Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (33 page)

The canal began near Turkmenistan’s southeast corner, branching off the Amudarya and following the bed of the long-dead Kelif Uzboi River.
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It stretched west through the Karakum, along the base of the Kopetdag Mountains, passing through Mary and Ashgabat. The further it got from the Amudarya, the narrower it became until it eventually got small enough to fit into a pipe. The pipe reached the Caspian shore at Krasnovodsk in 1986. The completed canal was 851 miles long, making it the longest irrigation canal in the world. It can take 30 days for water to travel from one end to the other.
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The Karakum Canal siphons vast amounts of water out of the Amudarya to quench the thirst of Turkmenistan’s cotton and wheat fields. By the 1970s, Soviet scientists had realized that the canal, combined with all the other irrigation projects in the Amudarya basin, would eventually kill the Aral Sea. After all, the sea, which straddled the Uzbek-Kazakh border and was roughly the size of West Virginia at the time, got 75 percent of its water from the Amudarya. If the river’s water fed cotton fields instead of replenishing the sea, the sea would evaporate like a puddle in a summer parking lot. They proposed saving the sea by diverting a few Siberian rivers to fill it back up again,
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but they never got around to it.

By 2007, the Aral Sea had lost three-quarters of its volume and more than half its surface area. It had split into three puddles. (Two continued to dry up. One was dammed off and began slowly to refill.) As the sea withered away, it left behind 5,000 square miles of salty wasteland – an area almost as big as Connecticut. “The shriveling sea bequeathed poisonous sandstorms, chronic health problems, dead fishing grounds and unemployment” to the areas in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan that surrounded it. The slow death of the Aral Sea has been called one of the worst ecological disasters of the 20th Century.
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As I floated through the Karakum Desert on water that should have been filling the faraway Aral Sea, I passed several rusty old barges, which looked like they were held together with old twists of wire and bits of welded tin cans. They were dredging barges, sucking sand off the bottom of the canal, and spitting it out onto the shore, to keep the canal deep and straight. In the Soviet days, a staff of 1,700 had tended the canal, which was crucial to producing food for local consumption and cotton for export. By 1996, the Soviet Union had fallen and there were only 640 workers still on the job.

Although engineers use computers to manage water flow through most major irrigation systems in the world, the remaining workers on the Karakum had to make do with more primitive technology. They monitored water levels with a series of what were essentially giant rulers. Workers noted how high the water was on the rulers and called the data in to a central office in Ashgabat – when the phones were working.
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Using this scanty information, engineers had to keep the water in the canal flowing fast enough so that sediment didn’t have time to settle to the bottom of the canal, but not so fast so fast that it ripped up the sandy bed of the canal and carried it downstream.
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They also had to balance the canal’s needs with the farmers’ needs, making sure that enough water flowed out of the main canal and into the fields to produce a good harvest.

Under these difficult circumstances, the staff often pulled far too much water out of the Amudarya and into the Karakum Canal system. So, even as the Aral Sea was dying of thirst, engineers were dumping excess water into the desert and farmers in Turkmenistan were over-watering their fields, “which has led to widespread land degradation in the Karakum Canal zone. Rising groundwater tables and soil salinization now [have become] endemic and … resulted in large tracts of land being abandoned and a significant reduction in crop yields”
 
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The water table in Murgab was so high that when Döwlet’s brother-in-law was working in his courtyard garden, it took only two big shovels-full of dirt to dig a hole that would fill with water from underground. All over the Murgab oasis, from Mary to Bayramali to Murgab, I saw vast tracts of land covered in what looked like a sprinkling of snow; when I tasted it, it turned out to be a crust of salt.

Despite the environmental disaster that the Karakum Canal had helped to cause in the Aral Sea and in Turkmenistan, the Soviet government looked on the bright side. A 1977 report from the USSR Academy of Sciences pointed out that the canal created a micro-climate that was slightly cooler and wetter than the standard Karakum Desert climate and, as a result, was more comfortable for people to live in. The report also pointed out that the canal had created a huge swath of new habitat for fish, birds, and plants.
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That much was true. The canal was swarming with life. In some places, the desert sloped gently into the water and the shoreline was choked with reeds taller than our boat. In others, the sand dunes dropped straight down into the canal, creating sandy cliffs, where birds dug holes for their nests. As we passed, they soared over us, diving and swooping. Though I couldn’t see any fish swimming in the murky water, I did see fishermen standing next to the canal now and then, selling fish as big as my thigh.

The trip was peaceful. The chugging of the boat’s engine was the only sound that broke the silence. I saw a few people on shore: shepherds watching herds of sheep from the backs of donkeys and beekeepers tending to stacks of white bee boxes. But mostly we were alone under an electric blue sky with a few high, wispy clouds. We lounged on the
tapjan
reading, listening to music, and watching the desert drift by. Berdy stopped the boat in the late afternoon so we could jump into the water and cool off. The canal was about 10 feet deep, warm, and muddy. Lying on the deck afterwards, it took only a few minutes to dry out. As the sun dipped below the sand dunes to our stern, a crescent moon appeared, hanging precariously from the navy blue fabric of the sky. 

Then the sky faded from navy blue to black, and the stars began to appear, first by the dozen, then by the thousand.

After finishing a half-liter bottle of vodka with Alei, I fell asleep on the
tapjan
. Sometime in the middle of the night, Berdy pulled the boat over into the reeds and threw an anchor ashore. A swarm of mosquitoes woke me by trying to suck as much blood as possible from my face, hands, and ankles. I wrapped myself in the carpet covering the
tapjan
and went back to sleep. I woke again when the marigold sun started rising over our bow. Berdy appeared from below, pulled the anchor back on board, and started the engine. After another hour, we arrived in Nichka. The trip had taken 12 hours.

