Who Pays for the Trains

A kind but blunt email arrived last week. How do you afford the trains, the writer asked, given what I have said about thin royalty statements and rejected grants. Fair question. Here is the ledger.

The degree was a full ride, though not from the university itself: the program funds nobody at the master's level, which its website states with refreshing coldness. The money was an outside scholarship whose name would mean nothing to you, plus a teaching job grading logic homework. I could not have paid for a single quarter otherwise, and I say so without embarrassment. The doctoral years bring a modest stipend, enough for books and tea and the occasional night train within reach of campus.

What actually pays the rent between royalty lumps is unglamorous freelance work my computing background makes possible. I debug other people's code. I do technical translation from Russian into English. The work arrives as invoices, not mystique.

The travel looks grander than it costs. I take overland routes, shared taxis and marshrutkas, guesthouses and yurts, friends' spare rooms. A twenty-year-old Lada Niva bought cheap from a retired engineer gets me to the trailheads. The big trips (Tibet, Turkmenistan, the China rails) were funded by one well-paid remote contract year after California. Kamchatka came out of a summer of translation work between quarters. I spent that money on train tickets instead of furniture.

The props that look expensive are flea-market old things. The typewriter was borrowed. The shortwave radio cost less than a dinner out.

A note on borders, since readers imagine them as the expensive part. A Kyrgyz passport moves without visas across most of the former Union, Russia included, which is why so much of my map is rail and steppe. The American visa is a ten-year souvenir of my student years. The rest is planning around embassies with a folder of bank statements and more patience than pride. The stamps are cheap. The distances are the cost.

The honest answer to how I afford this life is simple: I do not afford other things. No car payments beyond the Niva. No subscriptions I can name. Rent in Bishkek, and a wardrobe that is mostly one color.