When Things Get Dark

Even though I had lost the Catholic faith of my parents years before, I could not help but wonder, stuck in a Russian jeep thirty kilometers west from Ulaanbaatar, the windows thick with ice, the car cab cold enough to see breath, the sky dark, and the ground covered in snow, whether God had given me penance in the form of a broken-down jeep in negative-forty-degree temperatures.

Sandwiched in the backseat between two women, one with two small children whose ears were turning red, I bargained with the God I no longer believed in. “Dear God,” I said, “let me out of this alive and extremities intact, and I promise I will never drink again. I will never touch another drop and will never start another fight and will never embarrass my friend on her birthday. Just get me through the night.”

I learned three kinds of winter stories in Mongolia. The ones the Mongolians told. The ones the foreigners told. And the ones I told myself.

The stories Mongolians told dealt with loss and rebirth. One begins with a herder riding on the steppe with his sheep and goats. The wind shifts, the sky grows dark, and soon a blizzard pounds him and his herds off their path. He is lost for a week, and he sings to his horse to keep both the animal and himself sane, a long song, an urteen duu, a haunting ghostlike melody drawn out in one breath from the mouth, like someone is literally pulling the song from out of the vocal chords. The family never loses hope of father/husband/son returning, and they walk to the Buddhist temple on the mountain, its bright colors shimmering in the snow, to light butter lamps and pray for his safe return.

Foreigners told stories of adventure and toughness. Of retrieving water from frozen rivers. Of waking to negative temperatures with your tooth-paste frozen. Of surviving long jeep rides with no heat. “Man, we were on an eighteen-hour jeep ride in below-thirty temps,” they begin, “when our driver spotted a wolf out in the distance. He decided to chase it down, one hand on the steering wheel, the other grasping onto a rifle pointed out the window. We skidded into a pile of snow, the gun went off in the air, and we were stuck outside for two hours while we waited for someone to come and pull us out. It was FUUUUCKED UP.”

But there were other stories that foreigners told, the ones that were fucked up for a different reason. The story of the man who tried to destroy his Mongolian ger—or yurt, in the West—with an axe. The story of the woman who did nothing but bake doughnuts for two days straight. The man who began hearing voices and stayed home for an entire week. These stories were told to laugh at the craziness of others, and I did, uneasily, with a chuckle. I understood, knew what it was like to spend six months locked inside with little else but another novel, letters from home, and the friends you made in town. I already knew the fear of being swallowed by the cold and the dark that lasted from October to April. I just liked to hear the stories so I could feel comfortable with my own thoughts.

The stories I told myself were that I knew what I was doing. That I could handle the isolation, the beginnings of depression, and the vodka I had begun to drink in large amounts. “It’s what is done here,” I told myself. “And you are here. You survived the winter last year and you will survive this one. These feelings you have, Matt, that sick lump in the bottom of your stomach that won’t let you sleep at night but won’t let you get up in the morning, that, that is okay. Don’t worry. You know what you are doing.”

In June 1999, when I was applying for the Peace Corps, one of the questions on the medical form, where they had...