The Long Way to the Sources

After the airfield, the Pamir Highway is the part of the trip where the research stopped being about signals and started being about endurance. Our UAZ overheated twice, which our driver treated as a normal Tuesday and I treated as a near-death experience, and somewhere between those two reactions is probably an accurate description of what remote fieldwork actually feels like.

The canyon has a turquoise river running through it that has no business looking that color at that altitude, and I sat on the hood during the second coolant break because the view demanded it and the vehicle, for once, was not going anywhere without us. It is not a candidate site. None of the actual candidates photograph well, which is its own kind of confirmation that I am in the right industry.

What the highway gave me was scale - the sense that a signal can travel further than any road, and that the people chasing it have to go the long way regardless. This gravel owes me nothing. I owe it a decent chapter.