Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race by Lara Prior-Palmer (Catapult)

When still a teenager, Lara Prior-Palmer decides to enter the Mongol Derby, seven weeks before the race begins. “I am extremely competitive,” she announces in her application, “and want to be the youngest (am 18) person to finish.”

Giving herself minimal time for preparation, she’s allowed to enter a “1,000-kilometer race on twenty-five wild ponies, a new steed for every 40-kilometer stage” across the Mongolian grasslands, with only ten days allowed for completion. But, she says, “my thighs were strong and my heart was raw.” In a little over a month, she’s on her first pony, with a copy of The Tempest stowed away in her bag of survival gear. 

Her journey is broken by stops at the urtuus, the stations where riders change their mounts, which have been loaned by local families for a rental fee and vary in their stages of wildness. By 8:30 competitors are forced to stop for the day, choosing their “glum horses” to begin their ride by 7 the next morning.

It takes a while for Prior-Palmer’s competitive spirit to kick in. At first her goal is simply to make it to the next urtuu and eventually to finish the race. Her hours on horseback are contemplative ones and her observations are precise and poetic. Following in the hoofprints of Chinggis Khan’s thirteenth-century Postal Express, riders who carried the mail in stages from Siberia to Poland in twelve days, she’s haunted by thoughts of the Great Khan, a man so humble that he demanded that his burial ground remain unknown, with no grand monuments or markers, one who permitted all religions to be freely practiced within his empire, and who even now is regarded as Mongolia’s “ancestral spirit.” 

Stopping at the required time means she often sleeps in ger, those windowless circular tents that collapse and are moved on to the next grazing area, leaving no trace of their presence. Baigal or “what exists,” the natural world, is so respected by the Mongol nomads that they wear soft-soled shoes in order to avoid harming what their feet will fall upon. 

Prior-Palmer is seduced by baigal, even when “thunder burgles the sky” and she and her pony “ride on, curling our bodies against the teeth of the storm.” The sky looks like “a map of the world,” and she feels “very alone,” “the last drops in the bottom of a wine glass.”  

Perhaps it’s the pain that comes from days of constant riding that brings out the spirit of competition or perhaps it’s the awareness of Devan, an obnoxious young woman from Texas who takes the lead early on and maintains it, but on her fourth day, Prior-Palmer decides she wants to win. 

On the seventh day of the race, she enters the final urtuu, babbling stories and unconcerned that Devan has arrived ahead off her. Within twelve minutes she learns that she’s the winner because her competitor has been penalized for raising her pony’s heart rate above the sanctioned limit. 

From her copy of The Tempest, she finds “when I waked, I cried to dream again.” “Endings fade,” Prior-Palmer decides, “but the force behind a story lives on.” The Derby is over but the steppes of Mongolia live on, in this book and in the minds of its readers. ~Janet Brown