This is me, with one foot in Asia & one foot in Europe
November 22, 2015
Russia Could Be the Richest Country in the World
One winter day a Siberian woodsman was walking through a forest in the Ural Mountains. He was heading home very tired, but lucky, because he had trapped a rabbit for dinner. A fat rabbit. The icy air bit his lungs with each breath, so he sat under a tree to rest a moment. He became sleepy & his eyelids began to droop. But then he noticed a green glittering stone the size of his fist, right next to one of his boots. He took it home & discovered that it was an emerald, & that is how it became known far & wide that precious jewels fall from Siberian trees.
Not just emeralds, but vast supplies of diamonds & gold, gas & oil, mushrooms, nuts & berries, timber & furs, clean water...these are part of the richest, most plentiful, largely untapped natural resources on earth. Really, you could come to Siberia, melt a handful of snow, package it right, & have an endless supply of the purest, most delicious, most evocative bottled water on earth.
Siberian water & snow -- untouched by human hands
Living Inside a Russian Novel
How I admire writers capable of describing a scene, an act, a moment in such a way that you remember it, even in its minute particulars, years, no, decades later. Here, during the Trans-Siberian train stops, there comes a sound true in every aspect to a momentous sound from the pages of Anna Karenina -- the loud, iron, clanging noise made by railroad workers banging the huge train wheels with heavy metal mallets, walking up & down from one wheel to the next, clang clang clang. In Tolstoy's pages, this took place on frigid winter nights, with snow thickly whirling around these men, who were old & stooped & misshapen & ominous, somehow stepping out of the black forest just at the edge of the station, rather than the station itself. These echoing clangs are a death knell. We all know what happened to Anna.
Fortunately this sound, as I listen to it on similar mysterious snow & ice-bound nights, is not a siren call for me to likewise fling myself under the wheels of the train. But it does evoke my life's history of reading novels, how dear it is to me, giving me worlds beyond my world.
Undercarriage of a Trans-Siberian Railway car
November 20, 2015
The Modern Mafia Gangsters of Siberia Adopted The Godfather Movie as Their Actual Scripture, To Be Followed in the Creation of Their Ethical Rules & Values
After visiting a certain number of religious shrines, one longs for seedier fare. I asked to visit two places not on the usual tourist route & my guide reluctantly acquiesced.
The Mafia Cemetery is bordered by a lovely walkway. Elderly men sit on little benches here in the summer & remember the good old days.
This dapper fellow was also a well-know singer of pop songs
Even Mafia guys can be made ridiculous by Mother Nature
Just your average tank & rocket launcher on your average Russian street corner
The city of Yekaterinburg, a cosmopolitan city at the edge of the Ural Mountains in Siberia, was home base for some of the most prominent gangsters in modern Russian history. Shootouts in the streets in broad daylight in the middle of town, etc. They established their own Mafia Cemetery for those who fell for the cause.
This Mafioso was also a famous wrestler
This grave belongs to the girlfriend of a Mafia man. She was a prize-winning beauty queen & therefore got the full statuary treatment.
The Russian mobsters who survived became elected politicians in their old age & officiate here to this day. They improved the infrastructure of the city by building hospitals, schools, & better roads. This marked a change in philosophy from The Godfather to a Robin Hood/Black Panthers paradigm (take from the rich to improve life for the poor/we are still bad motherfuckers). This makes perfect sense to Russians, for whom gangsters & politicians are kissing cousins.
R.I.P. bad guys
This city was also the secret location of the factories that made tanks & rocket launchers & other weapons of war during the communist Soviet Union era. It has only been open to foreigners for a very short time. Here's the outdoor display at a military museum.
A real Soviet tank
The hammer & sickle still shows up here & there
Surprisingly, across town there is a quite different war remembrance, this one to Russian soldiers who died in Afghanistan. It's called "The Black Tulip" because from afar, it looks like a tulip that grows in Afghanistan. Behind the huge, very affecting sculpture rise blocks of marble containing the names of the dead.
November 19, 2015
Traveling Toward Yesterday
52 train hours, this portion of the ride = a mathematically curious number of days & nights when moving across so many time zones. It's like the Little Prince, who exhausted himself on his small planet, with too many sunrises & sunsets to keep up with. I've seen dawn break for 4 consecutive hours!
