Travels in Siberia Page 20
Suddenly, with a percussive wind, the helicopter arrived. Eric Penttila hopped out, flight-suited and goggled beyond recognizability. The other three passengers climbed into the helicopter’s backseat, where they barely fit, and Eric opened the door on the helicopter’s left side and gestured to me. I got in, then awkwardly climbed over some controls and into the seat on the right side. I had never been in a helicopter before and assumed the right was the passenger side. Eric came around and opened the right side door and said, through goggles and mask, “I was wondering why you climbed over here, unless you are going to fly this sucker yourself.” Under the gaze of the others just inches behind me, I clambered back over to the left side. After a few minutes Eric got in on the right side and we took off.
Helicopters require more faith than airplanes. If something goes wrong with a plane, you imagine you could glide, but in a helicopter you must put from your mind the thought of how fast the earth will come up to meet you in an emergency. As we moved out over the strait, sea ice in many shades of blue and white alternated with sigmoid-shaped stretches of open water animated by sharp, swift ripples. In places where linen-white ice expanses met, the lines of crunched-up ice pieces were the exact same blue as Comet Cleanser. Around the ice floes that had been frozen in place the ice took on an unlikely Caribbean Sea hue, and sometimes a pale purple wash with no discernible source flickered over the whole scene.
From the Cape Smythe plane I had caught a glimpse of the Diomedes and of the coast of Asia beyond. Now, as the helicopter moved farther from land, the Diomedes approached on our left, with the much smaller and uninhabited Fairway Rock to the south of them; in the clear distance, just a few ticks to the right of dead ahead, the easternmost cape of Asia rose into view, gray and vast, disappearing around the earth’s bend. Meanwhile, over our right shoulder, the Cape of Wales’s white hills stood out vividly in the sun. Few travelers to the region have seen this sight. The ill-starred Vitus Bering sailed through the strait twice without guessing how close he was to land. Captain Cook’s ships, on the other hand, happened to hit good weather when they came through in July of 1779. A journal of the voyage states: “The weather becoming clear, we had the opportunity of seeing, at the same moment, the remarkable peaked hill, near Cape Prince of Wales, on the coast of America, and the East Cape of Asia, with the two connecting islands of St. Diomede between them.”
That view was before us now. Looking at one continent and then at the other, and encompassing in a glance the space between, gave a grand, globe-bestriding feeling. Of course human beings came from Asia to North America by this route! Of course Alaskan Natives traveled by boat to hunt walrus on the coast of Chukotka! Of course adventurers crossed on skis from one side to the other! It’s right over there!
Soon Eric was banking around the northern tip of Little Diomede, and the massive front of Big Diomede filled the bubble window of the helicopter—but only for a second, as we swung past. Then we were landing on the helipad. I hopped out and someone showed me the way to the tribal office, where I paid my $100 and filled out some forms. The woman handling the paperwork was about to walk me through a sheet of complicated rules for taking photographs, when I told her I had no camera. I took my sketchbook from my pack and showed it to her and said I preferred to draw. At that she mentally slipped me into the harmless-nut category and sent me on my way.
First I went to the ice runway at the edge of the island. Pieces of it had broken off. Wales had been colder than Nome, and this place was colder than Wales. Sea currents sped by the ice runway’s edge. In the narrow channel, a little over a mile across, ice floes jostled and slid onto one another as they hurried past at maybe seven knots, the wind and current pushing them hard. Above the lines of open water, wraiths of steam fifteen feet high whisked along next to the floes, leaning forward and rushing all in one direction like commuters. Beyond this fierce and wind-scoured zone, the lowering, black-gray rock of Big Diomede reared up immediately without beach or shoreline. This was what I had come to see, and I could barely face in that direction, with the wind belt-sanding the side of my nose and freezing the pen tip as soon as I took it out of my mouth.
Clouds caught on the peaks at the top of Big Diomede, then seemed to come loose and blow by. Somewhere along that ridgeline was a Russian observation post, but I couldn’t pick it out with my eyes tearing so. The idea that any human beings inhabited that rock seemed a stretch, though I knew that a detachment of Russian soldiers, in a small base on the island’s less steep northern side, were on duty year-round. I attempted a couple of drawings before my pen became useless. Then I returned to the village, grateful to turn my back to the wind.
