The Ships at Muynak

The Aral Sea did not disappear all at once. It went the way most things go: gradually, then undeniably. In the 1960s the Soviet state diverted the two rivers feeding it — the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya — into cotton fields across Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Nobody told the sea. It kept being a sea for a while. The fishermen kept fishing.

The town of Muynak sat on the southern shore. It had a cannery. It had a fleet. In the 1950s the catch was forty thousand tons a year and the docks were loud with it, with the slap of fish in crates and the diesel cough of boats and all the other sounds of a place that doesn’t yet know what it is about to become.

The water began to pull back. The fishermen drove longer distances to the shore, then longer. Then they stopped driving and the boats just sat. There is a photograph from the 1980s — a line of rusting trawlers, their hulls orange with oxidation, sitting in what is clearly a desert. The sand has reclaimed everything. Behind the boats: flat white nothing, stretching to mountains. No water at all. Not a shimmer of it.

What do you do with a boat that has no water? You leave it. You can’t move a fishing trawler the way you move furniture. The boats just stayed where the shore last was — which was no longer the shore, which was by then just land — and the desert gathered around them and began the slow work of rust and salt.

The salt is its own story. When a sea evaporates it doesn’t take the salt with it. The salt stays. The Aral seabed became a salt flat stretching for hundreds of miles, and the wind picks that salt up and moves it, and so the towns that were once fishing towns are now salt towns, breathing salt, growing nothing in the salt-poisoned soil. The infant mortality rates in the region are among the highest in the former Soviet republics. The average life expectancy in Karakalpakstan dropped ten years between the 1960s and the 1990s. These facts don’t move the way the image moves — the rusting ships in the desert — but they are the same story told in a different register.

The sea is not entirely gone. In the north, Kazakhstan built a dam in 2005 and the northern lobe has recovered somewhat. The fish have come back to that part, a little. The southern lobe — the Uzbek side, where Muynak is — did not recover. It became the Aralkum, which is now among the youngest deserts on earth. Someone named it. There’s something in the naming: the Aralkum. As if now that it’s a desert it needs a desert’s name. As if the sea had a name and the thing that replaced it needed one too.

The ships are a tourist attraction now. People travel to Muynak to photograph them, to stand in the sand and look at the hulls. The boats have names still, hand-painted letters in Cyrillic flaking off the bows. They are not beautiful in the way a wreck underwater is beautiful — they are too dry, too bleached, too obviously wrong for where they are. A ship on the seafloor has gone somewhere. A ship in the desert has simply been left.

There used to be a lighthouse too, though I keep thinking of the ships. The lighthouse stood at the edge of Muynak’s harbor and by the late 1980s it was standing in the middle of a desert eight kilometers from the water. A lighthouse pointing at sand. The apparatus still inside it, presumably — the Fresnel lens or whatever they used, still angled to throw its light over a surface that was no longer there.

I think about the lightkeeper, if there was one. The job of marking where the water was. Whether that job ended slowly — someone continuing to wind the mechanism, to check the bulb, to log the hours — or whether there was a day when someone said: that’s enough, that’s done, there’s no one out there to warn anymore. Whether the person who did that last thing knew it was the last thing. Whether they locked the door or just walked away and let the salt take it.

The cotton fields still exist. The crops that took the water are still growing. The calculation that was made — cotton versus sea, irrigation versus inland ocean — was made by men in Moscow who had never been to Muynak, had no idea where Muynak was, would never see the ships in the desert that their calculation produced. They made the decision and then they were dead and then the Soviet Union was dead and then there was no one left to hold responsible for anything and the ships stayed.

Forty thousand tons of fish a year. The docks loud with it. The sea there, being a sea.