For this longest leg of the Trans-Siberian Railway, 20-30 Russian police cadets occupied my train car -- strapping young fellows in their 20s -- three of whom were my bunkmates. Days & nights of drinking & card playing & wild laughter & racing up & down the hall to each other's cabins for no reason except to laugh & drink some more. At some point, one of them asked where I am from. I said "New York City," my strategic answer for right now. "Ohhhhhhh!!!" Apparently those are magic words, for suddenly a pack of these men crowded around me, wanting to talk about New York.
These two were the first priests of this village. They look like they dropped in from a gig in a heavy metal band.
The first cabin built in this part of Siberia
Prior to my trip, I read that it's nice to bring along post cards of your home town for the Trans-Siberian Railway trip because, bereft of common language, post cards & home towns are of universal interest. So I reached into my backpack & brought out my NYC postcards. Thus ensued an eager, gleeful round of the cadets pointing to certain cards & shouting "Brooklyn Bridge!" "Times Square!" "Empire State Building!" "Statuesque of Liberty!" Later, near dawn, they fizzled out & fell into their beds. As for the three in my room, at times they snored very lightly, as a baby with a cold might. In sleep, they looked rather cherubic, despite the stale afterwhiff of vodka...with their tousled hair & flushed faces & long eyelashes resting on their cheeks.
(Taking pictures of police in Russia is really not a good idea)
-23 F. Finally off the train. My Siberian guide, Constantine, & I headed out of town to a village where life is lived, purportedly, just as it was in the ancient times when independent-minded people traversed rivers & mountains & fairy-tale-looking forests (spooky beautiful) to take up an agrarian way of life, described so romantically in Tolstoy's novels. Happy, singing peasants with their scythes. On the way we pass a shop with what must be the most sublimely-named liquor store ever -- "Wine and Vodka and Other Essential Stuff."
Kontenobo is the oldest village in Siberia (though this is hotly debated in all the surrounding villages). (Also hotly debated is the assertion of every city, town & village over the span of 7 time zones that they are the "real Siberia.")
Constantine the guide at a special village lunch, about to pour us a home brew called "kopbelovna." It is made from red whattleberries & other local plants...an ancient recipe. We must drink three glass - one for salad, one for soup, & one for main dish. Oh boo hoo...it's so demanding to keep up with local customs.
Everything old is new again
A more modern dwelling
Put aside, if you can, glimpses of the satellite dishes & cell phone towers & wifi connections visible here & there in this village, for then Kontenobo is Tolstoy's village in the flesh. The beauty of the forbidding forests & snowy mountains & frozen, winding river at the basin of a cliff & bales of ice-hard hay lined up at the edges of rolling fields dressed in their winter planting of stubby, gold grass... on a sunny frigid day, this beauty is existential. It hurts to look. This remote landscape, which surely is a painting come to life, will endure, while you are a nothing, just passing through.
November 17, 2015
Early Morning Radio Show on the Farm
Just before dawn, I'm asleep in Cabin #1 in this little Siberian village when the farm dogs start barking furiously. Maybe they're trying to get the stubborn winter sun to push up over the horizon so they can start their official farm duties. But even I, dog-ignorant, know that something panicky is happening. Since I can't see anything from my vantage point under the covers, I must rely on my ears to assess events. Noises are strangely exaggerated & a bit hyper-real, like the sound effects on an old time radio show.
Crunch, crunch, crunch...men running heavily, clumsily through the deep frozen snow in the yard, right outside my window. Thud, a wooden gate crashes. Moo, moo...a hitherto quiet cow begins to bellow loudly ...mooooo, moooooooo. Other cows, some distance away, also begin to moo, softer, elegiacally. Slap, a door slams. Crunch, crunch, crunch footfalls, faster, more urgent. Aaaooooowwwwwwww, the dogs howl. "BepeBka," shouts a man. "Hokk," roars another. Running crunch, crunch, crunch. Moooooooooooo, mooooooooooo. Bang, bang, hooves wildly kick side of barn. "Da da da da," says a man, soft, as to a frightened child. Aaaaooooooowwwwwwwww, dogs gone mad. Mooing suddenly cuts off, gurgle, choking, trying-to-moo, wet cow-cough. Crunch crunch, men's feet. Pop, gunfire, once. Hovering silence. Long, heavy falling thud, cow hits ground, dead. Day begins.
Later that afternoon I learn that one slaughtered cow feeds a family of four for a Siberian winter
Men with hatchets chop selfsame cow into steaks.