Berdy’s job was to pick up his boss, the engineer in charge of overseeing the Zakhmet-Nichka stretch of the canal, and take him back to Zakhmet. The boss was waiting on Nichka’s pier with a couple of assistants. He was a middle-aged Turkmen bureaucrat, overweight and greasy, with thinning hair. As soon as he laid eyes on Alei, Kelly, and I, he started yelling at Berdy for bringing us along. We were not going to Kugitang, we were going back to Zakhmet with him, he said. At first he didn’t want to allow us ashore even for a moment, but after Berdy put in a word for us, he told us we could go into Nichka to find a bathroom and buy some food, but we’d better hurry. We left the two men arguing on the waterfront and slipped into town.

Nichka’s houses were weathered but well-kept, its yards were planted with vegetables and carefully weeded, its streets were sandy and clean. There were no cars in sight. In the sandy village square, there was a 30-foot-long model of the canal. When we asked for directions to the bazaar, we learned that it had been closed for the day because of a mild sandstorm. So we found a tiny shop that an old woman was running out of her house and bought what she had: orange soda and cookies. She let us use her outhouse, too, which was built from weathered scrap wood and was listing to one side. Then we hurried back to the boat.

Berdy cast off as soon as we were on board, and turned the boat around, pointing it downstream toward Zakhmet. While the boss brooded on the bow, I ducked into the pilothouse to apologize to Berdy for getting him in trouble and to try to find out what we’d done wrong. It turned out that two KNB men had visited Berdy’s boss the previous week and warned him not to allow any strangers on the canal. Since it began within spitting distance of Afghanistan and was barely monitored by the police, it had become an opium smuggling route. The boss was convinced that we were either smugglers or spies and that he was going to end up in jail because we’d appeared on the canal on his watch.

The authorities in Turkmenistan have been trying for at least a century to stem the flow of opium across their southern border. Raw opium has been used in Turkmenistan for centuries, both as a panacea to cure everything from aches and pains to diarrhea and coughing, and also used recreationally. When the Russians conquered the Turkmen lands, large quantities of opium were being imported from Afghanistan and Iran.
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The Russians and then the Soviets and then the independent Turkmen government fought this flow of drugs and failed.

But it seemed the boss was determined to do his bit in this endless war on drugs by turning us in to the police. On the long ride back to Zakhmet, we took turns trying to smooth things over with him, to convince him we were neither smugglers nor spies. He immediately hated Alei, who asked him what was wrong and how we could fix things. He tolerated my questions about the plants and birds of the canal zone. He liked Kelly. Of the three of us, she spoke the best Turkmen. She was also young and pretty and had good Turkmen manners. He was charmed. The atmosphere on the boat began to thaw.

After a few hours, we stopped at a dredging barge so the boss could bark some orders at its crew. While the boss was acting important, Berdy bought a three-foot-long fish from a man sitting on a nearby sand dune. He hung it from the awning over the
tapjan
where it dripped fish juice from its tail onto the deck, its mouth gaping at the sky.

Around lunchtime, a freeway bridge appeared ahead of us, arching over the canal. The boss told Berdy to tie the boat up underneath it. Then the two of them jumped ashore and disappeared into the desert. Once they were out of sight, I climbed to the top of the bridge. There was no freeway, just a bridge. There was no town in sight, just the canal, and a whole lot of scrub-covered sand dunes. I went back to the boat to wait.

A half-hour later, Berdy and his boss reappeared out of the desert with two bottles of vodka and a giant bowl of fish stew. Berdy refused to eat with the boss – he was still offended at being yelled at. He stayed in the pilothouse while Kelly, Alei, and I ate fish stew with his boss on the
tapjan
. The fish has been fried in batter and cut into chunks before being simmered in a salty broth with potatoes, green peppers, and onions. We ate it with stale
chorek
that we’d bought the day before in Zakhmet. It was delicious, much better than the orange soda and cookies I’d had for breakfast, and by the end of the second bottle of vodka, we are all friends with the boss. He had nothing against us. He was just scared.

On the outskirts of Zakhmet, the boss told Berdy to pull the boat close to shore. He wasn’t going to drag us into the police station and tell them we were smugglers or spies with fake passports. Much better to just make the problem disappear, he’d decided. He told us to jump ashore and get lost. We didn’t argue. We grabbed our bags and leaped. From the shoreline, I waved goodbye to Berdy as he steered the boat back out into the channel and headed for the port.

We hiked through the desert toward the highway, which we could see in the distance. A man appeared ahead of us, standing among the thorn bushes. He wore a suit and stood with his arms clasped behind his back. He was about 30 and hadn’t shaved for a couple days. His suit was dusty and had lost its creases. He looked too bedraggled to be a KNB man, but still, it was an odd place for a guy to be standing.

“Did you just get off that boat?” he asked. “Why?” I asked.

“Was that Berdy’s boat?”

“Why?”

“He’s my cousin. He said he was going to bring me a fish. Do you know if he has it?”

Relieved, I told him Berdy had the fish. Then Alei talked him into giving us a ride up the highway to Bayramali. We piled into the car, covered in sand, exhausted from nearly 24 hours on the boat. I was still a little drunk from lunch. We bounced across the desert to the highway, dodging thorn bushes, and then turned south. Between potholes, I wrote a note to Berdy in my awkward, looping Russian cursive, apologizing for getting him in trouble and wishing him well. His cousin promised to deliver it.