Pack… Hiking Boots

A couple of weeks ago I hiked the Northern Summit of Mount Aragats in Armenia. I’ve really loved hiking in Armenia this year – it has helped me feel grounded in what my Armenian identity means to who I am today. But this hike was particularly meaningful to me. And not just because it was challenging and I can’t wait to give it another go when I’m better trained, rested, and fueled. Not just because it’s the tallest peak in Armenia. 

Aragats has a special meaning to me, it holds a special place in my heart. But to tell you about it, we have to go back, all the way back to the “cold and dark” 90s in Armenia. We have to go back to huddling with the neighbors around the battery powered radio in the dark, waiting for news from the front. We have to go back to how proficient I had become at splitting wood with an axe at 10 years old. We have to go back to going to bed fully dressed with a hat in my head while cuddling a brick heated on the stove and wrapped in rags for warmth. We have to go all the way back…

(As I spend $150 on a pair of hiking pants and a shirt, I am reminded all of a sudden that at one point my mom’s monthly salary was $100. It was one shiny crisp hundred dollar bill, and I was in awe. That month we could afford to eat.)

This radio that brought everyone together was really a multifunctional tool of survival those days. For starters, it was battery powered and rechargeable – an absolute must when you had electricity for only an hour each day. In reality, the battery powered marvel wasn’t quite enough to last the 23 hours between the bouts of electricity, so we had two of said radios. I liked the pink-and-purple one; a bit of much needed cheer when picking out a radio, from which you get news of the ongoing war. The radio also had a spotlight, a neon “daylight,” which wasn’t as powerful as the daylight but neither did it use up as much battery power, and was perfectly sufficient to read by, and also a flashing orange distress signal light. It wasn’t a function we ever used, although it was likely the most appropriate one under the circumstances. 

But we definitely did use the radio. Every night, this was the point of convergence for my little family. Mom, dad, and I would come together around a single candle that crackled and sent plumes of black smoke into the already-sooty ceiling and listened to the radio. Sometimes it was “TV on the radio”: you could literally tune into TV stations and “watch” your regular soaps of rich white Americans suffering sudden memory loss on Santa Barbara or not knowing what to do with their oil money on Dallas. And sometimes it was reporting from the front: “you are listening to radio Azatutyun (Independence)…” 

There was fighting in Kelbajar, there was fighting in Martakert, there was fighting in Shushi. To my 10 year old ear these places sounded at once foreign and familiar. I wondered what “fighting” looked like, and if it looked anything like the World War 2 movies I had seen on TV. I wondered if the soldiers were scared. I wondered if you could be both scared and brave. I wondered if I would be brave if I were in their place. I wondered if they would take girls into the army. And could I persuade them to. But most of all, I wondered where the fighting was and whether I should be scared.

We had this big map of Armenia and Artsakh that was tacked to the wall above my dad’s desk in his study. I would spend hours sitting on his desk, staring at this map. We didn’t heat the study and kept the door shut. My mom had come to use it as a walk-in refrigerator of sorts, the room was so cold. She would stash half-eaten pots of soup and tinned meat that passed for protein those days under my dad’s desk. In my outings to the study I would be fully bundled up: hat, scarf, and all. I would run my gloved finger over the names of the places where fighting was happening and wonder what things were like there.

The map had cities and towns, highways and railroads, forests and mountains on it. And once I was sufficiently convinced that the fighting was far enough from Yerevan, I’d spend hours marveling at the map. I wondered if I could hitchhike to Dilijan, or if the Khosrov forest had any wildlife. But I was especially interested in hiking Aragats. It was the tallest mountain in the country, and I wanted to get to that summit.

Even at 10 years old I was nothing if not single minded about my goals. So I took to driving my parents batty, talking about nothing else but hiking Aragats. If they countered that I couldn’t go alone, I begged my dad to go with me. If they said that it was too hard and I wouldn’t be able to do it, I went and ran laps around the neighborhood to prove just how good a shape I was in (even if I wasn’t). At a certain point I just got tired of asking and decided to will this hiking trip into reality. I was always better at begging for forgiveness than asking for permission anyway. And so I packed my school rucksack with all the supplies I thought a hiker might need: matches (not entirely sure what fire I was planning on starting), a knife (again, not sure what the exact intention was but a knife made sense), a piece of bread, warm woolen socks, and a paper, since I had heard that you could stuff sheets under your shirt for warmth. I even called my geologist uncle to ask him for his sleeping bag, but it appeared my mom had gotten to him first and told him not to encourage my “silliness.” Well, I would have to do without a sleeping bag, and the sheets of paper in my shirt would have to suffice. 

I was ready. All preparations had been made. I was going to set out in the morning, attempt to hitchhike to Byurakan, and hike out from there. But my attempt to sneak out at 6 am the next morning was intercepted (sorry, mom). I was told I would have to wait until I was older (this was a frequent adage at my house, so I saved a lot of my stupid for when I turned 18 – again, sorry, mom). 

Granted, it may have taken me 27 years to finally get around to it, but summiting Aragats was an emotional affair. Particularly these days, when I frequently find myself examining the map of Armenia, trying to look up the names of all the places where my country is being attacked all over again.