Blood and Thunder : Setbacks and Redemption in The Land of Wolves Sample Chapter #1
By: Dylan Reddick
Tags: Travel Writing, Nonfiction, Essay, Writing, Creative Non Fiction

“Know that a rose without thorns has never been plucked” -Shota Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin

I wake up to dry cracked lips and the metallic smell of blood. My face is sunken into what seems to be some old roughly furnished couch as I turn over to face my surroundings. I open my left eye but strangely my right does not. It can’t. I sit up to face a room I’ve never seen before, in a city I barely know, in a country I’ve been in for less than 72 hours. Georgia. What a place. No, not the state. Somehow I’ve never been, despite 25 years of living in the American South. Nope, we’re talking the country, nay, the Former Soviet Republic of Georgia, and let me say that it’s one hell of a place to have the worst hangover of your life.

I slowly sit up, and bring my hand up to feel around my right eye, a mass of tender, swollen flesh with pain pulsating from underneath a messy wound where the cheek bone angles beneath the eye. Opening my mouth brings wet blood back into the equation as I find myself removing my right front tooth from its lodging within a hole in the front of my upper lip. Something’s off with my whole mouth and there’s some real nasty dental work to be done, but for now my attention turns to my torso, where my rib-cage throbs with pain. Much of the front of my shirt is darkened with what is presumably my own blood.

“Shit.”

I check my things. My drawstring bag containing my phone, wallet, keys, and even the Macho Man Randy Savage notebook that I use to reference language and travel notes, is still hanging from my back, thank god. I first hope this is Ilia’s family’s home. A friend from back in the States connected us and Ilia gave me the grand tour of the area around Rustaveli Avenue.

It had been a stormy evening. Heavy rains and thunder forced us under an umbrella on a bar patio for an hour around midnight with another two-dozen club patrons. Ilia and I ducked out when the vibe ran dry and entered a boisterous bar full of drunk Georgians and expats, many of the patrons chanting “F*ck Russia” in English before subsequently handing me a shot of strong vodka every five minutes. The others in the bar had dubbed me “Tormund,” in recognition of my resemblance to a barbaric “Wildling” character on Game of Thrones. It was the ten-year anniversary of the 2008 Russo-Georgian War and emotions were running high. Stories were swapped of Georgian heroism as others cursed the aggression of their northern neighbors.

Ilia’s a fun guy, but even his eyes narrowed and his tone changed when we’d discussed the conflict. It’s a complicated territorial dispute with arguments on both the Georgian and Russian sides that I quickly find myself ill-suited to attempt to offer opinion on. Travel teaches me one thing, and that’s that I’ve got more to learn to than I have to offer in discussions like these. That being said, it seemed like a fundamentally unfair fight. Russia, the primary instigators of aggression in the conflict, had both outnumbered and outgunned Georgia many times over. Ethnic Georgians were expelled from the contested territories and Georgia lost the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, twenty percent of the entire country, by the official end of the war, with the United Nations cutting a deal that has continued to sour in the collective consciousnesses of Georgians ever since.

Unfortunately it’s quite apparent that I did not, in fact, end up at Ilia’s house. I recall making an Irish goodbye amidst the din to walk back to my hostel alone as the beverage consumption reached maximum capacity. I assume Ilia’s home doesn’t have dozens of sewing machines, racks of machinery, and strands of textiles hung from the ceilings. It also, presumably, doesn’t have a massive shirtless man in the next room working noisily a machine. Every few seconds the machine would screech and the man would swear quietly to himself before fiddling with it again.

With my one good eye I try to make sense of my surroundings. I vaguely recall the surprising sound of a crunch to the head, intense pain, an adrenaline filled flash of violence as I kicking at the knees of one of my nearby assailants, and lying up against a nearby building, blood dripping from my nose as a gruff voice yelled angrily in Georgian at the crowd around me. The last thing I remember is being picked up, carried by my shoulders, and helped into what I’m guessing this place.

I rise up from the couch and take a look around the room with dazed vision. A muddy mix of yellow sunlight streams through the windows, leaking onto the brown cement walls and grey machinery. Dust twinkles in the light as metal scrapes against metal somewhere else in the building. Dank smells of mildew, metal, and old upholstery waft through my nostrils as my confusion grows with each second. The entire scene resembles some hellish fever dream from a horror movie and the popping sounds that emanate from my bloody cheek with each movement of my jaw doesn’t ease my worries.