Farm dogs know the drill but are stunned & exhausted anyway.
The clean-up crew is in place.
Beady eye of a vulture
November 16, 2015
Wandering Among the Ghosts of Siberia
There is nothing like climbing a snowy, icy mountain that rises far above a Siberian village in winter to introduce you to the complex relationship you have with yourself & your place in time & history. After you blow your nose a few times & stop crunching the snow under your boots, your ice-crystal breathing returns to normal & soon you can't hear your heart pounding in your ears anymore. The little houses & barns below look like toys waiting for some giant baby to knock them over.
Beyond them, Lake Baikal, the deepest, cleanest, largest, oldest, bluest, most mysterious lake on earth cups around behind the village, as far as the eye can see on three sides, cold translucent blue to the horizon & beyond, down over the curve of the earth. There are no people about, no twittering winter birds, no wind in the trees, no cows mooing, no wolves skulking by with their guilty faces. Even the village dogs are silent. No phone, no earbuds, no notebook. It's just you & the big, big blue.
And let us not forget the ghosts of Siberia, the millions tormented & tortured & starved & slaughtered in ways that make ISIS look like kindergarteners, not the junior leaguers our president once deemed them. Underfoot, under my feet, the bones of these ghosts are now grateful dust.
Time & the lakes & rivers, the mountains & forests & earth of Siberia doze their sleepy, eternal ice naps.
When it gets really cold in Siberia, especially in the far north, your breath freezes into ice crystals & tinkles to the ground with a noise they call "the whispering of the stars."*
*I discovered this last poetic fact by reading In Siberia, a magnificent book by the British travel writer, Colin Thubron.
November 15, 2015
Bolshoe Goloustnoe, Siberia: A Tiny Russian Peasant Village on the Coldest Day so Far This Winter
-26 degrees C =somewhere around -17 degrees F. Even the afternoon sun (shy as it is) shoots ice needles through your body. 80 steps from my cabin to the privy (tiny shack, hole in ground), then 80 steps back. This journey & and any time you step outside requires donning:
the usual underwear
two pairs of thermal leggings
short sleeved silk thermal shirt
long sleeved thermal shirt
waist-length underlayer down jacket
thick mohair sweater
knee-length down coat
long wrap-around wool scarf
heavy wool cowel scarf
Scandinavian wool hat, securely tied under neck
heavy fur-lined wool gloves
2 pair wool socks
knee-high boots
The guide-driver pair for this two days were not as congenial as those in Mongolia. In fact, any words at all emerge with great reluctance. My guide was a skinny, young, nervous fellow, constantly thrashing his hair around such that he looked perpetually alarmed. He just graduated from a Mongolian university with a major in American studies & has no idea what he wants to do with his life. Grudgingly, he took me on long hikes, up a mountain, down alongside a lake, but he said not a word & walked 30 feet ahead of me at all times, with me tagging along like a five-year-old, my windproof pants making loud rubbing noises with every step. I could have slid right off that icy mountain or plunged into the near-frozen lake & he'd have been none the wiser.
But I didn't slide, I didn't plunge. Instead, in the evening, I frolicked in their bathing sauna, a wooden room with a huge tank of boiling water heated by rocks that are behind a roaring fire & a gigantic barrel of ice water, which is melted snow. Using a big rubber bucket, you slosh boiling water & ice water into a rubber tub until it's your desired temperature (or bathe yourself with hot & cold separately, if you dare), then pour it over yourself, then over the hot rocks to create an eye-watering steam room. Repeat as desired. This sauna greatly ameliorated dashing up the 80 steps to the privy through the ice-black, breath-freezing night.
November 13, 2015
Four Strangers on a Train
View from the back window of the last car on the train
The Trans-Siberian Railway is the longest train ride in the world -- 7,621 km, across 10 time zones & 16 big rivers, passing 87 cities & towns in China, Outer Mongolia, & Russia. In winter, occasionally you get lucky with a second class cabin to yourself; it is you & your indomitable spirit slicing through the unknown with your great sweet free will.
Today's cabin: two upper berths, then me below on the left & a kindly Russian man on the right (who wanted to explain to me why he takes the 24-hour-long ride from Yekaterinburg to Moscow every 6 days. He gestured in one direction & said "my voman" then in the other direction & said "my mama." "My voman, my mama; my voman, my mama," & with these few words you can understand the core dilemma of this man's life).
