4 April 2010, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

On March 30^th we rode from Bishkek and headed down the road to our gate at the base. Each morning we pass villages and towns along the way, places like Pregorodnoye, Lesnoye, Ak-Zhol, Uchkun, Manas and Kamyshanovka. Each town has its own flavor, its own personality, and I can almost feel the oil paint dripping from my brush as my mouth literally waters at all of the sights. That morning I watched a full moon set over Ak-Zhol just as the sun rose behind us. It evoked emotions reminiscent of Ansel Adams’ famous photograph called “Moonrise, Hernandez” and I ached for a camera and a few minutes to capture that instant forever. But the photographer’s first rule was the one I broke, “f8 and be there.”

The farmers are burning their old stubble during the day and it fills the air with layers of bluish smoke that settle through the night. The layers of smoke weave themselves in among the homes with corrugated steel roofs, some painted in peeling, fading red or blue hues mixed with the rusty red that creeps down each valley in the corrugations. Each roof is steep to help the snow slide off in the severe Kyrgyz winters.

Each evening I watch countless people walking along the well-worn path at the side of the road. Some carry burlap bags, half-filled with vegetables for their evening meals while others walk alongside their cows or their sheep. A few of the fortunate ride their stocky, round-nosed horses or drive small, horse-drawn wooden carts. Once I watched two horses playing at the side of the road, jumping up at each other and butting heads in a way that you might expect to see two young dogs playing. Two evenings ago I watched a man leading his cow across the freeway. As they reached the opposite side they faced a raised concrete channel for irrigation water and an obvious difficulty for the cow. The man slapped her on the hind quarter and she jumped the channel. It surprised me to see a cow jump that high, but the channel turned out to be no more than a bump in the road to her and it was much more of an obstacle to the man who followed.

Everyone wears black in this country, long black wool overcoats or short black wool jackets. Men wear black leather hats or dark baseball caps. A few men wear tall, white, traditional Kyrgyz hats with white embroidered designs. The women wear thick black leather boots that make me think of Eskimo muck-lucks, and the women always amaze me with their bright, colorful silk scarves, carefully wrapped around the front of their hair and tied carefully in the back. Their scarves provide most of the color in the rural environment and they save the rest of the countryside population from a total monotone form of depression.

Kyrgyzstan is filled with the extremes created by their near-sighted system and by the corruption that comes with power. Choices are limited in everything. At the same time that I gaze at the endless masses on the side of the road, a few fast BMW’s and Mercedes Benz cars glide easily past us in the inside lane. The police here are powerless to enforce speed limits because they don’t ride in patrol cars, but stand helplessly at the side of the road with flashing red signal lights in their hands and whistles to attract attention. I watched one policeman hold out his signal light and blow his whistle at a speeding BMW, but the car kept speeding down the road as the policeman waved the impotent flashing light angrily above his head and continued to blast away on the tiny tin whistle. His frustration was painfully evident.

There’s a hot water system that runs through the city of Bishkek. The water is heated in a plant on the outskirts of the city and then piped underground to every city block. At the beginning of the month of May each year the system is shut down for cleaning and repairs. For that entire month residents are subjected to cold showers and cold water washes of their clothing and dishes. The temperature inside apartment buildings is also controlled by government edict. On April first all steam heat is turned off and left off until the first of October. Residents continue to pay their monthly utility bills, though, just as if the services were still available.