Bewildered and trembling, I head over towards the fat man as he fiddles with his machine, a morning radio show chattering next to him as the song ends. He seems oblivious to my waking as I slowly creep behind him, my hands held up in some sort of hopeless defense in case of further violence.

“Hello? Can I leave? Can I go?”

The old man turns around, grunts loudly, and gives me wide-eyed look. It seems there’s a language barrier, but he smiles coyly after a couple seconds before muttering something and pointing to a large metal door to my right. I try to open it but I’m too stupefied to figure it out. He looks at me with pity, pats me on the shoulder sympathetically, and yanks the heavy door open.

“Madloba.”

I timidly wave goodbye as I walk out before the iron door shuts behind me and I’m out on the street. The early morning sun glares into my face as I begin to panic.

Where am I?

Who was that?

What happened to me?

Did-

Despite the familial warnings I’d received before embarking on my trip around the globe, I’ve now been dealt an extremely tangible reason to fear. I begin dry-heaving into the gutter out of sheer panic but somehow my body holds me back from vomiting. Instead I spit out a bloody chunk of tooth amidst a spray of crimson that had been stuck somewhere in my gums.

Oof, that’s no good.

Somehow I calm myself and stand. An old woman with wispy dark brown hair up in a tight bun above her head approaches me. Her mouth agape and eyes flashing with concern, she asks me something in Georgian and reaches for my bloodied eye.

“I’m fine.” I say, stumbling as I wave her away with two thumbs up, “Just a stupid American in way over his head.”

She walks away, looking back once or twice before shaking her head and turning a corner.

There is a bizarre lucidity to walking through a city in the early morning and Tbilisi is no exception. I’m somewhere near Liberty Square, so I head towards the noise, using the fortress perched high on the cliffs to my right as a point of reference. The shops are already abuzz, peddling everything from cheap Russian vodka to tarragon-infused breads. Guns, knives, trinkets, and toys are laid out on blankets when I press through a crowded nearby park. I wander away from the crowds a couple blocks, past expensive hotels, Orthodox churches, and rows of multi-colored churchkhela nut candies hanging in doorways before I recognize my street. I walk a few blocks up the street and find the wrought-iron gate that marks the entrance to my hostel ajar.

Disoriented and drained, I shuffle past the courtyard’s half-dozen cats and pull myself up the rusted metal stairs towards the hulking red door at the top. I try the key, but I’ve totally forgotten the required finagling that the owner had shown me yesterday. In pure desperation, I slam my bloody knuckles several times against the door and sink down to sit upon on the top stairs. The cats dart around the base of the stairs, looking up at me and meowing softly. It reminds me of Richmond, of home, of that feeling of helplessness in the alley.

In… 1…2…3…

Out 1…2…3…4…

After a minute the door opens, and I hear a gasp from two young women standing above me. I start to rise, jingling my room keys towards my room, the first in the hallway.

“Are you okay?” one asks, in an accent that sounds vaguely German.

“I’m not quite sure how to answer that” I answer, “I’m definitely not doing particularly well, but I’m not sure where to begin at the moment. Anyways, I’m sorry to bother you, that door is tricky.”

“Don’t you need medical attention?”

“I’d say so.”

“Okay, give us one minute.”

They disappear into their room, whispering to each as I gaze into the person-sized mirror in the hall.

Jesus Christ, I really am a mess. My right eye is completely swollen shut and growing bluer by the minute. Below it is swollen bloody gash and a swath of bloated skin. I open my mouth and find one of my two front teeth reduced to a misshapen triangle. I’ve never chipped a tooth and good god it sure is horrifying to wake up to my first like this. My lips, nose, and neck are matted in dried blood and there’s a hole in my top lip where that broken tooth had pierced it. On my collar are two deep cuts, still wet with blood but no longer flowing. Underneath my shirt and throughout my legs are abstract paintings of bruises, a smattering of dark blue and red running down my left side. Tears start to well in my eyes at the shock of the overnight transformation I’ve undergone. This is not my finest moment.

One of them returns with some sort of medical kit as the other takes me down the hall and into the kitchen. They sit me down, unbutton my shirt, and begin dabbing at my cuts with a bottle of isopropyl alcohol and gauze. My memory of the previous night is jagged at best as the more talkative of the two girls asks questions while the pair cleans my wounds.

“I was rather inebriated so I can’t claim to remember much. I just remember walking back here after the thunderstorms had let up and the next thing I know I’d been beaten to a pulp. It had been such a great night too, I can’t believe this is happening…”

She sees me beginning to panic again and squeezes my hand as her other dabs at a gash on my eyebrow. I can’t help but feel terrible for bringing them into this low-water mark of my existence.