Most often, you have three cabinmates & it's a human experiment in sociocultural & physical adaptation. Physical facts: the interior of the train (all cabins & hallways) is kept at 85 degrees F at all times. The windows don't open. It's suffocating. Not a molecule of moving air to be had. The beds are hard, very hard, like old wooden park benches. The bathrooms, one at each end of each car, are disgusting. All waste goes directly from people's bodies into a metal toilet-like contraption (which is filthy beyond description, suffice it to say that you must crouch), then down onto the tracks...right onto the tracks, all along the length of the Transaction-Siberian Railway.
As you lie on your very narrow cot during the long winter nights, taking care not to crack your head on the table an inch away, the train rocks you across unimaginable distances, the wheels & rails clatter under you, you touch the cold windowglass from time to time just to remind yourself that there is cool air somewhere in the world. You can feel & hear the breathing of your roommates.
Lovely British woman with a bad cold, resting
As you spend oddly intimate days & nights with these strangers, you very soon learn who has an adenoid condition, who mutters in their sleep, who suffers from insomnia, & that unfortunate Russian man who has the ill manners to use his Coke bottle as a pissoir, loudly relieving himself into it right there in the tiny cabin, just inches from his fellow sleepers. You see them in their underwear...this one has a scar all the way down one calf, that one keep a huge wad of money in her bra, that other one takes tremendous pleasure in eating a cup of noodles at midnight by sensually sucking in one long noodle at a time, not 7 inches from your face.
Border crossing soldiers are kind of scary
Border crossings are serious business. The China/Mongolia one took a tolerable 3 hours, but the Mongolia/Russia border stop is now into its 10th hour of being stopped on the tracks, doing what appears to be mostly nothing. Every few hours a small army of guards boards the train & painstakingly inspects every person, every person's belongings, every person's passport, visa & customs papers multiple times. They make you stand right in front of them, then look from your passport photo to your face six or seven times, long gazes that might be quite personal in other circumstances, to find out if it's really you. One soldier stood on the doorsill of our cabin & pointed a space-age laser gun at each of us, a heat-sensing device, to see if we might be carrying Ebola. Then the drug-sniffing dogs. This process elicits a kind of obsequiousness in the face of authority, especially when that authority is wearing a military uniform, heavy black boots, a huge Russian fur hat, and an absolutely absence of human emotion.
At last we are on our way again & giddy from the mere fact of moving. Siberia, today's Siberia out this window is grand & cold, but not forbidding, what with a rose sunset & your cheek pressed against the cold window as the train trundles on. The roommates recede into the background & all seems eternal through a time long, long before consciousness.
November 12, 2015
There Are Mythical Creatures Here
I rose from my lovely Mongolian bed, that is to say, the flies & I rose from my lovely Mongolian bed, for there are flies here in November, but at least they are November flies...lazy, half-hearted. Into the Jeep my guide, my driver & I went to search for Przewalski's horses, rare as unicorns. The landscape is vast & the horses few.
Over hills & ruts & valleys we drove, sometimes on a suggestion of a path, sometimes over the landscape itself, across sheets of ice & strange rock formations & hard, unforgiving ground, all without a single spin out, spill, or flip over. My driver loves his Jeep so much that he wears a Jeep hat.
By appearance, Przewalski's horses (called The White Horse by locals, though they are only white as newborns) are fat, squat, stolid horses...the sumo wrestlers of horses. Indigenous to this land long ago, they became almost extinct by the 1960s, with just a few demoralized, quasi-domesticated individuals in zoos around the world. Carefully bred, they were reintroduced into Mongolia, into this one park. They had to learn to reclaim their wild nature. By nature, they are shy, rarely seen. There are now about 500 here.
These are not galloping, wind-in-their-mane, light-footed streaks of powerful horseflesh like wild mustangs. They are cousins of the African ass & as such have a bit of donkey-ness about them. They mostly stand around & eat. But they have natural Mohawk hairdos, which give them a certain laid-back cool. Yes, by nature these are the James Dean of horses...sensitive, held-back, easy to shock. A single fright can kill them. Therefore the Mongolians are tender with them, not as individuals, as they never get close to them, nor try to domesticate them, but tender in their protectiveness & pride.
Along the way, we encountered a nomad, out about his daily rounds. He stopped for a smoke with my guide & driver.
Other animals of the steppes:
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