You've Got Rhythm.

I recently (three days ago) received a much-sought-after harmonica from my brother and sister-in-law. I have no idea how to play it; but I have a book, Country and Blues Harmonica for the Musically Hopeless. The title fits me quite perfectly, the back cover of it reads “If you can count to 4......you've got rhythm.” So I figured (figure) since I am living here in this soum with a lot of idle time on my hands, I should learn something...why not the harmonica. I already had the book; all I needed was a harmonica. So some eight months after deciding I would learn the instrument, it has finally arrived. I really enjoy belting out appalling sounds from my harmonica; an added bonus to my doing this is that my no-name cat (ner-gui) moans like I am mercilessly beating her every time my lips touch the apparatus. This entertained me for a solid 30 minutes on Saturday night.

I read but didn't get to finish a really really good book, Caucasia. I would really like to finish it, I only have about 30 pages to go, but I accidentally dropped it in a meat truck, and it is now lost; I am afraid it may have to wait until July, when I go home. That is actually a rather good story: The Tale of How I Accidentally Dropped Caucasia in the Back of a Meat Truck.

“The Tale of How I Accidentally Dropped Caucasia in the Back of a Meat Truck”

It all started with me deciding to go to the aimag center (Choibalsan) in January. I needed to go to Choibalsan this particular day because the next day I was supposed to travel to Khentii aimag (the next aimag over) with my sitemate and good friend, Trinh, to meet some of our other Peace Corps friends. This was a Tuesday. I needed to be in Ulaanbaatar by Friday to receive the Swine Flu shot that was mandatory for all us PCVs. So the plan was: I was going to Choibalsan on Tuesday, to Khentii with Trinh on Wednesday, to Ulaanbaatar with Trinh and our other PC friends on Thursday and would be in Ulaanbaatar just in time for the shot. Okay, so I had informed EVERYONE at my school that my plan was to go to Choibalsan that day. I was all packed and ready to go, I had cleaned my house top to bottom including hand-washing my carpet, I had taken out all the water from my house (because in the winter, you can't leave water in your water container because the water will freeze and then your water container will crack and break, flooding your house and seriously pissing you off), given my keys to my neighbors, etc. I mean I was READY to go. I walked down to the store where the cars who are going to Choibalsan that day wait for customers. No cars. No biggie, I have some friends who are drivers. I asked my friend and he said we would go soon. However, he soon drove up to me and said, actually, no one else wants to go today so he wasn't going. I was devastated, sort of. More like, annoyed, but devastated sounds more dramatic. Then I glimpsed down the snow-covered dirt path of a road in my soum and saw a “69”, which is the Mongolian word for an old, crappy Russian jeep. I went over to the driver, who was busy fiddling with ancient parts under the hood, and asked if he was by-chance going to the aimag today. Yes! He replied. Excellent, I thought. I informed him of where I lived and he said he would come pick me up in a bit. A bit turned out to be about 10 minutes later; I thought it was going to be 2-3 hours later, but no, 10 minutes. I climbed into the passenger's seat of the 69, and turned around and said hello to the other passengers. “Ahh,” I thought, “I am going to be able to go to Khentii with Trinh tomorrow.” And I was right, but did not foresee the little “hiccups” that lay ahead of me.

The 69 did not perform well, to say the least. I think we were going about 15 miles an hour, no joke. We also kept stopping every 15-20 minutes, so that the driver could get out, open the hood and fiddle around with some parts, smoke a cigarette, then decide it was time to start driving again and get back in the jeep. About one hour to an hour and half into the trip, the driver got, fiddled under the hood, came back to the jeep with a part in his hand, showed it to us passengers and then shrugged his shoulders and threw it onto the snow on the ground. “Hmm...,” I thought, “I guess it's okay.” If I have learned anything while being in Mongolia, it is to not worry so much and to blindly trust others. Sometimes my blind trust ends in me crying to myself or to No Name The Cat, but usually things turn out fine. As a wise man once said, “Worrying is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do, but gets you no where.” (That is from the movie “Van Wilder”, BTW.......NOT a wise man.) So off we went, missing one part of the engine, but hey, it was okay, right?? Keep in mind I am seated in the passenger's seat, beside the driver. In between the two of us is the gear shifting stick. All of a sudden, smoke starts pouring up from the stick. Yes, I did worry. I have been in cars that have over-heated before, and this was somewhat reminiscent, if not worse. I probably needn't tell you what happened next: the driver got out, fiddled around with some parts, smoked a cigarette, then decided it was time to start driving again and got back in the jeep. Off we went. Also, bear in mind that my soum is 77 kilometers from Choibalsan, our destination. In the summer, it takes about 90 minutes to get there. However, this wasn't the summer; this was January and the winter in Mongolia is no joke, especially this year....maybe you heard that this year's winter was the worst it has been in some 50 years or so. The technical term for a ridiculous winter like this one is zud, FYI.