“I’m sorry to bother you like this. I’m so sor-”

“Don’t apologize” she says while pressing a wet rag to my forehead, “We are medical students; this is nothing to us, a quick warm-up. You need help and we are quite capable, so we’ll help you.”

The other yawns and nods groggily as she gets up to throw a bloodied cloth into the trash.

“Now, you need to rest. It’s early. We’re going to get some groceries and we will return soon. Get some sleep, we will figure out what to do in a couple hours. Relax and rest.”

They help me into my room, lay me down on my bed, and leave me to rest. I message Matt, one of my oldest friends. I’d been crashing at his place in Saint Petersburg for a month prior to Georgia and my ability to find trouble so quickly is bordering on comically impressive. He chastises me for a minute but I’m glad for it. I like having people in my life that call me out on my mistakes. It’s the middle of the night back in the States, so everyone else gonna have to wait their turns. I guess there’s only one thing left to do for now and that’s getting some rest. I fall asleep to the sound of Johnny Paycheck echoing from my phone.

“I’ve seen better days

When the rain was pouring down

And she had her little arms wrapped around me

I’ve seen better days

Lord I’ve seen better days”

__________________________________________________________________

I woke up at noon to noises in the kitchen and blood on my pillow. I’ve always had trouble with grinding my teeth; my dentist says it’s stress. It turns out stress and broken teeth are a poor combination. The girls had made vegetable curry upon returning from the market and offered me some with a warning that it was rather spicy. I was starving at this point, so I delicately sipped the chunks of cauliflower through the gap of my broken front tooth with some degree of care. I shivered with each bite, tooth sensitivity turned up to ten, as the teeth adjacent to my broken one had all been knocked around a bit. After a few mouthfuls I asked what brought them to Georgia.

“To see the culture, to try the food, to get a new perspective!”

“Our school gives students breaks to travel,” the quieter of the two added.

“How about you? What brought you to this…. scenario?

“I needed a change of scenery.” I mumbled, slurping curry.

“That’s it?”

I grinned weakly and breathed deeply, figuring it as good a time as any to open up to some strangers.

“So, I’ve got a buddy in Russia who’s has been trying to get me to visit him since he moved over there two years ago. And I’ve been real burnt out, 70–80 hour weeks between three jobs, a real heavy smattering of spreading oneself too thin. I fell asleep biking home after a 15-hour workday one night and crashed into a trashcan. Around that point I figured that was enough. I needed out. Around the same time, my grandmother and my dog of 16 years died. I’d rather not get into that because it’ll just make me sad, but I’ll say this. It was a lot to handle. Life hadn’t been sitting particularly well with me and that feeling festered for a few more months until I decided to get away from it all for a bit, I didn’t want to be beholden to anything anymore.”

“So” I continue. “I took the money from my savings and what my grandmother left me, figuring I had about enough for about two to three months of inexpensive Eurasian living. I bumped around Amsterdam, Berlin, and Prague with my friend Christina before spending a month with Matt and his girlfriend Valya in Saint Petersburg. Unfortunately my Russian visa only lasted a month, and the whole time I’ve been in cities, which are nice, but I was overdue to answer the call of the wild.”

I trailed off for a minute while I let them chew on that. I fancied it a pretty inspirational story until that point, but I was slowly coming to the painful realization that I sounded supremely naïve. The worst part was knowing, as the words left my mouth, that I’d fallen into the kind travel incident that all my books had specifically cautioned against. I was the Idiot Abroad. I may not have been an “Ugly American” in spirit, but for now, as far as looks were concerned, I resembled, quite literally, an ugly American. The dark haired girl pressed an ice-pack to my increasingly swollen eyebrow.

“Go on.” She said, holding the back of my head.

“So in Russia I keep hearing Georgia is the most beautiful place in the world, a land of mountains, wine, and hospitable people. I even heard they give you a bottle of wine when you arrive, it seemed like paradise itself. I found myself entranced, so I looked up a five-day hike here in Georgia that looked remote but safe enough for a first timer, bought a plane ticket from Moscow, and here I am.”

Here I was indeed. Bloodied and barely able to stand, I’d come, ultimately, to hike the fifty-plus miles of tough mountainous terrain from Mestia to Ushguli in Georgia’s northwestern Svaneti region of the Caucasus Mountains near the Russian border. To analyze the situation from a more sober perspective than my previous night, the border situation in Georgia is one of the more overlooked conflicts of the 21st century. Georgians will tell you, despite the ceasefire, that Russian encroachment still inches further with to this day. Some families go to sleep at night in Georgia and wake up in Russia, the previous day’s barbed wire moved overnight to separate them from their own country.

