TRAVERSE 137
TRAVEL- PAKISTAN
LEIGH WILKINS
NOTHING HAD CHANGED, AND EVERYTHING HAD
The first thing that stayed with me about the Karakoram Highway wasn’ t the altitude, though I remembered the way it had crept into my body, subtle at first, then undeniable. Breath had shortened. Thoughts had thinned. A quiet pressure had built behind my eyes until even stillness required effort. It wasn’ t even the danger, though there had been moments when the road felt more like a suggestion than a certainty. What stayed with me was something harder to define, a sense that the world in that place had not yet finished becoming. That the mountains were not relics of some distant past, but something alive, still rising, still reshaping everything around them, including me.
I remembered the morning I left Islamabad with a clarity that felt almost disproportionate to its simplicity. The light had been soft, diffused through a thin haze. The city had moved with quiet order, cars slipping through wide avenues, people beginning their day without urgency. Nothing in that moment had hinted at what lay ahead. It had felt, in hindsight, like a kind of gentle misdirection, as though the world had been easing me toward something it knew I couldn’ t yet comprehend.
My motorcycle hadn’ t looked like it belonged in a story like that. It had been larger than most, slightly worn, unremarkable in the way that everyday machines often are. But perhaps that had been why it felt right. There had been no illusion of control, no sense that I could impose myself on the landscape. The bike had offered no protection from the reality of where I was going. It had simply carried me forward, or it hadn’ t.
Just outside the city, I had stopped for chai, more out of instinct than need. The tea had come thick and
TRAVERSE 137