Little Diomede, the village, was a hardscrabble place if I ever saw one. At the time its population was 178. Its public buildings and houses ascended the island’s steep rock in a shallow out-of-the-wind indentation on its northwest side, one small structure mounting above another like the apartments of desert cliff dwellers. The village’s vertical access ways were zigzag staircases carved into the cement-hard snow. I walked and climbed around the village for a couple of hours, stepping into a store or office now and then to get warm. I saw a frozen seal on the floor of the vestibule of the tribal health building, and a polar bear skin hanging on a wooden frame, and two boys shooting a small black dog out by the village dump, and a guy carrying cans of soda pop on his shoulders into the general store when the cans exploded in the cold and sent soda cascading all over him and down the back of his neck. I spent a good while examining a walrus-skin boat on a rack near a launching ramp at the bottom of town. Almost nobody makes skin boats anymore. Splitting the skins and sewing them require skills both physical and spiritual; you have to have absolute quiet in your soul to sew the skin covering to the willow frame. This twenty-foot boat, a museum-quality object, was obviously still being used.
Eric’s helicopter had been landing and taking off on its shuttle runs all the while. Late in the day I heard it coming back and went down to the helipad. Looking back at the village I saw Little Sister Mary Jo, all four foot eleven of her, shoveling loose snow off the steps to the Catholic church building on the cliff face sixty feet above. I got in on the left, Eric loaded some stuff in the back, and we took off. Again I saw the globe-spanning view of the two continents and the strait in between. Then we turned toward Alaska; it grew gradually larger straight ahead. Soon we could make out the village of Wales, and the hill beyond it, and then some little specks at the hill’s base—Wales’s reindeer herd, Eric said.
I was glad, after so many tries, finally to have reached the Diomedes. In that winter of 2001 I saw Russia at both its westernmost and its easternmost end. In the summer, I would go on a nine-thousand-mile road trip to see what was in between.
PART III
Chapter 11
When I went back to St. Petersburg for a quick visit in June to take care of some final details, I learned that Victor Serov would not be guiding me himself. Victor would do the planning, he informed me, but his colleague, Sergei Lunev, would be the actual guide. Victor had worked with Sergei on other expeditions. He had been Victor’s mountaineering coach at university, and together they had climbed peaks in the Caucasus and Crimea. Both had also climbed in Kamchatka, though on separate expeditions. Sergei was a “good man,” Victor assured me, underlining his pronouncement with a brisk, military nod.
Zdravstvuite, Sergei! Greetings to you and family! I ended up spending more time at a stretch with Sergei than I ever have with anybody except my family. With nobody else except those closest to me have I ever been so deeply annoyed. Maybe he could say the same about me. Often I composed long and stern speeches to Sergei in my head, though I could translate only fragments of them. I saw more country with Sergei than I ever did with anybody, and eventually I agreed completely with Victor’s judgment of him. Early on, I admired his ingenuity and toughness. Learning to trust him, though, took a while.
The impression I got when we first met did not help. Victor had said he would bri
ng Sergei to Luda’s apartment to meet me, and I had arranged to be waiting for them on Zagorodnyi Prospekt out front. They arrived in Victor’s car and parked across the street. I crossed to that side to greet them, and before we’d even shaken hands Sergei came up close and grasped my elbow and steered me back across through traffic, like a Boy Scout helping an old lady. That sort of gave me the creeps (a word whose Russian equivalent, murashki, also means “small ants”). Later when I became upset with him, I sometimes felt a dark regret that I hadn’t paid more attention to my first impression. Later still, I understood that the gesture hadn’t signified much of anything, besides a certain exaggerated Russian deference and courtliness. It was just the way Sergei was.