Several people from home, my parents especially, had encouraged me to stick with my original plan of Budapest and Vienna for this exact reason. But that’s the classic post-college Euro-Trip half the kids from my high school had embarked upon at some point and it just didn’t sit quite right with me. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but I wanted to get off the typical American backpacker routes and into a sort of comfort with one of life’s great equalizers, nature. That grand hiking trek seemed far away now, and returning home with my tail between my legs felt like a far more likely option. Idealism has a nasty way of coming around to bite the unprepared.

“Well you’ll need to see a doctor if you want to do any of that.” One of the girls replied with no small amount of sass, “We can only do so much.”

Being able to see out of my right eye would be a start, so I thanked the girls and headed back to my room to make a call I’ve been dreading.

I love my mother a great deal and there are few things I hate more than stressing her out, but desperate times called for desperate measures. She’s worked for the State Department for a long time and has handled a litany of sticky international complications, but never one quite so personal. She was the one who worried most when I mention Georgia and not from a sense of ignorant baseless fear. She has always been quite perceptive of the geopolitical happenings of our time, is acutely aware of the extent of my belligerent naiveté, and still remembered that 2008 invasion, so she was quite expectant that I’d be rather capable of finding trouble there. She’s also a chronic worrier when it comes to her children, but don’t tell her I said that.

From their bed, my parents woke to an early morning video call.Within a half-hour my mother had charged into our family dentist’s office, me still on video chat, telling him to look at my teeth. He assured us, under significant motherly duress, that my teeth probably could survive until I get back to the States for some more extensive work. He was worried, however, that my cheek might be broken and with the throbbing pain emanating from it I was rather inclined to agree.

Bam! Within another half-hour my mom had worked her magic, and I received a comprehensive list of English speaking hospitals and clinics in Tbilisi. I’d never been so excited to hit the hospital. Dare I say, it might not have been the worst Wednesday I’d ever had. I picked one and headed over to Liberty Square to find a taxi and negotiated a cheap ride to the hospital; the bloody eye helped quite a bit. Fifteen minutes later, I found myself at an unmarked building near in the northern end of town.

I located the nurse’s desk and made the inevitable inquiry

“Hellllo, I need a doctor.”

As if she couldn’t already tell from fact I vaguely resembled a redneck Cyclops at this point, the receptionist handed me a clipboard full of paperwork, some in Georgian, mostly in English. I filled out what I can understand and was immediately pulled into a small emergency room. Screams and curses chimed from a couple booths down. A tense voice asked for more pain medicine in English and was denied. Bleak stuff.

An older doctor arrived after ten minutes with an inquisitive look on his face. He looked me up and down with puzzlement before asking me what happened.

“I’m not quite sure but I woke up like this.”

“You were fighting?” He asked, his heavy Georgian accent peppered with suspicion.

“I’m no fighter, and I definitely wouldn’t start here, but someone clearly wanted to fight me” I insisted.

He mutters in Georgian to a younger doctor. The assistant replied, and seemed to have his answer.

“We think you were, how do you say, ‘Sucker punched?’” he said, miming the punch slowly towards my face to really drill the point home, “You have a large contusion on the right side of your face where you were struck or hit the ground, but your extensive injuries make me think you were beaten.”

“But why would someone want to fight me?”

“I don’t know, maybe they thought you were Russian. I did until you spoke.”

He pointed to my large red beard, making him the fourth Georgian to have made this assumption in the three days since I’d arrived. It wasn’t entirely inaccurate, having just left a month in the motherland itself, where Russians themselves were often surprised to find out I was, in fact, an American. I’d even spoken Russian once or twice around town when English didn’t cut it, though I was starting to realize that might have been a bit of a mistake. I may never have a clear answer on what happened to me, but a case of mistaken identity and being in the wrong place at the wrong time seems the most likely at this point.

“So,” he continued, “Your teeth we cannot fix, you will need a dentist. I will give you a list of them here. Your face is badly damaged but probably not broken, cracked possibly, but it will just have to heal. Your eye will improve in a few weeks, but the swelling should be reduced to a point where you can see again within a couple days. We will change your bandages and close the wounds on your shoulder. You don’t seem to have a concussion but no drinking for a couple days just to be sure. Is there anything else?”

