[The Old Groaner] The missing and missed

Our first encounter with such a family occurred when we were walking about three miles away from our home. We met Mr. Nomad with his flock of goats and his dog in a high pasture. Given the presence of our dog and the man’s rifle we very urgently made friends with him and his dog. After some small talk we asked him where his camp was. He gestured to a saddle between two near hills and told us that is was only five minutes away and that we were invited to visit. We accepted and set off to follow him.

Now readers will know that Turkish time differs somewhat from the time used in most of the northern hemisphere. A factor of about x2 might be applied to hours and minutes and anything up to x4 to days and weeks. (If a construction project is involved, then the correcting factor becomes far bigger and the calculation too complicated to express here.) Let me tell you, though, that when it comes to walking uphill with a goatherd, the factor becomes logarithmic. Our guy was about 70 years old; he towered over his goats by just centimeters and had the build of a willow stick. I am well prepared to believe that he and his flock could have reached his camp in about five or 10 minutes, but given the wheezing and panting “yabancı” now in tow, he was forced to wait for two minutes after every two climbing. It took us half an hour to reach the camp.

At the camp we were greeted by Mrs. Nomad, who was slightly shorter than her husband, and by an indeterminate number of children and hens, many of whom where taller. We were invited into their tent for tea.

In conversation with the nomads they frequently referred to the camp and the surrounding mile or two as theirs. The family had been camping on that spot for generations, and they were in no doubt that it was their patch. [Mustafa’s patch to the east started at the oak tree.]

Perhaps 12 years ago the Forestry Directorate banned the nomads from our local forests. The goats were causing too much damage. Of course, not all of the families observed the ban, and we still see at least one of our old friends with his herd every year.

Now we come to the reason why we miss those nomads. We don’t walk in the hills as much as we used to, but when we do we discover that the paths which we used to know well and follow easily have all but disappeared. Without the herdsmen and their charges they have become overgrown, and even if the start of a trail is still discernable it may well fade out over a very short length and leave a hapless hiker standing in a thorny jungle. Some of those paths, though barely one meter wide, were actually the main roads of the Lycians and had been kept open to foot and hoof traffic for 2,000 years or so. They are slowly disappearing as the villagers take to their cars and the goats graze elsewhere.

We even have a problem at our own home. We have a water storage tank up on a mountain ledge above our house. I was easily able to occasionally reach it when the goats were around, but these days I need to send Die Frau ahead with a machete if I want to get there. We do wish the nomads would return.