we are pack
On connection, advice, and transhumance.
Two travel epiphanies; connected but loosely stitched together. Threadbare, torn and frayed.
The Darvaza gas crater, also known as the Door to Hell or Gates of Hell, is a burning natural gas field collapsed into a cavern in the middle of the Karakum desert. The first time I saw an Alabay dog it was standing at the rim to the gates of hell in Turkmenistan. The dog looked like a statue, an oversized version of some other thing, a dire wolf with flames behind it. They are large breed dogs, traditionally used for shepherding and transhumance; that ancient practice of moving livestock from one grazing ground to another in a seasonal cycle, lowlands in winter and highlands in summer.
The Alabay is related to many others; the Tibetan Mastiff, the Georgian Shepherd, the Karakachan and the Kangal. It is a tidemark left from foregone nomadic times, when Asia and Europe were known as the one land mass it is, and the Steppe, its highway of grain and grass. Humans and dogs would roam together.
The Alabay looked like something ancient, otherworldly. It is praised in Turkmenistan, statues cast in public squares of the breed, but seeing one walk around the desert with confidence and genetic lived-in skill, it made me feel like a foreign object, and indeed I was. These dogs fight off wolf and bear, they are loyal and strong. Marco Polo is said to have brought some back to Italy after the long haul home.
There are other marks left from this roaming strip of land called the steppe. Standing stones and burial sites in Mongolia that mirror ones found in Ukraine, in Turkey, in France, in Ireland. Worship sites of fire and the sun, stories passed down with names changed, and a closeness and worship of nature that has since evaporated in our collective psyche.
This is one of the thrills of travel, the forensic lived history one can feel of humans doing things together in the past; through art, language, habit, and form, connective tissues through time and space. The evidence of communities and connections. I love to feel how history fades at its edges and is subject to mysterious faulty memory, that time alone can distort our collective ideas. We don’t know for sure how certain things moved from one place to another, we theorize, we tell stories and we hypothesize, but the oldness of things leave question marks more and more as the minutes move on and the ghosts of our past selves shine through. You can see this in the large breed of dog left in the deserts of Turkmenistan.
When I have seen him give talks, his hands stand at attention like a porcelain doll, stuck in position, fingers taut and frozen, seldom bent at the knuckle. He uses them as if he is holding giant ideas in his hands, and indeed he is. In the hours and days after an election in 2016, Timothy Snyder wrote down notes on a subject he knew well, Tyranny. He wanted to know what to do, he wanted to advise an action in the present after spending many hours and years looking to the past as an historian. He wrote twenty lessons learned from the 20th century on what to do in the face of tyranny, action notes. Twenty ways to fight oppression. A concise, deliberate list. Number 12 in this list was “Make eye contact and small talk.”
We are parts of a whole, we know this scientifically; that we are animals that physically thrive off of being social and communal, that celebrate collective awe, we are pack. It is what we feel when we celebrate the success of sports teams we follow, when we dance, when we listen to live music, when we travel, it is religious rapture. Sparkles of this happen each time we look each other in the eye, something is communicated sans words, independent of the language part of the brain, some sort of emotive contact through sensory neurons firing off through pheromones and eye contact. Collective effervescence, what it awakens us to is that we are part of a social system, a community. Why is that inherently a good thing?
In quantitative language, it reduces stress, increases the immune system in the body, our heart rates move in synchronized rhythm, and our breath. We pulse, together.
Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab published a study showing that the most common source of awe is normal people doing normal things. “It was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming—actions of strangers, roommates, teachers, colleagues at work, people in the news, characters on podcasts, and our neighbors and family members. Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty: exceptional virtue, character, and ability, marked by a purity and goodness of intention and action.”
Recognizing connection is a way of locating the self with-in the system. It is a way of orienting oneself, an emotive positioning system.
Being less connected in our day to day, we are seeking to connect, and we connect with devices as they are easy and at hand. These give the illusion of connectedness, but it is incomplete, there are different ways we connect together not captured in the pixelated screens of our smartphones: Biological connection, Spiritual connection, and mental connection. The device gives the illusory feeling of connectedness but it is saccharine, false and void of sustenance. We communicate and connect biologically in ways we do not fully understand, like a baby to a mother, the spark in looking into one and another's eyes. Spiritually we connect in ways that are not related to reason, it is more ephemeral and through feeling and faith.
When we travel we are seeking, at least to some, seeking things out, contact and connection. When we say local or authentic, entailed in these words are small communities that exist that we want to experience and mingle with and be a part of. It is a simple impulse, something we can all relate to, something childlike and evergreen. But we are losing the tools for it, how to talk about natural things. You can see signs of the loss in our language. Robert Macfarlane wrote in “the Lost words” about how in one year the Oxford English dictionary omitted words related to nature such as acorn, bluebell, kingfisher and wren. They were replaced by words like broadband, celebrity and voicemail. We are learning how to prompt computer programs instead of learning how to prompt each other. Learning how to ask ChatGPT what to do for 3 days in Hanoi instead of asking someone who lives there. Digital life is a different language, there are no pheromones.
My curmudgeon self feels this in public transportation. I am instantly transported back to a time before cell phones and apps, and the image in my head is a movable cocktail party in a bus or a subway. Of course, it wasn’t like that, even then, but there was more eye contact, and more synchronized communal rhythms that naturally occur through the limbic system.
I have seen advertisements recently from AirBnB on the commodification of experiences, and because it is digital, it threw me off, but I quickly realized, at least in part, this is what I do for a living with trip planning. I charge a fee for the arranging of experiences. Travel has always been free though, it is why we have limbs. Aristotle talked about our large intestines being so we can have time to contemplate the heavens between eating. We are able to roam, with our bodies and our minds, and in doing this we are more human. Connecting with each other is part of what we do as well. We are pack animals, our health is better in small groups, we are happier, biologically we respond and become fully functional, our empathies and hormones fire off and our bandwidth of ability is fully active.
It then becomes important to go out into the world, physically, not digitally, and have eye contact, conversations, share stories and emotions, and remind ourselves about these connections we are neglecting. Travel can be a tool that helps, it can be something moving, it can be a wonderfully subversive act of backdoor diplomacy in a time when diplomats are being shunned and fired.
I want to help people by teaching how to put oneself into a position of openness that allows for spontaneity to happen. I want to teach how to find experiences rather than just setting them up, I am convinced this is a teachable skill for I have learned it by watching and reading and listening to the poets and singers and explorers and philosophers. You do not need to fill your days with events and things to see and do, you can merely sit still, in a place, and lean over to another and make eye contact and start a conversation. The magic that comes from that is far better than any AirBnB-ing that might occur, if only for it not being some sort of consumption and exchange of funds for service. No, it is just being human.
In addition to making eye contact, some other line items of Timothy Snyder’s 20 Lessons from the 20th Century can be used as field guides for travel as well. This isn’t meant lightly or in jest. The world is shifting and moving and we can all feel it. There are places once thought to be dangerous that no longer are, and places once thought to be stable that have lost footing. In this sort of epoch it is good to be an expert at seeing how things are moving in realtime. From his own words “history does not repeat, but it does instruct.”