Sergei Mikhailovich Lunev is a muscular and youthfully fit man in his midsixties. He looks like a gymnast, or a coach of gymnasts. He has a long, ectomorphic head whose most expressive feature is its brow, which furrows this way and that in thought, emphasizing his canny, mobile, and china-blue eyes. The neatly trimmed hair around his balding crown adds a professorial dignity—appropriately, because he is the head of the robotics lab at the St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University. He used to work in the Soviet space program before it was reduced in size; guiding is something he does for extra cash. After knowing him for a while I wondered if the discontent and suppressed anger that sometimes showed on his face were the result of taking on an additional job, one unequal to his talents. We did seem to get along better once I understood how prestigious the Polytechnical University and his real job were.
I had asked him and Victor to come to Luda’s partly at her request. She wanted to have a look at these sharp characters who she was sure were taking advantage of a naïve American; she also wanted to quiz them about the Siberian perils into which they were leading me. She conducted the investigation over tea and snacks in her apartment. I followed only some of it, but I believe she went into the subject of bears, and particularly what the guides planned to do if bears bit the tires of our vehicle and punctured them. Victor laid out his and Sergei’s credentials and answered all questions patiently and in detail. At the end of the session she was less doubtful, but only marginally.
From Luda’s, Victor and Sergei and I drove to a labyrinthine warren of single-vehicle garages in a far section of St. Petersburg. I had wanted to buy a Russian all-road vehicle like a four-wheel-drive jeep Niva. Victor had said that was a bad idea, because Russian vehicles constantly break down. (On our journey, after I’d seen the thousandth Niva by the side of the road with its hood up and the driver peering under it, I appreciated this truth.) Instead, with $4,500 supplied by me, he and Sergei had bought a diesel-powered Renault step van. They promised me this car was far more reliable.
In the narrow, low-ceilinged garage where Sergei was keeping it, the Renault struck me as not Siberia-ready. It looked more suited to delivering sour cream and eggs, the job it had done until recently. Sergei backed it out and we went for a quick test-drive. Its shocks weren’t much and its stick shift was stiff. Sergei said he would have it running smoothly in time for the journey. He said he planned to put an extra seat in the back and a place to store our stuff, and a table where we could eat when it rained. I noticed there were no seat belts and said that each seat must have one. Sergei and Victor conceded that seat belts could be added if I wanted them. They treated this as an eccentric special request. Russians in general do not use seat belts and consider them an American absurdity.
Sergei described how he would arrange the back so we could sleep in there if necessary. I didn’t see quite how this would work, especially when I learned there would be three of us—Vladimir Chumak, called Volodya or Vitya, who was another past associate of Victor’s and Sergei’s, had been asked to come along as an assistant. Sergei and Volodya had been in Kamchatka together and had known each other since university. Victor said that three men were better than two for safety. That sounded sensible to me. Both my companions praised Volodya Chumak as a top-notch alpinist and great guy. He lived in Sochi, a resort town on the Black Sea, where he employed his alpinist skills in his regular job as a building renovator, rappelling down the façades of buildings he was restoring. I would not meet him until just before the trip began.
There are almost no motels in Siberia. Most of the time Sergei and Volodya and I would be camping out, or else staying in people’s houses. Sergei and Victor would supply tents, propane stove, camp chairs, and other gear. I was to bring my own sleeping bag, eating utensils, personal items, etc. I asked if I should buy a travel directory of Siberian campgrounds, and Victor laughed. He said I would understand better what Siberia was like once I got there.
To celebrate, we then drove outside the city to Sergei’s dacha. Just before it we passed a village that Victor said he remembered as a lovely place in his childhood, but Khrushchev ruined it. The remnants of the village could still be seen, crumbling at the feet of out-of-place and also crumbling 1950s-era high-rises. Sergei’s dacha, in a woodland clearing filled with many other dachas, reminded me of family cottages in Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie before the modern age. It was a plain, unpainted board structure, just walls and a roof. Sergei’s wife, Luda, met us at the door with their twelve-year-old grandson, Igor. We picked wild strawberries, walked to a pond; some of us swam. During a dinner of shashlik—marinated pork skewered on thin sticks and cooked by Sergei on a wood fire—Victor made an emotional toast to the great adventure Sergei and I would soon be embarking on. And while we were walking in the woods, Sergei came up beside me and said, with passion and sincerity, how happy he was to be going on this trip with me.
