I’ve had the Turkish verb üşüşmek stuck in my head for a week. It’s a very ancient word: Clauson’s Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth Century Turkish has as its first citation of the üş- root an eleventh-century lexical text, the Divan-i Lugati’t-Türk. Unlike so much of the modern Turkish vocabulary, it’s not an import from Persian or Arabic. It means to crowd or press together—an evocative and useful bit of language. I think about it every time my children are congregating in a hallway I’m trying to walk through: Çocuklarım burada üşüşüyorlar.

One imagines it stuck around because it was useful for the various Turkic nations, too. In their ancient epics, people are always gathering on horseback or covering the plains with their tents and rugs or mustering together in uncountable hordes for battle against whichever villains are threatening the chaotic but merry lifestyle apparently enjoyed on the steppes. In Geoffrey Lewis’s translation of The Book of Dede Korkut, a deeply entertaining work, he invariably gives the epithet and name of the protagonist nation as “the teeming Oghuz.” I do not know what word the anonymous Turkoman compiler used that is rendered as “teeming,” but an üş-like spirit seems to hover over it.

I’ve been thinking about the steppes a great deal lately. I’ve never been on a steppe, to tell the truth; indeed, the amount of my life I’ve spent more than two hours from a seashore can be measured in mere weeks. My rare visits to the Midwest have all left me with a vague claustrophobia; how do you know where you are when you can’t find the edge of the land? Not to mention that there’s something else about the Midwest that is unsettling, lurking just on the edge of sight, some suspicion of a deeply repressed frontier brutality under the famous niceness. (Which I’ve always thought seemed more than a bit phoney in itself—but perhaps this is mere sectional prejudice.) This isn’t just paranoia; the Midwest, physically, should not support nice people. Long stretches of uninterrupted plain brought us the Huns, the Mongols, the Comanche, and, for that matter, the Turks and our own dear old Indo-Europeans. There’s something deranging about that much ridable land. Do you really trust that the Iowans are pacified? Aren’t they just biding their time?

On the other hand, for all the fabulous violence of your historical steppe nomads, being one does seem to have been a bit of a hoot—enough that, countless years after their ancestors moved to distinctly bad riding environments, the Greeks, Romans, and Indians kept the chariot around as a symbol for when Serious Fun was afoot. There was lots of exercise, a protein-rich diet, a pleasant seasonal rotation of residences, and abundant prospects for career advancement. What more do you want?

So I’ve been thinking about the steppe and its attractions, especially as we round the bend on another sedentary summer in which I have done little of particular note—that vague late-August sense of disappointment with how it’s all turned out. I would say the steppe beckons me, weird Midwest hangups notwithstanding, but there are a few problems. First, I have never been on a horse, and I don’t think I’m going to change that at this late date; to do so would be tempting fate and my relatively high center of gravity. Second, it would be difficult to run my magazine and file columns from the steppe. (See how I consider you, my loyal reader!) Third, I don’t think my wife would tolerate a life of yurt-based nomadism in Central Asia supported by stupendously destructive raids on nearby settlements. (The kids would probably be okay with it, though.) 

I guess I’ll be sticking to rural Maryland. At least the state fair is starting, and I’ll be able to indulge my horse fascination in a more conventional way: üşüş’ing at the Timonium racetrack. Meanwhile, my wanderings will remain in their usual tracks between home, the office, and the Bottom Line. Not quite the stuff of continent-spanning migration, sure, but it is actually a hell of a commute. 

Well, it’s not such a bad life. I don’t have to worry about saddle chafing, for one thing, and I actually don’t much like being out in cold weather, for another. There are plenty of things to be grateful for—tolerant readers among them. May your black-rooted mountain never be overthrown, O Khan, may your tall shade-tree never be felled.