So, we had been driving from about 2- 2 ½ hours by this point. Of course, we had been continuously stopping to pick people up and drop people off in the countryside, and making numerous repairs on the 69. Just as we were starting to go at a reasonable speed, the 69 comes to a halt. “Oh, the gasoline has run out,” says the driver. “Oh,” I think to myself, “gasoline isn't something most everyone checks to make sure he has before going on a trip; ESPECIALLY a trip into the countryside where there is NOTHING and NO ONE for miles, and most definitely NOT a Quiktrip or BP.”....But really, surprisingly I wasn't even that annoyed or mad. I was pretty content; the only thing that really worried me was how cold it was and wondering how I would get warm.

So the driver climbs on top of the jeep to try to get cell phone reception. He is able to get some, but just barely. He calls his friend, and tells him what has happened. Of course, since he had to climb onto of the jeep to have reception, it wasn't very good reception and his phone kept cutting out. Meanwhile, all of us in the jeep are thinking and then yelling to him “Just write a message!” When he finally hears us and understands our rationale to have him just write a message, his phone's battery dies. Another person in the jeep has a phone and writes a message. From then on, the consensus in the 69 is that “someone is coming with gasoline.” When are they coming? Why, now of course. They are coming right now.

After sitting in an unmoving vehicle from some 2 hours waiting for the “someone coming with gasoline,” I am cold. Even though I am wearing 3 pairs of pants, 2 pairs of socks, L.L. Bean toe warmers, lined fur winter boots, 3 shirts, 1 sweater and my winter coat that is supposed to be able to withstand -20 degree weather, I am cold. Thankfully, I have my winter deel (the robe like clothes Mongolians wear) in my bag, and put it on underneath my winter coat. I am looking good. After we (the other passengers and I) wait for about an hour more, getting colder all the while, one of them decides to go to a “near-by” ger to wait there. I put near-by in quotations because from the jeep we were sitting in, one could not see this ger we were now trudging through 3 feet of snow to get to. About 30-45 minutes later, and to me what seemed an eternity, we finally made it to the ger. Walking those 30-45 minutes in the 3 feet of snow may have been one of the physically hardest things I have had to endure in Mongolia. My hands and feet started off being so cold that they ached, the kind of ache that makes you want to cry, scream, do anything to make the pain stop, but you are too tired to do anything but feel the cold and hope that you get to somewhere warm soon. But then, after walking for a bit and having the bitter cold wind continuously beat against my face, my hands and feet began to feel a bit fuzzy, and the cold didn't feel so bad anymore. Instead of making me feel better, happier, this worried me greatly. They say when you are getting frostbite, you start to feel warm, so you think you are getting better, but instead you are about to lose your limbs. I was not looking forward to being the one-handed American in my town. I have been plagued with having trouble sleeping my whole life. When I was younger, my biggest problem falling asleep was that my mind would always turn to the worst thing I had seen or read, and then I wouldn't want to go to sleep because I often had nightmares. My childhood nightmares caused my parents to bane me from watching many things such as The Lion King, because some kids cried when the daddy lion (king) got killed. But, even though I didn't see The Lion King until later on in my life, I certainly watched Rescue 911 with William Shatner, despite it scaring me. In one particular episode of Rescue 911, a young boy and his mother get into a car accident and the boy drags his unconscious mother out of the car and a mile or something down the road to get help. William Shatner said that the boy was able to keep going because of a book his mother used to read to him: The Little Engine that Could. In the book, the little engine constantly said to himself “I think I can, I think I can” and “Never give up.” Those two phrases helped that boy drag his mother to safety and they are the same two things I repeated to myself while trudging through the snow for 30 minutes, because the thought of just giving up and laying down in the snow actually occurred to me – that's how bad it was.

So that was somewhat dramatic. We got to the ger, looking pretty ridiculous, I thought, but then compared to the herders, whose ger we were intruding upon, we looked like we had just come from New York City. And by that I mean, we looked FANCY compared to them. We waited in their ger for some 2 or 3 more hours until a SUV came for us. Of course, they were already some 9 or 10 people in the SUV, so what's 5 more people?? We crammed into the cramped quarters of the SUV and drove back to the spot where we had left the jeep some 3 hours or so ago. And this is how I ended up accidentally dropping Caucasia in the back of a meat truck. A meat truck, with three Mongolian men in it was waiting by the jeep, apparently waiting to take me to Choibalsan. The ride itself was rather uneventful, I arrived in Choibalsan about an hour later, still in one piece. Of course the total time it took me to get to Choibalsan was around 8 hours in all...but 8 hours well spent, I suppose.