The reader may be wondering how I happened to have the money to pay for this expedition. The answer is that I received an expense advance from a magazine. George Kennan in 1884 financed his Siberian journey with an advance of $6,000 from the Century magazine in New York City. For my trip in 2001, I was advanced $22,000 by The New Yorker magazine. Kennan’s trip was ten months long; mine would be about seven weeks. Six thousand dollars back then would be about $112,000 today.
The American dollars I imported strengthened the Russian market for used delivery vans, vehicle-interior improvements, diesel-engine parts, trip-consultant fees, groceries, motor oil, preowned GPS navigating devices, water jugs of flexible plastic, collapsible metal-and-canvas camp stools, pith helmets with drawstring veils of mosquito netting, and other Siberia-related miscellany. During my own preparations when I returned to New Jersey, more of the advance went for additional mosquito netting, olive-drab plastic bottles of high-strength insect repellent with DEET, a kit of camp toiletries, a small suitcase-load of presents (boxes of Legos, assorted Beanie Baby dolls, Statue of Liberty key chains, snow globes featuring the New York City skyline, pocket mirrors, bass-fisherman baseball caps, Swiss army knives for the guides); also, iodine pills, new carbon filters for my water purifier, SPF 40 sunblock, ziplock bags, energy bars, pocket packs of Kleenex, a plastic tarp, a pen that can write in zero gravity . . .
Anybody going to remote parts of Asia is advised to get vaccinations of various kinds. At a travel clinic in New Jersey, I was administered shots for typhoid, hepatitis A, tetanus, and polio. Hepatitis B, also recommended, requires shots spaced six months apart for full effectiveness, so I skipped that one. A clinic doctor gave me prescriptions for Cipro antibiotic and said I should buy other medications also for intestinal ailments. He warned against tickborne encephalitis, a danger east of the Urals; he said there’s no vaccine against it and no cure. Fortunately, the ticks that have it are infectious only in the spring. The doctor asked if I would be carrying firearms and I said the guides would be. This surprised him. He had never advised anybody going to Siberia before.
A big expense was the satellite phone. I didn’t think I would need one, but my wife insisted. She took care of finding and buying it. From Outfitter Satellite in Nashville, she ordered an Iridium brand phone made by Motorola. Outfitter Satellite also handles the satellite linkage and gives you a troubleshooting number to call. I
n the event, I did use that number; deep in Siberia it was strange suddenly to be talking to a technician with a Tennessee drawl. This $1,000 piece of equipment, when it arrived in its foam-padded case, looked like a combination of a cell phone and a field radio. It had an extendable antenna shaped like a pistol barrel, and many accessories—batteries that cost $85 each, a battery recharger, two kinds of foreign-current adapters for the battery charger, another charger attachment that fit into the cigarette lighter of a car, a remote antenna for use on the roof of the car, and so on.
I wanted to make sure that the phone worked and I knew how to use it. I took the phone into our backyard, turned it on, waited for a satellite hookup, and made a call. The signal went from me to one of the system’s sixty-six satellites in low-earth orbit about five hundred miles above. The satellite passed the signal to another satellite, which passed it to another, and so on, until it was relayed down to the Iridium “gateway station” in Tempe, Arizona, which then sent it along regular long-distance routing to my house. In about a second and a half, our downstairs phone rang. Looking at each other through the back window, my wife and I kept our conversation brief, because rates for this kind of phone are in the $4-per-minute range.
Victor had said that a trip later in the summer would avoid the worst of Siberia’s insect season. The first week of August was when we planned to set out. On July 30, my wife arranged a farewell party for me at our house. Alex and Katya came, and Boris and Sonya, and our friends Mark, Caroline, and Bill. For the Russians, the evening was an occasion for minor-key histrionics and doom-predicting in their native fashion, along with excitement and hilarity. Katya said how bitterly she blamed herself for leading me into this Russian nightmare in the first place; the next minute she was saying what a great adventure this would be. Boris asked if he could have my car, in the event that I did not return. He added that he was saying this as a precaution only, because I would return, of course. Caroline, who is French-Canadian and observant of style, said she thought it was cheating for me to bring along a satellite phone. That was the only comment I took sort of seriously. What would George Kennan have thought of the satellite phone?