I’d been sporting a gratuitously infected ear for a week since I was in Moscow. I hadn’t paid it much mind; despite the fact my ear lobe had grown to the size of a small golf ball. I had faith my immune system would fix it up eventually but also figured I might as well have him take a look. He painfully grasped the inflamed ear in a gloved grip that lacked any degree of sensitivity, examining it with an incredulous look.

“You have just let this get worse and worse? No no, we must treat you. This is a bad infection, it’s right on your head, and it’s spreading! It could kill or deafen you if you do nothing and let it get worse!” He uttered in shock at the sheer belligerent stupidity of the patient sitting before him.

Covering the area around my ear in surgical paper, they warned me about the pain. Despite a small injection of painkillers, it would still be a supremely uncomfortable time. I breathed deeply, on the other side of the world, in a country I’d only really heard of two weeks ago, as a doctor lowered a scalpel towards my neck.

It is a thoroughly bizarre experience to listen to surgical implements scrape around inside your head. The sinister strangeness of the sound itself makes you wince and wet your shirt with spit as you bite down upon it like some sort of action hero. And yes, it’s painful as all hell.

Somehow, in this moment, I ceased to consider returning home. If anything I’d never felt more certain about going forward. Despite everything, I couldn’t help but feel as if I was now more prepared for the trek than I would’ve been if my introduction to Georgia had gone without incident.

Rob Schultheis, described in his 1984 memoir Bone Games an experience while injured from a climbing fall in Colorado during a storm as almost revelatory in nature. As he lay stranded on a cliff-side, he became acutely aware that if he did not act then and there he would be dead by morning. In the moments after, he was able to move in ways he thought impossible, bouncing supernaturally between the smallest of footholds down 200 feet of steep rock face before safely reaching the bottom.

He wrote, “The person I became on Neva was the best possible version of myself, the person I should have been throughout my life. No regrets, no hesitations; there were no false moves left in me.”

It was time to see if I could find that person in myself.

They sewed their incision back up and left the room for a minute. My ear had returned to normal size and I grinned at the wonders of modern medicine. A girl about my age entered the room and was sat down on the other side of my bed’s curtain. Turns out, I overheard, that she had just come back from the Mestia-Ushguli trek, the same hike I was about to do suffered a wound to her hand that got gratuitously infected. I waited another fifteen minutes for a release form, filled it out, and walked towards the door as the doctor began what sounded like a similar procedure to mine. The last thing I heard from the girl was a howl of pain as I pushed the door open. At least I’d taken care of the seemingly mandatory hospital visit in advance.

I checked myself out of the hospital, paying about seventy-five dollars for my multi-hour visit, a mildly surgical procedure, and some sound advice before walking out with an odd rhythm to my steps. Somehow I’d woken up in my nightmare traveling scenario and now I felt fine, if not a bit empowered on the same day. It occurred to me now that my own approach to this country may have been more than a bit assumptive. At this point I could dwell on whatever had just befallen me or absorb some degree of perspective from the experience. The old man from the morning that had given me a couch to crash on, left my belongings and self untouched, and didn’t ask for a thing. I had been fed and more or less healed by two strangers that didn’t give it a second thought. I knew Georgia was the second oldest Christian country in the world, but my experience already felt biblical amidst its various good samaritans.

I swiped my metro card and hopped on a train to Liberty Square. It was time to stuff my face with khinkali and a couple days of much needed R&R before beginning the Ushguli trek. Georgia’s name is potentially derived from a Persian word “gorg” meaning “land of wolves” and I was ready to see the landscape that had borne the title. Before leaving Russia, I had debated hiring a guide in the days prior after finding rumors of bandits, wolves, and even hyenas on the trail. Maybe they were up there, maybe not, but I knew now that I was going to do it myself.

The lights flickered as the train noisily hit a bump. I gazed around the car as the occupants steadied themselves.

Georgians stare a lot, I’m not one for blanket statements, but Georgians have told me the same, so perhaps I’m safe in saying that. I’d already received plenty of stares during my first two days there; being the only red bearded individual on entire train cars will do that. The stares had lost all subtlety now, and I could feel the eyes of dozens piercing into my prizefighter face. I didn’t just stick out as a potential Russian now, I looked like the craziest scoundrel on the whole damn train. Some kid, a boy of maybe ten, stared at me from the opposite seat with blank shameless curiosity. The unapologetic gawking felt oddly fitting for the moment. What was I to do with a moment as cinematic as that, could I find some shred of divine comedy? I smiled with my still-broken teeth, pointed at my eye, and told the only joke there was to tell.

“You should see the other guy.”