the one that’s evolved the least from the Sanskrit roots of the Indo-European language family.  They say there’s a village in Lithuania’s north called Indija, where local linguistic peculiarities have some commonality with languages still spoken in Pakistan’s Baltistan.

Once, at the end of the fourteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was one of the largest countries in Europe, with territory stretching to the Black Sea.  And in 1991 the country made its mark on history again, as the first Soviet republic to declare independence, a move that cost the lives of 14 Lithuanians when the Soviet Army attacked the Vilnius TV Tower.  But the movement had history’s blessing.  The Soviet break-up started in Lithuania.

In a way it was that transition that paved the way for my need of a pathologist.  When the borders opened, a Norwegian friend of mine Ragnar was sent to the country on business.  As that business over the years developed so did his passion for Lithuania.  He took the country into his heart or maybe it captured him.  But beyond business he contributed in various ways, to promote modernity and development.  He’d taken an apartment in Vilnius and although he wasn’t arriving until the following day I was lucky, because a pathologist called Rita held for me the keys.

I kept in mind my general luck too in finding new addresses in unknown cities.  I kept my eyes on the works of art that were the buildings of the old town.  I took in the signs of each snaking alleyway just as the signs of autumn had taken in me.  There were Northern European style shops playing American background music.  I saw proper supermarkets with metal poles outside to tie your pet dog to.  There were large bookstores, music stores and cafés. 

Although I missed Ukraine already, where I’d been living that year; although I enjoyed Belarus, memories stirred.  It was as though in Vilnius I’d arrived back into a happy Northern European past.  All the same, should a chimney sweep have passed by on the street it wouldn’t have seemed altogether out of place.

There may have been queries with people on the street but I found the alleyway I needed.  Soon I was sitting opposite Rita-in-a-white-lab-coat and drinking a cup of coffee.  There was a book open on the desk between us with multicoloured microscope pictures on its pages.  I wondered how to diagnose my being there: I doubt there are multicoloured microscope pictures that can do that.  Perhaps it was simply the autumn that had taken me in that direction.  Rita picked up the phone and dialled Norway.

When she was able to, she whisked me across the city by car, to Ragnar’s apartment: open-plan, modern and with that wooden, pine-type smell that can easily remind one of Oslo.  It had a peaked wooden roof with no ceiling and on the table was a note, in Norwegian, to me.  ‘Welcome to Vilnius,’ it read, ‘Try the beer in the fridge.  Lithuanian beer is good.’  In retrospect I’d say it was probably the most modern accommodation I’d had for the best part of a year.

The apartment was an art gallery: a fish swimming from a rafter, wooden angels over there and of course, candles everywhere.  I surveyed the room and found again that smile that had been with me since I’d left Belarus, the re-finding of a different Northern European dimension to life.

Ragnar arrived from Oslo the next day.  It was the first time we’d met in five and a half years.  We spoke English, then Norwegian once again, and the hardest part was the ‘yes’, the rediscovering an automatic Norwegian ‘ja, ja, ja’ to replace the Russian ‘da, da, da’ I’d picked up in East Ukraine, although I was never skilled at Russian.

We found a restaurant some floors below street level, in a ‘mind your head’ type of cellar.  They served sausages by the half-metre and beer in tall glasses, by the metre.  We walked around the castle and up the hill to the historic three white crosses that were destroyed in the Soviet era but were rebuilt when the politics turned.

And in the evening we walked to the end of the street to find a forest overlooking a river.  It was a landscape descending into brown, at that time of the year.

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“Look! From the glowing west, forceful and angry winds

Are eastward moving with ferocious, headlong haste,

And bringing biting frosts to our Lithuania dear.

My friends, let’s to the house and build a glowing blaze.”[1]

-         From the poem Metai, or The Seasons, by Kristijonas Donelaitis.  This epic poem from about 1765 is considered the first classical piece of fiction written in the Lithuanian language.  From the third part of the poem, ‘Autumn Boon’.

Stay Happily Baltic, with Latvia or Estonia!

Retire eastwards back to Belarus.

Or go for the tropics in Trinidad!

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Welcome to Vilnius

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[1] English translation of the poem is here: http://members.efn.org/~valdas/autumn.html