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  • Maggie on the Road: A Triptych
  • Pam Houston (bio)

1. clear air turbulence

It was a crj-300, the little jet, in which even reasonably sized people spend the two and a half hours between San Francisco and Tucson bumped up against each other at the shoulder, elbow, and knee. Maggie couldn’t bring herself to do actual work in a space where she couldn’t straighten her arms or legs, but once they reached cruising altitude, she decided to distract herself by editing her Mongolia photos.

The trip had been her fiftieth birthday present to herself, a lifelong dream: the temples, steppes, Karakorum, the Gobi desert. That her Mongolian guide was an undiagnosed borderline schizophrenic and such a compulsive liar that at one point Maggie became convinced he was not even really Mongolian was a small black mark on an otherwise satisfying trip. (If he is not, in fact, an American misogynist, she wrote on several postcards of a yak/cow hybrid that the Mongolians delightfully call a khainag, which translates roughly to an “every once in a while,” he certainly came to the States to receive his training.) But the physicality of the place was magnificent, the nomadic culture more or less intact, and Maggie in twenty-one days had taken three thousand photos, which now sat on her hard drive waiting to be futzed with.

Her seatmate on the commuter plane had smiled so broadly at Maggie upon her arrival that Maggie thought they must be acquainted. Maggie was always bumping into former patients on airplanes (though not often current ones, thank God). But this woman, who wore the aspect of a large eager bird, an ostrich Maggie thought, or a dodo, turned out to be simply friendly, the sort of friendly that made Maggie—and she hated to admit this—instantly suspicious.

“Where’s that?” the woman said, before Maggie had even selected her first thumbnail to enlarge. [End Page 7]

“Mongolia,” Maggie said. “I was there for the whole month of July.”

“Mongolia!” the woman said. “Incredible! I am so fascinated by Mongolia. I saw it, you know, on The Amazing Race.”

Maggie didn’t know The Amazing Race, but she got the gist of it. Another thing about fifty, she thought, is that it is okay to get the gist of things and leave it at that. tv was one of those. Systems analysis another. Entire categories of professions existed, Maggie realized, about which she had only the vaguest notion of what people actually did. Until only recently, when Maggie heard the words “Silicon Valley,” she hadn’t realized they referred to actual towns she knew the names of: San Mateo, San Carlos, Palo Alto. She had pictured, instead, a series of low-slung gray buildings nestled somewhere in the green hills of Santa Clara County, like Neverland or Santa’s workshop, buildings full of tiny people making things with very small tools.

“Is that a temple?” the woman asked.

“Gandantegchinlen Monastery,” Maggie answered, “in Ulan Bator. One of the few the Russians left standing.”

“Isn’t that something?”

“Beautiful,” Maggie said, “and very alive in there. Monks chanting in the different temples all hours of the day.”

“Is that a cave painting of a deer?” The woman pointed to another thumbnail.

“Ibex, I think,” Maggie said. “We saw some living ones too.”

And so the miles passed under the wing of the plane, Maggie describing the Bronze Age petroglyphs at Bayabgiin Nuruu; the flaming cliffs at Ob Nob; the wild, short-legged, and handsome Przewalski horses, descendents of an ancient breed.

The woman’s enthusiasm was nothing if not genuine, and eventually Maggie’s mild irritation turned to an equally tepid gratitude. Really, had any of her friends been this excited to hear about her trip?

The plane bounced sharply once without preamble. Clear air turbulence, she’d been told that was called.

“And look at this,” Maggie said. “A dinosaur spine. Twice as long as I am, just lying on top of the sand.”

“Really?” the woman said, leaning hard over Maggie’s arm to see the dun-colored, calcified bones stretching like a long tail across the whiter calcified soil.

“We...

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